Operation Sports is proud to present our interview with Rich Yasi, Director of Design and Production for the upcoming NASCAR Racing 2003 Season.

GAMEPLAY
Operation Sports: Are you going to allow a little more rubbing online? It's the worst thing in the world when you're racing side by side for 10 laps, then one person gets TOUCHED and is sent spinning into the fence. Upon replay review, you can see that the cars barely knicked. In real life, you can do a little rubbing.

Rich Yasi: The problem is that we have to include some type of extrapolation code routine (essentially, predicting where a car WILL be) that compensates for the inevitable lag and inconsistent data flow that any Internet connection introduces. This is why you’ll get the occasional spike and exaggerated collision response online if you’re door to door with someone.

The simple fact of the matter is that until everyone has 100% rock-solid LAN-like latency over the Internet, you won’t be able to get away with rubbing door to door for extended periods of time like you can offline. Just remember to give the other guys a little more room than you normally would offline and you’ll be OK.

Operation Sports: Will the AI be less robot like on the track? Example, more AI bumping, more AI induced incidents, randomness would be nice, especially for long race setup testing. This is something that has been editable in the track.ini file in the past, but usually by a ton of trial and error.

Rich Yasi: We’ve done a lot of work on the AI for this product. We’ve attempted to address every point you’ve brought up, along with many others. I think that you’ll be pleased with what we’ve been able to accomplish in just one year.

Operation Sports: Are you, or have you ever considered a career mode in Nascar Racing?

Rich Yasi: The problem with career mode it is that in order to make it compelling, at least within the context of NASCAR, you’d need to do it in such a way that you have a player start in some lesser type of car like a sprint or a modified, and basically chronicle his rise through several series on the NASCAR ladder en route to (and including) Winston Cup. That means modeling a lot of additional cars and tracks, a ton of new artwork, new AI, and on and on it goes. Since we’ve been committed to an annual release schedule, we just haven’t had the time to do it the way it should be done.

Operation Sports: Will the cockpit view be improved any?

Rich Yasi: If by “improved” you mean having a different field of view, we’ve added the ability to adjust the cockpit FOV. We’ve found that the default FOV has caused firestorms over the years, so we finally decided to let people adjust it for themselves and leave us alone.

Operation Sports: Will the tire wear gauge be improved any? Example, seperate meters for the inside, center, and outside of the tire.

Rich Yasi: Only tire temperature will be tracked as you suggest. Wear will continue to be displayed as before.

Operation Sports: Will it be possible to stall your car on pit road after a pit stop?

Rich Yasi: No, it’s not possible to stall the car.

GRAPHICS
Operation Sports: Will we be able to see other users pit stops/crews while coming into pit lane?

Rich Yasi: Yes, we’ve included the option of displaying opponent war wagons and pit crews.

Operation Sports: Are you ever going to bring back small track racing like South Boston?

Rich Yasi: Over the years we’ve found out the hard way that the only NASCAR tracks most people care about are the ones that are part of the Winston Cup series. If South Boston were on the Cup schedule, it would be in the game, but since it isn’t….

Operation Sports: Since this is the final Papy release in the Nascar series on PC, are you going to release any sort of editor for tracks/car models, so that the mod community can continue to produce for it?

Rich Yasi: As of now we haven’t made plans to release any of our tools to the public, but since we’re planning on moving away from that technology and toward middleware solutions for building our games, who knows? I can see it happening down the road, but not right away, because most of our tools are decidedly NOT user-friendly and would really require extensive documentation to make them of any use to the public.

ONLINE PLAY
Operation Sports: Any chances of an online season mode?

Rich Yasi: This is something we had planned to implement back when we thought we’d be making NASCAR games for years to come. Now that the situation has changed and we’re coming to the end of the line, we decided it would be better for us to take that time and energy and devote it to adding new things that all players – not just the 20% who play online – would enjoy.

Operation Sports: Will the online ratings start over from scratch or are they going to be transferable (from N2002) as with N4 to N2002? In addition to this, will there be more trackable stats for the user from online races?

Rich Yasi: We haven’t made a final call on this, but we’re inclined to reset the ratings because of the physics changes and the fact that this since this will be our final NASCAR title, it would be nice for everyone to start with a clean slate. After that, barring unforeseen circumstances, there wouldn’t be any more resets for the remainder of the product’s lifespan.

MISCELLANEOUS
Operation Sports: Any console future for Sierra/Papyrus with racing?

Rich Yasi: Oh yes, the consoles are definitely where we want to be. That’s where most of the industry is heading, especially now that those machines have online capability. At the same time, though, we have no intention of abandoning the PC. That’s where we got our start, and it will continue to be a part of our overall business plan for the foreseeable future.

Operation Sports: Will N2002 cars (user created) be importable or will they need to be re-painted for N2003?

Rich Yasi: There have been changes to the car template, so they’ll need to be repainted. Sorry!

Operation Sports: We would like to thank you for your time with this interview, is there anything else you would like to add?

Rich Yasi: First off, thank you for the opportunity to be on the site. We’re really working hard to make NASCAR Racing 2003 Season the best it can possibly be. We have a lot of pride in what we do, and we every intention of making NASCAR Racing 2003 Season the new benchmark in the sim racing world.