rec.autos.simulators

I just installed the patch and thought I would share my thoughts with
everyone.

1. The traction bug appears to be fixed.  The car feels more stable and
handles more predictably.  I can now coast through the first two chicanes at
Australia (as the manual suggests) without spinning out and hitting the wall.

2. There is a frame rate display which can be toggled with ALT-F.  This may be
in a readme file somewhere but if it is I missed it.  This option defaulted to
off.  Users of the DOS version on the DOS/WIN95/MAC CD reported that there is
no way to turn the frame rate display off in that version.

3. There is a problem saving your driver information.  For some reason the
drivers2.txt file got set to read only by the patch (as matter of fact, all
the files in the cars95 directory got set to read only). This will probably
create a problem editing cars with the paintkit also.  Just turn off the read
only attribute on the files in the cars95 directory and everything should work
fine.

4.  This patch does not modify the paint kit, so if you re-installed ICR2 as
the readme from the patch suggests you'll need to re-patch the paint kit. (I
consider this to be a minor point).

5. I do not know if the yellow flag bug was fixed or not.  

Let me add for anybody doing the patch, give yourself a good hour to
go from unzipping and reading documents to the time you can actually
run the patched ICR2. The patch itself must have taken 25 minutes to
do it's job, constant disk accessing...

So far, I agree that the patch seems to have addressed the "weight
shift bug"- my car seems to feel much more solid to me, I can now
actually save near-spins, for example. All in all, the whole model
just seems better to me.

You're right, the car feels a little better.  But, I'm wondering if
anyone has seemed to get a little slower framerate.  Maybe 1-2fps.  I
run in VGA, Dos, with a 486-75, with no grass, asphalt or wall textures.
 Skids, smoke, car textures are all on, and horizon, object and
grandstand textures are set to auto with min. at 15.  I run in FM sound
with 6 cars drawn ahead, 1 behind, hearing one and 31 cars total.  
Before the patch I'd consistently see the track objects, horizon and
grandstands usually without flicker.  Now after the patch the grandstand
texture begins to flicker, sometimes shutting off all together.  Just
wanted to know if anyone else has noticed this or is it my imagination.

Joe

The patch also adds three new car setups to the game: QUALACE,
QUALFAST and QUALEASY. Might be a good thing for rookies like me :-).

a 486-sx33 upgraded to a dx4-100, so it isn't the worlds fastest.

But I'd say it was the (slow) speed of hard disk that was the critical
factor, in my case. Maybe you have smartdrv running? I wonder if that
smartdrv would make a difference regarding the  constant
disk-accessing. I know from my own programming experience that (as a
lazy shortcut) I could often shorten my programming time by skipping
all the system-dependent buffering and just doing all disk accessing
willy-nilly. Some of the programs were real disk-chuggers, and slow as
hell!

But hey, the bottom line is that for the first time in a *long* time.
I'm using ICR2 again! I am pretty happy about that. And I think it is
plenty good now for me to have fun with it.

BTW, I threw out all my old setups; I now realize they were all based
on the flaws encountered whenever racing for the 10 or 15 minutes, and
even the generic ones provided by Papyrus seem more solid than mine
ever felt. Sort of nice to start over.

Also, didn't Papyrus give us some new generic setups for qualifying? I
can't remember quite how they used to have it, but I think there are
now 3 qual setups for each track.That's a nice extra.

 >>
 >> run the patched ICR2. The patch itself must have taken 25 minutes to
 >> do it's job, constant disk accessing...
 >>
 >I don't know what kind of system and HD you have but my AMD 5x86-160
 >and Quantum 1.08G Fireball did the whole upgrade in about 5 min.

That's pretty slow there; I think the problem is available memory.  I run a
16MB SMARTDRV disk cache and got it in about 2 minutes with a crappy Western
Digital IDE drive.

Clark Archer    Speed Tribe
IVGA #3920      1996 Lola Honda Firestone

ken

Sounds like you oughtta install a disk caching utility (SMARTDRV.EXE
for example).

--
John C. McCanless
Department of Electrical Engineering
University of ***ia

Gregory Fung

Vancouver, B.C., Canada

ABout a 25 minute, disk-chugging wait for the patch to finish:

Yeah, this was the first time in ANY racing game that Papyrus gave us more than
one qualifying setup.  That's good help for the ICR2 novices.

--
+------------------+--------------------------------------------+
|  G. Warren Abao  | Official BBL Jacksonville Jaguars Website: |

+------------------++------------------------+------------------+
| SPOOOOOOOOOOON!!! |  BBL Jacksonville 1-0  | IFL Chicago 11-6 |
+-------------------+------------------------+------------------+

The patch itself must have taken 25 minutes to

Ummm...5 mins?...are you sure you downloaded the right patch!
I'm on a Pent-120 and it took roughly 30 mins.