Let's discuss iRacing - attempt #2

Point being, you lose access to the content you paid for unlike non-subscription games. It's just not a sustainable model that works for all of us - especially if we do the math and our schedule doesn't favor the online format, it makes it far too expensive to justify. It's great for a short term splash & go occasionally but, I actually miss the forum access more than anything else although, when the Rx content arrives, I'll have to give it a go.

 

@Dean Ogurek : On the other hand, there just is no other sim which has an extensive multiplayer league mode built in per default, with loads of servers running, and a backend, which have to be maintained. Frankly, i think the iRacing model is fair for what it does, and the amount of people paying for it proves that it works. I can only repeat myself, if you can set up a multi thousand dollar simulator, you surely have 120 dollars spare a year for the subscription. Especially as they usually discount it on black friday. The multiplayer mode is the heart of the sim, it's what makes it what it is. AC, to the contrary lives from the nice physics, and the content, not so much from the multiplayer mode.

Insiders say that iRacing usually busies in the red, BTW. Just to give a perspective, because people always claim that they're a cash cow like Apple. They mainly live from a rich investor, who considers iRacing his "baby".

 

Any news about black friday?

I have to resubscribe and buy some content so I can practise a bit for an upcoming endurance event we have in January.

 

Just got an black friday sale offer to renew my membership for 25%.

 

Yeah but 1 year is minimum..

 

How to monitor tyres in iRacing? How much slip you wanna maintain? Is there some car in the bundled content which is "up to date" and worth studying? (I still don't know which car we will run in the event I have to sudy for so don't want to buy worthless content.)

Yesterday I finally resubscribed and did a quick test drive. It was better than I expected but knowing how the game engine likes to be driven is so freaking hard and unnatural that I was a bit lost. The Ross Bentley tip, Just go and drive the wheels off, doesn't have much value.

 

Tried to give it another go myself this week just the base content again, put a good session in on Okayama with the Cadillac CTS, it really doesn’t like any slip angle at all it seems, the car just breaks away with no warning and even if you recover the slide it seems to be still set on spinning you off and does it anyway.
Needless to say I found myself back on Assetto Corsa pretty quickly! 15euro down the drain, although I will give it one more serious go before the month runs out.

 

I resubscribed over the weekend, had $5 credit in my account so it only cost me $8 and I wanted to try it out in VR. For the most part I was pleased with it, felt a lot better than the last time I played three years ago. I know it has issues but the other sims aren't scratching my itch right now so I figured I'd give iRacing another go. Haven't done any racing yet, we'll see how it goes. Oh, and it looks pretty good on my Rift.

 

Agreed it looks decent on the rift nice sky and clouds etc but graphically not amazing, IMO assetto looks better..
It’s hard to justify the pricing of it really €15 a car and €20 a track is plain robbery for the quality of it..

 

Yeah, not quite as good as AC but pretty close. I noticed everything in the distance has a slight blur to it though, more so than other sims, but I haven't tinkered with the settings so maybe I can get that to go away.
It's not cheap, but I guess it just depends on how you look at it. I spend $15-20 for 8 minutes on track at the local karting facilities, so buying a car/track in iRacing gets me a helluva lot more seat time than an afternoon karting. At least that's how I'm looking at it. Luckily I'm in a position now where I can afford to pay-to-play for a while so we'll see how it goes.

 

Anyone tried the 3rd party force feedback app (irFFB)? It's telemetry based and ticking at 360Hz which should be quite a difference after vanilla 60Hz..

 

Yeah, I tried it but returned to the vanilla FFB. It was ok but not so much that I wanted to stay with it. Now that I have a Wheelbase 2.5 since two weeks I might try it again.

 

Where do we find it and how do we install it?

 

Thread:
http://members.iracing.com/jforum/posts/list/3552959.page

And instructions:
https://github.com/nlp80/irFFB/wiki/Configuration

 

I have a strange question:

How to drive Nordschleife Combined in iRacing? I've bought both, GP & Nordschleife but when I click the track it just doesn't select it. I can drive both of these layouts separately just fine.

 

You prob need to buy the endurance layout too.

 

I have both.

I actually managed to solve it. The launcher is somehow buggy and does not want to select "Combined" layout. It works perfectly from the browser.

Edit: What kind of high fuel race pace I should be driving with GT3 cars at 24H Nordschleife?

 

I've been driving iR quite a lot lately and believe it or not, I'm really starting to enjoy the driving experience! At first I had some adaptation problems because of the absolutely crap force feedback. Nowadays I've made the FFB heavily filtered, non-linear and dampened and finally I've managed to get into the point where the force feedback does not send me into the barriers.

Couple of things I really like about the sim are the dampers/suspension and tyre bite on slow speed corners. The latter makes approching slow speed corners much more natural.

I didn't have to adapt my driving style other than in iR I coast a bit more because the car is more sensitive to small changes in tyre load. In general my lines are a bit rounder. Otherwise I drive just like in AC and it seems to be working reasonably well.

And icing on the cake, VR looks stunning in iR. I still don't use SuperSampling at all because it looks good even without it.

 

Yes iR is good enough of a sim to get into it. It's behind AC and AMS in terms of physics and a lot more behind in FFB but at least the FFB only comes from a proper simulation of the mechanical chain and there's no added stuff to cover up the flaws. I can live with that. But in summary, the benefits don't outweigh the disadvantages so I'm not touching that again anytime soon.

 

I don't fully agree. There's some pieces like kerbs it does much better than AMS or AC. In AC kerbs does more or less random things to the car while in ISI engines kerbs are "non existent". In iR you have to think what kerbs you can take and you also can lean on the outside kerbs which is quite rewarding. Kerbs are important part of the race track in iR.

The FFB is one massive downside in iR. I honestly have to hide all the information it wants to deliver while still maintaining some weight on the wheel. FFB makes the physics feel so much worse and I cannot believe they still haven't fixed their $hit. It just feels ridiculously bad!

I'll give you an example of physics: I did a quick video track guide to my friend and yesterday decided to put it side by side with Nick Catsburg's onboard. I was amazed how identical brake and throttle inputs looked like. Even more amazed I was when I was looking at what corners Nick did better than I and copied his technique into iR and it just worked flawlessly!

Another big downside in iR is the behaviour over the limit. That's something I don't like because while the driving looks kind of realistic it doesn't let you much room to do things differently. You're always kind of forced to drive in a over-smooth manner.