Don’t worry about the graphics as they appear now , Sure on the face of it the game looks like RF1 with some slight lighting changes. But under the hood there are some fundamental differences which will result in far better graphics than RF1 and place the game on a par with newer games on the market. One of the most important aspects of a game like Rfactor is the underlying frame work that then allows track makers to produce top end tracks and From reading through the modding documentation I believe the fundamentals are all there to produce excellent and very believable tracks. You also have to remember that the colour levels and general visual output of the game is not in a final state and that with the correct colour correction along with good fundamental assets Rf2 will look much better than Rf1. If you remember back to Rf1 allot of ISI's tracks tend to look almost cartoon like in the sense that they tend to make and use chunky assets and also tend to use overly bright saturated textures making the game look as if you have taken mushrooms , This seems to also be the case with Rf2. In the end its going to be down to the top track makers to push the RF2 engine just as they have done with RF1 . Modders using billboards , Heat haze , Distance fog , Increased asset density , Improved specular maps , Improved road texturing , Improved lighting in general and Improved shadow calculation will be able to produce some fantastic looking tracks. Finally aside from the power of the engine ultimately track quality will come down to the artistic ability of the people making the tracks. Sure you can filter things and put affects on but a good artist can work with even a technically bad engine and produce something quite spectacular , there is only so much effects can Fagin realism , as an example look at allot of the RBR tracks. Granted in my opinion the stock tracks should look better than they do but just think of them as a starting point and keep in mind the game is yet to have many of the post processing and colour correction effects applied to it. I am not trying to belittle the work of ISI track makers The art of making very high end tracks is very hard and you have to remember that allot of dev studios have 15-40 artists working on things ,ISI from what I know have very few staff. If sumone from ISI happens to read this I would be interested to know if they will allow outside people write there own shaders ? I know this can be hacked into the game such as with RBR but due to RBR being natively DRX 7 or 8 There is a very limited amount of what you can do. Due to RF2 using DRX9 I'm sure some people in the community could produce some interesting shader effects , It certainly would not be to hard to have sumone knock out a shader that gives you the polyunsaturated and muted visuals you find in games like Dirt.
This is a very fair assessment, although I feel the tracks / cars are actually, really quite impressive As James said above, remember much of the post proc is not working yet and we are looking at a BETA (we really need to remember that) Also remember that ISI is a small team, with limited time to spend in each area
