This is the first really high res video I've seen:

http://www.kolumbus.fi/martin.bror/crusse/iso/mazda_lime.avi

It looks awesome - much better than all the blip/vimeo/youtube videos I've seen previously.

See Crusse's post here for more vids:

http://www.teamredline.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=119

Yeah check out the posts from #33 on here:

http://forum.racesimcentral.co ... d.php?t=321307&page=2

It kind of sucks especially since as the last poster says the F2000 car is more difficult to drive than the Formula Mazda. Yet you have to purchase it anyway in order to obtain a high enough license to race the Mazda online.

Quote from Shotglass :

no you dont since they force you to buy some horrible single seater before they let you get anywhere close to any of the cars you want to drive

hey you're right. You can't skip vehicles to progress to higher licenses. So yeah you need to buy each car up to the one you want to race with online... (you could always race it offline without the license). Oh well. I would be doing this anyway, but I can see why some may not want to.

Pretty pointless. If they're just using GPS data until the car is "close" or "overtaking", then there's a good chance that the F1 drivers can take lines/do things that aren't possible with the simulation's physics or vice versa. The last thing I want is the GPS based computer drivers (not AI in this case) doing something that's not possible in the game.

I can see this selling for console racing games with arcade-ish physics.

Quote from Christopher Raemisch :

Sounds like to me they are trying to imitate the level of elitism found in real racing. Which is exactly the reason why I am playing games in the first place...

How did you deduce that from ajp's post? The game comes with a few ovals and a few road courses. It comes with one oval car and one road car. If you buy a year subscription you get $60 credit to buy whatever you want. It's as simple as that. What does that have to do with elitism?

A smart person would use the credit to purchase cars/tracks needed to compete in the next level series (but you're not required). See this post:

http://forum.racesimcentral.com/showthread.php?t=321307

Every year you renew, you get another $60. So, if you're patient, you never need to purchase additional cars and tracks with your own money if you use the free credit every year. (I doubt many people will do this).

Yes I believe the online series for legends only features ovals. From what I've read and understand you basically choose your career path (ovals vs road tracks) and that dictates what car/track combos you race online with. I think offline you can race whatever track/car combos you want with whatever you've purchased.

And of course you can do both oval racing and road racing - you don't need to stick with one.

They don't use your "free credit" to buy anything. You make the decision what content you want. The game comes with everything on this page in its base form:

http://www.iracing.com/membership/subscriptions.php

Quote from bbman :

3 cars, one track against 2 cars and (really) two tracks... I can see where I bullshit everyone about the joys that are iRacing, yes...

If you purchase a year's subscription, you get $60 towards to purchase of more cars and tracks. If you're interested in road racing, the next car up, the Skip Barber car, requires VIR and Infineon to compete in the series.

So, for a road racer with a year subscription, you would ideally get the following for your $156 USD:
Cars:
Pontiac Solstice
Legends
Skip Barber Formula 2000

Tracks:
Lanier National Speedway
Lime Rock Park
Oxford Plains Speedway
Summit Point Raceway
South Boston Speedway
Lowe's Motor Speedway
Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca
Virginia International Speedway
Infineon Raceway

Also note, that many of these have several configurations. So take VIR for instance, from the website it has 4 layouts:

• Full Course : 3.27 miles
  
• North Course : 2.25 miles
  
• South Course : 1.65 miles
  
• Patriot Course : 1.1 miles

All of these layouts are included in the sim.

What's with all the Solstice bashing? What would you have preferred instead as the base car, an F1 car? iRacing is an american company and over here your only base sports cars are the MX-5, Solstice, and it's clone the Saturn Sky. The next step up being the S2000 and Boxter which I don't think are as well suited to beginners.

There's a few other road cars that might make good additions such as the GT3, Elise, Atom, Caterham, etc. but once again I don't think they would be good beginner cars.

I have an S2 license yet I find racing the XRG just as enjoyable as the GTR cars. There's a certain amount of pleasure in operating an h-shifter and clutch that can't really be had by simply clicking a paddle.

I will probably continue racing the Solstice events event after getting a better license. It's certainly the closest I can come to racing my own car on the track (even though my car's engine is in the Formula Mazda....!). If they add other road cars I will probably switch to those instead.

Quote from BurnOut69 :

If, for example, Scavier wants people to keep playing LFS, they should get up to iRacing's level.

I don't think so. LFS offers a competitive product at a much cheaper price. For those not willing to invest in iRacing, LFS is a good choice.

19" screens were considered "big" in like 1990

Quote from Jamexing :

So typical. Whenever seems that someone might actually be smarter than one is, that someone should be insulted, humiliated and basically squashed. So typical.

...

Quote from Jamexing :

Sounds like someone who can't be bothered to learn about what they drive and thus, shouldn't be driving in the 1st place. Or someone so incompetent at setting their brake forces right that they want to take this setup option away from everyone. The ultimate act of spite. Scorched earth! If I can't master it, no one can!

What goes around comes around I guess...

Quote from DarrenMarsh :

Looks more like it's going over a bump.

That problem in NR2003 was only on downshifts wasn't it?

I didn't think he was talking about that bump. IMHO, that's why I thought the video looked impressive. I thought that huge laser scanned point cloud was going to be more of a marketing thing because the tracks would be too large/memory intensive if they went into such fine detail. But the radical was bumping around a fair amount on the track

Quote from ajp71 :

Presumably the Radical coming out the pits must have been another car online, doesn't really look like they've got rid of some of the N2003 online issues like the over excessive visual movement you saw when another car lifted or changed gear online which is disappointing.

Can you elaborate on that? I'm not really familiar with N2003... I didn't see anything excessive. The car coming out of the pits took off a bit harshly but that could have been the driver just releasing the clutch too fast.

LFS on the other hand has lots of funky movement. For instance, in the starting grid, cars are flopping around like they're on hydraulics...

Scawen should add the "go back in time" feature to LFS. Imagine... a grid of 30 drivers.. everyone manages to safely get through T1 and then some jerk forces everyone to goes back in time 4 seconds causing major carnage... that sounds like a fun feature to piss everyone off...

The new iRacing footage on sim racing tonight looks pretty dang impressive...

http://blip.tv/file/957906?fil ... SimRacingEpisode17607.wmv

I found heal toe to be a bit unnatural with the G25 pedals and a desk and office chair setup.

The combination of CST pedals, a real seat and accurate placement of everything made H&T much easier for me: http://downshift.blip.tv

If the CST pedals aren't in your budget, you can mod your G25 pedals like this guy did to match his Lotus Exige (or simply turn them upside down!):

http://www.thewayiplay.com/mai ... topic=110.msg1304#msg1304

I have no idea how the G25 pedals feel in that configuration, but I assume it would make H&T somewhat easier. My biggest problem was the way the pedals pivoted. The lower end of the G25 throttle pedal is very high (especially when the brake pedal is depressed) and hard to push in from the bottom. But Tristan just called me a noob and told me my technique was poor

Quote from BackMarker :

I think that if everyone had the same wheel-pedal combo then this might work, n reality finding the "threshold" may be too far up on one pedal andbut i too far down on another. If max brake force is adjusted to where no lock up can occur then lap times will suffer because no two braking zones require the same force everytime.


Maybe the max brake force slider should be re-labeled "Squash ball calibration"

I believe this "threshold" can be adjusted by changing the center position of the axis. So if for instance it takes too much pedal travel to reach the threshold, move the center closer to zero travel. Also, as stated in the other thread a few posts above, consistency is much more important than a tenth or two of a second.

Quote from Bluebird B B :

search button:
http://www.lfsforum.net/showth ... highlight=max+brake+force

Thanks this is exactly the point I was trying to make. It didn't show any similar topics after typing in the title

Maybe instead of spending $20 to try iRacing, we can all donate $20 towards a state of the art laser scanner for the LFS devs

Quote from chunkyracer :

As long as a lot of that market is a "bunch of frustated shumacher's wanna be", I don´t really think that LFS will be an alternative, because of the lack in "real" content. For a lot of people, the most important thing they want of a sim, is to pretend they´re driving the "x" car, around the"y" track and getting their ego's up, thinking they can drive faster than "z" driver. For them, even if they try it, LFS will not be good enough.

Many real racers say that sims are only useful for learning tracks (besides strength/focus training). iRacing will no doubt have much more accurate tracks than other sims/games. There is value in having real tracks. Real cars is a different story. There's not too much value in having real cars. I like the fact that there's a Solstice in iRacing just because I know it's similar to cars I might consider taking to the track.

On the FAQ it said grid size was determined by license or iRating. For beginners, the grid size is smaller than upper level licenses. Previously they said their net code can support up to 40 racers or something like that.

Quote from ajp71 :

Well TBH I don't see how shoving 30+ people in low powered cars for a short race is a bad idea, it is how a lot of the most popular club level entry championships work here.

Agreed. I'm really disappointed in the max grid size. I really enjoy larger grids. In the US, Spec Miata is one of the most popular entry level series and the grids are huge (30-40+).

I wasn't really familiar with the squashball mod so your example made it clear why this is useful to some people.

I have a pressure sensitive brake pedal so to me it seems unrealistic to have this option.

Be right back, I'm going to go adjust my braking force in my RX-8 to 730 Nm. I hear it my rain tomorrow and I have a long trip.

Last edited by Technique, Wed 28 May 2008, 04:15. Reason : :)

Quote from PAracer :

From my experience (modified road car on a race track), I have found that overall brake force is dictated by your foot. Want less force, don't press so far. The interesting thing is that during a race, the brake pedal is likely to change its feel unless you have a really well sorted out braking system. When your brakes get a little too hot, the fluid will boil, create gas withing the caliper and cause the pedal to feel mushy. A mushy pedal limit's force greatly. Heck, even the thickness of pad material has an effect on brake force.

On a related note, I would love to see brake temps come into play. Cold brakes at the start with less friction, then building to a maximum. Abuse the system and the friction drops. We could even set up a couple pad friction profiles for the race cars.

http://brakepads.wilwood.com/02-graphs/ahjbc.html Example of race pads performance (temp vs. friction) Note that the rotors will begin to glow once over 900 deg.

edit- I also should mention that when you use the brakes on track (ABS or not) your sense of g-force and experience tells you where optimum braking is. In LFS, we have basic brake simulators (I'm not aware of any force feedback pedals) and zero sense of inertia.

Until we get force feedback pedals I'll just continue to use your rear bumper to stop faster

Quote from xtm :

Brake mod for g25 from nixim is a great easy solution to this problem.

However, a -1 for me, brake force is adjustable in real cars so it should be in the simulation.

How do you adjust braking force on your road car? I'm asking seriously - I'm no mechanic I know front-rear bias can be adjusted and there's kits available to make this easier in certain cars.

Quote from xtm :

If you feel disadvantaged, why not do the same?..

Using an h-shifter and clutch while everyone else is using a sequential and autoclutch is another disadvantage. But I strive for realism - even if it costs me time on the track.