do you "play" other sims as well ?

[Nigo]

I'm just wondering what is your "sim"-story ?

I play sims since the first time I tried Grand Prix Legends in 1998. At the time my computer was so slow I can barely play in 400x300 on my Cyrix M-II 300 and a S3 Virge chip... the graphics were way worse than Gran Turismo on my Playstation but I was so impressed by the realism of the thing that I still was in the championship of the french GPL league last year... what a sim

In the meantime I discovered Nascar Racing (4, 2002, 2003) from the same editor (Papyrus), it was amazing as well but I sucked :lol:

Netkar was a free sim and a very fresh idea I was following. Netkar 0.99 (Namie) really was a great piece of software, unfortunately it was a beta, the network was poor and so...

Live For Speed : it's fun and kinda realistic; I got the S2 licence now

Racer : compared to Netkar it's almost a joke

GTR : what a disappointement. Last summer I tried the demo of GTR 2 and it was alright, fair enough...

GT Legends : I do think it's a good sim (even though it's a modded GTR), but I rather like to think it's great fun to drive this 60's cars, especially since they did a great job modelling them

rFactor : amazing sim, very open and still in my mind the best "racing platform"

Richard Burns Rally : the first and only realistic rally sim ever

Netkar Pro : it wasn't free anymore, and the just 4 racing cars and tracks kept me from buying it, and it's going to a dead end anyway. It's too bad because it sure is realistic

allright, did I forgot one ?
I'm a "flight-sim" user as well, but that's another story :wink:

[joevenzon]

note that GTR, GT Legends, and GTR 2 all use the rfactor engine:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFactor

[kcid]

I really like LFS, Rfactor and GTL. I've done some online championships with LFS and Rfactor. I bought GTR but didn't like it very much. I also have Netkar Pro, really like it's physics, but the network play is not yet very good and it only has 4 cars, however, they are finishing up a hillclimb mode for NKp
I also have GPL but didn't play it allot since I'm used to LFS and Rfactor.
I would like to try Nascar 2003 from Papyrus, but it's not for sale anymore.

And yeah, I also have every combat and normal flightsim available

[Nigo]

note that GTR, GT Legends, and GTR 2 all use the rfactor engine:

yes but but the same version of it
anyway, the behavior of the cars in GTR was almost "binary", not giving any feel
the "Porsche Carrera Cup" mod for rFactor was way more realistic

[reece146]

At the expense of dating myself, my sim playing goes back a little bit further: late 1980s (yes, we had computers then).

When I first started the state of the art was running CGA/EGA graphics on Hercules monochrome graphics via a software emulator in DOS!

Sounds horrible (and it was) but I have fond memories of procrastinating from exams while playing LHX (attack helicopter sim) and Grand Prix Racing. At least, I think that was the name of the racing sim. I forget who made it.

Then came RedBaron... and later Falcon 3.0.

The game that really turned my crank for car sims though was the original "Indy Car Racing" by Papyrus. They've been around a long time in computer terms. Indy Car was the first sim I encountered that was able to induce a mild sense of vertigo when driving down the corkscrew at Laguna Seca at full bore.

By that time I had upgraded my system to a 486/66 w/ 256 colours in something like 640x480 mode for games (or was it 320x240?). This would be circa 1992 IIRC. Before that I spent a lot of time playing Falcon 3.0 (man that rocked!) and "Aces of the Pacific" and "Aces over Europe"[sic]. Falcon and Indy Car were great when connected head to head via serial cables. Oooo, retro. <shudder>

Then I stopped playing with sims and started playing/wrenching with real cars (Honda, Porsche, Subaru) and trucks (Suzuki, Chevrolet, Jeep) for about 15 years or so. I stumbled over this project one day last fall while browsing macosxhints.com.

The idea and execution of VDrift really seems to click with me. I like being able to easily tweak the cars for different things and testing them in a pretty good dynamic simulation environment. Sure, it's not perfect but for the cost it is damn good. And while it may not give real world reproducible results it does seem to indicate trends. I've been playing with different engine configurations where the torque curve has a different shape between tweaks. I like the "output".

I'm hoping to get to the point where I can test my models on a simulated local track (Calabogie, maybe Tremblant and Mosport) that reflect cars I actually own (Subaru, soonish V-8 powered M-B W123).

I've seen the other sims like GTR and such while at friend's houses. They have lots of eye candy but don't have the same "draw" for me the way VDrift does. I'm guessing it is a combination of being a open source advocate (I'm a UNIX/Linux admin in the "real" world) and the openness of VDrift with respect to playing with the models. That and when at home I only do Mac OS X for front end machines. If it doesn't run on the Mac I'm not interested.

Given the leaps and bounds of enhancements to VDrift that have occured in the short time I've been playing with it, the future for VDrift looks bright indeed.

[cotharyus]

At the expense of dating myself, my sim playing goes
The game that really turned my crank for car sims though was the original "Indy Car Racing" by Papyrus. They've been around a long time in computer terms. Indy Car was the first sim I encountered that was able to induce a mild sense of vertigo when driving down the corkscrew at Laguna Seca at full bore.

Ahh. We share some history. I believe this was my first car sim as well.

[thelusiv]

I played some kind of Indy Car game when I was 11 or 12, don't know if it was the Papyrus one or not, but I remember when you hit other cars triangles would fly out, and the robot cars would sit dead on the track. My favorite thing to do, since I was a really crappy driver, was to drive backwards and collide with the other cars, and then try to pile them up on a section of the track so that other drivers would hit them.

[Nigo]

I just tried Racer again (on Linux you don't have much choice...)

you have to admit, it looks really good...

[joevenzon]

Don't worry, I've got plans for VDrift....

[reece146]

Don't worry, I've got plans for VDrift....

Go Joe, go!

[TerraRoot]

id love to see the pics of the v8 merc reece!
actually, maybe a sub forum for real cars would be cool?