In the Garage: Discord AMA on Forza Race Regulations (FRR) with the Simulation Team

The following article is adapted from a presentation and AMA (“ask me anything”) hosted in the Forza Official Discord on September 26, 2024. The featured guests are T10 LoungeToy and T10 OG. These remarks, explanations, and responses to Discord audience questions have been edited for length, clarity, and accuracy.

Intro

(Speakers) T10 LoungeToy and T10 OG: We're both co-leads for the simulation team at Turn 10 Studios. Some of the areas under our umbrella include artificial intelligence (AI)-related aspects, the penalty system also known as FRR, as well as all the physics in the game such as the vehicle dynamics and how tracks show up. We also study the tuning and mapping of all the possible input methods (game pad controller, wheels, other peripherals such as the Xbox Adaptive Controller—did you know you can even play the game with a guitar?). Force feedback also ties directly into our physics work. We're responsible for car balancing and car division management. So what cars go to where? How do they feel? How they actually feel out-of-the-box, and what the tuning limits are, and that sort of thing.

T10 LoungeToy: That said, today’s presentation will be focused on FRR. FRR is one feature that is a big deal for us; we’ve invested in it for years, since 2017 all the way through now. FRR has gone through many different iterations, but I wanted to give you a high-level overview about where it is today, and how we think about FRR, and hopefully give you a good general understanding of where we are with the current release.

Hopefully we can do some more of these AMA sessions in the future and dive deeper into topics like AI, physics, input, car balance, car division management, or any other area of the game anyone is interested in hearing about. We're hoping to shed some light on the inner workings here at Turn 10, how we're thinking about our systems, and just being transparent about where things are and, of course, help you understand where we're going in the future.

What is FRR?

T10 OG: Wait, does everyone know what FRR is?

T10 Lounge Toy: Good point. FRR stands for Forza Race Regulations, and it’s Motorsport’s adjudication system used for identifying, measuring, and assigning faults for collisions and off-track penalties.

The collision system is based off a machine learning system, which is trained by a bunch of collision data that we use to assign faults. Interestingly, the off-track penalties are calculated with a different technology, and we'll explain that later. But the collision data that actually makes up the collision system is generally created by players like you. Every single collision in the game is tracked and sent to us, and that makes up the majority of the data that we actually use to help inform FRR. Additionally, some data is contributed from our internal playtests and from experts on the team like T10 Raceboy, to focus on certain areas of the collisions. In a lot of ways, T10 Raceboy is how we judge our FRR (we’ll explain that later, too!).

Sometimes we get literally over a million collisions a day, right? Someone actually has to go through every single incident that we want to put into the FRR model and label it, manually. That’s a very time-consuming process, and we'll actually show you the tool that by which we do that. FRR’s fault determination and improvement is truly dependent on all of this manual data labeling.

Alright, let’s talk about our time penalty systems. We have time penalties for collisions and time penalties for track cutting/going off-track, and they have some differences.

Time penalties for collisions are based on a severity system. That severity system is mostly influenced by the speed delta (basically, the velocity of impact that occurs). If one player’s going 200 miles an hour, and another player is going 20 miles an hour, that's a huge speed delta, and that's going to have a major impact on the time penalty that is given to the player. Additionally, we have a tool called a “speed calculator” or “speed computer,” which has an expectation of what your speed should be at any time, based off our AI driving as fast as they can with that particular car or tune. If you're over that expected speed, that also impacts the time penalty that is given. If the other player loses a place or loses time from the collision, that data is also factored into the severity calculation.

For off-track penalties, we use the (aforementioned) “speed computer,” which knows how fast any car should be going around any corner or any part of the track at any given time. If you cut the track, or get pushed off-track for any reason, the speed computer compares your speed or time to the expected speed or time. Penalties are given based off any time gained or speed over the expected speed there.

These are the basics of how FRR works, how we generate data for it and tune it, and how time penalties are given.

Now that you know the basics, let’s move on to the advanced course! The portion of FRR that detects fault for collisions currently has an estimated accuracy around 89% (improved from 80% at launch). Here’s a graph so you can see how this has changed over the past year.

When we launched, 4 out of 5 collisions were, in our estimation, adjudicated correctly, which also means that 1 out of 5 was incorrectly adjudicated. You, as a player, could have been incorrectly given fault for a collision (false positive), or you could have been incorrectly given no fault for a collision (false negative). Both cases are still considered incorrect FRR rulings.

As of the most recent release, we are around 89% accuracy overall. Now I just want to make it clear: we're not done. We're heavily investing in this area, and we'll talk later about our current targets and when we hope to get there. The thing that I really wanted to make clear here is, we learned a lot about how to improve the model over time. And when we launched, we were not quite at the place we hoped we'd be. And we did not really understand how much time it would take for us to improve the model. But after a lot of learnings in the last few months, we have, I think, a really good plan in place to improve.

We believe the biggest issues that players have with FRR right now are these false positives that show up in very specific racing incidents. As an example, I think that the classic “meme’d” FRR issue right now is when someone gets rear-ended and gets a 4- or 4.5-second penalty. It's not their fault, because someone just ran into the back of them, but now they're like, “hey, why did I get a penalty?” And this situation is exactly what we're trying to solve right now.

So, a very interesting thing happened over all of the releases. In this next graph (below), you can see a spike around March (2024).

As of March, even though the overall accuracy of the model was getting better (per the first chart we showed, which was for overall accuracy), specific false positives were getting way worse, now occurring as many as 10 times per 100 collisions a player encounters (compared to launch, when we had about a 4% false positive return, or 4 times out of 100).

Consequently, there was a huge outcry around FRR in March, and so we responded and changed our thinking around what was important to improve. We really set our sights on improving the accuracy of false positives as our main priority. Now, as you can see up till now, we have increased both the overall accuracy as that previous chart I showed, and also significantly decreased false positives (currently at their lifetime lowest rate of occurrence).

We have a custom-built tool that visualizes every incident in the game. So anytime there's a collision—I mentioned earlier that we sometimes have well over a million collisions every day-- we have a way to visualize exactly what that collision looks like. We have a tool that people like T10 Raceboy can use to look at an incident to label who’s at fault, and what’s the severity of the collision. This is kind of a first for us, showing some of our fundamental dev tools which really don't showcase awesome graphics.

So, for the first time, here is our FRR labeling tool. Like I said, it’s not pretty, but when we get any collision sent to us via FRR, it looks like this example clip, and we can play it back and forth.

• The tool shows two cars racing in a top-down view. Each has a colored bubble that changes between green, yellow, and red--which indicates their speed relative to the expected speed of the speed computer.
• If the car goes into a corner too hot, the bubble’s color will change from green (“within the expected speed”) to yellow (“not quite over the expected speed”) to red (“beyond the expected speed”).
• The blue bars coming out of the car are an indication of steering input. At the start of the clip, the red car has a lot of steering input to the left, while the green car has a little bit of steering input to the left, as they're navigating this corner.
• Lastly, the arrows in the front of the cars are an indication of how much throttle they have at any given time. The green car has what looks to be nearly full-throttle, while the red car has maybe one-quarter or one-half throttle there. When they brake or if there’s any type of deceleration to the car, those arrows will appear in the rear direction.

As you may be able to see in the top right corner of this interface, our devs can come in here and label this incident. In this case, we have labeled the red car as being at fault, with a severity rated a “2” out of 4 severity levels.

One other thing to note there, you may see the green car jittering around a little bit. And what you're actually seeing may be latency issues. Latency is taken into consideration every time we are labeling the data.

What’s Next for FRR

T10 LoungeToy: The biggest thing we've done in the last, I think, 6 months is really get come to grips with what it takes to make the model better. I'll talk about that in just a second, because it's a lot of effort to make it better and establish rough goals for us of where we believe it needs to be at, so we can have the best FRR adjudication system.

We're currently around 89% overall accuracy, and we believe that we need to get to at least 95% overall accuracy to be in a really good place. But more importantly, we also have a 99% goal. The 99% goal is more about what we call “specific accuracy” or specific incidents. Our goal is to make sure that those braindead-simple incidents are 99% accurate for us.

T10 OG: “Braindead-simple incidents” meaning, my mom could look at the incident, she knows nothing about racing, but she would know who’s at fault.

T10 LoungeToy: Before we go into the specifics of how we're getting to 95-99%, there are a ton of related features to FRR that we are iterating on. Some of you may know that we have some new ghosting features that will be showing up in multiplayer, both as an option within Free Play, as well as part of our Featured Multiplayer series. Situations such as returning to track, or going really slowly on track, or really high-speed ramming incidents, will automatically be ghosted in the near future. So that's going to have a big impact on how FRR is functioning and how people are perceiving the overall accuracy of FRR. Cleaner racing through some of the ghosting technology we are working on should have a pretty significant impact here.

Of course, matchmaking with cleaner racers should make for cleaner racing. We have a lot of work to do here, and that's related to our safety rating and skill ratings, of course. Interestingly, when we recently shipped multi-class as a function of our Featured Multiplayer, we saw really, really good and clean racing across the board there. And that has a lot to do with the race starts and how the field really does get spread out a lot more before Turn 1 in multi-class racing. It cleans up a lot of the racing. And this wasn't intended. This is just a result of having this style of racing and this type of race start. So that also has a big impact on things like FRR and people's perception of it.

Lobby size, I think our average lobby size over the day right now is 11 or 12 and that's been pretty consistent since launch, I think. And that lobby size, we can take a look at and push it up or down depending on how people are feeling. Of course, the smaller the lobby sizes, the potentially less fun racing that people can have, but also the cleaner racing that it potentially could have, right? So that has a big effect on perception of FRR. And of course, we have a lot of work to do with our safety and skill ratings in terms of how they're showing up, and things like people's safety rating after they get out of the first couple of races, and their overall safety rating. We're looking at a lot of stuff here.

Lastly, while we actually do have racing etiquette guidelines that really govern how we think about assigning fault for FRR, we've never published those and we currently don't really give any of our players a good idea of like, “hey, you want to join multiplayer? Here's how you should think about other players on the track.” We are figuring out ways that we can promote better racing through understanding what's expected of players.

Going back to our FRR goals timeline: we're hoping to get to 95% accuracy by the end of this year. That is a huge and ambitious goal, because you can see how long it's taken us to go from 80 to 89%. It's basically taken us a year.

One of the main issues here is that the labeling process is incredibly manual. And up until this point, we have basically had one person doing most of the labeling for us. He's in the audience here, T10 Raceboy, and he's a limited resource, right? He does a bunch of stuff for the team and for Motorsport all up. But what we realized is to get to that 95%, is to bring on a host of additional resources here to help label all of this data because like I said, we have well over a million of these things coming in every day.

We have added a number of additional people full-time here to really attack this problem, and they're reviewing up to 1000 or so incidents per week at this point. Our expectations are, going forward, that they're going to be labelling anywhere between 2000-3000 a week. It's a huge part of how the overall accuracy of this model gets better. So now we have well over four times the resources attached to labeling this data and making it better. They just started and are affecting this as of September. I think that'll really dramatically help us get this model better.

The second change here is about the different models that actually drive FRR. Without going into too much detail, we're actually on our third model of FRR. The most important thing to understand is there are new data points that the model is now tracking that might help us both get better accuracy, and also filter down to specific types of incidents.

In our first model, we didn't have the data that tracked where the collisions on the cars were happening. We couldn't really tell if a car was rear-ending a car from the front of the car, side of the car, back of the car, things like that. That wasn't part of the initial data set. We initially believed that all the other inputs (throttle, brakes, steering inputs, expected speed) were the correct inputs to solve for. Turns out it's easier for us to filter down to the types of collisions we're looking to improve if we have additional data being tracked.

So now I think with Model 2, we added a bunch of data. Same thing with Model 3. We now know the specific portions of the cars that are colliding. What that allows us to do is to filter out for only those types of collisions going forward. So we can say something like “today, we're only going to look at front-to-rear collisions from last night and just label those.” And that's a huge change for us because we can now go in and attack “specific accuracy” and go, “hey, we know people are having some issues with getting rear-ended and having false positives there.” We can now filter down to those specific types of incidents and make those better and have a focused effort there.

So the long story here is that the overall accuracy number may be less important, going forward, because of those related features I mentioned, but more importantly in regards to the “specific accuracy” that we were just talking about. If we get to 99% for the specific types of incidents we're looking at, and people aren’t complaining about the braindead-simple ones that T10 OG was talking about, I think we're going to be in the right place.

We have a bunch more people and resources assigned to the labeling portion of this. And I think we have the right tools and technology now to get us to that 95-99% accuracy overall with FRR.

Audience Q&A

How does the FRR system determine how large a penalty should be assessed for collisions? How does it determine who's at fault, and what problems did you have to deal with while developing the FRR system? (asked by SoraS1dewinder)

T10 OG: I'm going to start with the last question first actually. There were a lot of problems when we first started to develop an FRR system at the end of the support for FM7, and we implemented the first iteration of FRR. It was built by writing this scripting system that allowed our designers to write some simple rules to determine who is at fault. Our thought was that we could use this system to modify those rules through scripts and update the game without having to update the game code: without requiring an entire title update. So that's a great goal. But the scripting system wasn’t powerful or flexible enough to get it right. You could make one rule would be correct for some scenarios, and then it would get it wrong for other scenarios. We weren't anywhere near the accuracy that we're at now. So we knew that we had to attack the problem differently for our current title. It's a super difficult problem to solve, and we know that we still have more work to get it to where we're happy with it.

OK, so T10 LoungeToy sort of talked about this, but I think it's OK if we repeat ourselves a little bit. So how does the FRR system determine how large of a penalty should be addressed for a given collision? So the biggest factor with that is the size of the impact, which is determined by the relative velocity of the cars hitting each other. Then we have a couple modifiers on top of that. One is that if the car that you hit loses race position due to the collision, we'll modify the penalty based off of that. And the other is, if you're going over the optimal speed for your car at that position on the track when the collision occurred, if you're going way too fast into a corner or something like that, we modify it for that as well.

For the next release coming out in October, we're making a significant update to that, to how the system determines how big of a penalty you should get. And we're going to have our neural network also calculate this penalty time. I'll talk a little bit more about neural network in a little bit. And so we're going to have two systems determine the penalty time. And for the first iteration, we're just simply going to take the lesser of those two.

Last part, how does FRR determine who's at fault? So we use a neural network solution. I'm not going to get super deep into what a neural network is here today. In fact, you know, I'm not the expert on the team either. The expert happens to be sitting right next to me, being support on this Discord call for us. But it’s a neural networks machine learning technique. It's built to take a bunch of data as inputs that we all label, that T10 LoungeToy was talking about. And if properly trained, it can build these layers of nodes that recognize patterns and make smart decisions.

There's another question in a little bit where I'm going to get into one more layer of detail of the neural net and everything. But basically, you know, it's really cool tech allows the system to get smarter when given enough data. It's a little new to most of game development as well, right? It's this super fast evolving area in machine learning.

Will there be any change to how off track penalties are given or approached? I'd just like to add that they've gotten a lot better over time, but they're still very tedious to the point where some off-track penalties result in one or more seconds added when you don't gain that much time for slipping a tire off.
(asked by Ash)

T10 OG: That’s a really good question. Let me start with just how the system currently works, which is a little bit of a repeat again, but that's OK. For the off-track penalties specifically, we wanted to build a system that only gave penalties if you went off-track and gained a time advantage by doing so. If you go off-track and don't gain an advantage in time, we won't penalize you.

The way that we figure this out is, we use our driving AI system, and we look at the ideal racing line and the speed for your particular car, your particular upgrades, your setup. And so basically, if you go faster for that segment of the track where you're off-track, and our top-level AI thinks that it can’t, then we penalize you the amount of time that you gained plus a small scalar on top of that. So I'm pretty sure that [the player who asked this question] is pretty fast if they’re getting regular penalties when going off-track, because most people actually don't, because they're not going faster than our fastest AI. This is definitely something that we're aware of. It's becoming more important with the community, and specifically with some of our fastest drivers and people that play the game the most.

So it's important. I do, you know, I think we're going to need to make some modifications to the system. I can't say exactly when yet, but we do recognize this is an issue and needs work for some of our fastest drivers. So, yeah, thanks for that comment.

T10 LoungeToy: Yes, and, really quickly, we're definitely aware of some of the deficiencies that we have with the speed computer and how then it affects our off-track penalties. We are heavily, heavily focused on getting the collisions portion of FRR right first. So our priority right now is making sure that all the collisions are good to go and then we'll start addressing things like our off-track, just so you understand kind of where we are with our priorities.

What is your favorite part about what you do in your role at Turn 10 Studios? (asked by PTG Jamie)

T10 LoungeToy: I've worked at a lot of different studios, made a lot of different games, and the greatest thing about this studio, Turn 10, is that I can show up every day and geek out and talk about cars and racing. There's no other studio that I've been able to do that at.

As a great example, I just blew an S54 engine and that's going to cost me a lot of money. It was a hard summer of racing and at the end of it, I was giving some people joy rides and I think we overdid a little bit, and that's going to cost me. There are a number of people at the studio who have not only worked on deep in the guts of the S54 engine, but raced it very hard over the years. So I immediately was able to come in and talk to all these experts on “hey, so what to do? What are the signs of this? What are my options here?” That incredible knowledge base of, like, where else in the world are you able to, outside of a mechanic’s garage, show up to work and say, “hey, I blew my S54? And how would you think about rebuilding it?” So again, I love thinking, I love talking, I love geeking out about cars and racing and there's no better place to do it than here.

T10 OG: OK, so kind of a two-part answer for me. First, for me, is just the people I get to work with. The people that I get to work with every day, you know, Turn 10, we have this ever evolving team: super smart and passionate game developers who enjoy coming into work, I'll say most days, maybe not every day, but most days! And a lot of people can't say that they like going into work most days. So that's pretty cool. Some of these people I've worked with for over 20 years, and they've become lifelong friends, practically family.

Second, for me, is just getting to work on really cool, challenging problems. In particular, in the simulation space, we have things like physics and FRR, AI, steering wheels, things like that. Things that I particularly enjoy. I learned how to program when I was about 10 years old and I've always loved it. You know, I'd make my friends these simple little games in Q Basic, which I know I'm dating myself by saying that, but oh well. It was always such a rush to have people play something that I made, and get joy out of it. And now I get to do the same thing and get paid for it. So yeah, not too shabby.

As someone who does machine learning research mostly applied to biology and aerospace, I'd love to maybe get an overview or understanding of the technical aspects behind FRR and its architecture. I've always been curious how these sorts of systems are deployed in a game setting and would love to know more. (asked by PJK)

T10 OG: Machine learning in biology and aerospace sounds pretty cool! We’ll need to get a bit technical here. First off, we talked about the fact that we're using a neural network machine learning technique built to take a bunch of data, and if properly trained, can build layers of nodes, make smart decisions, etc. So, you know, that's kind of step one of the architecture of its neural network.

Let's talk about some of the inputs into the system. The inputs into the system is all the data that we think like a trained human brain, or like a race steward, would need to determine who's at fault in the collision and what types of penalties to hand out. So we capture roughly 7 seconds before and 7 seconds after the the first collision. We capture this data at 12 Hertz, so like 12 times a second.

We capture things like the position of your car and the nearest cars around you. We capture the car's orientation and how they're oriented compared to the direction of the track. We capture the speed of the cars, the optimal speed they should be going on that part of the track. The inputs of the car, are they braking? Are they on throttle? Are they steering into the corner or away from it? Are they steering into the collision or away from it? So all these things and then some: the points of the collision relative to the cars, the size of the impact.

OK, so how do we train the neural network? In the presentation we showed the clip of our FRR training tool. We capture all these inputs from the collisions in the retail version of the game. We store those on a server, and we have the ability to look at those in different types of collisions. So we have that simple visualizer tool that shows the cars on track from an overhead view. We allow the user to scrub forward, backward, look at the incident from all angles, and then label who's at fault.

We have tens of thousands of incidents labeled so far, soon to be hundreds of thousands. This is fed into this neural network training model. And once it has all the training data, it processes it, which does take many hours, and it creates that neural net model.

The last part is, once we have that model trained, how does it run? So, in-game we track your car and all of those inputs. When a car collides with another car, we have that data for the 7 seconds before and after. We pack all that data into the input vector, and that gets fed into the neural network runtime code. We actually run the code locally, on the box that you're playing on. We don't send it to a server to run, or anything like that.

So one of the tricky things for us is, our game is already pushing the CPU cores to their limits when the game is running with 24 cars and, and it does take a decent amount of CPU to process one particular incident. And so we decided to process the incident over the course of a few seconds, about 100 or 200 game frames. We run it on a lower priority thread on the CPU, which allows our gameplay core, our rendering core, audio core, and all the other code that's just currently running all the time to remain running at speed. Since you don't need an immediate result for FRR, we just allowed it to run a little bit slower over that time and get the result.

Would it be possible to introduce a strike system, and/or have you considered other systems beyond just the FRR system currently in place? (asked by Artiick)

T10 LoungeToy: Have we considered other ways of doing a penalty system or adjudication system? Absolutely, yeah, absolutely we have. We've definitely looked at things like iRacing’s solution, and discussed at length about how we might do a similar thing, or how we might learn from that. I think of it as like, an insurance model or something like that: the strike system is a very similar kind of idea, suggesting maybe we move away from an at-fault determination type of system and that sort of thing. All really interesting points of discussion, and we can definitely think about how we might, in the future, if things don't work out with FRR as it currently is with our machine learning model, maybe we go down a different path.

What I can say is, right now we're not really considering a different solution for our adjudication, not yet. We're all in on FRR with the machine learning model, and I think we have all the right tools in place now and the right investments around it to get to where we need it to be. So that's what I'll say around all the different models. But right now, I think we have a really good chance of making FRR awesome.

Are there plans to add more telemetry data to the data-out feature? We are developing an app for Forza Motorsport, and it'll be great to be able to collect more telemetry data such as telemetry from other drivers, the gap between drivers, the type and the type of tires. (asked by Anotherjez)

T10 LoungeToy: We're always looking at ways of adding data and making these third-party experiences just really awesome. I've seen some really good HUD elements out there based off the telemetry and the data-out stuff, that looks really good, and it’s inspired us as well. It's really just a matter of priorities and making us aware of what you're looking for and what kind of data-out you're looking for. Please add it to our Suggestions Hub.

Are we likely to see AI in private multiplayer? (asked by Jess)

T10 LoungeToy: So even though my team works on aspects of AI, it doesn't necessarily cover how we talk about AI in private multiplayer in total, because it’s not only our team that’s needed to make it work. Every single person on the team wants to see AI in private multiplayer. It's just a matter of our priorities and making sure that we get this into our schedule. We have a lot of stuff on our plate right now, and we are making sure that all of the current investments and features and releases are going to go off smoothly. But yeah, this is definitely on our list. We talk about this literally every day. Hopefully we can light that up soon.

Do you like karting? (asked by h4rr1s)

T10 OG: Heck yeah, we do! And actually the simulation team just recently took a little field trip to PGP Pacific, PGP Motorsports in Kent, WA. It’s a great outdoor track with legit karts. They're pretty fast, it’s a nice track. Yeah, we have some really fast people on the simulation team at karting. You know, it's definitely quite a skill to get fast; I think I was somewhere in the middle of the pack. We had some people with Go-Pros on their helmets. We captured some really great footage. Maybe we could actually use some of that footage to make our FRR model better, heh, because it wasn't always necessarily the cleanest of racing!

T10 LoungeToy: There's a lot of karting fans here, and a number of the team actually do participate in leagues and that sort of thing.

How does Forza’s penalty system account for internet latency? Is there a way it could accommodate to look at one-way collisions and help make better decisions for the penalties based on hit detection from one player to another? Side question, does collision come into play when figuring out track limit penalties? (asked by A Lost Crayon)

T10 OG: Great question. First off, we calculate all penalties locally, meaning it's calculated on the Xbox or PC that you're playing on. So it's not calculated on the server. We don't use an authoritative server to determine the penalties, there’s some pros and cons to this, but in this particular case, I think it's a good thing. It means the neural network for penalties is only looking at the motion of the cars as your local machine sees it.

So, your car won't have any lag issues with it and its motion. But it's possible the cars around you might. They might be lagging, they might have some inconsistent motion due to latency. So our neural net has also been trained with this data captured from retail. So every incident that we label is from a particular box, which has real-world latency issues like this in the data. In a lot of the incidents where we've labeled who's at fault, some of the cars will have similar motion. This also means that the neural network will learn how to deal with this as long as we have enough incidents that behave like that.

Does collision come into play when figuring out track limits and penalties? So if you go off-track, do we take into account any collisions that happened before that? So currently it does not. It's only looking at whether your car gained time compared to that top difficulty AI on the section of the track where you exited and then entered, kind of like what we talked about. So if you do get pushed off-track by another car and then it speeds you up, it doesn't take that into account. You know, it is a little shortcoming of that system. We've been talking about this recently. As LoungeToy talked about earlier, our main focus so far on improving FRR has been with improving the car-to-car collisions. But as that's getting better, we're starting to look at the off-track penalties too.

How many ways to apply penalties did you consider for Forza during its development? Was adding the penalties to the overall race time your first idea and first choice, or did you consider other ways like a force braking maneuver (as in GT7) or some kind of temporary power or grip handicap? (asked by Deutschmaschine)

T10 LoungeToy: The answer is yes. We've discussed a lot of different ways of serving the penalty. The very first concept that we had, which we actually implemented back in FM7, when FRR was in its infancy, we actually marked up every single track to have slow-down areas, similar to the GT side of things, where you'd be able to serve your time penalties on track. We actually had that functional. We never shipped it. There were a lot of issues there, and the easier path forward for it at the time was just to have the time penalties added to your overall race time.

Now, we’ve kept to that and it's mostly been, I think, a generally OK solution. We have discussed things like being able to serve those time penalties on both on the track and in the pit, that sort of thing. And we're looking at other ways of approaching this in the future. One of the things I don't like about our current system is that if someone has a massive time penalty in front of you, you shouldn't really be racing them, because they're not really in that position anymore. And it really ends up being kind of a hamper to your race. So there's definitely things that we need to look at here in terms of balancing all of this out. But yeah, we've looked at a tons of ways of serving penalties and making sure that it's all balanced well. We’ll be looking at this for sure.

Will we be getting a more detailed setting for traction control and ABS that we can change on a per-car basis? So 1-8, rather than just on/off? (asked by Lrapsody27)

T10 OG: So yeah, this is something that I'm hugely passionate about, and I know a lot of those on the simulation side of things are hugely passionate about. It's been on our list for a long time. We've had a lot of other priorities kind of jump in front of it. But this is something we're hoping to get to pretty soon.

Have you considered adding tire compound info next to lap times during practice and in the post-race screen? (asked by Joshsmosh)

T10 LoungeToy: Yes, we've considered it. As a quick note, getting any HUD or UI changes is actually the most difficult thing for us. It's very difficult and time consuming. So something as seemingly simple as tire compound info can actually be one of the most difficult things to add in the game. However, it is definitely one of the many things that we'd like to make sure players are aware of, along with safety rating and that sort of thing. We agree these would be really, really useful to see, especially in Featured Multiplayer. We are definitely looking into how to get this data into the HUD UI and leaderboards.

If money was no object, what car/van/SUV/pickup would you want for the following: (1) Daily driver, (2) Track day, (3) To help you in a zombie apocalypse? (asked by Burny)

T10 OG: Alright, daily driver: maybe this is kind of a basic answer for me, but I was just looking at this the other day and I've always loved BMWs and the shape of the BMW M4. So I’ll just go with that. For track day, I go with Formula Mazda. Maybe sort of basic, but I was lucky enough to do this Bondurant Racing School, and it was incredible, on the last day we got to drive these cars. It's like, super manageable from a power perspective, for an amateur, but has amazing, amazing handling. OK, zombie apocalypse. Maybe it's just because we live where we do, and we see a lot of Teslas, but we've been seeing a lot of the Cybertrucks running around lately. And I think they're ugly as heck. I really do. I would never say that I would want a Cybertruck myself, but, you know, maybe good for zombies. Who knows?

T10 LoungeToy: I have very particular tastes, and this is not what anyone would actually argue is a daily driver, but I think an LFA would be awesome as a daily driver, because the sound is so incredible. Who wouldn't want to hear that on their daily commute? That would be amazing. Track day: oh that's easy, GT4 RS, that's easy. I think that's one of the freaking best handling cars out there and I would love that. Zombie apocalypse: a Sherp, if you know what that is. That is absolutely what I would have, if money was no object.