I've got on board with a Logitech G29 this month, feels like I bought the last one the UK the way everywhere was selling out. Anyone been keeping an eye on Charles Leclerc, Albon, Russell and Latifi's journey into twitch streaming? Latifi has been super serious, F1 2019 only. The rest of them discovered a mod tonight that allows you to race lawnmowers around Silverstone...Truck simulator is also a new found favourite apparently. please log in to view this image
I've watched some of it, Russell showing Mansell levels of whining, it's a shme they have to use the F1 game though, if they'd used one of the other titles it would've been so much better. What game/sim did you buy the wheel for? and platform?
Yeah they have to use the official game for the F1-sanctioned events, but most of them have branched out. Lando Norris and Verstappen both do most of their events on rFactor or iRacing. And the lawnmower racing was on Assetto Corsa. I'm on PC, played the official F1 game when I just had a controller, but picked up a pack of racing games for a song through HumbleBundle a couple of months ago. Assetto Corsa has been the best so far, racing the Lotus 25 around the classic Monza banking is a great experience. Also played some RaceRoom (which is free to play and you pay for more tracks and cars) and Project Cars.
so, Assetto Corsa, the competizione version? that's one of the 3 I'd narrowed myself down to, rFactor & iRacing being the others. though iRacing is the one I really want to play, the subscription is fairly reasonable at £8 p/m but the cost of cars and tracks is a bit extreme, for example to get the tracks for an F1 season will cost about £200+. To get all cars and tracks upwards of £1,000 (though you can get a bulk deal which will save you about £300). I do love racing though, and it seems to be the best stewarded of the sim racing games, and £1000 is a lot for a computer game, but much lower than the amount of money I spent to get to the grid in my first kart race a few decades ago. The ultimate goal would be to build myself something like this
I don't have Competitizione, I have the original game. My understanding is that Competitizione has better graphics and updated physics, but is essentially the official game of the GT World Challenge series. So it's only GT3 cars, and about 10 tracks. The original game is much more open, with anything from Fiat 500's to Le Mans prototypes, rally cars and F1 cars. It's also got a good selection of tracks to suit everything. Content packs are modest, but the modding scene for AC is ridiculous. So tonight's entertainment was racing buses around Monaco, with both the track and bus being freely available mods, that took minutes to download and set up. iRacing I'm certainly curious about, but I think it depends how much time you want to put into it. It has by far the best reputation for online racing, but the license system means that you can't race most things online until you've proven yourself fairly extensively. So you spend a lot of time racing MX5's until you're deemed safe and competent, and the content slowly becomes available to you the better you get. So even if you spent the £1000 on all the F1 content, you've still got to work your way from Rookie class to D,C,B and finally earn an A license to be able to play that content on public servers. rFactor 2 I'm just waiting to come on sale and then I'll probably pick it up. I didn't find the free demo (on Steam) particularly enjoyable though, I've had a better experience with Assetto Corsa. For me, I'm finding Assetto Corsa really fun whilst I get familiar with Sim racing, using the wheel etc. I've been happy playing against AI so far. Once I'm comfortable with everything maybe iRacing is the next step.
ah, glad you said that. I'd assumed, due to the price differences, it would be the GT3 series AND the original game, rather than just a single series release, looks like it's just AC for now then, see how I get on with that. rFactor 2, I couldn't get the demo to work for some reason, a look at the comments shows I'm far from alone, so wary of paying for a game that doesn't work, and won't get a refund as it'll say I've played it. Assetto Corsa it is! I don't mind paying for some of the DLC, gotta have the Nordshleife & Brands. With the licensing on iRacing, that's it's big selling point for me, the relative security of going into a hairpin knowing I'm not going to be punted by the guy 1sec back, or being 'allowed' to pass someone down the Kemmel straight at 200+ without getting swiped. I'm not overly aggressive in either attack or defence online, if someone is clearly much faster than me, I won't bother fighting them, I'll just hold my line and let them work it out.
Steam are usually pretty good at refunds if you have less than 2 hours of playtime, I think it's essentially automatic. Admittedly I don't know if they'd include hours from the demo in that. Nords is in Dream Pack 1, Brands is in Dream Pack 3. Mods are pretty easy to install, I'd reccommend re-skining Assetto Corsa with Content Manager pretty quickly, definitely worth downloading.
I bought the 'get it all for £30' pack. Ty for the tip, just DL'd content manager, took a minute to work it out, now I just need to relearn lines as it really doesn't seem to like my kerb abuse. Took a while to get the G29 functioning to a decent degree, still haven't got the D-pad working on it which is a bit of a bummer.
http://thesetupmarket.com/#/setups/Assetto Corsa I found this site @DHCanary takes a while for the page to load, but loads of setups in there
There's always at least 1 in each lobby online, in this case it was pagenaud & Ferucci, both of whom are deservedly getting massive amounts of **** today. I do laugh at the naivity in the 'no one would do it in real life' people keep saying, have they never heard of Prost, Senna, Schumacher or Rosberg? At least in the NASCAR it's expected.
Ferucci doesn't have a great reputation, and he's undoing any progress on that by acting like an actual child in a sponsored, official event. Pagenaud is disappointing though, he's won Indy500, and yet he's deliberately taking Lando out because he seems threatened by the idea that an F1 driver who has put hours into iRacing might actually be alright at it. Says something when Lando ends up looking like the mature one, despite being 20.
Just reading some stuff on the eSports racing, I am amazed by how sophisticated the programs are. Norris is talking about his engineers looking at traces and then tweeking car setup! Seems like the modeling must be so sophisticated, I wonder where they get the data from. Do they 3D map the tracks using some lidar imaging. Anyone know about how 'real' the sim data is? Do these games run on consoles or serious PC's. All very interesting.....
iRacing is PC only, the others are either both, or will be in the near future. How good does the PC have to be? here's the thing about games, if the developer makes a game that needs a £1,000+ PC to play, he's going to go bankrupt pretty quickly. The GFX card will be the big cost (other than a decent wheel), but most 2-6gb VRAM (that's min specs and recommended) 5 year old PC will be fine, obviously the better your PC the better the GFX and frame-rate will be, but they should run without a problem on a decent i3, which are 11 years old, with recentish GFX card, which you could get for less than £100. They also have tests on their websites to check if your system is good enough. you could do it for under £500, which includes brand new wheel and peddles. As to the data, it's never going to be exact, and my impression is the main titles all excel at something, but fail at others. I went for Aseetto Corsa, but will probably move on to iRacing later.
You're pretty spot on, many companies are using LIDAR, laser scanning of circuits. A lot (all?) of the iRacing circuits are laser scanned, all the official, non-fictional tracks in Assetto Corsa are laser scanned. Codemasters doesn't laser scan any of their tracks, which is an issue "serious" sim racers have with the official F1 titles. For example the F1 game version of Suzuka has a giant bump before the final chicane, which simply doesn't exist in real life (or any of the laser scanned versions of the tracks). In terms of setups, it varies by game. F1 games have been criticised here as well, in that things like having maximum ride height, weight distribution all the way to an extreme, etc have been found to be the quickest in some cases. The setup doesn't necessarily match real-world physics. It's why the virtualGP series have been using fixed setups and automatic ERS settings, because there's so much game-specific knowledge in using both properly, that it massively advantages those prepared to put the time in. It's why the e-sports guys are way quicker in their own events. There's an "rFactor Pro" package which isn't publicly available, and is used by some teams as the foundation for their simulators. Kunos (the team behind Assetto Corsa) have a similar offering. I think the main difference in these compared to the commercial releases is that they come with controls which allow the pro outfits to vary the physics as much as they desire, in order to match the real world performance of their cars. Most of these parameters are fixed in the commercial releases.
Cheers, I didn't realise that some of the games are the basis of some team sims!!! I should have thought really. About 15 years ago I did a little testing work on a 'military sim' based on the unreal game engine. Well that's how I remember it anyway. So it shouldn't surprise me that the sim games have 'commercial' / Pro versions. I do find it all fascinating especially the data, probably due to me working for 10 years testing gas turbines and jet engines on the data side of things .
Cheers. My dektop is an old i5 but only a 2nd gen so about 8 years old I think. My graphics card is only a 512mB one that I added so I could have 2 monitors . So I guess my specs are a bit low and as funds are very tight at moment probably just watch eSport on youtube a bit now and again. Cheers for the info.
Might only be "a game", but that crap from Pagenaud was utterly disgraceful. He's rightfully taking pelters for it. Lousy looser. If they do more Indycar sanctioned races, he totally deserves to be left out.
