rec.autos.simulators

  The force feedback is great.  It's alot better than Rally Masters or
Rallisport Challenge.

  What specificly didn't you find realistic?  It seemed to me to be much
more realistic than a game like Colin McRae Rally 2, where the whole car
seems like it's pulled by the center on a string  (I don't want to trash the
game too much though, because it's also fun to play).

  Actually, I think GPL's physics are pretty good, it's just not every car
should handle that way in a sim (light, fast, twitchy, and little grip).
They are certainly the hardest sim racers  I've ever tried.

CMR2 isn't particularly realistic, and I agree that RT is better than that,
but where CMR2 is alot of fun, I find RT rather annoying, frankly. Tonight,
spurred on by this thread, I tried the '99 Subaru and a few of the other
(standard) cars with the latest physics patch 1.11 at the 'ring. The track
looks great, as do the cars, but the controllability of the cars felt
woefully inadequate, and I feel that JoWood would have been better off
making it a good arcade racer like CMR2 than the poor sim that it tries to
be.

Very true, the cars that gpl models were hard to drive in real life too, and
gpl is very challenging to drive. I find the cars in gpl easier to control
than even the Cortina in RT simply because I can work out what the car it
telling me about it's attitude and level of grip, even without FF. RT feels
like driving a car with balloons for tyres, the feedback is so vague.

Have you tried running the XR GT (the second slowest car) in LFS at the
Blackwood rallycross track? It's about as close a comparison as I can make
to some of the less powerful RT cars, but it's FF doesn't rattle my teeth
out, and the car is much more easy to place on the track. Sure, the cars are
less direct than in gpl, but I would expect them to be given the type of
car. The FXO (Astra Coupe type car) is a fairly heavy, powerful FWD car, and
feels remarkably similar to my own fairly heavy, powerful FWD car. I've
owned several Minis in the past, and I can assure you they feel nothing like
the RT minis, but not too far from the XF GTi in LFS. I've never driven
anything even similar to one of the cars in gpl, but the cars are still
predictable and controllable, and even though they are hard to control, they
make driving a challenge. RT makes it a chore.

All of the above is my personal opinion, I fully accept that other's opinion
may differ, but this isn't:
There's no way RT's physics are closer to reality than gpl, lfs, NR2002, or
F12k2. Trust me on this.

Hope that answers your questions.

Malc.

Graphically the Ring never looked better as it does in RT, but I can't
seem to enjoy it half as much as I do in GPL or Netkar :-/

Andre

I tried the ff patch yesterday and it really makes the ff a lot
better. It gets rid of the annoying rumbling.

Andre

Just read a post from Roger on  racesimcentral:
With the current tools they can't change the spots where the car will
be placed on the track after a car reset.. so 1 crash and you will
have to restart the stage :-/

Andre

  I've a Logitech Momo, and at 100 percent strength the stick is a monster.
I usaully turn it down to 50 percent in Windows. I remember in Rally Trophy,
I also had to turn down the effects alot, otherwise it was just no fun.

  It's been a while since I played RT, but I remember, at least how I had it
setup, that the wheel shook alot, but it had more to do with the fact that
my car was bouncing around alot over very uneven ground.

  I don't drive much in "real life" (I only have a learner's permit and I
have low vision), but I went down a dirt road once and the car shook
continuously and you could feel it in the wheel.  At 25 MPH it shook alot.
I can only imagine how much more it would shake at 70 mph.

  It's possible RT doesn't give much grip feedback.  I notice Rally Masters
doesn't have the grip feedback than CMR2 does.  Still, I don't think it
makes one game automaticly bad, the other good.

  No, I just checked out the demo a while back.  I may eventually buy it,
just depends.  The main thing I don't like is all the cars in the game, at
least with my force feedback wheel, feel twitchy, the feel isn't smooth at
all.  I notice games that emulate "speed sensitive" steering like F1 2002 or
NASCAR HEAT don't have this problem.  The "speed sensitivity" gives the FF a
"power steering" feel that helps dampen some of the forces, otherwise it
feels too twitchy to me.

  Ok, they may not be more  "realistic" then, but they do the job.

   Oh, and the main purpose of FF isn't to give you better times or
whatever, it's to make it more fun and give you some feedback.  I think
force feedback is pretty amazing.  Before it driving games were very boring
to me, but with it it really makes games come alive.  It's like having a
nice speaker setup for your computer with a subwoofer.  It adds some reality
to what is otherwise setting in front of a monitor and mashing a button or
joystick.

Real cars don't have speed sensitive steering, this is something game
designers put in to make it easier to control the cars. It makes it more
difficult to jump straight from one game to another though, since you have
to 'train' yourself to know how much to steer. I can go straight from lfs to
gpl & although the car feels different, my instincts still work, and I can
control the car in either without having to adapt to each one's quirks.
Force Feedback is an aid. It doesn't make you faster, but it can help you
avoid being slow, by helping you catch slides. It can also throw you off
with incorrect information, and it's probably why alot of drivers use very
low strength FF settings. Sometimes you need to go against the force, or try
to keep the wheel straight after a difficult jump. Curiously enough I find
the steering in RT too twitchy at low speed, and too vague at high speed. I
guess we're approaching RT from opposite ends of the driving-sim world ;-)

Malc.