Racing games - GTR, Race07, Rfactor, etc

I’m not saying I’m perfect at being the lead car, but here is what helps me

  1. The more comfortable I am with a track/car, the easier it is for me to deal with a car in close pursuit. Some of this is seat time and practice, but its also important to have a stable setup (over a fast but unstable setup).

  2. I try to check mirrors habitually twice per corner or corner complex: just before and into braking zone, and during or just after track out. Depending on what I see during track out I may watch mirror a bit during the straight. This way I get a read on people possibly overtaking in braking, and a read coming out of the corner. But I’m not “driving in my mirror” which to me leads to mistakes. I try to follow a similar pattern in real life track events.

Some sim-related things
-I use the virtual mirror, and I’ve reduced its FOV so the appearance of distance is more accurate/useful for me.
-triples or VR gives you the ability to check your left-right. My son uses a single monitor but she is proficient using buttons on the wheel to look left-right.
-the Racelabs overlay has a radar tool that can be very helpful.

Regarding braking: I think iracing’s simulation of brakes is fairly rudimentary. I just adjust pad and brake bias to my liking and have not seen an issue. rFactor had a far more sophisticated modeling and I remember having brake failure more than once when I got it wrong.

The Autumn Sale kicked off on Steam and the Ultimate edition of Assetto Corsa is on sale for $8.

If you somehow haven’t picked this game up yet then even despite its age the full content and all of the community mods combine to make this remarkable value for money.

I picked that up over the summer. I might be missing something though – in real life I have a driver’s license but never learned how to drive stick. Is there a racing/driving school for Assetto Corso (and other driving games) where I can learn how to drive better, from a novice’s point of view?

The old Gran Turismo games had great driving schools, that you needed to pass for progression. It’s something I really miss in modern drivers, I’m not sure there’s really anything like it. GT2 was particularly great at teaching a ton of stuff. As for modern games, none of the ones that I’ve played were very helpful in that regard.

GT sport has driving lessons. They even have a track.guide with videos for every single track. It’s actually how I finally got over the hump of learning tracks. It’s really a fantastic game. Can’t wait for the new one to come out.

I wanted to respond regarding driving stick. I drive a manual in real life, but never in a sim. I have never liked the implementation within sims. My point is you do not have to drive in 3 pedal mode in the sims. Set yourself for autoclutch and map paddles or buttons to shift up and down.

Most sims do not have a driving school, but they all have the ability to turn on a driving line indicator. This will show you where to place the car, when to brake/accelerate, etc. Pick a low powered car, like a Miata or Fiat Abarth. Drive the sim with that on until you are pretty familiar with the track, then turn the driving line off. Drive the track without the line help until your lap time is pretty consistent (say within less than 0.5 sec/lap), then try racing against the AI. You might need to tinker with AI’s speed settings (it will be adjustable) until you are comfortable with racing around other cars.

I do not suggest turning on help features like autobrake or auto-stability as this will just make you develop bad habits. Some cars will have ABS or TC. Those are fine of course.

Here is a website that goes over alot of the basics

Maybe start with Driving the racing line: turn-in, apex, exit - Drivingfast.net and then read basically all the articles in the car control section.

Wow – thanks for the advice! That’s just what I was looking for.

Ya even if you had a 3 pedal setup and a stick it’s not exactly the same as real life where you can really feel the clutch. What was said above is really good. I’m far from great at sim racing, but the main thing I would say is stick to 1 track and really learn it. And then move onto another one. If you bounce around track to track and car to car it’s just going to be super difficult.

Driving with the line is great to figure out how you should be approaching the turns. What you should be doing with the driving line up is figuring out reference points for when to brake and when to accelerate. That’s really the most important thing to be able to replicate it lap after lap.

For example we raced at Watkins Glen last night in F4 cars. On one turn there’s just a light pole on the left. That was perfect spot to hit the brakes and turn it. So each lap I would be looking for that pole as a marker. And then as I was turning I was waiting for a marshals box to show up on the screen on the right to know when to slam on the gas.

Without reference points it’s a guessing game each lap which won’t end well.

Here is a pro-tip I got from real world racer Randy Pobst (from an article I read): If you are waiting until you can slam on the gas, you are too late adding the gas and therefore slower than you could be. To get the best track-out speed you need to start applying the gas earlier, but incrementally. You roll onto the gas as you unwind the wheel. Also, higher exit speed trumps later braking or higher apex speed because exit speed is speed you get to carry all the way down the next straight and help you make passes.

Believe me, I have to practice this! Once I know a track and now I’m looking to knock off time, one of the things I pay attention to is when and how I’m getting back onto the gas. I’ll often find myself waiting until I can slam on the gas too. So then next lap I’ll see if I can add gas a bit earlier but incrementally. Sometimes that means I need to change my approach to the apex so the car has completed the hard cornering a bit earlier (ie early apexing).

A technical question please.

When I plug my wheel (Logitech 920) it causes ‘up’ auto-scrolling. Any idea how to stop that?

I’m thinking of dipping my toes in the sim racing waters again. I played 100s of hours of Race 07 back in the day, but haven’t done much with the genre since. I’m kind of over old-as-dirt sims (i.e., anything more than five years old) after pouring so much time into Race 07 and am looking for something new. Or at least newish.

On a whim, I checked GPLaps’ YouTube page—sim racing dude who did a great playthrough of the 1965 F1 season years ago and now seems to be uploading regularly again—and noticed he’s done quite a few videos about Automobilista 2 the past few months. It seems to tick off a lot of boxes for me:

  • Emphasis on racing cars rather than street/production cars. I am not a car person and do not care about driving or collecting them beyond having access to different racing series.
  • On that note, it has nearly every major category of circuit racing cars (open-wheel, prototypes, GT, touring) aside from US stock cars. However, they are close enough to touring (particularly the Brazilian stock car series) to not bother me as much and it could possibly be addressed in a future DLC. Plus, some historics including mid-'60s formula cars (i.e., the best racing cars). I respect ACC’s focus on GT cars and had an okay time with it over a free weekend once, but I need variety in my sim.
  • No track modding, but AMS2’s track selection is very good—a mix of widely praised tracks with some more obscure South American ones thrown in, plus a decent selection of second-tier British tracks like Oulton Park—though many are $10 DLCs.
  • Seems to have good AI if you lower the aggression slider significantly. This is important because online racing is not my thing.
  • Customizable AI files, so I can play past and present racing seasons to the extent allowed by the available tracks and what modders have come up with (though the files look similar to those of Race 07, so I could probably throw some together myself if needed). It’s supposed to have an in-depth career mode coming too, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

Additionally, the ongoing Racin’ USA DLC series is plugging a lot of holes in its track list and the third part is focused on oval racing. Competent oval racing in a non-oval based sim is a unicorn from my experience, so that has me intrigued as well, assuming they pull it off.

Probably, I will wait for a sale to get into it. So, in the meantime, does anyone here have any impressions of it? In particular, what are its flaws? A search suggests that it’s far from the most popular sim on this forum, but at least a few of you have played it and I’ll try not to infer much about its quality from the paucity of posts here.

I am a massive fan of Reiza’s work and the things they pulled off with the original Automobilista were bordering on witchcraft considering it was really just a very fancy mod for the original rFactor. For AMS2, Reiza switched from rFactor’s isiMotor to Slightly Mad Studios’ Madness Engine which was used to power Slightly Mad’s Project Cars series.

If you’ve played any of the Project Cars games then you’ll know where some of the potential flaws are.

Fortunately, your timing is impeccable and a recent major update broke the back of the remaining major problem, (car feel and consistency), which means it’s a great time to get into the game.

Despite being a Reiza fanboy I wasn’t convinced that they could bring the Madness Engine to heel, (especially as even SMS gave up entirely when releasing Project Cars 3), but it does feel like they made a massive step forward recently with the 1.3 update.

This means they can go back to smaller iterations over other smaller problems. Like underbaked features (custom championships, AI customisations, [+others]) and remaining smaller problems (AI “wobble” in traffic and AI corner aggression, [+others]).

So what you get now is a sim that isn’t quite as “simmy” as rFactor2, ACC and iRacing, is quick to setup and get into the fun and looks just amazing. It also has clearly the best “environment” for racing, with real weather, day/night transitions and track state transitions (e.g. wet-to-dry) that are pretty much above anything else.

I’d still say wait for a sale, because the whole package is still quite expensive, but if they can nail the feel of oval racing when that content comes it’ll really push itself into the front pack of contenders.

Oh no! I played Project Cars 2 and did not like it. However, the most frustrating thing was racing open-wheel cars on tight circuits (Long Beach most notably) and having the AI persistently wedge their wheel axle into mine as if by magnetism, even when given space. It doesn’t look like that happens in AMS 2 and presumably other, less memorable issues I had are addressed or improved as well.

Otherwise, it sounds like what I want. The AI wobbling in traffic is a bit concerning, but presumably that gets addressed in the oval DLC, or else how is oval racing going to work?

Thanks for the response.

They’ve been slowly tuning the wobbling out.

In Project Cars 2 it did look at times like a TVTropes moment where a robot was arguing with itself, trying to work out one of those impossible logic problems.

In close proximity to the player or other AI it would look like there was some kind of hard-coded border for safe distance and the AI would cross it, make a micro-adjustment to steering to get out of that “danger zone” then steer back into it and out and so on, over and over.

One of the great things about AMS1 was how close the AI could race you without problem, so hopefully Reiza can find a way to continue their clear progress and fully replicate that for the Madness Engine.

I’ve not tried AMS2, but to me the closest descendent of Race07 is Assetto Corsa. While older than AMS2, to me it looks good and is dirt cheap to get all the content. With all the content you get a heck of a lot of cars and tracks, but AC also allows modding and you can get nearly anything you want. .

AMS2 is discounted 50% for Steam’s Lunar Sale and has a demo, so I reckon I’ll be giving it a go over the weekend. The only bothersome thing (for now) is the DLC structure. Specifically, it does not seem possible to get the historical tracks DLC separate from the premium expansion (or season pass) bundle, as illustrated by this graphic I found:

ams2 dlc

Which is a little unfortunate as I’m not interested in the three car packs.

Loved this today. The ultimate difficult Souls-like where one mistake can derail hours of work.

Excellent!

This is an interesting deal. Especially if you don’t have an existing iRacing account.

iRacing is some kind of multiplayer doohickey right? As a single-player-only gamer, I can continue to ignore it, right? How is the rest of the bundle for single player campaigns?