原作者：Sean Cleaver 译者：Willow Wu

即使你会开车，那你知道要如何测试一个赛车电子游戏来保证它的真实度与精确度吗？Sean Cleaver采访了Slightly Mad Studios的Stephen Viljoen和 Rod Chong，谈谈他们是如何面对这种压力，让世界上最贵的汽车到逼真、精确的效果。

跟大多数游戏相比，《赛车计划2》的测试过程是非常与众不同的。当然,也有一些很常见的游戏测试项目——比如bugs、小故障、画面问题、内存泄漏等等，但是对于模拟类游戏来说，你测试的目的不仅仅是让游戏顺利运行，还有让游戏变得逼真。

Project Cars 2（from develop online）

如果有人说QA测试人员对于塑造模拟比赛是不可或缺的，那么这确实是大实话。Stephen Viljoen说“从一开始就有很多工作要做，”他是Slightly Mad Studios《赛车计划2》的开发总监。“我们要测试的并不是游戏体验，而是测试游戏背后的技术问题。”

《赛车计划2》使用的游戏引擎是in-house engine，测试不仅仅是为了车或者是赛道。测试员们要对各种细节有过详细了解才能确保游戏的高质量。“技术问题必须要在某个特定的场景中单独测试（比如说赛道），而且每个场景都需要测试。各种细节问题都不尽相同，需要一一解决。

“举个简单的例子，观众的着装首先是根据天气状况，然后是根据季节，然后才是年代，QA人员必须要注意到这些问题。从我们的角度来说，我这边的团队工作是游戏设计，制定各种细节，必须要确保我们交给QA人员的文件足够精确、详尽，这样他们才明白要测试哪些地方。接下来QA人员就得把目光聚焦在那些小细节上。这在其它游戏或者是模拟应用中是很少见的。”

还有一个例子就是游戏中的后勤维修团队。《赛车计划2》是一部续集游戏，有些前作的东西可以在测试过程中起到帮助作用，但是其它的，比如说后勤维修团队和维修站，我们不仅重新设计、制作动画，而且还要确保他们符合所在方程式比赛规则，还有就是符合他们的年代。

“如果你驾驶的是1970年代的赛车，那么当你进入维修站时你就会看到维修人员都穿着那个年代的服装。我们不能就假定QA知道这些吧？不能期待他们什么都知道。这就是一般QA人员不知道的一种细节。但这是游戏提高拟真程度所需的众多重要细节之一。

测试真实度

你可能觉得既然测试和保证游戏质量是《赛车计划2》最关键的工作，那么QA这个词用得不太准确。 “我不知道我们会不会称其为QA，”首席商务官Rod Chong说道，“但是这个工作中必定包含着一个反馈的过程，我们会和车手们以及那些聚焦于真实度的专业人士共同工作。每辆车我们都要审视，然后问自己：‘它听起来像不像一辆真实的车？这样对不对？操作起来是不是很真实？我们有没有掌握赛车的精髓？’

“就比如说保时捷911，它的发动机是后置的，具有特殊的操纵性能和驾驶方式。我们需要根据反馈进行多次修改，尽量提高游戏的真实度，这是我们平常一直在做的事。”

《赛车计划2》之所以能够这么逼真，原因之一就要归功那些真实车手，他们帮助开发人员更准确地调整赛车的各种细节。Slightly Mad Studios目前有7位全职车手参与游戏制作。比如说特技车手、同时也曾是Top Gear的Stig扮演者Ben Collins，还有前房车赛车手Nicholas Hamilton，两个人都对游戏有着巨大的贡献。

“我们和Stefan Johansson开了两次会议，他是1980年代的F1赛车手，从1970年代至今驾驶过各种不同类型的赛车。”所以我们和他讨论了他的赛车生涯，了解他在哪个年代用什么车比赛。然后他试了7、8辆不同的车，我们进行测试，收集到了相当多的反馈信息。

“有几次他在开车时说：‘你们搞错了。’就比如保时捷962C那次。他开着开着就说‘不，感觉不对，后倾角没调好。’他说，‘把后倾角设置成XX度，回去修改一下。’所以我们把角度给改了。”

尽管过了这么长时间，车手还是可以清楚地记得赛车的感觉，真是不可思议。更让人难以置信的是一个电子游戏竟然可以记录下这种专业的精确感，呈献给现实中的赛车手们。这么做不仅仅是向玩家证明了游戏的物理设定准确，游戏控制器（比如方向盘）有所提升，还体现了测试人员的敬业精神以及Slightly Mad Studios对质量的把关。“现在的模拟技术已经到了十分精湛的水平，你甚至可以感受到所有正在发生的事情，”Rod Chong说。

你可以感觉到轮胎、悬吊几何的作用，你真的可以感觉到车子有了哪些改变。对于技术精湛的玩家，就像那些赛车手，他们玩虚拟赛车就知道哪些地方不对劲，需要改动，然后列出个清单给程序员。接着他们就可以继续改进物理设计，调整赛车属性。”

要做这个时代背景下的赛车游戏，开发者们可以从汽车制造商那边获取到很多信息，这在以前是做不到的。涉及到老式赛车部分的就比较棘手了。“当你开现代车时，它们大部分是在测试轨道或者是赛道上，”Chong说。“它们会保持在同一轨道上，我们只需要设定以毫米为单位，激光扫描之后就可以开始跟踪数据，记录下车子跑一圈的完整情况。

“但如果是老式车，有些可能是20多年来都没人开过的车……你绝对不想要你的游戏设计师只能无奈地坐在桌子前，想着‘法拉利啊，我该怎么做？’他们甚至还用滑动器增加赛车的其他一些属性，比如过度转向、最高速度、咬地过弯、下压力等等。这对于我们来说是无法接受的。我们必须把汽车从里到外的状况都模拟出来，这也是我们一直在做的事。这就是我们的出发点。”

“我们有这么丰富、庞大数据资源，”Viljoen总结道，“但是怎么才能把这些数据在模拟游戏中调整得那么精准，那就是我们的独家秘诀了。”.

本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao

Even if you know how a car drives, would you know what to test to make sure a videogame captured it accurately? Sean Cleaver speaks to Slightly Mad Studios’ Stephen Viljoen and Rod Chong about how Project Cars 2 ‘handles’ the pressure of getting the worlds most exclusive vehicles accurate

Testing a game like Project Cars 2 is an unusual process compared to most. Of course, there are some things that will always be familiar in games testing – bugs, glitches, graphical issues, memory leaks, etc. But with a simulation you aren’t just testing to make sure it works, you’re also testing to make sure it’s as realistic as possible.

In fact, it’s fair to say that QA and testing are inherent in building a racing simulation. “There’s so much of it right from the get-go,” says Stephen Viljoen, game director for Project Cars 2 developer, Slightly Mad Studios. “Instead of ‘QA’ing’ a gameplay experience you have to QA the technology behind it.”

Project Cars 2 is built using an in-house engine and testing isn’t just reserved for the cars or the track. A lot of that detail has to be known by the testers before they can make sure that the quality of the game is accurate. “The technology has to be tested independently of the specific environment (like a track) and it has to be tested per environment as well. There is so much detail that falls out of the level of detail assimilation.

“The simple example is our spectators are dressed based on the weather, based on the seasons and then based on the era, and QA has got to pay attention to that. From our perspective, with my team working on the game design and specifying all that detail, we’ve got to make sure that the documentation that we handed over to QA is thorough enough that they know what to check for. Then the QA team has to pay attention to all of those little details. It’s not something that you typically find in many games or simulations.”

(L-R) Rod Chong and Stephen Viljoen

Another example of this is the pit crew in the game. With Project Cars 2 being a sequel, there are already some things in place that will help testing but the others, like pit crews and pit stops, have not only been entirely redesigned and animated, but they have to be accurate to the rules of the racing formula they are in, but also the era that they come from.

“If you go and do a pit stop while in the 1970s cars, the pit crew will be dressed like they would have been in that era. We can’t assume QA would know that, right? We can’t expect them to know that. It’s just a level of detail that a general QA team simply wouldn’t know. But that is one of many very important details that recreates the real world as close as possible.”

TESTING REALITY

You could argue that because testing and quality is so inherent to the makeup of Project Cars 2 that QA probably isn’t the right phrase. “I don’t know if we would call it QA,” says chief commercial officer Rod Chong. “But there’s certainly a feedback process that we go through with the drivers or with people that are focused on authenticity. We have to look at each car and ask ourselves the question: ‘Does it sound like the real car? Did we capture the car or is it wrong? Does it handle like the real thing? Have we captured the essence of the car?’

“Like a Porsche 911 for example, with a rear engine, has some very particular handling characteristics and ways that you drive it which are quite unusual. We have to always be going through these feedback processes to try and strive for realism and authenticity and that’s a continuous process.”

One of the ways that Project Cars 2 has achieved the realism it has in the handling of the cars is thanks to the input of real drivers. Slightly Mad Studios currently has seven full-time drivers working on the game. Names such as stunt driver and former Top Gear ‘Stig’, Ben Collins, and former touring car driver Nicholas Hamilton have contributed heavily.

“We did two physics sessions with Stefan Johansson who was a Formula 1 driver in the 1980s, but he’s raced a wide variety of cars from the 1970s to the present day. So we spoke to him about his racing career and understood what cars he raced in what eras. Then we did tests where he drove about seven or eight different cars, all stuff that he’s driven and he gave us a lot of feedback.

“There were a couple instances where he drove a car and he said, ‘you’ve got this wrong.’ Like the Porsche 962C. He drove it and he said, ‘no this doesn’t feel right. You’ve got caster wrong.’ He said, ‘we ran this amount of degrees caster angle on it. Go back. Fix it.’ So we changed it.”

It is incredible that regardless of time, a driver can recall exactly how a car feels from memory. It’s even more incredible that a video game can capture that and present it to the driver authentically. It’s a testament, not only to physics or the improvement in game controllers like steering wheels but also to the dedication to testing and quality from Slightly Mad Studios. “The level of simulation now is so sophisticated that you can actually feel everything that’s happening,” says Rod Chong.

“You can feel the tyres, you can feel the suspension geometry and you can really sense what’s happening with the car now. For people that are highly technical, like these racing drivers, they can drive the car in the simulation and then know what has to change and give a list to the programmers. Then they can continue to evolve the physics and the handling characteristics of the cars.”

VINTAGE GARAGE

Racing games in this era of game development get more from car manufacturers than ever before, but historic racing is a much more difficult prospect. “When you have the modern cars, most of them have driven on test tracks or on race tracks,” says Chong. “They could be the same tracks and so we had laser scanned millimetre perfect versions of those, so we can get a data trace of the car going around a circuit.

“But when it comes to things like the older cars, some of which may not have been driven 20 years… What you don’t want to do is have a game designer, sitting at their desk thinking ‘Oh okay, Ferrari. How should that handle?’ And they’ve got some sliders to add oversteer, top speed, grip, downforce, etc. For us, this is unacceptable. We have to simulate whole aspects of the car, and that’s what we did. That’s the starting point.”

“We have this vast resource of data available,” concludes Viljoen. “But how you get that to the point where it’s accurately representing in the simulation, that’s the secret sauce.”（source:develop online ）