What becomes of rFactor2?

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Kickbox, Feb 14, 2014.

  1. GCCRacer

    GCCRacer Banned

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    There's nothing wrong with poly count, shaders, textures for me. Just the colors on some tracks are off, and that is something they can take from the other two - albeit AC also looks a bit pastellic on a lot of screens. But Silverstone at none? No way the real track looks like that...
     
  2. samuelw

    samuelw Registered

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    For some reason I can only open the 4th and 6th images which show cars and little of the landscape they inhabit. The cars in the image are very shiney and jump right out of the monitor which emphasizes the perspective. However the landscapes they inhabit look, IMHO, worse than the latter rF2 landscapes. In paticular I find AC landscapes fatiguing to look at after a while. Never bought PC but in posted videos, PC lanscapes compare poorly with latter rF2 landscapes, IMHO. This not to claim PC and AC have stupid graphics but rather for some of us the rF2 graphics more than hold their own. Of course we all want more and better. Me too.

    Feature wise, rF2 is the most ambitious of the contenders with weather (including rain), real road, AI, online, modding, time of day, great force feedback, and fabulous physics. None of the other contenders are attempting all of these. ISI already has all of these features operational in rF2. Obviously, ISI will continue to refine these features and the graphics and add content.

    We need to remember race sims are niche products developed by small teams with small budgets. Given resticted resources, development will be slower than we want. On the other hand we're lucky to have developers producing sims rather than being left only with the popular stuff like Forza.

    Utimately whether you love rF2 depends on your reaction to the physics and FFB rather than to the graphics. rF2 is an edgy sim, even driving in a straight line you can feel like you're about to lose control. I suspect many are put off by rF2 FFB. That's ok I can understand different tastes. I for one, at this time, choose rF2 as my main race sim.
     
  3. hexagramme

    hexagramme Registered

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    That sounds just like AC. At least in rF2 you can see everything clearly around you. And it all looks good.
    I'm not a huge fan of all that flashy fake stuff.
     
  4. Jamezinho

    Jamezinho Registered

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    Only the 4th and 6th images are showing for me too.

    I have been quite critical of rF2's visuals in the past but after the releases of Silverstone and Autodromo di Mores I have seen enough to feel satisfied that this sim can hold its own in the graphics department. This sim looks realistic and natural, and very immersive when in-car or down at track level. There's a certain honesty about the graphics in rF2.

    pCARS looks undeniably great in screenshots but in a way it looks too good, to the point of having an artificial, almost stylised look. It doesn't do it for me. Admittedly, I didn't buy into pCARS as I was concerned by the number of reports of poor physics and FFB. There's no smoke without fire, as the saying goes.

    I like the visuals in AC. I can't really criticise it in that department. Replays look great in particular. Still, I firmly believe rF2 looks just as good as AC on the track when using high-quality content and good HDR profiles.

    Actually, HDR profiles are one of my issues with rF2 i.e. the need for different profiles at different times of day or weather conditions. However it sounds as though something HDR-related is coming in the upcoming build.

    Also, replays look poor. This is one area where a few effects would really improve things. Depth of field is a must-have.
     
  5. Saabjock

    Saabjock Registered

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    I too can only see the 4th and 6th images.
    The wipers on that BMW are wrong by the way (with reference to how they contact the windscreen). They're are turned sideways in the wiper arms.
     
  6. osella

    osella Registered

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    Yeah.

    After 4months hiatus from all simracing, last week I tried all of the 3 big so called next gen sims - RF2, AC, PC.
    I have just a mediocre pc, old phenom quad 4ghz, hd 7950, 8gb ram.
    And I was shocked. PCars doesn't look even 1% as great as on those screenshots. I have no idea what I'm doing wrong but on my system with everything maxed (only fxaa, no real aa and no af) it doesn't look gorgeous at all and runs like total crap. 30-50 fps with 1 car, with 15 cars it turns into worthless 20fps slideshow (opponent cars max detail too). And while it looks nice, it's overly flashy and it "tries too hard to look so good", I'm sure most of you know what I mean.

    RF2 supposedly runs much better on nvidias too but to my amazement I had over 60fps constantly with 10 skip barbers on lime rock. And lime rock looks great. Also ISI's silverstone looks hundred times better than AC version. RF2 is the closest to photo-realistic looks of the 3, no doubt.

    AC is a bit graphical disappointment for me as well. Similar to pcars I get nowhere near as beautiful looks as official screenshots, however unlike pcars it's well optimized at least. I'd say it runs the smoothest of these 3 with comparable settings. What ruins it is the crazy aliasing I can't get rid of. As I use 70" projector aliasing is my biggest enemy. No setting whether in AC or CCC drivers can satisfy me. Except very highest settings like combining 16msaa and fxaa which turns it into <10fps slideshow, would need Titan for that. Also everything that's further than 20meter from you is blurry and not very detailed.
    If you remember me when I was more active here in 2012 I was criticising ISI a lot for the slow development and for the graphical side of the sim, well we all know it may not be ideal but at this point RF2 should satisfy everyone who actually tries it himself, at least with certain car/track combos.
    So those screenshots posted by Kickbox are worthless to the topic, I don't believe it looks exactly like that on any system in the world, it's only like that in the static photo mode, which means nothing IMO.

    Here I have to take into consideration that it's not so simple on a 22" lcd. Aliasing and fine detailes don't matter so much on a small screen so RF2 might be the weakest there but on a large screen where you can't hide anything, RF2 is often the winner.


    Physics wise I don't think much commentary is necessary. Pcars feels just as floaty and disconnected as it did 1.5 years ago. No car feel at all. It's not about car physics. I'm sure cars there have realistic grip, downforce, may run realistic laptimes, all of that, but the way the physics is translated to final feel is fundamentally broken for me. No fun.
    AC is loads of fun very addictive, but.. as I said in VR commentary, Kunos chose a smarter approach economically speaking than ISI. Not as hard task as ISI chose for themselves. They don't really add anything new into simracing, there's no weather, no rubbering, no marbles, no flatspotting, so it's the same old completely static environment we had for decades. Good ffb and tyre feel, yes, but overall it can't be called revolution of simracing when so many aspects of real racing are missing; I could have similar experience with the best RF1 mods using realfeel+leoffb. The biggest advantage of AC at the moment is the graphics + optimisation, which is ruined by aliasing for me anyway, but I'm sure that one will be fixed eventually.



    If RF2 had already finished the most important core features (graphical part of rain...), finalized rubber buildup & drying track speed and made UI that looks from this century (PLEASE, choosing a car in allcarsandtracks using those huge cards is literally painful, even RF1 UI was better), no other sim would come even remotely close.

    I stopped believing in RF2 for a year or so but now I believe again it will get there, it will just take another year or two but it will be worth it.
     
  7. Lazza

    Lazza Registered

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    Agree with all your other stuff regarding camera shake and not being able to 'save' positions etc, but you might find in the meantime changing this line in your controller.ini:

    Freemove Forward Speed="2.00000" // Freemove Forward speed.

    to

    Freemove Forward Speed="20.00000" // Freemove Forward speed.

    or even higher, will save you a lot of time moving cameras. If you assign a key to "Cam Move Slowly" you can still finetune (in external camera terms) your position after getting roughly where you want. Moving the cameras at 2m/s is certainly very time consuming :)
     
  8. Hectari

    Hectari Registered

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    Absolutely magic, thank you very much! :D
     
  9. Empty Box

    Empty Box Registered

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    What becomes of rF2?

    Depends on the community. And threads like this frankly make me think it's not a bright future.

    But let's think about Real Road. Great piece of technology, probably rf2's defining thing feature wise.

    Except it is 10000000% useless as it is right now. I'm not even going to go into the grip / no grip / green / dirty argument, but the simple fact that tracks rubber up in as little as 15 laps is silly - it makes that amazing feature entirely useless, might as well not even be there as it has no effect. You race online, many servers are running with tracks that are nothing but rubber, or even if they do have just the racing line rubbered in, that line still has heavy rubber. The big problem is though, there is a certain section of this community who is unwilling to accept anything else and will turn it into some sort of religious project, you know, you sim racing heathens must be saved from the world of static conditions!

    Oh wait. That is more or less exactly what we have here, though thinly veiled. That example almost entirely explains why it depends on the community. There are FAR too many people who are happy with this sim as it currently is. I'm not saying that we should be hunting down ISI staff or anything, but people need to stand up and stop chugging the koolaid and acting like rF2 doesnt have the same type of problems literally EVERY sim on the market has.

    Now, if you want to give me the development excuse on real road, rain, UI, or whatever - I ask you this - why was the feature developed as such to begin with? Real road in particular - a new feature. This isn't a hold over thing, it isn't we couldn't develop it, but rather... whatever it is that got us this. Lack of ability in development, lack of time, lack of man power, an intentional thing to ease people into the idea, or just a flat out poor design decision.

    Meanwhile, near constant complaining about the graphics.
     
  10. osella

    osella Registered

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    The only thing we can do is to rant on forums.

    Most people here including have realized that no matter how loud we rant, ISI doesn't change a single thing on their schedule and won't tell us what direction they're heading. Except some of Tim's tweet here and there which are so brief or cryptic I don't even count them. That's certainly something none of us like and is probably bad for ISI themselves but I guess they know what they're doing. Again we can't change that so that leaves us with 2 options, keep on ranting or enjoy what we have. Even in such unfinished state of most key features RF2 is the only sim that pushes the boundary further at the moment.

    In my previous post I omitted talking about FFB and tyre model so to change that: Even if RF2 didn't have realroad and weather and flatspotting at all, there's still the ffb and tyre model which are better than AC or any other sim. Which gets me back to the point is that RF2 (to me) is the most advanced sim we have. Still not sure if I'll have the most fun with it, maybe I will spend more time with AC in the future, but the thing is ISI is the only company that evidently tried (and hopefully still tries) to implement more feats of real racing.
    Kunos and SMS say they plan all of these features too but we all know how it is, will take either 3 more years or won't happen at all.
     
  11. Jamie Shorting

    Jamie Shorting Registered

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    Please don't quote that guy. ;)
     
  12. samuelw

    samuelw Registered

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    Its not useless to me. I enjoy offline race every day. (Never race online.) Neither do I find green tracks undrivable. I just slow down. For me the point of real road is to adjust my driving to road conditions. rF2 is unfinished but ISI is still working on it. Far be it from me to criticise ISI's pace. To my reckoning none of the competitors is progressing much faster.
     
  13. Spinelli

    Spinelli Banned

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    Also better visual representation of physics. It's the reason why I can still spend an hour watching a replay lap of Live For Speed, messing around with all sorts of different camera views, going from corner to corner, as I see the car in action doing it's "thing".

    It's amazing when watching. You can also use it to help you with driving technique and setup because the physics are visually/graphically represented so well.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Feb 24, 2014
  14. pas74

    pas74 Registered

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    +1!


    Inviato dal mio GT-I9500 utilizzando Tapatalk
     
  15. hexagramme

    hexagramme Registered

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    This.

    Real Road is in no way useless. Big overstatement imo. The whole skill required to adapt to the ever changing conditions is what really sets rF2 in another league, sim wise. Sure, I'm excited to see Real Road develop into something even more refined in the future. But all in due time. I'm already enjoying it now in its accelerated state.
     
  16. K Szczech

    K Szczech Registered

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    It's slowly growing towards solid, representative graphics, but not towards photorealistic graphics. ISI simply doesn't have this kind of manpower and knowledge (with no offense to anyone, of course).

    They're still learning. Made lots of improvements since rFactor 1, but are still stuck in old ways of thinking in some areas. And they're working with relatively old engine trying to add on top of it. Refactoring it would take a lot of time.

    It's too big subject to discuss in detail. Besides, everyone is looking at graphics from different perspective. Some look at detail (polygons, textures), some look at realism (reflections, materials, lighting), some look at quality (antialiasing, filtering), while others look at number of features (smoke, particles, damage, weather). There's no clear winner in all categories.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Feb 24, 2014
  17. mclaren777

    mclaren777 Registered

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    Nope. The problem isn't the technology (DX9 vs DX11). The problem is that ISI is basically a modding team at this point. We need to stop thinking of them as a proper development studio. Instead, they're a group of 6-12 guys who are piecing this game together the best they can.

    rFactor 2 will never become the wild success we hoped it would be because ISI simply lacks the manpower (and seemingly, the leadership) to do so. The modding community has mostly abandoned the project because they don't see clear direction from ISI and the online community is virtually non-existent because very few people have purchased the game. Whatever hype and momentum ISI had in 2011 is now gone and they will never get it back. rFactor 2, as good as it may be, will never be as popular as rFactor 1.

    That ship has unfortunately sailed. :(
     
  18. Maug

    Maug Registered

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    [brainfart]

    A modding team that was founded in 1992, that is making its 16th product and that is making a simulator that "is being used for driver-in-the-loop simulation by OEMs in North America, Japan and Europe as well as by most of the F1 teams and NASCAR manufacturers."

    Pfffffffffffffft... AMATEURS!

    [/brainfart]
     
  19. C3PO

    C3PO Registered

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    The glass two-thirds empty world must be a miserable one.

    The modding community is waiting for rF2 to settle down a little more with its features. But already I am seeing cracking third party tracks (Le Mans, Sebring) and bespoke vehicle mods (URD Endurance). Many people are naturally wedded to rF1 which was a great product.

    But the tide is turning with leagues too for rF2. SimHQ, Race Department to name just two. And this announced just a few days ago:

    http://www.racedepartment.com/formula-simracing-2014-season-announcement/
     
  20. Satangoss

    Satangoss Registered

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    Time to visit your ophthalmologist ASAP.
     

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