Good work!

Just a thanks to the team for bringing this to the Ps4, I'm thoroughly enjoying the driving experience the best and most like the real thing from any game (even pcars). I've compared the Lotus Exige to the real thing and it's very close, I've tracked my own Exige 240 many times this year and the physics are so close. I noticed the cars are set up a bit safe with a lot of understeer, the Exige feels like mine with old tyres on front and new ones on the rear. But it's easy to dial that out. It really is very impressive. I particularly feel you have excelled in the force feedback it's just right and behaves like real cars do on the limit. Soft hands pay back here unlike other sims. Pcars is hopelessly inconsistent and needs a lot of tedious faffing to get better but it's never right.

The online experience is also much better far few rammers and car contact physics are very realistic for example in pcars if you so much as touch another cars bumper it's like you stick to it and lose steering, it's so frustrating, that's not what happens and it ruins close racing. I had a great evening blasting round Brands hatch in the mclaren 650 gt3 manages maybe 4 or 5 races. In pcars I get 1 befor I get hacked off with the rammers and **** minor contact physics.

On the negative side, no lap time leaderboards. I think this is essential to benchmark car setup for competitive racing. I'm not fussed about private lobbies at the moment but possibly some longer lobbies for when you have a bit of time to commit to longer races. Also on the car setup front there is no telemetry to help set up tyre pressures camber and suspension travel and there seems to be no API to connect apps to get data logging for the same.

And one final request this would make make the game complete... Knockhill circuit. It's such a challenging track and it's my home track so I can practice in the Exige. Thanks again and keep the updates coming to better an already impressive driving simulation.

 

Nice post.. i'm on the Xbox One but pretty much echo your sentiments there. Handling is superb, by far the best I have experienced in many years of virtual racing and the FFB is just sublime.... it's the first time I have actually been able to feel exactly what the car is doing. Brilliant!!

On the telemetry front I too was surprised to find no real telemetry although there is the tyre temperature info in the garage that you can access of course.

I did wonder wither there was going to be the possibility of getting third party apps for things like telemetry in the same way we do with pCars. Are you saying that this is not possible with AC?

 

Rawsco808 can you please tell me what FFB settings you have gone with?

Like you i have done plenty of track days in various cars but struggling to be totally convinced by the FFB - I'm sure its just that i haven't found those perfect settings yet and its reassuring that you think its so close to your Exige.

Cheers

 

They have telemetry on the PC version so seems weird not to have it on the console one!

They have all the apps on PC, so you can add different tyres apps etc amongst hundreds of others. No idea how they are going to do that on the console.

 

Awesome...first consolero with RL track experience in an AC car!!! Thx for sharing and keep enjoying and reporting bugs

 

I assumed that there would perhaps be a similar UDP stream possibility with AC as well but I have no way of knowing whether that is true or not. Hopefully somebody more in the know will be able to furnish and answer to that one.

 

Hi FFB settings are default maybe taken down a few notches to 80% i cant remember, I didn't mean that the FFB was like a real car, its close but it lacks a lot of the detail on brakes such as lockups on the inside wheel, it does however reward the principle of letting the car follow its own path with very soft hands, when you see cars being driven at the limit you see the wheel moving around a lot, that's mostly the driver just letting the wheel do that rather thank actively sawing the wheel. If you tense up in this game you go slower and have more 'moments' just like in real life, that the main similarity in the FFB with real life.

Regarding the physics, here's me on a walshy driver training day in my Exige 240. This is lifting off then turning in about 65/70 in 3rd and applying no correction until it was very out of shape. lesson objective was to hit lock stop on the 1st correction and get it back. The 1st run was just a sighting attempt, the latter 2 were what happens when you get the correction right(ish) then wrong respectively.



In the game the cars are much safer than this and just plough on with understeer. Easily sorted with some tweaks to the geo , springs ARBs and camber... I get it though safer make it easier to drive, as you are missing so much of the physicality of being in a car on track that its actually harder to drive on the sim but as you want to go faster you need to dial out the understeer more and more until you reach your limit of skill in managing it on a narrower and narrower margin.

But, all good on AC efforts, love the game so far and hopefully all the minor things get tweaked....

 

Nice driving advise right there!

 

Thanks much easier said than done... Everyone tenses up eventually. Starting with the fingers all the way, eventually to the sphincter depending on how big the moment that started the tensing is... ;-) racing drivers are just better at not tensing up.

 

I certainly get tense way too easily. But when I don't care so much about the results - e.g. when I do a lap on a Nordschleife Tourist server and don't even aim for a good lap time - I'm usually very relaxed. What happens then is what you explained earlier - I let the wheel do its thing instead of trying to fight it and hold it in place. I'd like to learn how to do it in the heat of a race.

 

cool post

the default setups in AC are supposed to reflect the stock setup designed for driving on the street rather than track (for road cars at least) do you think that in this case the AC default setup is set even safer than that (in terms of toe, camber etc)? or the setup is correct (toe camber etc are the correct factory values) but the behaviour is too safe?

How about your car, is the alignment etc adjusted for track driving?

cheers

 

My Car is default performance pack Geo for the Exige 240 but I'd suggest the Exige is an out of the box track car rather than a road car. It can be made pointier With more camber and toe out but I'm not brave enough for that yet. It does have quite a lot of understeer if driven incorrectly but not generally low/mid speed lift off conditions. It will keep rotating if not corrected until a spin albeit in a controllable manner as seen in the first attempt in my vid with the 2 minor clumsy corrections. Where the Exige is very dangerous is over correction as seen partially in attempt number 3, and also suddenly going from understeer to snap oversteer. Walshy (ex f1 test driver Andrew Walsh) told me, understeer is the forewarning to sudden and uncontrollable oversteer in mid engine cars especially lotus Elise/Exige. If your under steering you are one very small step away (usually a lift, dab of brakes or surface change) away from a massive crash and his excercises proved it. So it's with this real life experience I'd suggest that the sim cars are set up with a bit of understeer under most conditions. But again I think this is the right thing to do as the cars would be very difficult to control without the feel of the car through the seat. In a real car you don't react to the visual cue of oversteer, it's the changes in vibrations as the tyres slip angles increase feeling the suspension move, weight transfer, forces etcetera. In the sim your missing 90% of the information you need to be quick coming through the seat of the car.

Even the full on gt3 cars understeer on the default setups. It's just a good safe baseline for consistency before tuning.

 

After all the flak Kunos is getting at the moment, it is very refreshing to read something positive here! I could not agree more with rawsco: the actual driving is spot on and the best recreation of real world driving physics (from both simulation and force feedback) I have ever experienced on a console.
Yes, there are bugs that really need fixing (sound crackle, AI going to the pits on the last lap, difficulty inconsistencies), and mandatory features still missing (wheel configuration, leaderboards, UDP support), but I am 100% positive that the game will get there. I for my part applaude you guys at Kunos Simulazioni for pulling off this amazing feat of releasing an awesome sim for us console racers with the small team and lack of experience on consoles that you have! Thank you! And race on, everybody!

 

People don't get it the games industry is going towards DevOps and the net result is that you get a better game, honed over time, and the way they do this is by seeking feedback from the community rather than guessing and releasing a finished game that flops. KS have nailed the fundamental core of how the game works, informative sound, FFB and handling model the rest is just fluff that will come eventually as they figure out what people want from the game. It's just a shame they need to be subjected to so much abuse and hostility from child like keyboard warriors (probably rammers). No mans sky is the same although their promises were somewhat more optimistic borderline lies and I do t have any sympathy for them promoting the hype and failing, but fundamentally they have built something quite impressive in the procedural generation probably more of a science experiment, but have yet to wrap a game round it. The problem is that the market (us lot) demand a lot and hype gets out of control expectations rise unnecessarily and people get angry and lack patience.

 

Totally agree. Thanks a lot to Kunos. The success of Assetto will make to other simulator to aproach consoles (or not).

 

I just think expectations were too high in many respects. Some things that we get in other games as standard like private lobbies and leaderboards were assumed would be included whilst they were never actually promised by the devs and in fact they said were not there before release. Personally I am just pleased to be in the console generation when there are companies like Kunos \ SMS that are willing to try to give us virtual racers as realistic an experience as possible. AC is just stellar in its handling and physics aspects and given time and patience from us I'm sure we will be rewarded with improvements galore as we go forward.

 

There´s a big diference between the PC gamer and the console gamer. If Kunos cannot fix the online lobbies in less than a month this game will be finished.
While the PC gamer is more patient and the majority plays offline the console players are the opposite, mainly focused just on the online portion of the game.
I loved the game, but in the PCARS league group that race a lot of people will not buy the game because they can´t race in private lobbies.

 

Well to be fair leaderboards and private lobbies are things we've come to expect in any racing game nowadays. I think the developers have shot themselves in the foot by releasing the game without these features. Having said that, it's easier to add this functionality than having to fix a broken driving model which in AC is the best I've ever come across after 15 years of simracing on both PC and console.