SEGA Rally is known as an arcade classic, and it had a huge impact on the racing genre when it hit arcades across the country back in 1995. Over 10 years later Sega decided that the racing game had got a bit stale without them as the focus had moved away from fun to realistic simulations; good to look at, but often dull to play.

With that in mind the publisher decided to take on the challenge of bringing the fun back into racing, and create a true next-gen rally game that still offers the realism, but also takes advantage of new technologies to bring character back into the genre.

Today’s gamers won’t be content with basic graphics and gameplay though, and the original SEGA Rally probably wouldn’t grip those but the nostalgic. So the development team worked on how they could make a properly challenging game using the next-gen consoles’ technologies.

As with the original, the single player mode is still about racing successive laps of a track against a number of opponents; computer players, friends or online gamers. So what could they do to bring rally gaming into the 21st century? How about adding deformable surfaces that affect how you race!

Basically what this means is this; as you race around each lap, you and your competitors churn and wear the track, leaving a scrubbed or rutted surface behind. In the past this has been possible, but only in a visual form. The team took it a step further with ‘Rally, by making these different surfaces affect the gameplay; where you will see, hear and feel nuances in taking one racing line or another.

For example, you might see a contour made by another car through some gravel, which if you follow will help you gain speed, whereas if you take a fresh route through the gravel it could potentially slow you down. Cool huh?

So how is this done? Well, most games use a one metre polygon (many sided shapes such as a triangle, square and rectangles that are pieced together to create the 3D image) grid to drive upon, but because of the detail they were aiming for, the entire drivable surface of every track is modelled at the massively high detail of six centimetres for every single polygon. That’s 17 times more detail, and means that each tyre of every car interacts with up to 12 polygons at any time.

The physics engine powering this game also runs the detail at a high frame rate (the number of frames or images that are displayed per second on the screen), reacting to every bump in the intricate and colourful scenery you’d expect from a next-gen rally game.

For every surface, there are a number of characteristics the racing studio has worked on. It has modelled the wear rate of the ground, and how ruts form for every single polygon when driven over. They also added the detail of how the friction changes as players drive over already ridden surfaces, and they were even able to model the higher grip levels expected on tarmac over gravel for example; meaning real live racing lines form that can and must be reacted to as in a real race.

But it doesn’t just end there, the developers also focused on creating the most detailed rally cars seen in-game. Working as the lead car artist on SEGA Rally, Keith Burden built every single car from scratch, making all of the cars look as realistic as possible.

This was done with a lot of reference work. Keith and his team went out and about taking pictures of all the cars they would be creating; over 30 in total, using the Internet to get information and images, and even using car model kit blueprints to get the exact dimensions etc they needed.

The team had tough deadlines to meet, but they worked hard to create highly detailed cars within the given timeframe.

“The overall build time is 55 days per car; from nothing to getting it in-game and working,” says Keith.

This entails the research for each car, then creating the wire frame model of the car and then adding the details to make it ‘real’; including special high resolution features like the wheels and bonnet since it’s a High Definition game. This is called texturing, where the designers ‘draw’ on the details like grills, rivets and headlights, bringing the basic car model to life.

“For the PS2 or original Xbox you’d build a car with say around 5000 polygons, and have a texture resolution of 512 x 512 pixels,” explains Keith. “For the new consoles (PS3 and X360) you can build up to around 25,000 polygons for a car, and then we’re also using a resolution of 2048 x 2048 for some of the outer body shell textures.”

Even more impressive is the fact that as well as creating models of real cars, the team developed a virtual car that has now become reality!

“The McRae Enduro is one of our very special game cars because I assisted in its design and 3D visualisation. We have other in-house designed cars in game but none of these will ever become reality. Having seen the photos of the real McRae Enduro it’s pleasing to see that it looks exactly like our in-game model.”

“The guys who were building the McRae Enduro sent me some basic drawings and technical specifications and asked me to build it in our 3D software. We then went through a process where I would model and design certain areas and they would amend and re-design certain areas. This went on for a few weeks while their design team resolved the look they were after and I would re-create and amend the design in 3D. Kind of like design tennis! The McRae Enduro team would then translate this data back into the real car they were building. I suppose it was like an evolutionary design process.”

Surprisingly all this design work is done using two different programmes, one of which you may have even used yourself.

“There are only two programs we really use – 3D Studio Max to do the modelling and the mapping, and then we use Photoshop to do the textures,” Keith explains. “3D Studio Max is basically just a 3D modelling package, it’s like virtual clay sculpting. It’s fairly straight forward to use; you can make simple primitives, shapes, objects etc, it’s just a case of literally learning the tools in that application. We had a temp here for a while, about 17 years old, and he had already had a go at this programme at home. He was a whiz at it, showing us up on it actually,” he chuckles. “It was like he’d been using it for years, he was really, really good.”

SEGA Rally is the first next-gen racing game this team has worked on, and so they feel they’re only beginning to start exploiting the technology possible, and that in the future things will look even more amazing. With this in mind the team were a bunch of perfectionists who kept going back to add more finishing touches wherever possible.

“There’s just so much to do and you want to make everything look so nice,” Keith says. “I’m a real perfectionist; I can’t let anything look rubbish, so you spend a lot of time re-doing things and re-tweaking things. Sometimes you’ll jump back a stage, to redo everything again because it doesn’t look quite right, or you can do it better by using a different method. It’s quite an evolutionary process really.”

Its early days for the next-gen consoles, but already developers are working hard to create games that really harness the technological capabilities the hardware allows. SEGA Rally is just the beginning, so check it out…

SEGA Rally is the first title to speed out of SEGA Rally’s newly formed racing studio, and is available now on PS3, X360, PC and PSP. www.segarally.com