Forza 3 Discussion...

You can turn off HUD completely for that full cockpit immersion feeling.

That's how I play, unless I'm hotlapping, in which case I usually turn on the lap counter and timer. Of course, if I'm driving a car like the R8 V10, I don't need to turn it on because you can read the lap times recorded right in the digital gauges of the center console, just like in real life. It rocks.

Two weeks back we were sent a pic that seemed to suggest the upcoming Forza Motorsport 3 would feature at least one V8 Supercar, the Team Vodafone car of Jamie Whincup. Looks like there’s more to it than that.

Today I was invited to a press conference hosted by Xbox and V8 Supercars Australia “where they are set to announce a new and exciting partnership between the two organisations.”

The invite continues: “A number of V8 Supercar teams will be represented at the event, where Xbox will also be showcasing the new racing title Forza Motorsport 3.”

V8 drivers Mark Winterbottom (Ford Performance Racing), Garth Tander (Toll Holden Racing Team), Lee Holdsworth (Garry Rogers Motorsport), Michael Caruso (Garry Rogers Motorsport) and Shane van Gisbergen (Stone Brothers Racing) will be present.

So, what to conclude from all this? I know it’s not exactly confirmation, but I reckon there might be some V8 Supercars in Forza 3. Just a hunch…

Australia, September 1, 2009 - Xbox 360 and V8 Supercars Australia today announced a partnership which will see eight V8 Supercars appear in the upcoming blockbuster racing title "Forza Motorsport 3" exclusively on Xbox 360. The intense rivalry within the V8 Supercar Championship Series can now play out in the living room, as motorsport fans battle head-to-head on over 100 renowned real-world tracks and exotic road courses from around the globe.

The following V8 Supercars are featured in "Forza Motorsport 3":

• 2009 Holden #2 Toll Holden Racing Team Commodore VE
• 2009 Holden #33 Garry Rogers Motorsport Commodore VE
• 2009 Holden #39 Supercheap Auto Racing Commodore VE
• 2009 Holden #51 Sprint Gas Racing Commodore VE
• 2009 Ford #1 TeamVodafone FG Falcon
• 2009 Ford #5 Ford Performance Racing FG Falcon
• 2009 Ford #9 Stone Brothers Racing FG Falcon
• 2009 Ford #25 Britek Motorsport FG Falcon

V8 Supercars Australia Chairman Tony Cochrane commented, "V8 Supercars is recognised globally as the best touring car Championship on the planet and being included in the internationally acclaimed Forza 3 is testament to that."

Available in Australia on October 22nd, Forza Motorsport 3 takes V8 Supercars to world-famous tracks, including Suzuka, Nurburgring Nordschleife and the Sebring International Raceway, as well as new environments like the mountainous Montserrat region in Spain, the rugged Amalfi Coast in Italy and the American Southwest.

V8 Supercars legend Mark Skaife commented, "I'm extremely impressed with the polish of Forza Motorsport 3 and excited about the exposure it will bring to our great sport internationally. Aussie Holden and Ford fans can now battle head-to-head everyday of the week, and get up-close and personal with the power and precision of V8 Supercars."

"With 20 million people connected to Xbox LIVE, Australian Forza Motorsport 3 fans will never be short of competition online. As racers the world over realise the potential of the V8 Supercars, the Holden vs Ford rivalry will most certainly swell beyond our shores," continued Skaife.

Featuring the latest and greatest production offerings as well as the world's fastest and most exotic street cars, "Forza Motorsport 3" offers more than 400 fully customisable and tunable cars from over 50 of the world's leading manufacturers. Whether your passion is classic American muscle cars, European roadsters, purpose-built race cars or high-tech Asian imports, "Forza Motorsport 3" puts you in the cockpit of the cars you love.

All cars will feature immaculately rendered interiors and extensively reinforced cockpits to handle any collision or rollover, just like their real life counterparts. Players will realistically experience their favourite V8s to a degree that, until now, was only possible in their dreams.

And yeah, no Bathurst in the game. But the V8s are fun as hell. We have 3 new tracks we haven't talked about yet. And 1 returning from FM2.

Just was not one of the tracks we ended up including although it was on our list. Many many tracks were on that list.

You have a lot of cars in Forza 3. You're actually going to have some of the cars stored on a second disc -- it's actually going to span two DVDs. How does that work? You know, what's stored on both discs? If it's cars, do you rip those cars onto the hard drive? What exactly will the process be if I'm buying Forza 3?

It's a great question. We do have 400 cars and they all feature damage, rollover, and cockpits. It's not just a small subset, but everyone of them feature that. All of them can be painted, put on the auction house, and used in [user-generated content]. But to your question, the way it is done is that we've got a primary disc, which has 300 cars on it, which is a ton of cars -- more than Forza Motorsport 2.

The second disc contains three environments, and another 100-plus cars. What you do is actually install all the content from disc two as if it was DLC and then it automatically integrates into your game. So you can play off disc one without installing it, without ripping to the hard drive, and all the disc two content you have installed (similar to DLC) gets put into the career as AI opponents and shows in your career mode, as different races and the tracks change out. You can make the game more deep, if you like, by adding that content

Obviously not everybody has a hard drive on their Xbox; not everybody has room on their hard drive. What if I was playing on an Xbox Arcade unit against someone online and they were using a car I didn't install or a track I didn't install. How would that work?

The way that we deal with cars – we've done DLC for quite awhile now; Forza Motorsport 2 had it as well as just learnings we had through PGR. And so we have what we call a "blob car." It's a car that stands in for any car you don't have. It's a generic car but it functions just like the other person's car. So you're not going to see their livery; you're not going to see their paintjob; you're not going to see their car; but what you are going to see is a representation of a car that's performing the same way they do.

Now when it comes to tracks, we actually don't allow you to be on an environment you don't have. That's obviously gigs worth of data and we can't send that data over the wire

And if you're matchmaking, you would just skip that track obviously ...

Absolutely. We actually have a hopper system similar to Halo or Call of Duty. This is not a very hard problem. This is something that's been solved by lots of games. We look to how people have solved it in the past and there are some pretty good models to follow.

And so the hopper system and parties and bringing parties into hoppers -- those are the two different changes that we've put into a ton of game modes such as Tags, such as Keep It Clean, Cat and Mouse.

And we put it in a rules editor so any user can go in and make it a drift race. But it's team-based and one team is all Class A and one team is all Class B and you're only allowed to drive in cockpit. And they can layer all of these rules on top and save them and reuse them. We call those people "social coordinators."

Now if these rules take off on the web, we start hearing about them on the forums and then we can also monitor what people are playing online. Not individual people, but just generally what the community is using rules-wise. We can bake those into the hoppers.

I expect a month, two months after the game releases, we're going to find that there's a new variant of Tag or a new variant of Cat and Mouse, and we'll just bake it into our hopper system so everyone gets to enjoy it.

Anything you guys really wanted to include but you didn't have time?

Everything. I don't know. The issue is that it's not a little bit of time to add the sorts of features we'd like to add. It's a lot of time. So we were shooting for what it would take to make a game in a few years, but the truth is I want to bring even more people together; I want to get more people excited about cars. I think that really comes down to technology we just don't have yet.

I don't know -- it's not a good answer to your question, sorry. I've still got a lot that I want to do in this franchise and we're just years off from it. It's not a matter of well, if we just had another three months or six months. It's like, if we had another three years where we could really sit down and re-architect the system, we'd be able to give an even cooler experience.

What might one of those systems be? Damage extending to engine parts and driving performance and that sort of thing?

We have that. Yeah, when you damage your car in Forza it damages all the components. And if you turn it up to "sim" damage, if you roll your car over, it's pretty much incapacitated. We had that in Forza 2 as well, it's just now we have roll-over, it's much more apparent.

For the series premiere I teamed up with "Turn 10" for a behind-the-scenes look at Dyno Testing for the upcoming Forza 3 Xbox 360 game. We bring in a Ford GT and capture the specs and audio which will eventually end up in the game. I also have a chat with content director John Wendl and talk about the challenges of developing for the 360, we discuss the new engine and simply talk tech: Visible Tire Deformation, Polygons, Game Engines and Rendering.

Now you’ll be able to mess with shapes, decals, and alphanumeric characters to create custom vinyls on a blank screen without the need to load up a car. You can even turn on a grid overlay to keep better track of your design's dimensions. This should help make the process of creating custom pieces of art that can be applied across a wide number of cars a lot easier.

The next logical step that comes after making a sweet paint job is taking your work to the game’s new storefront system. Players have the ability to save screenshots, replay movies, vinyls, paint work, and tuning set-ups and share them online with others. If you find someone who’s work you really enjoy, you can add them to your favorites list without having to add them as an Xbox Live friend, and easily track all their contributions.

Later on, he showed us a race at the Circuit de Catalunya in Spain with the Lamborghini Reventon. The Reventon is a sleek, all-black car that looks almost like the Stealth Bomber on wheels. But its most striking trait is one seen from the cockpit view. The Reventon features all-digital gauges that look like the dashboard of a spaceship. It’s truly one of the more exotic cars in the game.