Driving Project Motor Racing with the GIANTS Engine

September 06, 2024

Tim Wheatley on why a partnership with GIANTS Software is like getting a full factory engine in motor racing... in this case, the GIANTS Engine that is now powering Project Motor Racing...

On the Shoulders of GIANTS

The GIANTS Engine—that traces its roots back to the early 2000s—will now be driving Project Motor Racing to its 2025 launch. In terms of benefits for Straight4, this partnership between GIANTS Software and S4 is massive. To put it in racing terms—we swapped a shelf-bought engine for a full factory-supported championship-winning engine with all the bells and whistles, and along with the engine comes two decades of experience in simulation and a close-knit partnership with this project.

That is all key for us: to be in a partnership where we’re able to leverage support from the very engineers who made the engine is crucial as we go about integrating our physics engine and importing our cars and tracks and so on.

The Chase: Performance Always Wins

Making sim racing titles means we’re always chasing performance gains. With our new physics engine, we found ourselves rubbing-up against the self-same issues that many sim racers have discovered with commercially available game engines. You can get away with a lack of FPS in many other genres, but in sim racing, performance is king because even a quarter-second lag is enough to ruin the fidelity of the handling. Lack of FPS is fatal when you’re simulating high-performance cars.

And what we’ve found with the GIANTS Engine is exactly what we hoped we’d find. The integration of the GIANTS Engine with Straight4’s in-house modular physics engine has been in the works for almost a year now, and we are delighted with the performance of our sim, even in pre-alpha.

So from this technical partnership, we are enjoying the best of both worlds: a powerful engine, and full backing from the team that created it. But that’s not where it ends. There are a few other benefits that will be key to the future of Project Motor Racing.

The Engine: Moddability

Modding is a massive part of the success of the Farming Simulator franchise. As with all simulation titles, the ability for their community to add machines into Farming Simulator was something GIANTS understood early on. They worked on the engine to make it easier for fans (and third-party devs) to add new machines and functionality by adding the Lua scripting language. This is something we’re excited to explore.

The Engine: Co-op and Competitive Multiplayer

Since farming often requires operators to operate multiple machines simultaneously—having a harvester work the field while overloading into the following tractor-with-trailer, for example—it was clear early on that multiplayer was another element that the GIANTS Engine would need to support.

As soon as that was implemented, though, players wasted no time in creating their own ways of playing Farming Simulator—such as using this mode for competitive online play. Some even set up competing farms to see who would be the first to reach certain goals, while others competed to load bales onto a trailer. In response, GIANTS created a separate map and game mode for competitive team play in 2019 and founded the successful Farming Simulator League esports competition.

Thanks to their close ties with agricultural manufacturers and gaming / hardware providers, they could also feature sponsors for both esports teams and the league itself.

The Engine: Multi-Platform and Cross-Platform

The GIANTS Engine’s portability is particularly robust. The GIANTS Engine supports PC, Mac, PlayStation, Xbox, SteamOS, Nintendo Switch, Android, and iOS devices, which means they can adapt their games to the broadest possible install base.

As they have full control over the engine and its features, making the games work cross-platform is another important factor: Having friends play on different platforms, be it on different consoles or PC, is a big plus for the engine and the community. It’s something that is really attractive to us as well.

Project Motor Racing

So what does this all mean for Project Motor Racing? There’s obviously a lot that we’re going to reveal in the next months, but the direction GIANTS have taken with Farming Simulator should give some clues as to the direction of Project Motor Racing, specifically in how we can work alongside the community to create the kind of simulation fans want. After all, that’s always been the key to success in gaming: listening to your fans.