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.
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