Just wanted a few thoughts on the consensus on mods

Look, I'm not exactly a sim racing vet, but I'm strongly inclined to believe car mods, competition mods (not huds etc.) is not conducive to a thriving community. These might be a good thing when standard features are missing, but compartmentalizing isn't a good thing to help grow a community into mainstream, that is if mainstream is even possible or desired. However, I remain curious what the consensus is in sim games, or even the consensus in this community specifically.

However, just as they are doing liveries to be put officially into the game, perhaps the same can be done with cars?

 

Well, Konus did bought mods from 3rd party and made them official for free DLC pack. That's a good point to speed up development when official have limited resource. But I think you are right. For sims, non-official personnel is very hard to get detailed data from car manufacturer. So official cars are way much better than mod cars. A good sim should never leave the content to modders. So I once thought the only way to save RF2 is that some studio can buy the whole gmotor 2.5 engine and use it to make a brand new sim. But thanks to Studio 397, it' more or less the same. All in all, official cars are crucial for sims. Mod is OK, but leave it to tracks and skins.

 

Are you saying you don’t think 3rd party mods are good or at least shouldn’t be included ? If so , your taking away the very fabric that makes rf series of sims what they are . Correct me if lm off track please.of course the choice is always yours not to download or delete if you don’t like it . There are some superb 3rd party mods without which many wouldn’t bother driving rf2

 

3rd party mods are very hard to stand up with official ones. Sim game is very serious in accuracy, and we all want the car drives like a real one on real road. Otherwise we'll all be happy with need for speed. There are good mods, but more are just chasises. So I guess studio 397 is on the right path by making more and more official contents. Mods can be a complement when there are not so many contents. But official ones are always better than mods.

 

Honestly not I don't think so. The problem with official content is that it must follow the game standard, nothing less but, what is cruical - nothing more. There are always things to generalize and simplify because the timeframe is limited, and many things that could be better just aren't, because of some standard that was set in the beginning of process, or at some massive update. Good mods were always pushing the standards up. I understand tho, that nowadays the sims got much more complicated that many modders haven't kept up even with new sim's standards, but it's just a matter of time i believe.
And for the sake of all the great things on Earth, don't tend to mainstream, please. More mainstream=more blandness.

 

I think some people in this forum underestimate car modders in rF2.
More often than not, active modders in RF2 are people you see posting their progress here in the forums (Apex, Simtek, URD, Postipate/Chief Wiggum are some that come to mind) and it's people that do their homework, look into every tiny little detail and spend sometimes months developing a car. You can just look at the release notes of the Ferrari 312.

RF2's modding complexity is a curse but also a blessing in the sense that people who mod for RF2 are imo more meticulous and interested in getting the simulation aspect 100% right compared for example to AC. Not to say there aren't good modders in AC, but I spent about a year around modding communities there and it's like night and day compared to rF2. Modding is too easy in comparison so everyone there thinks they can mod a car and quality is all over the place.

I think everyone can make their own judgement on what's a good or bad mod and choose to keep it or delete it. In the end it all comes down to perception. Some people talk here about simulation as if they were ever going to drive a Porsche 917 in Le Mans to be able to tell the difference but if I've seen the amount of work the modder has gone through to replicate the car by following their progress and their reputation, that's good enough for me.
Take that away from the game or limit it, and you sink rF2 into the abyss.

 

Fair point. Modding RF2 is too difficult, not everyone have the patience or enthusiasm to do so. So there are always good mods and bad mods. And even good mods sometimes are controversial. I'm not underestimating the modder's work. Some of them have done great work. And I'm now enjoying raceing Endurance mods. But once an official car is released, few go back to its counterpart 3rd party mod. As I stated before, mods can be a complement when there are not so many contents. RF2 in ISI times is more like an advanced platform. It's good for technology showcase, but it lacks enough contents. So modders fill the gap. Now studio 397 takes over, and making more and more official contents. And I'm glad to see the trend.

 

The good thing of modding is that it can suit a vast array of needs, and suit a vast array of public.
For example, e league may decide to setup a championship with a X car, having hardcore players in their league they may use the most detailed and realistic MOD avaiable for that car. On the other side, another league, having amateurish players and not wanting to impair too much newcomers may decide to tame a bit that same X car, lock certain settings to focus on driving more than setups and so on.
In the end, the purpose of a league is to setup events that are fun and enjoyable for their players, and let them improve with time.

 

Yeah, I agree, and my comment wasn't directly at you, just what I've sensed in general.
As you well say, now that the GT3 pack is out, I'm sure all the other 3rd party GT3 mods are getting less mileage but without them, the game would've had what, one GT3 car during 4-5 years if i'm not mistaken? the Camaro....so yeah, i agree that official content and mods can complement each other just fine.

 

Sometimes official cars are too

 

In my opinion it is useless to discuss about how cars behave, independent if they are made by 3rd party or from isi or s397.
I would guess that only a few people here could be able to compare sim cars with the real ones, because only a few people maybe have driven some of them in real life.
And to have real data in a sim car doesn't mean that the car behaves like the real one.
In the end it all goes down to if i like a car or not.
And for that, everybody has his own taste, as you can see here and in all similar forums.

 

Well just because a car is licensed does not mean the dev has the data for it, and some times they may have just as much access to the data as a modder with good contacts in the industry would get (from customer cars like spec formulas and GT3).
And for factory teams like the top 3 in F1 or LMP1H I seriously doubt you get any data. Just impossible to imagine programs that costs hundreds of million dollars per year will have their secret numbers sold for the price of a gaming license

 

RF2 is a simulation platform. It will deliver the physical behaviour of what you put into it.

There good and bad real cars. What makes them good or bad?

The same can be applied to simulation. The fact that a car in the sim is not accurate with respect to the real car doesn't mean it is not a good car.

 

There is a distinct difference between a conversion and a vehicle created from scratch. If you are adding conversions into the question of 3rd party content, then yes, the official content is usually (I'm quite sure I have not seen every conversion) better. That is not because of the person converting the car or track (all the time) that is mainly due to different titles require different things from the models as far as display goes. Same with tracks. If you convert a track from a title that is not open world, you will see that the conversion is missing needed data to look good in rF2.

Slow Motion, Nibiru, MAK-CORP, Positapte, Spaskis, Apex, FVR, URD are just a few (there are more but this is not a shout out thread) of the many examples of people (and groups) that can deliver quality that could fit alongside official content. In Slow Motion's case, one of his fine vehicles is official content.

As for the data from a manufacturer, I can tell you that sometimes a manufacturer will give you full permission to do as you wish but will not give you a single bit of data. Sometimes you can have the needed data but have constraints as to what you can and cannot do with that data. There is much more to it than this, I'm sure, as I do not create or convert anything. This is just the little bit I know about it.

 

My concern is more or less that the avg potential player buys game goes online and literally can't race a single server which would IMMEDIATELY put him off completely. Then this player is like WTH? He figures he's got lots of tweaking, and reading, and downloading before he can even populate a server? So that guy is like f this, downloads Pcars 2, jumps online, and KABLAM he's in and ready to go.

There appears to be, and I may be wrong, but there appears to be a gigantic effing wall between buying the game, and racing online. This seems to be a problem. But of course what do I know, I've only got 40 hours into the game, which admittedly is nothing. Nor do I particularly have any deep sim experience. But I was a beast in console racers. I get some street cred! heh

 

I am not a car modder and I have no experience in building cars for sim racing. I am a track modder who likes creating fictional tracks.

However, I am really interested in understanding vehicle behaviour. As a mechanical engineer who uses (and validates) simulation tools to design things in my own work I would love to do the same using rF2 as the simulation platform.

I would really like to design a completely fictional car based on how I think a car should be built. I really love creating things but cannot find any pleasure in adapting an existing thing.

My idea is creating something that could be made in real life. For example, I don't care about the engine. I would use an existing one since I don't find any pleasure in making a car quicker with power.
The same can be applied to other things. I wouldn't use unrealistic values in things that have a direct effect on performance.

What I love to do is to put things in the right place. My priority now is understanding which is the right place. If I get to understand it, I might start some vehicle project. As always in my case, do no expect beautiful contours or eye candy stuff. I am not good at that.

 

@ Eternal Rage That last post I fully I agree. The downloading of things to join a race never made sense to me. I know why it has to happen, I just don't understand why they chose that method, not that I have a better idea (or care to try to think of one) with how Rf2 works. While creating a vmod is easy it is also only needed here so yes, you are correct, others might simply go race where they can race instead of downloading and/or packaging. If someone wants to race 10 tracks in a night and want to pick the tracks on the fly, that person and those wanting to race with that person are going to be doing more sitting around and waiting than driving.

On the other hand, if you only race certain tracks and certain cars and have a group of people that do the same (a league or whatever name you choose) , this is perfect. Proof of that is all the servers with the very same 32532758032457 versions of a track or vehicle that we both seem to dislike downloading.

In order for the type of pickup racing to happen here that you describe, everyone would have to have the same exact content and that is not going to happen even if it was all free.

 

heh I see Rfactor 2 as the best sim in terms of its gigantic upsides, crazy good AI, fantastic physics etc. I just want the game to succeed. And badly. I don't recall seeing default servers with default everything. Perhaps this is one way to solve the problem, if there even is a problem? I just dropped about 1k on VR and a new woman groping GPU (bad joke). I would much much rather be playing this sim than the others. (I haven't read all these comments yet, at work)

 

Besides the feeling that this whole discussion is more or less something like beating a dead horse, I personally have a different look at car-mods since a year or two.
The quality and credibility that some (most) rF2-mods offer is beyond good and evil.
Modders tend to just scrap something together, just to have car XY inGame.
I´ve some experience with modding physics, AI and sounds and I can tell you:
I haven´t seen a single mod-car (not tested them all) where there isn´t something really off.
Be it uneven/crappy sounds, gigantic poly-count, no AI-work at all, or just physical behaviour that is far beyond earth-like laws,
because modder thought car have to behave like that. Most mods around have close to none correct physical data (it seems)
and I´ve not even mentioned the tyres yet!
ISI´s/S397´s support for modding tyres is weak at least and the great majority of modders isn´t able to create life-like tyres -
besides the fact that it´s nearly unpossible to get data of certain tyres. And even if they would get this data: who is able to feed ttool with this data in a correct way?

Conclusion: If there where better modding tools, documentation and help and if all or just most modders would use correct data,
then this discussion would have a right to exist. But as long as "modders" like Juergen-BY are the norm, whom glue something together based on wild guesses, it´s pointless.

 

1. Mods are needed to fill in the gaps that the studio leaves because of licensing issues, time constraints, & lack of studio interest.
2. Modding rF2 is not difficult, but it is slightly different from modding rF1 because of the version control that rF2 implents.
3. Creating an accurate rF2 mod is more difficult than creating an accurate mod in rF1 because there are more features to screw up. In both cases though, multidiscipline knowledge of car physics and graphics are required to create a "feature-complete" accurate mod. AC is no different in this regard.
4. Downloading mods required to join a server is either going to happen a join-time or before-hand. Downloading at join-time is a nice feature if you like mods because it automatically answers the question of "where do I get that mod?" If you feel that mods are evil, then it's not going to matter when the required mod has to be downloaded and where it comes from... another way of saying the same thing is that if a mod is required to join a server and you don't like mods, then you're unlikely to join that server anyways, so the download method does not matter. Strangely, if its DLC, then no one complains about having to download the mod, eh?
5. Multimarque, multiclass mods (e.g. a complete LeMans field) are going to take time to download and you either have to do so beforehand or at the time you join a server. If you're trying to join a server advertising something like that and you know the studio has not released such a field, then why are you getting annoyed about a required download?
6. Getting accurate information can be difficult, but modders working together and not being offended by advice, can generate pretty good cars. Even solo work can be astounding (street Caterham mod for rF2 comes to mind) when a modder works with what they know.