No reaction from the jaded British crowd.
A cut down version of Project Cars just hit Steam for the low, low cost of free. It features a couple different cars and tracks and you can play it in quick race or time trial modes on two different circuits, (Nurburgring and Monza), and one point-to-point track (Azure coast).
Heh. I need to see if there’s a way to turn off the crowd. It’s fun to see the stands full on race day, but the individual people standing on the track edge are so poorly done.
My son actually took a corner like that in his MINI at the local autocross this weekend. Full lock and full throttle, yo! Unfortunately he nipped the apex cone
iRacing’s 24 hours of Le Mans is running for roughly the next 23 hours. They have live coverage on youtube here.
Coverage is being split at six hours each between four commentary teams, so now we’re onto the second team, which is here.
Hours 13-18 switches to the Aussies here.
The final hours, 19-24, are picked up by racespot who covered the opening six here.
Live timing is here for the whole event.
World Touring Car Champion Jose Maria Lopez is currently on track driving a HPD Prototype.
18 hours and 266 laps into the race and the overall leader and prototype class leader is ahead of the second place car by… half a second.
The GT1 leader is almost two minutes up on second place (a lap in GT1 is ~3:50) and the GT2 leader is ahead by a whole lap.
I’ve just picked up Race07 on Steam for the pittance they’re asking for it, and with some nice Reshade post process tweaks it still looks great.
I’m wondering if any of the expansions have any tracks that are “can’t miss”. I’m not much of a gearhead so I don’t care too much about car variety. But what I’m looking for are tracks with varied / different scenery. It seems like the STCC addons are all Scandinavian tracks, and if it means just lots of pine trees, I’ll pass. But if it goes through towns or has varied locales, I’l like to know which expansions have good ones.
I notice too that NoGripRacing has a ton of downloadable tracks too… there are so many… any of these standouts? I remember I had a small library of downloads from here when I played GT Legends and GTR2 way back in the day, and some were quite nice looking. Let me know if there are any favorites here!
Well, GTR Evolution (an expandalone) has a decent version of Nordschleife, which is always fun.
Not that I remember
I typically go to NoGrip and scan through popular tracks I am interested in.
STCC has some fun non-traditional tracks in the sense of very tight and hilly. .
Yeah, I went on a little downloading kick, and while some of the user tracks are fun enough, most have been converted from rfactor or whatever, and tend to be quite old. None of them match the quality of SimBin’s Race07 tracks, mostly in terms of texture detail and color balance, that actually make Reshade’s post process filters help the official tracks stand out even more.
So I just bought STCC and STCC2… they’re dirt cheap anyway.
As an aside, I downloaded the Project Cars:Pagani Edition (basically the demo) and my aging computer couldn’t handle it well at all, graphically. But Other than that, I noticed the cars felt really slippy, like they were skating around. Is this a by-product of my computer not handling the game well, or is the feel of the cars way, way off in this title? I do remembering feeling like Shift 2 had a weird bull-in-a-chinashop feeling, and it’s the same game dev; but rather than an uncontrollable surging, this is just sliding around.
Enduracers mod for rF2 released. I think this is the best showcase of rF2’s capabilities yet. The tire model in particular has the real-world feel of riding on rubber that rF2 lacks in many mods (but AC has in spades)
I played this for all of 3 minutes before I un-installed it for the same reason. The pig on ice handling drives me nuts in games like this.
Tyre temps seem to be very important in Project Cars. In rFactor2 the start of a race weekend feels awful because there’s no rubber on the truck, but even that game isn’t as reliant on tyre temps. I remember running a GT4 endurance race at Watkins Glen in Project Cars and when it started to rain I came in to change rubber and my cold wet weather tyres were harder to drive on than the warm slicks I had been on. Then because the cold tyres made me slow, I couldn’t get any temperature into them and it became a self-reinforcing circle.
Outside of that I never really felt the cars were very slippery.
I have been going sideways a lot this week though, as Automobilista’s Imola content pack dropped, featuring four layouts of the circuit and the 1972 version in combination with the 1967 or 1969 Formula Vintage cars is sublime.
Despite the 69 Vintage’s pretension of downforce the handling is spiky to say the least, as the car’s power will overwhelm the grip in almost any gear and sawing at the wheel as you slide side-by-side through Tamburello will really get your attention.
Also, having the cars split between the V8 and the heavier but more powerful V12 adds a see-saw element to the race - I’d spend two thirds of a lap easing away from the blue Matra car, then we’d hit the start-finish straight and I’d have to watch him monster back into my mirrors again.
Finally getting a triple-screen for my rig ! Now when I cut people off, it will be on purpose
Beyond that enjoying the 1st two Porsche packs for AC.
Oh dear, they called it a Season Pass. I’m not sure I can be friends with AC anymore.
In racing sim news, I’m trying to burn through DiRT Rally and RSRBR so I can move them out of my backlog limbo. No real time to dig into anything right now.
Also, I want to state for the record that one day I will have a race sim rig.
It’s not like they have to be super expensive. Decided to hook my wheel back up now that I have a video card that should handle all the monitors just fine.
Yep, AC took the Porsche license and are creating 3 content packs you can buy individually or with a season pass. I have been very please with every other content I have bought for AC so I took the plunge.
Each pack includes ~8 cars, with a good mix between modern and historic, and between street and race.
The good: The race cars are all very fun. For example the Cayman GT4 has become an online favorite as the mid-engine car is just fun to drive with the right pedal. The historic 962 and 911 RSR are just brilliant.
The bad: For whatever reason the street-cars are understeering pigs. You can dial some of it out with setup, but it unexpected (and unrealistic) given real Porsche street cars are well known as track-toys. AC did not make the previous street cars, like the excellent Japanese pack, such understeering pigs. I hope they fix this soon!:
Does nobody make a standalone gearshift and clutch pedal unit? I can’t find one with some quick Googling, and that’s disappointing.