I noticed an unbelievable bug in N2 while racing in Talladega
yesterday. The race started again after a caution period and I was on
the backstretch! Race leader Dale Jarrett got a 20 second gap to the
rest of the field. I checked the situation with the replay and what
did I see? There was no pace car on the track at all! The pace car
disappeared when the yellow flag came out. The replay showed it
clearly.
Then I went to Rockingham. There were no problems after the first
caution on lap five. But after the second one they put the yellow flag
out immediately after the restart. Well, something went wrong, maybe
the AI passed before green or had a touch to the wall... Wrong. The
pace car had disappeared again. The race didn't re-start at all.
I decided to watch only the AI cars racing and started a new race with
accelerated time. And what happened next? The pace car disappeared
again, before the pace lap was even under way. I thought there was
something wrong with Tally and Dover AI patches or the larger fields I
had made so I installed the whole game again. And after that I saw the
pace car disappear again. This was a big bug - not a result of my
changes to text or lp files.
So, this is what I think happens: the pace car disappears every time
when the first car retires because of an accident (a car disappears
from the track area). The same thing happens when you quit a race and
start the accelerated time mode. How can N2 have a bug like this after
weeks/months of beta testing? I think the reported bug with the AI
driving too slowly under yellow is a result of a disappeared pace car,
too. Papyrus, please fix this major pace car bug. People can't race
100% races before they get a patch.
Jussi