when they say improved tyre model, will that mean the tyres will visually bend, because nothing can even come close to lfs without this feature.

Just gave the demo a shot and my first impressions are mixed.

The controller latency which seems to plague ISI engined games - and especially rFactor - seems to have been addressed and is much improved. I get a much better feel for the dynamics of the car. I can finally sense it starting to slide and break loose and can countersteer and use the throttle to recover. Very encouraging.

Force feedback is the same mixed bag found in other ISI and SimBin titles. Bleh.

Graphics are disappointing which is a surprise since I expected them to be a highlight. They're not much different than GTR and GTL and manage to look both washed out and vaguely cartoony at the same time. The track could have been lifted straight from GTR. Rain effects are nice and atmospheric though I would have preferred much reduced visibility through the windscreen. Unhappily, it also murders my framerate. Lined up at the start with a full-grid and no rain, I get around 27fps. With rain, that plummets to 9fps, which is unplayable. Once the field spreads out a bit and there are only a handful of cars in the same section of track, the framerate creeps back up to around 17fps with rain and 45fps without. I suspect the novelty of rain will quickly wear off.

Sound is on par with GTR and GTL. Good but not great.

All in all, it feels almost like a slightly newer version of the original GTR with some refinements and a bit of spit and polish. A bit of a disappointment though the improved feel and handling of the cars is encouraging.

i am downloading now

does the steering wheel try to correct itself when you oversteer?

Where are you downloading from?

I hate anything built on the ISI engine. Well that was until now. This game is very enjoyable. I have only driven the ferrari but its nice to drive. Easy to correct slides as well which seemed to be absent in GTR. I might get this as a single player game when it comes out.

so far so good, the force feedback is awesome, some shots i grabbed. LFS needs FF like this, at least an option anyways, the feeling of the cars is great, you feel really connected with the road surface and its changes.

To me it feels about on par with LFS but the steering is somewhat too tight, but I guess that'll take some time to get used to. Oddly even if I change the aggression of the AI from "real" to "psychotic" it doesn't make any difference. Then again, that might just be a good thing since I wouldn't want a crazy, hell-bent-on-wrecking-everyone driver up my car's ***!

Please, where did you get the demo from? I want to try it out too!

Here's a link:

http://www.download.com/GTR-2- ... 0563540.html?tag=lst-0-2i

I'm currently downloading. Its 312MB - sorry about the misinformation, RSC said 512.

Thanks! I don't think it's supposed to be online yet... gamespot has a nice countdown counter (which has 7 hrs left), and on 10tacle's site 'demo' is still greyed out ;-) .

Quote from Stregone :

Its because the demo is verys imilar to the game. If the crackers can see the game without the copy protection present, it gives them a big advantage in cracking the retail version when it is released (or even before its released). Copy protection isn't there to completely eleminate piracy, its main purpose is to stall crackers so it isn't cracked in the games primetime immediatly after release.

Starforce sucks though.

slight error in your train of thought. Now that the crackers have seen the "copy prevention" scheme in the demo they can already start working on it. If the demo was released without any "prevention" (i will not use the word "protection" because there is no "protection" of any kind involved) then the crackers would not know what to expect.

There is no way to eliminate "piracy" (and still make a profit).

I am very curious how it will look like - GTR1 was pretty crappy - especially that Force "Feedback". But I am afraid it will not run on my S3 Virge DX graphics . I would like to see if they managed to tweak up the tyre physics.... if they got at least on 50% LFS tyre realism, then they are good.....

Tyres are 1000% improvement over GTR 1 in my opinion.

http://www.fileshack.com/file.x/9110/GTR%202%20Demo/

Faster download, the other one was going at like 50kb

thnx vale, i couldn't wait an hour and 15 minutes, now all i wait is 9.

Well, its different. There seems to be too much grip, the only time you seem to get oversteer is by using the curbs, its kind of like there is traction control on ... but there isnt.

It seems impossible to lock up when braking, using 100% brake presure and brake balance of 51:49 in the lambo, you can just stamp on the brake pedal with no worries. If you push too hard the worse that will happen is you'll understeer off, the gravel in GTR used to be punishing but now instead of skating over the top of it, it just slows you down, and you can turn easy enough to get back on track.

edit: what season is it meant to be, because its the old '03 track?

The rain seems quite fun to drive in, but the cars will still understeer too and there is still to much grip when braking. I looked in the plr. file and saw that steering assist and brake assist are still turned on even when you turn it off in game, but changing that in the file didnt seem to make a difference.

Second impressions after spending a couple of hours with it:

- this thing is a resource hog. Turning hotlaps by myself around the track I usually see framerates around the 40-50fps mark. Add some AI cars into the mix and the framerate drops down to 25-30fps. Add headlights and it drops even more. Add rain and the framerate drops through the floor. Unfortunately, the controller response noticeably degrades when the framerate falls below 25fps or so and the car handling goes all to hell. I've tried reducing graphics options, reducing screen resolution and running DirectX 8 shaders but still can't get the game to run consistently smoothly on my system (Athlon64 3500+, 2GB DDR, GeForce 6800GS).

- lovely lighting effects; the gradual transition from day to dusk to night back and back to dawn is gorgeous. Headlights are a resource hog but look fantastic.

- the handling is significantly better than other ISI engined games but I still don't feel connected to the car. There's still something missing. It's hard to describe but the handling feels artificial, synthetic. It's missing that visceral, dynamic element that makes a car feel alive.

- the artificial force feedback effects are annoying and tell me nothing about the car. I suppose they're intended to improve the driving experience and enhance immersion but they really do nothing for me.

After playing with the demo for a couple of hours, I loaded up LFS and took a couple of the GTR style cars out for some laps around Aston. I was immediately struck by how much smoother LFS runs, how clean the graphics are and how responsive and alive the cars feel. If only SimBin had used the LFS engine instead of that fricking ISI gMotor engine ...

Quote from VALE 46 :

http://www.fileshack.com/file.x/9110/GTR%202%20Demo/

Faster download, the other one was going at like 50kb

hm.. thats a crap mirror. i get 10kb and 9 hours on that one. :chairs:

Quote from VALE 46 :

...I looked in the plr. file and saw that steering assist and brake assist are still turned on even when you turn it off in game, but changing that in the file didnt seem to make a difference.

Well, it´s called a Sim, not a game. Have you tried read-only-access after editing?


Played it for 50 minutes and after that erased it from disk. A simulated train is more fun to drive...

Quote from thisnameistaken :

Buddha: What hardware are you using? It'd be nice to see what's required for the performance you're getting before I finish this download!

Athlon64 3500+, 2GB DDR, GeForce 6800GS. I'm running the demo at 1280x960x32 with DirectX 8 shaders and 8xS AA, 8x AF. I might need to reduce AA and AF and drop the resolution down to 1024x768 and even drop the colour depth to 16 bits to see if I can get it to run smoothly.

[edit]: just turned off AA and AF and reduced the resolution to 1024x768x16. In the rain at night with headlights on I'm getting 25-35 fps on track by myself and the 10-15fps on the starting grid with 15 AI cars. It looks like crap at those settings too. I was getting similar framerates when I was running at a higher resolution and with AA and AF enabled so they don't seem to be the limiting factor.

Lots of people over at RSC are saying that they get good performance on relatively low spec systems though, so either my expectations are too high, their expectations are too low or my system has a bottleneck that GTR2 doesn't like. Best to give it a go on your own system and see what the performance is like.

@ Bo Kristiansen You have to register (free) to use the faster servers, and there is more than 1 server to download from, one of 'em must work for ya


After playing a bit more, its not that bad. Its easy to keep the car on the track at a reasonable pace, but once you start pushing more then its quite fun and challenging. My best time is a 1:37.7xx

Torrent http://www.no-grip.net/tracker/index.php
312MB (not 512)

Just gave the demo a try. Gonna write a quick impression post.

1. Graphics
Cartoony. Sluggish. Slow. Made my (a bit old) P4 2.4GHz / 512MB DDR / 9800 Radeon Pro setup suffer pretty badly. It's better when you're alone on the time trial and no other cars are around, but what's the point there?

I can run LFS fine on a full grid without a hitch, even 3-4 cars on the track in GTR gives me 15-20fps.

2. Audio
Sampled. Need I say more? Nah, but seriously, I think the GTR sounds are ok for being sampled, but not in my lifetime would I prefer these over LFS. The car engine just doesn't sound alive in GTR, you can't tell how much stress it's going thru.. it's just.. fake.

3. Menus and control setup
Same old confusing menus from the previous GTR/GTL titles here. I don't like them one bit. I still can't configure my clutch in to the game from my second wheels pedals, I have no bloody idea why. The game asks me to choose which wheel I want to use. ARRRGH.

4. Physics and the "feeling"
Better than GTR and GTL I suppose. Still no default presets for DFP, which frankly pisses me off. The physics still feel fake, which wasn't really a surprise to me. I did feel pretty good a few times while hammering that Lambo in to corners, but for most of the time I was biting my lip and thinking "not like this Simbin, not like this". It doesn't feel like YOU are driving the car, it feels mostly like the game engine is driving the car for you.

5. Final words
I didn't have high expectations about GTR2, and I found nothing new from this so called sim.

Call this as an LFS fanboy post if you must, but I just can't stand sims that claim to have "ground-breaking physics engine (that's straight from the readme.txt)" while they clearly don't. I've always considered anything ISI physics based to be made for the mass public, not for the hardcore simmers. In GTR you are being made feel good for driving even if you don't deserve it.

I'm not going to buy this title. It's not a hardcore sim, which are the only sims I'm after for. Flame ahead, this is how I feel about these sims and no GTR fanboy post will change my opinion untill THEY get their sim right.

Quote from VALE 46 :

@ Bo Kristiansen You have to register (free) to use the faster servers, and there is more than 1 server to download from, one of 'em must work for ya

yeah. but nevermind.
- im dl right now from the download.com link. 50kb is fine enough.