The question is how realistic is driving on the limit of any given car in any simulation or racing game, no matter how it feels. If i see vids of super fast software racer, i don't see much realistic car behavior anymore. It doesn't looks very natural and the cars allowing to overcome the realistic level of there limit as it looks like. I actually haven't seen an super driver vid of AC and rf2 but Iracing, what was a joke and leaves a bad impression on me and remembers me, it is just another cheatable game as the most are to some degree. They all have positive and bad aspects, thats life and the more Software.
A year ago rF2 drove like trash and with chassis flex everything changed!?!? Is the chassis flex even implemented in all cars? Ok, if it is, how much difference does it do? Enough to go from trash to excellence?? How can this change do so much for you Empty Box? What changes exactly are you talking about in the behaviour/physics of the car that changed so dramatically just from chassis flex? What are your intentions for the simracing community?!
That's always going to happen in sims though, IMO. The alien setups will always be full of odd stuff that would never fly in real life. Same goes for some of the driving. Hotlaps at Monaco is a good example. You can zoom through the waterfront chicane flat out and if you get it right, you will drop your laptime a massive amount. You are only going to be able to do that once every 10 laps though. I suppose it's the same when pushing hard in the sim in a race, you will probably be pushing so much harder and taking bigger risks than any real driver would be, no personal risk, no monetary risk, no team boss ready to give you a bollocking if you screw things up. The super fast laps I saw of 60's Monza in AC with the Lotus 49 were crazy and yet again, would never work in real life, massive understeer, crazy steering inputs. Not much seemed to upset the old car though, with it's lovely treaded wooden block tyres XD The talk of reaching the top laptimes being hard I find to be a bit odd though. There is always going to be someone quicker/better than you in most things, and if you are already driving as hard as you can, there's no way you can close up that gap unless you spend an age practicing or sorting out your setup. That limit could be 5 seconds behind for some guys, and they will have no idea how to get there. Could be .2 off for the next guy though. I didn't really expect this to turn into this kind of discussion, but it is kind of interesting, even if much of it is going to be down to personal opinion. So much of this really is just opinion, with no decent way of proving anyone false. All we can do is argue and ramble until someone posts something stupid, and the thread gets shut down, like many of the previous ones with no outcome at all and with noone changing their opinions and outlooks in the slightest. For what it's worth though, I'll bite XD. All of the following is my opinions, if it isn't already clear, hahaha. I have AC and I have RF2, as well as many of the "previous gen" sims. The feeling that I get with rF2 is like what Spinelli and Matt Sentell describe as "dancing with the car", which I don't feel in AC or many other sims. What I feel is really important with rF2 is being able to balance the car and load it up correctly. It is hard to do in a virtual environment, as we are missing so many vital physical inputs, but it is the key IMO to being fast and consistent while being able to look after you tyres somewhat. As you as you get some decent practice with a car, it just becomes second nature and you automatically know what to do and how you can influence the handling really easily. The URD Darche is great for that with the rear engine, so is the Skippy training car. So many fast sweeping corners where you have to keep it pinned or you risk losing the rear end. You lift off and shift that weight forwards, and the car is gone. I see people complain about the ice and the way their cars spin where they can't influence them, and all I can see when looking at them online when I find someone doing this is how their inputs are causing it to behave that way. Load the rear up in a fast sweeper, then they want to slow down a bit so they chop the throttle. Enough of the weight comes off the rear, and they are gone and there is little they can do to control it. It's poor technique that I have seen that leads to these kind of "issues" that people have with it. That's only a tiny few people though. I didn't find that need to balance the car much in other sims though. To me it is like the cars have a determined amount of grip, and a threshold at which it will let go, and there is not much you can do to influence that level of grip. I can't hop on the brakes and load up the front end and then once some of the travel has been taken up and settled, brake just that fraction harder as the tyres are being pushed into the ground harder. The same goes for the throttle coming out of corners, where I can't feed the power in and steady the car and then really start to get on the power once the rear is settled and loaded up. Feeling that balance in the game is what is missing in the older sim titles and in AC. I dunno if it is visual clues in rF2 or its the FFB or god knows what. I know it's not a fair comparison as such, but go and drive the Lotus 49 in AC and then drive the Brabham in rF2. The AC car seems to have very little happening in terms of weight transfer and body movement, and they way the car responds to the throttle just doesn't look like anything from the old videos you can see. It's near impossible for me to find that balance point with the car around Monza unlike in rF2 where I find it is a very easy task to balance the car with the throttle and slide out of corners. The cars will still react like a normal car would, it will spin the tyres when you plant the throttle, it will lock the brakes, you can kick the rear out, etc. It just doesn't do it in a way that feels alive to me, more of a way that in my eyes seems altered or "artificial". With the Lotus above, I found I could not keep the car driving forwards when sliding. It was either accelerate in a straight line, or lose speed while the rear wheels spin and the rear end slides out in the corners. That felt so unnatural to me. The opinions really play a stupidly massive part when it comes to FFB, as we all derive our own feelings and thoughts of what FFB should be like based on what we have found IRL and what we find works for us in a certain sim. Even in a sim where you can tweak the FFB, the same thing happens. Some people run a FFB multiplier of 2.00. Others run 0.50. Neither are wrong at all, just shows how different we all are in what we are looking for (and what hardware we have... ) I do not really like AC's FFB, as all I find it to be is one big spring force through the wheel which give me no idea of how the car is loaded and what kind of load is coming through the tyres. When I get on the brakes I don't get any info on braking, probably due to my G25, but what I do get is this crazy brake vibration when the wheels lock. The wheel judders backwards and forwards harshly. So in a completely different view to the previous posters, I find very little is communicated. But hey, opinions and all that. It's why I can understand why the rF2 forces can feel very light at times and varied, as they are trying to communicate a wide range of forces the tyres are feeling. If you go and look at the tyres on the FISI cars when doing a lap of Silverstone, you see the tyres barely flexing in the slow corners, and really flexing heaps in the fast sweepers. A lack of downforce loading the tyres up and a lack of cornering force in the slow corners explains the weak feeling you get, like they are trying to communicate how little the tyres are working. When it is really loaded up though, you get that nice heavy feeling, where those tyres are being mashed into the track. The thing that is great about the rF2 system IMO is that you can go and tweak that to how you want. Go and spend some time with the FFB multiplier and the min force settings and I'm sure you can get it to provide a more even range of forces. Oh lawdy, rant over, I'm good for another few months until the topic pops up again XD
I don't like this sort of discussions because the most of the time it ends bad and i just would like to share my observation as someone who knows a bit about car behaviour and what i was seeing there was everything but not realistic and yes it was never different with this sort of software. There is always anybody doing nothing else than gaming, therefore it is nothing special to find out how to cheat where the majority has not enough time to practice to get on same level, while i wan't like to be that sort of driver using such software and call it simulation to feel good.
Frrrooom the top of my head no guarantees on what I say but everything after the Howston has chasis flex. Howston, Civic, Karts, Panoz, updated Camaro and Corvette. That's all I can think of.
Comparing rF2 FFB to older sims (I don't have iR, AC or any of the others and I only tried RRRE a little) rF2 FFB is amazing and lightyears above even rF1 with properly configured RealFeel. I use the FFB to help with setting up the car. most of how I set it up is with feel and the FFB tells me what the car is doing almost as much as what I see and delta timing. Yeah I can feel curbs (when the curbs themselves are properly configured by the modder- some tracks miss FFB effects in some areas, like the track out curb at Poznan's final turn) and road bumps and it helps to know when you are at track out and where the bad bumps are, but mostly FFB is best for telling you when you ran out of grip and it's time to dance. But it's almost like rF2 is made for the T500RS, and that taints my opinion somewhat. When I switched from Race 07 to rF2, it was like using my T500 for the first time. It was transformational.
