Exactly. Those guys first started out badly last year. The cars they had back then were real bad, and few people got ripped off, or so to speak, by buying them, and not being able to do much. The BMW I had bought back then had no sound, the physics were really bad... The performance of the car (I mean hardware wise) was bad too... it was an heavy car, as we have seen quite a few of these in the beginnings.. like the early BES.. I dunno how they are now, but I couldnt run many AI with these cars at first. I had also warned you guys, and I wasn't the first on the forums to have a bad experience with them. There was also rumor that the guy was taking assets from other games to do his stuff. However, lately, after getting used to the panoz and having a blast with it, I wanted more road cars. I then remembered sim dream, and remembered having seen an email from them lately in my inbox. So I go check it out, and it was talking about a may pack. I went to see it, and noticed the price of their cars went down by half or so. So it was more enticing... however, I wasnt ready to spend 24.99$ on the may pack, without knowing how it was. So I thought I would purchase a single car, out of the may pack and test it out again... and I picked the HKS evo, and was really impressed... specially since I was mostly expecting nothing. I then purchased the may pack, and tried out the cars, and again, I was impressed, mostly. The scion isnt really good atm, but that's one on 7.. not so bad. And he will improve them further. I then purchased every single rf2 cars he had.. first to have more road cars, but also, because I wanted to suport the guy. I clearly want to see more from him. There aren't many people making road cars, and he got something good going right now. It would be a shame to put him aside for reasons of the past. I have asked him were his assets came from, and he told me with all honesty it was coming from free model website mostly, and he also made a few from scratch, but not for rf2 yet, but f1 2013 or 2014, cant remember... or a game similar to this, I'd have to check. I also asked him if I could send ISI any cars they wanted to see, to get him unbanned from the forums, and he agreed as well. After speaking to him a bit, he will likely release another free car to the isi forums, if he can get unbanned. There is one at the moment you can try, but it doesnt really reflect the other paid one.
Hi Pleclair, Loving the track. Great that you sorting the AIW file making the AI faster etc. Would you consider making your track more league friendly too for online races with large grids of people? Last year we ran your 0.97 version of your track but found a few things that were going to stop us racing the track. What we ended up doing is making a mod to make it more league friendly. We doubled the number of pit spaces from 12 to 23. 12 was just not enough. Think you said it's now 11 ? We moved the start grid a lot closer to the bridge and spaced out the grid a lot. It's too tight the way it is. We also bolted some start lights to the bridge too, we borrowed the lights from the GP circuit. We did need to remove the dust from the road too. We found online there was frame rate issues. People were reporting pauses and stutters. Even if you just add extra pit spaces and space out the start grid is a good start. We got your track booked in again for season 4 of our SimRaces4life league. Should be good.
Hi there, Thanks for the kind words. I can certainly give it a shot. I have a question tho regarding the grid. I have the grid that's autogenerated, but you ask to make the spacing between cars longer. Without a grid marked on the tarmac, how can I make sure the cars are evenly spaced out? There is no way to move the car a fixed distance as far as I know... so it may not look so good if I try to make it without any such markers. Any ideas on the matter? Regarding the extra pits, I wanted to give a shot to creating an extension in the old pit area in the gp overlap. What do you think? Do you think it would be ok, or the extra distance would be a problem for positioning? The start light isnt really needed for our usage, since its a rolling start. I'll leave that for you to mod again and put your banner in the new bridge. It should be easy enough I believe. I can also move the teleport spots a bit closer to the start finish to prevent the keeping in row before start problem.
Hey just trying the M5 E39 and the Z3M... Let's try if they are better than my m3 e30/e36/e46 at first sight ... a bit expensive for the result ... the sounds ... erk ... hope they update the mods
Oh really? I havent heard any of these in real life, so it's hard to compare, but it did sound good to me. If you are talking about the 2012 model, I agree, the sound aint so good. But the 2003 model and the z3 is rather acceptable for the time being. It is likely to get worked on, specially with guys like you with real life experience, you can probably hint him in the right direction to get the physics and sounds sorted right. Cause it is still a very nice drive even if its close or not to its real life counterpart That I'm sure you can agree I forgot to mention the z3 M which I think is also very nice to drive. More power, and I simply love the look of that car... older bmw are so much nicer than newer ones... imo.. I love the 80-90-early 2000s models..
Here on the matter, I had recorded a nice drift I made at Schwedenkreuz while having fun with the cars when I got them. This was my best rwd drift I made over there... I'm more comfortable drifting fwd since most of my real life experience is with fwd, some awd, and a lil rwd... So I can drift the civic in that corner like a champ tho Even when racing you don't lose much time taking this corner in this manner with the civic It's awesome I dunno about you, but the sound sure is nice in this video.. It might not be exactly like the real thing, but it sure does sound closer to a bmw than a toyota! It's satisfying for me at least... it can only get better EDIT: I also happen to have a civic drift as well in that same corner... I just love this car... It's one of the most fun car to drive imo. Job well done here ISI
Thanks a lot pleclair for answering my question in such detail, very helpful as usual. I asked in order to take the good decision on my next purchase from them. IMO they are a bit too expensive, irrespective of the quality. If they were sold at half the price it would be fairer imo (maybe after they expand they offer they will start lowering their prices). Anyway there are very few road car mods for rF2 so the guys deserve a bit of advertisement.
[RELEASE] Nordschleife Tourist v0.97n beta I just finish testing and the physics are awesome !!! The engines are genious !!! Same for cockpits !!! For the sound I think z3m is not bad except for the feeling that sound is saturating, it does sound like my straight 6(6 in line cylinders s50b32 engine same engine as in the m3e36 with 3.2 double vanos engine). For the M5 2003 V8, it sounds like a v8 but strange behaviour in high revs, no engine cutoff. For both, engines sounds catalysed cars. Really nice surprise !!!
Thanks Pleclair, that would be nice. The start grid I think I just did it manual. I too was not sure how to set a custom spacing for it to auto generate. I'm a noob too. It was not perfect. I guess if you're good with the text editor, let it auto generate 100 grid spaces, then delete in notepad every 2nd pairs of spots. Eg delete 3 and 4, then 7 and 8. Then renumber them again 1,2,3,4,5. You should end up with 50. If you want 100, just repeat what you just done starting where the 1st 50 ends, then join the last 50 to 1st 50. You would need backup AIW file after each step. Not sure if anyone would need a 100 grid spots but whatever . We wouldn't be using the rolling start, just the normal grid we would be using, but I guess it's the same process to make. If you do find a way to make a custom spaced grid let us know. I have no preference weather you try use the old pit area or not, don't know if there is much more space in there. Not sure if there would be any problem with there being a very large distance from where the cars are stored to where they are pitting. cheers
I was trying free 2010 BMW Z4 sDRIVE 35is and must say, hands down IMO best road car available at the moment for free together with Ferrari Challenge 2011 from simtek. I can imagine May car pack is the same or better.
I didnt liked it at first when I tried it. It doesnt have the same heavier feel as their other heavy road cars. However, I driven it a bit yesterday, and I must say it's pretty good, even considering how light the steering is by default. The may car pack is better imo. Not all cars tho, but all bmws are real nice, the mercedes aint bad either, but it might feel heavier than it is, but I can't know... this is the kind of car I will never step in The SL65 is a beast of a road car... the acceleration is brutal and its a tough car to handle due to the massive weight. It's stable however once you get the hang of it, and brake a bit early, since you come in much faster than with most other road cars... so you need to take this into account The only car in the may pack that isnt really driveable, is the scion. I've spoken to the guy, and he will have a look at it soon. It is driveable, but the rear end is even more fragile than the skip barber... so its very tough to drive, and shouldnt be like so. Actually, all cars, except the scion and gemballa are nice... the gemballa have the same problem as the scion, more or less, the rear end is very light as well and will break loose with the slightest release of the gas pedal... not recommended for now. But the viper aint bad either for a car needing the 660 update, and so is the hks evo.
I screwed up the packaging on my end... I have update the main package to 1.63 last week, I replaced the skybox with the one that I had fixed before, in the 0.97n days. It turns out I had imported a version prior to the one that was fixed. The mappings were wrong. So the update package I made to test on my end is made for 1.63... I dont have 1.60 no more, I would need to redownload, so I cannot make an update package for 1.60, without having it installed. However, I did some texturing fix yesterday, I had noticed a while ago there was patch in the tarmac that didnt appeared as they should... I wasnt sure if it was like this anymore or if it was wrong, but when I was working on creating rubber profiles as I had done before, I noticed how the groove didnt appeared well on those patches of tarmac. I had a look with 3dsimed, and noticed the fresnel values were wrong for these patch, and a texture slipped in by mistake, from the time I had the tarmac too light. So it made some patches, like the one near the bilstein bridge, lighter than what it should have been. Then, I decided I would try to do something with the tarmac textures gametextures.com have done for me. So here I am now, working on creating the different tarmac textures I need from those I have. Once this will be done, I will release the v1.65 which will include all these fixes and the much improved AIW. As a matter of fact.. I pushed the AIW further yesterday... after racing it a bit with cars I can push to 100% for most of the track, so the clio and civic mostly, I was able to take the lead, but I wasn't getting away completely.. but it is beatable if you race really good and push the car to its limit all the time. This is much harder to accomplish with some other cars... I tried the skip barber, and its gonna take a while I think until I can win at 100% I thought I would look at the whole track, comparing the paths I have made, and took the best bits of each path, and put together the ultimate path As a result, the Formula ISI now runs the track in 5:21, instead of 5:32 or a little lower. So thats another 10 seconds shaved. It's not gonna be easy I'm gonna make a guide on how I have created this AIW... it might help others as well creating good AIW for their tracks.
Your welcome! As for the prices... well, I agree, at first it seems like it might be more expensive than it should be. I mean, you can get games with bunch of cars for 20-50$ usually... but they are games... this is sim stuff. Also, people need to realize there is much more involvement needed to produce good quality stuff for rf2 than it was for rf1. I wasn't around during rf1 time, but looking at nord, and seeing how I had to work to make it look good in rf2.. cars aren't much easier feat to do. Without having digged into cars yet, I'm sure it's much tougher to build a car than a track. Even tho there is less modelling needed... physics, tires, engines, etc... So for the price of a coffee+muffin or so.. or cheap lunch, you get a nice car you can drive in your favorite sim. I mean... you can't go wrong with that! Most will pay the same price for a fast food that will hurt their health, and be ok with this, but how it can be tougher to spend the same price on something someone have puts a lot of hours into. (and to top it off, you will leave an extra 1-2$ to the cute waitress for only smiling at you ) I could understand if he was selling 1000s of cars... but I wouldnt think so... I understand it is euro, and more expensive for us NA users, but eh... we dont choose were we live most of the time The guy is most likely in europe so he asks euro...euros might be worth more for us, but it aint for them... cost of life is more expensive over there as well. That's the way I see it.. and trust me, I came to rf2, straight from rf1 and its many free mod. When the first paid mod arrived, I was like, oh no... but it turns out alright. If prices are kept reasonable, I dont see why we cant have both quality free mod and quality paid mod. We have to understand not everyone come from the same background, and some might actually need the money needed to work further on this, to buy computer upgrade, to buy software to produce these things... etc... and some might not have a good work or work at all. So we can be thankful for those who can afford to do quality stuff for free, and we can also be thankful to those who ask a little compensation for it. EDIT: To clarify things, I said I wasnt around during rf1 days, but later say I came to rf2 straight from rf1.. I mean, I was on linux back then, playing games thru wine, and at some point, I had the need to drive a sim... I knew my old trusty LFS worked in linux, so I installed it again and played a while.. I remembered the good times, and thought I would have a look at the recent sim offering.. After searching a bit what I could play on linux, I found rFactor. Which I had tried when it came out, back when LFS was still in its early days, and I prefered LFS to tell the truth, at the time. When I tried it again, on its final 1255 build, with more cars, tracks, and mod cars, I became hooked. So I played rf1 for a month or two, and really liked it. Then I came aware of rf2 being in beta, but I couldnt purchase or run it in linux. The hardware wasnt recognized at the time. So I couldnt even purchase. I installed windows again, and purchased rf1 and rf2. I was using a cracked version of rf1 in linux, yes I admit, and I purchased it even tho I didnt even downloaded it... when I tried rf2, there was no going back, even tho I only had a handful of cars vs 1000s in rf1. I purchased the lifetime license straight away, and never regretted it! So that's how I came to rf2
To digress myself a little... It would be a pity not to share your work to other games too (I'm thinking AC mostly). Although AC is the star lately, I always enjoy coming back to rF2 and driving around your track. I'm a mediocre simracer, I don't care about rankings or setups or whatever, but I always was attracted by this gaming genre. I remember struggling 25 years ago to drive Atari's Hard Driving at around 3fps on my home basic computer. It was the first true 3d driving game and was a revelation for me. Then it was NFS's Porsche, than LFS, huge leap - made me by my first wheel. Then GTR2 and iRacing and nKP and the rest of them. I somehow missed the rF train, but bought rF2 as soon as it was launched.
AC already has a Nordschleife being build, which is coming along nicely, but is gonna be over shadowed eventually with the Kunos own laser scanned version By 100-0. I dont see a market there for another conversion.
Thnx for clarifying about particular car and agree about rear end. Even for a road car i believe some of them will be needed grip level adjustment. Also nice story about you getting involved in sim racing scene.
I'm well aware of Snoopy's covert, as well as the promised DLC. Still it was a missed opportunity no starting off from pleclair's work.
