rec.autos.simulators

I saw X-Car today at EB in Pentagon City Mall. I think it was $51

My recommendations?  For tracks with gradual turns, increase the steer
ratio.  For tracks like Seattle which have a lot of right angle turns,
best to decrease the steer ratio so that your can can take these tight
turns.  It also helps to increase the steer lock to make these tighter
corners.

If you are finding that your car spins out too easily at high speeds
because of a slight turn left or right, you want to mess around with the
steer scale.

Glad I could help.

Clee

And there are even PRESET configuration for SPEEDTRACKS and CURVING TRACKS so if
you don't feel like "tinkering" you can use one of the built-in setups.  I have
NO problem controlling this car.  The NAME of the GAME is X (aka EXPERIMENTAL)
CAR which means you are basically building the ultimate race car.  Don't expect
to set any speed records with the default setups.

I'm pretty sure nobody ever won a NASCAR or INDY race without tweaking the car
setup some.  This game is no different and in many ways it much more of a sim -
at least as far as the mechanical aspect of racing!

I find this terribly hard to swallow...I've been "tinkering" with this
game for several weeks - and have come to the conclusion that
there is something fundamentally wrong with the steering input.

Too bad - my favorite track is Seattle, and I've been waiting to
get a hold of the released version for some time.  Even though I
felt the game was flawed (and this was also pointed out to me by
close friends "in-the-know"), I still refuse to remove it from my
HD...I can't help but feel that the secret is just around the corner
(or next turn<g>), but in reality this isn't so.

X-Car is close (oh, how it's so close!!), but until the input code is
repaired quickly, this game is gonna' go down in flames.  I still
feel the earlier version "felt" better, and I wish I had had some
"quality time" to have looked at it closer.  This one looks better,
runs faster, has more options (and an extra track), but is squirely
around the tracks --> No if's, and's or but's about it.

Setups can smooth-out an otherwise bad situation, but IMHO this
game is gonna' need a patch.  FWIW, the inputs used were of the
following:

MS Sidewinder Pro
TM T2
TM GP1
I-I/O Virtual Vehicle
ECCI
Keyboard

Cheers!

Marc

Marc J. Nelson
Sim Racing Online / Sim Racing News / The Sim Project
http://members.aol.com/simracing

:Glad I could help.

Here's another chance for you to help: in the 3Dfx demo (X-Car),
it appears that if you set all the details to "Full size"
(cars, objects, objects2 etc.), you will most of the time get
poor performance even on a P233MMX with a 3Dfx card. Sometimes
it speeds up, but mostly it seems to run at 10 fps or so.

I think the reason is texture swapping, because when I exit the
demo, there are a couple of lines complaining about "Unable to
load mipmap textures" or something like that in the MS-DOS prompt.

So, how should I set the object/car details so that the texture memory
requirements never go beyond the 2MB limit of current 3Dfx cards?
Which options determine the amount of texture memory needed in
the demo, and in the full game?

A general request to game developers supporting 3D cards: as there are
(going to be) 3D cards with varying amount of texture memory, it
would be nice if you made it easier for the end-users to determine
how they should set the graphics details to prevent any texture
swapping. For instance, in the options it would read "For cards
with 2MB texture memory" and "For cards with 4MB texture memory".

That would be much nicer than having to experiment by trial and
error, which options determine the texture memory used, and how
you should set it for your 3D card.

Thank you.

I also use a T2 and the controls of this game are REALLY, REALLY bad!  
I have "tinkered" with the sterring quite a bit and it doesn't seem to
help all that much.

I hope they fix the sounds of the game also.  They are quite arcade
sounding.  The rest of the graphics are pretty good though.
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