1st Impressions

Started by Deetz, May 08, 2015, 09:19:07 PM

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Deetz

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.
dMrDeetz is currently :

Neys

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....

TeaLeaf

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.
TL.
Wisdom doesn\'t necessarily come with age. Sometimes age just shows up all by itself.  (Tom Wilson)
Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships. (Michael Jordan)

Deetz

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
dMrDeetz is currently :

ReddFour

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.

TeaLeaf

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.
TL.
Wisdom doesn\'t necessarily come with age. Sometimes age just shows up all by itself.  (Tom Wilson)
Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships. (Michael Jordan)

albert

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.
Cheers, Bert

ReddFour

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.

Deetz

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
dMrDeetz is currently :

ReddFour

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]

Deetz

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.
dMrDeetz is currently :

ReddFour

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.

albert

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.
Cheers, Bert

main

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

sulky_uk

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


I came into this world with nothing,
through careful management I\'ve got most of it left.