> I was wondering if any of you guys or gals have actually driven a race car
> on a circuit, sprint track or hill climb?
> Reading some of the posts here it seems that most people have never been
> near the real thing let alone driven one. In my opinion the game closest to
> getting it right is Grand Prix Legends, though this is still a little way
> off the real thing.
responded to your post, I guess there are many around here who have
some kind of experience with the real thing even if much more limited.
The best I have to compare against the games is some 20 laps in a
formula ford in a single session a few years ago. Not much, but
at least enough to qualify for getting near the real thing.
(It was on a rainy day, so the wet track made it quite a realistic
simulation of the GPL F3's but with a much better frame rate, not
to mention the truly amazing force feedback :-)
By comparing it to whatever real experience you have (driving
an ordinary street car is better than nothing) and applying
whatever physics knowledge available (you don't need much
physics knowledge to conclude that a real car won't have any
magic force stopping an oversteer from going beyound 20-30
degrees tail out as in many games, for example).
But as games get better, this gets harder. My guess is that
games like GPL and F1 2001 brings us very close to (or even
beyond) the point where people like myself have much
authority on how realistic it is.
Another view on this is that with the best sims available today
the physics engine is good enough to leave us limited almost
exclusively by the inherent problems with a PC sim (small screen,
low resolution, low frame rate, low-precision controllers, high
input to output delay, lack of 'real' force feedback etc etc).
This leads to physics engines being developed to compensate for
the limitations, sacrifying correctness trying to get a better
'feeling' (or just to stop a game from getting too hard).
Now 'more realistic' doesn't mean much anymore because it all
is a big compromise, and if a game is realistic or not depends
on what kind of realism you want.
The hard-core physics ***s will ask for a sim with the best
physics available and no compromises even though it will be as
hard as driving a real car using a not-that-good radio control
setup, and in the other end of the scale you have those who will
ask for something that is just as easy to race with as in real
life ignoring all the limitations even if it means the physics
will be like something from a ten year old arcade rally game.
I'm at the best physics end of that scale (and quite a few here
in this forum probably are), but there are lots of people at
the other end also.
_
Mats Lofkvist