rec.autos.simulators

Graphically it looked nice enough, but the physics and frame rates...

Holy schmoly!  It's a total piece of you know what!

I'm running a Falcon NW Mach V, P-III 933, with 384meg of 133RAM and a
64 meg GeForce 2 GTS video card, which by today's standards isn't
cutting edge any longer, but ain't too shabby either. I can run other
sims/games like N4, F1-2001, CMR2, and Rally Trophy just fine so I
know my system isn't that far off the mark, but this demo/game must
require a Cray supercomputer to get acceptable fps!!!

I've seen posts on High Gear that say that Codemasters is aware of the
FPS problem, and will have it resolved in the full release, but I have
to ask WHY, if they knew this was going to be such a dog, did they
release it to the public?!?!?

Talk about shooting themselves in the foot! DOH!!!

Even with the qualifying statement that it's only 60% complete, it's
still an embarrassment. Hell they would have been better off just
offering a move file to download and view, then to drop their pants in
public like this!!!

Apparently they must have felt a 60% demo was "good enough" to give to
Computer Games magazine for their monthly samples disk, which doesn't
say allot for codies marketing department. Ya gotta think that someone
must have been asleep at the wheel to let it go out the door in this
sort of condition.

I've always had the opinion that a racing game should be "drivable" to
be enjoyable. That all the eye candy in the world won't make up for a
title that isn't fun and somewhat challenging to drive. This doesn't
mean hard core true to life physics, but it also doesn't mean an
arcade simple game either.

Sims/games that require outlandish system requirements, or that
require endless amounts of tweaking in order to control the car
(without spinning out after less than one lap, etc) may be cutting
edge in their realism and look but if I can't jump in and run some
hotlaps right away then what's the point?

I don't have the time any longer (7 month old Daughter to look after)
to spend hours and hours tweaking and hacking a game to improve the
framerate, or endless free time to master the twitchy controls of some
"ultra-real" racer.
I just want to be able to run a quick race or a few hotlaps once in
awhile, and if I'm lucky and it's early enough in the morning or late
enough at night, maybe run a full race distance.

I don't have the time to reprogram a game just to make it "driveable"
and enjoyable.

If Codemasters can't get a demo right, then I will surly wait until
it's fully released and reviewed by other members of RAS to determine
if it's worth my while before I open my wallet and spend my hard
earned cash on it.

Your thoughts?
Jay J

Simon

[snip]

I don't have any inside information, but I do work in the software business
and sometimes you don't have any choice. They probably had a commitment with
Computer Games to provide them with a demo on a set date. They also probably
had a penalty clause for failure to live up to that commitment. So they
released what they had, KNOWING it was gonna get negative reviews, but
counting on short memories. They'll blitz us with ads telling us how great
the game is, and 2 months from now when it's released, we'll all try it
anyway.

Because we all HOPE that the next one is IT, the game/sim we've all been
waiting for.

Brit
btgoss

"> Computer Games to provide them with a demo on a set date. They also
probably

Any magazine would be crazy to allocate room in their pages without a
guarantee that the content would be there in time for publication.

"Compromise itself?" Come on.

As for the shabby peformance, Codemasters has put out buggy, incomplete
demos of other games in the past and they turned out fine in production,
this is no different.  I think they do it intentionally (the
incompleteness, not the bugginess) to get some early feedback on what
issues people are having (okay, today I'm an optimist).  Personally I am
glad that they do, and I know to not expect the demos to be issue-free.
I am very much encouraged by what I see in the demo.  As I said in the
other thread, it drives as well as a certain mod that a lot of people
around here are playing.  And I think the other issues will get

DDR Radeon, 256 meg RAM), so that is not a huge issue for me.  You never
really upgrade for one game anyway, you upgrade for one initially and
then over the next year it turns out that it was a damn good thing you
upgraded when you did because all the other games you get after that
point seem to need the increased power also.  I have just gotten used to
the fact that if I want to play the latest games, I am going to have to
upgrade something at least once a year, and pretty much do a total
rebuild at least every two years.  Of course if you don't like that
there is always the Xbox version....  ;o)

I also agree there are some framerate problems, but it seems as though
everyone is going nuts about the framerates! I mean, it's a game that isn't
going to come out for a while, the graphics have to be amazing to compete
with the level of detail the next generation of games coming out will have.
So, shouldn't we expect it to run a bit slower?  I'm not justifying the
performance I saw in the demo though.... It's just that a few of the
complaints were "I had it on full detail 1024x 32bit resolution and it ran
slow". Maybe putting the detail down will help...

It works about 50% of the time when I try to use my wheel (FerarriFF), the
other half of the time it crashes completely. The force feedback seems a
little weird, it's pulling me into the corners sometimes...

And the car powerslides really good.... Is a toyota supra supposed to
powerslide that well around a tarmac corner??

But, I thought I remembered reading a thread on here a while ago saying that
codemasters weren't making this game any type of Simulation. It looks like
it's meant to compete with Gotham Racing or whatever anyways. So, I'm not
really angry about the physics being arcade-ish, since that's what I
expected when I loaded it up.

The car models look awesome though :)

Either way, I'll probably still end up at least trying the full-retail :)

Mike
http://mikebeauchamp.com

I have however seen full releases/upgrades of our product go out the door,
supposedly QA'ed yet end up so full of bugs that we had to contact our
clients to advise them not to upgrade/install it, but that's another story
for another time.

A demo is basically a marketing tool to try to drum up interest for
potential buyers of the software, and when you put out ***like this, your
basically shooting yourselves in the foot!

JJ

Each of these games were/are some of the best offerings for their genre when
they hit the shelves, and CMR2 is still arguably the 2nd best Rally game on
the market (behind Rally Trophy) so I hope this one turns out for the best.

I also understand that demos will / may have bugs, and they are not the
complete game, fair enough.
But... When you only get like 3 FPS in a demo, that's totally unacceptable.

Let's hope they get things ironed out, and let's hope they troll the forums
for feedback because there is no better source for honest input/opinions of
what we the RAS community wants to see in a racing sim.

Jay J

A publisher wouldn't enter into a deal "compromising" itself by releasing a
horrendous demo?  Publishers enter into deals that result in them releasing
horribly buggy "final" games!  C'mon, what planet are you from? :0)

--
Joe Marques

What do we want?, a buggy demo, that makes the developers aware of what
problems they have to fix,
or to get a buggy software that we actually had to pay for?.
Bad framerate was a problem of F1 2001 RETAIL, and we didnt get any
forcefeedback either. We had to
wait for the patch to get a optimised version with better framerate and
forcefeedback.
I rather have seen EA Sports released a demo, where they could have spotten
the bad framerate, and
that people wanted ff right away.

I get acceptable framerates on my computer and its even slower then yours.
Today, Nvidia releases or leaks
drivers like there is no tomorrow. Its like 3000 different nvidia drivers
out there for our geforce-cards. Some work
great for games, while ohters make us almost throw the computer out the
window. This is another problem for
gamedevelopers, since most seem to like to have the newest drivers, even if
they are leaked betas with known problems.

Another fact that Codemasters where pretty silent about the demo, and havent
released a demo on their webpage only shows
more that this demo wasnt probably going to be released, if it wasnt for
that magazine

Come on, we havent paid $40 for this demo. Its incomplete, just look in the
files of the game, and you see marshalls etc, which
we havent seen in the demo. No penaltys for cutting corners etc. This demo
isnt even complete as a demo.
I guess we will wait for another demo to get released.

Now Codemasters know about FPS-problems, Soundproblems, Bad physic (or bad
data of the car into the physic-engine), too
sensitive damage, wierd AI, etc.
If they release a game with this bugs still left in it, with no plans on
fixing them, then well, we dont have to buy it.

 J

Search for the mpeg of a 900HP Supra drifting around corners on tarmac!.
Its a superb video :) It should be availble on the net.
The funny thing is that this car looks like the one in the game. Orange and
everything :)

I've never expeceted this to be a simulator either. Why do everyone expect
the new
games to be simulators?. One big part of the costumers are little kids, that
dont want
realistic car-games, they want "floor the pedal"-games.

Yeah =) Just wait for hires textures too :)