after finishing s.t.a.l.k.e.r. i found it is time for more racing action. i won’t cancel playing s.t.a.l.k.e.r. but i think i should spend some more time to gtr again. after learning that most of the tracks runs very fine and after testing an 18 elise custom championship i have decided to pay some attention to common race tracks instead of fiddeling with this kinda annoying nordschleife. i mean, i really appreciate the effort and the time people spend to projects like the nordschleife but i really can’t understand why this track is still suffering from the same issues like the first release for gtr2 (not the old gpl version). very variing performance, wierd shadows, reflection layer about half a meter above ground on some parts of the track, sun is shining thru the track or ground, the track appears as a white ‚rollercoaster‘ at the horizont, sudden ctd, ai drivers failing to find the box or play demolition derby at certain corners. beside the ‚beautiness‘ and the realism of the track, at the end, it is a race track and what i want to do is race. i don’t care if the number of seats at the tribune beside the ford corner is correct or if there is enough space for the vips above the pits. to turn shadow details down helps a lot but then i drive on a flat lighted shadow free track and this is indeed far away from what i expect from driving on the nordschleife. to say it like elvis – a little less detail a little more action please! i know, it is possible to contribute and at the end there is no real excuse. just to complain won’t change something but the direction this projects has taken, i can not see a real benefit of spending a tiny and very unreliable amount of time. anyway, i was a little bit unhappy with the 18 elise custom championship since i’m always struggle with the performance and the 5 gear fixed gearbox of the original elise. i still have my own version of the elise around and thought it would be nice to use the engine mapping and the gearbox of my version for the championship as well. unfortunately, i wasn’t able to get this ‚hack‘ running and by whatever reason, i don’t have the original archive available. a quick search on one of my prefered pages ’nogripracing‘ (big thanks to you guys) offered a 25 cars lotus exige pack which has catched my attention like a sundew a fly. even if this pack comes with 500 ps exiges, overall, this is what i’m looking for. different tires, nice paintings, 6 adjustable gears, great sound – perfect. a quick run on barcelona in rain was proofing my assumption, this power is far too much for this tiny car. but i found on nogripracing some 380 ps exiges/elises as well and it wasn’t really tricky to use the different engine for the 500 ps versions. by whatever reason, the sound of the engine was heavily shifted to the left but to edit this within the engine file isn’t really rocket science. without spending much time for the setup, i’ve started a quick race at barcelona and i’ve had some very serious action. the ai is performing quite perfect and the variation between the cars/drivers is very well designed. the tires are really sticky, i have tested the soft slicks, so for longer races it won’t be a problem to go for med slicks. the 380 ps are really handy and still enough to speed the car up to 250 km/h. the lap times on barcelona are reduced by 12-15 seconds, down to below 1:40, which provides enough adrenaline, especially when you surrounded by about 10 other exiges and the rear starts to get loose under braking 😉 i will now go and try to implement the 18 elises from the other pack, so that i will get a field of 40 cars and then i will create a custom championship with ’suitable‘ tracks for a 6-8 races season.
at day, there are no performance issues, just a few stutters, at night the performance is dropped a little due to the headlights but even under rain condition with headlights, the frame rate still tries to stay above 40-50, when just a few cars visible the frame rate climbs the 60 fps like under daylight condition. this may vary for certain tracks, especially spa is very demanding, but overall, this is much more ‚driveable‘ than the current nordschleife, even with higher graphic settings.
in general, i’m really happy to be back to gtr2, it is still a very good simulation and the more or less outdated graphics is something i can life with, while racing i don’t spend any attention to the surrounding except for brake points or other vehicles. the feeling, even with my old momo racing wheel, is nice and kind of close to real world driving, especially the scrubbing when pushing the car too hard or the feedback when the rear starts to loose grip. this is exactly what i found while driving with my roadster on real world race tracks. the sweeping and rattling is still strange but maybe i will go for the g25 sometimes. surprisly, i was able to go with the pack quite quick. i was expecting that it will take some time to get close to my old performance since i haven’t touched gtr2 for more than a year and especially on unknown tracks (i haven’t spent so much time on barcelona before) i really struggle to find the right pace. more to come so stay tuned.