rec.autos.simulators

--
Joe Conklin
http://www.racesimcentral.net/
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Grand Prix Legends will not ship with a track editor.  You have to
understand that compared to other racing games on the market with track
editors (from SODA to C:PR), the track layout is soo complex that actually
it would be no utility for anybody. It's not a user-friendly "click and drag
grandstands on track" type of editor.

Also, there is too much licensing and copyright problems that would happen
with this.  C:PR was targeted as only 1 product (no sequel) directly from
the start, so the next products wouldn't have licensing problems due to the
past track editor, since there is no C:PR2.

Papyrus has the CART and Nascar series of title who are very successfull and
they wouldn't take the chance to loose their franchise rights only because
of a track editor.  If you ain't happy with the 11tracks of GPL (remember,
the 'Ring is 24km long) or the 17tracks that Nascar Racing 3 will normally
have, there is something wrong IMHO.

- Fran?ois Mnard <ymenard> Good race at the Brickyard, (-o-)
- Official Mentally retarded guy of r.a.s.
- Member of the r.a.s. Ego-maniac club
- Excuse me for my English (I'm French speaking)
- Excuse me for being provocative (I'm dumb speaking)
- "People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don't realise
how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world."--

I'd much rather have very accurate real tracks, than to have the absolute
ghastlyness of the tracks being forced to fit the track-editor's
limitations.  Prime example, "Grand Prix Unlimited".  Many of the tracks
with unique corners just weren't accurate.  Was mildly amusing to create a
big oval and race the F1 cars, such as they were in GPU anyways, but didn't
really add enough to the game to throw out accuracy in the real tracks.
Can't see making anything even moderately accurate without a lot of research
if you were trying to use it to put in "missing" tracks, and don't want to
see any "fantasy" tracks myself.  You'd get something that looked close, but
just wouldn't race like the real thing.

That does reminds me, though - we slam a lot of the current games and fondly
remember the "good old days", and sims like World Circuit (GP1) and Indy
500.  Yep, some of the oldies are classics, but we had our share of real
dogs back then too.  The aforementioned GPU, "Days of Thunder", and several
others that escape me at the moment were REALLY bad.  As buggy and flawed
(or more so) as some of the crud today, but with Adlib sound and CGA, EGA or
low-res VGA graphics, which don't wear that well even in the classics :-)
No wheels back then, no 3D acceleration, digging up that last few K of low
memory to get the thing to run.....

Or really fun, waiting for a C-64 disk to load (a process only slightly
faster than typing in the code yourself) and have some really crappy game
pop up.  Ughh.  No problem waiting for Grand Prix Circuit, Pirates or Red
Storm Rising though :-)

My vote on the track-editor, though, is to leave it with GPU, dead and
buried....

Ken

Cheers!

Marc

--
Marc J. Nelson
The Sim Project - http://www.simproject.com

* No animals were harmed in the making of this e-mail *

    Actually I used to like that game! :) (one of the few racing titles
available for the Mac then).  Did anyone ever play Ferrari Grand Prix on
the Mac?  Version 2 of the game was actually quite fun, and it had a
track editor!  You could choose from different tire compounds, C and B I
believe.  You could also qualify for as long as you wanted!  I wonder
what happened to that game.

Later,
John

Cheers!

Marc

* No animals were harmed in the making of this e-mail *