rF2 My initial impressions...

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by AUY2K, Feb 2, 2020.

  1. AUY2K

    AUY2K Registered

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    I bought rF2 last week right before the end of the sale. In addition I bought Sebring, Challengers Pack, and the Endurance Pack. What got me interested was the fact that you can run full length single player endurance races utilizing the Toggle AI as a "teammate". My past sim experiences mostly have been with iRacing for the past 7 years. Now that iRacing is impleminting AI I wanted to get more experience with the plethora of content that rFactor 2 has to offer.

    Here are my 1st impressions of rF2 after completing 12 Hrs of Sebring.
    Pros:
    1. Sebring! This is truly a work of art! It was a sure joy to race and out does iRacing's version in feel and looks. Well worth the full price!
    2. The "toggle AI" feature. Love it and the AI are a lot better to work with than trying to do the same type of AI driver swaps using Project Cars 2. I found that initially my AI teammate blistered my lap times, but after a couple of laps he was putting in the same lap time average as myself.
    3. The quality cars that came with each DLC. Worth the price for what you get.
    4. Customization of driver rosters - being able to input real driver names and assign them to the cars that they drive in real life. I pretty much had the full field of real life driver names/cars from last years Sebring race.
    5. Resuming from replay. What an awesome feature!

    Cons:
    1. Very un-user friendly way to add specific cars to a particular event/championship. I spent a whole day trying to figure out how this is done and to actually configure the right cars that I wanted for my Sebring event. Having to load all those cars into the sim and then boot the ones I didnt want and to sort through default names vs names I created was very trying at times and frustrating to try and get it just the way I wanted it. Hopefully this chaotic way of setting things up is corrected.
    2. Also, all the videos out there show a list of default events. It took me awhile searching various forums and info to realize all this has been done away with. I thought the installation went bad somewhere along the way. I know if I didnt have extreme patience and was coming from PC2 or another game then I would have returned rF2 in a new york minute due to these issues.
    3. Never ending cautions. I experienced a few cautions where we did lap after lap with no resolution to the incident. Finally I just exited out and loaded from replay.
    4. AI under cautions. There were small groups of cars all over the track that would never catch up to the safety car.

    Side Note: Thank goodness for the "Time Compression" feature. With this feature I was able to stay on a 12 hour race schedule. Reloading the sim from replay after stopping it from the endless cautions saved my sanity.

    After all that I did enjoy my 12 hours of Sebring even though my suspension broke with 1 hour to go in the race! Loved every minute of it.
     
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  2. The Iron Wolf

    The Iron Wolf Registered

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    There's a bug where caution phase does not finish correctly, it happens with some content/under some conditions only.
    However, if you mean cautions happen too often, you can adjust
    Safety Car Thresh":1,

    value in player.json. It works pretty well. Increasing value will reqiure more severe accident. If you do not care for SC phase, you can disable it completely in session settings.
    Hopefully, never ending SC phase will get addressed soon. I absolutely love SC in rF2, it is the feature that sets it apart from other games, and that's biggest bug in my list currently.
     
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  3. DrivingFast

    DrivingFast Registered

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    @AUY2K

    Compared to what you know, so apparently iracing, what do you think of the graphics, the physics engine, the FFB, the sounds ?
     
  4. AUY2K

    AUY2K Registered

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    1. I like the SC. It adds to the realism just like in iRacing. Thanks for the tip about setting the value for the SC. What would you suggest that I set the SC Thresh to?

    2. As compared to iRacing: The only thing I can compare so far is Sebring. rF2 is a step up as compared to iRacing's Sebring - the look and the feel of it are really good. But of course iRacing's Sebring is 7+ years older and is showing its age. The car sounds is better in rF2. I like how the Audi R8 handles in rF2. I drove it for the 12 hour Sebring race - I feel a lot more confident in that car on rF2 Sebring than I do in iRacing. I drove the Porsche just a little and really cant compare just yet.
     
  5. The Iron Wolf

    The Iron Wolf Registered

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    Unfortunately, there's no value that will fit all content, you will have to experiment. If you feel like it is too frequent at 1, set it to say, 1.4 (there are multiple values, set them all to same value) and see how it goes. Unlike iRacing, rF2 is semi-open, flexible game, with content that is wide in range of kind and quality. While this means you can achieve very good event simulation (and not bound to licensed content only), it also means you will need to put a lot of work into preparing the event. But, that work will pay off eventually. Note that, however, on some tracks, especially newer ones SC seems to be simply broken, and unless developers look into it, it won't work correctly no matter what you do :(

    Are you looking for F1 style SC phase, or you are looking for oval Pace car rules? For ovals, there's a plugin with lucky dog, wave around etc, but I am not using it currently as I mostly need basic F1 style calm down/(imaginary)clean up phase.

    BTW, does iRacing have SC phase on road courses? Last time I tried it didn't, one of the reasons I took a break from iR until it gets more features I need.
     
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  6. AUY2K

    AUY2K Registered

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    There is no road race safety car in iracing. I think it could be kind of neat for endurance racing events like 24 hrs Daytona or even during full length 1.5 hour races. This would break up the intensity of those long races.

    On the other hand I can see why they dont implement it...having a safety car during a 20-30 minute sprint race doesn’t make much sense for what iracing is.
     
  7. AUY2K

    AUY2K Registered

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    Also, another observation after reviewing the results of my 12 hour sebring race:

    1. The gt3 Lamborghinis and the Ferraris far out performed any of the GTE cars.

    2. The other GT3s were performing on par with the GTEs.

    So basically my race outcome was:
    1.DPi
    2.LMP2
    3. Lamborghini/Ferrari 488
    4. GTE/GT3

    I dont know if there is a way to improve the GTEs performance to match current Lamborghini/Ferrari and then drop Lamborghini/Ferrari performance down to the other GT3s?
     
  8. davehenrie

    davehenrie Registered

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    you are racing 3 year old mod content vs 1 year old DLC that have undergone 2 reductions in speed in that last year. This is what happens when you mix mods, you get un-even results. To get a more competitive time spread, you will have to choose between either the mods or DLC. But that also means, if you choose the official content, you won't get Ferrari or Lambo or DPi. The GTE/GT3 cars are gauged to run at official tracks like Sebring. Here is your test: At Sebring, what is the fastest lap at 100% of the Lambo/Ferrari vs GTE. GTE should run around 1:58 with GT3 pacing at 2:00 to 2:01 for fastest laps. If the non DLC cars are noticeably faster, then the mod cars are not accurate. You 'may' see a slight increase in S397 GTE dlc pace some time this spring, but it won't be a big jump. Even with the official DLC packs, the two classes intermingle a little too much. The URD Detroit(Ford) is also faster than the official cars.
     
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  9. AUY2K

    AUY2K Registered

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    Thanks Dave for that explanation - that clears up a lot of my confusion. I will most likely stick to just official content when running these endurance races.

    On a side note ....There is no way I'm turning a 2:00 min lap time on that track!!! Lol! My best during that 12 hour period was 2:08.
     
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  10. The Iron Wolf

    The Iron Wolf Registered

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    You may also consider Enduracers series (unofficial older years Endurance car set, I quite like it because of real life liveries, floor mounted sequential in GTE and better damage implementation). I also heard someone mixing it successfully with unofficial Apex GT3 car set.
     
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  11. davehenrie

    davehenrie Registered

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    Me neither, but I chose 100% for AI to verify which cars were too fast. In a perfect world, with a perfect track, and perfect cars, 100% should equal real world track times. It is almost impossible to achieve that unless you only use one set of cars at one track. The more tracks and cars, the more variables come in and muck things up.
    Choose a % that you are comfortable with, and for most AI races, I either skip the warmup lap with the space bar and/or turn off the yellow flags. Those are items that are yet to be fixed.
     
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