Eudemon

When Stressed, Play Fun Web Games Over the past month or so I have been real busy in converting our site and community over to https, as well as moving our dated forum to a better and more modern software; and being the non-genius that I am, I got stuck, trampled and very confused during this time. So, like most people, I liked to step away from the task at hand and go do something else. As if you didn’t know, walking away and doing other things at these moments, can keep you working on the problem still at the back of your mind. Therefore, between watching tv, listening to music, going for a walk and reading old school books (The White Mountains!), I also took to playing some web games – the more stress free and crazier the better. Even making sure to move away from my preference for car games, as the need to place or win would much likely make my head explode! And so, I found myself doing everything from (simply!) driving a lorry/semi-truck from point A-B while avoiding C, D, E, F and G, and had fun racing in the stone age, in a title that felt like a brilliant Mario Kart and Worms mash-up. Undoubtedly though, the best of them all, was the one where you need to defend some cows from being abducted by aliens, by picking them up and delivering them to a plane at the airport. (stupid but fun!) I have to warn you, this one is especially addictive! Did playing these work in easing my tensions? Well, just like what kind of happened with Einstein at the Patent Office, doing this helped me solve some of the issues I was facing, and even reset my frustration, so yeah, I would say it did. Although, there has been a side-effect to this: I keep going back to play that crazy save the cows from aliens game. Oh well. :)

Assetto Corsa Competizione – Official Community FAQ Just over a week ago, Kunos Simulazioni and 505 Games revealed Assetto Corsa Competizione, the official game of the Blancpain GT Series. Naturally a flurry of questions have been asked about what exactly it is and several other important factors, and so, they’ve answered a selection of them to help us better understand. To summarise the more important aspects: Competizione is a whole new game, not just a break-off (so it is AC2 then?) At this time, Competizione is being developed only for PC (Steam) and this will continue throughout the ‘Early Access’ period (so a possible move to console once ACC 1.0 comes perhaps?) Competizione will use an improved version of the AC physics engine and not those of Unreal Engine 4 AC will continue to remain online for as long as people are active on it but new updates and content will not be forthcoming as the all the team is now on Competizione Full day and night are in In regards to modding, it is best to see the last question as it sounds like they are unable to commit to it because of their inexperience with the new engine (potential for some smart cookies to work it out afterwards?) The whole (brief) Q&A is listed below. What is Assetto Corsa Competizione? Assetto Corsa Competizione is our all-new racing simulation that reproduces the Blancpain GT Series Championship managed by SRO and based on the GT3 homologation. ACC is not an additional module or an extension of Assetto Corsa but a different, new and separate product altogether! Is AC Competizione a spin-off of Assetto Corsa? Absolutely not! We are developing AC Competizione from scratch. It takes advantage of the Blancpain GT experience, know-how and data collection acquired while working on AC. However, AC Competizione is not AC featuring the Blancpain GT Series. It is a completely new game that will offer realistic car handling as well as new features and gameplay not seen before in our products. Will AC Competizione be available on PC Steam only, or on console too? Right now, all our efforts are going into developing Assetto Corsa Competizione on Steam, during Early Access. Does AC Competizione use the UE4 Engine’s physics? AC Competizione will feature an evolution of the physics engine already used in Assetto Corsa, completely independent from UE4’s built in physics. What is going to happen to Assetto Corsa now you’re working on Competizione? The game will continue to be available for purchase, servers for multiplayer and lobbies will be kept open and active for as long as people continue to play it. The game will not receive further updates now (It has now been 7 years since AC development started and 4 years from its 1.0 release) Our entire team is now focused on AC Competizione. Why the Blancpain GT Series? What does make it so special? When we started to figure out what the new AC would have to be, we saw that -including AC- the current generation of racing games offers a huge variety of “generic” titles performing multiple race modes with any kind of cars. This usually results in finding a compromise in terms of score, racing rules, gameplay modes etc. On the other side, very few games are dedicated to a specific race series that can be completely simulated in all its detail and, more importantly, can keep gamers focused. Whenever we’ve asked the community for their opinion, GT racing was always on the top of their wish list, and we found that the Blancpain GT Series fits the bill! Featuring Sprint races, endurance, night racing, driver swaps, official teams and drivers, these are exactly the things our fans asked for! Not to mention the best GT cars available, in their racing outfit, that results in lightness, handling, grip and brake power. Add to this formula the 24 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps, and you get the best thrilling GT racing series ever. Will we see a day / night cycle in Assetto Corsa Competizione? Yes – Players will be able to race at any time of the day, thanks to a realtime, full day / night cycle. What are the recommended system requirements for Assetto Corsa Competizione? Our minimum target specification is currently an i5-2500/AMD FX-8100 or equivalent, 4 GB RAM and NVIDIA Geforce GTX 760. However, right now, it’s way too early to be more precise. Over time, we’ll be able to be more specific later as we continue to develop ACC. Therefore, if you are considering upgrading your hardware configuration, we strongly suggest you wait for our Early Access before upgrading. Will Assetto Corsa Competizione be moddable? And will modders be able to port their work onto AC Competizione? Assetto Corsa’s structure was designed from the beginning to be moddable. Being developed with UE4, AC Competizione processes data and assets through a completely different structure and file format. Therefore, the game will not be compatible with mod contents created for Assetto Corsa. Also, our team does not have enough experience with UE4 to tackle both the development a brand-new game and the challenges of supporting an open platform in the time frame available for this project. We are fully aware of the importance of modding and its contribution to the success of Assetto Corsa. It’s a great way for new talents to emerge, for the community to “suggest” new directions and/or simply to make a product richer. It is not a coincidence that some of the best community members are now contributing with us to the evolution of the software. However, for ACC this element will have to be put in stand-by mode for a series of reasons. The most important one is that we have given ourselves an enormous task of rebuilding, once again our software from (almost) scratch. In a world where pretty much, every product you see on the market in simracing is an evolution of games that have been on the market 10-15 years ago, our approach is to get a big axe and reset things to (almost) zero before starting with a new project. ACC is no exception. In this case the task is rendered more complex by the fact that we are using, for the first time a third party engine that we did not design ourselves and the truth is, given the amount of time we have available to deliver ACC to the public, we have more than enough on our hands trying to figure out how to use the engine effectively to also think about how to make the platform moddable. As you can imagine, this has been source of endless discussions in the last year and half as every decision comes with pros and cons, there is going to be pain no matter what your final call will be. It goes without saying that we believe we made the right call even if that means losing the huge benefits of a moddable platform. [via 505 Games]