New Racing Simulation Distances Itself From Gamers 208
waderoush writes "In an unusual move that could alienate a large segment of potential customers, iRacing.com, an online racing simulation company that opened its site to the public on August 26, is calling its system a 'driver development tool' that isn't designed for PC or console gamers. 'We don't think of ourselves as a game company,' says one exec. 'World of Warcraft has a real appeal...But our system is more serious, frankly. If you are serious about racing, our product is for you, because getting on a [simulated] track with a full field of other drivers and racing against them safely involves as much commitment and time investment as if you went to racing school.' In fact, to distinguish its system from MMOs, the company has come up with a new acronym to describe its simulation: MMIS, for 'massively multiparticipant Internet sport.'"
Re:A better headline: (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah. From the article, it's a $20 monthly or $156 annual subscription. THEN, to get anything more than absolutely shitty cars (Pontiac Solstice??) and shitty tracks you have to buy your way up.
Re:Can you say publicity stunt? (Score:5, Informative)
Creating games is usually a whole lot more complicated and requires a lot more knowledge and experience than the average business application
I would prefer to say different rather than harder. Creating business apps also requires some skills that are not found in games, for example : disentangling the business rules, interacting with users, making sense of the 20 year old system which consists of cobol-programs, jcl, ... all written by 20 different people which aren't there anymore, and you're stuck with a database which is a melting pot of 3 older systems ...
Re:Can you say publicity stunt? (Score:5, Informative)
iRacing is simply the MMO business model applied to the racing genre. Sadly a bunch of my race sim buddies have fallen for Dave Kaemmer's bullshit and subscribed. However the reviews I'm hearing from folk are primitive graphics etc...
Papyrus know how to do racing physics. Grand Prix Legends is ten years old and still holds it's own on the current crop of sims from ISI, Simbin etc... But this just screams of publicity stunt. It's basically a subscription based ranking system. It's kinda like a virtual SCCA.
Dave Kaemmer stuck a stake through the heart of the NR2003 community when iRacing first came into being as First Racing, and threatened a bunch of folk with lawsuits, actually DID take Tim McArthur to court if I recall (ultimately settled out of court), just so they could reuse code from NR2003 for this thing. Apparently modding a now five year old video game was somehow damaging their business. They changed their name to iRacing after all the bad publicity of threatening their potential customers with legal action.
I'll stick to sims made by DECENT companies who don't screw their users over, thanks.
Life for Speed (Score:3, Informative)
There's an excellent racing simulator out there already; Live for Speed [lfs.net]. I was impressed by it's realism, cars handle as expected. They've modeled suspensions well and the game even accounts for tire flex. There are guys out there who've set up cars specifically for drifting and that's pretty much all they do. If you've got a controller that supports it you can even play with a clutch pedal.
It also scales up nicely to high resolutions, and it performs well. I had it running at 2560x1024 across two monitors and it ran consistently at 50-60fps on a 3ghz P4 with a Radeon 9800 Pro.
Where the game is likely to disappoint is in the lack of cars. Most of the cars are inspired by actual models but not the real thing and the tracks aren't based on actual courses. Although they did manage to get approval to include a BMW Sauber F1 car in the game. That car is impressive.
Contrast that with Gran Turismo which has a huge library of actual cars. Although despite the amount of work Sony supposedly has put into those games I've never been impressed by the physics and even worse, the AI.
So I'm curious about iRacing but not yet impressed. And I can't say I'm keen about all the oval tracks and the Nascar leanings.
So let's review (Score:4, Informative)
1) iRacing buys rights/code/everthing related to NASCAR Racing 2003, Sierra/Papyrus's final great NASCAR sim.
2) They then chase off a lot of modders for the game (who were making custom tracks, etc), threatening legal action etc etc. (see: http://forum.tmcarthur.net/viewtopic.php?t=52) After meeting resistance, their lawyers presumably move on to more productive activities, like kicking puppies.
3) Now, years later, they finally get around to releasing a new "racing simulation" based on what's now 6 year old code. And they want people to pay out the bum for it.
4) rFactor is probably better anyway.
Good luck with that, guys.
Re:Can you say publicity stunt? (Score:3, Informative)
Howdy.
Try out any title made by Simbin on the PC: GTR, GT Legends, GTR2, and RACE.
GTR is FIA GT1 and GT2 cars, like in Lemans.
GTR2 is more of the same.
GT Legends is FIA GTC65, GTC76 and TC65 classes in a game.
RACE I believe is WTCC racing.
They are very realistic and have a pretty active community. They also support a clutch pedal and H-pattern shifter setup, if you have one.
Disclaimer: I don't work for Simbin, I'm just an avid racing sim gamer.
Re:Can you say publicity stunt? (Score:3, Informative)
I think it's more likely (or at least I hope so) that their game is just very realistic and that most 'gamers' wouldn't even enjoy it anyway. I've been playing GT: Prologue over the last week on 'professional' physics mode as opposed to the default 'standard' physics. While it is still fun, it can also be highly frustrating compared to most driving games. You have to be very controlled and sensible, just as with real racing.
In some cases (especially with the Ford GT on 'sports' class tyres rather than racing class) I think it was actually more difficult than driving the real car - if you didn't give the exact small amount of throttle required through the corners the car would just oversteer and spin out. If you gave a bit too much throttle through the corners, the car would oversteer and spin out. The traction control was no use as it just cuts out the power completely for any skid (as does the active stability management, so I just drive with all the aids switched off). I'm not sure if that's realistic as I've never driven a real Ford GT, but it seems it's pretty dangerous to cut power off altogether during a fast corner in a rear wheel drive sports car! I've now unlocked unlocked the 'S' class of races and they include the ability to tweak the suspension settings though, so I may try later to get the GT into a more drivable state where I'll be able to go more than 3 respectable laps without spinning out!
Anyway, after the whole Ford GT fiasco I was getting frustrated and tried the 'standard' physics to see the difference - instead of spinning out at every corner I could pretty much be as crazy as I wanted to, and would only spin out when I did something extremely stupid. I hardly even needed to follow proper racing lines to win a race. I lapped a couple of seconds faster than my best, most controlled time on one track in the GT-R and didn't even have to do any slipstreaming to get that time. IMO the 'standard' physics seems to involve making the tyres a lot more sticky,. Then it doesn't matter if you mess up your braking a little, and you can carry a lot more speed round the corners. Much more fun, but not very realistic.
So if they are wanting to leave out all the crap and just make a pure racing sim, good for them. They will be limiting their audience sure (I remember hearing complaints a few years ago about certain driving games being 'too hard'), but they will attract people that are actually interested in proper motor racing.
If they really want to make this serious the game will require a steering wheel. In most driving games you can use a keyboard without much fuss at all. But you definitely couldn't control a real 500HP rear wheel drive race car adequately with a keyboard, which is just a bunch of on/off inputs. Perhaps if the vehicle had extremely wide and slick tyres you'd be fine starting and stopping, but it would still suck for cornering. The latest PS3 joypad has all analog buttons (even on the 4 way d-pad) and is more workable, but a steering wheel and pedals is still the easiest control method. Even with a steering wheel I can still imagine a lot of gamers trying a realistic sim and crying because they can't powerslide around every corner and still end up in 1st place, despite starting at the back of the grid. That's not an elitist attitude, just a realistic one. The point is that only those who have done a bit of learning about vehicle handling and racing technique would be able to get anywhere on a true racing simulator (unless the AI was set to be just as poor as the player). That type of thing is meant to be for enthusiasts rather than gamers. In reality there will be a bit of overlap of course, but one style of game isn't likely to suit the extreme ends of both crowds. Real race drivers want to be able to finely tune suspension setups etc. Gamers want to ram into cop cars.