hehe! I just figure "I did it myself because I'm leet!" = ego, but "The leet sim I wrote did it!" = revenue
I hope iRacing really is all it's cracked up to be. There's no reason why the sim itself can't be. I do get the impression that, like LFS, they didn't follow the FITYMI philosophy that SimBin and ISI have done. I worry that they're overselling the product, and writing cheques their sim may not be able to cash, but we can't know it until we see it for ourselves. I want them to succeed, but the value for money aspect is my biggest concern, and seeing those nice big 42" screens etc doesn't dispel that either.
Obviously he had the ultimate track walk when they scanned the track in and was able to dissect it to bits in a way that you won't just driving it in RL or in a sim. I don't think we can exactly assume this is unbiased though, obviously he has a rather large interest in saying the sim helped him and did he do any testing, track days, racing schools (all of which Lime Rock offers and pretty extensive school/testing is required before entering Skip Barber as a novice) before hand?
Added to that some people are very very fast out of the box. There's was a story about somebody in Motorsport a while ago who didn't do karting (a driver who had potential but never really got anywhere whose name I can't remember) beating the lap record set by professional instructors by 2 seconds on his first day of getting in a racing car. Racing sims may help in some areas or they may even be a hindrance but there's no way of telling how good someone naturally is
edit: @Sam, balls, I thought I could get away with not quoting
Yeah I want it to be great for sure, but I have no idea what to really expect. I do know a few things behind the scenes that make me excited about the end result, and I think it's tunnel vision to think that just because nKPro failed or other things have failed mean anything. First of all, none of those failures had previously written two of the best sims ever made. Whilst I may be naive expecting a great product, it's equally naive to think that Kaemmer is not capable of blowing us all away. And what's the deal with 42" screens? I don't get worried when I see Scawen's 3 20" CRTs! (IIRC), besides, most of that is all write off / capital expense anyway. I'm sure they are doing much more expensive and important things
Did you read the snippet? There was no scan back before N2003 was even made
And yes, as I said in the first place - maybe he's just a natural. But someone with that kind of talent is rare, and perhaps he also just happened to be a sim developer / math guru, perhaps he's just the best at everything in the world. (no he's not).
Well having read the snippet it says nothing about racing that car or track in N2003. Whether a sim can help develop real racing skills and techniques is completely different and doesn't require real tracks or cars, but that's not what I read the original comment as being about.
FFS, The original comment that I made was that simracing can helping your driving skills - I never said anything else. I didn't say he raced the same car or track in the sim did I? (no I didn't)
there's so much hate for iracing for many different reasons, i dont know how warrented these reasons are... I'd like to try it out once its released. hopefully we will get a hefty LFS patch before then.
I want to try it out first, read reviews, see more game play videos, see if the karts have chassis flex lol, and THEN i would give my opinion about iRacing.
Right now i feel its nothing compared to LFS, but could be proven wrong.
i think everyone here does
but i also think the number whod like to pay 20 dollars to try a game is a lot smaller (and for that youll get 2 amazing tracks that afaik haven been specified and a stock car almost no one here gives a damn about plus some horrible looking pontiac... sorry but this game here has more to offer for free and judging by that video physics that compare just fine)
so far the most accurate description of the game has been that the logo looks like a racer getting mugged
Yeah your right sorry I just mid read your post. I don't disagree that N2003 could well have helped him, as could GPL and LFS, but it didn't help him learn the track or car, so even if the claim is true it doesn't help the laser scanning/real tracks/cars argument one bit
Silverstone is the only European circuit on the list atm. I'll try it when it's got Spa and Oulton Park.
Hopefully we'll be allowed to drive the stock cars on the road courses, but with all this structured racing format I don't think a server running those combos could be publicly available, unless iRacing themselves host it, that is of course if they allow it in the first place.
I'm also getting increasingly worried about all the servers being in the US, for Europe it may not be that bad but for the rest of the world it could make it a non-starter, which would hugely reduce the population of a game which has already sued members of its target market and now seems determined to milk them for all they've got. Couple this with no demo and I think a lot of non-US racers will just be put off paying to find it's crap and even worse if those that do pay come back saying it's crap.
What's the fascination with european tracks? Looking at that track list you can see names like Laguna seca, Virginia, Road america, Watkins glen, Infineon etc which all are great tracks, at least from from my simming experience. Or are would you like to compare the tracks to their real versions? There are great tracks in UK but american road tracks are very enjoyable as well. Most of the known european tracks are F1 tracks anyway, wide, boring, dull and uninteresting.
Laguna Seca has massive appeal to me, but apart from that I guess I don't really know the US tracks well enough to get excited about the prospect of them. It's different for the iRacing target base because they race those tracks IRL, but they may as well be purely fictional, for the amount of relating to them that I'll be able to do.
luckily there will most likely be other option to try it
but with their current business model it would have to be more than brilliant to make me pay all that money for a game that makes it impossible to get pings lower than 100-200ms by developers with that sort of history
if they can develop a strong base in america, I'm sure they'll move onto other countries, and the library of cars and tracks will grow. one of the 1st places that comes to mind for me overseas is southkorea, since they have pretty strong net cafes and gaming gets alot of attention there. I
Spa is dull and uninteresting? Most of the European F1 tracks are crap and a sad reflection of their former greatness, we do have some very good tracks though, some big names like Donington and the full Brands circuit and some less well known but still very very nice like Cadwell, Pembrey, Snetterton, Knockhill and Mallory in the UK and there are other little circuits around Europe that are gems to discover it is one of the nicest things about rF.
Add to that a lot of second class circuits around Europe, some of the F1 tracks and some club circuits. There are only have two rovals in Europe, both of which are awful and unpopular with just about everybody the current lineup from iRacing features 4 rovals all, none of which are likely to be good tracks. Added to that lot you've got a couple of real American equivalents of European airfield track day type locations, flat boring and slow, ok for racing schools track days and a bit of local racing but when you've got the choice of any track in the world not exactly first choice material.
There are some very nice circuits on the iRacing list, Mid Ohio, Laguna Seca, Road America, Sears Point, Long Beach, Virginia and probably the best club circuit in the world, Lime Rock.
But they've been insisting that it's real motorsport and appeals to racers not gamers all along. Traditionally I think it's fair to say that proportional to their population Europeans (particularly British, Germans and Scandinavians) have shown far more serious long term interests in circuit racing sims than the Americans, who never really seem to make up that much of active sim racing communities. Maybe iRacing is using the US emphasis to try and help draw in more serious racers from the US who currently aren't racing other sims seriously, meaning they don't have to rely on converting current sim racers.
Because it's obviously question about prestige. Ironic that possibly most of the best tracks in the world right now comes from 'Murica, from the promised land of turning left...
ps. Lime Rock is being repaved right now... And some chicanes will be added See PDF
And anyway, this particular friend is someone whose impressions of sims I trust implictly because a) he's extremely quick and experienced in simracing and b) he's also extremely quick in various kinds of real world racing.
Edit: all I'm saying is that as someone who's been (I think) fairly neutral about iRacing so far, this makes me legitimately excited/anticipatory.