Hi all! well, I've been thinking about it for a few days now and I'm starting to think that 10tacle might've finally got their physics right. I remember thinking back in the first GTR days that the car was too nervous and that you couldn't get away with a 5 degree slide which I thought was very unrealistic because from watching vids, I can see them doing corrections with slides that have a much higher angle. GTR2, however, they seem to have made some great improvements in the physics department in that you can feel the car more in the steering and can get away with some slides but still, to be realistic, not get away with crazy angle slides. I don't know but I just feel that they've got it right. True, I only got GTR2 yesterday and M3 Challenge the day before but going by first impressions, I'm starting to believe that the LFS developers might have some competition .

Just a little request please, no flaming. I'm only posting my opinion and would appreciate it if this could be discussed on a mature level. My opinion is not final and I'm still with LFS but GTR2 seems to come very good. I've never driven a racing car (Single Seater or GT car) so my opinion could be a load of shite but I base my opinion from racing vids that I've seen.

If you disagree (and I bet that most of you do ), please provide reasons to why you think GTR2 or M3 Challenge or both is unrealistic compared to LFS.

Thing i always think is.. we cant really say if GTR2 has real physics because none of us have driven a big GT car (i think anyway) so its hard to tell, where as on LFS, i would guess everyone has driven a real life counterpart of a LFS car..

I still prefer GTR over LFS because of the fact theres so much more content, and more is being made to a high quality.. but thats my opinion

Quote from (-Mark-) :

Thing i always think is.. we cant really say if GTR2 has real physics because none of us have driven a big GT car (i think anyway) so its hard to tell, where as on LFS, i would guess everyone has driven a real life counterpart of a LFS car..

...

Actually that makes the worst argument ever invented because very few have actually raced a car, driven on the limit and over it. Driving to and from work does not make anyone's opinion any more or less valid. It is simply totally different issue. Even very similar real life cars handle very differently. It is kinda like comparing riding a bicycle to riding a motorbike

I haven't yet seen anything that feels as natural and ... well, feels like a real car as LFS does. Certainly the Caterams, the BMW M3 challenge and Niels' C6 are good examples of what rfactor can do but there is still long way to go for an actually good sim, even for LFS.

Something about the gmotor engine just ruins it for me, and I can't figure out exactly what it is. Maybe it's the FFB but the cars don't feel as dynamic as they do in LFS, I don't feel like I have as much control over them.

I don't know which is more realistic (perhaps I wouldn't have much control over a racing car!) but GTR(2)/RACE/rFactor all lack "something". Something important.

Quote from (-Mark-) :

Thing i always think is.. we cant really say if GTR2 has real physics because none of us have driven a big GT car (i think anyway) so its hard to tell, where as on LFS, i would guess everyone has driven a real life counterpart of a LFS car..

I still prefer GTR over LFS because of the fact theres so much more content, and more is being made to a high quality.. but thats my opinion

To me, that's a backward argument because then the only thing that counts in a sim is content/graphics/sound and that's not what sims are all about. Sims are all about making you feel like you are driving a real race car. The sim that makes you most immersed should be the one you like the most. And to me, that is LFS.

Quote from Leprekaun :

If you disagree (and I bet that most of you do ), please provide reasons to why you think GTR2 or M3 Challenge or both is unrealistic compared to LFS.

I say chuck "realism" out of the window and examine what you can figure out on your own. Does simulator _________ convince you that you are in a vehicle travelling on a track? Does what you get relayed to you by either ffb, audio or video seem logical enough/make sense? And is the whole package - immersion and rewarded expectations giving you the thrill/kick/fun/whatever it is you are seeking?

I believe that's all that counts for the current level of budget priced computerised simulation.

Quote from Hyperactive :

I haven't yet seen anything that feels as natural and ... well, feels like a real car as LFS does. Certainly the Caterams, the BMW M3 challenge and Niels' C6 are good examples of what rfactor can do but there is still long way to go for an actually good sim, even for LFS.

Yeah, i think thats just about hits the nail on the head.

At the end of the day we're all just a bunch of wannabes sitting in our living rooms in a comfy chair holding onto a bit of plastic, staring at a flat screen watching tiny little squares rapidly changing colour. It's never ever gonna be as good or dangerous as the real thing, it's always going to be a virtual form of reality.

So, the skill of the programmer is how it makes us feel inside, does it involve us, does it engage us ? and for me thats where LFS wins hands down. It's like the sum of the parts coming together and hitting that imperceptible sweet spot. The feedback through the wheel, the sound of the tyre's washing across the tarmac, the instant input from my controls being mirrored onscreen, the slight bobbing of the view when i brake and accelerate. The fact that i can get a steady 60fps on my aging system, the almost flawless netcode meaning i can run bumper to bumper with a bloke in China that I'm never likely to meet in a million years. I'm prattling now......

Yeah, ok there are issues with LFS and I'm sure as in the past many more sims will come along and put up a decent argument and try to knock LFS of it's perch, but not just yet. To be honest i don't think the large mainstream developers will ever manage it. They've got to many baskets to fill, they'll always have to make compromises in certain areas of development.

GPL was once the sim that all others were measured by, then LFS came along and raised the bar a few notches higher. I think the only way LFS can be surpassed will be by another small team of independents with the same passion, drive, enthusiasm, dedication and integrity as our boys. And without the need to pander to marketing men and CEO's.

(argh.... I've been up all night and I'm really tired, and i tend talk a load of crap when i need sleep) Feel free to ignore everything i just said.

Ok great. Now we have three threads about the same game. Anyone care to make few more?

GTR2 & M3 sim are GOOD, I can't deny that, however, at this point in time there is nothing that provides me with a me realistic representation of driving a real car than LFS does.

It is widely known that sims like GTR2 need there figures "fudged" to get decent results, LFS doesn't, and to me, thats the killer.

Over the last few days i've been playing GTR2 a fair bit, I have a few mods and a lot of extra tracks and I was frustrated that my LMP mod cars did not have any GT cars to race next too, so I decided I would add the games original GT cars to the LMP mod, and was sucessful.

However it kept frustrating me that the FFB was so aweful. Sometimes when I touched a kerb the wheel would start to vibrate and would then stay vibrating until I hit another kerb and got a different level of vibration. It was driving me nuts. In regards to FFB GTR2 is totally bugged rubbish.

However #2... armed with fresh confidence from modding my car selection I had a hunt around and after a few hours i'd found, tinkered with, and fixed the FFB in my GTR2. It doesnt feel as real as LFS - but i've got rid of the bugs in it and it's now a playable game.

Whilst doing that I found a few other things I could edit too, my debris and trackside objects that get moved are now permanent, any rain / spray / sparks emitted from another car will travel over and around other vehicles. There's lots of good stuff that they just hid away from the player for no real reason, well I guess performance on some PC's.

GTR2 to me is not as realistic as LFS in the physics, my FFB mod whilst no longer cronically bugged is just not as good as LFS' system. At the end of the day i've only disabled a dodgy effect and tweeked a few others, so there is little I can do to solve this with my install.

Having said that GTR2 does excell in other areas, the pit crew is fantastic, the diversity of track environments from all the mods and the atmosphere when driving such a diverse selection of cars is fantastic, especially as I find myself quite bored of all the content in LFS that i've driven so many times.

And the thing is, armed with my fixed FFB I decided to see if I could do the same to rFactor, a game I previously tried and thought was absolutely dire.

I grabbed the demo and applied my mod and bingo, problem sorted and its actually not as bad as I first thought.

The car modification system is also pretty cool - although I suspect it would not be flexible enough in multiplayer to make full use of it in a league.

So over the last few days i've come to accept that GTR2 and rFactor are not as bad as they where when I first played them - but I just dont understand why they released it with such diabolically aweful FFB settings that would cause sickness if I tried to do a full length race (and did on my first go).

I think people are raising fine points, which is good to see in this sort of discussion. Of course few of us can compare our experiences in game with experiences from real life, so it comes down to how much each game satisfies our perception of what driving a 500 bhp racing on the limit is like. For some that perception is satisfied by rF, for some by GTR, and for some it is LFS. When the argument drifts into which is the most realistic, well that's where the argument starts falling apart.

Off topic, a little, it's funny that no one mentions good old NASCAR Racing 2003 Season in regards to physics, as it is in my opinion one of the finest simulations of recent years. In my memory the cars behaved very similarly to the way they behave in LFS, although it could just be my rose tinted testicles.

Quote from Mazz4200 :

...

GPL was once the sim that all others were measured by, then LFS came along and raised the bar a few notches higher. I think the only way LFS can be surpassed will be by another small team of independents with the same passion, drive, enthusiasm, dedication and integrity as our boys. And without the need to pander to marketing men and CEO's.

(argh.... I've been up all night and I'm really tired, and i tend talk a load of crap when i need sleep) Feel free to ignore everything i just said.

I really sound like a broken record when I say this but imho there haven't really been any real progress in the development side of racing sims since GPL. The fact that imho the best sim at the moment is developed by three person tells a lot about the sim racing scene. Certainly the money is tight in sim racing but with good sim it pays quite well in the long run. Take GPL or Nsacar 2003, making a 2007 edition with upgraded engine and all other stuff that is legally possible, it would still sell a lot. Of course it would be needed to be done well, no one is interested in buying the same thing twice... If and only if...

Racing sims are in some ways in a similar situation what adventure games (like the alike monkey islands etc.) are too. You need to go to the small teams to get what you want. May it be nkpro, LFS or rfactor, dunno. In a way it is sad that no one is really willing to make the next push to next level. Everybody are just about to get that 1% more than others while the majority just avoids the whole scene.

Maybe the next level is achieved by iracing, drivers' republic or rfactor2. What I'm starting to fear is not that no one is willing to make a good hardcore sim - what I fear is that there aren't people willing to play such sims. Racing sims are about to find a turning point - whether to go with the gaming clans or to go with the motorsports enthusiasts.

In a way I find the whole question of "Has LFS finally met its match?" a bit absurd. If racing sims were today on the level I thought they would be in 2007 - LFS could not achieve what it has achieved... Today's sim market is like drag racing in 1920. Everybody can with with everything :/

Try and flip a car in GTR 2 and see what happens when you do, then tell me the physics are as good as LFS.

As someone who's using mouse, and with nothing to say about this or that sims force feedback, I think M3 challenge does a pretty good job. I haven't opened LFS for weeks, but I want to get back to M3 every few hours and run a few more laps. I think it's the polish of the thing (and the novelty) that I'm attracted to. Also it's very quick to just get into a race (AI's for me) or run some practice laps; it doesn't feel bloated or clunky the way the other ISI games have in the past. I think the physics are fine, but I'm neither a physics or car buff so I can't really go any further than that- they just seem adequate and believable enough for me to make me want to improve my times and have fun. I think one difference is- the LFS inputs are more immediate, but I also wonder if that's really more realistic, because if I jiggle my mouse from side to side the steering wheel will move quicker than I could ever turn it by hand. The BMW feels weightier and a bit more sluggish but I guess I like that about this sim. The LFS cars seem a bit over responsive by comparison.

With all aids off, the BMW will pretty much do things that the LFS cars will do, for the most part. Only going on the grass and into the sand feels canned to me, but I got used to that.

The lighting system is really nice, especially around sunset when your steering wheel turns that nice greenish yellow. Quite a beautiful game. Having that dynamic lighting adds another layer of polish, I really would like to see that in LFS sometime.

If I have to compare LFS and M3 challenge (I only played the GTR2 demo), I'd definitely pick LFS as the ultimate winner because it has many more tracks and cars, but I'd have to confess that the M3 Challenge is a really nice high quality experience, with a lot of good things going for it.

Some things wrong with the BMW are:

- the centre of gravity is some 10cm too low (thats a LOT) bye bye weight transfer

- it produces about 65kg front and 128kg rear downforce at 200km/h.. the real car is neutral at best..

the tyres are too flexible..

ho hum below average.

Quote :

bye bye weight transfer

Quote :

the tyres are too flexible..

I noticed these... if it's somehow changeable would feel a lot better I think.

lemme just say that the title made me chuckle a little

Quote from Niels Heusinkveld :

- it produces about 65kg front and 128kg rear downforce at 200km/h.. the real car is neutral at best..

seriously ? its worse than i thought then

and now for the original question ... no:
0.000000 0.174836 0.349483 0.518060 0.668882 0.790665 0.878928 0.936783 0.971287 0.989751
0.997978 1.000000 0.999918 0.999683 0.999296 0.998757 0.998068 0.997230 0.996247 0.995119
0.993851 0.992445 0.990904 0.989233 0.987435 0.985514 0.983476 0.981324 0.979063 0.976699
0.974236 0.971679 0.969034 0.966306 0.963500 0.960621 0.957675 0.954667 0.951601 0.948484
[..]
0.679135 0.678843 0.678554 0.678269 0.677988 0.677710 0.677435 0.677164 0.676896 0.676631
0.676370 0.676112 0.675856 0.675604 0.675355 0.675109 0.675000

Quote from Hyperactive :

...

i think your off on many points
yes gpl was good and maybe ahead of its time but the ones to blame for not improving much upon that probably arent the sim developers (well isi and simbin maybe for their complete incomptence in getting a curve based tyre model right) but rather intel and amd

the fact is that todays computers really arent that much faster than they were 10 years ago and especially in parallel tasks they plain simply suck horsepoo through a straw
if you need some proof of that try rigs of rods or plasma pong both of which are nice examples of how to properly physically model two of the areas all sims still completely fail to get remotely right since they still have to rely on fudged numbers (dont get me wrong both ror and pp are amazing but the really drive home how inadequate todays cpus are at calculating huge fems if you turn up the number of cells in pp or use a lot of vehicles at the same time in ror)

things might turn sometime by 2012 if intel keeps their promises of hitting 80 cores by then
but unilt either that happens or amds fusion hits with some really good integrated parallel cores sim players are quite simply ... ****ed

Quote from sixfour :

The FFB is not part of gMotor. gMotor is the graphics engine

What's the physics engine called then?

MoreCurvesThanYouCanShakeAStickAtMotor

Quote from Shotglass :

i think your off on many points
yes gpl was good and maybe ahead of its time but the ones to blame for not improving much upon that probably arent the sim developers (well isi and simbin maybe for their complete incomptence in getting a curve based tyre model right) but rather intel and amd

...

With current hardware it is quite possible to get a good realistic sim working well. Take LFS, improve the tires to solve the few issues there, add some damage models to the drivertrain parts, update the 3d-models, maybe a more complex chassis simulation with a basic chassis flex, better aero and a dynamic racing environment (weather etc...). Plus all the small ones...

Would this really be out of question with today's computers?

What you are suggesting is solutions like RoR which are imho nothing more than extremely cpu-intensive models that don't even simulate much, other than doing something that hasn't been done before without thinking any optimizations. A fem model is not something you want to ever run in realtime without optimizing it. Not even with 80 cores

Quote from Hyperactive :

Would this really be out of question with today's computers?

No sir, it wouldn't be out of question. But we have to wait several years it to happen with LFS. :weeping:




But this thread title we got here is ridiculous. It's so trollish. The M3 challenge isn't anything but a slightly updated GTL demo. I mean, come on, it doesn't even have road car turning angle (because it's just a mod) and the steering is probably hevier with the G25 than with the real car, they have power steering after all don't they? Not to mention the FFB is canned anyway and feels awful most of the time. Plus, it has automatic throttle blip you can't turn off well, it might be like that in the real car but if you blip the throttle the sampled sounds make some awful noise. Some might say, hey no problem, change some files there and there, mod that a bit and it feels good, but I don't want to do that. I shouldn't have to do that. Whats wrong with the developers if they make the consumer make their game like they should have done it in the first place! This seems to be the problem with all the ISI based games, the developers don't actually know what they are doing.

I admit that the environment is far more better in the GTR titles, but it should with the resources and amount of artist they work these games. But lack of driving feel (bad FFB) completely destroys the enjoyment for me.

Quote from Niels Heusinkveld :

MoreCurvesThanYouCanShakeAStickAtMotor

:ices_rofl That is spot on.

Quote from Blackout :

Plus, it has automatic throttle blip you can't turn off well, it might be like that in the real car but if you blip the throttle the sampled sounds make some awful noise.

Auto Clutch="0"

Change that value to 0 in the .PLR file... it removes autoblip and cut.

Quote from deggis :

Auto Clutch="0"

Change that value to 0 in the .PLR file... it removes autoblip and cut.

See that's exactly what I mean. :rolleyes:

Quote from sixfour :

Its like that in lfs as well

No, in LFS I can remove the autoclutch and blip from the menu, and I never had to change anything from some txt file to make the game like it should be, never. You should also try to come up with a proper counter argument if you want to comment something. I know my longer post was a bit controversial because I said the title a bit trollish, but I didn't say Leprekaun was a troll. What I meant was that usually such threads have been troll attempts, well, at least it gets attention. But you should try to make a point and I might try to respond, you look like the troll now to be honest. Trying to provoke me to flame you, I won't though, I only told my honest opinion about the M3 Challenge game and that's it.

edit. Looking your previous posts...well, shouldn't have bothered actually.