Q2 2023 Early Update and DLC Released

Lazza said:
There are plenty of games over the years that had poor performance but people did their best to play them anyway, I'm not saying performance doesn't matter but I think it's a relatively rare reason to stop playing (or stop trying to play). Things that actually stop you running the game, happen for apparently no reason (or an obvious bug), and with no direct communication to the user, are things that will cause a refund.

We can argue about performance and physics and AI behaviour and appearance, but can we just get a game that works for people?
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A game that "just works for people" is impossible to realize on the PC. We aren't playing on consoles where we have a very limited framework in terms of hardware and software. Granted there are similar games on consoles that work at different quality levels, but there are few points that get ignored here. All the sims that I have played in the last couple of years have bugs. Controller detection in AC is still a pain in the butt for me and I can't tell you how often I had to restart the game because my wheel wasn't detected. That's with one of the most common wheels on the market. Kunos has moved on so I will never get a fix, but I know how to work around it. There are tons of bugs in AMS2 with stuff like the pit crew running over the track, AI cars driving around with no wheels, the graphics engine going nuts during night racing and my personal favorite - the FFB and physics of cars getting broken because they updated the physics engine and people forgot to delete folder XYZ. rF2 is the most complex sim on the market, still growing in terms of features and content while being very open to modding. There simply is no comparable sim out there. Maybe we will have the same discussion about Rennsport or AC2 in ten years, but who knows.

Add to those points, that rF2 is a niche within a niche with a very tiny userbase compared to AC and you get the result that the percentage of people complaining about bugs in rF2 get's instantly much higher compared to AC wich suddenly makes rF2 seem like a bugfest while it actually isn't. If you actually take alook how bugged AC is I am allways amazed that it has so many players. Because it is really bare bones and a complete mess, with older mods not working and the shaderpatch being all over the place. Have I mentioned the horrendous UI of the CM? They basicly have what we had 10 years ago with the HDR profiles and everyone seems to be happy with it.
 
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hitm4k3r said:
A game that "just works for people" is impossible to realize on the PC. We aren't playing on consoles where we have a very limited framework in terms of hardware and software. Granted there are similar games on consoles that work at different quality levels, but there are few points that get ignored here. All the sims that I have played in the last couple of years have bugs. Controller detection in AC is still a pain in the butt for me and I can't tell you how often I had to restart the game because my wheel wasn't detected. That's with one of the most common wheels on the market. Kunos has moved on so I will never get a fix, but I know how to work around it. There are tons of bugs in AMS2 with stuff like the pit crew running over the track, AI cars driving around with no wheels, the graphics engine going nuts during night racing. rF2 is the most complex sim on the market, still growing in terms of features and content while being very open to modding. There simply is no comparable sim out there. Maybe we will have the same discussion about Rennsport or AC2 in ten years, but who knows.

Add to those points, that rF2 is a niche within a niche with a very tiny userbase compared to AC and you get the result that the percentage of people complaining about bugs in rF2 get's instantly much higher compared to AC wich suddenly makes rF2 seem like a bugfest while it actually isn't. If you actually take alook how bugged AC is I am allways amazed that it has so many players. Because it is really bare bones and a complete mess, with older mods not working and the shaderpatch being all over the place. Have I mentioned the horrendous UI of the CM? They basicly have what we had 10 years ago with the HDR profiles and everyone seems to be happy with it.
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I don't care about other games.

rF2 not working, with no clue why, on a fresh install. Dead .json files (either randomly or for a 'good' reason, doesn't matter) stopping it from running, which a steam verify or complete uninstall/reinstall won't fix. Audio device initialization fails (reported in the trace on startup!) with no messages or warning, just a CTD at 80% track load. This is just what comes to mind immediately. These are major, literally game-breaking, issues. It's not like rF2 is perfect after that, and I agree nothing will ever work perfectly for everyone, but these repeatable core issues that linger for much too long simply make rF2 look silly.

This particular one (no items subscribed / game just freezes on startup with no content) will be fixed today/tomorrow as above. Great. I'm sure there are good internal reasons it hasn't come out yet, but I think we need to get a to a point where we stop (and stop needing to) justify things that are sub-par.
 
Lazza said:
I don't care about other games.

rF2 not working, with no clue why, on a fresh install. Dead .json files (either randomly or for a 'good' reason, doesn't matter) stopping it from running, which a steam verify or complete uninstall/reinstall won't fix. Audio device initialization fails (reported in the trace on startup!) with no messages or warning, just a CTD at 80% track load. This is just what comes to mind immediately. These are major, literally game-breaking, issues. It's not like rF2 is perfect after that, and I agree nothing will ever work perfectly for everyone, but these repeatable core issues that linger for much too long simply make rF2 look silly.

This particular one (no items subscribed / game just freezes on startup with no content) will be fixed today/tomorrow as above. Great. I'm sure there are good internal reasons it hasn't come out yet, but I think we need to get a to a point where we stop (and stop needing to) justify things that are sub-par.
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I agree with that no question, that we should strife for perfection or atleast get the startup of the sim as smooth as possible for everyone. That said, a racing game not detecting my wheel and forcing me to restart isn't any worse or better than a CTD. What I tried to tell you is that we rF2 users aren't alone with this, far from it. I think I even know why the game CTDs on trackload but that might be different from user to user. On my end it mostly happens when I change the graphic settings between loading tracks, not sure if the same or another track. But I never really bothered or thought about to report it in the bug report section wich is my mistake afterall. It's one of the things that I have learned to workaround aswell. :oops:

But I have no idea about the other things because they never happened to me. I recently reinstalled rF2 due to an OS change, downloaded it from steam, setup everything and it worked perfectly out of the box. One thing that I noticed is that I had performance issues with the sparks under Windows 7 while I have zero issues with them under Windows 10. I mean, how big is the chance that a dev will notice and be able to reproduce such bugs, let alone a tester? It's impossible. And what in gods name is causing it? I've been part of a modding team with a pretty huge tester team myself for the last couple of years and you would be suprised how many bugs never get fixed or simply reproduced and fixed by accident. Let's hope for the best ;)
 
Maybe they need to stop all dlc's from release, work on the bugs fixes core ect.. for 6 months release a big update, a new series and some tracks. Yes they wont make $$ in the mean time but surely fixing some issues will help with sales in the future.
 
Binny said:
Maybe they need to stop all dlc's from release, work on the bugs fixes core ect.. for 6 months release a big update, a new series and some tracks. Yes they wont make $$ in the mean time but surely fixing some issues will help with sales in the future.
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I don't think it works like that these days. You need to release new content to keep things fresh and to actually sell your "outstanding features". I think they have been on a very good path for the last 15 months and have to keep following that way. Flesh out the content that's there (BTCC, Indycar, FE and WEC/IMSA) and build their own niche where there is simply no way around the product and smoothen the rough edges that make the entrance to the sim a bit of an issue for new comers. One thing that annoys me personaly is still that the content feels a bit all over the place in terms of quality. Why aren't older tracks updated more frequently. There are great tracks like NOLA, AMP and a couple of cars that would benefit greatly from PBR and sound updates. At one point they kind of stopped with the updates and it still shows in the reviews and comments.
 
The topic of unoptimised games is that in other genres you can get away with it, in racing Sims you can't because they demand smoothness and precision. If a racing Sim has a reputation for being a bit poor in this area (as rf2 does) then it points to something being needed to be done by the Devs, it'll take a while to reverse that reputation of course but it won't start until the Devs get on top of the core issues that are causing users headaches.

Since my "return" one of my biggest issues has been optimisation, it's poor in VR and in some cases a lot worse than it was two years ago and that's simply not good for me - as it puts me off from racing this particular Sim when others are simply better optimised.
 
Binny said:
Maybe they need to stop all dlc's from release, work on the bugs fixes core ect.. for 6 months release a big update, a new series and some tracks. Yes they wont make $$ in the mean time but surely fixing some issues will help with sales in the future.
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As a developer, I know how hard can be chasing some bugs. While some users might be able to reproduce the bug on their system every time, it might be impossible for someone else to reproduce. It might be impossible even for the same user to reproduce the bug on another system even if they wanted. If it can't be reproduced it might be very hard to know what's happening and how to fix it.

Dumps can help a lot with that but there's has to be a crash, and the user has to send the dump. If there's no crash, logs still can be helpful sometimes, but again, the user has to send the log and information about their system.

Those bugs can't be fixed without the help of the user. Either they send their computer for analysis or they send information that helps devs know what's happening on their computer. And sometimes the issue will lie in the user's computer, adding to the complexity of such bugs.

I don't know why but other gaming communities seem to be more informed about the way software works. We think of our computers like they were videogame consoles. No, they aren't.
 
Bernat said:
As a developer, I know how hard can be chasing some bugs. While some users might be able to reproduce the bug on their system every time, it might be impossible for someone else to reproduce. It might be impossible even for the same user to reproduce the bug on another system even if they wanted. If it can't be reproduced it might be very hard to know what's happening and how to fix it.

Dumps can help a lot with that but there's has to be a crash, and the user has to send the dump. If there's no crash, logs still can be helpful sometimes, but again, the user has to send the log and information about their system.

Those bugs can't be fixed without the help of the user. Either they send their computer for analysis or they send information that helps devs know what's happening on their computer. And sometimes the issue will lie in the user's computer, adding to the complexity of such bugs.

I don't know why but other gaming communities seem to be more informed about the way software works. We think of our computers like they were videogame consoles. No, they aren't.
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There are obscure, hard to reproduce bugs and they're hard to track down. This stuff isn't easy.

There are also issues that come up time and again, that might (or might not) have obscure causes, but are being handled poorly and are not complex to implement workarounds.

Let's not lump these in together.
 
Lazza said:
There are obscure, hard to reproduce bugs and they're hard to track down. This stuff isn't easy.

There are also issues that come up time and again, that might (or might not) have obscure causes, but are being handled poorly and are not complex to implement workarounds.

Let's not lump these in together.
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The issues that get the most hatred are the game breaking ones that most of us don't have. I think we were already mixing them. Dead json files, audio initialization failure, CTDs, bad performance,... These aren't common failures, although they happen to a number of people. Some issues have workarounds and we're here trying to help them, but some will get very angry because it should work OOTB. They should try playing other games and apply the same criteria.

I have tried to help people find out what's happening so it can be fixed faster. Sometimes it doesn't work. Even getting a log or a dump from them is sometimes impossible. I don't blame them but maybe they should get a console.
 
Bernat said:
The issues that get the most hatred are the game breaking ones that most of us don't have. I think we were already mixing them. Dead json files, audio initialization failure, CTDs, bad performance,... These aren't common failures, although they happen to a number of people. Some issues have workarounds and we're here trying to help them, but some will get very angry because it should work OOTB. They should try playing other games and apply the same criteria.

I have tried to help people find out what's happening so it can be fixed faster. Sometimes it doesn't work. Even getting a log or a dump from them is sometimes impossible. I don't blame them but maybe they should get a console.
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You know the game literally not running for no discernable reason is pretty major, right? Even if the occurrence rate is quite low, the deleterious effect is a fair kind of offset. (hey, hardly anyone gets in car crashes! What are we all wearing seatbelts for?)

If you get a dead json you have no idea what's happened. Verifying files won't help (because the game made the files), fully uninstalling and reinstalling (which for most people seems a clean slate, though we non-console experts know better) won't help (because the game made the files).

As I said, trying to find all root causes of this could be quite difficult. So if you keep seeing it happen - and we have - what might you reasonably do? How about take a copy of the working files after a successful start? How about checking for dead files and restoring from the known good copies, or failing that, generate new ones and let the user know (optional, but wouldn't that be nice?).

With this being a 1 day task, and knowing it would avoid some number of people spending days or hours trying to work out how to get the game starting, how long do you wait before doing it? How's 5+ years?
 
Pity they didn't fix the hang-on-exit bug, which has existed for several builds...God knows what problems that is causing.
 
So S397 changed the licencing structure and now we can race owning the track and the car we drive, after years saying that this was not possible. Great work. Now maybe RF2 can grow in participants.

Other big issue has been the liverys management. Is not really possible to simply copy the iRacing-Trading Paints system ?

With this and the remaining WEC and BTCC content (LMH cars, Fuji, Barcelona, Knockhill, Supra BTCC, ... ) we can have a good 2023.

Will only last a good ranked CS system (LFM show the way, is not so difficult)
 
The AI slipstream and passing the player on straights is not doing what it is supposed to do yet. Tried gt3 at Monza and they continue to back off when closer to the player's car. They also lose momentum because they don't use the curbs properly. Tried bumping up difficulty and with the AI more than a sec faster than me they just couldn't slipstream and pass on the straights, even when I costed half the straight.
 
oddtimer said:
The AI slipstream and passing the player on straights is not doing what it is supposed to do yet. Tried gt3 at Monza and they continue to back off when closer to the player's car. They also lose momentum because they don't use the curbs properly. Tried bumping up difficulty and with the AI more than a sec faster than me they just couldn't slipstream and pass on the straights, even when I costed half the straight.
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I thought the release candidate had been removed ?
I don't have one in BETAS I can see.
I can notice Historic AI are driving normally again and less like maniacs.

P.S. Release candidate Historic AI races I tested were undriveable.
 
8Ball said:
I thought the release candidate had been removed ?
I don't have one in BETAS I can see.
I can notice Historic AI are driving normally again and less like maniacs.

P.S. Release candidate Historic AI races I tested were undriveable.
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This isn't a release candidate thread.
 
oddtimer said:
The AI slipstream and passing the player on straights is not doing what it is supposed to do yet. Tried gt3 at Monza and they continue to back off when closer to the player's car. They also lose momentum because they don't use the curbs properly. Tried bumping up difficulty and with the AI more than a sec faster than me they just couldn't slipstream and pass on the straights, even when I costed half the straight.
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Have you tried different class of cars? I believe the GT3 cars have very little slipstream ability. In real life it takes a very good exit off Parabolica to be able to pass by turn one. Not surprised the AI can’t do it.
 
I tired some slow f cars and they seemed to do better, but with the gt3s, even when off the gas around Pafabolica and intentionally allowing the AI to pass they won't.
 
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