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Thanks for your input. No one will be offended by your opinion, in fact I'd have to agree with most of what you said.
First off, please try to find a joystick device (preferably a steering wheel) to try the game with, I think you'll find it much easier in many ways...next there are a few options that can make driving a little easier. Check out touchiness compensation in the menu under Options -> Controls -> Joystick Options.
While the default controls are keyboard ones, this does not mean they are the best. In fact all the non-analog controls are pretty bad because they are either 0% or 100%... This is an area that needs some work, we know. However it's not a very high priority...maybe it should be, people usually try it first and maybe it gives them a bad impression...
Anyway, aside from input, you're right about some of the cars. Many have problems of either over or under steering when they shouldn't at times. It is due in a large part to tire physics. VDrift simulates tire forces using the Pacejka "Magic Formula", as do many games. The only problem is that it's difficult to get good input variables for this formula for many different tires, and it's even more difficult, to tweak the values by guessing to get them right. There are some "Pacejka editors" out there but none that I'm able to use...so the short answer on the tires is that our tire system is acually quite good, but our data is very limited.
We did have a way in our old menu system to change the tires, as well as a few other things...getting that stuff back in the new menu system is in the todo.
As for brakes...using the keyboard pressing the brake is like in real life stamping your foot to get the pedal down to the floor as far as it will go as quickly as possible. In a normal car the brake has some resistance which works against your foot. But using the keyboard, or a mouse/joystick button, as the brake, will mean that the brake goes 100% down in 0 time. (This is certainly considered a bug in the controls...one we haven't figured out a great solution for yet.)
Acceleration: the problem is mostly tires. The cars use real life torque curves to determine how powerful the engines are. Again using keyboard or button controls it is totally unrealistic, like stomping the gas fully as fast as possible.
Adapting the physics behavior of a certain game or other is exceedingly difficult without specific knowledge of that game's source code. Also a big hurdle for us is the difficulty in obtaining specific detailed physical properties of cars (like Pacejka constants for tires).
Again I don't take offense to any of this, I feel the exact same way in many cases. The solutions to many of these problems would be found easily by another energetic open source developer with some free time and dedication to the project. VDrift's current dev team can find them in time, but we need help and patience...
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