Zonda Cockpit Mirror (AND further problems)

  • Thread starter Alan_G
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Alan_G

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Bugman_27
Have a close look at the Zonda rear view mirror in the cockpit, preferably with a car behind you. It is inverted (or rather, the rear image is not inverted when it should be).

Myself, NewSoul, Derek and Frawe we doing some Zonda races. At Spa, myself and NewSoul were having a great race. I took the lead from NewSoul going into Les Combes. Coming out of there onto the little downhill straight, I was on the left beside the grass. I saw, in the mirror, NewSoul trying to pass me on the left on the grass. I though "oh damn. I'm squeezing him on the grass. Better give some room". So I swerved a bit to the right. *BANG*. He was on the right. :grumpy: So taking a close look at curbs and things in the mirror, the problem was pretty clear then.

For carrying out so called "white box" testing on this game, I'm sure you would break things down into many categories, one of which could be something like 'Cockpit Functionality'. So you would go through all 44 or so cars checking all of the specified function and features for that specific car. Naturally then, one of these would be for the rear view mirror. Some people may think it's a difficult thing to spot. However, because of the way the mirror is implemented (a dumbed down projection of the actual rear view or something), requiring it to be inverted, it would immediately imply a particular thing that must be tested on all of the cars.

It's quite clear they didn't do any complete testing on this game at all. It's the same problem with circuits' shortcuts and things. All of these issues are being discovered after the release, and by customers (for free). Some may point to lack of resources etc. But it is many times more expensive to fix these things after a release, compared with beforehand.

A lot of people are kicking up a fuss about System 3, lumping blame on them for various things. But perhaps they were unhappy with Eutechnyx rubbish product, and decided quite early to not fully commit.
 
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I don't want to comment too much in an open forum, nor do I wish to completely absolve Eutechnyx of any wrong doing. But I know they were under a lot of restrictions in the testing of this game by System 3.
 
So if they were under loads of pressure why did they not stand up and take things into there own hands, Do whats wright, after all its its mainly eutechnyx brand name on the line.. ask any business man our director of any major company they are there to sell a brand to consumer's,, we are the consumer and when we pay things need to be perfect,, but life do's not allow man maid things 2 be perfect,, i dont want to get involved with eutechnyx our syestem 3 business worry's i leave that to them.. but one thing for certain i would have checked thing's over double time before releasing anything to the end user.
 
Well in contrast to my previous post, System 3 were a customer of Eutechnyx, so any difficulties or imposed cutbacks would have had an effect on testing. And in many cases, the customer will want to take some, or even all, responsibility for testing (in System 3's case, I have no idea).

Maybe a new topic for a small bug is not completely justified (although this forum could do with some more activity and topics). It followed quite a frustrating evening of races, and discovering the mirror bug was almost like a step too far, and pointed strongly to lack of testing (coming just a day after many of us came across the issues of the still present Silverstone shortcut).

Myself and NewSoul are quite evenly matched, which is not something seen often with an unpopular racing game such as SCC. So we had a lot of very close racing last night. For example, in a 5 lap race at Spa, pretty much from start to finish we were running within less than a second. This kind of close running is not seen so often in SCC online. And my opinion is that the game just cannot stand up to this kind of racing without quite serious problems.

It was just one thing after another. At Redwood, myself, Newsoul and Derek went 3-wide into the left-right chicane around turn 7/8 ('Point de la Concorde' is stated on the wikipedia map). As usual, I got my momentary screen freeze just at that point, but this time an even longer one - around 0.5 seconds. That resulted in a small contact between myself and the two other cars, which would have looked like my clumsy driving. So what started as my move to take the lead ended up me falling a couple of seconds back in 3rd position after the exit!

Also at Redwood park, following closely behind NewSoul (for much of the race), every time going into turn-2 hairpin, NewSoul would be a bit away from the apex. So I would put the nose into that space, and suddenly his car would shift maybe 1/2 a metre to the right! (The usual prediction/correction thing) So I'd have to get out of the throttle, change the line, and fall back a few tenths.

Also experienced last night was the difficulty in driving varying racing lines (as required sometimes when having such close racing). And then the mirror bug just took the biscuit.
 
The thing is eutechnyx are busy with another game.. They are cleary trying to build a brand from nothing,, maybe they should take a step back before they head into the wrong direction,, less haste mor speed they say,, look at gt5 1 million european down loads.. and they postponed the first release till May 2010,, i hope both eutechnyx and syestem 3 pay attention and don't mess thing's up further,, Mark cole was he not envoled with gt4..? because the driving physic's of FC and SCC plus GT4 are very much the same.. they doing something wright...
 
Mark Cale - No, pretty sure he had nothing to do with GT (at least according to the wikipedia page [which has no references whatsoever, and also was created by a name I've heard of!]).
 
Well in contrast to my previous post, System 3 were a customer of Eutechnyx, so any difficulties or imposed cutbacks would have had an effect on testing. And in many cases, the customer will want to take some, or even all, responsibility for testing (in System 3's case, I have no idea).

Maybe a new topic for a small bug is not completely justified (although this forum could do with some more activity and topics). It followed quite a frustrating evening of races, and discovering the mirror bug was almost like a step too far, and pointed strongly to lack of testing (coming just a day after many of us came across the issues of the still present Silverstone shortcut).

Myself and NewSoul are quite evenly matched, which is not something seen often with an unpopular racing game such as SCC. So we had a lot of very close racing last night. For example, in a 5 lap race at Spa, pretty much from start to finish we were running within less than a second. This kind of close running is not seen so often in SCC online. And my opinion is that the game just cannot stand up to this kind of racing without quite serious problems.

It was just one thing after another. At Redwood, myself, Newsoul and Derek went 3-wide into the left-right chicane around turn 7/8 ('Point de la Concorde' is stated on the wikipedia map). As usual, I got my momentary screen freeze just at that point, but this time an even longer one - around 0.5 seconds. That resulted in a small contact between myself and the two other cars, which would have looked like my clumsy driving. So what started as my move to take the lead ended up me falling a couple of seconds back in 3rd position after the exit!

Also at Redwood park, following closely behind NewSoul (for much of the race), every time going into turn-2 hairpin, NewSoul would be a bit away from the apex. So I would put the nose into that space, and suddenly his car would shift maybe 1/2 a metre to the right! (The usual prediction/correction thing) So I'd have to get out of the throttle, change the line, and fall back a few tenths.

Also experienced last night was the difficulty in driving varying racing lines (as required sometimes when having such close racing). And then the mirror bug just took the biscuit.
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I'm not that knowledgeable about the ins-&-outs of the gaming industry, but I'm pretty sure that it would not be accurate to call System 3 a "customer" of Eutechnyx. Rather System 3 pays for Eutechnyx to develop the game - the relationship is more like that between the director of a movie, & the producer who, in the end, controls the purse-strings.

In that context, presumably, Eutechnyx is obliged to work within the constraints of the budget & timing imposed by System 3. I'm wondering, Alan, whether you played Ferrari Challenge? It seems that FC had the advantage of more time being devoted to it, so some aspects of the game were better than SCC - the AI most obviously, however there were some fundamental problems with FC's online play. SCC has definitely improved online functionality & eliminated the worst lag & connectivity issues that plagued FC, however the game remains far from perfect in this area.

Racing bumper-to-bumper (or side-by-side) was very difficult in FC because of the stuttering frame-rate & sound, usually present even in small lobbies. The best racing usually consisted of drivers being one to two seconds apart, waiting for a small (or major!) mistake by the lead driver, & then moving quickly past - very close racing never offered a smooth frame-rate. In my experience, SCC is much improved in this area, but I agree that the cars still seem to make occasional odd, laggy movements when in close proximity. It may be that you're just experiencing this, because generally you're far enough in front of everyone else not to have encountered this issue much ... ;)
 
Well Eutechnyx are a company who offer a service to develop software. Maybe the fact that they probably put all of their resources at the time into FC and SCC would make it seem like System 3 is not a customer. But from Eutechnyx point of view, they are their own compnay providing a service, and can offer this service to anybody for a payment (possibly more than one at the same time). Anyway, doesn't really matter.

Yes, I bought Ferrari Challenge around May/June 2009. There was not much online activity then, so I spent most of my time doing time trials, and doing some offline races, which actually had some purpose in FC. I think AI is something that would be heavily reusable, especially since the two games are based on the same physics engine. So I can't understand why the AI is completely different in SCC. It was a bit of a pain in FC with some of the ridiculously dirty AI driving, but at least you knew what you would get during races - and they had some pace too.

The only other online racing I've done is with GT5P and Toca RD3. The only problem I had with both games online was as a result of people's actual connections, and latency due to people in races being spread around the world. My setup was dodgy with Toca RD3 (and I always had people scratching their head about my cars' lag) - I had my PS2 physically plugged into my laptop, which had a wireless connection to the modem on the other side of the house!

But the point is, apart from that, with Toca RD3 the online gameplay was pretty much flawless. There was no crumby prediction issues, screen freezes, system crashes/freezes etc. Lobby/connection issues only materialised when they were coming to a head with the development of GRID (my favourite). In fact, exactly what is happening with SCC online (people being kicked out of lobbies, lobbies collapsing etc) began to happen with Toca RD3 when they started scaling back on hardware support for the online play. So I'd say it's pretty clear financial constraints had (or still has, as it's ongoing) a big impact on the hardware support SCC could get.
 
2 things i have noticed now 10 min ago my self and donlimpo13 plus new soul.. were in the zonda every time i tryed 2 change from my settings to a default livery it did not work,, the same colour car always appeared my own cars colour i changed it 3 times and i was shell shocked wow more problems,,, @Biggles i have experienced slow frame rate in scc 2 at times when i am pining it out of corners only sometimes though..
 
Well Eutechnyx are a company who offer a service to develop software. Maybe the fact that they probably put all of their resources at the time into FC and SCC would make it seem like System 3 is not a customer. But from Eutechnyx point of view, they are their own compnay providing a service, and can offer this service to anybody for a payment (possibly more than one at the same time). Anyway, doesn't really matter.
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I guess the question is: did Eutechnyx decide to make a racing game & then look for a publisher, or did System 3 commission a racing game from Eutechnyx? In any case, clearly the resources available to work on the game were limited - unlike GT which seems to have almost unlimited resources available. Presumably, if Eutechnyx had 5 + years to work on SCC, the game would have less problems.

The change in AI from FC to SCC really is unbelievable. As an offline game SCC is a complete waste of time, whereas FC was actually reasonably fun & challenging offline.
 
System 3 are the ones who provide the budget and invest the money. They are the ones calling the shots on deadlines and ultimately any problems casued by forcing strict deadlines are their fault.
Really, the question is whether it was System 3's fault for not allowing extensions or a longer time frame or Eutechnyx's fault for not properly organising their time and money.

It appears to me they both are to blame, Eutechnyx appear to have spent too much time fixing the online issues from FC that they ran out of time to make sure the whole of SCC was up to scratch. System 3 likely demanded a strict deadline so they could begin marketing it and also to possibly avoid the release of other major racing titles (like Forza).

Its easy to say "they should give them more time" but ultimately the game needs to be completed in a timely manner otherwise it becomes outdated or irrelevant. The best example of giving a developer free reign and it going wrong is 3D realms with Duke Nukem Forever - they spent so long on it they kept having to update the engine and start from scratch!
But on the other end, EA and Activision and their yearly release strategies have created some of the worst game franchises ever because the developers only have enough time to modify an existing game and send it out again.

Somewhere the balance of time management and quality control have gone wrong. I find it shocking they haven't identified these issues and fixed them yet through patching, almost sounds like they did little testing at all beyond the beta! Otherwise they would already know many of these flaws and would have been working on a patch during release...as the finished game is usually sent quite a long way in front of distribution. That or they decided the errors were small enough to not bother with.
 
I think it's kind of amusing that the thread title is "Zonda Cockpit Mirror" - it makes us sound like a bunch of nitpickers. There are, of course, numerous minor problems with the game, but the atrocious AI has to be the most egregious one. Shift - a big budget game - also had many issues.

I would love to know what the economics of this are. What is the trade-off for time & money spent in development (& marketing costs) vs. units sold. Clearly, one way to make money is to work hard to establish a large fan base with strong product loyalty -"branding". This is what PD has with the GT franchise. Stumbling from one flawed product to another, like Eutechnyx is doing, is not likely to create a large fan base.
 
Biggles
...stumbling from one flawed product to another, like Eutechnyx is doing, is not likely to create a large fan base.
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I think it's important to point out that with Ferrari Challenge and Supercar Challenge, even though Eutechnyx was the developer, System 3 controlled every aspect of these titles, from the cars, the tracks, the features, right down to the marketing the advertising AND having the final say on the product before it's release.

From what I understand, if Eutechnyx wanted to make changes to the AI today, they would still have to get specific approval from System 3 in order to do so. And Eutechnyx has alluded to the fact that System 3 is not paying for any further development.

Again, I don't want to obsolve them completely. But it seems pretty clear that Eutechnyx are moving in a completely different direction in the future and will have more direct control over the products they create. And I think their next title will be a better indication of what they can (or can't) do.


EDIT: FWIW, this image is from the www.eutechnyx.com site. I don't know if this is truly and example of what they're working on for their next title but the lighting, color and shading on this 3D model is far superior to anything we've seen out of Eutechnyx in the past. And I hope it's a sign of what lies ahead.

McLarenF2_6_crop_0.jpg
 
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Well, you play what you get and you don't have many options, do you? Well, you have:

1 - the japanese "uptown girl" you cannot access because she is doing her make-up for 5 years now;

2 - the rich, but brainless, easy-going all-american girl with piercings all over her body that you have fun with but can't keep dating because she is, in the end, obnoxious;

3 - the serious, slightly naughty and neither rich nor flawless british girl that likes exotics and can be an interesting date for a reasonably long period, although you know she could and should be ... better.

4 - the italian hottie, available and willing, even more flawed than the british one, but a lot more intelligent, she puts up a fight but when you master her you know it was worth it. Sadly, she too could and should be a lot better.


EDIT - Obviously, I'd like the japanese princess to end her endless make up, I want to have a lasting and meaningful relationship with her.

Meanwhile, I'm dating the british but already have an appointment with the italian for February :D

Just hear "her" singing in last few seconds of this clip. I think she will show up better than she was the last time we met ;)

[YOUTUBEHD]VlFqHEkjbqA[/YOUTUBEHD]
 
You're clearly more infatuated with no. 4 than you should be. I had a go myself and the twit kept tripping over her own two feet and showing up at the wrong restaurant.
 
Account inactive. Just like the actual game, there's clearly a technical problem displaying the picture. How ironic.
 
I had no idea that there was another version of V8 appearing in February! This has FC - SCC written all over it. How can they possibly introduce any significant improvements in a matter of a few months? :indiff:
 
jjaisli
Account inactive. Just like the actual game, there's clearly a technical problem displaying the picture. How ironic.
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Told 'ya, she isn't easy. Copy the web adress, maybe you get to her. I assure you, it's worth it! :D



Biggles
I had no idea that there was another version of V8 appearing in February! This has FC - SCC written all over it. How can they possibly introduce any significant improvements in a matter of a few months? :indiff:
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They can, of course, if they keep at it. That's where you will probably find the trade-off. These are low budget titles taht are sold half price from the start and that have found their market (at least in the PS3) because they are decent and because the "big" titles either don't get released or go the mass-marketr arcadey way.

Are they (Black Bean and System 3) making money out of them? Can't tell, but at least some money must be made, or else they would have simply gone.

Anyway, this is nothing new. The MotoGP and the Toca (then race driver) series being a good example of almost yearly releases. In the end, the product gets refined, and the games are sold.
 
Hun200kmh
They can, of course, if they keep at it. That's where you will probably find the trade-off. These are low budget titles taht are sold half price from the start and that have found their market (at least in the PS3) because they are decent and because the "big" titles either don't get released or go the mass-marketr arcadey way.

Are they (Black Bean and System 3) making money out of them? Can't tell, but at least some money must be made, or else they would have simply gone.

Anyway, this is nothing new. The MotoGP and the Toca (then race driver) series being a good example of almost yearly releases. In the end, the product gets refined, and the games are sold.
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This weekend I saw V8 Superstars selling a game store... didn't seem half-priced!

Nevertheless its good to know there will be a new one... even though still no cockpit view :ouch:

I'll probably get it. Do you have any more info about it?
 
The most annoying thing IMO, is no follow-up to Studio Liverpool's very creditable initial effort: F1CE. That's been a real missed opportunity for PS3 sim fans. And unlike FC/SCC/GRiD/Shift/SSV8 etc., F1CE served an obvious niche market that I could see being dedicated & loyal & generating good revenue regardless of the competition from Gran Turismo.
 

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