Automobilista 2 April 2023 Development Update

And as most probably know the simcade market is the biggest so…. AMS3=PC3

 

and then AMS GO

just like pcars ended up as a mobile game

 

Why so much worry over something that hasn’t happened yet , or even been conceived ?
Ams2 isn’t going to lose VR support , and whatever straight4 do is obviously going to be trying to meet the market .
But even if it didn’t have as good VR potential , you’re not obligated to buy it .

 

But I want to buy every future Reiza title and I expect it to have good VR support. This since I'm a fan of AMS2 and I was happy with how Reiza was doing on it's own and since they now cooperate with a new studio that didn't even mention VR on their homepage/press releases it simply makes me concerned. I don't even want to live with that idea "not obligated to buy it". The thought alone is terrible. And also the focus of Reiza comes to question since it's still unclear how Reiza stands in all this, what the cooperation exactly means for the future of Reiza studios. Do they go ahead with the ideas of Ian Bell, or do they only help him with the physics/handling/ffb for example? And does Reiza keep doing what they are doing? Or will they develop every new title from now on together? This are huge differences.

Of course I hope the best of it too, and I even think that the intentions (I said it what negative now that I read it backwards) of Ian Bell are good but I also think that his intentions are commercial. This while Reiza always did everything out of one thing and that is: Passion. For Ian it was always money AND I believe also passion. So I hope that the niches that Reiza always focussed on don't get lost by this new adventure. Reiza's time and effort in developing something could only spend once, so I hope that they spend their time and effort as they always did and that is spending it on the sim racing market including the niches within it: all the unique content that AMS1/2 has and VR.

 

Still don’t understand the amount of dread over the announcement of two creative studios with experience in the same coding joining minds to share IP .

both can only only be stronger for it , and perhaps Reiza will be the key to future straight4 title being amazing in VR .

you should be excited for what possibilities lay ahead , not full of dread.
All will be cleared up soon I’m sure , until then, we are just imagining good or bad . Doesn’t change what i will be doing next time I sit in my rig .

 

The latest iteration of it not the PC2 era code

 

I believe some SMS Studio employee said they found out some big things about the madness engine that they were sadly not allowed to share with Reiza, maybe that will be possible now.

 

It's always good to have positive thoughts, and I have those thoughts for Reiza of course. But nothing is wrong with having healthy concerns about a new cooperation.

CodeMaster was lost by cooperating with EA, it didn't make them stronger at all.

Recent history about Ian Bell: "Codemasters acquired Slightly Mad Studios in 2019 and was itself acquired by Electronic Arts in 2021.". Slightly Mad Studios was founded by Ian Bell, so he has the right to do that but in the end I think that his commercial thoughts sometimes go way to far and this simple fact is proof of it.

So I think that especially in a cooperation with Ian Bell it's healty to be concerned from the start, because we don't know what direction this is all going.

 

How do you know that?

 

there is no suggestion of anyone acquiring anything.
Just a combination of mind and potentially assets.

 

Partnership can also mean Straight4 hiring Reiza for outsourcing work. Reiza gets money, at the cost of man-power and delaying Ams 2 stuff.

 

That would be contractor agreement , not partnership
Man this paranoia’s spreading

 

That's how it all starts. Ian Bell acquires time from Reiza, that's at least for sure, what they get back in return for it is unclear at this moment.

Of course an business acquisition doesn't happen in a split second. Ian Bell also worked years towards selling his assets of Slightly Mad Studios to CodeMasters and who knows if he had a side contract to also benefit from their future deal with EA. That's the moment that he works towards maybe now again. He's a business man. This while in my opinion Renato is doing everything out of 100% passion. Who knows what Ian's personal endgoal is with this new project?

 

Isn't this simply confirming offcially whats already been happening for the last 2/3 years. This "partnership" must have already been there or else we wouldn't even be racing on AMS2 given its foundation on the Madness Engine.

For me, this is a win win situation all round. Ian Bells new tech he's working on like AI scripted commentary, Reizas ability and experience in extracting performance and features from graphics and physics engines.

Ultimately, if both studios do well, then that equates to more and bigger licensed content for AMS2.

 

Let's hope that the process goes like you describe over the long term too and that Reiza always stays independent in the meantime. I didn't see a need for all this but maybe I'm wrong, Renato always knows what he's doing so yes let's give it some trust. I'm looking forward to his official statement about where they are moving together.

 

Reiza's statement back in 2018:

They did just port some of their assets to RF2 back then, though. But it was still purely about monetary gains, they didn't gain any tech or assets back to improve Reiza's game, and still called it a "partnership".

 

First, if Straight4 buys licenses for cars, tracks, etc, i doubt they can sell them or give them away for free to other studios. Reiza needs to pay for the licenses themselves, and only after that they can copy the assets from Straight4.

Regarding that AI commentary demo, that seemed fake as hell to me. Felt like some dev just asked ChatGPT to write some commentary, and then recorded real-life commentators to read what ChatGPT wrote, and stuck that over an existing video. The background for the voices was really inconsistent, the main commentator had some awful background noise (should not happen if the voice was AI generated), and also the game sounds were muted. All these scream "fake".

Unless they write their own AI to generate and read the text, and ship that AI inside their game, using other existing AIs as APIs for thousands of concurrent players at the same time seems like a no-go. Or the subscription would cost Straight4 way too much to have this as a usable feature for every player. Like i said, i really doubt that video was in real-time, using AI for both writing and reading text.

 

It's probably easier to do AI deepfake voices these days than get famous motorsport commentators to read your "fake script". It's so easy that politicians are using it to make a point about AI:

 

Some call it paranoia, some call it long standing experience.
Reminds of a company I worked for a good 20 years... the last 3 years full with consultant meetings. In the end it was sold and dissolved, despite the owner prior statement that he has no intention to sell.

 

AI generated content is a bit unregulated at the moment, but this will change very, very soon. I doubt it will be legal to make money using a real person's voice as training data without his or her permission. Yes, they could compensate that person if an agreement is reached. But my point still stands, im not sure AI is yet fast enough to generate that text and audio lines in real time. If you have an accident or an overtake on track, you dont wanna wait 3-4 seconds until the commentary is generated. It needs to be lightning fast. And right now, it isn't.

Speaking of deepfakes, i'm not exactly sure about audio ones, but video deepfakes are notoriuously hard to make at the moment. But like i mentioned, i doubt Straight4 created AIs themselves, it's way more likely that they used existing AIs, using public APIs to generate text, and maybe speech, but that is not really sustainable in a video game with thousands of players, where you need non-stop commentary for everyone.