Send help, I developed a simracing addiction

[Great Deceiver]

How is Forza like? Never played a Forza before but I hear it's the most "GT-like" and in ways even better.

I've only played the recent Horizon games (4 and 5) and found them to be awful. Spergy announcers, "festival vibe", YOU'RE AWSUM, shitty moon physics that were designed for controllers and don't translate well to the wheel, etc. Racing is the last thing you do in these games. I can't speak for Forza Motorsport as the last one I played was the very first one on the original Xbox.

I'm still waiting for my GT7 disc to arrive, the last GT game I played was 4 on the PS2, but I recently replayed it on PCSX2 (it has great wheel support now) and it's pretty great. Incomparably better than contemporary console games like Grid, Forza Horizon, etc.

 

[anvi]

Time to buy a wheel! Do you guys get pedals as well? That would be cool...

 

[Curratum]

Just played PCars 2 for 45 minutes. The AI at a modest aggression and skill setting, crashed, scraped and bumped into me every chance it got.

I mean, I got fucking divebombed on turn 1 on Suzuka / Sakkito by an AI car, while my right tire was almost on the inside kerb, and the AI car just said "Nah, plenty of space for me here too!" and crashed us both out...

Take all my excited sperging about the game above with a grain of salt. I honestly don't remember the AI being this crazy and annoying.

But after all, once you play Assetto Corsa long enough, everything else starts feeling bad. Deleted, going back to AC and wondering whether I should spend another 60 EUR for the complete Race Room Experience track and car pack...

 

[Curratum]

You know what, just play Assetto Corsa for track racing, man. Just do it. Ignore everything else. I keep trying to convince myself that the other titles are worth the time and money, but none of them fucking are.

RaceRoom is still running poor AI and the graphics look fucking hideous.
Autismobilista 2 is a buggy piece of shit.
rFactor 2 is still buggy and the UI/UX and content management is still a nightmare, plus AI is buggy too.
AC Competizione is running like absolute ass on a PC that can run all the above games maxed out at a locked 60 fps, even when ACC Is on medium and with AMD's upscaling on, because it's massively CPU-bound and very heavy.

At the end of the day, none of this other stuff is worth it, when it comes to racing on track. Just get fucking AC for 10 bucks in the current sale and you will have enough content and gameplay to last you a lifetime.

 

[Curratum]

Time to buy a wheel! Do you guys get pedals as well? That would be cool...

 

[adddeed]

I havent played GT before, but just from knowing what it is, id say maybe SHIFT 2, Project Cars 2 and GRID Legends?

 

[adddeed]

Time to buy a wheel! Do you guys get pedals as well? That would be cool...

Yes otherwise its pointless. Plus wheels usually are in set, wheel and pedals.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Entry/mid level wheels usually come with pedals, but the further up you go in the food chain, the more modular everything gets. Also exponentially more expensive. Thrusmaster's shifter (TH8A) alone costs almost as much as a G29 wheel/pedal set, for example. It's easy to recommend a G29 set if you're starting out, and it's good for what it is, but the force feedback mechanism (gears) produces a rattling that is kind of annoying and it feels like a toy despite the build quality being pretty good (leather rim).

I bought another set within a week, so I'd personally recommend going straight for a better model by another manufacturer (Logitech's most recent wheel, the G923, is pretty much the same thing as the G29) if you can afford it.

AC Competizione is running like absolute ass on a PC that can run all the above games maxed out at a locked 60 fps, even when ACC Is on medium and with AMD's upscaling on, because it's massively CPU-bound and very heavy.

Assetto Corsa Competizione runs pretty well here but I find it a lot worse than the first game. I'm not interested in being l33t gloved lap master, so the competitive aspect is not really that important to me. I'm more interested in variety and accuracy. I really like driving regular road cars in big trail tracks in AC, much more than racing a Lambo against other spergs.

 

[Curratum]

I'm more interested in variety and accuracy. I really like driving regular road cars in big trail tracks in AC, much more than racing a Lambo against other spergs.

Hear hear!

https://www.racedepartment.com/downloads/glava-zete.2223/
https://www.racedepartment.com/downloads/the-tajo-hillclimb.13771/

 

[Great Deceiver]

Although I've also never driven a race car, the problem I have with brakes in these games is that it just doesn't feel like proper braking behaviour, even accounting for the dinkiness of the pedals. It takes too long to come to a full stop and the curve is too smooth. I haven't seen a single game in which stomping on the brakes (at relatively low speeds) feels even marginally physically accurate. Even altering the braking curve to compensate for the toylike potentiometers of these pedals seems to do jack shit.

But I'm not going to invest in load cells or anything like that for now, so I guess I just have to live with it.

You need to play some Assetto Corsa

I've played a little bit of it, but I suck terribly. I also thought the default launcher was a bit shitty but the Content Manager makes it a lot better.

Don't forget to install the custom shader patch from inside CM if you haven't, and grab Sol for weather: https://www.racedepartment.com/downloads/sol.24914/

Played for hours tonight with Sol enabled. Even gave some money to the CM guy so I could grab the latest preview build and enable rain effects (which look really great - does snow work btw? I couldn't get snow to work). AC is really a textbook example of how modders can keep a game going. It looks better than pretty much any other racing game out there with these mods, including GT7, and AC is at least 8 years old at this point.

I raced some F1 cars tonight and they feel better than in the Codemasters F1 game. Amazing.

 

[Curratum]

I don't think they have snowfall in CSP just yet. Also bear in mind that so far rain is just visual, there's no wet track physics, but the CSP guy is working on that too, coming in the future.

Also, YES on all of the above. Modded AC simply looks better than anything else on the market, and yes, the F1 cars will feet better than any Codies game out there.

If you enjoy F1 cars, I'd recommend looking into those:

https://www.asrformula.com/simulator/assetto-corsa/asr_owc_1991/ - The full 1991 real world teams and cars, orgasmic engine sounds and great handling physics, with less downforce that modern cars.

https://www.racedepartment.com/downloads/rsr-formula-3.8040/ - Great looking, sounding and feeling Formula 3 car, smaller engine to get you up to speed to the big bois and teach you how to control and drive an open wheeler car with SOME downforce.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Yep, I ran some laps in the ARS Formula 1991 McLaren as Senna. Felt really great.

I'll give the F3 cars a try tomorrow.

 

[Curratum]

Since I STILL haven't set up my wheel, I thought I'd leave my ACorsa x360 controller settings for people to try. It takes a frustratingly long time tinkering with all those sliders and the huge ranges of values to see how they mix and affect handling, so this is pretty much what I've arrived at following weeks of autism. Hope someone finds this helpful and an improvement, if playing on controller (which is very very doable and fun with the right settings)

 

[adddeed]

I don't like how you can't feel the gforce obviously and you can't feel the tyres start to lose traction, or the weight shift or whatever. It just always feels gamey to me. I need to try with a wheel, preferably one that rumbles.

There you go

https://youtu.be/jXGKdk6apRo?t=945

Only thing missing is the wind in your hair and dying when you crash.

 

[Curratum]

I don't like how you can't feel the gforce obviously and you can't feel the tyres start to lose traction, or the weight shift or whatever. It just always feels gamey to me. I need to try with a wheel, preferably one that rumbles.

There you go

https://youtu.be/jXGKdk6apRo?t=945

Only thing missing is the wind in your hair and dying when you crash.

Fucking SPOILERS: It costs 2000 dollars.

 

[anvi]

That looks amazing! But yeah I can't even afford the VR yet. Graphics cards are insane.

 

[forumvisitor#451]

I was thimking about buying a wheel for beamNG.drive none of the other really interest me. Maybe Snowrunner. How are those on wheels?

 

[Great Deceiver]

I was thimking about buying a wheel for beamNG.drive none of the other really interest me. Maybe Snowrunner. How are those on wheels?

They're both great. BeamNG.drive has a really amazing driving model and great crash physics, but it's more of a sandbox/playground than an actual game.

Snowrunner is great but the shifting is kind of weird - the company's previous game, Mudrunner, had a perfect manual shift implementation. While the new game supports manual shifting, it's implemented in a strange way, all cars I've seen behave like semiautos (R/P/D/1/2), so I end up just using the paddles most of the time instead of the actual gearbox. Still, it's a very fun game.

Both of them play great on a G29, but you have to do some tinkering to get them feeling right (mostly to avoid FFB clipping, which feels terrible on gear and cog-driven force feedback mechanisms). What wheel are you thinking of buying?

 

[Viata]

Maybe it's because I only play on keyboard, but I really can't enjoy modern racing games. I just like those 2D ones from the 80s and 90s.

 

[anvi]

It makes a huge difference. The main thing is the pedals, with keys you are either flooring it 100% acceleration, or 0%. You really need to be able to control that smoothly. But it's a leap of faith to buy the gear and see if you like it.

 

[Curratum]

Maybe it's because I only play on keyboard, but I really can't enjoy modern racing games. I just like those 2D ones from the 80s and 90s.

I've played WRC games and both Dirt Rally games on keyboard and I was faster than I currently am on the wheel :D

 

[JamesDixon]

How is Forza like? Never played a Forza before but I hear it's the most "GT-like" and in ways even better.

I've only played the recent Horizon games (4 and 5) and found them to be awful. Spergy announcers, "festival vibe", YOU'RE AWSUM, shitty moon physics that were designed for controllers and don't translate well to the wheel, etc. Racing is the last thing you do in these games. I can't speak for Forza Motorsport as the last one I played was the very first one on the original Xbox.

I'm still waiting for my GT7 disc to arrive, the last GT game I played was 4 on the PS2, but I recently replayed it on PCSX2 (it has great wheel support now) and it's pretty great. Incomparably better than contemporary console games like Grid, Forza Horizon, etc.

I hope you enjoy grinding because to unlock everything you need to spend thousands of dollars or thousands of hours of your time.

EDIT: Link to article about this.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Yes, I'm aware, but they had a ton of backlash and have since patched the game to be less stingy with the rewards. That article is from a month ago.

Still, I fully expect the unlock/microtransaction model to be shit. It can always get worse though and things don't look good for sims when the most popular racing game at the moment (iracing) has a disgusting subscription model where you have to buy each individual car with real money on top.

In other news Curratum I've tried Dirt Rally 2.0 and it's quite alright. Waiting for the racing game sale coming up on Steam (23 May) to buy a bunch of stuff.

Re: wheels and pads, I am incomparably worse on the wheel. There's a crazy learning curve and I think no one should buy one if they just want to improve their times (this is especially true for games that were developed for consoles/pads, which are the majority).

I got one for the IMMERSHUN factor and I don't mind relearning how to play games, in fact I kind of enjoy it. As I said before, I get much more enjoyment driving a dingy stick shift '84 Toyota on a long road in BeamNG.drive than doing laps in ACC with the latest zingy stock car. The only exception is F1 cars, I really enjoy doing laps on those in AC. They feel so grounded, it's awesome. Especially the '91 ones.

And although I appreciate the increased popularity of sims, I can't say I enjoy the YouTube/esports aspect at all. In fact I'm repulsed by it.

 

[Curratum]

In other news Curratum I've tried Dirt Rally 2.0 and it's quite alright. Waiting for the racing game sale coming up on Steam (23 May) to buy a bunch of stuff.

Re: wheels and pads, I am incomparably worse on the wheel. There's a crazy learning curve and I think no one should buy one if they just want to improve their times (this is especially true for games that were developed for consoles/pads, which are the majority).

I got one for the IMMERSHUN factor and I don't mind relearning how to play games, in fact I kind of enjoy it. As I said before, I get much more enjoyment driving a dingy stick shift '84 Toyota on a long road in BeamNG.drive than doing laps in ACC with the latest zingy stock car.

And although I appreciate the increased popularity of sims, I can't say I enjoy the YouTube/esports aspect at all. In fact I'm repulsed by it.

I'm somewhere in the middle of this. I'm not a hyper-competitive autist, but I do like grinding lap times and racing the AI at a medium difficulty setting, learning braking points, learning lines through corners, keeping the racing clean and not having contact, even when it's AI.

 

[Great Deceiver]

It makes a huge difference. The main thing is the pedals, with keys you are either flooring it 100% acceleration, or 0%. You really need to be able to control that smoothly. But it's a leap of faith to buy the gear and see if you like it.

Well, analog acceleration on pads has been a thing for a very long time since triggers went analog so that's something that costs a lot less than a wheel.

In other news Curratum I've tried Dirt Rally 2.0 and it's quite alright. Waiting for the racing game sale coming up on Steam (23 May) to buy a bunch of stuff.

Re: wheels and pads, I am incomparably worse on the wheel. There's a crazy learning curve and I think no one should buy one if they just want to improve their times (this is especially true for games that were developed for consoles/pads, which are the majority).

I got one for the IMMERSHUN factor and I don't mind relearning how to play games, in fact I kind of enjoy it. As I said before, I get much more enjoyment driving a dingy stick shift '84 Toyota on a long road in BeamNG.drive than doing laps in ACC with the latest zingy stock car.

And although I appreciate the increased popularity of sims, I can't say I enjoy the YouTube/esports aspect at all. In fact I'm repulsed by it.

I'm somewhere in the middle of this. I'm not a hyper-competitive autist, but I do like grinding lap times and racing the AI at a medium difficulty setting, learning braking points, learning lines through corners, keeping the racing clean and not having contact, even when it's AI.

Sure, I like those things too. I edited my post to make special mention of F1 cars in AC, which are so awesome. I'm still very, VERY bad at the wheel so I'm sure my overall enjoyment of laps and stuff will go up as I get better.