There's a weird effect, I hesitate to call it a bug. If you drive a car, and
then go to look at it in the opponent manager, it appears slightly blurry. I
have a GEForce 2 GTS and am using D3D in 32 bit color, perhaps that's the
only combo you get it in. It made me almost dump a car from the Net because
I thought the painter did a bad job with converting to clean hi-res texture
until I figured out that this happens with hi-res d/l'ed cars. It doesn't
happen with the default cars, which is why I wonder if the .car files are
missing something when you paint with imported .tga.
Also, if you turn driver aggression way down, but improve the speedway and
superspeedway ratings, you get a much better AI. One that doesn't push you
into the wall and ram you from behind. I've been tweaking the ratings around
and have now found a set for my cars that I find pretty driveable in
traffic. They err on the side of staying away from me, which is a sound way
to drive in general. :-)
I get the feeling that Papy was looking for realism in that's how the NASCAR
racers would drive if you were a driver. After all, you would be a rookie
and you would be expected to defer to these guys. If you drive like that,
move aside and take the high line when they are coming faster than you, you
have no problems. I think 95% of the complaints is they want the N3 AI
defaults, which was totally deferential to you. Tune aggression way down
(into the ***s) and you will get that.