AMS2 vs IRacing rain hype: sponsored content creators sucks

All the hype about rain in IRacing in YouTube is fun as hell. A lot of "unbiased" content creators praising the "best wet track system" that AMS2 already has a longe time.

Always take these "reviews" with a TON of salt.

 

You should generally do that, independent of sim. If a creator mainly or even exclusively uses one sim, then follow their technical advise, but be wary of their praises and critiques of other sims. Unless of course you already know that creator to actually be fair and unbiased, those exist as well.

 

The weather system looks quite impressive to be honest. If they just had nice ffb…
We will know tomorrow. But yeah: the opinions of some youtubers should be treated with caution.

 

Yes, it's like AMS2 now. And visualy really well done. But people in some vídeos believe that IRacing simulate every water drop. Internet is strange.

 

The rain looks nice, but until they have a non jerky detailed 400hz+ FFB and a tyre model that doesn't lose grip instantly (no ramp), I will not renew my subscription.

 

Iracers try to justify the money they invest and therefore, in their opinion, iracing must be the best product. This is probably not true for all Iracers, but over the years I have met some for whom there is nothing else but Iracing (a very good friend of mine, for example).

i still like Iracing, but its ffb and the tire model lag behind AMS 1+2, rf2 and AC.
I often don't realize exactly what the car does or intends to do through the steering wheel.

On the plus side, there are an incredible number of excellently modeled tracks and an ai that can drive really well (including errors here and there -> immersive). Also Trading Paints is also a nice website to get skins.

 

YES, thank you! I'm glad I'm not the only one so put off by the bloated hype around iRacing's rain. It's like the iPhone and Android debacle - iPhone gets a "new" feature after Android has had it for several years, every iPhone user loses their minds, meanwhile the "new" feature usually doesn't work as well as the Android version. But I guess iRacers gotta justify their expenses. I swear, iRacing's whole business model is built on the sunk cost fallacy, it's actually damn impressive from a business standpoint.

I think the worst offender here is Jimmy Broadbent. The guy has probably done more damage to AMS2's public image than any other YTer. And even recently: AMS2 Le Mans DLC comes out - crickets. LMU comes out - instant (undeserved) hype and praise. AMS2's wet weather - naaahh. Wet weather for iRacing comes out - instant hype and praise. Not saying he's the only YTer guilty of this, but he is arguably the biggest and best known sim racing YTer. His videos are seen by the largest number of people, including more casual fans, for whom AMS2 would have been perfect.

God I wish AMS2 keeps its upward player count trend. It more than deserves it.

 

I have not tried it yet, but I do think that it has its objective merits, and can achieve things that other titles cannot. But again, objective merits: people are acting like iRacing is the first title ever to simulate rain, and nobody before ever did something remotely similar. Just because it is technically more advanced (thanks to being for YEARS under development, with a group of people and budget that other studios cannot have), it does not mean that previous models in other pieces of software don't hold any water (ummm...it may be pun intended?).

 

Fanboyism isn't good, Period. But then again that goes both ways, I love AMS2, by far my most played sim, and I've stuck with Reiza's work since the old Game Stock car 2012 days, and I'll continue to stick with them aslong as the quality of their products keeps being as good as it is, but I gotta say what iracing has build is super impressive. Is it perfect? No ofc not, there are things to improve, and good that there are, but it's super impresive.

What we currently have in ams2 right now is good, very good, but it's not what iracing has, the difference between the conventional wet line and the dry line is not that noticiable in ams2, but in iracing it completely changes the driving, it makes you search for different lines and explore outside of your confort zone, in ams2 the biggest difference I've seen is on the braking, allowing you to brake just a little bit later, then again AMS2 is mainly an offline sim atm, and I believe once the AI gets wet lines (Something Reiza has said they want to do) we can start to modify the grip levels on the different lines to see if we can improve the experience. If we had a massive difference in grip between the dry and wet lines right now, but the AI still continued to use the conventional line, it would be extremely confusing..

What imo Reiza has to do is stick to their plan, do what they feel is best for the sim and in the future more things can be polished, they are doing a really good job so far imo.

Also yeah, not every studio has the resources that iracing has, it's not rare that they can develop a system like this considering the amount of money they make every year..

 

I didn't try it so far. Currently I have no sub. Perhaps I will try it tonight. What I heard so far from a couple of people I know for many years and who are racin' almost every sim is quite positive though. Looks like iR did that generally pretty all right.

Tbh if wet or dry conditions, it has almost no impact on how I drive the cars in AMS2. Same line, bit more TC and bit more careful but that's it more or less. It does not feel very special to me but it looks nice. When rain stops the tracks dries out almost faster than you can monitor it. It's clearly not what I understand of a good or best wet track system.
All this kind of stuff is a lot about marketing (and not only in AMS2...as well as PC2, rF2, ACC, LMU...). There is so much fanboyism on all sides and I get often the feeling some people can't admit that another sim is doing something really great because they fear their fav sim is falling behind if they do.

Best as always is to try it by yourself and be open minded for all of the sim titles available. Makes this hobby way more interesting and diverse.

 

On a note, I believe the main problem right now in ams2 with regards to the weather system is the way each weather slot is always 1h, doesn't matter if the race is 1h, 2h or 20 minutes, each weather slot is always 1h. This causes so much confusion between players is amazing SMS released this without thinking about it..

If any of you ever have confusion this is how it works:

Example:

Weather slots selected: 3
Race duration: 30 min
Weather speed: sync to race

Overcast -> Heavy rain -> Sunny

Each weather slot will be about 10 minutes of real time duration, but they will affect the track like they'd been 1h of duration. Meaning, even if you see 10 minutes of rain, it's actually 1hs worth of rain.

This causes problems in quick test people do where the track gets completely soaked by the time rain starts, dries too quickly, and it's generally a mess.. Hopefully this is the first thing Reiza addresses in the future.

PS: if you wanna go crazy in practise sessions: select 2 weather slots, both of them select Storm, and set the weather speed to 60. Each minute will be 1h's worth of Storm, the track gets flooded in no time. Kinda fun tbh

 

Unfortunately, there are very few reputable YouTubers who really have the skills and knowledge to judge a sim. Most of them are paid (including real drivers, by the way) or they try to make money with their channels (no matter what they have to do to do it). Unfortunately, I also had a certain gentleman (GM) who once tested a file of mine. I didn't ask him to and I would have preferred if he hadn't. For me, these are all the greatest (destroyers) of simulations because they have the power (through their thousands of fanboys) to trash everything or praise everything to the skies. Unfortunately, things are getting worse with these YouTubers, everyone wants a piece of the cake

 

I've noticed I need to avoid the racing line in iRacing way more than AMS2. I'm wondering what's accounted for that? Is it the "track polish" that iRacing claims is going to make the racing line more dangerous to be on in general? I found this in a discord



I'm gonna guess that AMS2 doesn't have any "track polish" at any of the tracks. But it does seem very dynamic, similar to iRacing, and far far better than rF2 (and LMU)

 

Only a person who would know in detail how all the simulation models and concepts are going to work is able to answer what really the reason of the "more dangerous" racing line in iR is seriously.

What is far far better in iR and AMS2 in terms of dynamics compared to LMU?

 

That rain does indeed look good and on the windscreen I think it looks better than in AMS2. I hope there are still improvements coming on the AMS2 rain, for example rain drops seem to be on a loop when you watch it in the one spot. I will never try iracing rain though and I don't agree with their business model.

 

Can't say I know if AMS2 has a fully dinamic rubbered line, one that's entirely dependant on where the cars drive, but this is not new, RF2 all the way back in 2012 already had one..

This right here is basically what you're looking for, in the wet the rubbered line will get slippier than the not rubbered line because water has nowhere to go, rubber fills the gaps in the tarmac and as a result water just gets deposited on top, making the rubbered line more slippery.

AMS2 has rubbered lines, but again, I don't know if they are fully dinamic like RF2 or there's some sort of predetermined position where the line appears.

AMS2 has a "wet line", according to Renato it was implemented in 2023, although right now is very minimal, it's easy to not notice it's there. But to be honest, with the current state of Livetrack 3.0, I think it's better to first overhaul the system and then worry about wet lines and other things.

 

rF2's track model is definitely not as dynamic as you state.

 

Is this really how the rain works in AMS2? There's no slow transition on track once the weather changes? I feel like this is a pretty gaping hole in the realism of AMS2's weather if that's the case.

 

Yes but also no. The system basically works as follows: each weather "slot" is, by default, 1 hour of that weather. I.e. rain is 1 hour of rain. All settings except real time weather compress (or expand) the weather to a shorter (or longer) timeframe.

For example, let's say you had a 1h race with two weather slots (sunny & light rain). With real time weather, you would only see the sunny weather as it is 1h by default. With sync to race, the system compresses the weather to fit the 1h duration. With 2 slots, that means 30 minutes for each weather.

But what happens with rain isn't that it rains for 30 minutes. No, the game instead gives you the same amount of rain (water downpour) for 1 hour, but in half the time. I.e. the "rate of raining" (so to say) is doubled. If rain is by default 1000 drops of water per minute, in this case that becomes 2000 drops of water per minute, if that makes sense.

So what happens is that the track gets wet much quicker than normal. Same goes for the asphalt drying (I believe). That's why in shorter races you see the track change so fast, because 15 minutes of rain is in fact, just quadruple the amount of rain per minute.

(I assume this also happens the other way around. If you have a longer race, the weather gets "stretched out" to fill the timeframe, and instead you get half/quarter/eight/etc. of rain per minute)

Yeah it's not a perfect system - especially for short races - but until Reiza can fundamentally change how the weather system works not much we can do. The weather works very well for real time weather or up to x2 acceleration, but anything more and it does get quite wacky.

 

I have noticed the dry line having a noticeable difference from the wet; I have had to stay off dry line to keep my wet tyres cool enough in certain races, with perhaps not that much rain which leads to very interesting and fun racing. I don't know if iRacing models this well. Of course I look forward to when the AI gets wet lines, but I still think wet driving in AMS2 is pretty good. Perhaps I need to try with heavier weather.