05-30-2015, 06:08 AM
Thanks for reminding me Caedrion - I've just joined the steam group now 
Okay, well, first impressions of the game: It looks amazing. AMAZING! I am amazed; The soundtrack is beautiful (with one niggling exception), from the epic score to the pop and crackle of the excess fuel in the extractors, i have never heard so much detail in the effects for a game before now; The physics feel very nice (as in the old definition, meaning exact) and very responsive. I haven't needed to touch the controller settings except to add some button bindings; The circuits are painstakingly detailed and are great fun to drive, and the weather and time settings add so much replayability that, even if you only ever drove one track, it'll never get boring; The weather is a lot of fun to play with and can make driving far, far more interesting than it ever needs to be; Skinning allows for specular detailing (for highlight variables) and fresnel effects (for chrome). Outrageously happy about this :p
I have to say it feels a lot like the TOCA games, but prettier. It has a very similar feel to the physics and feedback but with more detail, and of course there's your pit engineer talking to you throughout the race too.
On the downside: Worst Oculus Rift implementation ever. Nothing, up to the point of starting your drive, is VR-friendly. Navigating the menus is horrible, as they tend to put useful hotspots away up in the corners of the screen. My eyes felt like they were trying to turn themselves inside out. The workaround for this is to use OBS or something similar that will greatly affect your computer's performance. Once inside the car, things get really screwy. Rotational head-tracking works as normal, but postional tracking switches forward-backward movement with side-to-side movement for some insane reason, and I can't seem to find a fix. Also, no matter how you try, recentring the viewpoint always results in you sitting a few degrees askew. The result is really damn disorienting and quite uncomfortable, and I'm not prone to VR sickness at all. Hopefully all of this will be sorted in the near future.
The only downside of the audio is the sound they use for crashes. Any crash. All crashes no matter how big or small. All the same sound. Every one. Seems a bit lazy when they've put so much detail into everything else...
The AI are atrocious, but I ran them at 100% ability, so maybe that was causing them to drive like they owned the track.
In summary, there's waayyy more tweaking to be done, both in the development of the game and at my end in the settings and configs, and hopefully a lot of the issues can be solved with simple fixes. I'm really looking forward to seeing how it all goes.
When the VR does sort-of-work and you're not hitting anything, it's a beautiful place to be.
Okay, well, first impressions of the game: It looks amazing. AMAZING! I am amazed; The soundtrack is beautiful (with one niggling exception), from the epic score to the pop and crackle of the excess fuel in the extractors, i have never heard so much detail in the effects for a game before now; The physics feel very nice (as in the old definition, meaning exact) and very responsive. I haven't needed to touch the controller settings except to add some button bindings; The circuits are painstakingly detailed and are great fun to drive, and the weather and time settings add so much replayability that, even if you only ever drove one track, it'll never get boring; The weather is a lot of fun to play with and can make driving far, far more interesting than it ever needs to be; Skinning allows for specular detailing (for highlight variables) and fresnel effects (for chrome). Outrageously happy about this :p
I have to say it feels a lot like the TOCA games, but prettier. It has a very similar feel to the physics and feedback but with more detail, and of course there's your pit engineer talking to you throughout the race too.
On the downside: Worst Oculus Rift implementation ever. Nothing, up to the point of starting your drive, is VR-friendly. Navigating the menus is horrible, as they tend to put useful hotspots away up in the corners of the screen. My eyes felt like they were trying to turn themselves inside out. The workaround for this is to use OBS or something similar that will greatly affect your computer's performance. Once inside the car, things get really screwy. Rotational head-tracking works as normal, but postional tracking switches forward-backward movement with side-to-side movement for some insane reason, and I can't seem to find a fix. Also, no matter how you try, recentring the viewpoint always results in you sitting a few degrees askew. The result is really damn disorienting and quite uncomfortable, and I'm not prone to VR sickness at all. Hopefully all of this will be sorted in the near future.
The only downside of the audio is the sound they use for crashes. Any crash. All crashes no matter how big or small. All the same sound. Every one. Seems a bit lazy when they've put so much detail into everything else...
The AI are atrocious, but I ran them at 100% ability, so maybe that was causing them to drive like they owned the track.
In summary, there's waayyy more tweaking to be done, both in the development of the game and at my end in the settings and configs, and hopefully a lot of the issues can be solved with simple fixes. I'm really looking forward to seeing how it all goes.
When the VR does sort-of-work and you're not hitting anything, it's a beautiful place to be.
AA™| Vim Fuego![[Image: isonline.shirtkicker.gif]](http://www.lfsworld.net/isonline.shirtkicker.gif)