Post your initial impressions here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpQFKD8h7z0

data tyre temp

 

+1

 

Thank you. (Blush!)

 

There are curbs and then there are kerbs. I've hit some granite or concrete street curbs hard enough, even at low speeds, to break the rim of a mag wheel (doh!). OTOH, the F1 machines, which have incredibly delicate suspensions (they're designed to sustain unbelievably high side loads, but not random violent spikes) regularly clamber over FIA-spec kerbing (more like a rippling ramp than a sharp right angle) without damage...lap after lap (as may be seen on German TV's agonizingly leisurely slo-mo). In any case, I wasn't complaining about kerbing so much as getting off into the grass (which, in a race car, is generally smoother than the racing surface) and being battered around like going over Victoria Falls in a tin can.

 

I honestly don't want to start anything, or sound like a douche, lol, but I would very much disagree about grass being smoother than the tarmac. Unless you are racing on the old Monza oval, filled with potholes, the grass on a racing track is normally alot worse than the tarmac.

I have had many small off track excursions in real life, where I have just gone wide onto the grass, only to get my teeth rattled out and my track rods snapped/bent.

Here is an extremely OTT example of nasty grass:

And a more normal one at VIR, which is actually known for having rather smooth grass compared to most tracks:

Sorry for going OT.

 

What's With All These Similes?

Don't get me wrong - I love rF2...even at this early stage of its development. I am a huge fan of The Good Old Days...after all, I was there (let me tell you about trying to get Clark and Hill laid one night in NYC...well, maybe another time). I absolutely hate chicanes (racing is about going fast; chicanes are like speed traps) and I am thrilled and delighted to be able to enjoy Spa in all its long-form glory and Monaco without all the fiddly bits. In amusement park terms, rF2 is like an old fashioned wood-trestle roller coaster vs. a Wild Mouse steel-railer (I grew up riding the Thunderbolt and the Cyclone in Coney Island).

Compared to the other New Kid on the Block (SMS's pCARS), rF2 is more like the German black & white Expressionist cinema of the Weimar era ("Nosferatu," "M," "Dr. Caligari) vs. pCARS' Technicolor musicals ("The Wizard of Oz," "Meet Me in St. Louis"). That is, pCARS is more technologically advanced, but rF2 offers a harder, grittier reality ("Man of Aran," say, or "The Naked City"). pCARS is, quite simply, beautiful; something I marvel at every time I take the wheel. rF2 thrills me for its ability to immerse me in its reality (and I haven't even sampled the weather system). I have no idea whether or not its 1966 Spa is that much more accurate than the 1967 Spa in Grand Prix Legends, but I can believe it is. The level of detail is fantastic; swashbuckling around Monaco in a period-correct F1 car it makes all earlier versions look as soul-less and character-less as the scenery in Bruce Artwick's original Flight Simulator.

But the fact remains that rF2 is near the end of a long product cycle; ISI has squeezed the last drops of blood out of the old gMotor engine. pCARS is at the beginning of its cycle, but it has a long way to go before it's wrought the best out of its potential. So far, I love them both...and rF2 is already on the grid.

Gentlemen, start your engines!

 

Looks to me like the wall is a lot nastier than the grass. But you're right: grass can trip you up in the worst possible way (as per Greg Moore's fatal flip @ MIS in 1999).

 

Those extreme examples of grass are exactly that, extreme. More often than not a trip across the grass at any tier 1 FIA graded circuit would (should!) not have any large bumps that could send a car hurting up in the air. The worst case example of that happening in F1 was Petrov last year in Malaysia, but as said, that's an exception not the norm. Most times cars are controllable on the grass and can get back on track relatively quickly.

 

I think the tracks are way to bumpy its overdone to show their new tyre model working ?
its crazy in the formula renault car.

also the grass / gravel FFB is way extreme

 

P.S. I really like the MMS (Mod Management System, or whatever it's called). Hope it continues to work @ advertised.

 

Hey all!
First i want to say that i like rF2 very much!!! I waited so long for it and its become very well!!!

But there are some things being not so realistic, I think:

- The physics are for me in fast corners too unstable... Especially in the Megane its a problem and its doesn't seem to be very realistic... I noticed that in the long lefthand corner in Mills. On the exit of this turn the car is so unstable that its nearly impossible to step into the brakes without drawing some black lines on the tarmac... Only solution is to go slower

- The optical damage model is ok, but not good.. I rF1 and other GMotor2 sims, i liked, that some bodywork parts got squeezed in some way or got some butchering marks for example after wheel-to-door contact.

Regars from Germany

MarkusK

 

I’ve just bought the “entire life license “and spent 2 hours on track.

Honestly, I’m a bit confused here. I couldn’t see any of major bugs related so far. It’s not a flame post or “brown nose” post, but I'm wondering if I downloaded the same data than the most of you guys.

1. FPS issues: not at all. At default settings, 150 fps + all the time. All maximized and 16 visible cars around, 80 fps. Perfectly playable at 1920 x 1080 pxs x 32 bits. To be honest, there’s a little stuttering some times, as the hard disk was being called or something being running on background. It must be fixed, but I have no FPS problems in any circumstances.

2. FFB issues: I went out the track and didn’t experience that abnormal effect on my G25 (very strong reactions). To be honest, it was a quite normal FFB reaction. The FFB is… different. But it seems promising after fine tuning.

3. Poor graphics? I wouldn’t say that. More than enough for a racing simulator title. Minor issue: flickering textures on away objects. The track reflection is very convinced. Trees now look times better than RF1 (good transparencies but it looks like Z-buffer confusion is still there at certain angles of viewing).

Well, I’m here just to say the beta version is much more than I was expecting mostly after reading the first impressions at this thread. None of the major bugs has shown up here. Does it demand a lot of polishing? Yes, sure. But the major structure is there, and is solid.

Great times coming!

Edit: Proc: i7930@3.8Ghz / VGA: Nvidia 480GTX / RAM: 6Gb Corsair 2000 Mhz / HD: piece of slow crap.

 

Satangoss, what are your G25 profile settings? Also, what are your controller.ini settings for FFB?

 

Well, I had time to settup better the sim and after installed Ati 11.12 drivers Im geetting 70 to 120 fps. I had been driving the Spark F1 car (the yellow one) and got a bit dissapointed with it, then I started to drive the EVE F1 (the green one). NOW its another story. This car gives a lot more feedback and now I feel Im over the track. With the Spark it was more dificult to interact with the track and the wheels got overtemp too easy.

Now the questions. If the EVE cars have a DFV engine, what kind of engine the Spark have? Another v8? a v12? The Three F1 EVE cars have different physics?

I found some issues about the game these days.

- I have to load my control profile every time I join a race, other way I get 100% of FFB on my Logitech DFP (I use less than that)
- Its too easy to crach into other cars, looks like the car box is bigger than the car, and the result is a big crash (ala GPL)
- How can I adjust the mirrors? I couldnt fine the options to assign a key to do that like in RF1

Congrats, I really enjoyed lapping at Spa last night.

 

mirror adjustments are done with shift key + seat movement controls.

 

thank you

 

ctrl + seat movement controls (for left mirror)
alt + seat movement controls (for right mirror)

Also works

 

I have held off posting my thoughts and glad I have. My initial reaction was very close to giving up on rF2. A few times I thought I should try it again, apply some of the suggestions on the forum and generally fiddle with settings to see if here really is any potential.

Sure it is a beta but fiddling and rFactor seem rather synonymous and I think rF2 takes that concept and builds upon it.

With my love of GPL in the past my hopes were for a real “GPL2”. My initial reaction was that the graphics looked worse than GPL did when fully modded in the mid 2000s and the driving model felt disconnected, a combination that seemed a complete disaster.

A zillion tweaks of anti aliasing, detail settings, a few PLR and controller ini setting updates and reverting to single screen and back to Eyefinity and I have rF2 running that looks acceptable in an immersive if not particularly impressive for 2012 kind of way but most importantly feels great to drive offline against the AI in the 60s cars at Spa – my goal for the rF2 beta.

The end result doesn’t have any wild settings or special tricks but getting there took a lot of patience waiting for tracks to load. I guess this is what betas are about and hopefully our findings will make the final product work more quickly out of the box. Many simply won’t invest the time.

The key thing for me is that anything much less than a brief drop at the start below around 60fps and the feeling of the car falls away. It needs strong fps for the physics to shine.

I got a lot of sparklies and flickering and used RadeonPro to modify the LOD to +1.0 to remove these.

The AA simply didn’t seem to work until I created a RadeonPro profile.

It too me a long time to adjust the general details of cars, tracks, textures down. The initial view was that they needed more detail. Turning them down not only fixed the fps issues but gave a more “blended” look which IMHO looks better.

Lowering the FOV not only creates a more realistic driving view (especially with three screens) but the AI seem to look in a much better perspective – at default FOV they look curiously awkward and cartoonish in my view.

I used the controller smoothing tweak and set it to 8.

I turned off the head movement and exaggerated yaw and in the PLR file turned off cockpit vibration completely.

I changed the time of race to 9am. The bright mid afternoon colours add to the cartoon like feeling which goes away with the morning sun rise. Some moody overcast weather works well too.

This has transformed the beta from unusable to allow me to explore what seems to be an immersive offline racing experience.

The dynamic aspects of weather and track aren’t new, we had these to some degree back in the nineties with the GP3 and Ubisoft F1RC and more recently GTR2 but this seems really well done. Seeing the lighting, sky, track and weather evolve is really good and in an offline environment the way the AI evolves with it makes for really immersive experience.

The evolution of the tyres throughout the race or even a few corners makes for a truly dynamic and living experience.

I can’t really describe how much I initially thought “what were they thinking?” and how that has been transformed into believing in the potential just by playing around with the settings. Having seen how rF1 evolved graphically and in a more extreme case, GPL from 1998 to 2005 – using the same core graphics engine – I now believe that in the hands of the modders some great things will come. Whether it can touch some of the new DX11 sims is another matter but the underlying physics and dynamics feel pretty solid.

In my view as the toolset that rFactor2 is there is great potential, as a marketable final product this beta will need a lot of polishing if any form of major launch is planned.

 

I'm loving rf2, it's great in its beta stage.

I'm liking the weather system, the script system is ace, although I haven't seen water spray, maybe this has been removed on beta.
I like the ffb, but can we have options to reduce the effects when the cars go over gravel, my wife has moaned!
The graphics are good, not amazing but it's a sim, I would choose gameplay over graphics, but it's an improvement overrf1
The FPS do need improving, not sure how good my system is, I have amd Athlon x3 425 processor 2.70ghz, 6gb ram, ati radon had 5670, using windows 7, and I run rf2 at 1680 x 1050, I don't have much knowledge about pc's so any advice on my system would be greatly appreciated.
The tyre deform is great, but when side by side with a car the flat at the bottom is to much.
No effect when flat spotting tyres, hopefully this will be in the full version.
Tyre display doesn't work half the time.
A HUD editor needs to be included, or a data logger, so when we test, it shows info like highest tyre temps, fuel per lap, average fuel consumption, not 4 litres per lap, but 4.6 litres so more accurate readings.
Crash physics need improving a lot.
Can't see what tyres other cars are on.


But it's a beta so it will be improved, I'm more than happy I've paid for this, more money they have, the more they can improve. Thanks.

 

I'm going to agree with some of Steve's comments here, after pondering the menus for a while.

I'd like to see the tire temps and adjustments which affect them most directly show up grouped together on the same page, and yes, the temps need to be more visible. I'm not as fussed by the different font sizes/choices, but it does look more game-y than it should.

Having any selectable button appear greyed out is a Bad Thing and should not happen. A GUI is supposed to make the user's job of selecting something intuitive and fast; things like confusing color cues and mismatched button shapes force the user to think about the UI instead of the task at hand - which should never be "figuring out the UI". Bruce Tognazzini (e.g.) has written books on proper GUI design and there should be no need to re-invent the wheel when folks like him have already done the hard work of solving the common UI puzzles.

Likewise, the flipping card deck selection screen is cute but actually not very intuitive. I had seen it used in the pre-release videos but still fumbled with it for a while, getting my intended choice to show up. Also, as others have pointed out, what happens when you have a multi-class mod with several variants of each car? Some way to filter or just hierarchically display the cars seems inevitable if you're not wanting to spend a frustrating minute or so getting to the action. It's not actually broken, just a hindrance.