Formula One Grand Prix (video Game) - Critiques

Critiques

Despite these great achievements, F1GP also contained a flaw that was considered irrelevant at first, but would later seriously compromise the potential of the game and its successors.

Geoff Crammond wrote the game long before the era of DirectX, OpenGL and 3D acceleration video cards. So F1GP was built around a proprietary 3D engine that ran in software. This engine was set up in such a way that a fixed frame rate had to be chosen (up to 25.6 frame/s on the PC version), and the game would at all times try to render the specified number of frames.

The result was that the engine would never drop frames when the CPU couldn't handle the rendering in realtime. Instead, gametime itself was slowed down. The software itself provided an option to display the CPU-load, pressing the "o" key. When this was higher than 100%, the game was no longer working in realtime. This would become known in the community as the infamous "slow-motion driving". Since the rendering was obviously dependent on the complexity of the scene, this also meant that one could experience slowdowns of the action only on certain parts of certain tracks, or when there were lots of cars around (for example at the start).

The game did provide options to eliminate trackside details; (CTRL-D), and in addition one could also choose a lower framerate to avoid the problem altogether. It also has to be understood that gamers didn't have quite the same expectations of framerates as nowadays. The unmatched quality of the 3D representations in itself was enough to impress people. So the actual impact on single-player gaming was not seen as important.

Later in the game's life, this effect became a larger issue. The Grand Prix series never offered solid multiplayer network support, largely due to this design choice. "Real time" in the game could differ between different players, and this conflicted with the all-important synchronization in a multiplayer context. The effect could also be misused to artificially slow down the action, and exploit the extra reaction time that became available to the player that way. Although largely irrelevant if one played the game on its own, it caused a lot of trouble for online competitions (see below). Successors Grand Prix 3 and Grand Prix 4 offered LAN-play and were even hacked to be playable over the Internet, but never performed reasonably. Even when the first boom of 3D acceleration chipsets revolutionized gaming, the concept was not reworked as this would have required a large rewrite of the game engine, and remained a problem (although less so because of the available computer power).

Another exploitable flaw lay in the physics engine, which only took account of horizontal collisions and ignored vertical velocity when calculating damage. Thus, it was possible to use the rumble strips on some tracks to launch the car into the air, bypassing chicanes, and land without damaging the car.