Thanks for the reminder, I've been meaning to post a general status update, although it's mostly been research so there's not a ton to show. I'm still going through all of the stats and paint colours for every car where I can find a reliable source, and figuring out specifically which year or month of production they're supposed to represent and what's right or wrong about them. I've got a large portion of the stats done now and a decent number of paint colours - I'm not too bothered about the colours that aren't quite the right shade but there are some cars with entirely the wrong set of options.
For example, the colours on the XJ220 were copied from the XJ and stayed that way right through GT6, but the real thing only had five options, all named after racetracks:
The 1998 Elise 135 in GT2 has a copy of the base model Elise colours, and the physics are a combination of things like the base model transmission and the 1999 111S weight. The real thing was a limited edition only available in one special colour, with a close-ratio gearbox and less weight than the later car:
Other cars have had accuracy overhauls of their stats too - the Fiat 500R had the 23ps Fiat 126 engine instead of the 18ps 500R version of that engine with a smaller carb, and a mangled version of the already broken Honda Z Turbo transmission which was geared much longer than it should be. With 18ps it's a few seconds slower in a 1000m drag than the original game, but with more low-end torque and gearing short enough that it's in 4th rather than 3rd at the end of the straight it's actually pretty decent to drive. I still need to work on its colours, it should only have five but two of them will need to be made from scratch:
One more example of a car with a significant physics fix - the Shelby Series 1 had gearing that was triply broken. First of all, it was set up to use a Corvette ZR-1 ZF transmission, except Polyphony mistakenly put the Camaro's Borg-Warner T56 ratios in the ZR-1 so the Shelby inherited those. Secondly, the ZF box in the ZR-1 is not the same as that in the real Series 1 - the C4 Corvette has a conventional transmission mounted to the back of the engine whereas the Series 1 uses a transaxle in the back of the car like the C5 Corvette onwards. It turns out that the correct box is an RBT RBT-6, a 90s derivative of the 70s ZF 5DS-25 modified to add a 6th gear. Finally, the final drive ratio was broken too. The brochure says 'ZF transmission' and '3.12 overall gear ratio', but what it actually means is a ZF-style transmission and a combined ratio of 3.12 with 6th gear and the final drive ratio multiplied together.
Long story short, with the right transmission 6th gear is as short as 5th used to be, and the final drive has dropped from 3.12 to 4.22, meaning that instead of being geared like a Viper and one of the longest in the game, it's now got short and snappy ratios that keep it in the powerband and make it feel like the agile sportscar it should be. Instead of 4th gear being longer than any straight in the game, all six are now useful:
I have pages and pages more of this stuff researched, including some that I haven't decided how to resolve yet. For example, Polyphony seem to have missed that the 1800cc Eunos Roadster was revised into the Series 2 in 1995, with different specs. The Eunos Roadster '93 and its variants in GT2 are largely '95 Series 2 models, but with some '93 and '94 colours mixed in with the full set of '95 options. In beta 7 the specs are 'fixed' to '93 values, but after finding all of this out the correct change is probably to set the model year to '95 instead... and then figure out how to handle the '93 and '94 special edition colours.
Sometimes what looks like a mistake turns out to be correct too. A 1995 Cappuccino is listed as 690kg, not the 700kg in GT2. However, GT2 has it equipped with a limited-slip diff, which only came in an options package that added ABS and an airbag, and thus 10kg extra weight. They clearly paid attention to the small print in the brochure on that one, which is a big contrast between how easily their researchers read Japanese-language brochures and their apparent oversights with foreign English-language brochures, where written details have sometimes been missed. For instance, the Jaguar XJ Sport and XJR in GT2 have every paint colour shown in the brochure and not just those listed as 'for XJ Sport and XJR'.
Anyway, lots more of that to come, alongside stuff already long since shown like the '97 Vipers. There will be some other niceties too, but I don't want to put out an 8.0 release with the Vipers and some stat fixes then a 9, 10, 11 etc with just other tiny fixes and break savegames every time, so while it may take a while I want to get a serious number of corrections into the next version.
