Quote from SamH :

iR seems to have the mentality that it's deliberately only appealing to a specific crowd, who have the good things in life, like money and decent internet connections.. anyone who doesn't meet those criteria are completely irrelevent to their venture anyway.

That's perfectly sound to me, what's a better common hobby for the riche than making stuff exclusive so the poor can't touch it.

Quote from SamH :

If your net connection is so bad that you wander away from the site before the intro loads, then it's probably the best thing for everyone if you do.. your connection probably couldn't handle the net traffic required for the game anyway.

They advertise it as playable with dial up

I have a 2meg connection and the intro stuttered like a *insert non PC comment of your choice*

Quote from SamH :

I don't see a different or better way of achieving the intro presentation than the way they did it.

DISCLAIMER: Not talking about iRental in particular here, not pursuing any sim agenda, etc etc

BUT....

From a practical point of view, flash is very good at delivering an animated presentation, but from a design point of view, what is it about flash that encourages everyone to stuff a near contentless download slap bang on their index page.

Its formulaic, devoid of anything approaching intelligence, and frankly rather impolite.




EDIT: Just been thinking... I used to love Joshua Davis' abstract experiments with Flash. Not seen anything as interesting as that for a long time.

Quote from JJ72 :

if you want multimedia material, flash is a easier way to go. and it does not have any real performance hit, you just need good clean interface design.

Which Flash designers never deliver, because Flash-requesting clients want Flash because they want the associated high-impact, bloated intro movies and animations on everything whether it would would work better without animations or not.

Quote from JJ72 :

and dude, just the avatars on this very thread plus the banner can sum up to few hundred Ks, it's nothing....

Page plus content, maybe a few hundred K isn't bad - if you're getting a lot of content. Forum pages are generally pretty bloated, poor examples of web page design though, especially if users are permitted to include avatars / signature images / "userbars". You're comparing a web page "by committee" here to a purpose-built Flash interface and the Flash interface is still losing!

Quote from JJ72 :

and the good thing with flash is you have holders and layers, meaning the main navigation structure only has to be loaded once.

On this page, all the avatars only have to be downloaded once. And the CSS and scripts only have to be downloaded once. That leaves the HTML content (potentially cacheable too) which is still only 75kb even with the "WYSIWYG" post editor included.

Flash designers don't achieve anything in 75kb. I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying it never, ever happens. I used to work with Flash up until v5 (before I eventually stopped accepting Flash work) so I do know what I'm talking about.

Quote from The Moose :

For those people that enjoy proper league racing,(one qual, one race, one chance. Like reality ) endurance racing, practising together on a server with team mates, (the social aspect of sim racing is very important to me)all that sort of stuff, iRacing doesn't cut it. Yet. I have no doubt it will, sooner rather than later.

I agree with you, but I´m not so sure that IRacing will open their system that way. After all, if they do it, in what are they diferent of what you we have now, and how can they justify the price they´re asking??

It is true that there's lots of bad or unecessarily overblown Flash sites out there but a lot of that is because of clients demands rather than developers' preferences.

Anyway, to bring this back to relevance, Flash can do a hell of a lot more than just fancy graphics and animation and since the whole iRacing interface is web based, Flash is the only option.

And if your site requires Flash in the first place, you might as well use it to make the rest of the site look a bit nicer. Simple as that

Quote from thisnameistaken :

Flash designers don't achieve anything in 75kb. I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying it never, ever happens. I used to work with Flash up until v5 (before I eventually stopped accepting Flash work) so I do know what I'm talking about.

Ah that explains a lot - Flash was dreadful back then. The Flash 9 player and Actionscript 3 (which presumably is what will power iRacing) is awesome.

Remember the web is new technology, we're only just beginning to understand how to use it properly.

Quote from chunkyracer :

I agree with you, but I´m not so sure that IRacing will open their system that way.

From their FAQ

Q: Will iRacing.com support private leagues, allowing groups of friends to run invitation-only races?

A: One of our highest priorities is to develop ways to fulfil requests for individual races and leagues.

So it certainly looks like they are doing it. but it will still be run from their servers i suspect, hence justifying the price.

Quote from The Moose :

I'm aware of a few 'hardcore' simmers that feel exactly the same way. It just doesn't provide the type of racing that many are looking for.

you are speaking about what it's like now when its still awaiting the first fee paying beta people. It's really not a shock it doesn't provide it NOW.

Thanks for the comments though. Nice to have a better understanding from the beta testers there now of what's to come

Quote from SamH :

If your net connection is so bad that you wander away from the site before the intro loads, then it's probably the best thing for everyone if you do.. your connection probably couldn't handle the net traffic required for the game anyway.

I don't think that's fair to say at all. They say you can play on dialup and it's a totally different beast to be sending down game data to streaming video, whether through flash or not.

If you base everything on your comment and there was a flash intro on LFS then you'd also assume you can't play LFS on dialup, which one can very well indeed.

Yep, Andy I'm not really referring to the site or its use of Flash, more to the angle that iR is coming from with regard to its userbase.

A few years ago, when everyone at home was on dial-up and everyone at work was on half-T1, there was a two or so year phase/spate of designing corporate B2B (the main body of the dotCom movement) websites with no regard to home users at all.. heavy use of Flash when it was absolutely not required, poorly or hardly compressed graphics on main webpages and so on. The thinking behind it was that the sites weren't for home users, so they weren't designed to be home-user friendly. As long as people who they wanted to do business with could access their site, it just didn't matter.

iR is just following that tradition of thinking/focus, even though that mentality died away on the internet generally when everyone at home got 10-20mbit connections, far in excess of typical business T1 connectivity.

Just like to say something about the graphics. They look pretty good already, however the skies are not bright enough relative to everything else. The grass colour is also terrible. Far too artificial looking and bright. Real grass has a slightly yellow / brown tone to it, and LFS nails grass textures (excluding resolution).

Does anyone know if textures can be edited?

Quote from DaveWS :

Does anyone know if textures can be edited?

from their FAQ

Quote :

Is there any content that we're allowed to mod?
No. As clearly stated in the End User License Agreement, iRacing.com content cannot be modded. To even attempt to do so is a direct violation of the agreement. Again, the content can only be used by registered members within the iRacing service.

thisnameistaken you just have yet see some good clean flash sites, or you have yet see a big one which is innovative enough to justify the loading.

whether a site is loaded with excess media is just a design decision, and there are not only one type of client (although we love to stereotype about it)

about the cache issue, in flash you don't even need to cache it, it's just there, it doesn't even have to be reloaded even when you flip pages, because the background stays put.

and just some sites that i think are good.

http://www.janholoubek.com

http://www.kindnessandhumility.com (i especially like this one)

http://www.leoburnett.ca/FLASH/

i don't think anyone is going to sue you because you changed the grass texture honestly, and technically i don't think they would go through all the trouble encripting everything.

Quote from durbster :

I think a website for an online-only sim can get away with assuming a fairly decent web connection.

The site lists 56kb/s as the minimum internet speed required, and people did race N2003 online with those kind of connections, it should also be noted that some parts of the world are still on dial up and being the only sim that still offers online racing without too much fuss for dial up users is a huge plus.

Quote from durbster :

This is getting rather off the point but have you got any examples?

The Call of Duty 4 website took 4 minutes to load on my college internet connection, which is still a lot faster than dial up/ISDN.

Quote from Technique :

What's with all the Solstice bashing? What would you have preferred instead as the base car, an F1 car? iRacing is an american company and over here your only base sports cars are the MX-5, Solstice, and it's clone the Saturn Sky. The next step up being the S2000 and Boxter which I don't think are as well suited to beginners.

It is the only 'free' car we get to race on R/C and is also the only road car in the whole game. It also should not be confused with the XRG it is a fatter, uglier and heavier than the XRG.

Quote from SamH :

If your net connection is so bad that you wander away from the site before the intro loads, then it's probably the best thing for everyone if you do.. your connection probably couldn't handle the net traffic required for the game anyway.

My connection (BT) is currently dropping to 512kb/s in the evenings which does piss me off when we're paying for an 'up to 8mb' line, latency remains fine though and it is more than enough to play computer games all night long, does stop streaming video though which no doubt is the reason they cut speeds in the evening. You can still buy a 512kb/s line and there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to play any game over it.

Quote from Technique :

I will probably continue racing the Solstice events event after getting a better license. It's certainly the closest I can come to racing my own car on the track (even though my car's engine is in the Formula Mazda....!). If they add other road cars I will probably switch to those instead.

Someone has an RX-8

Quote from JJ72 :

http://www.janholoubek.com

http://www.kindnessandhumility.com (i especially like this one)

http://www.leoburnett.ca/FLASH/

First one took ages to load.

Second one I had no idea what it was about, couldn't find things and nothing intrigued me to click on to see what the fancy trick was going to be.

Third one I've seen before, quite a nice concept but takes ages to find anything and ran slow on my laptop.

Why is it the only 'good' flash sites are flash portfolios and design concepts?

Quote from durbster :

Anyway, to bring this back to relevance, Flash can do a hell of a lot more than just fancy graphics and animation and since the whole iRacing interface is web based, Flash is the only option.

Flash would be required for any multimedia content but the rest of the page could (and should) be done with marked-up text and script.

Quote from durbster :

And if your site requires Flash in the first place, you might as well use it to make the rest of the site look a bit nicer. Simple as that

Who cares what the visitor's experience is like so long as they can see our cool animations. Classic Flash designer attitude.

Quote from durbster :

Ah that explains a lot - Flash was dreadful back then. The Flash 9 player and Actionscript 3 (which presumably is what will power iRacing) is awesome.

No it isn't, it's the same old technology with more of the stuff we used to have to script ourselves automated by the design interface. That interface is still geared towards building animations instead of building applications, and thus it's still a pain in the arse to use for anything clever - especially if you have to maintain/extend that application in the future.

The only real innovation is the inclusion of other media types within Flash applications, and that was probably lifted straight from Director anyway.

i would expect incredible levels of detail to be paying that much. but i guess a great deal of the price is for the 'service. I was hoping for incredible graphics, marbles, rain, dirt on track, pitting, rain, better damage than we've ever seen in a racing sim... at least all of the features of LFS and rFactor.

I've never played, so i dunno...I would've thought that at least pitting would be included.

I made some quick edits; increased the brightness / exposure of the skies, and adjusted the grass colour.

How difficult is it to get decent colours in a game...

Quote from DaveWS :

I made some quick edits; increased the brightness / exposure of the skies, and adjusted the grass colour.

That is so much better Dave.

This is the issue with iracing, its so expensive that you expect it to be bigger and better than everything.

Quote :

How difficult is it to get decent colours in a game...

Not difficult at all, apparently

Yeah, that grass colour was a bit sickly looking :insane:

PS, actually, it's pretty easy to get colours wrong, especially something like grass which covers a relatively broad area, and where subtle changes to the texture can sometimes cause dramatic changes in game. Always better to err on the side of de-saturation, I've found.

Quote from thisnameistaken :

Flash would be required for any multimedia content but the rest of the page could (and should) be done with marked-up text and script.

Yes, like on iRacing.

Quote from thisnameistaken :

Who cares what the visitor's experience is like so long as they can see our cool animations. Classic Flash designer attitude.

Again, as many have pointed out, you're blaming a tool for an engineers' mistakes. Your view is about 5 years out of date.

Quote from thisnameistaken :

No it isn't, it's the same old technology with more of the stuff we used to have to script ourselves

Based on that comment I'll assume you don't know anything about Actionscript 3 so it's not really worth explaining it. All I will say is that a web developer that ignores Flash these days is extremely unwise.

The bottom line is that it is by far the best tool for a site such as iRacing, so there's no reason they shouldn't have used it.

Quote from bbman :

3 cars, one track against 2 cars and (really) two tracks... I can see where I bullshit everyone about the joys that are iRacing, yes...

If you purchase a year's subscription, you get $60 towards to purchase of more cars and tracks. If you're interested in road racing, the next car up, the Skip Barber car, requires VIR and Infineon to compete in the series.

So, for a road racer with a year subscription, you would ideally get the following for your $156 USD:
Cars:
Pontiac Solstice
Legends
Skip Barber Formula 2000

Tracks:
Lanier National Speedway
Lime Rock Park
Oxford Plains Speedway
Summit Point Raceway
South Boston Speedway
Lowe's Motor Speedway
Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca
Virginia International Speedway
Infineon Raceway

Also note, that many of these have several configurations. So take VIR for instance, from the website it has 4 layouts:

• Full Course : 3.27 miles
  
• North Course : 2.25 miles
  
• South Course : 1.65 miles
  
• Patriot Course : 1.1 miles

All of these layouts are included in the sim.