How Kunos Simulazioni used new technology to create Assetto Corsa EVO’s open-world

Perhaps the most headline-grabbing feature of Kunos Simualzioni’s upcoming Assetto Corsa EVO Early Access release has been its open-world mode – a first for the developer and its Assetto Corsa series of games.

Around 1,600 km2 of real-world roads will be re-created in-game, centred on the area surrounding Germany’s most famous race track-turned-toll-road, the Nürburgring Nordschleife.

Creating such a massive environment with diverse vegetation, road surfaces and topography would be an enormous challenge for any Triple-A developer. For a small studio like Kunos, it seems like an onerous task.

However, thanks to the dev team’s determination and skill set, you’ll be able to explore the Eifel region in near-photorealistic detail this summer.

LiDAR to the rescue

“When we found out that the LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) data of the [Eifel] region was available to purchase there was not a second thought about that”, explains Kunos Simulazioni’s co-founder and executive manager Marco Massarutto, in an interview with Traxion.GG. 

Kunos had stumbled across extensive laser-scanned data of the Eifel region that was commercially available to license, a spark that ignited EVO’s open-world idea.

However, the team would still face difficulties in terms of interpreting the laser-scan data to help produce a huge in-game environment.

“We had to create a technology that can read LiDAR data and generate a terrain, a mesh [and] the morphology of the area,” explains Massarutto, highlighting how Kunos created a tool that could analyse and interpret the laser-scanned information and automatically reproduce this into a tangible form in-game.

“We integrated a lot of functionalities that can read geographical and custom data and can place this automatically – the trees, the vegetation, anything else we need to fill the area. Because doing this with artists and so on would require 10 years,” he added, showcasing how important innovation is for smaller studios in terms of maximising their resources. 

However, the potential ramifications of this LiDAR-interpreting tool are much more far-reaching, especially concerning the AC series’ popularity with modders and its burgeoning free-roam communities:

“We created this terrain engine which possibly in the future could be available for companies and the community to create other areas,” said Massarutto, potentially paving the way for modders (or other game developers) to create open-world maps once EVO allows modding post-v1.0 release.

How would you like to see Kunos’ LiDAR-interpreting tools used in the future? Let us know in the comments below.