rec.autos.simulators

After reading the previews I had already decided to ignore the driving
school for my first run, and just go for it to see what happens, treating
the drive as realistically as possible. I wanted to see how I well I could
drive the car "out of the box" given that I've done a lot of rally driving
(RWD) in the 80s and 90s.

Well, I'm proud to say that I made it the end of the Harwood stage in one
piece, and without requing assistance. However, I took it reasonably easy,
and with a couple of wrong turns and 3 minor offs (ditches, reversing, etc)
managed 5 minutes for my first run.

The car is great to drive! Its exactly what I expected in terms of realism.
I mostly turned into corners using throttle off oversteer, and the car
behaved very naturally. I was able to get a few scandos happening, and also
some nice sweeping drifts through the esses.

Many other reviewers have complained of the car running wide out of tight
corners. I didn't find this,  but then again I was already sideways into the
corners and just used enough throttle to turn to the outside.

To be honest, I thought it would much more difficult to learn to drive. Of
course I haven't been 10/10ths yet, and the finesse will come through
learning the limits.

That's enough for now - back to the sim.

Tim

For a real challenge, the tight, muddy Japanese stages are great. The fast
Australian stages are just plain scary.

My biggest problem now is disipline - remembering that this is sim,
concentrating, and controlling the adrenilin. Fast times really do require
smooth driving. Its easy to do in the rally school with little pressure, but
once I'm out there its difficult not to overdrive, damage the car, and
basically be slow.

Now for a few more points:

PC/Graphics performance. Its ok, but the framerate is a bit jerky sometimes.
I'll need to tweak the video settings. I have a 3.2Ghz P4, but running an
older Nvideo GeForce Ti4600 video card. I'm running at 1024x768x32 bit.

Graphics quality. I like it a lot. Some people complain that the graphics
aren't as spectacular as some of the other games out there, but like
everything else about the game, the focus is on realism. The colours are
quite natural and neutral, but those used to the F1 or Nascar series might
consider RBR colours to be a little washed out. Let me put it this way, I
feel like I'm on a real road, and get all the visual clues I need, rather
than having the graphics stand out and distract me by being too
ultra-realistic.

Car physics - ***y fantastic. You can really feel all the camber,
pot-holes, puddles and everything else you experience. The throttle has to
be used just like in reality - you can only occasionally get away with full
throttle for more than a second or two, but when you do, you really notice
it!

One of the outstanding aspects of the realism is when I crest a hill a touch
too fast, or approach a fast sweeper too quickly. I get this momentary
butterfly feeling in my stomach that is really quite scary!

This game is like a fine wine. It needs to be sipped and appreicated as your
palate takes in the all subtleties. It won't be case of taking a day or two
to master it, then just try and improve my stage times by a few tenths at a
time. The real challenge will be doing the full seasons to become a champion
instead of a hot lapper. This will require careful risk analysis, keeping
the car in decent shape for the next stage, and slowing building up
competence over time. I want to back into real rallying soon, and feel that
this will genuinely help my training.

The only major downside is a lack of online "connection". It doesn't have to
be head to head, but it would be great to be able to chat and spectate other
drivers whilst taking turns on the stages, and being able to view other's
replays and ghost them against my own driving style.

I haven't touched the car setups yet - one thing at a time.

Tim

Andrew McP

Anyone know if there's a demo to be downloaded somewhere?

Thanks!

I have an old TM Ferrari FFB wheel which has been great so I hope it
performs well.

I have a P4 2.4 with the same video card (MSI) and 1GB of RAM; I'm
hoping I can run smoothly at 1024x768x32...

     - F50 GT

Roadside Objects

This has the best moddelling of roadside objects that I've experienced. Each
object has the mass and density that you would expect, and you can really
feel it when you run into things. On the rally school stage there is a
wooden fence running along the road. Glancing into it rusults in a solid
thud and spin, with the wooden posts  all flying off in an incredibly
realistic geometric progression - you'll have to wait a replay on your own
copy to appreciate this.

Another glimpse of attention to detail was when I understeered coming into a
fast sweeper and head butted the start of the armco on the outside of the
road. The "head" at the start of the armco dented (don't ask about my car!),
and then I noticed the first 5 meters of railing slghtly resonate for a
couple of seconds, quickly increasing in frequency and decreasing in
distortion, just like you would expect from a legth of thin, fairly solid
metal.

The only roadside object I didn't enjoy hitting was the Marshall. I won't go
into the details of seeing red...

Driving a realistic WRC car.

Most of you will be thinking - "hey, I can handle this, I know how to handle
oversteer". You'll learn this is false assumption on the first corner - RBR
is all about handling understeer. 4WD rally cars pull as well as push. Their
natural tendancy is to understeer at the limit especially at low speed. If
you turn in and try to accellerate hard out of a 90 degree corner, you'll
just understeer straight off the road.

These cars have to be chucked sideways into the tigher corners, but dont'
rely on the brakes to do so. Setting up rear wheel brake bias might help on
these corners, but good luck the first time you approach a fast downhill
sweeper and need to brake! The cars really do require judicious use of the
hand-brake on any over 90 degrees, and for medium speed curves you'll need
to unbalance the car to get turn-in before power-sliding through the corner
on opening curves, or usng throttle off oversteer on tightengin curves.

RBR really makes you think! Not only do you have to master at least 4 very
different ways of sliding a car, but make spilt second decisions when
driving as to which approach to commit to. I think the key that will
determine the really outstanding drivers is how they cope with the
situations where they have over-cooked things a bit. To beome a fast driver,
you'll always be looking down the road the and making sub-concious decisions
about how to take the 2nd and 3rd curves ahead as you are already commiting
to the current curve.

For example, you may find that the crest of the hill you're on with an
opening left hander at the bottom is more sudden than you expected. The road
is turning slightly right as you go over the crest and you feel the car
getting light. What are you thinking?

Many drivers will be thinking about how to get through the crest saftely.
They'll want to ride out the crest with a little more right lock,
calculating that the understeer won't be bad enough to run entirely off the
road. These drivers will make it through the crest ok, but plough off the
road at bottom of the hill. The really good drivers will be focusing on the
left hander at the bottom of hill, which they were planning to power
oversteer around. As the car crests, they'll throw on plenty of right lock
and trip the car into oversteer as the weight transfer to the front over the
crest. The'll then throw on full opposite (left) lock and brake coming down
the hill in order to both slow the car down and set the car up for the left
hander at the bottom, effecting a double scando over the crest and down the
hill.

The reason I mention this scenario is that it happened to me on a RBR stage.
Aferwards, I realised that I just relied on real world experience to get me
through, as all the thinking above happend at the sublimininal level in a
second or so. Never on a PC sim before have I just re-acted in a such reflex
(real world) way before in a complicated situation and found that it just
worked.

Bfn,

Tim

Hearing this from someone who has actually driven a Rally car means
something.  It has to be good.

I only ran a bit of the Rally School.  I couldn't say whether it drove like
a Rally car or not, having never driven such cars in real life.  All I know
is that it feels different than any Rally game I've tried, and I've tried
all of them.  :)

Alanb

Sounds like they were locking the brakes.  You almost need to play with
headphones in order to hear the skidding sound when you've locked the wheels
up.  It's quite easy to lockup on loose surfaces at low speeds but once
you're conscious of it, you can avoid it and as you say, you really need to
enter >90deg corners sidways in order get through them properly.

I don't think the game is that difficult that it can't be appreciated by
someone who enjoys driving after a bit of play.  If the reviewers don't
enjoy driving then ***s me what they're doing reviewing a driving
sim.

Charlie

Now with the XBox version and a controller, though not impossible, driving
has to be more difficult than using a wheel with a PC.

Alanb

Agreed. They sit through 20 hours of fragging imps, they should really take
some time to really get to learn how to drive. I've played RBR for an hour
and a half now and I can get through any of the stages without much problem
if I drive carefully.. that's quite exciting, and I can't wait to start
pushing the limit quite a bit more. Of course, I do have some "seat" time
with a lot of other rally games.. but I'd say any reviewer could be a decent
driver with only a few hours of practice, especially after the rally school.
So I don't see what the reviewers problems are with this game... maybe not
enough flash for them.

Agreed.  Good point.