This interview with Benoit Jacquier was conducted as part of a visit to the Kylotonn studios (find the introduction here). Technical Director of the studio for 12 years, Benoit has the difficult task of coordinating the team in charge of the in-house engine, the KT Engine, the central core of all Kylotonn studio titles! Because, if each game has its own gameplay, the engine remains common to it.
KT Engine was created as part of an initiative launched by five French studios who pooled their technical knowledge in 2007, under the Play All label. Kylotonn, the group's only studio still in operation, left with the embryo of what has become its driving force. Technology improved year after year, thanks to feedback from players, the intervention of experts and the study of the competition. These returns remain subjective, even if KT tries to use as many sources as possible. So the team is also trying to inject as much real data as possible. Like those from telemetry or official values shared by manufacturers. A braking distance, or a 0 to 100, cannot lie!
Coded in C++, the engine integrates all the algorithm behind the simulation for the player: rendering, vehicle dynamics, up to the level of force feedback from peripherals and changing gears. For designers, it offers the tools to create roads (based on splines) and environments. These are, for example, the tools needed by designers to create layouts or by graphic designers to generate background decorations. But also of course the visual and technical integration of the cars. WRC Generations has requested changes on this side, in order to support hybrid vehicles, a big novelty this season. From now on, the charge, then the use of a battery by the "engine" are managed in the KT Engine. The developers in charge of the gameplay to retrieve this information, in collaboration with the UI (user interface), to display it on the screen.
Other functionalities are less used in WRC and however gradually added, such as the management of an AI, the creation of an open world, the integration of quests, functionalities necessary for other studio games such as Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown (TDU). Our discussion then slipped towards a slightly too technical aspect, which I will spare you, about server management and data hosting. What can be learned from this, however, is that TDU takes the demands in terms of storage and queries to another level, compared to WRC which was content to save rankings.
Engine development is constantly a story of compromise. Because, of course, the more the development progresses, the more the functionalities are numerous. But it is also the risk of adding new bugs. The functionality must also provide some benefit. If no one notices the change, or if no one uses a tool, there's no point in implementing it. Once the needs have been identified, a relatively classic cycle is followed by prototyping, then production and finally bug fixing to avoid as much as possible a problem that could impact the studio's entire production chain.
On a more practical side, I was wondering how the different engine versions were handled. Thus, until May/June, Generations and TDU shared the same engine, with continuous integration of improvements. Then they were unlinked, as Generations entered its stabilization phase, just before the final global QA. Improvements and fixes continue to be deployed, but only in a very targeted way, and with great care, to avoid the creation of new problems as much as possible.
A WRC opus was created almost every year. A relatively high pace, which also brings the advantage of helping to structure and reflect on possible improvements at the end of the development of each game, to improve the quality of the next iteration. This is one of the reasons that today allows KT to claim that Generations will be the best WRC game in the series. Answer on November 13!
