Formula 0

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93143
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Formula 0

Post by 93143 »

So I've been watching sim racing on YouTube lately. Also F1 highlight reels and historical stuff. Since I'm a long-time F-Zero fan, this is all very interesting.

As a result, I'm starting to appreciate the long-form race, where it's more about maintaining a consistent pace rather than a desperate dash to the finish line (and if a spectator has to pee, it's "did I miss anything?" rather than "did I miss the race?"). The great thing about this is that F-Zero GX is hiding a game mode that actually allows you to race this way, sort of.

Practice mode, 20 laps, no recovery, 29 master-level opponents. Don't use boost for the first lap (the AI drivers will, but it's a decent handicap). Don't use momentum throttle, snaking, or any other cheesy physics-breaking technique; just try to go fast with normal driving techniques. Don't use attacks - I once decided to seize an opportunity to kill Mighty Gazelle in the midst of a tight battle on Sand Ocean: Surface Slide, and I sorely regretted it because now I'll never know if I could have beat him. For maximum immersion, go for cockpit view, and either pretend the actual cockpit is hidden by a holographic surround display or ignore the fact that you can't see it.

It's great - a lot of the courses range from a bit under a minute per lap to around a minute fifteen, so you can get 20-25 minutes of solid knife-edge concentration, and the results can range from an abject loss ([cough]Phantom Road[/cough]) to a super tight race to lapping the whole field, depending on the course and on your machine and setup (and how well you drive, obviously). It keeps track of your recent lap times on screen, highlighting your personal best, and the time delta to your rival that shows up at the start/finish line is way more useful than it is in the actual Grand Prix mode.

This would probably not work as well in X with its blatant rubber-band AI, but the AI in GX is believable enough that it feels like a race - it feels like if you gain a second per lap, you're doing that much better against your rival, and if he keeps up it means he's pushing harder. I've had tight battles where my rival actually pushed too hard and DNFed, and I finished several seconds ahead of the guy behind him. I've had a race where after 20 minutes of intense battling I won by less than a third of a second, and I've had a race where I lapped my rival and came in nearly a minute ahead. It's a far cry from X Cup, where during lap 3 you literally can't catch your three designated rivals until right near the finish line where they slow way down for no reason...

...

There needs to be a VR F-Zero kiosk game, with real physics and a consistent, detailed technology concept and ruleset. Force feedback wheel and brake pedal, motion rig, tracking gloves, retinal resolution, the works. Maybe a disposable barf bag attached to the headset... Multiplayer Grands Prix (the big thing missing from all F-Zero games to date). Home version too, AX/GX style, with support for VR and sim racing equipment. Unfortunately Switch is probably not up to this in its current form, but who knows what Nintendo's partnership with Nvidia could produce in future?

In addition to the futuristic hovering courses, there could be a few classic courses, like Monza (including the oval) and the Nürburgring (the real Nürburgring, not the GP course). Can you imagine the hilarity of F-Zero at Monte Carlo? Obviously these would be the 26th-century versions of these courses...

I'm still working on the technology concept for a real-physics F-Zero machine. The new hotness is floor suction, which looks like it may make it easier to design a fun game that's recognizably F-Zero, but could actually justify momentum throttle and even blast turns if I'm not careful...

Sadly, the market probably isn't there for this. F-Zero is not Gran Turismo, which has esports events at famous race venues around the world with live commentary in several languages and guest appearances by people like Lewis Hamilton. But I do kinda wonder if, properly handled, it could grow a niche. Smash certainly has...

...then again, Smash has the advantage Gran Turismo does, which is that it has ready-made fans because the content is from other stuff that people are already fans of. F-Zero is its own thing, and you have to be sold on F-Zero specifically to become a fan of it.

Also, perhaps even more importantly, Smash and Gran Turismo have full-fat multiplayer. F-Zero does not. This seems like an easier thing to fix, but it may be necessary to dial back the built-in bloodthirstiness because nobody is going to join an hour-long 50-lap Grand Prix (or a 3-lap sprint race for that matter) if there's a 90% chance they'll be deliberately wrecked before finishing the second lap. Removing the dedicated attack moves seems like a reasonable approach to me; the machines have shields, which means they're much better suited to surviving accidental punts from bad drivers (or "accidental" punts from dirty drivers) than anything in iRacing.
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FrankenGraphics
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Re: Formula 0

Post by FrankenGraphics »

.then again, Smash has the advantage Gran Turismo does, which is that it has ready-made fans because the content is from other stuff that people are already fans of. F-Zero is its own thing, and you have to be sold on F-Zero specifically to become a fan of it.
Set the racing game in Becky Chambers' the long way to a small angry planet universe, it's got the perfect space opera intergalactic weirdo species for this sort of thing. Engines are algae based but can be boosted by a precious substance known as amby. Not so big that it’d be completely impossible to make a deal for a smaller studio. Then again.. not the fanbase of mario and pikachu.
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Re: Formula 0

Post by Pokun »

Yeah well I don't know about amby salad engines, but I really think they should expand on the canon space opera universe (so not the non-canon anime story). The story mode in GX, Falcon Densetsu and Climax was among my favourite modes. That's one thing F-Zero has that Gran Turismo doesn't, a universe with tons of characters, use that.
A story mode with an upgradable machine that you have to buy parts for, or why not something like a quest mode kind of like in Final Lap Twin for PC-Engine (a racer-RPG hybrid with racing challenges replacing battles). That would please me at least.
You maybe start out with a machine you put together from things you found in a junk yard, and you participate in underground bet races until you can afford to participate in a real F-Zero grand prix. While doing that you have to fight off space pirates, gangs and stuff.

And yes there are no more excuses to not include multiplayer in GP anymore. In the past it may have been a technical limitation, but surely the Switch can do an F-Zero GP with 30+ machines including 4 human players at least. And with the online service available they should at least make it on par with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.

But I don't think the attack move has to go. F-Zero is supposed to be a dangerous race where only the bravest/craziest pilots participate to entertain the rich merchant sponsors. One of the fun parts in F-Zero X multiplayer mode was trying to squash your brother at the start of the race, and since human-controlled machines was stronger he wouldn't die from it, often it just sends him in hyper speed forwards or backwards but with significant damage, so attacking was a gamble. And even dying wasn't so bad because you could at least play the slot machine and hope for revenge. Removing the slot-machine in GX was unforgivable, it has to come back in F-Zero Switch.

As for realistic physics, F-Zero may be a "cartoon racer" but I also don't think it wouldn't benefit from a little more realism. It may be hard to do away with things like rubber-banding but I'd prefer they didn't include so many counterintuitive tricks like snaking and momentum throttle. The game should be fully beatable with realistic driving skills alone.

The VR idea isn't bad either, although F-Zero needs to be accessible without expensive accessories as well.

BTW what's the thing with that attachment?
93143
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Re: Formula 0

Post by 93143 »

Apologies for the long post, but apparently I've been holding back some pressure on this topic... I get enthusiastic about this stuff, and with nobody to talk to about it and no realistic prospect of implementing it any time soon, it just builds up.
Pokun wrote:story mode
That's another direction they could go in. There's quite a lot of room for expansion there, and a number of ways they could approach it.

It could be interesting to have non-racing gameplay in the story mode - Captain Falcon is supposedly a bounty hunter, but has famously never used his gun since the Scale Head encounter in the original comic, and has never even pulled it out since the mob boss encounter in the same comic.

One question is how cheesy to make it. Whether to attempt to top GX, or do a gritty, subtle, realistic story (to match the realistic physics), or something in between. (You want gritty? Do a mission as Pico.)

At first sight, this idea of expanding the story mode clashes a bit with the idea of a sim-like F-Zero, and non-racing gameplay especially clashes with a wheel-and-pedals sim rig. You'd almost have to make The Adventures of Captain Falcon a separate game; otherwise it's kinda like welding together a Batman game with Assetto Corsa Competizione... but the idea of working your way up from the junkyard is a bit different, and more similar to how Gran Turismo actually works...
But I don't think the attack move has to go. F-Zero is supposed to be a dangerous race where only the bravest/craziest pilots participate to entertain the rich merchant sponsors.
The same thing was true of the original F-Zero, and it had no attack moves.

In fact, much the same thing was true of F1 in the '50s and '60s. Sir Jackie Stewart says he had a one in three chance of surviving his racing career. And the racing back then was much more gentlemanly than today; it was just an inherently dangerous activity, and they all respected that. Simply having drivers like Pico and Zoda not respect the rules and/or their fellow drivers would make F0 plenty hazardous IMO, leaving aside stuff like mines and lack of guardrails, or even just the fact that driving that fast without crashing on your own is actually pretty hard. The usual X paradigm of half the field getting killed in each race kinda strains suspension of disbelief...

The backstory for X and GX states that F-Zero was suspended for years after a huge accident (which in the GX version didn't even kill anybody), and only reinstated with greatly improved safety systems. Having dedicated attack moves may be metal but would seem to run counter to this narrative, although I can see counterarguments. In addition, the attack moves are difficult to justify physically and are hard to implement without introducing cheese techniques (the side attack was the best way around fast corners in X, which is utterly silly, and I've even seen people recommend using the spin attack to get around hairpins in GX).

Also, story-wise I'm not sure the attack moves exist. We've seen Deathborn use a side attack on Black Shadow in a movie - he literally just drove into him and forced him into the wall. I can do that without a dedicated button...
One of the fun parts in F-Zero X multiplayer mode was trying to squash your brother at the start of the race, and since human-controlled machines was stronger he wouldn't die from it, often it just sends him in hyper speed forwards or backwards but with significant damage, so attacking was a gamble. And even dying wasn't so bad because you could at least play the slot machine and hope for revenge. Removing the slot-machine in GX was unforgivable, it has to come back in F-Zero Switch.
It's a difficult issue. What direction should F-Zero be taken in? Even Nintendo can't do everything at once (and having two F-Zero games, one arcade-style and one serious sim, seems a bit much). But I suspect that with an increased emphasis on multiplayer, the heavy metal wreckfest vibe of X and GX might not work as well.

I think with realistic physics, punting an opponent into the barrier (or off the course, which I'm not convinced should be an auto-death) should be a plenty sufficient mode of attack, and even there I'd be open to considering a penalty system. Especially if longer races are contemplated - even the weaker effect of the attack moves on human players can be decisive if the target has already used most of his boost, and over the course of a long race there will probably be many opportunities to wreck somebody under those circumstances. It may be fun to try to wreck each other if it's just you and your brother and the race is 90 seconds long, but if you invest 90 minutes in clawing your way up to first place and holding on to it against a field of a couple dozen of the best drivers on the internet, only to have some jackass backmarker destroy your machine on the final lap, you WILL be cursing the developers for giving him the tools to do it. Not that you'd likely survive even that long; with every competitor using attacks, every race of any real length would turn into one of those X Cup prank courses where the objective is simply to cruise across the line because everybody else is dead.

I've seen online races in iRacing with 40-50 cars (all human; there are no bots in iRacing). The first lap is hellish enough with everybody trying not to wreck. Even in real-life F1 things can get ugly; look what happened at Turn 1 in the Belgian Grand Prix last year. And you want to incentivize that stuff?

I don't know; maybe there's a good way to balance it. I'm not a game designer... and after all, Wreckfest is a real game, and it does have multiplayer... At the very least, the fact that you do have shields should probably result in more of a casual "rubbing is racing" attitude towards car contact, especially if the machines can take a little physical bumping even with the shields down.
As for realistic physics, F-Zero may be a "cartoon racer" but I also don't think it wouldn't benefit from a little more realism. It may be hard to do away with things like rubber-banding but I'd prefer they didn't include so many counterintuitive tricks like snaking and momentum throttle. The game should be fully beatable with realistic driving skills alone.
Now that I can fully get behind.

I would love an F-Zero game where everything the machines do can be explained by reference to a consistent and plausible technology model that operates in the context of real physics, modelled with aggressively robust and conservative numerical methods and models. This way, if the player understands how the cars are supposed to work, everything that happens in the game will make sense.

Also, an essential part of real racing techniques being valid is good AI. If the AI is heavily rubber-banding or otherwise cheating in a way that's affected by the player's actions, it becomes a totally different game. Instead of trying to lap as fast as possible, you have to figure out how to keep the AI from cheating its way to victory. And even if you can't figure that out, the results of trying to be legitimately fast are often wildly inconsistent, discouraging the player from focusing on finesse. (Of course, breakable physics also contribute to this - why work on your racing line when driving like you're having a seizure gets you a better result?) In the original, taking a fast line can put you under more pressure from the AI than taking a slower line that doesn't make the computer think you messed up. And there's little point in using super jets unless you're under threat, because the AI will just teleport behind you. But perhaps the most blatant example anywhere is the Red Canyon run in GX's story mode, where it literally locks victory behind the lesson that you shouldn't boost until right before the end because Goroh has unlimited boost and won't use it unless you do.

I don't think rubber-banding is absolutely necessary on a modern CPU. I'm not sure it's even used in normal races in GX. (Obviously Story Mode is a different matter...) Supposedly there have been tests where the AI has been clocked putting in pretty much the same times regardless of what the player is doing. And in my recent experiments with 20-lap races, I've been in situations where I'm struggling at 1:09 per lap but handily pulling away at 1:07 per lap. The AI times do vary, and I've seen opponents make up a two-second gap in one lap without any discernible errors on my part, but they tend to arrive completely drained of energy and either can't repeat the performance later in the race or try too hard and DNF.

What I imagine (probably wrongly) would be cool is a non-cheating Master-level AI so good that even a top-level player would basically have to win on points, because different machines are good on different courses and you can't reasonably expect to win them all. This is of course distinct from having to build up a big lead in points before Slim-Line Slits because all the AIs are suddenly CGN...
The VR idea isn't bad either, although F-Zero needs to be accessible without expensive accessories as well.
Of course. You can play modern racing sims just fine without VR. You can even play with a controller, although it's harder. There's no reason F-Zero would need to be less accessible than iRacing...

The only problem right now, interface-wise, is that none of the last three Nintendo systems have had a controller with analog triggers, and no Nintendo controller has ever had analog face buttons, so the smooth control of throttle, braking, boost, and slide is basically impossible without a GameCube adapter and really tough with one... wait, I guess the lack of pitch control on your average racing wheel might be a problem too, not to mention that I don't think all of them have dual analog clutch paddles - I wonder if it's possible to design a custom rim and/or button box that would provide those features while being compatible with an existing wheelbase...
BTW what's the thing with that attachment?
That's my attempt at an early mockup of what the four main F-Zero machines might look like if they were designed by actual engineers to a consistent set of rules. Minimum frontal area, large inlets, area ruling (ie: transonic streamlining, though I didn't really try very hard at this early stage), that sort of thing. I also made them smaller, about the size of a modern racecar. It's low-resolution because I wanted to deliberately limit my options so as to make the pixel-poking quicker and not have to specify fine details I'm not prepared to justify.

Basically the idea is that all motive force is provided by airbreathing electric thrusters, so you need a lot of inlet area to get the best acceleration for a given amount of reactor power, and as little non-inlet frontal area as possible to minimize drag. There's also a lot of aerodynamic downforce from wings, body shaping and floor shaping to push the machines closer to the track and strengthen the grip. Sucking extra air through the floor helps with downforce and low-speed acceleration, but hurts high-speed acceleration. All things considered, I figure performance should be broadly similar to GX, but with maybe a bit more speed and a bit less acceleration.

I had a detailed technology concept description here, but it was giving me a tl;dr vibe so I removed it. If anyone wants to see it, I'll happily re-post it.
93143
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Re: Formula 0

Post by 93143 »

I wonder what it would take to give F-Zero a good online multiplayer mode. The kind that could support a 30-machine race with no bots.

My recent experience spectating online sim races has taught me that it's not trivial to do good racing netcode. For example, the term "netcode" in iRacing is used to refer to a collision between cars that didn't touch each other, which, while hardly common, seems to be common enough to make this the dominant usage of the term. RFactor 2 may be even worse; I've heard stories of cars outright teleporting into other cars that were trying to slipstream them, wrecking both. Lately I've been watching Jimmy Broadbent's stream of the 2018 VEC 24 Hours of Le Mans, and at one point there was a Code 80 (essentially a full-course caution) due to an accident on the start/finish straight - from the official stream, it appears that a car experienced lag and abruptly stopped cold, and the guy behind him was too close to evade.

If F-Zero is to have an online mode, I'd want it to be as airtight as possible. It's a way faster game than any modern racing sim, with a lot more collisions (partly because it's harder to react at speed, and partly because it's the sort of racing series in which the design of the Wild Goose makes sense). RFactor 2's potentially deadly netcode jank was actually one of the reasons Jimmy Broadbent quit the VEC after the 2018 season in favour of just doing iLMS. We don't want F-Zero's netcode turning people off - one of F-Zero's main differentiators versus Mario Kart is the focus on skill and the lack of RNG as a core mechanic, right?

Global signal latency might require the online to be region-limited, unless we can figure out how to generate small wormholes for data transmission...

...

Also, there's the question of the "Forza open lobby" problem. Online racing games that don't filter or sort their users tend to be full of griefers and astoundingly bad drivers. The sort of driver who, instead of braking for a corner, will floor it and aim for the guy in front, and then miss. The iRacing model of just making the game itself stupidly expensive isn't really an ideal option here, but some way for good, serious drivers to lift themselves above the muck would seem desirable. iRacing (in addition to being stupidly expensive) has two separate statistics they use to divide up drivers: the iRating, which describes how good a driver is, and the safety rating, which is more or less self-explanatory. I wonder if a similar system would make sense for F-Zero...

...or if being good at F-Zero just means being able to give as good as you get against griefers who aren't even trying to race. But that doesn't sound like fun, honestly.

Then again, if you prioritize gratuitous bashing over lap time and track position, you won't build skill points anyway. And too heavy an emphasis on safety points might exclude players who legitimately drive like Pico from the top levels of the game, possibly resulting in a much cleaner race than F-Zero was ever intended to be. Thoughts?
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Re: Formula 0

Post by tepples »

Would it help to split the league into two, one that discourages contact and one that encourages it? It'd help separate players with Pico's idea of what the sport should be from players that aren't quite as much into bumper cars. And a sport with two leagues with different rules that meet mostly in the post-season has precedent: Major League Baseball has the American League, where a designated hitter sits in for the pitcher, and the National League, where pitchers hit and each run is more valuable.
93143
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Re: Formula 0

Post by 93143 »

Perhaps it would, if the player base was sufficient to support it.

I imagine you'd need to gate at least the higher levels of the gentlemanly side behind a sufficiently good safety rating. But since it'd be impractical to try to build safety rating in the wreckfest side, you'd need a bush league of some sort to demonstrate your ability to respect other drivers.

If somebody on the gentlemanly side wanted to blow off some steam (or build some up), he could pop over to the wreckfest side because racing there wouldn't affect his safety rating. But just going there to wreck as many folks as possible wouldn't be desirable because losing would still damage your skill rating. And gross misbehaviour would still be bannable everywhere, like it is in iRacing - you see someone driving the wrong way and trying to line up head-on collisions, you report him.

Invitationals and private lobbies wouldn't need to observe the distinction rigorously, because the participants would be known quantities.

...

I'm finding it hard to mentally model what a race would look like with no restrictions on car contact, but with all drivers having a reasonable level of skill and a primary goal of doing well in the race. In a lot of modern racing (especially stuff like formula cars and prototypes) you try to avoid contact as much as possible because almost any significant collision has the potential to seriously hurt your pace or even force you to retire. But in F-Zero, you can be in a situation where your opponent is significantly more vulnerable to damage than you are, and you can wreck him and only lose a bit of time (this goes tenfold for the scenario where the attack moves are still in the game). For this reason, I'd favour not showing any external indications of low shields, and only have actual damage be visible - broken rudder, bashed or overheated thruster pouring smoke, that sort of thing. That way, the aggressor would have to guess how much boost his target has used and how many hits he's taken since he last pitted.

...I was considering having only energy recoverable by driving through a pit strip, and having physical damage require an actual stop. That might heighten the risk of using up all your shields without the unrealistically harsh one-touch deathblow mechanic of X and GX. On the other hand, it would be more complicated than just having the pit row repair physical damage more slowly than shields. But on the other other hand, if you could recharge shields without repairing physical damage first, it would add more uncertainty to a potential attacker unless he actually witnesses the impact that breaks your car. Now, would this be good or bad for online gameplay?

...

I wonder if F-Zero is sufficiently different from modern racing that it would work without contact rules at high skill levels... I still think the attack moves are a bad idea in the context of online multiplayer, though; the temptation is just too great, and you'd never get a fair race.
93143
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Re: Formula 0

Post by 93143 »

I want to know what people think of an alternate vehicle concept. Something different from what I've been working with, and pretty different from what most fans and probably even the developers had in mind:

What if a Formula 0 machine actually propels itself by some sort of electromagnetic linear motor effect between it and the track, and the apparent jet nozzles are actually just thermal exhaust ports?

Consequence #1: no thrusting while airborne...
93143
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Re: Formula 0

Post by 93143 »

Well, I've been playing a lot of F-Zero 99 on my brother's Switch lately, and while it is very fun, it clearly illustrates one thing: online multiplayer in a serious GX-tier game is not on the cards unless they can radically improve the netcode.

When I first saw this game on YouTube, I thought it was a fangame. Then I kept seeing it, and realized it was actually official... My first reaction was similar to many, in that I saw it as a disappointment, but like many people I changed my mind. It's not a full substitute for a brand-new F-Zero, but that's because it's not a brand-new F-Zero. It's an MMO version of the original. Which, as it turns out, is great.

Also, the reindeer antlers on the bumper cars in Frozen Knight League are hilarious.

The cooldown timer on the spin, with it being the only attack move, is certainly one way to solve the wreckfest problem. It isn't terribly realistic (I suppose the spin attack itself is the main culprit here), and I'm not sure it scales to an iRacing-style super cereal tryhard sim game with hour-long races, but in the context of F-Zero 99 the balance is pretty good. (Also, I was very right about how infuriating it is to be wrecked right before the finish line. Weirdly, I didn't get as mad at the player who did it as I thought I would; perhaps the massively multiplayer casual nature of it takes the personal sting out, along with the fact that you clearly are supposed to do it, and therefore it was on me to be aware and defend myself against it. That, and it was a competitor and not a backmarker, after only a couple of minutes invested in the race...)

...

Regarding my post above this one, I think the answer is already in it. We can say that for "safety reasons", the F0 Committee requires machines to have thrust and braking available while airborne. So the jets have to be actual jets.

What's interesting is that in both the original and 99, boosting doesn't work while airborne, or on rough. Could boosting be an EM interaction with the track? If so, it shouldn't look nearly as dramatic as it does - which is actually something of a problem, as anyone who's been following F1 since before the V6 turbo hybrids can attest...
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Re: Formula 0

Post by Pokun »

93143 wrote: Fri Jan 18, 2019 8:20 pm ...
Yeah I would also like to see more of Captain Falcon's bounty hunter life. I'd prefer it to be in the cheesy direction. F-Zero has always been mimicking American comics in style and I'd like to see more of that world.

I don't think it would have to be a separate game. The "Gran Turismo" mode in the Gran Turismo games is one thing I love about the series so much. Starting small and working your way up is also one reason I love RPGs and games like Legend of River King (which is basically a fishing RPG) and Harvest Moon (a farmer sim).
I don't think the realism of a racing sim is necessary, it's the journey from small to big that I'm after, while also showing off more of the F-Zero universe. A little more realism (and fixing "bugs" like momentum throttle and using attack moves to take corners) would be great, but if you basically have to be a real professional racer to survive a hairpin-corner, it is going too far.

That said, the fact that real racing techniques (requiring a lot of practice) works as expected and being required in Gran Turismo is another thing I love about that game though.


I think the danger is one of the fun things and is totally part of the space opera genre. In real races accidents are of course a tragedy but in fiction a cruel world full of adventure and danger where people live at the mercy of beasts and bandits is only exciting in my book as it satisfies the romanticist in me. A perfectly safe world without conflict would probably be hard to use as a setting in fiction.
Gran Turismo does have a safe world (at least cars mostly can't wreck or even flip in most of the games) but there is also no story as the focus is on the cars, driving techniques and on tuning.

The dangers in F-Zero was that it was possible to crash if you ran out of energy or jumped over the rail. Destroying other machines was almost impossible (except for those blinking lapped machines that served more as mobile landmines than anything else).
I found F-Zero X improved this a lot by giving you attack moves and rewards for "retiring" rival machines (though which would just come back in the next race but gain no points). Pilots seems to survive crashing down on the planet a lot so I imagine that the machines are equipped with ejection seats and other emergency mechanisms.
I also loved the Death Race in that game, it's the closest to Mario Kart's Battle Mode as we have come yet and I was disappointed that it didn't come back in GX/AX. I wish that some sort of demolition derby mode would come at least.

Half the racers getting retired by the player in a grand prix only happens on the easier difficulty levels. On higher difficulties it becomes more like you would expect (kind of like the pod race in the newer Star Wars films). Attacking rivals makes you loose so much speed that you have no chance for a good position if you retire more than a few machines, so you focus it on wrecking rivals with the highest score, the game helps this by showing a rival mark. Retiring the most dangerous rivals is an alternative to getting a good position and is especially useful when someone gets ahead too much score-wise with little chance for you to catch up, it is a valid strategy and part of the sport. To win F-Zero X on highest difficulty level you have to find the balance between the two, and a little luck.

I thought those X Cup "prank courses" where you win on walkover by taking it slow was fun (you don't literally win by walking over the finish-line though, you win as soon as the last rival is retired without a need to finish the race). It's just a bug that the X Cup randomly generates certain killer corners that the AI can't handle, and it happens very rarely. Otherwise I didn't find the X Cup very fun though. Part of the fun in racing is memorizing the track to optimize a racing line through it, which you can't do with randomly generated tracks, you have to rely on your reaction skills alone.


Story-wise the attack move might not exist, it might be a gameplay feature to make it easier for the player, who isn't really a reckless galactic pilot, to retire rivals. It helps the player becoming Captain Falcon (or whomever) who as a typical space opera hero has skills beyond the human limit and is able to take on a whole army of human-level pilots in the story, that is what I want when I play the game. And so we are getting back to the racing sim discussion again.


Yeah rubber-banding might not be needed on modern machines, as it was partly a way to make up for simple AI programming. I think there are many good alternatives to the usual aggressive rubber-banding seen in Nintendo racers. One could be AI with different personalities and temperaments. One type may always take it easy preferring safety, another is taking great risks to go faster and a third one underestimates his opponents when he is ahead and doesn't perform his full potential until he is behind (basically his AI difficulty level is variable depending on his position). This third one may serve a similar role as rubber-banding as it allows players in a wider range of skill levels to enjoy the game.
This of course requires an AI that is capable of being genuinely good at piloting the machines, something that has been very hard to do in the past.


93143 wrote: Mon Dec 25, 2023 5:41 pm I've been playing a lot of F-Zero 99 on my brother's Switch lately...
...
I had not heard of the leaked rumors that Nintendo were working on a new F-Zero so I was not disappointed at all when this game was announced. On the contrary, I was happy that F-Zero isn't entirely forgotten (unlike some of my other favo series like Eggerland). Though I'm sad that Pacman 99 (and SMB 99 before that) had to go.

I've played a ton of F-Zero 99 and I haven't noticed the netcode problem.
The spin-attack cooldown certainly solved the wreckfest problem. The game awards retiring rivals (or KO as it's called in this game) by increasing your energy bar maximum and the spin-attack does not lower your speed unlike F-Zero X. But it is also very hard to wreck a rival as the spin-attack only causes some limited damage and as the game uses the SNES F-Zero 1 tracks there are no tracks without the guard beams on the sides.
If you are wrecked right before the finish line it is pretty much your own fault for boosting too much when you don't have enough energy to finish the race. But if you are not risking the boost enough you will get a worse position and might even be disqed for falling out of the safe range, so it's a question of balance and judgement again.

I think they did the right thing by the continued encouraging of wrecking your opponents while also still preventing it from becoming a wreckfest, it just feels like F-Zero this way.
The machines are bumping into each others all the time which is generating the sparks used to get up to starstreet (or whatever the upper track is called), without making the game unplayable. I almost never see any lag either unlike the online mode in Mario Maker 2.

Yeah the frozen knight league is pretty fun, I've just recently got all the frozen unlocks from it.



Yeah the F-Zero machines seems to be able to act like spacecrafts when airborne but they also do have some sort of friction with the track since you can loose the grip and drift, they are not entirely like air-/space-/water-crafts which can't drift as they have no wheels (or rather they are always drifting).

Did braking work in the air in the SNES games? I'm not sure I ever tested it. In the F-Zero X manual it specifically said that the brakes are air-brakes and they indeed work in mid-air. I suppose that means the machines won't work in vacuum, which is kinda weird as some tracks seems to be taking place above the atmosphere.
As a kid I imagined that the brakes in the original game was some sort of magnet force. The machines hover above the track by using electromagnets with the same poles as the track and when braking you flip the poles so that the machine is attracted to the ground and hits it causing friction.
But in newer F-Zero games they claim to use some sort of G-diffuser (gravity-diffuser) system, same as the Arwings in the Star Fox games.
93143
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Joined: Fri Jul 04, 2014 9:31 pm

Re: Formula 0

Post by 93143 »

Pokun wrote: Fri Dec 29, 2023 9:42 am I don't think the realism of a racing sim is necessary, it's the journey from small to big that I'm after, while also showing off more of the F-Zero universe. A little more realism (and fixing "bugs" like momentum throttle and using attack moves to take corners) would be great, but if you basically have to be a real professional racer to survive a hairpin-corner, it is going too far.
I'm not sure I agree with the premise. The main dangers of a hairpin, if we're talking about making it through at all, are (1) missing the corner and crashing out, and (2) money shifting and not having a working engine after the corner. The former is a standard danger in F-Zero, mitigated by the fact that the machines are shielded (so a crash doesn't usually result in a DNF), and the latter is simply not possible with how the machines work. You wouldn't have to be a pro racing driver to survive the corner; you'd just have to practice a bunch to do it well.

The main way F-Zero is not realistic, in the context of tight corners, is that you basically never have to brake. Part of this is the cheese techniques, and part of it is simply that the corners are generally not all that tight relative to the maneuver capability of the machines. I think this should change, and I think having regenerative braking to allow you to boost back out of the corner would feel good enough to counteract the loss of the full-throttle lap vibe.

Oh yeah - there's another danger: getting divebombed. A classic risk in any racing game where brakes are important, and also somewhat mitigated by the immense durability of an F-Zero machine.

As for realistic grip issues, being "on the limit" and risking losing control, F-Zero X pretty much works like that already, except that if you screw up you can cancel out of it with a side attack and only lose a bit of time (and accidentally kill Captain Falcon, who has a penchant for trying to pass me in corners where I use the side attack to steer). Fun fact: I once turned onto an icy road and got on the power too eagerly, and my car started to spin - I reflexively countersteered and saved it, not (I think) because of any real-world experience, but because of F-Zero X.

If you mean that modern racecars have a bunch of knobs and buttons on the steering wheel that the driver is constantly fiddling with, yeah, that's not really necessary I think. We can pretty easily claim that the Formula 0 regulations were written to minimize unnecessary complexity in the cockpit, making the driving experience more about fundamentals than tweaks. A Mercedes W25 or Matra MS10 doesn't have a bunch of fiddly bits on the wheel either. Remove the gear shifting (which F0 has no use for) and you've got a fairly unencumbered, almost arcadey driving experience without making any compromises on realism at all. You could probably add in pilot-controlled active aero and still come out ahead. You just have to remember that momentum actually means something, and there are limits on what you can ask your machine to do.
Half the racers getting retired by the player in a grand prix only happens on the easier difficulty levels.
I've taken out half the field and won on Master level. Just recently I got a game over because I was trying to arrange the final podium by killing nearly everybody on Big Hand, and I slowly ran out of lives because it is admittedly pretty hard...

IIRC there's a YouTube video of somebody taking out all 29 competitors on Big Hand in the Blue Falcon, with Smash voice acting dubbed in. ...ah, here it is. To be fair, he got an incredible spin attack on lap 1...
Attacking rivals makes you loose so much speed that you have no chance for a good position if you retire more than a few machines
That is generally the case. Not many tracks make it as easy to bump off rivals as Big Hand does.

Even so, the loss rate is far too high for a real full-length Grand Prix race that takes over an hour to run. Same goes for 99 - what works well in a four-lap sprint would be a tragic bloodbath in a hundred-lap marathon. (I won't comment on the effects over a full season, under the assumption that F-Zero pilots usually survive their DNFs...) I'm sure it's possible to balance the attack moves as attack moves, but they are difficult to justify in-universe, and the harder you try to make them realistic, the harder it gets to decouple them from the racing technique, without just giving up and making them actual weapons (which I'm entirely against).
(you don't literally win by walking over the finish-line though, you win as soon as the last rival is retired without a need to finish the race).
I'm pretty sure that's only in multiplayer mode. In a Grand Prix you do have to actually finish all three laps.
Otherwise I didn't find the X Cup very fun though. Part of the fun in racing is memorizing the track to optimize a racing line through it, which you can't do with randomly generated tracks, you have to rely on your reaction skills alone.
It's a different experience, sure. But memorization isn't everything, and every now and then you get an amazing X track. Also, while it is risky, you can just kill five guys and do the track over again as often as you like.
Story-wise the attack move might not exist, it might be a gameplay feature to make it easier for the player, who isn't really a reckless galactic pilot, to retire rivals. It helps the player becoming Captain Falcon (or whomever) who as a typical space opera hero has skills beyond the human limit and is able to take on a whole army of human-level pilots in the story, that is what I want when I play the game. And so we are getting back to the racing sim discussion again.
It strikes me that the difficulty levels are another way this could be managed. F-Zero has always had a high skill ceiling, and if an actual competent AI could be pulled off, perhaps Master level could be cranked up to the point that it would take someone like Max Verstappen to actually come in first in every race, and mortals would have to win on points. (As I said earlier, I don't know if I would actually like that, but I imagine I would.) If you're not very good but you want to feel more like Captain Falcon, racing on Standard may be what you want.

If a hyper-competent AI isn't feasible, well, that kinda does the job by itself, as long as it doesn't cheat...

Also, the mere fact that you're in a comfortable living room and can try again repeatedly is a fairly big deal. Jimmy Broadbent once beat one of Jim Clark's lap times, and quickly explained that even apart from any sim inaccuracies, the situation he was in was not comparable to actually, physically driving a Lotus 49 at real-life Monza in the '60s with your butt life on the line.
This of course requires an AI that is capable of being genuinely good at piloting the machines, something that has been very hard to do in the past.
Yes. Although GX did a very respectable job.

I've played a ton of F-Zero 99 and I haven't noticed the netcode problem.
You've never noticed people bumping into you from behind multiple times and then cruising past as if nothing happened? Crashing into walls, and then un-crashing, zipping ahead at super speed until the machine on your screen catches up with what the other player actually did? Blowing up a bumper without being anywhere near it? You haven't noticed that when you spin into other people, they get bumped farther than you do when someone spins into you? I once saw somebody driving along the ground outside the track on Red Canyon II, because the game had missed the fact that he'd hit the jump plate. No, the netcode is good enough for this application, but GX 99 or Formula 0 Worldwide would be a mess. GX 99 would be worse, because of the split-second side attacks...

They did do a good job making the netcode feel relatively forgiving and conservative. I haven't noticed any real disasters caused by lag, and it seems to wait to kill a machine until it can confirm on both ends that it died.
I think they did the right thing by the continued encouraging of wrecking your opponents while also still preventing it from becoming a wreckfest, it just feels like F-Zero this way.
I can't disagree.

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Yeah the F-Zero machines seems to be able to act like spacecrafts when airborne but they also do have some sort of friction with the track since you can loose the grip and drift, they are not entirely like air-/space-/water-crafts which can't drift as they have no wheels (or rather they are always drifting).
The track grip is extremely important in F-Zero. The grippy, snappy feel is one of the big things that differentiates it from WipEout. One thing that does bug me a bit is that in the original and GX (and to some extent in X), you can steer just fine in midair. I think having no grip and having to rely on aerosurfaces, thrust vectoring and internal reaction wheels should give you very poor airborne handling, nothing like what you have on track (which is several dozen gees at least, not counting cheese techniques).

The issue I'm trying to solve is that if the machines can thrust while airborne, they can fly. Even the Fire Stingray can pull several gees in a straight line, meaning that unless you're racing on the sun, you'll only fall if you do something wrong - every F-Zero machine is in principle a powered-lift flying machine. Making it hard to steer in midair helps prevent players from cheesing the game by simply not bothering to come down after a jump. Shortcut rules and maybe a time limit on off-track driving could help too.
Did braking work in the air in the SNES games?
Yes. I just tried it.
I suppose that means the machines won't work in vacuum, which is kinda weird as some tracks seems to be taking place above the atmosphere.
F-Zero has played a bit fast and loose with physics in the past. My preferred interpretation (which resulted in the machine concept art upthread) is that thrust is provided by airbreathing jets, possibly ion jets powered by a compact fusion reactor. This allows the vehicle performance to broadly match what is seen in-game, without impractical exhaust velocities or consumable-mass requirements. It does mean Outer Space is off the table without some sort of pressure enclosure for the whole track, but it opens up the possibility of higher-altitude races like Cloud Carpet being designed for slower acceleration due to the thin air. This sort of variation might be interesting.
But in newer F-Zero games they claim to use some sort of G-diffuser (gravity-diffuser) system, same as the Arwings in the Star Fox games.
My take is that the "G-diffuser" is just an acceleration compensator. It "diffuses" the G-force over the entire vehicle more or less uniformly, rather than having it transmitted structurally, squashing the pilot and causing structural and mechanical failures. Perhaps having the shields up makes the effect more uniform, while having no shields means an impact can cause damage before the system can react.

I don't know if there's deep lore about the G-diffuser that contradicts this, but I figure my description matches the name well enough.
93143
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Joined: Fri Jul 04, 2014 9:31 pm

Re: Formula 0

Post by 93143 »

I've been thinking that it might be reasonable to require a player to train a bot on his playstyle before he's allowed online, or as part of graduating from the bush league. This bot would be uploaded to everyone else's machine for use by the predictive netcode, resulting in a much more accurate approximation and requiring less correction when the real input catches up.

With attack moves, especially the side attack, this would be more difficult because the solution space is strongly discontinuous - a single split-second decision is the difference between smashing into somebody hard and cruising by harmlessly. Precise timing is critical, especially if both machines use side attacks at roughly the same time. This is another reason I think they should go (and probably one reason Nintendo didn't put the side attack in 99).

Is it possible to make a trainable bot good enough for this application, yet simple enough that one Switch 2 can easily run 29 of it? How long would it take to train? Obviously you wouldn't start with a raw neural net; this would be a mostly-finished driving AI with the ability to change its style based on observation.

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Here's another hard problem: How does one program a competent non-cheating AI that an SA-1 can easily run 19 of?
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