I just downloaded it. Its… Grid. On dirt. The racing is pretty great, though I tend to think the dirt is a touch too slippery for my tastes. The cutscenes are… Long. Way too long. I spend as much time listening to inane chatter as i do racing.
Attention Game Developers! I do not care what video game characters think about me, nor do I need them to tell me after every race. I do NOT want unskippable cutscenes/explanations. I do NOT want you to waste many seconds after each race telling me what worthless fluff I just ‘won’, and what worthless achievements I just achieved. I do NOT want ultra fancy in game menus that take time to transit from one menu to the next. I do NOT want to have to hunt for the graphical options by roaming around my rathole of a camper(its outside, btw). Oh, and I really, really do NOT need games for windows. Not now, not ever. Especially not to simply save my damned progress.
So all in all I’m confused. On the one hand I loved the racing. On the other, I never want to play the game again because I abhor everything in the game that is NOT the racing. I have not tried the matchmaking, but I imagine it is just as nasty as the rest of the game menus.
It’s essentially purely a console/codevelopment issue. What takes 4 seconds to load off a fast hard drive can take 20 or 30 seconds to load off an xbox dvd. So console games try to hide this by adding animated menus and loading screen graphics and all sorts of crap to entertain you while the game slowly loads. But that’s the retarded thing about how they did this game, unfortunately - the loading/menu screens are timed to correspond with the average xbox loading time, which means that if it takes the xbox 20 seconds to load a level whereas your computer is done in 4, you just sit there while your computer does nothing for 16 seconds. So instead of having these animations/screens as a result of being a slave to a slow loading drive (which is why they were designed), you become a slave to going through the programmed animation sequence.
It is utterly stupid and exactly the sort of bullshit that multiplatform development is doing to harm gaming.
But… it’s totally worth it anyway, I think. I just bring up the web browser using the steam overlay during the overly long sequences to pass the time.
I’m going to try to schedule an event to get as many of us as we can into one lobby, where we can go nuts and run every event type and car type. We’ve had 4 or 5 of us together at once, but I figure on Saturday afternoon at roughly 4pm eastern maybe everyone will be available and we can fill a race with us. I’ll keep in touch with people on steam.
Edit: Most of you have ventrilo installed, but anyone who doesn’t I suggest setting it up. We’re using that instead of the in-game voice chat because it’s massively better. It’s free and easy to set up.
Something ended up keeping me out all night, so since I need to sleep at some point I won’t be able to make the 4pm eastern time probably. But feel free to organize something yourselves, and I may be around to play later.
I’ve been playing around a bit with the game and I’ve discovered a few cool features. You can compare pretty much everything you do to anyone (or all) on your friends list. Stats, achievements, missions, lap times, etc.
It even records the runs of everyone’s fastest lap on a particular track with a particular car type. When doing time trial mode, you can add the ghosts of the cars of your friend’s (or anyone on the leaderboard’s) best lap, racing against it. That’s probably in other racing games, but that’s a really cool feature.
I was thinking we could hold competitions where over a period of time (say a few days or a week) we designate a few tracks/car type combos and see who can set the best lap time. We don’t have to work out any timing or meeting up - just whenever you have 10 minutes to play the game, run some laps and see what the best time you can do is. At the end of the contest period I’ll announce the lap times everyone managed.
I think we have 7 of us who play, although there may be more, they’re just not on my friends list. Enough for a decent amount of competition. If anyone else wants in on this, add me to your games for windows live/xbox live friends list (senorbeef0). I’m not sure if the friend stat comparison works cross-platform … it might, since I share the same friends list between my xbox and PC.
Does this sound interesting to anyone?
One question though - there seems to be some inconsistency when a new best lap is recorded on the leaderboard for me. Sometimes new laps just don’t record, and my record for that lap is whatever my previous best was. Are there certain modes where it won’t record a new best time or something?
I’ll have to give this a try - I’m downloading the demo now.
Last week I bought an ATI Radeon 5770. When I found out that it supports triple-monitor gaming, I broke down and ordered two more widescreen monitors, so now I’ve got a three monitor desktop setup, which makes a lot of games phenomenally better. Dirt 2 supposedly has native support for triple-monitor playing, and I hear it looks awesome with the panoramic visuals you get. But I’m worried my 5770 will be underpowered. We’ll see.
Awesome, I had no idea you did PC gaming. I saw you trying the dirt 2 demo on the xbox last week.
The 5770 is a very good card, but if we’re talking about 3 22" monitors (just a guess) then you’ll be pushing 5040x1050 pixels - around 5.3 megapixels. That’s a ton of required horsepower, and I suspect you won’t be able to max everything out on those settings. I actually have no idea how that might perform. However, I suspect it will look incredible. What sort of system are you running otherwise?
I tend to be the one who pushes to organize games, so you may want to add me to some sort of IM client. We can meet up through GFWL, however I won’t see my GFWL buddy list unless I happen to be playing a GFWL game at that particular moment, whereas if I see enough people around on some combination of steam/aim/yahoo messenger I can ask around to get one started. If you have steam (which I generally recommend, since it’s not at all bloated, does its job well, and has great sales regularly) you can add me as a friend (name senorbeef) and/or join our SDMB group here.
We also use ventrilo for voice chat rather than the in-game system which sucks. It’s free, easy to set up, flexible, and high quality.
You may actually do better than I expect, especially if your monitors are smaller than my guessed 22". From here it says the 5770 averages 33 fps 2560x1600 - which is around 4 megapixels, a large fraction of what you’d be rendering. 33 is on the low side, but playable, especially if it’s fairly stable. Of course this is for ultra settings - everything totally maxed out - and I’m sure you’d get more performance by setting some stuff on medium or high and still have it look great.
This is assuming the rest of your hardware is good enough that it’s not bottlenecking it.
Edit: That’s with no AA, so not totally maxed out as I said.
Now I’m tempted to get a 5850, even though my GTS 250 is still getting me by fine.
Alright, even though no one posted in response to the idea I proposed in post #45, when I played the game with some people they said they’d be interested.
Sometime in the next week (until Tuesday the 16th), try to get the fastest time you can manage on:
Battersea Air with rallycross cars
Ladang Sprint in rally cars
Kane Creek in trailblazer cars
You can use any car or any grade of car you’d like (pro/all star), but it has to be a car in that class (rallycross/rally/trailblazer) to qualify.
You can play the tracks individually by using the free race or time trial mode on the single player. I was thinking we should ban using the flashback feature, but there’s no way to enforce that so I guess anything goes. Plus since it’s allowed generally, the overall leaderboard times are made with it anyway.
If someone who has the game on the 360 wants to play, add me (senorbeef0) to your friends list and I’ll see if it allows cross-platform stat comparisons.
It appears that if you use the flashback feature during the lap/course, you invalidate your time for the leaderboard… so yeah, don’t do that.
We could just post our scores here, couldn’t we? Easier to keep track of, and we can see progress as well.
Yeah, you can if you want. You can also see your friend’s lap times by going to the leaderboards section and selecting “show my friends” as a filter - I was just going to post everyone’s times that way.
So you can add anyone’s best lap as a ghost in time trial mode - but does anyone know if there’s a way to just view their best lap in replay mode by themselves?
We’re having some stiff competition huh? I’ve had to retake the Trailblazer record a few times already.
So I’ve discovered on certain tracks, you can use some cheesy game mechanics to cut down your lap time a bit. On battersea air for instance, it’s very tricky to pull of a perfect realistic/clean turn, but it turns out you can just slam into the outer wall at 80 mph and hold down the accelerator and the wall will turn you around the corner a bit faster than you could do it yourself if you did it realistically. Both because the game is too generous with wall collisions/wall riding and because in time trial damage is turned off.
I did a lap time of 51.21 on battersea air with a totally clean lap, no cheesing at all. I ended up seeing what you could do using cheesy wall riding and got down to 50.63. I’m much prouder of the clean 51.21 lap.
In the future, I would say we should avoid using cheesy game mechanics like this to land our ideal times. It’s hard to define exactly what should fall under this category, though - is touching a barrier to straighten your car out on a tight turn cheesy? What about cutting through some trees to cut a turn? Hard to say, I guess we’d have to judge on a case by case basis. But definitely stuff like wall-riding around the hairpin on battersea air is clearly cheesy.
Anyway, for the purposes of this week’s times, don’t worry about any of that… we’ve already set some times using cheesy stuff and we can’t go back from that. But maybe next week we should have a rule against cheesing.
I think going off road is fine. It is something a real racer could potentially do. But yeah, if you hit that hairpin right, you’re bouncing back at 80MPH while everyone else is around 20-30MPH.
Results for week 1 of our competition:
Battersea Air (rallycross cars)
SenorBeef 50.56
tr0psn4j/The Trope 50.98
Reticulating Splines/AWESOME-O/Airborne Pizza 53.70
Mutton Time 54.39
Kinthalis 56.81
Ladang Sprint (rally cars)
SenorBeef 1:48.20
Reticulating Splines/AWESOME-O/Airborne Pizza 1:48.56
Mutton Time 1:52.56
tr0psn4j/The Trope 1:53.13
Kinthalis 2:02.00
Kane Creek (trailblazer cars)
SenorBeef 2:50.57
Trope 2:51.71
AirbornePizza 2:51.96
I’ll post new courses for this week later after I look through them.
Had I known you were going to try and gen the trailblazer score, I would have set a better time. :smack:
I didn’t think I was, but I fired it up for a half hour last night and ended up doing well
Oops, sorry about having three names. But when I registered my gamertag on my Xbox, I never imagined it would ever be linked to my Steam name. Or that either would ever be linked with my SD message board name…