No kidding. Race Driver 3 is even worse than Race Driver 2 in my opinion. As for Rfactor, I was also quite disappointed. The details of my tedious experience are in another post if anyone would like to read them. However, upon informing the Rfactor guys of my dismay and multitude of resulting system lock-ups and blue screens and ultimately requesting a refund, my money was retuned. 25 cents was missing, but I wasn't too concerned about that. Hopefully it will be used to improve Rfactor. Rfactor is promising, but just isn't there yet in my opinion. "Like driving a boat" is actually a good description, although somewhat exaggerated. It had a very odd feel and goofy steering behavior regardless of pretty much every possible combination of settings. I find LFS to be far more realistic in the area of driving physics. It also continues to run perfectly which is easily appreciated after Rfactor's perpetual instability on my system. Other individuals say it runs fine on their systems. My machine is a typical 1 year-old, high-end, Nvidia based gaming machine which seems to run anything except Rfactor.
My machine is a 1 year old high end machine also and I have no trouble at all with rFactor. I will say that the graphics between the two are fairly comparable, my frames are about the same with both. I like the earthy tones of LFS but I find everything too sparkly. I am struggling with finding the happy medium between sparkly or too being too rubbed out looking. But overall the graphics are very nice. In rFactor there is some sparkling usually in asphalt on converted tracks but I know how too solve that problem. I will say though, that a lot of converted tracks are too bright and over saturated in color. As for the blueish look, I have calibrated my monitor to 6500K Daylight. I believe most monitors are set at 9500K which is way too blue, I could be wrong though, have been before. All in all I play rF alot more than I do LFS. But they both look really good IMO.
The sad thing is, the original game looks worse than some of the mods.
I am speaking of the car models and some tracks. Because quite honestly, the car models in rFactor are absolute crap looking. And I still think their default tracks look like junk... not even comparable to a aesthetically pleasing and realistic looking style racetrack.
Because that Megane picture above looks totally out of place to me... its quality is much greater than anything around it.
And rFactor has the old issue with lighting on the wheels. Back then LFS had the problem where the wheels would light up the spokes even when the sun wouldn't be shining directly on them. But like you see in that Megane picture above, it doing the same thing LFS used to do. LFS only has some darkened effect added now, but the tires are still lit up from light. But I just cannot get over the bright wheels in rFactor when they should be darker. The wheels stand out way too much in such lighting conditions...
Wheels are the biggest thing that always bugs me about rFactor, they look like they came of a low end game from 5 years ago. Even the ad picture of the new BMW F1 car for rFactor had me thinking, "wow, that looks bad" even though the model is very good, it's the wheels that bring it down. Other than that, having not played it, I can't pass judgement.
Ian's settings are similar to mine, but not quite the same. In fact I'm going to try Ian's before posting mine.
Thing is controller.ini isn't the end of the story, to make it feel right you also need to set the DFP control panel as follows:
Overall Effects Strength: 140%
Spring Effect Strength: 0%
Damper Effect Strength: 0%
Centering Spring Strength: 0%
This was suggested to BWX232 by Logitech support. The idea is that ramping up the overall effects strength in the control panel, then lowering the FF strength in-game provides more linear feedback, and allows you to feel the subtle forces that are lost when running lower control panel strength and higher in-game strength (something like that anyway, it sure helps).
i downloaded NKpro tonight and really liked what i saw, so I paid/registered- it reminds me of gpl, it feels tricky and light, it (and I know this will cause a lot of grief, sorry) makes LFS feel arcade-like to me. I still reckon the finest race sim ever has to be GPL, I've always been in that camp, and NK has some of that feel, it's hard and the graphics are nice, and the ff feels good. I would recommend people persevere with the demo version, its good work for any serious race simmer although it doesn't have the door-to-door race fun of uf1's around south city, it's a very different sim, and it's good.
hahaha! I tried the demo and thought, "should i get it for the vintage cars?" Then a few days later i got s2 and i was blown out of my mind! Compared to LFS Toca Race Driver 3 is something i could crap out. I never tried RF, heard it ain't good. Also looked at lots of screens and i don't like the lighting on some cars, so i stay with LFS
The only thing I liked about toca was how easy it is to hang a car into a nice long powerslide round a corner. Of course doing this was obviously faster than doing it correctly. As an arcade game its good, but a sim it ain't.
nKP has some very strong points, and after extended play, coming back to LFS can take some getting used to, especially on the graphics front. Although LFS is far from 'Arcade-like' I know what you mean, when switching back from playing nKp.
Although not an exhaustive list or in any particular order, if nKp sort out the following, It'll probably grab some more of my time:
i) Too easy to flat spot tyres with excessive FFB
ii) FPS optimisation, especially in online play
iii) Sound - although a 2nd sound engine was added, it was (I hope) a stop gap
iv) Multiple (well documented) online issues.
I've also recently been giving rF another dusting off. I come back to it every few months to try out new mods, see whats going on online (not much, as it turned out) and to try to get into it. Unfortunately, after a week of seeing if things clicked, yet again this one really fails to grab me in the same way LFS (and to some extent nKp) does. The grahics engine is pretty good, and some of the mods now look very good, but it's on the gameplay front I'm left feeling detached. The Megane mod was the last one I tried, and it reminded me greatly of GTR, especially in the sudden and unrecoverable oversteer! A positive point about the Megane mod is that it was less like driving a hovercraft than most tintops in rF. Many people say rF and especially the default FFB needs lots of tweaking, but to be honest, if the devs couldn't be bothered to optimise the settings, I'm not sure I can be, especially when I have LFS and nKp (even in it's current buggy state) where, after the minimum of setting up, feel right from the word go.
I think whether a sim feels right is down to the individual, and can be influenced by what sims they've played the most, and for me that may be true, so for me LFS and nKp both feel right in the same way Papyrus sims (GPL and Nascar) felt right. I just haven't had that feeling with rF, but in a few months I'll probably take it for a test drive again...
