Automobilista 2 April 2023 Development Update

Barcelona

 

A huge thank you to you Renato and the entire Reiza Studios AMS2 team! You folks are awesome. Do you know when, approximately, the current test release candidate will become the Public release for AMS2? Just wondering, thanks.

 

Maybe Circuit de la Sarthe will be released in time for the 2024 24hrs of Le Mans.

 

Dear developers, I joined the Automobilista 2 community quite recently and was pleasantly surprised by the quality and elaboration of the content. You are definitely a talented team and I am ready to support your project for many years (purchasing DLC and recommending AMS2 to everyone), because this car simulator won me over...
But I feel pain as a player: I'm used to games as services where a developer can provide a racing experience with progression in single player. I'm not asking for a career like Gran Turismo or F1, a team of engineers and leveling up, I'm talking about a banal championship system lined up in a logical progression from F5 to F1 or from GT5 to GT1 like Project Cars 2. You create the world of motorsport, but in the game no motorsport to the fullest. I have to create championships by hand, studying Wikipedia in endless searches and comparisons of tracks - this is not user friendly. I can't recommend the game to a friend as neither he nor I are hardcore fans of online battles. I feel like the owner of a sports hypercar that is stuck on an island 500x500 meters and does not know how to entertain himself. There is a roadmap on your Steam account where you say that you are planning to create the best career in the history of car simulators and we will be overjoyed if this happens, but as of today there is no career mode other than championships (not all classes) that cannot be edited. I wish you great success, I want AMS2 to be super popular, but for this you need to urgently think on the question "What do I do in this game? How to motivate myself to play AMS2 more often?". I hope in the near future it will become a priority for you over new car models and new tracks.

 

Maybe this is a good solution for you, basically an external career type app:
Racing Life - AMS 2 Career Mode Companion App

 

I also heard of Racing Life but that does not change the fact that AMS2 is desperately missing a proper career mode. It is why i've quit AC, only ever play AMS2 in league races and reinstalled PC2 - because i want my racing games to have a career mode with progression in it and something to challenge me. I want to race on my own from time to time and not just when people have the time to do so, i want to race with in a big field of varied cars and feel like i achieved something.

People can say whatever they want about the official F1 games, but that series is the ONLY one on the market that gives me a proper immersive career mode from any sim titles available right now. Second to those would be Project Cars 2, then thirt is SRX The Game.

 

Career mode is planned, but what use is career if you have AI balancing issues, especially in wet weather, and still some lacking features (normal SC for example).

It is in the plans as far as I know, but probably only next year, I guess.

 

Career mode has been confirmed, but as one of the, if not the final thing they add, so they can implement all content in it as well, i do agree that the F1 games do give you the whole vibe of the F1 really well, including career mode, it might not be full blown sim, but still can be a lot of fun if those things tickle your fancy.

 

Career mode would be nice, but personally I think there's a lot of interesting stuff one can do in custom championships if they're creative enough.
Maybe Reiza could implement an easy practical way for people to share custom championships
they've created?

 

I play racing games 99.9% single player only and agree that the sim needs a career mode, but there are still so many features missing that there is no point in doing it as of now. I do hope that after 1.5 they can focus more on adding features to the game.

We need working flags, safety cars, team points, more points systems,working real weather on championships, better AI pit strategies, and a cleanup of the many bugs and issues still affecting the game.

So let's hope once they feel the physics are matured enough, they can focus more on bringing more features to the sim.

 

The thing with a career mode and anything single player is it's largely reliant on a good AI and everything else being finished... As it's not easy to just slot in content to a career mode that's been fully fleshed out... Nor is it worthwhile if the AI is only good for sprint races...

The only reason the F1 games have a decent career mode is because they're not adding content to a new engine... They've built layers over the same code for a decade now...

I wouldn't be surprised if some teams were still labelled Lotus and Toro Rosso in the file base...

 

On that topic of team names in the file base .. F1 22 had Aston Martin being called "Racing Point" for a short while after release.
And yes i agree the AI needs proper tweaking before a career mode is added because 120 with one car / track combo can be easy while 80 with a different car / track combo can feel impossible.

 

career is the least i need.
I told all my friends to buy the game, because we can play together and share our time.
What can be better driving with/against friends compared to the virtual honor beating a nameless AI, even when its modded with some famous names

 

The fact that most friends of mine have responsibilities outside of playing games at co-ordinated times. You know, things like kids, wives, work, maintenance. Trying to co-ordinate free time at the same time for more than a couple of people is not as easy for some.

I do miss the old LAN meetup days, but life and responsibilities prevailed.

 

Yeah that and basically no one can actually run the AI on the same physics as the player because not everyone can compete with NASA in their home PC...

So I just can't take running against the AI seriously... It's fun for a short time, but they are easily gamed out of a move and strategised against... Whilst against a human there might be lag but that's far less annoying to me...

It's why the best move forwards for AMS2 would be to fix the MP side first so that dedicateds are more reliable or that the p2p side shares the features of the dedicated so that admins lives are made easier... Plus adding a few missing features...

If Reiza can do the impossible with the Madness engine physics after the joke that was the pCARS series, then I'm not going to limit their possibilities... They may make the AI more believable, they already have many great moments, but there will always be a cap in place on their physics compared to the player side due to the CPU requirements... But it's the MP where they can make the most advances without waiting for everyone to upgrade their PCs...

Then when all the content is out calibrate the AI to whatever the current low end PC can handle... As doing too much AI work before the player side physics work is complete is like a dog chasing it's tail... It ever never reaches the goal or when it does looks confused because the goal has moved again...

 

This. I'm not against it but should be low low on the to do list. Wouldn't be upset if it never comes though.

 

I disagree with saying a career is the least it needs, because Racing Life mod proves otherwise with how big an interest in a proper single player mode actually is. A racing game needs both a good multiplayer and a good single player portion to have a strong player base. I prefered and always will prefer racing against AI.

And that argument "Game is better with friends" .. Why don't you see that as a virtue of your friends, and not of the game itself ?

EDIT: I would also disagree on the famous modded names as with the game Wreckfest, once downloaded a mod called "262 F1 Driver Names" i immediately had around 125% more fun than i had without it. Small details can drastically enhance the experience, like when they added the option to add custom helmet liveries, there were people who said "Who the hell has time to look at helmets while racing" .. i do, i have the time to see every detail while driving and it makes the experience better.

 

The market is there, no denying that, but the game is far from ready for it...

There are far greater needs before a career mode should be a priority...

Bug fixing is key and among the bugs is the MP issues...

And then there's the AI which needs to be able to be dynamic enough to make long races believable with all the simulation elements the player has also effecting the AI... Which of course has to wait until the player side physics have been finalised...

As AMS2 is a long term project I see it as we've just entered F1 1998 territory... Where you could do a season and that's it offline... Everything else is just far more advanced than F1 1998... Creating far more variables than were needed with the idea of F1 challenge where multiple seasons of F1 could be driven because the same basic concepts existed and the AI were on the same physics even if calculated at a lower level...

The F1 series took years to still develop a proper Career mode that led to the MyTeam mode... Which is where I would like AMS2 to end up with a nice helping of the TOCA touring cars career mode...

Unlike the F1 series which has had a canned experience on a similar engine for decades now, where the tracks and driving conditions have largely remained the same... AMS2 has had a few years of development and has had to clean up a lot of the mess that was created in the haste of the SMS crew looking for the quick sales...

Content and physics advancements will continue to push back the framework of the career mode until they've reached a point where the focus turns into polish instead of the massive gains we saw in 1.4 and will see again with 1.5...

That's the great thing about sim racing... It's easy to make new friends who you can race against...

I went from being in zero leagues for AMS2 this time last year to racing with completely new groups of people in many different leagues just because of AMS2's 1.4 update...

 

Of course, a career is an enrichment of the entire game.
But I'm personally most interested in the physics/force feedback and the AI. Especially a really good AI can make up for all the weaknesses in the game.

If the AI listens to blue flags, overtakes better, makes strategic pit stops and drives good racing lines, we would actually have enough content.

Currently, one would only start a career with faulty conditions.
Physics first, then AI and multiplayer, and finally, if everything works, there should be a career. Maybe even a career with online Connection and community race. At the end of the development you can also whip up the best combos easier and nicer.

 

It would be super cool if there was a way to see all your time trial records in one place, and not have to remember what car track and then go look.

Optimizing weather/night would be cool also. I can get 90fps in VR (G2 3080) 20 car grid with rain in Pc2 , but ams2 top out at 70. Not sure what those guys did, but for some reason I can. (Ams2 is better and my favorite sim)