rec.autos.simulators

Nascar 3/2000

Ok, NASCAR fans, its on its way. I talked to PR from Papyrus about
NASCAR 3, and heres the skinny:

The title will be NASCAR 2000, not NASCAR 3, and it is slated to go gold
September 1 and ship by the end of September. Two annual updates are
scheduled thereafter (NASCAR 2001 and 2002. Duh.)

N2000 will not, I repeat, NOT, be played exclusively on TEN anymore.
Papyrus will be setting up their own free servers, and the game will
ship with a built-in feature to help you find servers to race on. I
asked if they were going to reserve specific servers for fixed setup
racing or for certain skill levels, but it is undetermined at this
point.

As you may have heard, N2000 will no longer be using the Gran Prix
Legends physics engine. Papyrus has decided that theyre going to try to
make the game appeal to a more mass audience, not just the 1% who will
actually try to adjust all 200 engine and chassis tweaks. The physics
engine will be the same as that from NASCAR 1999, which was the same as
that from NASCAR 2.

Hold on dont get mad yet! Im told that the engine is going to be
tweaked extensively to make the handling much more realistic, and the
physics model is now 3D so cars can actually go airborne during crashes.
In essence, the engine will be much more realistic, but not quite as
overkill as GPL (known in some circles as "the hardest game in the
world."). The switch away from the computationally intensive GPL engine
should also make players with older computers happy.

You wont have the insane selection of car settings that were initially
listed in the N3 press releases, but there still should be plenty of
tweaking options available to keep you busy for a while.

Naturally N2000 will support the popular 3D accelerators out of the box,
so you N2 guys with Rendition cards may have to go shopping finally.

Enjoy
Dwayne(NU)
Nascar United
http://www.racesimcentral.net/~nasunite/

My question....why would you want a game that is almost unplayable due to it's
difficulty of it AND the strain that it would put on a normal PC to get it to
run smoothly?

Q. What happened? Why is NASCAR? Racing 3 on hold?
A. NASCAR? Racing 3 is on hold because the physics model that we
want to implement is so complex, the typical home PC can not handle
all the processing right now. We need to wait a little while for technology
to catch up. The physics and AI engine are that complex!

Q. Dan - Why not use the Grand Prix Legends engine for
NASCAR? Racing 2000?
A. Papyrus has always been the leader in developing products with the
highest degree of racing simulation realism available, and we intend to
maintain that leadership. Last years release of Grand Prix Legends is
widely regarded as the most stunningly accurate and rigorous vehicle
simulation ever created in a consumer package. However, given the
limited commercial success of Grand Prix Legends, its clear that we
would be doing a disservice to our core NASCAR? Racing fans if we
released NASCAR? Racing 3 with the same degree of difficulty and
steep learning curve. The average customer shouldnt be expected to
have real world racecar driving skills to enjoy the game. In addition, a
NASCAR? simulation based on the same engine at GPL would have
even steeper system requirements. Add to that a higher graphics load
and a system that will run the game smoothly is out of reach to the vast
majority of our customers.

BLASPHEMY!!!!!!!!1
rendition rulez

And no, perhaps the average customer shouldn't have to have a real driver's
skill to race, but a realistic degree of difficultly should be available for
those of us who want to be able to test our true mettle.