Hi all,

It is with sadness in my heart I must write to let everyone know that Raceday 2020 has been canceled to maintain public health in the face of COVID-19. Although this is terrible to hear, we are going to do our best to help the students in any way we can and deliver as much relevant content as we can to everyone over the next few months. We are holding a town hall meeting next Sunday, March 22nd at 2pm on the videoconferencing platform Zoom to discuss how we will move forward. A link will be provided here when it is available.

There are several announcements to outline, which we will provide as much information on as we can going forward. We hope to have substantive updates as we communicate with CMU staff for each item during the town hall meeting, which we plan to record and post online as well. Many of the following points will be expanded into their own posts in the coming month.

1. Our hope is to roll over any efforts from 2020 in to 2021. This includes applying membership benefits that were purchased this year to Raceday 2021. We would like to make Raceday 2021 into the amazing event we had planned for Raceday 2020 but need to consult with CMU staff to see what their intent is.
   
2. We are proposing to fulfill the Buggy100 commemorative t-shirt reward on Raceday 2021 and ship all Raceday 2020 BAA members a print of the original design in consolation. This is pending an estimate of the costs of printing and shipping, which we hope to absorb fully.
   
3. We have actually spent very little of the considerable budget for Raceday so far. The budgeting for Carnival comes from many sources so it will take us some time to track down how many are still on-board for next year, but at this time it is clear that most of the budget has been saved. We will outline for everyone roughly where the budget stands during the town hall.
   
4. We expect many people will be able to recoup their travel bookings so far in advance of the event. We are considering whether to expand Homecoming Weekend next year and suggest that as a potential option to change your flight if there is interest. Please comment below on your opinion on looking in to expanding Homecoming 2020, which (my guess) is Oct 16-17th, 2020, based on the Academic Calendar. We would administer bigger events, potentially sponsor a winner for “mini-raceday” or things like this.
   
5. We still have many items of content that are still relevant and hope you will enjoy this year. Chute the Sh!t, a Buggy podcast from the BAA in collaboration with Will Weiner, will be published regularly starting very soon. Also we eagerly await the conclusion of History of Buggy from our own Bryan Arsham! We are currently exploring a Carnival Livestream of past races on Saturday. We could also do a mashup of everyone’s favorite buggy videos which we could solicit in the next couple of weeks.
   
6. Elections will move forward as regularly planned, we’ll get you more information on that in April, with potentially some new positions planned.
   
7. We are looking for ways to support teams through these tough times. We are also considering providing graduating seniors a special consolation gift such as a badge or poster of some kind, in addition to as many exhibition races as we can get in 2021. Let us know if you have any suggestions of things we could do for graduating seniors.

Hi all,

We’re so excited to learn about a VR game being made by students in Advanced Game Design (53-472) for Buggy100! Professor Thomas Corbett, producer Trento von Lindenberg, and a class of several dozen students are working hard towards their goal of a playable prototype by Carnival. I took some time to interview Professor Corbett, but if you want to know more, you can follow blow-by-blow development updates weekly at their dev blog here. 

The game is slated to be a first person seated driving experience, in which the player travels around a recreation of the course as it was in the 1920s. Campus architecture, famous buggies, and popular characters as pushers will all feature in the game, as well as classic course elements such as potholes, flaggers, and hay bales as well as some gamified power-ups. The dev team cites Mario Kart, Fortnite, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild as inspiration for the art and game design, and of course careful study of the sport of Buggy. I wanted to dig a bit more into the details on how this awesome opportunity might impact our community. The interview below was lightly edited for clarity.

Mike: It’s still early in development, are there any big features or challenges the team expects ahead?

Thomas: Hahahaha.  So, so many. Too many to count, and many of the biggest ones we don’t even know about yet.  That’s why constant playtesting is extra important. As of today we are 59 days out from launch, which means we are 52 days from when we need to be finished.  We are currently wrapping up Alpha development, which means that a lot of the pieces that have been developed independently are starting to come together into one build.  It’s exciting to watch it evolve, and also slightly nerve-wracking to know that we have less than two months to deliver, but that’s all part of what makes development so much fun.

Mike: I saw that there is a 1:1 course model as one of the environments available. Do we know roughly how fast the player will travel through the course at various points?

Thomas: We’re not yet fully decided on which map will be used.  We like 1:1 for authenticity, but recognize that it may not make the best game experience, so we are experimenting with some options.  Some of these are subtle, like condensing some of the uphill portions to keep the action going, or easing some of the more extreme turns to minimize motion sickness.  Others, like the finish line, are much bigger and more noticeable. In the early days of the race, contestants turned into the main campus at what is now Hunt Library, and the finish line was the axis connecting CFA and Hamerschlag.  Today, that puts us in the heart of Carnival. Once we realized that, we knew we had to build it that way. It’s a huge celebratory moment that connects buggy, carnival, and campus all in one, and was just too cool to pass up.   

Speed is something we are still working on.  Our goal is for the free roll portion to feel as authentic as possible and we are using timing from the videos we have to make estimates on how fast we should go.   But motion sickness is also a concern so we may need to adjust. Our goal is for the guest experience to last about the same as a real buggy race.

Mike: It seems that some models and animations for pushers are in the works. Do we know how pushers will interact with the player? Will there be differences between the different hills?

Thomas: The pushers are very interesting!  And they present a number of challenges for VR.  For a lot of the dev team, this is the first time we’ve really gotten to see buggy up close (in video) and we realized early that we had underestimated the complexity of pushing strategy.  Things we are looking at include: how do we interact with something that is mostly behind us? How do we coordinate actions between our driver and a NPC (non-playable character)? And how do we get close to a human character in VR without plunging into the Uncanny Valley?   That last one is extra tricky, and we have chosen to address it by having our pushers wearing giant foam mascot heads, like you might see at a baseball game. It sounds silly, but it helps make them more believable and saves us a LOT of time not having to animate the faces. And it lets us bring back historic figures like Andrew Carnegie to participate in the race.

Mike: One of the big challenges in Sweepstakes is getting practice driving, and not everyone can make it to Carnival. Are there plans to let teams or remote alumni interact with the experience, potentially after the final release in May?

Thomas: From day one, our plan has been to make this game available at the end of the semester.  Our physical installation for Carnival means that our software needs to be feature complete around April 10.  We plan to take the last three weeks to prepare the title for at-home use, building in additional menus and tutorials so that someone can download and play on their own. 

Mike: I’ve heard VR games can be demanding on computer hardware. What kind of hardware might someone need to play a VR game like this? What kind of hardware is the game slated to be run on for the demo at Carnival?

Thomas: Right now, the experience is being designed for the Oculus Rift S.  We made this choice because the on-board camera tracking system (known as “inside-out” tracking) requires the least external devices and gives us the most flexibility for our deployment.   That device requires a VR-capable machine (in our case gaming laptops). I would love to get this onto the Quest, the standalone headset by Oculus, which would make it much easier to share, and so we are exploring this as an option.  This goal keeps us economical in our polygon count and vfx, which has the positive effect of helping us maintain a healthy framerate, even if the Quest version does not happen. Right now that is a “stretch goal”, meaning that we likely don’t have time this semester to complete it, but perhaps it could live on as a summer project.