This improves on the localised weather that had it raining on certain sections of track. Codemasters use ”historical data” for weather on tracks based on the seasons.
The studio feels it adds more dynamic gameplay for F1 2013 as you can’t be quite sure what the road surface is going to be like. The Race Engineer might call it wrong.
”The weather system has been a staple of our Formula One games since we launched back in 2010,” blogged F1 2013 game director Paul Jeal and art director Anthony Filice.
”A number of other racing games have tended to steer clear of weather due to the complexity involved, not just in the visuals but also in tying it all together with the gameplay experience too.”
”Last year we added localised weather, so that it can rain in a single section or corner of a track. This year improvements have been made to knit everything much more tightly together, both visually and from a gameplay perspective.”
”We have a brand new series of weather scenarios, each tied in to the geographical location of the race as well as its place on the race calendar based upon historical data,” they explained.
”These weather scenarios are much longer, around four hours, and the game randomly picks a scenario and a point on it so that players will rarely play the same weather conditions twice. Even the Race Engineer doesn’t know 100% what is happening with the weather and sometimes calls it wrong!”
They’ve focused on the transitions going to wet weather, including how the track surface appears and visual effects. They hope it will ”eliminate any disparity between what the player sees and what they experience when driving in the wet”. All this leads to a ”more realistic wet weather experience”.
F1 2013 releases on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 October 4th.
