SimHQ.com - Motorsports Zone - Interview: EMACF1's Ralph Hummerich and Matthias Marquardt

Over the last few seasons probably the most downloaded carset for F1 sim racing has come from EMACF1. Alex "Zander" Keep caught up with Ralph Hummerich and Matthias Marquardt immediately prior to their releasing the new RH 2004 Season carset for F1 Challenge '99-'02. He asked them about the new expansion pack and about themselves.

Q. Hello guys and thanks for talking to SimHQ about the new RH 2004. First question... how did you both get into making carsets?

A. Matthias: I guess it's the usual story. Let me first say, that while I was playing GP2 I have heard, that there would exist season updates and I was quite amazed about that kind of stuff. Anyhow, the games have changed and while I was playing F1Racing I saw for the first time the name Ralph Hummerich on the net and I was very happy that I could update my game with some actual cars. Again, various month have passed away when I got my hands on GP3. The BIG disappointment was, that it came with a 98 Season. So I instantly started to search around in the web for car updates. Unfortunately, I found a lot of them — but the big dilemma was that nobody had the courage to say "this is good" or "this is bad". After I have downloaded over 50 different cars I said to myself, "this is enough". So I started my own webpage where I offered (with the permission of the people who have created the cars) "only the best" livery for a GP3 Team. After all 11 teams were done, I made a complete GP3Edit package out of that.

Actually, that's the point where Ralph and I meet each other. Since there was a close battle for the "best" cars between Momo Ichigo, Jan Frischkorn and Ralph... I never thought, that the web site (emac.de at those days) would become that successful. But as the final result of my host (who had give me a unlimited traffic offer) had quit the contract (obviously caused by too much traffic... 2-4 GB a day). Sorry... I am leaving the topic — so I came in contact with Ralph and since he had no real homepage, I offered him a place to create and maintain a web site for his carsets. At that time (2000 / 2001) I have started to help Ralph with certain technical issues in creating some parts of the GP3 carset (like tire issues and converting the textures to the "software mode" (index 256 colour palette). When GP3 2000 was released, we worked even closer together and finally it become a real kind of teamwork. Ralph was doing textures and performance related stuff and I take care about the integration into the actual game. So we have played two roles (in 'the team' — a creative one and a technical one). I do not really consider us a "Team". For some time we have been working together and Ralph has become a real friend with whom I share much more then just racing game related stuff.

When EA's F1-2001 came out, Ralph and I encountered a new challenge — car shapes. Before that we did not really had to care about the issue, but now we needed a partner that could provide us with solid shape work. Ralph has worked together with different people here, but in the years 2001 and 2002 the delivered quality was not in a way we have expected it. So that was finally the time when I started to spend time with shape editing tools [ZModeler] to be able to correct mapping issues and other small fixes. But still, basically my main focus was on the integration of the various files into the actual game. When we where contacted by EA and asked to work with them on a 4 Season F1 Racing Game (editor's note: later to become F1C), Ralph said that this would be only possible if we would get additional help in the shape creating sector. That was the time when Ivo Franic appears. And I was so amazed how accurately he works on the shapes. I needed almost 3-5 days to make all the fixes for one Team, his work only needed one or two. For 2004 there were almost NO fixes that I had to do. They were all delivered almost perfect. So I could "fall" back into my previous role — concentrate on technical issues. I guess explaining more in detail what this work really is would not be really interesting for most of the people — they just want to have these cars in their game. But I can tell you, that there are plenty of things that you have to consider before a texture and a shape file will show up correctly in F1C '99-'02.

Ralph: Well, that was Matthias' story. Mine begun some years earlier with GP2 which actually was my first racing game. The reason for starting with editing car textures was just that I wanted to see the actual cars and liveries (which was season 1996) in my game instead of the game's default 1994 ones and even more important, I wanted quite authentic liveries which means with tobacco and alcohol decals. Besides that, the shipped liveries were just really bad (as usual for the GPx series).

I did that only for myself and didn't ever give anything of that away or published it. This changed with UbiSoft's F1 Racing Simulation hit the stores. Again the liveries had been outdated and again — following license and laws — there were just unbranded liveries. So I made new textures and this time released them on some German fan sites, car-by-car, but a real carset was still far away. I stopped doing that after a while because of private reasons and got back into the whole thing with the arrival of GP3. This time a real carset was possible — thanks to good old GP3edit... the rest has been explained by Matthias above and there is nothing more to say.

Q. How long does it take to produce an entire carset?

A. Matthias: That's a very difficult question. All I could say is, that with each year, it takes longer — simply for the reason that we have to do more (not because of the fact that the people will expect more). It's just that we discover after a season, what we missed (or could do something even better) and with that the amount of work is just increasing. Beside the amount of work you have to consider that all that is just a hobby for us, which means, that we could not work 12 hours or more a day on this project. But when we would just break this down to the cars themselves (only the car body and the wings) then we could say, that for the F1C cars it took us around 2.5 months per season. But — I have also to admit, that this time two people were working on the shapes and that the quality of the output is much different — it really can't be compared to anything else you will see in 2004.

Ralph: That's not easy to answer because this is very much game related. The EA F1 series offered a very much wider band of editable issues than the GPx series does. I really can't say an amount of time needed for a whole set because this is very much depending on the time we can find for that. Matthias mentioned the work for the original shipped version of F1C, but IMO this is not comparable with the stuff commonly known under the "RH brand". For the shipped game we did what EA wanted us to do. For "RH" we did what we wanted to have in the game. So the time needed is much more. For RH 2004 Season it was approximatly 5 months only working on the cars.

Go To Page 2

Click here to go to top of this page.