Next … Just a simple suggestion or request: It just would be so cool to have some old honda’s to tune (civic EK9, integra type R). The old american muscle car really came as a nice gift, i just love them! But i’d like to do a race against some old honda’s and muscle cars. :P

The ruimble API’s are meant to be different – PC uses Direct X whilst the 360 version uses something else.

This is massively importantly as its a bargin wheel thats usually 360 only.

I was just wondering if EA / SMS had given consideration to upgrading the weaponary on the NFS Shift AI cars in the upcoming patch? I was thinking of such things as front and rear mounted rockets, boot mounted mini guns, remotely detonated grenades, flame throwers, oil slicks and – in particular – wheel spikes a la the ancient roman scythed chariots (also brought back into fashion by BBC’s Top Gear).

I realise most of the AI cars are already more than generously equipped with anti-human-driver weapons and battle tactics of various sorts, but given that the AI are already 90% the way to being fully fleged warriors, it seems such a pity not to go for that last 10%.

I was also wondering if EA / SMS might consider changing the parameters of what is considered aggressive driving from the human player please? For example, why stop at drafting? Why not include changing gear, accelerating and braking as well? Perhaps you could even include a bonus 1000 aggression points for actually just lining up on the grid itself and a bonus 2000 points if the human player’s car is painted metallic black?

In all seriousness though, thanks for a great game, and I am looking forward to the patch. Apart from my very strong misgivings about the AI and the way aggression points are accrued, the game really is top notch. And I for one love the physics.

schumi82: in the 2.0b the grip it’s again 1.2, but I think it’s ok, the AI works better, and most of the lap times are the same of the real ones.

First, thank you for your time and professionalism replying to these sometimes direct and abusive comments. Before I post my suggestions for improvement, please allow me to take a moment to post my Kudos’ to SMS because you guys, the entire TEAM, have accomplished some really special new features that make the game special.

1) Racer Perspective; Fantastic… the feeling of The Zone at high speeds (I’ve been there as a Motocross racer many times), the impact, the blurred vision, the slow to recover, but not annoying, the first time I smacked the wall, I truly smiled, and felt Wow, that was intensifying! You guys and captured this wonderfully.
2) Dash Board reflection in windscreen/windshield – Simply Awesome
3) Cockpit/car dash details from inside – Awesome Details, fantastic looking
4) Internal Sounds – Really Nice, really like the changes when changing exhaust.
5) Tracks, Best in Class IMHO, Yes, Spa is a slightly older layout, so!
6) Career Mode, Very Nice for an Offline Racer… great fun and very diverse… from Race Challenges, Invitational Events, knockout sessions, time trials, and more, very smart for new challenges
7) Car Selection, very good offering of many different and diverse models
8) Car Building, Very nice, I enjoy driving the cars at each level, Tier 1 – Works, Very Good, except the Nitrous, but, I guess some folks Love Nitrous

I could go on and on, but no one is pointing out the good! You guys, your team have developed a Next Generation Racer…. And I applaud you and your team.

Now, for my suggestions:

1) AI is completely off the mark. Could you guys not offer AI levels, like Aggressive, Angry, Real, Easy… it seems to me someone on your team has experience with this one!
2) FFB, could you guys offer a few more variables; i.e steering force, brake vibrations, steering vibrations, etc… again seems this is not new and since most of these parameters are offered in the wheel file, a advance settings for FFB would be an easy fix.
3) Car handling, of course this is a biggie for many… including me. Maybe a level above Pro Mode… Ultra Realistic Mode for the non wall banger type racer that enjoys a long boring race challenge… like PC users. Bouncing Car not good!
4) TH2G screen adjustments… for me as a TH2G users, it’s frustrating to have the track map and speed indicator at the screen splits… just an FYI

Anyway, I would like to thank you for raising the bar in many areas, SMS now has a game out and on the market, I hope DLC, not always for $$$ is offered to PC users, as I don’t mind paying for some offerings of course, but throw us a bone now and then…!

Hope you can get some of these issue corrected, many great suggestions of course besides mine, but I think you’ve heard most and probably even know more than we do as to make the game more enjoyable for more serious racers.

Good Luck and hopefully there is a SHIFT 2nd in the future for you guys.. and maybe a Ferrari Project or two.

Look forward to your next patch!
Randall

(P.S. Dario Morelli … your Real Mod 2.0 totally improved the game for me and I thank you for it, great work and thanks for the PACKED VERSION)

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.

And add 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 winning a race without error but it doesn’t do this if you record lap times and wins differently when you rewind or skip parts of the track, in froze you get ‘certified’ times when you race without rewinding or cheating on the track.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

Is the grip set at 120% or 100%?

I will like to give my feedback, I hope it will be useful

From a graphical perspective, although the game is pretty impressive, I feel it does not match upto Forza/GT standards. The reason to me is simply that GT has learned how to render bright sunlight more realistically, while EA’s games (grid included) some why try to dodge this issue by making games more gloomy. When they attempt to render sunlight it just does not work that well, making the whole environment look rather cartoonish.

Physics feel good to me though FFB doesn’t. And I feel the AI does need to be tweaked, it is a bit too aggressive and the mods I have tried to decrease aggression some why result in races full of crashed AI cars in the middle of the track.

I guess the sunlight issue (if indeed there is one) is not likely to be fixed with a patch, but it would be good to concentrate on in future titles.

Thanks for posting and congratulations for producing NFS Shift.

Some questions…

Will the excessive oversteer on turn in and pivot effect be addressed in an upcoming patch? Maybe this is related to bugged Garage GUI/ defualt car setup.

Plus, will the AI aggressiveness be lowered at all? because currently the AI is just annoying rather then challenging more akin to banger racing rather than track racing.

I’m currently using the Real Mod to overcome some of these issues which does improve the experience for me.

Also please fix the low frame rate issues for ATI users, I have tried all the claimed fixes but with no success, it seems related to the number of AI cars that are in close view ahead.

I’m not a driving expert but I followed around the discussions. A LOT of the harsh criticism on SHIFT depended on UI issues.

This means that you could curb a big chunks of complaints very quickly and without working too hard. Lots of those problems can be fixed or adjusted with access to the inner xml files.

For example:

- Lots of players complain about the AI being in general too aggressive. It would take little time to put an UI slider in the options to adjust the overall aggressiveness of AI. We can do this already with the xml but you would surely make many players happy (especially on consoles) if you let them adjust overall aggressiveness.

- Lots of complaints because you can only tune a car by exiting a race and then go through a reload. Letting players access the garage and restart quickly the race WITHOUT reloading the whole thing would make the tuning part a lot less like a chore.

- The same for arbitrary effects for things like (1) the cockpit blur at high speed, and (2) the head shaking. Just let the players disable or adjust both these effects in the Options.

Finally about the “handling”. What most players are saying is that even in “Pro” mode EITHER the physics system is programmed to be forgiving of oversteer and sliding, OR the cars are set up in their default, non-tuned profile toward oversteering. What players say is that the physics system doesn’t reward clean driving. You don’t go faster if you turn clean and you don’t lose enough speed by drifting the curve.

People think this was done as a compromise between the “sim” aspect and the fun/arcade aspect that people expect from NFS. This is why we have 2 advancement systems and “forgiving oversteer” may be a way to keep both those experience advancements as viable (but at the expense of realism).

Especially we noticed how there’s a physicstweaker.xml file that is used to “rig” some parameters and that may explain that.

So what could you say on this?

Sensekhmet: It’s good to hear from the man himself ;)
I’m an amateur racer in real life and I stand by the opinion that driving fast is not too difficult if you are smart and have some basic knowledge. In 3 years (maybe around 10 events a year) I turned from a hopeless ‘youth-rage’ driver into someone who can hold his own and starts to feel 2nd-3rd gear rallying is not challenging enough.
Anyway, back on topic.
I’ve noticed that car setup has some quirks. The stock cars feel good, but as you start modyfing them, they get progressively worse, up to some Works cars that drive like Crazy Taxi vehicles. I’ve noticed the setup not only is really, realy weird (even gear spacing is often wrong) but it can change by itself. No joke, a few times my cars switched from a 6 speed to a 5 speed, all by themself.

Hi there.

Thanks for the kind words.

I agree (of course:) ) on the handling point.

Yes, what you mention is a bug. There are a few linked to the garage GUI not transferring the correct values across, or changing to a left aligned start value. We ‘think’ we’ve fixed all of these now and things are working well here. The patch will be out soon ;)

Need for Speed SHIFT strange Force Feedback

Also, is the works car bug resolved, that is, you have to restart every race to get the works upgrade in effect, otherwise the car drives like without any upgrades.

Thanks a lot for taking the time to speak to the community!

Ian:
Apart from the bugs (some UI garage issues and the bouncing) yes, we are happy with it. Most of these bugs are fixed and a patch is in testing now.

djotefsoup: Yep, same. As far as I know Physx runs the same way regardless of whether it’s run natively on a supported NVidia card or on the CPU or on a dedicated Physx board. To me it feels very much like the GTL tyre model but slightly more forgiving in some cases depending on the drive and car setup. Some people really don’t like it for whatever reason though.

It feels much more advanced then GTL to me. I have a Nvidia enabled PhysX card. When I say “much more”, I mean allot! Like they tried to achieve the proper feel in GTL but were handicapped by the available hardware. Shift surpasses GTL by light-years. It is obviously enhanced by a PhysX enabled GPU or equivalent CPU: and a GPU is able to deliver 100 times the CPUs PhysX calculations. So if a user doesn’t have enough CPU power to make up for a PhysX enabled GPU, they maybe handicapped.

Ian:
Hi Uff.There are some limitations on what we can do here based around the driving and shifting animations for one thing. It’s something we’ve only had a few complaints on so I’m not sure it’s scheduled for a patch. I will check.

Hi Ian,

Well, if there weren’t enough complaints about the animations then probably because the main problem is not that only the cockpit animations are delayed, but the whole reaction of the cars is delayed to the input. If you make quick direction changes even the sports cars feel like boats.
If I drive slowly and calm I can feel the great physics behind the game, but when it comes to quick reacting while driving at the limit, I can feel the >0.3 sec of input lag. And this is a killer for many people I’ve talked to.
Do you have any news regarding this and/or multiplayer/netcode improvements?

Thanks,
Thomas

Hope it will be addressed in this patch