Month: April 2015

The DiRT Rally First Look by Betta Lines is the 6am BBC Documentary keeping you from falling asleep.

~ James ~ Leave a comment

Betta Lines just put out a really informative first look at DiRT Rally, a game I personally can’t contain my excitement for. Really worth watching if you’re into the technical side of racing sims:

The video, which runs about twelve minutes, seems like it should be a BBC documentary that appears on T.V at 6AM in the morning when you’ve been tripping on acid for 12 hours and all you want to do is is sleep, and all you hear is ambient sounds of people breathing and gurgling in their sleep so you turn on TV to down that out, but you want to kill yourself because suddenly that documentary makes everything so much more boring, but still makes everything else around you register as so much worse than when you originally wanted something to drown out the background noises that have become impossible to not listen to.

And I totally didn’t steal that from 4Chan.

I feel like this shouldn’t need to be explained

~ Chris ~ 5 Comments

However some devs seem to get it, and others don’t. When I load up a racing simulation and pretend to drive a car I wont ever be able to (save for my lotto ticket hitting) , I expect the car to drive like a car.

Tonight I loaded up AC after a 10 hour shift at work looking for something fun to do. I joined a GT3/GT2 Race at Nurburgring F1 that had 20 seconds remaining in qualifying. I picked the McLaren GT3, quickly I loaded up a setup, joined the grid and then we were off. After avoiding the usual carnage I worked my way through some cars to the top 3 and within 4 laps I was running times only half a second off the two leaders. I couldn’t catch the two leaders and ended up finishing 3rd. I had fun, the car felt natural and I never felt like I got the car out of shape for reasons other than my average skills.

James and I jumped on R3E over the weekend and into the McLaren GT3, hopped on a server running a practice/race at Zolder. Same thing, both of us ran laps and while James is always faster I stayed about a second off his pace.

In the two examples above we simulated what a real race car driver experiences on a Sunday morning. Wake up, go to drivers meeting, have a snack, suit up, jump in the car cold and race as hard as you can into turn 1 with no practice other than a sighting lap.

The point is that some devs get that no matter what their philosophy of physics is, the end result has to be a car that feels like the car being portrayed. You should be able to get in it and drive safely with out any practice. iRacing, PCARS and a few others don’t get this. You are constantly trying to figure out what in the world is going on and relearning everything you thought you knew.

If you are driving the sim car the way the game wants you to drive it and not the way a car is driven in reality, it’s wrong. Numbers and data amount to nothing if the end result isn’t portraying how a car feels and drives.

If you still play rFactor 2, you need these skin packs

~ James ~ 3 Comments

For all seventeen people still playing rFactor 2 (trust us, we checked), two massive skin packs were recently released that shouldn’t be ignored.

First up, we have the Historical IMSA Carset by Steve Rosswick for the game’s Toyota Celica GTO. According to the description over on RaceDepartment, we’re looking at 49 different cars spanning Trans-Am and IMSA’s GTO class.

rF2_80sScreen03

And the second carset you desperately need for rFactor 2 is the 2014 Verizon IndyCar Series Season by boxer and his friend Michael Peters. Peters himself is a professional graphic designer who has created liveries for real IndyCar teams in the past. This carset is important for all rFactor 2 players, as ISI’s Dallara DW12 does not ship with any real-world liveries – only a set of fictional designs loosely based on the current IndyCar grid.

Indy2

Much better than the standard set of DW12 liveries:

rFactor2 2014-05-24 21-53-51-10

R3E is getting the Nordschleife

~ James ~ 5 Comments

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Sector 3 continues to turn things around, today teasing a shot of the Chevrolet Cruze TC1 at the Nurburgring Nordschleife. In one month, the WTCC will visit the legendary German race track for the first time in history, and while pricing for the track in R3E hasn’t been announced, it’s safe to say you’ll most likely be able to grab it in a bundle of some sorts.

R3E’s recently released Group 5 expansion, as well as the multitude of GT cars available for the sim already will make this a worthy addition when it’s finally in the public’s hands.

Project CARS passing off PC footage as PS4 footage

~ James ~ 10 Comments

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Today we caught wind of a that has since been deleted, passing off PC footage of Project CARS as PS4 Gameplay. Originally posted on r/pcmasterrace, the Steam overlay spotted in the bottom right corner clearly indicates this is running on PC in some format. Some users have pointed out that the game is most likely being recorded through a PC’s capture card, although I question why anybody would do this, as PS4’s have their own built-in video capture technology that is pretty damn good on its own and records in HD. The fact that the video has been deleted after the Steam notification in the bottom right was spotted speaks miles about what’s going on with the console versions of Project CARS. Had the uploader recorded it through a capture card, it would have taken five seconds to type a comment indicating so.

The Forza Motorsport guys have also done a similar thing, showing Forza 5 running on PC during the DirectX 12 reveal, but it was made clear that the display was a tech demo. Given the shaky state of Project CARS on next-gen consoles, from PC-like graphics options showing up, to users groaning about terrible gamepad controls (which is sort of important for the console versions), rumors of extended delays for only the console versions of the game, and now blatantly misleading footage that was eventually taken down for violating YouTube’s terms of service? It all looks really bad, especially as competitors in the Sim Racing genre are steadily improving their products or dropping entire games on us out of nowhere.

admit defeat