Is that so? I know that Iracing has a very nice FFB and that you can feel the street better through your wheel. It also has a more in depth setup but thats it. I drove a few rounds in the soltice and one other car, but what is so exceptional about that in your opinion? With the same car, track and setup as in real life, you can recreate the exact same lap times with GT5. How can this get any better?
I really want to know why do you think that Iracing is so much better. The driving physics are nearly the same in my opinion.
ok ill address this point by point.
1. GT5 DOES have a very nice physics engine. Its 2010, and praising a company that ONLY makes racing games and works with real life car companies designing and devoloping systems for cars would be like praising a train for being able to run on rails, or praising a fire for burning stuff, not only is it their job to make a decent physics engine, with so many other studios doing so well, it is expected. So lets move past that.
2. FFB, the ffb in gt5 is completely laughable. If im honest it feels like its little more than a strong centering spring, with a few canned effects. This is after playing with BOTH my gt25 and my fanatec 911 turbo s (FAR FAR SUPERIOR). Yes the physics engine is nice, but that is only half of the story, a poor ffb model cannot translate the physics engine into an excellent feel and detracts from the driving experience. Let me give an example. First I will lay down some back ground.
I am an absolute car nut. I build my own cars, my entire life is cars, and I spend as much time on a track as possible. This passion also means I spend alot of time on various sims searching for the "authentic" experience. So I pick up gt5 and first play with a control pad as it was 4am and I came home from work early to play it.
Initially I thought "this is great, this physics engine is fantastic (once again lets not get caught up in praising a dog for mastering the art of wagging its tail). The next morning I got my wheel set up, fired it up in 3d and got ready for the REAL GT5 experience. I notice the FFB feels a little flat and dull, "thats ok I can live with that" I tell myself. I come into corner in a fashion that could be described as a little over ambitious, As I instinctively counter I feel a strong force pushing the wheel back to the center point rather than allowing me to feel my way through the counter. "what the **** is this??" I say. So I start playing with the settings on my fanatec wheel to no avail. I then try my g25 thinking "well they have developed it closely with logitech, maybe it performs differently with a logitech wheel" with no improvement and an even worse feel. Only to come on here and find that most people (with a clue) are complaining about the ffb in the same fashion.
2. Track realism. In Iracing the tracks are laser scanned. This is a process roughly uses the following steps. Go to the track with your equipment, Laser scan it in segments and take lots of photos, even some arial photography, Go back to the studio and import the track surface data directly into your software, Stitch it together, Texture it, Scale it, compile and export.This process ensures every undulation in the tracks surface is 100% accurately replicated. It is also a process that is alot more streamlined and efficient for creating tracks than PD's method. Ie. Go to a track, take a million photos, spend thousands of hours painsteakingly modelling the track from scratch using the photos as references, texture it, compile it, export it, test it. Only to find out that one of the sections is scaled incorrectly. Or to be told by a tester that the bump in the middle of turn 3 is missing. So you go BACK to the track, take a new set of reference photos, even drive the track. Then go back to the studio and start the process again. Not only does PD's process start to show just where 80 million dollars and 5 years went. At the end of the day it produces inferior results.
In regards to your comment about same car, same track, same setup, same time. This was only said to be true in alpha stages of gt5. Stop and consider this. Many of the cars statistics are miles away from the real counterparts. The tracks cant be 100% accurately replicated using PD's method. So how with inaccurate car replication, and inaccurate track replication can GT ever claim to yeild true and accurate results like that. It cant. This is cemented by the fact that some people on here are smashing the stigs power lap records in the same cars by nearly 10 seconds a lap in some cases using a control pad!...NOT EVEN A WHEEL...A CONTROL PAD! Granted the stig isnt schumacher, or even webber. But he is/was a professional touring car driver. A driver that 99% of people on here could not hold a candle to on his worst day. Some of the cars even seem to have their weight distribution completely back to front. This seems to be the problem with some of the lambo's and even the lotus in the top gear special event. They feel so loose and light in the back end as if they have nothing but a few carbon fibre panels and some suspension there. But so heavy and direct in the front like they have a big motor there. when in fact the real life counterparts are quite the opposite. You will hear car reviewers talking about both of these cars having a tendancy to understeer IRL and even with the lambos to be so "clinical, cold, serious and so user friendly a dog could drive one quickly", but the in game versions are about as user friendly and controllable mad homicidal clown on cocain! This is also added to by some people complaining about a similar phenomenon with some of the "sports" trucks, they claim in GT they just grip and grip and wont slide as if they have alot of weight over the rear end while claiming that the real life counterparts they drive IRL every day will lose rear traction and enter a slide basically as soon as you breath on the accelerator.GT is about as accurate as forza in this respect.
In short, Your comment is incorrect. And is likely misinforming people.
GT has a great physics engine, but that gem of a physics engine so let down by literally everything else around it.
was my first experience with the GT franchise, having done most of my motor-sports gaming on the PC over the years. GT5 is fun, but it is quickly growing very tedious. While there is a lot I really enjoy about GT5, there are so many odd and ill conceived aspects to GT5 both as a "console game" and as a self-described "driving simulator" that leave me scratching my head. It might not be such a big deal if they stuck to their guns when making decisions (or in what to ignore) between "game-play" and "realism", but the glaring contradictions between the two aspects just seem to go on forever...
