rec.autos.simulators

I've just got Sports car GT and am not very happy with the FF effects,
and I was wondering if anyone can shed some light on the subject.
Basically when the cars in the pit lane and under the computers control
I can feel effects, also when I run off onto the grass, gravel, etc.
it feels close to what I would expect. However when on the track I can
feel hardly anything through the wheel, it's just loose, there is something
there
but it's so weak that it tells me nothing.
I've tried setting various amounts of spring tension in the wingman
properties,
but that just works as it should as a spring, I've also tried playing with
the
settings in the game, i.e..dead zone, sensitivity etc. but to no avail.
Is this just how it's supposed to be, as at the moment it feels much better
to drive with the FF disabled and the return to centre spring on the
wheel enabled, or is there something I'm missing, or have I just been
spoilt by GPL.

Also while I'm at it, I took the game over to a friends house to try it on
his
machine (Much higher spec. than mine) and we were getting some terrible
frame rates in anything but 640x480.
Same problem with the wheel.

My machine
Pentium 233 MMX
64 MHz ram
Matrox Millennium !! PCI  (v. 4.10.01.4110 drivers)
Orchid Righteous Voodoo 1 (2.48 Q3 reference drivers)
AWE64 gold (rev.16 drivers)
Microsoft FF Wheel

His machine
P !! 350
264 MHz PC100 SDRAM
Matrox G200 (i don't Know what drivers)
2X Creative Voodoo 2 SLI (2.56 Q3 reference drivers)
AWE64 gold (rev.16 drivers)
Microsoft FF wheel

Thanks in advance

Mark
London UK

"Loose" is probably not the word since it centers (I've played SCGT with
MSFF) but you're right, the game provides very little feedback at least
in terms of road grip. I used to keep the FF disabled in SCGT, just
didn't do anything for me.

There's also the frame rate issue. With some FF wheels there is a clear
drop in frame rate when FF is enabled in SCGT. In my experience it's
comparable to the slow down effect you get from enabling the mirror.
Before SCGT I had never seen a single rear-view mirror to cause a notable
drop in frame rate. I used to map 'look behind' to one of the wheel's
buttons and disable the mirror altogether. Also keeps you from looking at
the mirror too much when you're supposed to concentrate on what's ahead.
Plus you only need a fraction of a second glimpse to keep yourself
updated on what's happening behind you. I played SCGT with PII450/TNT in
1024x768 mode with all detail on max and getting very acceptable frame
rates.

With MSFF-SCGT combination you're probably experiencing a slight drop in
frame rate when FF is enabled. Although I'm aware of the CPU hungry
qualities of MSFF, most of all it makes me wonder about the quality of
SCGT's FF implementation. There are many games which provide far richer
feedback than SCGT and still don't cause any slow down with any of the FF
wheels.

Also, try disabling the in-game e-mapping/mip mapping options and see if
it does anything. Personally I don't bother much with in-game graphics
settings. The real tweaking and optimizing is done in vid card's
settings. That's where you can make the discoveries + the real
difference.

---
Antti Markus Peteri

       15 miles. your dim light shines from so far away

                                 - Soul Asylum, Promises Broken