The thing is, you don't need telemetry to see when a car turns around its center axis or behaves completely unnaturally, atleast if you've ever driven a real car hard or on the track. If the devs can't (or don't want to) see that by themselves, then there's very little the average simmer can do about it that would make things to be any better.
I'm a firm believer of the opinion, that when you start developing a sim, it should always begin from the physics. The fact that they used the Shift engine as a base shouldn't change this fact, they could have dumped the physics and tire model code from the start and write a new one to get the handling right, and then jumped on the eye candy bling bandwagon, but they chose not to.
They spent a lot of time relying on Brn Collins' feedback, but he didn't know what he was talking about. It was just rubbish.
Born2BSlow - the trouble is that's its awful now and ISN'T getting better yet. Not really. There are long daily changelings, but very little tangible progress.
Unfortunately they HAVE jumped on the eye candy bandwagon well before acceptable physics.
I would imagine they have different people working on art and physics so they can progress together. Unfortunately digital art is easier than correct digital physics it seems.
However, there are many ardent sim racers involved in development, so hopefully they can get somewhere.
Having raced a season myself I can honestly say that real racers have no clue how to develop sim physics so in my opinion these 'big named' drivers testing are lol, unless Mr. Collins has driven thousands of hours on sims of course.
Anyway as with every other sim in development I hope this turns out good. I've not driven it for a few months myself but last time I tried it was definitely not going to keep my attention for very long unfortunately. I'll wait until closer to release then try it out again.
@Matrixi You do need telemetry to try to understand the calculations that make it happen though...but if you explain the issue with clear video evidence then it can help. And with respect it's not using Shift physics, that is just overused mud to sling at a game you have chosen to dislike in order to scare off other Sim racers from even trying it.
@Tristan, with respect Ben Collins feedback is on car behaviour in game versus real life...he does have a little experience of thrashing real cars around real tracks. I don't know your background so I'm not going to trash your view, but I'd like to understand how you came to your conclusion if you could explain further please.
The ethos behind the game development is to build a Sim that can be dumbed down for console, arcade and casual racers . The PC version will be the full fat, no holds barred version.
It's not using Shift physics per se, but it IS using the Shift engine with tweaked physics - they haven't overhauled them. The weird floaty four wheel drifts still occur when driving over uneven terrain at high speeds even in the latest version from what I saw my friend try it yesterday.
We are approaching what could be one hell of an era, Assetto Corsa, Raceroom Experience and pCars all coming along. It's going to cost me a lot of money if I love them all
As I've said to others, please get involved and feed back what your issues are, it can only help the game develop. In reality that's the reason you have the access you do. It's on Steam now, but you will have retrieve your unlock code from the WMD forum.
@Matrixi Four wheel drifts on uneven terrain? Do you mean off track? Grass has been an issue since the tyre changes to incorporate heating and varying grip levels related to heat. There is virtually zero friction on grass, but as the game is in development and not finished it will get sorted at some point.
No, I mean ordinary uphills and downhills combined with high speed corners. The cars get these strange hover motions and feels like it's turning around its center axis. It's the exact NFS shift physics behaviour.
It looks like the car goes light over a crest with quite a bit of steering lock on so the car starts to rotate. I'm not an expert but wouldn't you expect this? There is a roundabout near my house which has quite a dip and crest, if I hit it at 40 and I'm not dead straight the car tries to rotate as the wheels lose lateral grip near the end of suspension travel. I will try that sector out tomorrow and see if it is still the same. I'm getting the evils from wifey for spending my wedding anniversary chatting on forums I don't think I will get away with getting my wheel out and getting my game face on as well.
I was thinking more about momentum of the car causing the rotation, and the lack of lateral grip allowing it. The rotation caused by the angle of entry into the corner and steering angle before the car goes light.
For the record, Tristan drives open wheel cars around England. If you do a bit of searching, you can find videos of him driving his car. If I'm not mistaken, he recently purchased a new car as well.
When? If currently the PC is their lead platform, when will they go "no holds barred"? As Tristan and Matrixi have said, they're not on that path yet and when people have tried to help.. they are simply told that they are wrong. I've seen it happen more than once.
You've only indicated 1 real sim in that list.
What's the point of trying to give feedback if you get told off as being wrong. It's one thing if you're saying "Cars should jump on flat ground", well yes you are wrong. But with Matrixi's example of a car gaining MORE grip when going light over a crest (hence the over-rotation) versus LOSING grip (which should create understeer)... and being told that's wrong.. why bother trying to help.
For the record, I politely asked Tristan to explain further. I'm genuinely happy for Tristan that he gets to do that. I genuinely wish I could, but for the talent and the money who knows.
There is at least a year of development left, please by all means post the link to your post where you tried to report something. I'm not trying to say it's perfect now. I'm trying to say this is the only (you say simcade, I say potential Sim) where you have the chance to be involved in the development. If you give up because someone disagrees after one post, well that's not much conviction or discussion. You won't get the opportunity anywhere else, so why not get stuck in.
You have views that your entitled to, I only post here because in my view LFSers have a lot to contribute, because they/we drive a Sim that is very good and if the best bits of LFS can make it into pCars, well that wouldn't be a bad thing now would it?
I just want those not involved, not to be put off by the negative comments and try the demo when the game is released. You never know, they might like it!
Regarding Tristan's credentials, understand that he's been sim-racing (or at least involved with it on various levels, including being involved with LFS racing teams on and off) for at least a decade. That's about as far back as my input can provide, so it may be more than that. On top of that, however, he races semi-pro open wheeled cars regularly and has some connections (which I'm not at liberty to just spew) with Lotus that have afforded him opportunities aplenty that most of us won't ever see.
The main thing is that he's rather well versed in both "worlds" as it were. And in fact, this is the main key to the relevancy of his comments in terms of how a sim compares to the ultimate paradigm of reality. In case you're a (rightfully so) skeptic, all of this has been more than validated in this forum and others... not to mention his local newspaper
Exactly - this is a reasonable misconception though if glanced over by an individual not well versed in basic physics.. Rotation caused by differences in lateral grip between front & rear should cease entirely as that grip falls off at both ends due to the trailing off of mechanical tire forces at both ends of the car as it approaches a crest. Simple inertia. Since the front end will see this first by some fractions of a second, under-steer should ensue as well. Fascinatingly enough, this is what happens in the real world
And also Tristan, for a non specialised Engineer, has a wise head on his shoulders from watching his various technical orientated threads.
Basically he's termed a smart ass, in the best possible taste of course. Although the bugger made (suggested and rightly so) fork out a few quid for a decent HANS device, that was never worn at first....but will certainly be now after my recent 3 barrel roll site seeing excurtion
They're (at least) 2 or 3 years into development, if they have such basic issues with their tyre physics this late into the cycle, there's not a lot of optimism from me that they're going to end up with something that is proper.
I never questioned Tristan's credentials, I just stated that I didn't know his background. I'm old school so googling people feels like stalking to me. I also remember when googling required whites, a cricket ball and impressive wrist action, although I'm sure the modern meaning sometimes requires the latter, or so I've heard.
@dawesdust I'm not ready to give up hope just yet, and as far as I know games develop all the way up to the point they are released, it's just clever maths at the end of the day, unless you can point out how wrong I am if you have as impressive credentials in games development as Tristan does in car behaviour?
I'm an eternal optimist I warn you.
Also if the sim community won't get behind a company trying to give them the opportunity to give them the Sim what they want, well, then the sim community won't get it, I just see that as a missed opportunity is all.
I don't believe that is their intentions though, especially when they are targeting the mass market platforms called consoles. The costs for publishing to those platforms don't afford enough margin to take a risk, thus they will cater to the common denominator. A simulator will not be appealing, thus not profitable, to the majority of people.
They are dumbing down the experience for the $$. That's just simple economics so that they can make up the costs of spending money for certification along with the inevitable certification of patches on the consoles.
Up until recently (it's late in current gen), it costs $20,000 to put out a patch for an XBox game. I'd reckon that the certification process for a full game would be a factor of 5 more than that.
As you can see, by targeting the consoles like they have, they've effectively said "**** it" to trying to be a good simulator and are instead targeting the lowest common denominator to make enough money to make back their expenses.
Anything on consoles can't be "real". That's why every true simulation is being developed on PC platform. You just can't imagine fat US kid buying LFS on consoles and then whining why it's not possible to play with gamepad, because if I was developing a sim for consoles I'd lock it for gamepads and make it a wheel only...
Previously publishers dictated how games were made, men in suits reading marketing gubbins to decide how to maximise their income...so we had EA saying cockpit view is going right? Only 5% play cockpit so f*** it.
SMS is a developer, not a publisher, they want to make the best racing SIM they can, and their funding has largely come from the pockets of those who love SIM racing on PC... everyone who helped fund it gets a say in how it's made, gets to watch it being made (rather than screen shots every few weeks).
Fine if you don't believe the guys trying to rescue us from the greedy suits. Yes they want to maximise their income, so when the game is done it will be available on consoles. The console version will be incompatible with the PC version and there will be hardware constraints, but they'll do the best they can. The PC version will be the one for the petrol heads. That's not selling out, that's common sense.
I really hope you are wrong about pCars and SMS, not for some personal points or kudos, but because if you are, then we will get one awesome SIM that looks as beautiful as it drives, with car and track configurations to make your shorts moist. Please don't take that personally. If you are right then I'll probably still enjoy playing it even if you don't, again nothing personal, I'm enjoying the multiplayer side of it already, not very successfully but enjoyable nonetheless.
First off, I don't believe that is their goal anymore. No developer is retarded enough to target consoles, with their extremely high costs to even sell a game on consoles. Nobody is stupid enough to spend (per console, excluding PC) $100,000 on certification, plus $20,000 per patch without dumbing down their product to cater to the masses. It just doesn't make sense financially.
The first reviews that would come out would say "this is way too hard", and then nobody would buy it. Then SMS would be out hundreds of thousands of dollars for developing for consoles.
And yes, they did initially target PC gamers for it to be a "sim", and then proceeded to pull the largest bait-and-switch in history by changing it to a arcade-sim after they had enough money. They managed to have a lot of sim racers very excited about the possibilities of it, but as we've seen, this was all just smoke and mirrors to get our $50 out of our pockets, and into their hands.
If it is different than what I prophecize then that's great, maybe not for the developers wallets. If it does turn out how I expect it to, we always have Assetto Corsa which arguably looks better than pCARS, and we know already that it does have excellent physics and force feedback from the Tech Preview. Never mind the quality of content that AC has so far is extremely excellent. Laser scanned Spa and others. Extremely high-detail car interiors and quite good sounds.
As noted, I do have a little bit of experience at real racing, and a whole lot more sim racing experience than Ben Collins. Ben is undoubtedly better at real racing than I, and will be better at feedback in real cars. But I'm not sure that that correlates to good feedback in sims - no g-forces or vibrations. A fairly static 2D view of the 3D world, articifical force-feedback (that as we all know is very very difficult to setup to feel right even when the base code is excellent), artificial sound generation (either real time or samples)... So I don't think he's necessary any good at all at giving comparison feedback between sim and real life, just like Mr Earnhardt (I think) gave the thumbs up to the monstrosity that is (was? Haven't played in years) iRacing.[/QUOTE]
Thanks.
I don't claim to be the best driver, the best engineer or the best sim racer. Hell, Dennis Lind on this forum is way better than me, let alone Valtteri Bottas (ex-short term LFSer)........ Alex Gassman (minimaxman I think) is very good. So I'm outclassed on this forum, let alone in the rest of the world, but that doesn't mean I'm totally useless either.
But having done a fair bit of both (nigh on 25 years of 'sim' racing, although granted the first 15 years of the genre were pretty poor really), and won a few races and championships in both, I do think I'm fairly able to tell what's 'right' and what 'isn't' in sims. I do suffer from bias some of the time (I don't think I could ever like rFactor, even if a 'perfect' mod was released for it!! Although I do have it installed and I do use it to fiddle with new tracks before I race on them).
This year is going okay. Still racing, although I always suspect that each year is the last, so I may have to stop soon. Ought to spend money on houses and gadgets and families rather than throwing it at a racing car. Won my first race of the year three weeks ago. The next day I made an error that resulted in a compression fracture of my spine (I still finished 4th, but was 2nd at the time of the accident). That's healing well, and I am hoping to back near the front this weekend at Brands Hatch (GP circuit). There are a couple of good drivers I'm fighting will, plus Alice Powell who, being semi-pro and having had a year of GP3 in 2012, who is leading the championship. So I'm having to up my game to compete with her, but the season isn't over yet.
I haven't asked for my pCars refund, but at the same time I see a lot of progress in areas that much to do with the simualtion side of things. The console noises do suggest it'll be dumbed down, and I don't think they'll want to maintain two lots of code to keep the PC simmers happy. I might be wrong. But pCars in a single seater at Spa is one of the worst sim experiences I've had for a long time. rFactor is better (and I really don't like rFactor).
I disagree, with the potential revenue streams from consoles, $100k here and $20k there are drops in the ocean, obviously this depends on customers reaction to your following point...without a publisher raping the spoils SMS can net all but the distribution costs of the selling price.
Part of the process of finishing the game is going to be about "quick options" for the console players to click one button and get settings configured to make it easier.
Have you heard of libel laws, this is pretty strong stuff to accuse SMS of? The FSA have probed the whole setup diligently, and signed it off with just some legal structure changes. Your opinion of how the game will turn out may be proven wrong, yet you state it as supporting evidence of your accusation. Seriously, think about what you are posting please, for your own sake. I'm not going to sue you but if you write stuff like that regularly, someone will come after you. You are calling a reputable company fraudsters and liars, not recommended in my experience.
The two things don't have to be mutually exclusive, I don't understand why people insist they do? Why can't a great Sim have a great career mode and options to make it accessible and playable to novices, doesn't sound like rocket science to me.
I'm probably going to get all of them, obviously I've backed pCars so I want it to be the daddy, whatever happens the next 12 months is looking as though virtual racing is coming back to the fore as a genre. Call it Sim, Simcade, Arcade whatever label you want to put on the games (which regardless of label is what they will all be), I'm looking forward to a great year.
