I bought all Raceroom content 1 month ago and played for a few hours every night. I was really enjoying it and decided to get an Oculus Rift S for my first VR experience. rF2 went on sale and I thought I would give it a try. I liked it but missed things about Raceroom. I kept switching back and forth for few days, and finally settled on rF2 for the foreseeable future. Here is what I miss about Raceroom: The Leaderboards since sometime to just want to hot lap and have a benchmark for comparison or to have a friendly competition with my son. There doesn't seem to be an rF2 option here. The relatively short track load times. The WebHud when I could make my own SimHub dashboard. The built-in Championships. To a much lesser extent, I miss the car sound. What I like more about rF2: The AI is in my opinion much more human and fun to race against. The VR performance is at least 30% better from my fpsVR observations with similar settings, probably because of DX11 but who knows. All I can say is it looks significantly better when setting it up to hit 80 fps than Raceroom does. The tracks have a ton of immersive, higher quality details (people, support vehicles, fire extinguishers) I like to drive off-track sometimes just too look at the details. ("First loser" hand-written on the wooden podium at one track!) The new free Tatuus open wheel cars are really fun, and they have one with a halo which is amazing in VR! Safety cars! Square flag lights, which are great braking point markers and very immersive. In my opinion the FFB is better, or at least more what I am looking for. I understand what the car is telling me! I imported a Lando Norris and Sainz livery by a mod maker on RaceDepartment! It's really immersive to be running side by side with Sainz. I try to help him out when I can with slipstreams, lol. What I don't like about rF2: The UI is not great. They have been working on a replacement for two year, I guess. Won't cross my fingers there. Getting tracks not in the Steam workshop, but once you do it a few times it is not horrible. The HUD editor is archaic and it is the only option. Unpacking and packing mods based on TGA files in a dev mod interface is complicated and mostly undocumented, but I am learning! I have a VR friendly HUD mostly done after about 8 hours working on it!
I've owned rF2 since it was released (and iRacing for 11 years as well) and have somewhat recently got into Raceroom and prefer it to rF2 and consider Raceroom to be roughly equal to iRacing, but for significantly less money. rFactor 2 AI is great, definitely the second best in all of sim racing. However I would consider RRE AI to be the best there is. I've always been told that even from those in rF2 and and in iR even before I ever got into RRE. Not only is the on track AI great, but the UI and game itself supports offline racing very well with custom championships, and all of the adjustable settings for races, etc. I agree that VR is better in rF2 as well as iR. The stock content in rF2 is about as good as RRE content, but I'm not a fan of the fact that the majority of it is fictional. Studio 397 content is good, however like anything that is based on modding everything is fully hit and miss and that is one thing I love about RRE and iRacing, a lot of content and all of it is excellent. The new Tatuus cars are great on rF2, as is the FR90 on RRE, I think I've had a lot of fun driving both so far. I think the FFB in both are great, once you get them set up. I 100% couldn't agree more about the custom skins, I wish they had a livery builder like in iRacing even. I hate having to drive cars in RRE with other drivers names, etc. In addition I wish we had a lot more liveries to race with (I'd gladly pay for a TCR pack featuring liveries from the various regional series such as Josh Files/Target Competition, or Anti Burri, Luca Engstler, Garth Tander, or any of the other great drivers that run TCR events all over the world I'd gladly spend $20 or more on a TCR pack with 50-100 liveries).
You don't marry a sim! You're allowed to enjoy more than one! No one here will judge you poorly for playing rF2 AND RaceRoom
You're right, it is more like dating. And I have dated most of the options up to this point. I have over $300 invested in iRacing tracks, but I wanted a sim with both AI and multiplayer so I could play more casually. If iRacing gets AI at some point, I will reconsider dating her again! Right now, the VR performance difference is probably the biggest reason I am choosing to date fR2. If Raceroom gets that worked out, I'll be back as I already paid for the pleasure of spending time with her.
I have, RaceRoom, Project Cars, Automobilista, Assetto Corsa, F1, rFactor en the ones I forgot to mention. All have their cons and pro’s. The best Race Sim is a mix of all mentioned. Iracing and their rent path is not my cup of tea and therefore I won’t go that path.
Consider yourself lucky, I've got $1000s invested in iRacing and I've already pre-payed for access for two more years and I spend more time on RRE, rF2 and AC at this point. The only time I spend on iR anymore is on rx and dirt oval. A few season ago I decided for road content I was not going to buy anything more and I was going instead invest in trying all the other sims that are available so I bought AC, RRE, Pcars, Automobilista, etc. and I still came out ahead. iRacing is very smart in that they often add new paid tracks to popular schedules that way you keep needing to spend $30 per season or so on top of the monthly sub. I have fun on these other sims for a fraction of the price!
As I said later in that paragraph I think RRE is the best AI in sim racing at this time, at least from my perspective. None are perfect and I'm still occasionally bashed off road but rF2 is so track dependent, some tracks have good AI, and others are terrible. Pcars 2 is pretty bad (at most tracks you can park in the middle of the road and the entire field will just stop as they can't figure how to get by) and I think AC is notoriously bad (ACC is better).
So basically you're cheating RaceRoom with rFactor 2 and have the audacity to tell that RaceRoom in her face? Right here at her home? And you think she wants you back? Seriously, there's nothing wrong to with playing more than one sim. Spoiler
Yes, there is no perfect racing game. Personally I´d classify them on these criteria. I haven´t much knowledge of AMS or Iracing to rank them. Physics: very subjective but I prefer RRE Graphics: F1 2019 / ACC / PC 2 Car sounds: RRE System Requirements: RRE / RF2 Standard HUD: AC Loading times: AC DLCs: AC AI: RF2/RRE UI: RRE Ease of access for Noobs: RRE Single player mode: RRE / RF2 Career Mode: F1 2019 Mutiplayer mode: I racing for size of community Pricing: RRE for basic game, AC for full content Dev support/interaction with community: AC/Kunos Bug resolution / Game stability: ? Game development roadmap: RRE/RF2 Range of official tracks and cars: AC Modding community: AC or RF2 Cameras and customisation: RRE Dynamic Weather: ACC Penalty system:?? Car and Track modelling accuracy: Car Setup detail: RF2 FFB: ? VR: ?
Yes, apologies there. I realised soon after I posted, which is why I deleted my comment - but not soon enough it seems! Btw, Automobilista AI isn't too shabby either.
Automobilista If I am not mistaken have different ai path per car class per track which is a big plus imo
I added weather, car/track modelling and penalties to my list. It seems a pity that the dev of RRE is spending time and budget modelling tyre flatspots when dynamic weather or indeed even wet/dry races are not implemented, but I guess that is another topic.
Not a member of the dev-team, so I can't say for sure, but I'd bet serious money on the fact that tire flatspots is something that is (relatively) easily achievable within the engine as it is right now. I doubt dynamic weather would even be possible without a major rewrite of the core engine code.
Nothing wrong with being a Sim slut, helps to decipher what is good or bad about a sim far more objectively. ETRC is out in a couple weeks, time for a wrestle with the big birds. Variety is the spice of life!
Depends if we are talking about base game or all official paid content. Hard to see past AC complete edition currently 18 euros on Steam compared with 75 euros plus to get all RRE content, even in the sale. RRE would have more tracks but I believe carwise it is the same number give or take. RRE has more liveries but AC has road cars so only colours for them.
I am not sure if the RRE engine is totally different from that of GTR2 but the latter had both dynamic (buggy) and selectable weather back in 2003.
Neither of which worked particularly well. And the R3E engine is a completely different beast. What most people keep forgetting is that the R3E engine wasn't designed with something like endurance racing in mind, nor for that matter in-depth set-up solutions. Its main purpose was (and to some degree still is) to function in showrooms/race-stands as a jump-in-and-go system. You're unlikely to see vast differences in either temperature, precipitation or daylight in a 20 minute race.