rec.autos.simulators

   /ft, sick of you-know-who already (although I _do_ find it a bit too
amusing to         killfile just yet, I'm a terrible plonker)

--
Ken's Sig 3.0

"Who is the more foolish?  The fool, or the fool who follows him?" - Obi-Wan
Kenobi

Go #43 and #44!

volksy (at) geocities (dot) com
volksy (at) yahoo (dot) com

[Snip)

They had that ad in PC Gamer UK last year, and another one with the picture
of Graham Hill and a very little Daemon asking "When will i get to race dad"
(or something like that, doesn't remember), and Graham answering, "In August
1998".

Yeah, or not only FULL FORCE FEEDBACK SUPPORT, what about THE BEST FORCE
FEEDBACK EVER. And put a big A2 size poster with that ad you mentioned with
that great picture of an accelerating starting grid, and i would bought it
again.

What they should do is to make some new car-shapes, model wing-aerodynamics,
make some new track and a new interface and call in CART Racing 2000 :)

--
Olav K. Malmin
remove spam when replying

I agree.

Just wanted to throw my 2 cents into the discussion. I almost did not buy
GPL when in came out, not because it was too hard, but because I had little
interest in '67 formula one racing, which is probably the case for most
20-30 years old computer users. Which is the age of most computer users
(flame away).

I don't know about sales or whatever. My opinion is solely based on what I've
read in this newsgroup and it appears that GPL could have done better
comercially (in terms of sim there's no doubt it's currently the best there's
around).

What I think is the main cause off this low-sales figures is the era (1967)
the game acts in: consider yourself being an average guy who wants to buy a
racing sim/game standing in this computer shop (never having heard of the RAS
discussion group, after all we are only a small bunch of fanatics!) what would
you buy? I think it would be something you can reflect yourself with the
"real" guys on the real modern circuits. So for you americans this will be
probably NASCAR or Indycar and for us europeans it will more likely be modern
formula1. Believe I never would have bought GPL if I wouldn't have had access
to this newsgroup. I did buy GP2 and MGPRS2 however (and in fact I loved them
both up until GPL arrived :))
No matter how much advertising they would have made for that bunch of old cars
you want "reality": You see the guys driving around on your favourite tracks
live on ESPN or whatever and want to copy that on your own PC! I think that's
all there is to the fact that  GPL's  not being sold that massively.
I have two friend who are ***ed to mgprs2 and laugh at me because I keep on
telling them that there's really no alternative to GPL. I should get rid of
those dusty cars they say! The other day I showed one of them my new Logitech
WFF and demonstrated MGPRS2 and GPL with it. At that moment he (finally)
became convinced of GPL's qualities.

My point: GPL didn't sell that much because of its first impression it makes:
Old cars racing around.

Just my $0.02 worth thoughts.

He shoved a copy of GPL into my hands and said "this one has a very good
rating" - which convinced me, because I always believe what the
reviewers say rather than what the publishers say!

However, I do remember thinking that I wasn't particularly interested in
old-fashioned cars and it was only my faith in the reviewers that
persuaded me.

That said, I also remember that my initial reaction to the game wasn't
particularly good either - it didn't seem anywhere near as exciting (or
realistic!) right from the off as Colin McRae Rally, for example.

Of course, once you've put in the effort to learn how to drive the thing
you start to "feel" the limits of the car and discover so much more
about it, but by then most people will already have made up their minds.

On the other hand if you like to trawl the internet to find out about
games you will discover huge amounts of interest and positive comments
for GPL, so maybe it just shows that not as many people surf the net in
anger as has been supposed!

1) It wouldn't run on my PC (P166 + STB Velocity 128) - demo ran at
about 4 fps with everything off :-)

2) I wasn't particularly interested in the era.

3) No force feedback

4) Nobody I knew had it.

5) All the reviews said it was extremely difficult
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   Nortel, London Road, Harlow, Essex. CM17 9NA

and last but not least, (5) is not fixed but actually adds to the
***ion and challenge of the game. I've not seriously played any other
game since I got GPL, and it is the ONLY game I have played online over
the internet.

Any GPL Gold pack that gets released should have on the box in large
letters - full support for force feedback and an online ***
community. It should also have the functionality that GPaL was going to
give us, and it should have a more driveable set of default setups.

The game should also have either direct3d and/or opengl in the box,
since by limiting it to 3dfx/rendition, Papy have effectively eliminated
75% of the market since most of the OEM graphics cards bundled in
machines are ATI cards or TNT/TNT2. I believe that only a very small
percentage of the public are prepared to open up their PCs to put in a
new graphics card. They will instead stick with what they were given
when they bought the PC, and buy another one in 3 years time.

        Paul.

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   Nortel, London Road, Harlow, Essex. CM17 9NA

a) It had _very_ non-optimized code for handling skidding and wheels offroad.
It ran well on my P166/Voodoo2 with detail off, but as soon as I started to
skid the car or got a wheel off the road - slideshow. This convinced me that I
didn't have the machine necessary to run GPL. Sheer luck I re-downloaded the
demo (which wasn't clearly announced as being an updated one, AIR) and found
out that it worked flawlessly.

b) The car setups in the first demo were just plain awful as many people have
pointed out. They should of scared a buncha ppl off right there. Better (more
forgiving) car setups from the first to the final release versions would have
been desirable. The ICR model of having different setups for rookie,
intermediate and advanced drivers was good IMO.

Cheers,
    /ft

Yes it was. And there are lots of reasons why, none of them actually
tells something about the quality of the game but almost all of them
could have been solved before release.
Off the top of my head I think these were the most important mistakes
that caused such a commercial disaster (and 40000 *is* a disaster):

1. no D3D or OpenGL support out of the box > limitation to 3DFX or
Rendition (!) instead
2. completely unusable software renderer as alternative
3. no options to tone down AI as well as driving difficulty
4. resulting from 3. a couple of rather mixed reviews (i.e. great sim
but too hard)
5. a mediocre first demo
6. too steep hardware requirements to run a full field of cars (a sim
that only allows you to hotlap with yourself does not appeal to
everyone)
7. poor advertisment and marketing of the game
and 8. 1967 F1 cars & drivers & tracks don't mean much for the casual
sim racer either...

--Tel

I disagree on this point, I think the add was the final selling point for
me.
Although I bought it before the reviews were out, if I had waited, and read
the reviews, I'm not sure I would have bought it (GPL was my first Papy
sim).

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   Nortel, London Road, Harlow, Essex. CM17 9NA