A review after a few weeks playing

[ysu]

Ok, I have to write a little 'review' after a couple of weeks playing it.

First of all: I still maintain the car behaviour / tyre physics is very well done. It feels great, you can catch the car with throttle while it can still spin if you lack the xp/don't watch it, it can slide (and if you slam the brakes in, for example, the howston, you can slide out of the track, so that part is good too).
So all in all, feels good. But to achieve the good driving feeling you need to tweak a number of things in the settings, and maybe in the files too. A lot of seemingly fairly important things are only available via tweaking settings files. At least it has some explanations on most lines...not that all of that is working, but still... :-)

I have to admit it, the game has shortcomings.

First of all, generally it was rushed out. Apart from the obvious left-out things (weather, anyone?) there are a number of thing they could fix before release. Or at least it should be stated it's a beta - as it's always with LFS (I love that approach!). The racecast is not even working right (it's like lfsworld, a statistical site), it's been reset a number of times already, patched, updated...so it wasn't tested out at all I'd say.

Optical
Some say it looks cartoony. A bit, yes. Others say you need to turn all display settings up to max, it'll look good. But for this, you need a 5 grand gaming rig...
The night effect is nice, altho the sun's missing. Sometimes the glare starts behind objects, or in the middle of the concrete(!) which looks plain stupid.
Also worth mentioning, that the time multiplier does not work in every situation (especially in single player season mode) so starting a 20+ lapper season is a dangerous thing in open wheelers (they've no lights). by the way the lights look great!

There are other funny things, the flames on the exhaust (looks a bit stupid, it's a flat image), the glowing brake disc....

Sound
Hm, well, it's not that great. It uses the old method, repeating samples. Easy to mod. Plain. Forget any echo/wind noise/engine damage sound.
The base content has fairly average ones too. The F3 mod makes my head hurt. Imho LFS beats the sh1t out of it.
(I have to admit the howston sounds sexy tho)

Gameplay/hardware
The old 1fps bug is still present, I've experienced it a few times too, even tho I havent' had it since RBR with my old machine...(it's when the game suddenly goes with 1-3 fps then suddenly ok again, seemingly no reason to it, at random parts of the track)

Ah I have to mention you'll need a good machine to run it. The min spec is bullshit just as usual, multiply it with 2 or 3. (I can run fields of 20 on roughly medium settings, no more, A64 3400+/1GB/6600gt) especially the video card matters (for details) it seems; and for the number of AI: the cpu.

The AI is very bad, even with a few tweaks. You need to nudge them out from in front of you (they're madly blocking), and don't try to drive in front of them slower, they'll ram you usually (few exceptions).
This should have been fixed before release.

The damage model...hm...first of all: weak. Second: minimal vertex damage, mostly parts flying off. (The only dent I've seen was to the door, looked funny) And sparks if you switch it on in the settings files. While you can feel the effect of these things in driving (loosing a wing!) ...it's not that lifelike without dents, and somehow turned down.
Ah, but there's a nice thing happended to me the other day: I had heavy damage, went into the pits, and the guys in the pit couldnt' fix it totally! hehe....

On the pits: you dont' have the f9-f12, so reaching the details is a pain (you have to scroll through 8 different screens to find the one) The display is minimal, and doesn't seem to be correct at times, and only minimal settings possible (fuel and probably something else).

Now, one more thing: the grip off-track is too big. I've seen kids without any idea of the racing line putting in very good laps with the howston thanks to the 4wd and the high grip on the sides.

The tyre temp - while matters - doesn't make that much difference in the 4wd. There is no dirt on the tyre, and it's virtually impossible to wear down the rubber. (it takes very-very long time). There's only one tyre compound. Of course no flatspots either.

This is the revolutional game engine.


Now to the multiplayer.

It's good. They say it's revolutionary, but I say it's finally better and stable. The list of games need a tweak to show all servers, otherwise you need to keep refreshing and it'll show different servers every time (?!). The ping in the list is some hoax. It shows a value which has nothing to do with the server, but the people on it, and even that is vastly inaccurate. Get into the server, hit the '2' and it shows something very different usually (at least twice as much). I've had a disco (only one) but it was from an aussie server...interesting.

If the connection is somewhat crap, the effect is very disturbing: the other cars are all over the place, slowing down or accelerating with insane speed you cannot match, totally ruining the race. I'm braking like mad to avoid the disaster, cannot (because it wasn't braking, but the lag) then whooops...going throught the other car (there's a setting somewhere which prevents collisons if the lag is too big) ...so I was braking for no reason, but how am I to know it?

Also: the other cars are usual to see flying or dig into the tarmac, going through walls (!) I've seen a car taking a corner 2m above the ground....

There is a corner cutting watch, and it's nice (gives you a stop/go) but....it's not working in many places, it seems the base tracks were not fully equipped with this.

There are all the flags you need, those not watching the rules got DQ'ed, but it does not help dirty drivers, only very bad wreckers. It also costs money, but it does not matter much, almost everyone is using the babyfactory cheat, so it's sadly not a restaraining power. It takes only a percentage off your money anyway.

by the way: online you can find three kinds of races: F3 (most popular, running the F3 mod) , formula (not that popular), and some 'GT'. the GT is usually the equivalent of howstons fully prepped. maybe a hammer here or there. nothing else.

The population is usually 10 ppl on a couple of server for the GT cars, another 10 on formula, and some 20-25 on F3. There are another 50 odd people playing on locked server (ausorc, aor...)

Amazingly the public server population is not that bad on the GT servers (haven't tried the F3) as it's in LFS, but some are still a bit dirty racers.

Mods
The easy modding is there (they say, I'm not into it). So it may become a great thing.

You can change most of the thing in settings files, which is good because it's there, but bad because most of it should be inside the game in a well-organized manner.

There are two added tracks, those are very nice. A third is out, but it's just the same oval with different look.
There's the F3 mod, but I personally dont' like it that much. The cars are funny to drive, I think the trainer/adv trainer are much closer to reality than those f3's, altho it's a diff. category...the FOX feels better too (altho snappier. everything is snappier in LFS, losing grip much 'harder', and losing it very bad...)

Conclusion

They took the ISI motor one, replaced a number of things, patched a number of others, but the base approach is the same.

But apart from all the negatives I put down here rFactor is great fun, feels good to drive - if the conroller is set up well, aids all of.... It may be hard to achieve in some cases. Seems the defaults are for the plebs who'll drive with a decent amount of aids and stuff on.

IMHO it looks good too, not better than LFS currently, but good.

So in my opinion LFS is still at least on par, if not better, and it'll get even better - hopefully soon. :-)

And LFS alpha has less bugs than rF full...hm...mighty interesting. (the only serious shortcomings of LFS for me is the tyre phisics - especially at low speeds, and the moon gravity.