Game arrived in post today :-)
Installed.... yawn, and a big download to complete, yawn, yawn.
Started Game.
Wrestled with controller configuration, due to non standard pedals. (G25 wheel and shifter, Fanatec Clubsport v2 Pedals).
Track, Imola
Car: Various: Atom Supercharged, BMW E30, Lotus 49, Sierra Cosworth.
Nice Graphics, Good frame rate, nice sounds, but unimpressed with physics, (Grand Turismo style) & major disconnect between controls, and car.
Lotus 49 worst. Major castor trying to run car in straight line all the time, car does not seem to do what I want, back end snaps easily , but unrealistically easy to catch.
I think there is much more to come with controls configuration, but so far I don't see the draw to spend the effort to fix.
I'll have to force myself to persevere, but initial impressions, well, I'll be sticking to Assetto Corsa.
Oh and I could not see the DMW server, that is apparently up.
Deetz.
Thanks for the review; and I'm glad we didn't loose you to another sim :). This is matching the majority opinion in the AC forum thread about pCARS. I don't have it, but in some of the videos I saw, one of the things striking out compared with AC are the brake lights of the opponents. In AC, I have to focus on the cars to notice them while in pCARS, they are much more realistic....
Quote from: Deetz;398934Oh and I could not see the DMW server, that is apparently up.
The in-game list seems to show a very small selection of the servers that are actually live. Take a look at this list and compare it to your in-game browser list
:
http://cars-stats-steam.wmdportal.com/index.php/servers
dMw's server is in that list and apparently live, but not showing in the in-game server for me either. We're working on fixing that but information is a little sparse at the moment on WMD.
Cheers for the heads up TeaLeaf, I'll keep checking to see if the issue is resolved.
After mucking around a bit more yesterday, I discovered that I'd incorrectly calibrated my wheel, doh. (I blame unclear instructions). Afterwards, the feeling of actually controlling the car was much improved, I presume due to a linear steering curve rather than a logarithmic curve caused by the wrong calibration.
For anyone else struggling with this. During the calibration, the 1st step is to fully rote the wheel as far as it will go in either direction, hit NEXT , then return the wheel to center before rotating 90 deg in either direction and pressing FINISH.
The Force feedback still does some weird things, feedback just seeming to vanish in certain situations.
The force feedback does seem to be adjustable in a myriad of different (difficult to understand) ways, including per individual car. and I think would need set individually to get the best out of the game. That amount of required effort just seems crazy to me, and should have been better optimised out of the box. I guess the priority was making sure game pad controllers etc. work properly.
To me the controls, your fundamental interface with the game, are so important in any racing game, (or any game come to that) and often seems to poorly implemented, especially with multi-platform games. I haven't bought any Codemasters game in such a long time, as they never feel like you are actually controlling the vehicle you are supposed to be driving.
Which isnt to say I'm not enjoying Project CARS, because after the wheel calibration, I'm quite enjoying it, but I do have to say I consider it a very good arcade driving game rather than a proper Simulation.
:D
Yes it's not a proper Simulation but in all honesty that's a positive for me as I'm gamepad only. This has the feel of Forza but nowhere near as polished in my opinion. It actually still feels like an Early Access game to me.
Graphically it looks good even on my GTX 760. The AI isn't great and the collisions are not realistic some of the time but neither are game breakingly bad.
My biggest issue though is the gamepad handling. There is something just not right about it. Steam says I've put 5 hours into PCars and literally all of that has been time messing with the gamepad settings. That 5 hours of tweaking it has improved it but it's still not great. Considering the game has a XBox controller preset, I'd expect it to be a lot better out of the box. It's not just me, there are a multitude of people complaining about it on the official forums. For me, even after so much tweaking, the deadzone settings are still weird, the sensitivity even at their lowest is ridiculously sensitive and everything just feels that bit off.
I'll say this. It feels like there is a good racing game trying to get out from underneath the gamepad handling issues but unless they patch I'm not sure I'm going to get to experience it. There are so many complaining though that I'd be surprised if they don't address it.
I've played Race 07 on PC with a 360 controller and the handling in that was vastly superior with no tweaking needed.
I have to say that with my admittedly limited online race sim experience, I really like the handling and response of the cars (using a G25 wheel and pedals), but I'm not qualified enough to tell you if it is a sim or not - but to my inexperienced eye it seems like a sim to me given the huge array of setup options? I have played a little AC and it seemed to me to be at least as good as AC and I prefer the graphics of Project Cars to AC.
I'm pretty sure that patches will come thick and fast now with the game live. The forums are full of activity, so there are sure to be improvements coming with setup, guidance etc.
I rotated my wheel to full and it registered a number which it remembered when I centred, them I hit next. I then held the wheel at 90 degrees and hit next whilst still held. Seemed to work fine in game, and I suck at racing games, I did the first 2 kart series at Novice level and won. I did increase the AI quality to 60% as it was a tad easy and whoa, even set at 60% one mistake and its a challenge to recover in a 5 lap 3/4 mile track race.
8+ hours now and I've given up trying to tweak it. I've taken my frustration to the official forums in the hope of it getting fixed
http://forum.projectcarsgame.com/showthread.php?22966-Please-Fix-Gamepad-Support-On-PC-Version&p=891415#post891415
So no more moaning here :) I'll do it where it might make an impact.
Hopefully you'll get a resolution of your controller issues RedFour.
After the hope of yesterday, today has been a bit of a downer, Project CARS related, While some cars I can drive, as they feel reasonably ok, more are terrible, and I hope to never drive again. The real frustration comes when a car is almost ok... and I end up screaming in frustration.
Generally the cars don't have a handling trait, understeer, or oversteer, or are heavy and slow to turn, having momentum. They just seem to have either have grip or not. To give a car understeer, they just seem to remove grip at the front, and visa versa for oversteer, & through the force feedback, you never really get a genuine feeling for grip levels, and what the car is doing.
Probably for controller, where you never really get this information, and for those who just want to drop in for a bit of a blast, then this game is fine. However as a more hardcore sim racer, this isn't for me.
This is a pity, as I like the range of cars and tracks, and the sometimes spectacular graphics, and I'll probably continue playing for a little while, as I try out the aforementioned cars and tracks, but I don't think this will have a permanent place on my computer, as I prefer something a little more realistic.
As RedFour says, its a Grand Turismo / Forza type of game, rather than an Assetto Corsa rival.
I hope this information will be useful to anyone thinking of purchasing the game. P.S. Mine is the PC version.
:D
If there is still any doubt that the gamepad support is buggy beyond belief then here is the proof of just one of the issues with it
[video=youtube;NPnqLH0egbU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPnqLH0egbU[/video]
Wow, RedFour. If a picture is worth a thousand words, whats a Video worth!
Thats, well..... horrendous.
Sometimes when I exit the pits on a new session, the steering just does not work. Exit and try again and all is fine, but to have the controller inputs fail intermittently, that would cause me to just give up on a game till the issue was patched.
By the end of last night I had finally found a partial solution.
I had set the steering sensitivity as low as 5 but it had made no difference. I hadn't gone lower as I didn't think that extra -5 could make any difference. Then I read a forum post about how certain gamepad bugs only fix themselves at 0 sensitivity. It worked. The difference is night and day. It means some cars are undriveable such as the karts but others are a much better experience.
It needs patching but at least it's playable. The main issue now is I tend to play online by selecting random game and this can end up joining a lobby where these settings don't work and you can't change it once in a lobby. But it's a step in the right direction.
The game now feels a lot like Forza and for me that's exactly what I was hoping for.
Biggest issue for me is the online joining or creating a game on our server simply don't work..teething problems I'm sure they'll get solved fast.
hiya, LFS veteran here. Could anyone take me through simple comparsion between LFS x AC x PC ? Deciding what to drive next..whats more fun. Did those new games AC+PC managed to top LFS? Thanks
Quote from: ReddFour;399063By the end of last night I had finally found a partial solution.
I had set the steering sensitivity as low as 5 but it had made no difference. I hadn't gone lower as I didn't think that extra -5 could make any difference. Then I read a forum post about how certain gamepad bugs only fix themselves at 0 sensitivity. It worked. The difference is night and day. It means some cars are undriveable such as the karts but others are a much better experience.
It needs patching but at least it's playable. The main issue now is I tend to play online by selecting random game and this can end up joining a lobby where these settings don't work and you can't change it once in a lobby. But it's a step in the right direction.
The game now feels a lot like Forza and for me that's exactly what I was hoping for.
see if this helps
http://www.deadmen.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?41186-having-control-issues-with-your-FF
Hi main,
I have played LFS for some time, and now I'm playing AC. Don't know about pCARS, so someone else has to judge this :)
AC's pros (compared with LFS):
- very good physics including tyre model and force feedback
- laser scanned tracks
- you can drive real world cars and tracks
- modding possibilities: there are lots of high-quality track and car mods to choose from.
AC's cons (compared with LFS):
- poor game design. There are some very basic stuff missing making it hard for new-comers to get in touch with the game. My top 5 topics here:
1. poor chat (you need to enable an mod-app for being able to chat in-game)
2. poor session management (when qualify time is over, you won't be able to finish your lap, when race is over you are immediately sent to pits and confronted with a quite ugly race-over screen)
3. poor race start (no false starts are possible) and poor pit lane modelling (automatic pit-limiter)
4. poor timing functionality especially in multiplayer (the app 'ptracker' helps with this a bit, but still it is odd, that such a basic feature is missing here).
5. poor netcode (even with pings below 100ms players often have visible lags)
- high demands on the PC (you need some up-to-date PC components for being able to run AC smoothly; I have a laptop with a mobile NVIDIA chip and there are some combos I am not able to run at all, also I have only limited graphics candies)
- options are only changeable in the launcher. Which is quite annoying...
That's all for now, I hope this helps... If you want to give AC a try, meet us at the DMR server, the busy days are Mondays and Wednesdays :)
That's good info Neys. I'm not as experienced in racing cars but I can for sure observe the net performance and the transitional qualities of PCars. I've not really noticed anything too ugly but then again I've yet to complete a full race from setup through practice, qualifying and the actual race.
The dMw dedicated server was working fine for me last time I setup a game lobby on it and I raced the 78 Lotus F1 for a while getting a few publics joining me and we had a nice clear game. I was last lol.
Quote from: Neys;399179Hi main,
I have played LFS for some time, and now I'm playing AC. Don't know about pCARS, so someone else has to judge this :)
AC's pros (compared with LFS):
- very good physics including tyre model and force feedback
- laser scanned tracks
- you can drive real world cars and tracks
- modding possibilities: there are lots of high-quality track and car mods to choose from.
AC's cons (compared with LFS):
- poor game design. There are some very basic stuff missing making it hard for new-comers to get in touch with the game. My top 5 topics here:
1. poor chat (you need to enable an mod-app for being able to chat in-game)
2. poor session management (when qualify time is over, you won't be able to finish your lap, when race is over you are immediately sent to pits and confronted with a quite ugly race-over screen)
3. poor race start (no false starts are possible) and poor pit lane modelling (automatic pit-limiter)
4. poor timing functionality especially in multiplayer (the app 'ptracker' helps with this a bit, but still it is odd, that such a basic feature is missing here).
5. poor netcode (even with pings below 100ms players often have visible lags)
- high demands on the PC (you need some up-to-date PC components for being able to run AC smoothly; I have a laptop with a mobile NVIDIA chip and there are some combos I am not able to run at all, also I have only limited graphics candies)
- options are only changeable in the launcher. Which is quite annoying...
That's all for now, I hope this helps... If you want to give AC a try, meet us at the DMR server, the busy days are Mondays and Wednesdays :)
Thanks for comparsion Neys. So physics is better than LFS? Sounds good. What about damage model compared to LFS?
What about pCARS, I am guessing its more arcade? Anyone having played all three of them?
Quote from: main;399192Thanks for comparsion Neys. So physics is better than LFS? Sounds good. What about damage model compared to LFS?
Ah forgot about this. There are two dimensions of damage model:
- physics side: in AC, body damage has significant impact on top speed and downforce (which is different to LFS AFAIK). There is also suspension damage modelled with similar effects than LFS, and you can damage your gearbox as well. I never had any clutch issues in AC, in contrast to LFS. Also flat spots are modelled and you get some wheel vibrations with flat spotted tyres. You won't be able to drive anymore after heavy impacts (total engine damage).
- visual damage: one of AC's weaknesses, because in multiplayer you only see damage of your car, and no damage is visualized for opponent cars. We hope that this will be addressed by the developers in the next release, though (they said they plan to "improve the multiplayer experience" whatever this means). Also the maximum amount of visual damage in AC is generally less than the one of LFS.
Project Cars seems to have died a quick death on the dMw forums and the developers are now fund raising for PC2! I'm a bit baffled as to why. Anyone know?
Sent from my ASUS_Z00AD using Tapatalk
Quote from: albert;400794Project Cars seems to have died a quick death on the dMw forums and the developers are now fund raising for PC2! I'm a bit baffled as to why. Anyone know?
I guess they saw how quick they could make money, a quick look at the PC2 forum shows they have already raised £398,325.00 of their £7mil target in just 2 weeks or so since it was announced, not bad going!
Quote from: albert;400794Project Cars seems to have died a quick death on the dMw forums and the developers are now fund raising for PC2! I'm a bit baffled as to why. Anyone know?
Sent from my ASUS_Z00AD using Tapatalk
In my opinion pc1 could have been good but the number of bugs still present in it is ridiculous. The career mode just isn't worth playing. For this reason I wouldn't dream of helping to fund pc2. Such a shame.
Do any of the original backers of PC1 actually play it? FatBob? TeaLeaf? You guys really championed PC and I was sort of hoping it would bloom into a viable dMw game. Any feedback?
I've been on it a limited amount and loved what I played. My gaming time in recent months has been severely restricted though so I have not given it the run out or time it deserves......yet. But I will when the diary allows.
It started out really well, interesting new tracks like the California highway 4 section run and the classics (although they never had the correct names, few laps of Northampton anyone !)
Loads of annoying bits on and between menus that changed every month and then ..nothing, everything just seemed to be left where it was and next thing I see its launched.
I had picked up AC by this point and IMO (even given the very fair negative points made by Neys on P2) it just feels so much better to drive, the cars really do feel alive through your wheel and pedals and the tracks are just so much better you can really feel the bumps and cambers and then the interaction between them both is spot on.
Quote from: albert;400794Project Cars seems to have died a quick death on the dMw forums and the developers are now fund raising for PC2! I'm a bit baffled as to why. Anyone know?
Sent from my ASUS_Z00AD using Tapatalk
Because they can i guess. (have to ask why they need to crowd fund after just selling 1.2 million copy's + at £40 each)
If your prepared to work like an engineer for hour after hour on the force feedback settings (37 adjustment sliders for feedback alone per car/track) the game feels pretty sweet.
But flawed online much like ac. (both too much to list)
Once again lfs is the only finished game that allows close hard racing online for now. (eagerly awaiting patches sad face)
I hadn't even realised they were crowdfunding PC2. :blink:
Shows you how out of the loop I have been...... :sad: