http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/333357.page

Next patch will fix ALOT of things :D

NVIDIAGeek: ^Yeah! Please answer us Ian

Yep

car bouncing – system or controller sensitive? – looking at various videos, the amount of bouncing (with the same car) seems to vary. I’m wondering if the PC system, or the presence or absence of PhysX hardware, or the gaming controller, or …, is affecting the car bouncing issue.

The Pagani Zonda R is effectively a GT1 car, it should be much, much quicker than the R35 Nissan GT-R.

Recently a road legal Radical SR8LM lapped the Nordschleife in 6.48, this is region the Pagani Zonda R should be lapping in if pushed to the limit.

Howie47:You can probably hack off 45 seconds from the Nord in a Sim driving in hood view. You can take allot more risk in a Sim, and hood view gives to perfect view of the road ahead. IF rFactor can’t deliver faster times then the real. It must mean it’s tire physics are wrong. That is the general consensus of it’s tires, and Why they’re changing it in rFactor2.

Why is it that I can drive F1 in rF in cockpit or the tv camera view and run laps within tenths of each other? Sure you can see more around you but that doesn’t make your car accelerate faster and grip more.

The hood view may make learning a little bit better but if you actually know the track you gain nothing when it comes to speed.

That is the most insane conclusion I’ve ever seen about rF physics and it makes no sense at all. The reason the tire physics are being updated is because they lack key features that are needed to properly simulate tires. For example as far as I know there rFactor does not take into account the affects on the slip curve of having lontitudinal and lateral slip at the same time.

There are also issues with the load sensitivity of the tires, and the way that rF applies the effects of load on the slip curve is not perfectly accurate. It was described to me as horizontally stretching the whole curve, and then stretching the part of the curve past the peak again.

It’s also impossible as far as I know to set the tires so that you get a realistic 0-60 acceleration time and a 60-0 braking time at the same time. One of them must be compromised. If you get the 0-60 time perfect, you will have about 30% too short of a braking distance.

None of this has anything to do with going faster than real life. If those things and others are changed the result could be higher lap times… the result could be lower lap times if you simply increase the grip as much as you want. Lap times are almost useless to compare to real life anyway, with hundreds of flaws in the physics engine and the huge inaccuracies in tracks. In the F1 mod I race the best race lap at Suzuka (a pretty nice track in rF) was 1:33.4 and real life was 1:32.5. At singapore in rF, we ran 1:35 laps versus 1:48 in real life. The track was obviously way off, both in terms of grip as well as layout.

Howie47: You can probably hack off 45 seconds from the Nord in a Sim driving in hood view. You can take allot more risk in a Sim, and hood view gives to perfect view of the road ahead. IF rFactor can’t deliver faster times then the real. It must mean it’s tire physics are wrong. That is the general consensus of it’s tires, and Why they’re changing it in rFactor2. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if a minute or more can be taken off.You can wreck you car all you want and just keep trying until you get it right.

you do realize these times were all completed by drivers probably much more experienced than most of the people who post here right?

I’m pretty happy with the physics, but it’s the AI that is giving me problems. They can’t seem to last past ten laps, especially in tight circuits. They drive like they’re not actually aware of other cars. eg. not looking ahead and ploughing at top speed into a pileup of cars, moving into the ‘race line’ on a straight, whether there’s another car there or not, rear-ending you when you’re braking for a turn, etc. And this is after installing the ‘Real 2.0b’ mod, which toned down the worst of their behaviour. I ended up putting damage onto ‘visual only’ just to give the AI a fighting chance to survive a full race.

OK, so my question is; are you aware of these problems, and are you likely to fix them? I’d just like an AI that can drive a consistent lap, especially if we’re after a ‘real racing experience’.

Please keep in touch with the community even if some people are wildly rude.

Agreed. I have found the level of debate here, and elsewhere, regarding Shift to be pretty depressing. We seem to be such a tribal bunch, always eager to start a fight.

All I know is that I’ve been enjoying racing games (and they’re all games at the end of the day) since the BBC Micro, all the way up to iRacing. And when I’m in Shift belting around The Ring in my Lotus or the Veyron, I’m having the time of my virtual life.

Shift is not perfect, and I hope more options (damage etc.) can be added either officially or unofficially. But then neither is any other racing game. I fully expected to hate Shift based on what I saw in preview vids, and nearly cancelled my pre-order. But I am so glad I didn’t, because I haven’t had this much fun on a virtual track in years. Mainly the Nordschleife, admittedly. :-)

Thanks to everyone on the team. I think you’ve done a remarkable job given the difficult task of trying to please both hard and softcore audiences. It was inevitable many people would be disappointed, but I for one am looking forward to seeing what else can be done with this engine.

Andrew McP

PS

I’ve been trying out custom gearbox files in Shift, partly for tinkering’s sake, and I’ve noticed that the setup menu seems to create new ratios between the ones in the file. Is this an intended behaviour to increase the range of adjustments available, or one of the aforementioned GUI bugs?

Howie47: You can probably hack off 45 seconds from the Nord in a Sim driving in hood view. You can take allot more risk in a Sim, and hood view gives to perfect view of the road ahead.

Thats rubbish, on a long track like Nordschleife you can probably shave off 12-20 secs in a sim due to the risk factor or lack of but thats it. I dont see how hoodview should dramatically change your laptimes if the driver knows the track well already. In any case a 45 sec difference is too big to pin on anything other than physics.

I really hope you can release the tools for the game. And I hope you can continue work on updating this version and working on version 2 of the game.

Please bug fix issues with default wheel settings, FFB and steering lag from steering wheel devices, the in game HUD wheel does not match the input wheel with a delay and not animating to full 900 degrees, there is a bit of a lag in controlling the car too I feel.

Replays are messed up if you try to watch one half way through a race, and often after a race the replay has my car missing parts like the bonnet even as the race begins!

Id like game rewind like Forza/Grid/Dirt. I find it an invaluable tool for learning to drive fast as I can retake the same corner over and over and see what works and what doesn’t. Forza handle it in a nice way; I thought it would remove the thrill and tension of trying to win a race without error but it doesn’t do this if you record times differently when you rewind or skip parts of the track, in Forza you get ‘certified’ times when you race without rewinding or cheating on the track.

Please add the same level of immersion and wow to the damage system, it’s really weak and limp compared to games like Grid and Dirt. It’s a crucial part of the immersion missing, to feel real emotion you need real consequence to actions and a visceral authentic looking wreck of a car to sit back and go holy shit look what I did, that’s the consequence of my actions thank god it wasn’t real.. wow.

I’m sure you guys know you’ve done an great job, and I hope you know that if people are giving you such a hard time about the physics being 100% life like well it’s because we see such huge potential in the game and want it to go that extra mile.

I look forward to seeing night-time races, all weather snow and rain and other goodies I see lurking in the code for Shift.

I hope you can perfect and improve on the Sim aspects (qualifying, pit stops) without sacrifice and at the same time supply easier modes for newcomers and people playing with controllers. A tricky balance but it can be done if it’s exposed through a good interface. Theres no reason to leave out the more hardcore elements other than dedicating dev time elsewhere, you can put them in there and have a mass market appeal game at the same time as long as the interface/UI hides them away from casual gamers till they get more ‘pro’

I hope you can use your mass market appeal to fund and provide a realistic sim that immerses and is fun all round for a change.

I never thought Id’ ever be legitimately comparing a NFS branded game to PC sims, well done!

Please keep in touch with the community even if some people are wildly rude.

Thanks for your time in this thread and the excellent work of your team on both Shift and GTR2. A few questions:

Can you comment on your Ferrari Project status? Many of us are enjoying Shift a lot and hope to see more SMS work soon!

Is SMS big enough to work on multiple games at once?

Can you see SMS ever focusing on simulating a real life race series for a game in the future?

Have you tried iRacing? What do you think of their physics/handling model?

Hanzaleski: Thats why there is possible make unrealistic times with Zonda-R like 6:10 at Nord (compared to real 7:24) while with rFactor f.e. you will get very close times to real one.

Not a big deal but the Zonda F lapped the ring in 7:24, the Zonda R has another 100+ horsepower and is a lighter, track focused car similar in concept to the Ferrari FXX. I haven’t seen a ring time for the Zonda R but it will be faster than the F version, for sure.