Project CARS v2.0 Patch to Focus on Controls, Physics and AI Improvements

SMS have released details of the upcoming patch 2.0 for Project CARS, and it covers a wide range of areas, many of which have been discussed already in our Project Cars Forum. The patch will be for the PC, PS4 and XBox One.

No date has yet been provided for the release of the patch, with SMS saying that they will provide “….the final release dates as soon as we have them.” SMS have also stressed that as the patch has not yet been submitted some details may change. Full details of the patch are as follows:

Performance Improvements

• PC – up to 5% frame rate improvement when using Ultra settings
• XB1 – up to 17% frame rate improvement in extreme conditions

Online & Community Events

• Multiplayer search filter ‘Skill’ now finds games based upon certain lobby game configuration criteria. For example, “Pro” setting now searches for Full Damage, Auto-start Engine, Forced Cockpit, Mechanical Failure, and so forth.
• Community events page – when an event cannot be entered, it will now display the reason why: ‘Coming Soon’ along with a countdown, or ‘Expired’.
• Online – Ensure that vehicle light repairs are synchronized in MP races so that repaired headlights are visible by other racers.
• Xbox One – fix attempt for a hard-to-reproduce issue where the game would at times freeze or crash when 8 or more players joined a session all at once.
• Xbox One – fixed an issue that at times would prevent a player from establishing full connectivity when leaving a lobby and trying to reconnect to it.
• PS4 – fixed an issue where, after the PS4 resumes from Rest Mode, no network features can be used.

Controls – All platforms

• Adjustments made to the gears system, to prevent gears being skipped under certain conditions. This addresses an issue where gears would at times jump straight down to 1st, potentially causing engine blowouts.
• Steering wheels – reduced the centering rate of the steering spring. This improves the feel of steering wheels at very low speeds.
• Added support for the use of all active controllers for menu input. You can for example now use a steering wheel to race, and a gamepad to control the menus and photo mode.
• Gear shifters – when using an H-shifter on a car that has a sequential gearbox, the gearbox will now switch through the gears until the gear selected on the H-shifter is reached.
• Fixed an issue in Force Feedback calibration that would prevent a player from setting “Soft Clipping (Half Input)” back to 0 after modifying it from the original value.

Controls – PS4

• Thrustmaster T100 Force Feedback improvements.
• Fixed the Force Feedback dynamics for wheels with physical steering locks which were less than the steering lock of the vehicle in-game. This fixes the Force Feedback on the Thrustmaster T100 and similar wheels.
• Added a Motion Sensor controller profile.
• Fixed a crash issue when disconnecting and reconnecting Fanatec wheels.
• Enable support for USB keyboards to be used for in-game controls.

Controls – Xbox One

• Built in protection to prevent unsupported controller devices from crashing the game.
• Gear shifters – fixed an issue that prevented the selection of neutral when using an H-gate shifter add-on with a car that has an H-gate shifter in-game.
• Implemented accelerator vibration on the gamepad right trigger to indicate when and how much the tyres slip under acceleration.
• Madcatz wheel – fixed an issue where the switch on the wheel to change between 270 to 900 degree mode stopped functioning.

Physics & AI

• Slowed down the AI opponents in the rain when using racing tyres, to make racing against them better balanced.
• Adjusted the AI tyre wear rate to better match the player’s tyre wear rate.
• Adjusted wear of Slicks and Rain tires to more realistic levels where needed. Typically GT/LMP/Formula cars will get slightly more than a full fuel load on soft or default slicks (depending on fuel load amounts).
• Adjusted the heating of slicks and rain tyres to more realistic levels.
• Adjusted tyre temperature sensitivity on several cars.
• Adjusted rain tyres to generally be more sensitive to overheating, and less efficient in the dry.
• Improvements to AI navigation to lessen collisions during cramped race starts, improve detection of other cars during cornering, and improve clean overtaking
• Improved the AI pitting logic during practice and qualifying so that the AI cars run more realistic stints before pitting.
• Reworked the AI’s fuelling logic during qualifying sessions where no refuelling is allowed, so that they don’t always fill up the fuel tanks and negatively impact their qualifying ability. The AI will now deliver far more competitive lap times during qualifying.
• Fixed an issue where the AI would set impossible lap times during races with pit stops.
• The AI will now pit as soon as possible when low on fuel to prevent them running out of fuel and retiring from the race.
• Reduced the effect of damage to the car’s cooling system when suffering aero damage. This prevents engines from overheating and blowing at an unrealistic rate.
• Fixed an issue that prevented bump starts from working properly on some cars. An example case – with gears and clutch set to manual, take an Ariel Atom out on Brands Hatch. At the first right hander, stall the car, ignition on, 2nd gear, roll down the hill up to about 15kph and drop the clutch. The car will now bump start. Exact conditions for a successful bump start will vary slightly by car.
• Fixed an issue where at times some AI drivers in a race would use much higher skill levels than the rest of the field.
• Fixed an issue that prevented the AI from pitting within the final 3 laps of a race
• Further tweaked the AI ability in wet races to more closely match the player car’s ability in the wet
• Improved the AI’s efficiency in pit timing when needing to change tyres due to weather conditions.

Pitting, tuning, setups

• Fixed an issue where wet tyres were fitted too long before the rain starts, causing excessive overheating and wear on the tyres.
• Fixed an issue where, when running low on fuel, the Pit Board would appear to tell the player to do a scheduled pit stop when the player did not schedule a pit stop.
• Fixed an issue where flat tyres were fitted to the car during a pit stop, by ensuring that the tyres are correctly inflated.
• Fixed an issue where the car’s bump-stop value decreased after leaving a race session and joining it again.
• Reworked the brake bias display information so that changing the values is more intuitive.

Tracks

• Performance optimisation pass done on: Brands Hatch layouts, Cadwell layouts, Oulton Park layouts, Bathurst, Azure circuit, and Zolder. This helps improve the overall smoothness when racing on these tracks with large grids of cars.
• Track cutting tolerances reduced on all tracks where it was too forgiving.
• Fixed an issue where a pit crew character would at times appear floating above the race track on various tracks.
• Silverstone Stowe – fixed render issues on some tyre stacks, and addressed an issue with cars driving through certain objects.
• Road America – fixed an issue where a line of grass line appeared in the air near a concrete barrier.
• Spa Francorchamps – fixed an issue where cars under AI control would bump into the pit wall when exiting the pit lane. Fixed an issue where the AI were running too wide over the exit curb at the Bus Stop Chicane.
• Brno – fixed an issue where cars would at times start in the same grid positions, fixed garage six to prevent the AI from getting stuck on the right side wall when exiting the garage spot, fixed an issue when running more than 20 cars in a race would cause the car in 21st to slide into the pits.
• Le Mans – fixed an issue that would at times cause the car to crash while in the pit lane, leading to a disqualification. Improved the AI race line for better speed, and improved the AI behaviour on curbs.
• Laguna Seca – improved the AI performance as they were running too slow in some sections.
• Imola – Improved the pit lane AI navigation, and fixed an issue with a section of the fence at the pit entrance that appear to float.
• Bathurst – fixed a render issue with shimmering edges in parts of the track.

Career

• Added a new RUF RGT8 GT3 contract to ensure that the player can enter the RUF GT3 series on contract renewal and not just when starting a new career.
• Fixed the unlock details for the Supercar Ardennes Club Day Invitational.
• Fixed an issue where skipping the session during a race caused the player to move up in the session results.

Vehicles

• Group 5 cars – adjusted the gearshift timing tolerances to fix an issue with the gearing when pausing and restarting a session.
• Gumpert Apollo – fixed an issue with the livery sets that caused the livery selection to display wrong liveries.
• Aston Martin Vantage GT3 – tuned engine lifetime and brake cooling parameters for better accuracy.
• Lotus 98T – tweaked turbo to improve AI estimation of top speed.
• McLaren F1 GTR – modified the default setup and reduced front bump steer to improve straight line stability, fixed an issue to ensure that the car’s specific HUD motec display is used
• McLaren F1 – Fixed an issue that caused the car to use the wrong default tyre compound.
• Ford GT40 MK4 – Reworked in several areas to improve handling and match the real car closer – Bump stops settings exposed in setup with better tuned setup defaults, increased wrap around stiffness of the tire carcass, rebalanced base vs tear grip, rebalanced player vs AI rain performance against the AI.
• All Formula vehicles – Stop brake light reflections appearing on cars that don’t have brake lights.

General

• Fixed an issue where the player position would at times change to last when player crosses the starting line during rolling starts.
• Fixed an issue that could cause the game to crash when selecting the ‘Edit Tuning Setup’ option in the ‘PIT BOX’ screen.
• Fixed an issue that could cause the game to crash while watching a saved replay.
• Driver Network Profile – fixed an issue where entering Free Practice mode would count toward Races Entered.
• PS4 – fixed an issue that required the game to first restart after installing an in-game DLC before the DLC would be available for use.
• Audio – rebalanced the volume of skid sounds to make them a bit more audible.
• PC, Oculus Rift – added Oculus 0.6.0.0 SDK support, enabled positional tracking in non-helmet player camera views, implemented initial menus and HUD support, auto reset player view position at the start of a race, and disabled all non-VR-friendly scripted pre-race camera sequences.
• PC, D-BOX – fixed an issue that caused cars to lose power when playing with D-BOX connected.
• Updated the achievement “I am the 5%” to ensure that it can be achieved in non-Pro-modes as well.
• Fixed a game crash issue caused by an overflow of the email inbox when the player received above a certain amount of invitational emails.
• GUI – fixed an issue where the controls configuration arrows in Options would not respond correctly to mouse input when attempting fine adjustment.

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