In early September, I�ve had a chance to take a small interview with Mika Hirvonen, a member of RSDG mod team. He�s been kind enough to give us some insight on RSDG and its future plans.

1. Hi Mika, can you start off by telling me a little bit about your team, who's involved, how you guys manage to pull of such a fantastic mod. How long did it take you do?

Racing Sim Developers Group (RSDG) was created in April of 2001 with the goal of bringing together specific talents that would enable it to edit every facet of a given Racing Sim, thus providing 3rd party add-ons, patches, tools, and documentation for the Racing Sim community to spark more interest in GT racing, and ALMS specifically.
In June of 2001 with the advent of F12001 in the fall, it was decided that this game might provide the best editing platform for "full body" cars and other add-ons given some of the press releases regarding the game, and the fact the RSDG members were already familiar working with prior ISI (Image Space Inc.) games. With this in mind, RSDG set out to dissect F12000 CS in order to learn all it could about the game structure and it's limitations in hopes of carrying over some of that knowledge to F12001. What the team found in F1CS was more than any of us thought previously possible. With that, and what was known at the time about the upcoming F12001, we felt pretty confident that F12001 would be a great editing platform for full body cars, and related tracks.
When F12001 finally arrived, we started dissecting it immediately and were excited by it's many possibilities. Our plan was to confirm our findings and provide what information we discover about the game to the community to help modelers edit this great game, and also provide some tools and add-ons for the community as well.

SCC Design Team:

-David Chan (DC Racing) - 3D modeling and painting
- Ron Grzesik (RG) - LMP physics and testing
- Stian Berg (Lord Berg) - testing and gfx stuff
- Mika Hirvonen - 3D modeling, painting and odd jobs here and there
- Pieter Hofstra - 3D modeling, painting, track design
- B�rje Johansson (BJ) - Lead programmer, GT and GTS physics
- Stefan Karlsson (Gt40Steven) - Group moderator/coordinator, physics, track design, AI stuff, menu design...
- Frank Leitner (fosca) - Painting & research
- Steve Lowry (Tiresmoke) - Painting

In a way Sports Car Challenge is third generation of RSDG sports car mods so you could say that it's taken us well over three years to develop it. The first generation was ALMS 2001 GT and Sports Car Pack for F1 2001 and 2nd generation was Sports Car Racing for F1 2002. Although the cars, physics and sounds have changed many times along the way the concept is the same.

2. After SCC was released, there have been a lot of support by the community, many more stand alone teams are released, and the mod just keeps growing! Do you plan to expand into more seasons, release special packs, etc? Basically, is there life beyond SCC?

Yes it's been nice to see the community supporting SCC and hopefully we will see even more cars and carsets released by the community. It is likely that RSDG will release some add-ons for SCC but will they be whole seasons is not sure yet. Some ALMS 2000 season cars have already been made and also new 2004 cars are being worked on. We do want to keep supporting SCC and are working on a patch that will enhance SCC in many ways. The patch will of course fix the existing bugs but it will also update the physics and add a couple of new cars to SCC.

3. The models are so detailed, yet we have 2D wheels - is there a plan to create a 3D wheel pack for SCC?

Simple 3D wheels without any motion blurring were never considered. We did look into motion blurred 3D wheels but decided to go with the 2D style wheels we have now. 2D wheels give you better frame rates though the main reason for using 2D was that blurred 3D wheels take a lot of time and effort to make which again would have delayed the release. So answer to your question is no.