Quote from CarlLefrancois :

o_O

Oh yeahhhhhhhh.. the mini and the BF1 are so similar to the XRG. And what's the difference between the UFR and the FZR anyway, they're so generically the same

aston and south city... basically the same right?
some people will say anything! :uglyhamme

I'm afraid you didn't really get the point, Carl. Never did I say all the cars/tracks were the same, but that they generically felt the same to me. I'm not claiming that my opinion is any more valid than somebody else's, and I will not hesitate to point out flaws in iRacing just as I will happily give LFS credit where it's due.

But it doesn't really matter. Some people will see fanboyism in even the most objective remarks and in the most innocent expressions of preference. I've accepted that a long time ago and am really not getting worked up about it anymore.

I have to say Jakg is absolutely right in that LFS is a lot more user friendly. LFS is a very smartly coded piece of software. The fact that you can change every single setting without even leaving the car let alone the game is brilliant. iRacing is indeed far clunkier, but then again, so are most games/racing sims, afaik.

Couldn't agree less on Jakg's complaints about the driving experience in iRacing, though. But I guess the fact that he thinks it's impossible to drift in iRacing says enough.

I stopped racing in LFS long before I subscribed to iRacing. I had gotten bored with LFS, because even the occasional race on CTRA servers felt pretty much pointless (no pun intended). The races seemed meaningless and I didn't have the time for leagues. It all seemed so random. Add the slow progress on top of that, and, as I only recently came to realize, the fact that all cars and/or tracks seemed to feel generically the same to me and lacked character, and there you have why LFS was dead for me.

iRacing re-ignited my passion for sim racing and hence didn't kill LFS. But it will keep me from coming back to LFS.

Quote from gezmoor :

Just hope I remember to cancel at the end because it's going to have to be damn good to justify spending £15 a month on.

You don't have to wait till the end to cancel your subscription, I believe. You should be able to untick the relevant box right away. Just go to your user cp and have a look.

Quote from StableX :

Also, if you do have any good setups to share, feel free to add them to our download area at RSR.

lol, Andy, I wish I was even remotely capable of creating setups myself. I'm useless and rely completely on the goodwill of other people to post theirs. I wish it was different, but I just don't have the time to dig into the art of setup making.

Quote from Mackie The Staggie :

I have yet to come across a subscription based service that doesn't auto renew....from the Video rental shop years ago (mind the good old days of VHS, were there was waiting lists for the latest movies, and having someone on the inside was the greatest one-upmanship in the school playground) to my current gym membership run by the local council. I agree that the other way is a better method, but in the todays culture of doing everything with ease, the auto renew will stay.

I am not contesting that. I am just saying that I wish it wasn't like that and that a company doing it the other way around would immediately be in my good books.

Quote from Mackie The Staggie :

Shock horror, that's how the huge majority of subscrition based services work. It's the accepted model now, and I can't think of one that does'nt have this.

Accepted by whom? And more importantly: Why? Because the customers think it's a great model or because the companys think it's great?

For me personally, it inspires a lot more conficence in the straightforwardness of a company, if they use the (apparantly) "unaccepted" model. Like saying: We don't need to do count on your dopiness to get more money from you, because you'll extend your subscription anyway when you find out what a great service we offer.

Anyway, that's rather OT and a pretty unimportant minor niggle.

Quote from StableX :

Man, the truck is brilliant. Word of advice for this week's track, LOWES, try the default setup for texas rather than Lowes.

Or Vegas (possibly with the gear ratio set to 3.82 instead of 3.89). Seems a little less loose overall and still doesn't get tight in the draft.

Quote from Bob Smith :

I don't like the fact they will automatically start charging you if you don't ask them not to. It should be round the other way. Their supposed to be creating a community not a bank.

I agree. Eventhough it's really easy to not have them renew your subscription (as explained above: just untick a box), such practice always comes across as if you're counting on people's dopiness to generate a little bit of extra revenue.

Quote from StableX :

Can you see yourself putting up the funds and getting it for a 2nd year?

Yes, definitely.

I'm not quite understanding your ffb issues, Android. Did you say you were using the Wingman Software to turn off stuff you can't via the windows profiler for your wheel? I'm asking because I can't. I get the exact same settings when just using the windows profiler, I get using the wingman thingy. The only thing I used wingman for was for assigning buttons on my wheel. Besides that there was absolutely no difference in ffb feel with or without it. Just saying, cause if wingman gives you problems running it in the background, you might as well turn it off.

Also, I'm using the exact same settings for iRacing I ever used for LFS. Even the ingame ffb strength settings are around the same mark.

Edit: One more word about the screenshots: What really makes iRacing look nice are "more shadows". With it turned on, all the objects and cars cast a nice complex shadow that really adds to the immersion when driving. The problem is, when running a resolution of 1680*1050 or higher, you need at least a GTX260 to run them with several cars around. My HD4850 doesn't cut it. But than again, you don't notice it that much while racing. Just having shadows turned on at least gives moving shadows in your own cockpit, which is especially nice, and again, adds to the immersion in closed cockpit cars. Unfortunately, there aren't too many for road racing, yet.

Edit2: The video called iCrash does not have "more shadows" turned on, as you can see from the car shadow on the ground. The second one does have "more shadows", but is crap quality, obviously.

Last edited by Linsen, Fri, 19 Dec 2008 14:55.

Quote from The Moose :

I guess it depends on how much time you spend sim racing as well, as to whether the system as it is provides enough entertainment for someones needs.

True, the more time one spends sim racing, the more that person will long for more variety. For me, one series and one track a week is just about as much as I can handle, with just a few TTs thrown in in the next higher series to get at least a feel for the car for next season.

Quote from The Moose :

I really dont belive that adding these fetures will take away anything from the current system. Theres no reason that it should if the system is as good as a lot of people insist it is

That may also be true, but I wouldn't really know. I would guess, however, that the main reason for iRacing not to provide more pick-up racing and leagues is the fear that less people will race under what they (and I, too) regard as the core of the system. As it stands now, it's actually quite amazing that, given the low number of active racers, during the times I usually race in the series I race (skippy), I always find enough racers for at least 3 splits. That said, I never had problems on saturdays even though the 24h du fun were running at the same times. So, maybe the system is in fact good enough.

Quote from The Moose :

Lets face it, iRacing could do with a lot more racers. Anything that pulls in the punters has to a good thing.

Absolutely!

Quote from The Moose :

Erm, but CTRA is pickup racing....

Which is exactly why I didn't get as much enjoyment from it as I do from iRacing.

Seriously, though, CTRA offered a certain structure to pick-up racing, mainly because of license progression. Also, the yellow flag counts were a very tiny step towards a sort of SR if you cared about the figure (I don't know where CTRA is at now, so the above might be different).

So, you could argue, and some people actually do, that iRacing is nothing more than pick-up racing with a few bells and whistles . I can agree with that, and I think it's closer to pick-up racing than to a league. But those bells and whistles are what make a huge difference for me. Whether you want to call it structured pick-up racing or flexible league racing doesn't matter one way or the other.

It is what it is, and I like what it offers now. Therefore I can only hope that whatever comes (private leagues, true pick-up racing etc.) will not take away from that. I believe that as of yet, iRacing doesn't have the numbers of racers to support pure pick-up racing, leagues and the current system at the same time. Hopefully it can in the future, though, as it will only make the experience better.

btw, I skimmed through a few threads over at RSC and couldn't really find any snobbishness, tbh, but I might have been looking in the wrong threads.

I have absolutely no idea where you people get the idea that "iRacers" are looking down on other sims or feeling in any way superior or are snobbish. It's really funny to see this kind of opinion in an LFS forum, I might add. I don't think there's any other sim forum I know of where other sims are slagged more than here.

Personally, I haven't seen a single thread slagging any other sim on the iRacing forums (except for the ARCA thing maybe, of which I know nothing about). Many people are still racing in rFactor leagues for example and still enjoy iRacing for what it offers. Maybe you guys are mistaking enthusiasm for one thing with contempt for another thing?

As far as pick-up racing goes: there's nothing wrong with it, if you enjoy it. Personally, I never did get too much from it, which is why I raced in CTRA servers exclusively when I was still racing LFS. Still, it never offered the same close racing for me that iRacing does with it's SR and iRating. To have a 24 lap race with no more than 0.5 seconds between me and another driver was completely unheard of for me prior to iRacing. Honestly, I've never had more fun in sim racing than now with iRacing.

Atm it's really quite simple: If you like what iRacing offers as opposed to other sims, you race it -- if you can afford it, that is. But that doesn't mean that any other sim or system is worth less. It's what you prefer and nothing more. And that has nothing to do with "marketing crap", as someone put it. Marketing means nothing as soon as you enter a race and either get what you're looking for or don't.

Quote from John5200 :

wow! looks like the first cool policecar of germany

I don't think so.

Unfortunately, that's still green and silver instead of the much nicer blue and silver, but still...

I reckon that they won't go to europe and scan just one track. They did it for Silverstone, but that had to do with the Radical, iirc. So, Spa will probably not be the only european track coming. I'm crossing my fingers for Sachsenring (unlikely as it may be).

For everybody who's interested and hasn't seen it through the iRacing forums, here's a little taste of what might make it into the next build or is at least heavily being worked on and on the horizon:

http://www.iracingworld.com/_A ... r6/BLOG/146773/57752.html

open practice servers, local yellows on RC's, replays, spotter and crew chief, the Daytona Prototype, the Chevy Impala SS...

Not all of those things will be in the next release, I suppose, but at least none of them seem to be very far off.

F1 is not a spec series, after all. So, if someone in a Force India should happen to win the DC by just finishing consistently up front without ever winning a single race, but everybody else on the grid is just cack and finishes 1st a couple of times, but can't keep the car in one piece most of the other races, the Force India driver would surely deserve the cahmpionship, no?

Quote from ColeusRattus :

I use the same FFB settings I use in LfS, so 900°, 111 FFB strength, centering spring 0.

I use 101% in the profiler and 14 in-game for the Solstice. It's light, but it does feel pretty good to me, considering that it's supposed to simulate power steering. I get a lot of feedback and the car feels very "weighty".

The skip barber, which does not have power steering, is totally different and feels also really good to me.

Well, not much I can say, really, if you're settings are fine and you don't like it. It's personal preference, I guess. For me personally the cars feel much more connected than in LFS. I don't know how much of that is due to the smooth tracks in LFS as opposed to laser scanned ones in iRacing or due to physics or ffb. The whole sensation just reminds me a lot more of driving a real car in iRacing.

What kind of wheel do you use and what are your ffb settings, Coleus?

Quote from Storm_Cloud :

Gold medals is fine, but I would do it a bit differently:

Winner gets 12 gold medals
2nd gets 8
3rd gets 6
4th gets 5
and so on.

most gold medals at the end of the season wins the championship

Perfect solution. That would really make Bernie and the teams happy.

Quote from Velociround :

It played instantly here too, but I was actually saying how the loading time would be if the quality was as said by Linsen:

Yep, that was the point I was trying to make. The Where's Matt Video and all the other high quality ones I tried were loading quite fast for me, too. To me it seems like youtube has achieved a good compromise of quality and loading time.

Quote from Intrepid :

Burn some fuel, come in a wack on some new tyres for a quali run!!! Get the fastest lap, and the championship is yours ! That just aint right!

That's easily rectified by applying the GP2 rule of having to finish in the points in order to get that point for fastest lap, though.

I think the bigger problem is that points for fastest race lap will increase the gap between the top and the runner-ups. I'm sure someone will know off their head how many times the fastest race lap was not set by either a silver or a red car last season. I bet it wasn't often.

I really don't know what you guys are expecting.

Really shameless of youtube to not provide videos in the same quality you get on your 1080p 50" plasma screen and your Blu-ray player...

Seems like Eddie Jordan agrees with most of us on the issue:

Quote from guardian.co.uk :

Former team boss Eddie Jordan has poured cold water on Formula One supremo Bernie Ecclestone's plans to have the drivers' world championship decided by gold medals rather than points. "I think they are a nonsense," Jordan told BBC radio on Wednesday.
"I can't possibly believe he's thinking straight, especially on this one. His focus must be on cost-cutting and nothing else. The rest is just dressing it up." (...)
"He (Ecclestone) is tinkering with something on which he has lost the understanding."

And he also seems to harbour the same doubts I am having regarding the teams' happiness:

Quote from guardian.co.uk :

"There has not been enough thought put into this and for him to say that it comes with the full approval of all the teams -- I'm sorry, I just don't believe it."

Edit: Looking forward to next season on BBC, btw.