I've been taking a break from RaceRoom after getting frustrated with it for a while, but with a new patch just around the corner I decided to get familiar with it again. After playing for some hours, I have two questions. One has been bothering me since I started playing RaceRoom, the other is something I'm noticing in R3E after spending time with other games for a while. 1. Do the AI cars have the same physics as you do? It's not uncommon that I see the AI cars sometimes take turns in ways that I just cannot mimic, despite driving the exact same car as them. There are also other turns that for some reason the AI absolutely struggle with and take very slowly. This is a huge turnoff for AI races to me, and reminds very clearly why I so rarely play against AI in racing games. This inconsistent weirdness coupled with the way that so much as tapping the rear bumper of an AI car causes your car to spin out like you ran over a banana in Mario Kart kills AI races for me. 2. Why do the cars in RaceRoom feel very... floaty for lack of better word? I'm trying to come up with a better way to describe it. After playing a bunch of other sims for a while, many of the cars that I think should feel very planted and responsive (SR9 Radicals and GT3 cars for example), don't. When I'm gaining on somebody and wanting to pass them, in other games I can flick the wheel a minute amount to get the car off to the side, stop just short of where I need to, then continue in a straight line with no hesitation. In RaceRoom, it feels like there's a lag to everything I do, and consequently it ends up taking a lot more effort than I feel it should to place the car where I want to. This feeling of looseness is why the older cars such as the Touring Classics and DTM 1992 cars are so fantastic, but it's very odd to get that feeling in something that should be as stiff and responsive as the LMP2 Radicals. Am I doing something wrong? Are the default setups just weird and contributing to this? Is this just normal for RaceRoom, and if it is, why?
I'm sort of in agreement with you on the physics and car kinetics, totally with you about the bots. These bots are wonderful, strange... exasperating, AARGH! weirdoes. I like them then I hate them, but my gripe is for different reasons than yours. I don't like the way they artificially spread out the field by racing slowly, and don't like the timid way many of them take turns. I also really hate their aggressive tendencies. Pass more than two of them at once, perhaps even overrev your engine near them, and they take a disliking to you and might well spin you out in a turn or even bash you off the track on a straight. I agree that many times, they seem to have their own scripted physics, taking turns in ways I can't, and my car is almost always the one that spins out in collisions, no matter who touched who. The floatiness though, I'm not too sure which games feel more solid. I play Assetto Corsa, Forza and Gran Turismo, and to me, the cars in RR and AC are both solidly planted on the road. The lag, I might experience too, but to me I think it felt like inertia more than lag. I was going to blame it on your TV or monitor, but that would apply to all games equally. Maybe someone here would be happy to comment.
The AI is using a simplified physics, and will probably always do. But hopefully they will improve over time, and get more personalities and randomness as well. Haven't experienced the lag you are referring to. But I do feel that some cars feels extremely floaty, almost hard to drive them in a straight line.. Having hopes that the new tire model will iron out this part.
you cant expect a computer to realistically simulate 24+ cars with full physics... it just doesnt happen. Id say r3e has the best (or maybe second to gsce) in terms of similarity to player line/speed. there is going to be stuff done about their reaction when you have a mid corner mistake (I imagine hes going to make them more willing to pull of the racing line in the event you go slow out of a corner.) I dont know about floatyness i like the dtm 92/ touring classics cause they are loose. id hate for that to go away so the cars are less "floaty".
I like the feel to the retro cars too, but I think it's the suspension making them looser. They don't feel floaty or hard to drive straight. The cars I remember out of my head that feels floaty to me is Aquila, some of the GT 2 / GT 3 cars and DTM 2013. Might be others but those are the ones I most recent have reacted to.
Yeah, they are floaty / swaying and constantly need correction on straights. Making them hard, or harder to drive than they should. I don't notice this floaty feeling in the corners.
Wait till you try these updated, no more boats. Current GTR2 arent that bad at all, more down to ffb settings, unless your talking about the Ruf, then yeah.
It's not input lag. I seriously doubt I would be getting any input lag issues with the monitor I have (Acer XB270HU). Even if I was, I would have noticed it long before in other games that are much more time sensitive than racing. I guess inertia is a good way to describe it, but at the same time I don't get that feeling in Assetto Corsa or GSCE. Even Project CARS with its questionable physics doesn't have it so exaggerated either. GT2 and GT3 cars in AC, especially when you're moving fast and have all that downforce, feel very planted and confident in their movements. Driving the same cars in the same situations in R3E, the cars feel unstable. Once they get turning I find it more difficult than I think it should be to get them going straight again, and even driving in a straight line I feel like a sneeze might send the car into an uncontrollable fishtail. It's as if they were running very soft suspensions and high profile tires. Like I said, it's the kind of feeling that I adore about the older cars in R3E, but it doesn't feel appropriate on modern endurance cars.
don't know which lag you are talking about but i get some microlag when i have mechanical damage enabled and i'm very near another car...if you disable mechanical damage everything will be smooth as ever...(but hey probably it isn't what you are talking about)
The updated GT3 cars are very planted and allow for a better smoothness on throttle, as well very precise resulting in no swaying, much more narrow slip angles.
I'm one that has the floatiness, in all cars to some extent. The ADAC '14 cars feel the most planted to me but still have a floatiness and vagueness to them which affects my confidence in my inputs. I've also described it as a feeling of lag, like I turn the wheel, the car thinks about it for a moment, then decides "right, we'll go the way you suggested", and of course at that point the apex has already passed me by. It's not due to normal input lag, all my other sims are fine and I've taken the necessary steps to limit any input lag. Yet, the R3E cars feel very laggy to me and more times than not it leads to me getting frustrated and turning the sim off. I'm very anxious to try these updated cars that James says have no boat feeling to them. R3E has some problems (all sims do) but this odd handling behavior is the only one that really bothers me and it bothers me a lot. If, in fact, the new updated cars do not feel like boats than I will celebrate and spend many, many, many hours driving them and racing them, and hope that these changes filter down to all the other cars sooner rather than later.
If that's the case, then I look forward to trying the updated physics. On a semi-related note, are all cars getting a physics update or just some of them? Don't the GTR3 cars use different physics from the ADAC 2014 cars? If GTR3 gets updated then what happens to the ADAC cars? It's confusing that RaceRoom has so many copies of the same car built to different standards. I recall some people saying that all cars are being brought up to spec with the new physics standard, but I don't remember an official source for that, just rumors.
The log just says Procar and GTR3? Well, those are the ones that got the "massive" update anyway, not sure what kind of updates the Silhouette and Aquila got.
Yes, they got some kind of update, but it did not indicate they got the mahoosive update. But, I believe some of those are free cars so it's very good to see them getting any kind of physics/ffb update.