Automobilista 2 V1.3.6.2 Officially RELEASED

Having to relearn the car's handling every time there is an update is very annoying imo, even worse is having to reset setups and having to create new setups from scratch. Fortunately that's something developers recognized as an issue in steelcats's lastest podcast and they want to improve in the future.
I hope that happens soon, I really don't like having to spend a big chunk of my time doing testing to figure out how the handling has changed and having to create new setups.

 

To be honest I'm actually really loving the default setups for the cars I've tried. I also don't see your point in getting mad at the developers if you truly wanted a difference then constructive feedback would be a sensible choice. Steelreserv has a greater knowledge then most so I have full support for him to refine and create the best setups the engine has to offer not to mention everyone else working at reiza improving the game.

 

The cars with the tire changes seem to have the best default setups as well; pretty balanced and very drivable - especially astounding since Steel hasn't had much time to work on them.

As for the other content, some setups continue to bewilder me, like the still somewhat unstable F3 setup. Really hoping that that one's tires also get changes quickly, seeing as it is one of the most popular MP cars, and that the drivability improves with it.

 

It seems to me that hardly anyone is willing to invest time in MP rating system and time spent in MP in general if we get fundamental physics changes on monthly bases. Maybe one sunny day in 2025 when Reiza will track down the last major physics bug of Madness Engine we might be seeing some MP numbers grow for a few hours before Kunos introduce their AC2 breakthrough in the world of simracing as they tend to do.

 

Kunos he praises so much went through like what, 10 tire models in AC? And they had at least 4 patches with significant tire/physics changes in ACC. What is true though is that in ACC at least they made those changes throughout the whole field, globally. In AMS2 they are more frequent and do not apply to all the content at once. I guess having less types of cars in ACC helps with that though.

But I think I can name a sim that hasn't gone through significant changes in physics: Nascar 21: Ignition. Not that it went through any significant changes

 

I also agree with RS. You can't look at this situation in a vacuum. Especially when it comes to physics changes, compared with the other sims in their life cycle. AMS2 is the youngest of them all.

 

Yeah, i totally agree with that, we moved our league over to JustRace.net, and done a couple races there, and seeing what they are developing i think that reiza could easily setup a couple servers with hourly ranked races there, they could have that going in a weeks time, that platform works really well, but they need to promote those races then as well, and not just on this forum, but on every social media, and by that i dont mean only once a month, maybe even do a introductory livestream of it, where players can directly ask questions, it would really help them increase the popularity, ofcourse there are quite a few people doing singleplayer, but multiplayer i feel is for maybe 75% or more of significance to gain (or lose) popularity.

i think Renato also mentioned in a interview a while back that they underestimated the importance of multiplayer, which they quite frankly still seem to do, seeing as hardly anything has been done on the multiplayer part, and the "beta" ranking system is still the same as it was when released.

 

Multiplayer is inconsistent, full of bugs. It's hard to have serious racing with this mess of multiplayer. I'm really done about it after 300 hours trying to play it without servers kicking guys, sessions stucked, rubberbanding... Two years later, feels like a joke. I'm done of trying and waiting for fixes. A game is to have fun, not for waiting to be fixed if it's going to be fixed.

 

I dunno, as long as the changes are for the better I don't particularly mind. As you are very well aware, it's just not possible to develop high quality software without user feedback, and these days most products change rather dramatically during their life cycle.

 

In my opinion, and in contrast with other sims/games, Reiza has always been understaffed in term of developers working on code (unlike people working on content). With the consequence of developments that are not content/physics/AI/FFB/sound taking forever, if ever happening. Can someone give Renato a dozen expert coders in the Madness engine, please !

 

Is there any chance of improving the rolling starts and formation laps? They are very buggy and make racing at tracks like Daytona a nightmare with instant DQs and penalties. Or else I think we will see more comments like this.

The physics have made ams2 a brilliant driving simulator, but I think there is work to be done to make it the best racing simulator.

 

Spot on.

 

Maybe they will fix the broken physics, if they want to save motorsport games as a company. Although it should be said that yearly titles like F1 dont change within the same year, EA just release the incremental changes every year and charge full price for it.

 

How do you guys rate Raceroom? Didn't they recently add hosted MP events? It didn't seem to help their numbers grow at all...probably still the same group of people that have been playing it for the last few years.

We will probably have to wait for the safety car to be released before we get any major changes on the MP front. That's probably a huge amount of work to incorporate that into the engine for single player, let alone for MP.

However, the safety car probably needs some AI improvements before it can be implemented...and Racin' USA Pt. 3 probably needs the safety car before it can roll out...

They said "sometime in July" but hopefully it will arrive by the end of August? Just think, if the AI to AI passing was sorted, safety car was in a good state and MP received some improvements...the next major DLC would be even better received.

TBH, the recent push to polish the physics for existing content has went over extremely well in the community. They've bought themselves time and even better, have removed pressure to release new content. So they can sit on it for a while and flood us with content later in the year.

 

Perhaps it's just me, but Codemasters' yearly sports titles at this point feel like they innovate more with each release than their other series which to me is just mind-boggling (particularly in the case of the GRID games)

 

Raceroom have the opposite problems to Reiza. They have good multiplayer, but their physics and graphics are not as good as AMS2. Also their tracks aren't laserscanned (except nords) so the accuracy of the tracks is far less, with many raceroom tracks being billiard table smooth or having strange fictional bumps. The expensive iracing-lite pricing model doesnt help either.

 

Raceroom had two big updates that gave their numbers a boost: The first was related to ranked multiplayer in December 2019 (I'm not 100% sure on the date and details) which led to a boost from 900 to 2600 players, and the second was the new FFB in june 2021 that led to a boost from 1100 to 1500 players. Both of these boosts were short-lived, although the FFB update had longer-lasting effects, possibly helped by the pandemic. Now Raceroom is back down to 900 players again. Your hypothesis of "probably still the same group of people" might have some merit to it.

Steam Charts stats from the last 4 years:


Remarkably, there is a strong correlation between the Steam Charts concurrent players data and Google Trends data, and the latter has a denser resolution at this time scale:


So while I'm not discrediting those who propose that adding in-game official scheduled races will help player numbers grow, the data from Raceroom's player history only shows a marginal long-term effect (maybe 30% growth, if I interpret the data optimistically)

Leaving aside the desire for a more densely populated multiplayer server list, I still think that adding in-game official scheduled races might dampen the heavy bias towards GT3 and F-V10/Ultimate at the usual tracks (Spa, etc.) and instead promote good combos that would otherwise have failed to gather enough players for critical mass.

 

Agree and after trying all new rF2-tracks my suspicion was confirmed, that they are based on the same source than the AMS2-versions. Certainly rF2-tracks feels like rF2 and the trackside-objects differ like those pit-boxes at Laguna Seca, but the elevation and curbs seems the same and even the track-limits seems matching. The track-surface is probably matching as well, but only telemetry-data-comparison would prove that.

 

RaceRoom, to me, combines boring and very undynamic driving behaviour with difficult to predict slides that you can't catch. That sucks the whole fun out of the experience. Adding to that, it's not visually pleasing, neither in the menu nor while driving.

I struggle to see how that sim, considering its pricey content model as well, has managed to amass as many as 900 daily players, because there's glaring fundamentals that simply aren't there.

AMS2, especially with the tire updates, definitely has a far more promising base to build on than R3E.

I don't think it's gonna come at all.
Reiza haven't been good at predicting when new content will come out, but they have been atrocious at predicting when new features are going to be added. Just think back how many delays the Championship Editor had - that was supposed to come out with V1.0 in July and then came in December.

Back then, it was reasoned the game engine wasn't designed for it, which was why it took so long. Now it's the same thing: Project CARS 2 did not have a safety car, which you simply need for oval racing to be viable. You need to code
- an option to turn it on in the menus
- an in-game logic for it to be deployed when someone crashes
- probably also an option for a dedicated server manager so he can call it out
- a Safety Car AI logic that is completely different from how the AI normally behaves
- an AI logic for the Safety Car and the restart after it that only gets applied there
- a Safety Car and SC Restart penalty system

I guess that in July, Reiza will release Racin' USA Pt. 3 including a drivable Safety Car so it can be at least used in organised leagues in multiplayer, maybe with a promise to deliver an offline Safety Car some time in the future.