rec.autos.simulators

As for the game itself, quite dissapointing. As others have said, its no
sim! It doesn't come close to rally trophy in terms of realistic driving. It
has the usual arcade type features of easy oversteer, anyway you like. A
realistic 4WD rally car will understeer terminally unless you throw it into
a corner. Also, running onto the grass doesn't seem to slow the car down at
all or affect the grip or handling.

The steering (momo wheel) is very slow and sloppy - and I've decreased the
dead zone as much as possible. I find that I often have to dial in full
opposite lock for even small angle drifts, and hold it for a few seconds to
keep the rear in check.

The graphics performance is good. I'm running on a 3 year old Athlon 950
with upgraded Nvidia Ti 4600 video card, and am running at 1600x1200x32 in
high detail with complete smoothness.

However, I'm starting to tire of this game already - its just way to much
arcadish - I suppose that that's how its designed so as to appeal to all the
kids out there.

Cheers,
Tim

It's a typical console port arcade game. Anyone else notice the car
seems to handle or feel very different from different camera views.
In-car cam is by far the best. 3rd person view cam makes the car feel
like it turns directly from the center of the car; way too strange. Bad
thing is the sense of speed in this game isn't where is should be; looks
like I'm racing at 30mph max. or something and the tracks are very narrow.

Nothing special or new here. RalliSport Challenge is much better looking
and more fun.

I've got it down to 3m27s, but that's not the point I wanted to make.

I found trying to set up the MOMO a pointless exercise as I couldn't get it
to recognise the pedals correctly (even in combined axis mode) and reverted
to keyboard control. But if you can get yours to work (tell me how) it might
be worth your while to experiment with display resolution as I found for
some reason it changes the responsiveness of the handling.

Also, there's 3 drivable tracks in the demo: UK, Japan and Sweden.

Jan.
=---

Firstly, thanks for the tip on the extra tracks.

Secondly, I'm surprised by your comments about the pedals, because for me it
was the one case of "plug and play" literally.

I launched the game, went to  options, controllers, saw the that the momo
had been recognised, went back to tracks, and started driving. End of story.

The pedals had been set to split axis and they worked fine, so I left them
that way.
FYI, I'm running the LogiTech WingMan Driver version 4.20.167.0 (25/06/2002)

In CMR 3, steering is set to X AXIS 1, and both pedals are set to Y AXIS 1

Tim

Disagree.  Running onto the grass does slow the car.

You might have to do some added tweaking to get things the way you want.
I've gotten my wheel to behave fairly well with the game, but not completely
the way I'd like to see it.

On the contrary, I'm starting to like the game more and more.  I doubt the
*** racing community will ever find a game to their liking, unless it
be GPL or NASCAR 2003 or the like.

I expected going in that CMR3 would have a little arcade in it.  I will be
looking forward to the final, retail version.

Alanb

As you'll see from the message above that I'm about to type, I've also just
discovered that I didn't have any brakes until now...

Yep... I've been running without brakes until now and didn't realise it. To
me that says something about the realism of the game!

However, I've been driving Rally Trophy for the past couple of years, and
hardy ever touch the brakes - I'm too used to using throttle off over to
slow down by going sideways into corners.

Once I set the brake pedal to z axis, I found your problem. The pedal action
is reversed, and swapping pedals doesn't fix it.

For now I've gone back to setting both pedals to X AXIS 1 and just using the
throttle - that's all I need 95% of the time

Tim

Tim,

Same thing happened to me.  I believe that once I set the deadzone for my
breaks to zero (or near zero), I got my breaks back.  Now all is fine: no
revs at start, split axis and breaks working.  Now I need to tweak my
steering a bit more.

Alanb

Yes, but do you have any brakes? <g>

Seriously... I got to go back and try that, thanks.

Jan.
=---

No go.. neither in split axis mode nor combined. Combined does work, but gas
and brake are reversed upon which the "swap" setting has no effect
whatsoever.

Also, and I only just noticed this, the amount of lock you get is dependant
on how long you hold the input. It appears the amount of lock you put on
your wheel only controls the rate at which this happens... very weird.

Jan.
=---

Try pressing the break when configuring for acceleration and vice versa.

Alanb

Good thinking, but alas.... no effect.

Jan.
=---

However overall I think the demo is a lot better than TRD - demos, game and
with patches.

Andi.

I went out of the Demo, erased the option file (cmr3 without extension in
the main durectory), started back and re-setup with swap pedal and it
worked.

It seems the Demo doesn't write back the Swap setting in the file if it
already exist.

Give it a try, it worked for me!

I used a LWFF with separate axis for gas and brake.

Any change of having the Act-Labs shifter to work?

I fired up CMR2 and the feeling of my wheel is fine, just about the way I
want it.

I will run CMR2 until Codemasters releases CMR3.  My hope is that with the
retail release Codemaster will fix this wheel business.

Alanb