Assetto Corsa Competizione: Marco Massarutto Interview

[Paul Jeffrey]

We sit down with Kunos Simulazioni Co-Founder, Brand & Product Manager Marco Massarutto to talk Assetto Corsa Competizione past, present and future..

At the recent SRO E-Sport GT Series event in Monza, we took the opportunity to spend some time with Marco Massarutto of Kunos Simulazioni and ask him about the Steam Early Access title Assetto Corsa Competizione - the official game of the Blancpain GT Series.

Taking part in a special media event on the Friday prior to commencement of the new SRO E-Sport GT Series, Marco takes the time to give some insight into the development of Assetto Corsa Competizione, talking about how the game is progressing following Kunos move to Unreal Engine 4, what the future holds and plenty more besides.

Enjoy!

For more about the SRO E-Sport GT Series, head over to the official forum and connect with your fellow eSport drivers!

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[Alex Townsend]

My right arm hurts just watching it

That could be taken in a very different context...

 

[Deleted member 379375]

Great interview and questions. I really like the kunos guys but it’s starting to feel like this UE4 experiment was a mistake.

Agreed, great questions and nice to get some answer on VR and tripples, shame this wasn't communicated months ago. Yeah the commercial reasons for going UR4 make sense but what is says it that they were prepared to sacrifice multi-display for a quick turnaround and console support if it came to the crunch.
To achieve mass market sales,rather than compromise on sim reality they risk the same marginalisation of the hardcore sim racers via another route.
It's a sad day when the quality of a racing sim is dependant on the popularity of a shoot em up.

 

[kondor999]

In my perfect (impossible) world, they could've just licensed the graphics engine from PC2.

Whatever its other faults, PC2 consistently looks great, delivers excellent weather visuals in particular, and is much less GPU-intensive than UE4 will apparently ever be. I feel like UE4 needs a GPU from the year 2021 to really be happy at 4k or in VR.

Oh well, at least they didn't go with...Unity

 

[Jorge Villar]

Agreed, great questions and nice to get some answer on VR and tripples, shame this wasn't communicated months ago. Yeah the commercial reasons for going UR4 make sense but what is says it that they were prepared to sacrifice multi-display for a quick turnaround and console support if it came to the crunch.
To achieve mass market sales,rather than compromise on sim reality they risk the same marginalisation of the hardcore sim racers via another route.
It's a sad day when the quality of a racing sim is dependant on the popularity of a shoot em up.

They have communicated before release. Because, you know, ACC is released at the end of this month.

 

[Deleted member 379375]

They have communicated before release. Because, you know, ACC is released at the end of this month.

I am not having a go at Kunos I have bought neKar Pro and AC and all the dlc. I also understand that they have to manage peoples expectations as the most casual comment can be misconstrued or taken as gospel. I also understand that they couldn't be sure about support from the outset but I only recal them saying VR and multi-monitor users were a tiny minority which didn't instill confidence. I'm trying to be accurate here but I don't remember them indicating they had burning desire to support these technologies and that they would be disappointed if they couldn't.

Anyway we will have to see what the future brings, I hope in the end Kunos products will continue to be a no brainer for me.

 

[Fat-Alfie]

The fact that they are in talks with Epic about further developments in the Ue4 engine that might make triples a possibility says to me that they do care about triples users, but that also need to cater to the majority of users that don't, because they are the ones who pay for development.

Great interview which came across as very professional. Well done all involved

 

[Paul Glover]

Agreed, great questions and nice to get some answer on VR and tripples, shame this wasn't communicated months ago. Yeah the commercial reasons for going UR4 make sense but what is says it that they were prepared to sacrifice multi-display for a quick turnaround and console support if it came to the crunch.
To achieve mass market sales,rather than compromise on sim reality they risk the same marginalisation of the hardcore sim racers via another route.
It's a sad day when the quality of a racing sim is dependant on the popularity of a shoot em up.

Are triples needed today? With widescreen monitors available? Is it a question of change and people need to adapt?

Have never run triples personally, I am a VR user and at the moment when playing ACC I am using my 34 inch monitor.

 

[Paul Glover]

I liked how open this interview is, within reason of course. Honest question, would Codemaster's or any of the bigger developers explain their reasons and challenges like this?

Doubt it.

Thing is, you will never please everyone. Sometimes it's a thank less task, credit is due here for this interview imo. I would have that opinion if I was an RD staff member of not, I'm not blowing smoke up their backsides.

For me personally, VR is important, whilst I cannot run it at least now I understand the challenges ahead and they have set my expectations. I'll need to buy a better PC

 

[Deleted member 379375]

I liked how open this interview is, within reason of course. Honest question, would Codemaster's or any of the bigger developers explain their reasons and challenges like this?

Doubt it.

Thing is, you will never please everyone. Sometimes it's a thank less task, credit is due here for this interview imo. I would have that opinion if I was an RD staff member of not, I'm not blowing smoke up their backsides.

For me personally, VR is important, whilst I cannot run it at least now I understand the challenges ahead and they have set my expectations. I'll need to buy a better PC

Yes I am a VR user but run in a monitor as the VR performance is poor. I may not like the current VR state and yes it's nice to hear the reasons. The point I was making is the communication during the earlier phases of early asses. For me they are the devoloper who's products and business model best fit my needs and AC communication was better than I could have wished.

 

[oliver65]

I don't have acc now, but I intend to buy the full version. I have seen it many videos tripple screen and it looks good. Why do they tell it's no tripple?

 

[Neils on Wheels]

Great interview still love kunos & thank them for doing this interview I know the game is WIP at least for now the vr is not looking so good so i'm not really using it. Performance wouldn't be so much of an issue if it wasn't for having to push AA & pixel density up so high to counter the lack of sharpness & even then it's not as sharp as every other sim i use in VR. Also things like a lack of mouse support, presentation of the show room & something off with the colours & lighting imo. Still looking forward to version 1 i'm hoping some spit & polish will do wonders & will all come together.

 

[Enerjex]

Possibly a future GT4 DLC is the surprise? Would like to see another region but tracks take time so maybe not in the short term?

 

[Ghoults]

I think these kind of issues like triple screen support really underline the differences between making your own engine or using someone else's. With ue4 (and its editor and support) kunos has an engine that can do all kinds of stuff that would be really difficult to do on your own. Like adding fps shooter mode or making the game run on phones for extreme examples. But at the same time it is not kunos' engine and all of the work that is being put into making ue4 better is done and decided by epic and not kunos. Triple screen is difficult proposition for epic because it really is so rare thing in most games and practically useless feature for their own games.

This surely puts kunos into difficult position. Technically they could add triple screen support into the game on their own but that could require massive changes to the game graphics engine. Kunos does have the source code for ue4 (like everyone does who makes games with ue4) so it is not question of possible or not. In the end it is question of is it worth the cost which in this case could be huge. Adding triple screen support could and would cause major issues later when kunos wants to update to newer version of the ue4 engine to get all those other updates epic has made too the engine. It sounds like kunos has already gone through one such update and surely they are smarter now after having gone through it once.

This feature adding dilemma is probably true for many other things as well. Adding fundamental changes to the engine may not be worthwhile to do even if you can do them if it locks you down to specific version of the ue4 engine which then in couple of years is hopelessly out of date. And if it is difficult addition to the graphics engine for kunos then it is surely difficult for epic as well. After all they don't want to make it unnecessarily difficult for other games to update to newer versions of ue4 just because it now has triple screen support.

 

[Leynad777]

This "it's a sim, not a game"-argument is nuts, because sims are games and nothing wrong with it. You can get severely injured in all kind of ball-games, but stupid mistakes usually don't cause physical harm like in Sim-Racing. Just real fighting, racing and athletic sports are not called games, but with infinite cars in a fake-reality more safe than a walk outside it objectively shifts to a game-thing. Never heard of Golf-, Chess- or Tennisplayer complaining for calling their sports 'games' and makes more sense for me to establish Sim-Racing as a gamey sport discipline, because they are more than 'just' computer games.

 

[Dan Costa]

Well since day-one of the early-access we knew it would be coming to console, just from looking at the unfortunate User Interface choices..

 

[Paul Glover]

Yes I am a VR user but run in a monitor as the VR performance is poor. I may not like the current VR state and yes it's nice to hear the reasons. The point I was making is the communication during the earlier phases of early asses. For me they are the devoloper who's products and business model best fit my needs and AC communication was better than I could have wished.

Get your point, some more communication would be good.

But I guess their focus is getting the product out and meeting the tight deadlines, communication is probably not their focus. Not excusing it, just trying to explain.

Now I guess with V1 on the way they feel they are in a position to get out there, promote etc.

 

[Fanapryde]

I don't have acc now, but I intend to buy the full version. I have seen it many videos tripple screen and it looks good. Why do they tell it's no tripple?

Are you serious ?
There IS no proper triple screen support. A one screen image stretched over three screens is not wat it should be. It looks like crap.

 

[mantasisg]

It is obviously very difficult to get simulator growing, while at the same time growing as a game. Both are necessary. But as simulation gets greater, it also gets more complex to handle it, something what gamer side of casual simracer does not like.

 

[Paul Glover]

Are triples needed today? With widescreen monitors available? Is it a question of change and people need to adapt?

Have never run triples personally, I am a VR user and at the moment when playing ACC I am using my 34 inch monitor.

Those who have disagreed with my post, what are you disagreeing with? I'm simply asking questions rather than making a statement, I'm looking for a response.

 

[Fanapryde]

.../... Are triples needed today? With widescreen monitors available? .../...

Those who have disagreed with my post, what are you disagreeing with? I'm simply asking questions rather than making a statement, I'm looking for a response.

I disagreed with your suggestion (at least that is what I made of it) that the view on widescreens would be as good as on triples. I have tried both and widescreens don't even come close to the (obviously) surround feel triples offer. That is if you put them in the right angle and not (as I know some do) use them as a very wide (almost) flat screen.