ACC See!

So it begins anew...

Following a few months of joining the PC master race, we've landed on...

• RFactor2 - Great but a biatch to set up for multiplayer
• Automobilista - Great arrive and drive racing, but dated for sure
• Assetto Corsa - Yes, as everyone says a great hot lap simulator
• and...
• Assetto Corsa Competizione - We're in love with ACC.

But, most of the servers at our level are 20 mins practice, 10 minutes qualifying and 20 minutes race. The race is fine, but it makes for a 50-minute session. For us that's quite the investment in time and really only two races in a night.

What to do then? Well, I went here:https://streamline-servers.com/ and rented an ACC server for the princely sum of around $9.40 a month. High roller I think you'll agree.

What have I done with this... well, I've set up a server that has events as I want them, hopefully, a few others too!

Essential differences:

• No Practice time
• 15 Mins Qualifying (maybe change to 10, we'll see)
• 20 Mins Race
• Weather changeability set to 1 - I think that means no rain, but generally some action
• I'm running the qualifying on one day and race on the next. Apparently, it simulates interim races so it should give more track grip.

In fact, not sure if it'll show but this:

{

    "track": "nurburgring_2019",

    "eventType": "E_6h",

    "preRaceWaitingTimeSeconds": 80,

    "sessionOverTimeSeconds": 120,

    "ambientTemp": 26,

    "trackTemp": 30,

    "cloudLevel": 0.30000001192092898,

    "rain": 0.0,

    "weatherRandomness": 1,

    "sessions": [

{

"hourOfDay": 12,

"dayOfWeekend": 1,

"timeMultiplier": 6,

"sessionType": "Q",

"sessionDurationMinutes": 15

},

{

"hourOfDay": 15,

"dayOfWeekend": 2,

"timeMultiplier": 5,

"sessionType": "R",

"sessionDurationMinutes": 20

}

I'll be changing the track, though as we'll probably be doing three races in a night max I'll probably leave it on one track for the evening and then go from there. If there are racers on I'll leave the server running, no reason not to!

Some points for anyone reading this far:

• I'm doing this to get quality racing - so as our safety racing raises I'll be setting this higher (it's a paltry 49 at the moment). It's set to 35 at the moment.
• If it's a punt fest I will just give up - there are other games out there, but I think this will be fun.
• I'll promote the server around the place a bit, if we get it running right I'll start a league (again!) and run some private races so we can have mandatory pit stops etc.

Ad Break

Listen to this and tell me it's not a great riff.

Stuck in my head now.

(not sim) Mechanic

I bought  Mechanic Sim for the PS4.

Don't.

The problem and I do see it as a problem, is that to renovate a car involves hours of patience, sitting in the car imagining it running and eventually after hiding away in the garage from the family for many weeks (or more) finally rolling it out and taking it for a drive just far enough to justify your RACQ membership.

But it's rewarding - rewarding because you can touch it, smell it, and late at night when you sneak a snack taste it (burnt oil, not good mmkay).

Mechanic Sim takes away the emotional connection but leaves the hours of toil. There's also no satisfaction in finding that magnetic spark plug removal tool you thought you'd lost - no, it's replaced by pressing X to unbolt whatever you have to unbolt. And then that's it - you're undoing a myriad of bolts because someone has decided you should - not because there's some mechanical reason that makes it all work, someone has decided to make you do it all for the sake of doing it. Toil.

And I can tell you, having built an engine in-game, that once you've done it, you've bought all the parts, found out you've bought the wrong ones and gone at it again - you finally have an engine. And then, then... you realise you've built the wrong spec engine (there are many), this is the point you realise this is not a game it's a test of endurance.

I stuck with it though and built a car with a well-tuned engine, I even took it out for a drive. And of course it's not Sim Driver, it's Mechanic Sim. 30 seconds later I was over that too.

All up I've put in probably 3-4 hours on it, and I have a collection of cars to "do up" but I just can't find the desire to do so. Relegated to the uninstall list - and however cheap it is, it's not worth it. If you want to wrench, read on...

Making it real

What I have been doing in real land is spending a small fortune on cars. Nothing exciting, but the sine wave of service costs all lined up with the "fleet" which meant $1k for the Lexus, $1k for the Commodore and $1k for the MX5. Great.

But that's not mechanic stuff, other than funding their retirement, this is!

What's different? Well, there's new plugs, leads and coils is what. So now we're good for electrics for a bit I hope. We'll see!

But I want to build a car

And so I did. What I did was take two Meccano kits (dump truck and loader thing) and scratch built some sort of racecar. Overall it was a wholly satisfying experience actually, I built for around 30mins a day after dinner and it really exercised my mind. Sure I'd do it a bit different, but overall I'm happy. I might keep an eye out for more old kits in bargain shops in fact!

Work in progress

Not sure what formula

I do like the rear on it, a happy accident really

Fairly mean, if you skip the ultra wet weather tyres

Conflicted Rev

For its full title: Grid - the latest Grid, not the first Grid, or the Grid that's Autosport and being released on the Switch.

I can see why they're calling it "Grid" in fact.

Anyway, it's new, and it's out soon.

Other than Jimmy's dodgy sound issues in his voiceover, this is quite a respectable race:

 And so there it is. not bad. Certainly not a sim though, and I think I'm conflicted on this game...

• Looks great
• "200Mph" seriously?!
• Close racing
• Nemesis malarkey means insta crash maybe?
• Good wheel support clearly
• Physics are relaxed

I'm interested to see what an open-wheel car race looks like, drifting in an F1 car or similar would be a bad thing.

And in fact, what about fwd - TCR cars are in this game, which is awesome, but if they handle like a fake thing that'll be a shame, and same for V8s as they're in there too.

I'm concerned this game will become a "if only they did the handling right, the content is exceptional game" - and on that, enter GT Sport. I can't reconcile what I watch with what I experience, and I've certainly tried. The video below, a great race, and well commentated. But cars for me just don't handle like this, what's going wrong in my gaming life?!!?

Better late then neveRfactor

In our quest to find a PC game that is...
a. Able to run on average equipment.
b. Not pricey
c. Pretty solid
and most challenging of all...
d. has some AI component so a full race can be had...

we found Rfactor2...

Courtesy of Steam and Studio-397 (what happened to the other 396!!!)

But it's not PS4 and Pcars2 (can't believe I'm calling that easy!)... SitRep time:

1. Purchased game
2. Installed fast! (tm) 
3. Updated not so fast... much time later*
4. Had a go, fine, but more cars/tracks as this is a mod max game
5. Steam workshop - tick all the boxes!
6. Yah, restarting the game, taking a lot longer now as it downloads 37Gb of updates.
7. And all good... but...
8. Don't like the in-car dash, nowhere near enough geekery to sort, so opt for plug-in upgrade.
9. ... and game death.
10. OnError GoTo 2.

So currently on Lap 2 of installation and we've had an emergency pit-in for rebuild...

And I've not started on servers and AI yet - I suspect that'll be hard too.

Overall - Buy a console, buy a decent wheel, buy a decent game, buy some beer and be racing within a very short time indeed. Or go PC and get the metaphorical bonnet up on your tech.


*Much time: My current unit of measurement is episodes of Red Dwarf - it took two, rounded down.
For reference: there are four PS3 Skyrim loads per Red Dwarf and ten Red Dwarfs per Windows 10 initial install. However, post-install is Microsoft minutes - which vary between nothing at all really to "going to bed to see if it has restarted when I get up" minutes...

GTQLD Rally Club

Dirt4 of course - till I can find another game I already have that I can do this to.

Link to the club: https://www.dirt4game.com/clubs/club/202375/gtqld

Was thinking South East Australia League, but Club Seal wasn't crash hot so we're sticking with GTQLD. If I had a brand that would be it...

Oh hell yes...

Pre-order incoming.

Can't wait.

I've been stalking my next RPG game, is it Outer Worlds, Cyberpunk 2077, or this...

It's this. It's definitely this.

Four All! (see what I did there)

My love affair with Dirt4 continues, despite WRC8 being released soon - and that is better clearly, it's four more than Dirt4!

And I've done a cool thing, a stupid thing and a better thing. In that order.

The cool thing is that I've set up a club, only a few years late, but it's here on Dirt4.
And coolerer, I've set up a championship!

The stupid thing? I didn't set restart up, so I managed a DNF on the first stage and that's it for me. I'm relegated to Clark-of-the-course status and can only sit back and see if anyone joins it. Hint: you'll win.
Worse, as it was the inaugural event I put it over September pretty much in its entirety. Which means that I can't have another one on the go, it seems. And I can't cancel it either. Boo.

All is not lost though, as now we have a new championship! And its great, as it has both front and rear-wheel drive cars, and it also has two events each with 3 stages. So all up six stages with service stations, and crucially as it turns out, the ability to restart the entire event.

I am excited about this for sure - it'll be a good race I hope, and if it works, well we can have infinate championships by simply regenerating the tracks. At least until the servers are turned off anyway!

More more Four

And yet more of my career in Dirt4.
I'm not far off completing all the in-game career rally stuff, and I can see how others say that it's a short game. But... after that, I'll take the time to build a decent championship and see if can share it out with a mate or two. That would be awesome.
But in any case, enough cars and largely endless tracks means I'll be coming back to this game over time.
Happy days!

Name dropping

Looking at the soon to be awesome S5000 class, I started to wonder about other classes in open-wheel racing. After all, my mind is mixed on S5000, fantastic to have an Aussie formula class, but watching vids on them they sound a bit basic, make them rev to 10k+ rpm and they'd be awesome.

Perhaps it's testing times only at the moment, or perhaps it's a cost-control process which may well help it's birth, but it's not F1 (not that it's trying to be) and I'm undecided on it.

So I looked about, and I found this, from a lifetime ago, see how many names you recognise!

If you think current F1 is boring, you might be right - but at least they're trying to fix it.

And in the meantime there's F2. I've not seen a boring F2 race, to be honest: Exhibit A
(Boo to Formula1 for not allowing embedded content!)