Best simulation racing game for the PC?

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JCE

JCE

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JCE3000GT
I've been out of the PC game loop for about 3-4 years so I don't know what's out. My question is--which is rather obvious lol--are there any Gran Turismo or Forza STYLE/TYPE PC games? The closest thing I've found recently is NFS Hot Pursuit 2--but that doesn't really offer the depth that GT4 and Forza have.

Anyone?

*edit*
Please do not suggest any Need For Speed games that were made after NFS Hot Pursuit 2. Or any drifter type games either.
 
Agreed, Liveforspeed is the dogs when it comes to the driving physics, it also has very good online play. The alternative with a literally huge selection of mods, mostly based on real cars and tracks is RFactor, not as good as LFS physics wise but better than GT4. Be warned though, I have RFactor and with all the mods I have, the car folder alone has several hundered different cars and ammounts to over 20gig of data and the 200 plus tracks I have downloaded and you've got a pretty immense game. You can get carried away, and with some of the mods in development I have to reccomend RFactor. It really boils down to what you want most, the best physics, great online but not much content, then go for LFS. If good physics and fabulous content already available and scope for future expansion buzzes your err, buzzer more then go for RFactor.
 
Gabkicks
If your main concerns are great racing and realistic physics, look no further than www.liveforspeed.net. its got a decent range of cars, from a little mini type car to the bmw f106. BMW recently held a contest using LFS. The the prize was a BMW M6.

check this great video out http://don.vn.cz/s2/vids/slowmotion_tyres2.avi
there's plenty of info on other sims on this forum as well.
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I'll check out that video, when I looked at screens for the game I was impressed but the game seemed too "bright" with too much contrast and brightness. While I'm sure I could turn it down on my monitor it just didn't seem like the track enviorments were as crisp as GT3/GT4 and Forza. But I'll definately give it a try. 👍

Dave A
The alternative with a literally huge selection of mods, mostly based on real cars and tracks is RFactor, not as good as LFS physics wise but better than GT4. Be warned though, I have RFactor and with all the mods I have, the car folder alone has several hundered different cars and ammounts to over 20gig of data and the 200 plus tracks I have downloaded and you've got a pretty immense game. You can get carried away, and with some of the mods in development I have to reccomend RFactor.
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Hmm, RFactor hm? I'll give that a go then. And as far as space I have a 200GB and a 400GB harddrive with less than 40% used combined. I have plenty of space. ;)

Allianz
If you want GT4/forza style then its rFactor, if you weant fancy physics then LFS.
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Seems everyone's say this. Kind of like the old Enthusia vs GT4 arguement a while back. lol

Thanks for the suggestions guys I'll give those 2 games a try.

*edit*
Just watched that video for LFS and my god is it beautiful. The pics I saw must of been an early beta or something. Does the actual game itself look as good as the replays? And that Mini beater drifting with the different color body panels and rust and the like was just perfect.
 
yeah thats how the game looks. it looks okay. there are some musthave downloads like hiresolution texture packs for the tracks and hires cars. you can make your own skin pretty easily or download some of the millions of skins already available. there's an autodownloading system that automaticly downlaods other people's carskin onto our pc and uploads yours onto theirs... lots of race oriented features like that are on lfs. it has its own stat tracking website as well. www.lfsworld.net
there's a multiplayer demo with 3 cars and 1 track and a few sp training courses, but the demo demo servers can get pretty bad.
 
You know, I just noticed something. Neither of these two games actually have any REAL cars--they're all Burnout style cars. Please tell me that there are actual car models of real cars available.
 
rfactor has tons of "real" cars, but only a few of the cars in rfactor are official. rfactors got the 2006bmw f1 car like LFS. Rfactor has tons of downloadable cars, but due to the limitations of the physics engine and and partially the talent of the modders, they aren't quite as realistic as they could be.
in LFS, the raceabout, mrt, and bmw f1 are "real". i'd rather have 19 cars that handle more believably than 400 or so that don't. i guess it all depends on what standards a person has for what he expects of a racing simulator.
 
To me a racing simulator should have real cars to simulate. And I don't like F1, Indy, stock car/nascar, and or any other type of supreme racing. GT and touring car racing is what I prefer in terms of "race" race cars. Otherwise, I prefer normal road cars over race cars. So that BMW F1 car is useless to me because I'll never use it. Too bad Microsoft couldn't just release PGR3 for the PC. lol
 
lfs has gt class cars. the fzr,fxr, xrr are closer to super gt spec cars. Rfactor has fia gt cars from the 1960's 1970's and modern day fia gt cars. a super gt mod will be release eventually. I was just having a few laps around the indy gp course in the good old ford gt40. :) in rfactor. there are many many tracks for rfactor as well.

from what you've said, it sounds like rfactor might be more your speed, especially if you have a topnotch pc. I'd reccomend lfs over rfactor though, because of the superior physics engine and much better mp racing.
 
The cars in lfs (besides the actual real ones) seem to represent a "style" of car more than trying to "be" a specific one. the xfg (i think thats right:) ) is a compact fwd with normal aspirated I-4. It could be a gti, focus, civic, who knows ? but IMO it simulates each style of car very well like a template of sorts. My comp cant handle gtr even with everything turned down, but it looks good, but lfs is very good, and I haven't even dug into the telemetry stuff like f1perfview. 👍
 
yeah the telemetry programs are pretty awsome. they help in understanding where you are losing time and also in setting up a car. analyseforspeed, f1perfview and lfs replay analyser. it also highlights little details about driving style, for example, i never realized i shift quite alot and i also keep revs up very high compared to worldrecord laps. a wr lap might have the minimum rpm at 3,210rpms and mine will be at 5,000 :P. i guess when more realistic engine damage is added, I'll have to be more gentle on the engine.

rfactor, gtr2 and all the other isi games have telemetry recorders as well. :)
 
f1perfview is just daunting...:scared:

But its cool to know there is that much data available if you wanted to look at it!
 
JCE3000GT
To me a racing simulator should have real cars to simulate. And I don't like F1, Indy, stock car/nascar, and or any other type of supreme racing. GT and touring car racing is what I prefer in terms of "race" race cars. Otherwise, I prefer normal road cars over race cars. So that BMW F1 car is useless to me because I'll never use it. Too bad Microsoft couldn't just release PGR3 for the PC. lol
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I believe that rfactor has all kinds of these cars for download.
If 'real cars' on 'real tracks' and all officially licensed is what you want then maybe you should try gtr2?
 
I wonder why anyone never mention Viper Racing. Sure this game is old but this game offer the same number of tuning that GT4 has. The number of car addon already close to GT4 car number. It has additional track too. And there are people that still playing it online now at vrgt.

Graphic wise it can't be compared with modern games, but physics is great, we can also change it to our preference in a way other game can't. We can change it's spring rate, damper, camber, toe, ride height, downfore, gear ratio, just like in GT4. We can also change car power, car momentum, wind drag, tire magic value parameter, engine inertia, etc.

It has ghost car mode, career mode, quick race mode, and online race.

Ghost car mode and road car addon is what remind me of GT series :).

This is how it looks:




962c3.jpg
 
Viper Racing is kind of limited compared to games of these days, though, and it has a terrible interface/menu system (though the paint editor was a fairly powerful system). I always found the way it modeled downforce to be weird, as well.
I personally prefer Sports Car GT for old school sim racing.
 
No such thing as a Gran-Turismo-style game on anything other than home consoles, I'm afraid. Live for Speed is the closest equivalent, because unlike almost all PC sims, it has ordinary roadcars, and unlike the few other sims that have roadcars, it's very accessible, realistic, and has a very active community behind it.

Get LFS. You won't be disappointed. :) Besides, rumor has it that the game will be opened up for modding once it's "complete." As impressive and polished as it is now, it's still technically an incomplete alpha.
 
I can't wait for the modding thing.

Rfactor has a good community and mods but its engine isn't made for road car simulation.
 
Gen.
I can't wait for the modding thing.

Rfactor has a good community and mods but its engine isn't made for road car simulation.
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Its engine is also an annoyingly excessive system resource hog.
 
Toronado
Viper Racing is kind of limited compared to games of these days, though, and it has a terrible interface/menu system (though the paint editor was a fairly powerful system). I always found the way it modeled downforce to be weird, as well.
I personally prefer Sports Car GT for old school sim racing.
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The default value of car physics really lack of testing. I think that what make the car feel lighter. I usually made the car 60% heavier on my mod.

Funny thing is, Viper racing use the same downforce value as GT2. Both game also has weird behaviour when we change the car weight to very light. a 10kg feel like a baloon on viper, on GT2 and GT4.

We can't change Sports Car GT tire behaviour. In Viper Racing, we can make the tire behave like Sports Car GT, like GPL, like NFS or even like GT4 :). If you have time to tweak it off course ;).

With right amount of testing, I think tire behaviour should be able to reach Nascar Racing 2003 level, since both share the same game engine. The difference is Nascar Racing use real life data and rigorously tested with real team mechanic, and Viper Racing don't.

Anyone know Racer? They say it has better realism than LFS. I forget what version, but LFS just recently change it's tire physics. This means tire physics in LFS still need improvement.

I think the best PC game simulation do not have to be the one with the most sophisticated engine (rFactor and GTR). But the one that use real life data and verified by real life engineer. Something like Nascar Racing 2003 or GPL. Unfortunately both game have fixed physics. So my best bet would be any game with Open Engine physics that allow user to tweak the tire data (like racer, Viper Racing, Nascar Heat, motorsport-sim, etc), that have been polished enough by either it's developer or it's fans.

From what I learn after browsing many PC sim website, it seems the one that use Pacejka tire simulation has the best realism. If your game do not support modification to tire data, then you have to trust the game developer for realism.
 
I play GTR2, with f3000, f12007, porsche 956, zonda GR, and TDU road car mods, which is very good. However I have heard very good things about LFS and RFactor.
 
Well i think nearly all the games has been mentioned, but i think there is a few more left. Racer was really really cool at the time, because you could create your cars and tracks and you could modify the physics of the car to the way you wanted. I really like the D1 mod for Racer, it feels quite realistic in a way (unlike the D1 mod for rFactor, which was based on the Racer mod) But sadly though, I think the project died a few years ago and people are not very involved with the game anymore...... :(

You should go to racesimcetral if you want to know about any race sims. They covered almost every game out there and as well as having some mod packs inside there. There are several people who are from RSC as well (MistaX,Gabkicks) maybe you can ask them for help as well.
 
Ultimate quetsion: whats free?! lmao

I used to play the LFS demo, but i just hated the fact that i was not able to play with the other 042 570927405427 cars they had to offor, or the other bunch of tracks!
 
sucahyo
Anyone know Racer? They say it has better realism than LFS.
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Racer is an interesting project, but as of yet it's a complete joke in terms of both realism and accessibility. The physics engine uses the outdated Pacejka model for its tire simulation, and appears to be greatly lacking in terms of suspension modelling and polar momentum. Even if you can stomach the physics (and it does work well enough to amuse you for a few minutes), nearly all of the content is amateur-made and consists of a very broad range of quality and completeness -- even moreso than what you can download for the ISI games. Tracks will often have huge graphical glitches, and it's so difficult to nail down the "correct" physics values to apply to the cars that only a handful of car creators have any idea what they're doing.

sucahyo
I forget what version, but LFS just recently change it's tire physics. This means tire physics in LFS still need improvement.
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No, this means that Scawen is willing to work on and improve the tire physics in Live for Speed, so that they will continue to approach "true" realism.

I would much rather have a simulation made by developers who are willing to continue working on it than a simulation made by developers who leave the core elements alone, and/or rely on a pre-created tire model of dubious accuracy because they're too lazy to make their own.

sucahyo
I think the best PC game simulation do not have to be the one with the most sophisticated engine (rFactor and GTR). But the one that use real life data and verified by real life engineer. Something like Nascar Racing 2003 or GPL. Unfortunately both game have fixed physics. So my best bet would be any game with Open Engine physics that allow user to tweak the tire data (like racer, Viper Racing, Nascar Heat, motorsport-sim, etc), that have been polished enough by either it's developer or it's fans.
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The problem with "real life" data is that the way it's gathered and implemented into the physics engine can vary from development team to development team. And that's before you consider the fact that it's extremely difficult to get clear data from friction-based measurements (as in attempting to model a tire's behavior).

Also, the problem with "open" physics engines is that the game loses consistency and becomes much messier and harder to work with, forcing the player to attempt to decide which set of physics values is "best," and forcing them to download certain values to play on certain online servers.

sucahyo
From what I learn after browsing many PC sim website, it seems the one that use Pacejka tire simulation has the best realism. If your game do not support modification to tire data, then you have to trust the game developer for realism.
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Popular opinion isn't always "right." Personally, I've never been impressed with a sim that used Pacejka.
 
Wolfe
Also, the problem with "open" physics engines is that the game loses consistency and becomes much messier and harder to work with, forcing the player to attempt to decide which set of physics values is "best," and forcing them to download certain values to play on certain online servers.
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Isn't it the same with the commercial game too? Isn't SCGT and Nascar Racing 2003 has patch that can change car physics and anyone has to use the same type of patch to race online? Or like LFS where different sub version may have different physics? This is not happen on game which has physics stored on car though.

Wolfe
Popular opinion isn't always "right." Personally, I've never been impressed with a sim that used Pacejka.
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I don't follow sim racing progress lately, what is the name of the other method? what game already use it?

I ask because if pacejka real life data is very rare (I even found that one of them is what VR and NH use), do this other method have real data floating around?
 
Im gonna put a word in for Race 07. 2 seasons of WTCC, 3 classes of caterham, 6 classes of radical, F3000, FBMW, WTCC 87, Mini cooper challenge. Back of box says over 300 cars (thanks to alternate liverys for most I guess) 32 track variations. The racing is tight, fun, action packed and thrilling, the physics are really good and online is pretty good too.
 
sucahyo
Isn't it the same with the commercial game too? Isn't SCGT and Nascar Racing 2003 has patch that can change car physics and anyone has to use the same type of patch to race online? Or like LFS where different sub version may have different physics? This is not happen on game which has physics stored on car though.
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But with LFS you can generally expect the majority of players to be using the latest official version (some also download the test patches inbetween patche releases).

sucahyo
I don't follow sim racing progress lately, what is the name of the other method? what game already use it?

I ask because if pacejka real life data is very rare (I even found that one of them is what VR and NH use), do this other method have real data floating around?
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You may be interested in this Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_racing_simulators
 

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