It is soooo close to being great ...
Except for:
missing backfiring sounds and
no force feedback
(haven't tried multiplayer).
setting up steering to be OK is time consuming.
The .wav files for the backfiring sounds are in the sounds directory but
get no backfiring sounds in the game like I did with F1 2000. In fact the
sound on downshifting is bad - it is like they are not playing the samples
for downshifting properly - not at all up to the standard of f1 2000.
Upshifting is fine and other audio is fine (crunches of breaking wings,
the crowd etc).
FWIW I have
AMD Duron 950
Nvidia GT s2 (using old drivers 12.41). SB Live
A7V
I had terrible sound until I downgraded the graphics drivers (as suggested
in this group) and set to
16bit. (I think it was the graphics drivers which fixed the sound).
I setup direct 3d to NOT force the z-buffer depth to be the same as colour
depth (by default - at least on my machine - it forces the zbuffer to be
the same depth as colour). This seemed to get rid of some rendering
artifacts when using 16bit.
Minor niggles
no play by play instructions in the driver training - just a sector at
a time and not turn by turn.
Major good things for me.
Framerate sooo much faster. I can now run 1280x1024 16bit 2x2
antialiasing and
it is very smooth. 32bit was a disaster at any res.
Much quicker to load tracks.
Instant track access between setting up the car and hopping onto the
track.
Nice to have 'training' for more tracks. See above for minor niggles.
--
Bill (who hopes EA will implement REAL force feedback so i can feel the on
road grip like papyrus has been doing for years and years.)