Not ready for primetime

As the final race in the ALMS nears, I've started to think ahead toward next year's field and more importantly the next version of my race sim, GTR2. Since it's been a tight year financially with the new house and new baby, I convinced my wife to purchase GTR2 as my sole Christmas presesnt this year. So far I've been extremely happy with GTR and I've logged MANY hours of gameplay, so the choice to buy GTR2 was practically made for me.

That is not to say I haven't considered other titles. In fact last night I downloaded a demo of rFactor, which as I understand it is of a simliar vintage of gaming engine as GTR. I'd wanted to test it earlier in the year but no public demo was available at that time. I simply wasn't going to plop down $50 for something I'd never test driven.

While skimming the GTR2 forums over at RSCNet I noticed a few questions about prototypes in GTR2. Since the game is based on FIA GT racing there are no native models for prototypes in the game. Someone was quick to point this out, and was followed by the inevitable "well someone is working on it for rFactor" quip. Now I've read a lot of hype about rFactor. Once memorable one in particular referred to that fact that if you believed everything you read in a forum about rFactor it would simulate every kind of race car on the planet, and bake bread too. I don't know about rFactor's culinary skill, but the idea that anyone could create a model for the game was a bit intriguing.

So I zipped over to the official site and saw that a demo was available. Twenty minutes later I was installing the game and gearing up for my first test drive. I plugged in my Logitech Momo steering wheel and readied myself for excitement. After a brief rockin intro I was in the game. I set up the demo car and prepared to hit the track. Immediately the first thing I noticed is that my default controller setup was all wrong. For starters the pedals didn't work, nor the shifter. So I exited back out to the config menu to try and set it up correctly.

While the interface was straight to the point for controller setup, it wasn't very user friendly. For starters it never explained ANY of the various sliders that could be used to tweak controls. As far as I can tell some of them didn't do ANYTHING for my setup. I manually set my steering, gas, brake, etc and then clicked on the force feedback tab. I told the game to run FULL force feedback at 100% and that I had a wheel controller. I figured that would do it, so I jumped back into the game and took the car out for a spin.

Now given that I'd set the driving mode to Veteran (the highest level), I expected the car to be a handful. I also expected full force feedback and a pretty twitchy car. I rolled the power on and quickly noticed that something was slipping, perhaps it was the clutch. Since I don't have a clutch pedal I had to rely upon the automatic setting. I was a little surprised since I was in the "expert" mode, but I said what the hell and continued on.

The first thing I noticed when I hit the track is that my force feedback was clearly messed up. The wheel was rather heavy on the turn in, but about halfway around it would suddenly go limp. My natural reaction was to apply full lock on the steering wheel, but to my surprise the car didn't spin out. I quickly determined that stability control was still engaged, so after a few more tweaks of the settings and force feedback I hit the track again.

This time I tried the "joystick" feedback setting and immediately I noticed a slight rumbling in the controller. The wheel was pretty stiff all the way around so I didn't feel the tendency toward cranking the steering all the way around. I figured I was in business until I hit the first turn and found that my wheel was numb to either steering position, terrain or even wheel lockups under braking. All the things I'd come to rely upon in both real life and GTR were absent. Needless to say I had a rather hard time negotiating the track. To make matters worse the force feedback seemed like more of a hindrance since the "rumbling" I’d felt earlier wasn't tied to any sort of car behavior, and was mostly a distraction.

In all I found the lack of support for my steering wheel to be a show stopper for me. I turned a few laps, but the entire experience felt hollow for me. It's really a shame too because I was looking forward to comparing car physics in rFactor to GTR. I may give rFactor another try, but my first impression is that this simulator is long on promise and short on execution. While the in game graphics look awesome it seems that realism and hardware support have taken a backseat.

Tonight I will test the GTR2 demo which I will be very critical of. When I first drove the original GTR demo I quickly realized the absolute jump in simulator quality after only a few laps. I'd previously logged many hours on NASCAR 2003 both on ovals and road courses through the TransAm and touring car mods. I could immediately feel an upgrade in driving feel and I was blown away. While I don't expect the same sort of jump in sim quality, I do expect the new game to make major improvements in some areas. We shall see how it goes.