Codemasters' F1 game discussion

there are some utter tosspots on that CM forum. I have never seen such ignorance since a load of people tried to tell me the Killers were an indie band. they simply won't be told anything, as that Silverstone thread shows. You cannot win.

DaveEllis Wrote:
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> To be fair Chapel Copse was apparently tightened
> this year
>
> Even taking that into account it's still no where
> near right. This is a Mot
>
> Pole with a Force India, on the hardest settings.
> 8 tenths up on a @#$%& lap. :-\ This needs MUCH
> harder settings.


Been reading a lot of folks haven't enabled the Legendary AI, it's in a separate menu apparently, was it switched on when you played it Dave? Doesn't do it by just selecting expert difficulty level according to some posts I've read


Edit

Found this

22-09-2010, 11:52 AM   #49 (permalink)
Sevrige
Junior Member
 
Join Date: Sep 2010
Posts: 7

Yes there is such a thing as legendary AI. If you look under all the settings you can tweak for your difficulty, when Expert is selected, the AI strength is call legendary.
 




LS's Tip of the week
ESSENTIAL OILS aren't essential unless you're an engine, a gearbox or a twat



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/23/2010 12:58AM by LS..

[community.codemasters.com]

Roffle.

Yes LS. I set difficulty to expert and AI to legendary. Unless there is a hidden option for SuperLegendary, it's too easy.

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from what I see f1 2010 is Grand Prix 5 without Geoff Crammond!!

PЯuИNИ



[prunn.wordpress.com]

My setup! My wheel is mounted on the little table where my lamp stays, pedals are resting on an inflatable mattress supported by my guitar's amp, to ensure it doesn't move.





Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/23/2010 03:58AM by Guimengo.

loque Wrote:
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> [community.codemasters.com]
> e-1316/429150-some-questions.html
>
> Roffle.

I'd just like to stress that while not being a sim this game is very good at portraying physics that "make sense", as I've noticed so far. Definitely having great fun and I noticed some FPS thing for very brief eye-blink speed moments while under rain in Hockenheim entering the stadium when you can see both stands.

I managed to drive just fine with my PS3 controller, running no aids whatsoever. No sudden analog stick changes in direction and gentle corner exits and you can drive .

im just going through the silverstone thread at the codies forum, oh my its so much win through so much fail

Gui, I'm not going to bother responding to Codies and the idiots on the forum. Frankly if they argue that's correct then what's the point? It's wrong. Fact - anyone who's watched any videos of it will know it's wrong.

I'm going to write up a bigish review now. I'll post when done.

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My 360 copy is due to arrive today. This review is currently based on the PC Release only.

Installation and Setup

Installation is pretty painless. Put it in, install, done. The only draw back to this is it requires you have Games for Windows Live Gaming Windows ID Games thingy. If you don’t have it, it won’t save. When I say it won’t save, I mean it won’t save anything - not even your driver name or controller settings.

Graphics options are your bog standard stuff. AA, Shadows, Reflections, etc. Game runs very smooth on medium/high here, at 40 FPS. I have read some are having FPS issues, but I’ve had none personally. The rain seems to make no difference to the FPS either, which is unique in the racing game world.

Controller setup is a pain in the ass if you have used the Wingman software for Logitech wheels. You MUST set it to 200deg rotation in the Wingman Profiler, otherwise it’ll just spread the deg of rotation (default being 900) ac cross the entire wheel lock. This means hairpins will require more than 360 deg of lock on your wheel. Check your Wingman Profiler settings.

Presentation

The game is beautifully presented, no doubt about it. My normal menu preference is Forza 3 style, with clean crisp lines. This takes a completely different route but pulls it off well. You navigate around the paddock a bit to change options. Very graphical, and perhaps not the most efficient way of presenting menus, but aesthetically pleasing and gets the job done. The menus also allow you to setup a custom season, which takes place outside of Career mode.

The menus it provides when you’re in the cockpit in the garage are a little more confusing. They use icons rather than text, in order to save space. So learning the icons is a bit irritating at first and quite annoying when you get lost.

Physics

Let’s get one thing straight - this is not a sim. It isn’t meant to be a sim, and it doesn’t try to be a sim. This isn’t even as realistic as Forza 3. What this is, is believable. The cars act in a relatively believable way, rather than drifting round at 500mph like in GRiD. The cars are relatively easy to drive, but all seem to feel the same outside of the engine power. Whilst the cars all seem to accelerate at approximately the same speed, after you get to about 120mph, the differences show. In my VR01 I got out dragged by 3 cars at Bahrain, despite getting around the same launch from the corner. I suppose it’s a decent way of bodging the field spread, but even reducing the grip of the slower cars a bit would have worked.

The cars are perhaps a little too solid over bumps. The chicanes at Singapore with the tic-tacs on the apexs, the car can hop over very easily. Even though the game is aimed at the more arcade type drivers, it’d be good to have a little more depth to physics in this regard.

With the wheel and pedals on the PC Version, something which struck me as quite wrong was the braking distances. You (and the AI) have to brake around the 170m point for the first and second chicanes at Monza. Variante Ascari is around the 130m point. We all know these distances are far too long, so it took me a while to get used to that. IT’s also very difficult to lock a wheel at high speed. You can slam on the anchors and it actually takes a longh way into the zone before you can lock a wheel. Perhaps this is part of the brakes being too under powered issue.

Acceleration is also a bit easy, you can plant the throttle without much bother. Spins usually occur from braking too late and trying to force the car into the corner, or clipping a big lumpy apex kerb whilst having a lot of lock on. Whilst you can hit those kerbs without upsetting the car much, it only works when you straight line it. Lot’s of lock will spin you.

The damage is a bit simple. Wings and wheels come off, but require quite a hit to do so. Mechnical damage is more interesting, as you get radio messages from your engineer about following other cars too closely. The temperature indicator comes up when your engine is overheating. This goes the same for brakes and tyres - both require you to heat them up before pushing, and both can overheat.

Punctures however are quite detailed. I’ve had a few already. Some from impacting objects and cars, and some for spins, or even going sideways over a nasty saw tooth kerb. That was quite a cool moment when that happened.

Sounds

Sounds are pretty good overall. They sound realistic and the cars echo in tunnels as you’d expect. The PC version is currently suffering from a major sync issue, where the sounds are half a second behind the game. This is most note-able in the gear changes, and at first it’s easy to mistake the sound sync for extremely long shift times. You can apparently fix this by changing settings, but I haven’t tried it.

Tracks

Overall, the tracks are good enough for the job they do. They are close enough to the real world versions that it doesn’t spoil the enjoyment. The issues they tend to have are pretty minor. Caisno Square is a bit tight, whilst the Bus Stop isn’t up-hill enough. The quality of the lofts is a bit iffy too. The kerbs at Spa are quite poorly made, with some very visibly poly lines in them. The exit of the Parabolica has strange bumps which are not on purpose, but the result of a poor loft. Bahrain is pretty high quality, except for the Endurance section, which feels like it was added on to an already finished Bahrain at a later time.

The one place the tracks fall down is the much discussed Silverstone Chappel issue. It is FAR Too tight. In fact it’s so badly wrong that I’m pretty sure they modelled the MotoGP corner by accident. Not only is it not flat (something that it has been for decades), you actually have to brake. It is being discussed on the Codemasters forum, but unfortunately too many people are taking the stance that if you haven’t driven Silverstone in an F1 car, your opinion is worth nothing. They have even posted such stunning quotes as “Human memories are better than computers” and “laser scanning [referring to iRacing] isn’t accurate”. So don’t bother arguing about it - you won’t get anywhere.

Silverstone is a horrible blip in an otherwise ‘good enough’ track set. Oh, and South Korea is mostly fictional in terms of everything-but-layout I think. But that’s for obvious reasons.

For the night tracks, Abu Dhabi seems to be permanently set at dusk. A little disappointing, but good enough. Singapore is obviously at night. Abu Dhabi is a bit brown, whilst Singapore is a bit more natural looking.

Graphics

Stunning. Even on medium it looks great. The cars look natural, the tracks look natural. It all just looks ‘right’. Some of the tracks have some ropey bits here and there, but outside of iRacing you’ll struggle to find a game that doesn’t have this. What makes this game is all the little things like having the flag lights on the wheel work properly, as well as the rain lights.

However the rain is where the graphics really show how good they are. Driving out of the garage and then watching the rain actually hitting the cockpit puts a smile on my face. Seeing the spray gradually build up as it gets faster. Visibility in the rain is quite poor, but when you’re behind another car it’s virtually impossible to see. It’s really as bad as Brundle makes out when he talks about it. It isn’t just some horrible 2D Spray either, it’s proper rain streaming off the visor and a blur of spray with only a rain light somewhere in it.

AI

There’s been a lot of discussion on the AI, so I’ll separate this part into 2 bits. Good and Bad.

The good.

The AI do seem to have personalities. It’s not just some crappy faster/slower personality either. Every time I tried to pass Massa, he makes it quite easy. Whilst Rosberg and Hamilton have always blocked quite fiercely. So in that sense, it’s a massive step up from most other games.

Another brilliant point is the AI don’t give up. Some may block more than others, but this isn’t like GP4 or rFactor, where if you get on the inside line and they get hung out on the outside they’ll back off and get in line. These guys hang on on the outside till the very end. They may have over done it a bit, but it’s much better than AI that give in to a players every demand. Similarly, chopping a car to block it won’t cause them to back off. They’ll take to the grass, hold their line, or even swap sides. I’m yet to see an AI Driver back off.

They don’t suffer from the rFactor/GPx issue of being slow at turn 1. You can’t just fly down the inside and take 6 cars anymore. These guys pile into T1 and you have to go with them, or you’re losing spots. In this case, the reduced damage sensitivity is a blessing, as I’m yet to do a T1 without making at least light contact whilst in the mid-field.

The AI treats different sessions differently. In FP1, almost every car ran installation laps and pitted. It took ages before someone set a time (time acceleration is included). In qualifying the pace was considerably faster than FP1 as well. Whilst in the race they were some way off of qualifying.

So in this sense, the AI is outstanding. They provide much more entertaining battles than previous games.

Now, the bad.

The AI performance is FAR too varied. I originally made a statement of them being too slow but upon further investigation this may not be the case. My first proper race weekend, I put it on the hardest settings (Expert Settings, Legendary AI) and expected to get utterly annihilated. I took a Force India to Monza and qualified 6th on the default setup with half an hours practice. In the race I was able to keep up with the Red Bulls (the game doesn’t take into account which cars are faster where. We all know the RBRs weren’t great at Monza, but to actually program that would take even longer). That seems a bit easy to me.

However I then went to Bahrain with a VR01 on the same settings and it took me 10 laps to even match my team mate, and then when I got to him I only managed 20th on the grid. I haven’t tested it yet (but will today), but people have complained that they are extremely slow at Montreal compared to the player. It seems to me that it isn’t the AI being too easy as such, but rather they are extremely varied.

Now I’m not a great driver. On the Forza leaderboards there are countless people higher than me. So if I’m already at this stage then there will be thousands who are finding the AI Far too easy.

Another irritating AI quirk is the control they have in impossible situations. They make quite a few mistakes and end up hitting kerbs unrealistic and jolting about and keeping perfectly stable whilst doing it. It’s annoying to watch and looks ridiculous. This may be related to another issue where the AI block far too much when it isn’t needed. They were losing tones of time to me in the Lesmos because they were blocking in Lesmo 2 against other AI cars. It is awesome that the AI Blocks, but it compromises the performance far too much at times.

AI conclusion: Brilliant start, but needs more consistency and needs a higher difficulty setting added.

My rating? 7/10. Is this a good game? Yes. Is it great? Not yet. But it can be. It needs some relatively minor patches to fix some issues which really destroy the game play.

I think that’s it for now. Anything I missed?

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/23/2010 09:13AM by DaveEllis.

I've read a few post about 100% race distance and the AI being more realistic and the living track etc

I wonder if the force india performance at monza is based on their suprising pace at spa last year?

Good read though




LS's Tip of the week
ESSENTIAL OILS aren't essential unless you're an engine, a gearbox or a twat

lol!






Jenson drives it like he owns it; Lewis drives it like he stole it

Cars are all the same except for power. Force India at one track doesn't make a difference. This is backed up by the fact the AI are terrible at Montreal.

My race distance was 20% and the AI were still all over the place. If you spread that out to 5 times less than what I witnessed, it's still a lot.

Wet weather comparisons. Top is clean air, bottom is in the spray.



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Haha danm, didn't know Heikki had Parkinsons :P

The Codemasters forum is extremely entertaining, but so frustrating. If anyone complains about something, the others all jump on them saying the game is perfect etc. The sheer stupiditiy and conviction is most annoying though, for instance "You cant get stop go penalties in F1" and "Dirty air doesnt affect grip".

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Here's more to add to it after a test this morning.

The AI at Montreal is not particularly bad. The real issue is this track allows you to exploit the games weeknesses. The cars are too stable, which allows you to attack the monster kerbs and humps at Montreal. The AI doesn't do this - so if you exploit that you gain up to a second in each corner you can do it. You can take MASSIVE amounts of kerb at the final chicane for example.

Another issue is the wheel spin doesn't effect the car. You know the wheels are spinning because the revs are higher, and eventually drop when the rear wheels grip. But this doesn't effect forward motion or stability, so you gain massive chunks of time again.

Fix these issues, the lap times will rocket back up again.

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/23/2010 11:17AM by DaveEllis.

Nice review dave! I think this game is everything we expected it to be, just im amazed how incomplete it is.

My I ask what system you have to get those lovley shots?

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"Trulli was slowing down like he wanted to have a picnic" LOL

Let me ask you a simple question, Dave and all of the others that have the game:

If we enjoyed games like Grand Prix 4, rFactor and F1 Challenge, would we like this game at least as much? Simple, but important question to me.

Good review Dave, I especially liked your quote "Every time I tried to pass Massa, he makes it quite easy." I lol'd at that.

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