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Formula One Grand Prix (Geoff Crammond)
Encyclopedia
Formula One Grand Prix (known as World Circuit in the United States
) is a racing simulator released in 1992 by MicroProse
for the Atari ST
, Amiga
and PC
created by game designer Geoff Crammond
. It is often referred to as Grand Prix 1, MicroProse Grand Prix, or just F1GP, although the game itself was not affiliated officially with the FIA or any Formula One drivers (team liveries and driver helmets were accurate to represent the 1991 season
, but the names were fictional). The game is a simulation of Formula One
racing at the time and was noted for its 3D graphics and attention to detail, in particular the players ability to edit the teams and drivers and set up their car to their own personal specifications. Grand Prix's success spawned three sequels, called Grand Prix 2
, Grand Prix 3
and Grand Prix 4
. These were exclusively PC games.
, which was released three years earlier, it was the second serious 3D polygon
-based racing sim (that is, without textures
, except some for the scenery in the PC version). Geoff Crammond's REVS
on the Commodore 64
and BBC
home computers used similar polygon-based 3D graphics, but was limited by the relative lack of computer power of the 8-bit machines. Although Indy 500 was strictly speaking first in pioneering many novel features, F1GP would make a bigger overall impression and impact because it featured Formula One race cars, and because it offered the player a complete season to compete in, featuring 16 F1 tracks to Papyrus' 1 track in Indy 500.
When Indy 500 and F1GP appeared, they were the very first to implement something that resembled "real world" racing physics, accurate track modelling and car handling that required skills somewhat similar to real-world driving skills to perform well. Both were also the first to offer meaningful options to tune the behaviour of the cars. Although not quite on the level of later simulations, the most important variables, such as gear ratio
s, tyre
compounds and wing settings
were available to tune and, more importantly, proved to make an actual difference when driving. Important were also the functional rearview mirrors and an "instant replay" system with a wide range of adjustable camera settings not seen in other games of the era.
Despite several continuity hiccups, the game offered a completely new experience for players at the time. The accurately modelled tracks meant that the player could actually recognise their location on the real-life circuit. The detailed physics engine provided a more realistic driving experience than had been seen before, drivers could easily experience the differences in handling depending on how you entered a corner and how soon or late you accelerated out of it. Unlike other racing simulations of the time, the accuracy of the simulation actually made the 1/1000 of a second chronometer meaningful, as races could be won or lost by a few thousandths of a second. Vitally, the combination of graphics and physics meant players could actually "feel" whether they were driving fast or slow, and could predict how the car would respond. Even details such as tyre wear were modelled throughout the race, qualifying tyres are an extreme example of this: you could not drive more than a couple of laps without beginning to lose grip and eventually spinning out on nearly every corner.
Together with the 16 tracks and the atmosphere-packed rendition of complete Grand Prix weekends, it made F1GP a favourite with Formula One and racing sim fans for many years, and is still referred to occasionally in current reviews as a classic benchmark.
Two more aspects worth mentioning are the "driving help" features, the ability to drive easily with the keyboard or another controller, and the availability of automatic transmission on most cars. F1GP was built on a system that allowed for an almost perfect learning-curve. Depending on which driving assistances were activated, the game covered playability from a pure arcade-racer level up to the most advanced sim-level available at the time. Players could choose to activate innovative help-functions like "brake
-assistance" which would apply your brakes in time for a corner, displaying an "ideal line" on the tarmac to help learning the layout of a track, suggestions for the optimum gear, and others. Perhaps the most impressive achievements in that respect were the "steering help" and "throttle
assistance". At the time F1GP was released, analogue steering wheels were far from mainstream. Even joystick
s were still mostly digital, and in that respect no different from a keyboard. In order to compensate for the strict on-off nature of digital controllers, Geoff Crammond implemented a method to 'smoothen' the inputs. "Throttle assistance" prevented wheel spin when going on the gas. "Steering help" smoothened the steering actions (as an indication, one would experience cars steering slightly into corners all on their own when this help was activated). This was a subtle exercise, as it could give the impression of cars driving themselves when implemented too strongly. As experience showed, a balance was found. Which turned F1GP, and its successors, into a racing game that could be fully enjoyed and played well via digital input devices.
As an aside, it is illustrative for the depth of the game that people actually learned to overcome the need for "Throttle Assistance" when using the keyboard, and discovered that disabling it and applying the right techniques enabled "digital" drivers to go faster (at the expense of tyre wear).
Geoff Crammond wrote the game long before the era of DirectX
, OpenGL
and 3D acceleration video cards. So F1GP was built around a proprietary 3D engine that ran in software. This engine was set up in such a way that a fixed frame rate had to be chosen (up to 25.6 frame/s on the PC version), and the game would at all times try to render the specified number of frames.
The result was that the engine would never drop frames when the CPU couldn't handle the rendering in realtime. Instead, gametime itself was slowed down. The software itself provided an option to display the CPU-load. When this was higher than 100%, the game was no longer working in realtime. This would become known in the community as the infamous "slow-motion driving". Since the rendering was obviously dependent on the complexity of the scene, this also meant that one could experience slowdowns of the action only on certain parts of certain tracks, or when there were lots of cars around (for example at the start).
The game did provide options to eliminate trackside details, and in addition one could also choose a lower framerate to avoid the problem altogether. It also has to be understood that gamers didn't have quite the same expectations of framerates as nowadays. The unmatched quality of the 3D representations in itself was enough to impress people. So the actual impact on single-player gaming was not seen as important.
Later in the game's life, this effect became a larger issue. The Grand Prix series never offered solid multiplayer network support, largely due to this design choice. "Real time" in the game could differ between different players, and this conflicted with the all-important synchronization in a multiplayer context. The effect could also be misused to artificially slow down the action, and exploit the extra reaction time that became available to the player that way. Although largely irrelevant if one played the game on its own, it caused a lot of trouble for online competitions (see below).
Successors Grand Prix 3
and Grand Prix 4
offered LAN-play and were even hacked to be playable over the Internet
, but never performed reasonably. Even when the first boom of 3D acceleration chipsets revolutionized gaming, the concept was not reworked as this would have required a large rewrite of the game engine, and remained a problem (although less so because of the available computer power).
Another exploitable flaw lay in the physics engine, which only took account of horizontal collisions and ignored vertical velocity when calculating damage. Thus, it was possible to use the rumble strips on some tracks to launch the car into the air, bypassing chicanes, and land without damaging the car.
in 1993, crossing over to the wider Internet once that became mainstream.
The racing didn't actually happen online. F1GP only offered modem
play. Thus, the competitions were based on submitted save-games of races and practice laps. These were then used in competitions around complete (or partial) races on the one hand, and so called "Hotlap Competitions" on the other hand. Often, the races followed the schedule of the real world Formula One competition.
The community spawned a host of mods, making the game highly customizable for its time. Liveries, car-performance and the performance of the computer-opponents, camera-settings and many other settings could be edited. First attempts at a track-editor emerged, but this would only become reality after the arrival of the successor Grand Prix 2.
Because of the possibilities to edit the performance of the car, or to make other aspects of the game favour the player, there were also a lot of utilities to check for cheats. These could handle just about every possible trick that was available, except one: the mentioned "slow-motion driving" effect. The game didn't store the CPU-load
data, which could be displayed via a function key, in any save game file. So there was no way to exclude the possibility that someone maximized the graphics detail on purpose to force a slowdown of the action.
In practice, F1GP was already an 'older' game when online competitions appeared. This meant that most used computers could easily handle the highest detail at the highest framerate
. As such, F1GP-based competitions were actually not hit by the "slow-mo" cheat. Both because the communities were small, and because the CPU-power surplus meant that the effect and its possible usefulness as a way to cheat were less well known.
Its successor Grand Prix 2 though, was notorious for its high CPU-demands. When it appeared, there were no systems available that could handle it at full detail. Most people had difficulty finding a good compromise between details and smooth framerate, and the majority were likely playing in moderate slow-motion without being aware.
When the Grand Prix 2 community materialized and exploded far beyond what F1GP ever offered, it soon became apparent that some participants in the competitions submitted results that were totally unrealistic. Telemetry
-data files even showed typical signs of "slow-motion driving" (like impossibly fast gearchange speeds) but there was no way to unambiguously prove it.
This problem kept bugging the community for several years until the utility GP2LAP was developed to monitor and log the CPU load dynamically during the driving.
Despite the sheer age of the game and the fact that it is both technically and graphically inferior to modern racing simulators, F1GP still has a small active community and on-going developments relating to the game. At the forefront of this community is one of the last known active locations for this game, found at the racing game website SimRacingWorld http://www.simracingworld.com/games/2-microprose-f1gp/. A single section is reserved for F1GP in which downloads and articles from the past remain accessible to anybody interested in the game. In addition to this, any new developments which are of benefit to the community are made available by means of the section news and public forum. On the 14 January 2007, a mailing list http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/f1gpwc/ was added to further support the game. In this case, the goal was to promote community discussion and allow casual players to remain aware of new developments.
In more recent times, these developments have been limited to small-scale community updates and the development of a new open-source game editor called "Chequered Flag" http://chequeredflag.sourceforge.net. However, the introduction of Chequered Flag deserves notable mention; as a unification of previous editing tools and the introduction of new game modification facilities are promised. Despite the slow speed of the development process, the progress achieved has been good and a number of screenshots were released on the 3 September 2006 to give an indication of the editor construction state. This was followed on the 23 December 2006 by the first release of the editor under version 0.1.0. This early version focused only on providing modification facilities for track editing. A more complete set of editing tools was anticipated, although as of 2009 this remains the only released version.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
) is a racing simulator released in 1992 by MicroProse
MicroProse
MicroProse was a video game publisher and developer, founded by Wild Bill Stealey and Sid Meier in 1982 as Microprose Software. In 1993, the company became a subsidiary of Spectrum HoloByte and has remained a subsidiary or brand name under several other corporations since...
for the Atari ST
Atari ST
The Atari ST is a home/personal computer that was released by Atari Corporation in 1985 and commercially available from that summer into the early 1990s. The "ST" officially stands for "Sixteen/Thirty-two", which referred to the Motorola 68000's 16-bit external bus and 32-bit internals...
, Amiga
Amiga
The Amiga is a family of personal computers that was sold by Commodore in the 1980s and 1990s. The first model was launched in 1985 as a high-end home computer and became popular for its graphical, audio and multi-tasking abilities...
and PC
Personal computer
A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...
created by game designer Geoff Crammond
Geoff Crammond
Geoff Crammond is a computer game designer and programmer who specialises in motor racing games. A former defense industry systems engineer, he claims to have had little interest in motor racing before programming his first racing game back in 1984, but he holds a physics degree, which may explain...
. It is often referred to as Grand Prix 1, MicroProse Grand Prix, or just F1GP, although the game itself was not affiliated officially with the FIA or any Formula One drivers (team liveries and driver helmets were accurate to represent the 1991 season
1991 Formula One season
The 1991 Formula One season was the 42nd season of FIA Formula One motor racing. It featured the 1991 FIA Formula One World Championship, which commenced on March 10, 1991 and ended on November 3 after sixteen races...
, but the names were fictional). The game is a simulation of Formula One
Formula One
Formula One, also known as Formula 1 or F1 and referred to officially as the FIA Formula One World Championship, is the highest class of single seater auto racing sanctioned by the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile . The "formula" designation in the name refers to a set of rules with which...
racing at the time and was noted for its 3D graphics and attention to detail, in particular the players ability to edit the teams and drivers and set up their car to their own personal specifications. Grand Prix's success spawned three sequels, called Grand Prix 2
Grand Prix 2 (game)
Grand Prix 2, sometimes known as "GP2" and sold in the American market as Grand Prix II, is a racing simulator released by MicroProse in 1996. It was made under an official FIA license that featured the Formula One 1994 season, with all of the circuits, teams, drivers and cars...
, Grand Prix 3
Grand Prix 3
Grand Prix 3 is a computer racing simulator by MicroProse. Released in 2000 by Hasbro Interactive featuring the 1998 Formula One season...
and Grand Prix 4
Grand Prix 4
Grand Prix 4, commonly known as GP4 was released for the PC on June 21, 2002, is currently the last Formula One racing simulator released by the developer Geoff Crammond and the MicroProse label...
. These were exclusively PC games.
Impact on the racing simulation genre
After Papyrus' Indianapolis 500: The SimulationIndianapolis 500: The Simulation
Indianapolis 500: The Simulation is a 1989 computer game. It was hailed as the first step of differentiating racing games from the arcade realm and into true simulations. It was developed by the Papyrus Design Group, consisting of David Kaemmer and Omar Khudari, and distributed by Electronic Arts...
, which was released three years earlier, it was the second serious 3D polygon
Polygon (computer graphics)
Polygons are used in computer graphics to compose images that are three-dimensional in appearance. Usually triangular, polygons arise when an object's surface is modeled, vertices are selected, and the object is rendered in a wire frame model. This is quicker to display than a shaded model; thus...
-based racing sim (that is, without textures
Texture mapping
Texture mapping is a method for adding detail, surface texture , or color to a computer-generated graphic or 3D model. Its application to 3D graphics was pioneered by Dr Edwin Catmull in his Ph.D. thesis of 1974.-Texture mapping:...
, except some for the scenery in the PC version). Geoff Crammond's REVS
REVS (computer game)
Revs is a 1984 Formula Three simulation written initially for the BBC Micro by Geoff Crammond and published by Acornsoft that is notable for its realistic simulation of the sport and as a precursor to its author's later work on Formula One Grand Prix and its sequels.-Gameplay:Unlike most...
on the Commodore 64
Commodore 64
The Commodore 64 is an 8-bit home computer introduced by Commodore International in January 1982.Volume production started in the spring of 1982, with machines being released on to the market in August at a price of US$595...
and BBC
BBC Micro
The BBC Microcomputer System, or BBC Micro, was a series of microcomputers and associated peripherals designed and built by Acorn Computers for the BBC Computer Literacy Project, operated by the British Broadcasting Corporation...
home computers used similar polygon-based 3D graphics, but was limited by the relative lack of computer power of the 8-bit machines. Although Indy 500 was strictly speaking first in pioneering many novel features, F1GP would make a bigger overall impression and impact because it featured Formula One race cars, and because it offered the player a complete season to compete in, featuring 16 F1 tracks to Papyrus' 1 track in Indy 500.
When Indy 500 and F1GP appeared, they were the very first to implement something that resembled "real world" racing physics, accurate track modelling and car handling that required skills somewhat similar to real-world driving skills to perform well. Both were also the first to offer meaningful options to tune the behaviour of the cars. Although not quite on the level of later simulations, the most important variables, such as gear ratio
Gear ratio
The gear ratio of a gear train is the ratio of the angular velocity of the input gear to the angular velocity of the output gear, also known as the speed ratio of the gear train. The gear ratio can be computed directly from the numbers of teeth of the various gears that engage to form the gear...
s, tyre
Tire
A tire or tyre is a ring-shaped covering that fits around a wheel rim to protect it and enable better vehicle performance by providing a flexible cushion that absorbs shock while keeping the wheel in close contact with the ground...
compounds and wing settings
Airfoil
An airfoil or aerofoil is the shape of a wing or blade or sail as seen in cross-section....
were available to tune and, more importantly, proved to make an actual difference when driving. Important were also the functional rearview mirrors and an "instant replay" system with a wide range of adjustable camera settings not seen in other games of the era.
Despite several continuity hiccups, the game offered a completely new experience for players at the time. The accurately modelled tracks meant that the player could actually recognise their location on the real-life circuit. The detailed physics engine provided a more realistic driving experience than had been seen before, drivers could easily experience the differences in handling depending on how you entered a corner and how soon or late you accelerated out of it. Unlike other racing simulations of the time, the accuracy of the simulation actually made the 1/1000 of a second chronometer meaningful, as races could be won or lost by a few thousandths of a second. Vitally, the combination of graphics and physics meant players could actually "feel" whether they were driving fast or slow, and could predict how the car would respond. Even details such as tyre wear were modelled throughout the race, qualifying tyres are an extreme example of this: you could not drive more than a couple of laps without beginning to lose grip and eventually spinning out on nearly every corner.
Together with the 16 tracks and the atmosphere-packed rendition of complete Grand Prix weekends, it made F1GP a favourite with Formula One and racing sim fans for many years, and is still referred to occasionally in current reviews as a classic benchmark.
Two more aspects worth mentioning are the "driving help" features, the ability to drive easily with the keyboard or another controller, and the availability of automatic transmission on most cars. F1GP was built on a system that allowed for an almost perfect learning-curve. Depending on which driving assistances were activated, the game covered playability from a pure arcade-racer level up to the most advanced sim-level available at the time. Players could choose to activate innovative help-functions like "brake
Disc brake
The disc brake or disk brake is a device for slowing or stopping the rotation of a wheel while it is in motion.A brake disc is usually made of cast iron, but may in some cases be made of composites such as reinforced carbon–carbon or ceramic matrix composites. This is connected to the wheel and/or...
-assistance" which would apply your brakes in time for a corner, displaying an "ideal line" on the tarmac to help learning the layout of a track, suggestions for the optimum gear, and others. Perhaps the most impressive achievements in that respect were the "steering help" and "throttle
Throttle
A throttle is the mechanism by which the flow of a fluid is managed by constriction or obstruction. An engine's power can be increased or decreased by the restriction of inlet gases , but usually decreased. The term throttle has come to refer, informally and incorrectly, to any mechanism by which...
assistance". At the time F1GP was released, analogue steering wheels were far from mainstream. Even joystick
Joystick
A joystick is an input device consisting of a stick that pivots on a base and reports its angle or direction to the device it is controlling. Joysticks, also known as 'control columns', are the principal control in the cockpit of many civilian and military aircraft, either as a center stick or...
s were still mostly digital, and in that respect no different from a keyboard. In order to compensate for the strict on-off nature of digital controllers, Geoff Crammond implemented a method to 'smoothen' the inputs. "Throttle assistance" prevented wheel spin when going on the gas. "Steering help" smoothened the steering actions (as an indication, one would experience cars steering slightly into corners all on their own when this help was activated). This was a subtle exercise, as it could give the impression of cars driving themselves when implemented too strongly. As experience showed, a balance was found. Which turned F1GP, and its successors, into a racing game that could be fully enjoyed and played well via digital input devices.
As an aside, it is illustrative for the depth of the game that people actually learned to overcome the need for "Throttle Assistance" when using the keyboard, and discovered that disabling it and applying the right techniques enabled "digital" drivers to go faster (at the expense of tyre wear).
Critiques
Despite these great achievements, F1GP also contained a flaw that was considered irrelevant at first, but would later seriously compromise the potential of the game and its successors.Geoff Crammond wrote the game long before the era of DirectX
DirectX
Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with Direct, such as Direct3D, DirectDraw, DirectMusic, DirectPlay,...
, OpenGL
OpenGL
OpenGL is a standard specification defining a cross-language, cross-platform API for writing applications that produce 2D and 3D computer graphics. The interface consists of over 250 different function calls which can be used to draw complex three-dimensional scenes from simple primitives. OpenGL...
and 3D acceleration video cards. So F1GP was built around a proprietary 3D engine that ran in software. This engine was set up in such a way that a fixed frame rate had to be chosen (up to 25.6 frame/s on the PC version), and the game would at all times try to render the specified number of frames.
The result was that the engine would never drop frames when the CPU couldn't handle the rendering in realtime. Instead, gametime itself was slowed down. The software itself provided an option to display the CPU-load. When this was higher than 100%, the game was no longer working in realtime. This would become known in the community as the infamous "slow-motion driving". Since the rendering was obviously dependent on the complexity of the scene, this also meant that one could experience slowdowns of the action only on certain parts of certain tracks, or when there were lots of cars around (for example at the start).
The game did provide options to eliminate trackside details, and in addition one could also choose a lower framerate to avoid the problem altogether. It also has to be understood that gamers didn't have quite the same expectations of framerates as nowadays. The unmatched quality of the 3D representations in itself was enough to impress people. So the actual impact on single-player gaming was not seen as important.
Later in the game's life, this effect became a larger issue. The Grand Prix series never offered solid multiplayer network support, largely due to this design choice. "Real time" in the game could differ between different players, and this conflicted with the all-important synchronization in a multiplayer context. The effect could also be misused to artificially slow down the action, and exploit the extra reaction time that became available to the player that way. Although largely irrelevant if one played the game on its own, it caused a lot of trouble for online competitions (see below).
Successors Grand Prix 3
Grand Prix 3
Grand Prix 3 is a computer racing simulator by MicroProse. Released in 2000 by Hasbro Interactive featuring the 1998 Formula One season...
and Grand Prix 4
Grand Prix 4
Grand Prix 4, commonly known as GP4 was released for the PC on June 21, 2002, is currently the last Formula One racing simulator released by the developer Geoff Crammond and the MicroProse label...
offered LAN-play and were even hacked to be playable over the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
, but never performed reasonably. Even when the first boom of 3D acceleration chipsets revolutionized gaming, the concept was not reworked as this would have required a large rewrite of the game engine, and remained a problem (although less so because of the available computer power).
Another exploitable flaw lay in the physics engine, which only took account of horizontal collisions and ignored vertical velocity when calculating damage. Thus, it was possible to use the rumble strips on some tracks to launch the car into the air, bypassing chicanes, and land without damaging the car.
Online gaming and community
F1GP was among the first wave of games that had a busy online community. The first competitions were organized via online services like CompuserveCompuServe
CompuServe was the first major commercial online service in the United States. It dominated the field during the 1980s and remained a major player through the mid-1990s, when it was sidelined by the rise of services such as AOL with monthly subscriptions rather than hourly rates...
in 1993, crossing over to the wider Internet once that became mainstream.
The racing didn't actually happen online. F1GP only offered modem
Modem
A modem is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. The goal is to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded to reproduce the original digital data...
play. Thus, the competitions were based on submitted save-games of races and practice laps. These were then used in competitions around complete (or partial) races on the one hand, and so called "Hotlap Competitions" on the other hand. Often, the races followed the schedule of the real world Formula One competition.
The community spawned a host of mods, making the game highly customizable for its time. Liveries, car-performance and the performance of the computer-opponents, camera-settings and many other settings could be edited. First attempts at a track-editor emerged, but this would only become reality after the arrival of the successor Grand Prix 2.
Because of the possibilities to edit the performance of the car, or to make other aspects of the game favour the player, there were also a lot of utilities to check for cheats. These could handle just about every possible trick that was available, except one: the mentioned "slow-motion driving" effect. The game didn't store the CPU-load
Load (computing)
In UNIX computing, the system load is a measure of the amount of work that a computer system performs. The load average represents the average system load over a period of time...
data, which could be displayed via a function key, in any save game file. So there was no way to exclude the possibility that someone maximized the graphics detail on purpose to force a slowdown of the action.
In practice, F1GP was already an 'older' game when online competitions appeared. This meant that most used computers could easily handle the highest detail at the highest framerate
Frame rate
Frame rate is the frequency at which an imaging device produces unique consecutive images called frames. The term applies equally well to computer graphics, video cameras, film cameras, and motion capture systems...
. As such, F1GP-based competitions were actually not hit by the "slow-mo" cheat. Both because the communities were small, and because the CPU-power surplus meant that the effect and its possible usefulness as a way to cheat were less well known.
Its successor Grand Prix 2 though, was notorious for its high CPU-demands. When it appeared, there were no systems available that could handle it at full detail. Most people had difficulty finding a good compromise between details and smooth framerate, and the majority were likely playing in moderate slow-motion without being aware.
When the Grand Prix 2 community materialized and exploded far beyond what F1GP ever offered, it soon became apparent that some participants in the competitions submitted results that were totally unrealistic. Telemetry
Telemetry
Telemetry is a technology that allows measurements to be made at a distance, usually via radio wave transmission and reception of the information. The word is derived from Greek roots: tele = remote, and metron = measure...
-data files even showed typical signs of "slow-motion driving" (like impossibly fast gearchange speeds) but there was no way to unambiguously prove it.
This problem kept bugging the community for several years until the utility GP2LAP was developed to monitor and log the CPU load dynamically during the driving.
Play by Mail Mode
A special PBM or Play by Mail mode was introduced in F1GP. Players would choose one of the drivers for the particular race and when their turn was up save the game onto floppy disk. The disk would then be sent via second class mail to other participants in the event to continue with their turn. This would again be saved and the disk mailed out to the next participant. The PBM mode could extend to include a full seasons championship.Modern-day developments (2006-)
In more recent times, these developments have been limited to small-scale community updates and the development of a new open-source game editor called "Chequered Flag" http://chequeredflag.sourceforge.net. However, the introduction of Chequered Flag deserves notable mention; as a unification of previous editing tools and the introduction of new game modification facilities are promised. Despite the slow speed of the development process, the progress achieved has been good and a number of screenshots were released on the 3 September 2006 to give an indication of the editor construction state. This was followed on the 23 December 2006 by the first release of the editor under version 0.1.0. This early version focused only on providing modification facilities for track editing. A more complete set of editing tools was anticipated, although as of 2009 this remains the only released version.