[360] Forza Motorsport 3
- Thread starter Arwin
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djskribbles
Legend
Are there any racing games that look better than Shift on PC? I played the Shift demo on PC with 8xAA/16AF and was not that impressed with the visuals TBH.
(((interference)))
Veteran
Dirt 2
Thanks, but no thanks. To be honest, I find this to be very worrying and highly disappointing coming from a developer. I'd much rather have them (you) concentrate on gameplay rather than visuals which tend to be forgotten when immersed into the game or after a while.
I might not be all that impressed with Forza and Turn10, but I give them a lot of credit for pushing 60fps rather than trying to compete with GT by offering better visuals at a lower framerate. At least like this, we will not have to worry about Polyphony about going the 30fps route.
Even if they fall short on the graphics side - they deserve upmost respect for striving for 60fps, despite where most of the competition is heading. Sadly they can blame their PR for the shitstorm they're in with regards to the visuals. If they hadn't overdone the PR, perhaps less people would actually care about it. It certainly doesn't matter to me if the lighting is up to GT5 or not. Visuals, especially when they're as good as they are in Forza 3, isn't a factor anymore. Framerate, gameplay, physics, cars, engine-sounds, wheel-support, multiplayer and tuning-options are.
+1
The London track in GT5
is just horrible, for a lot of the side streets they don't even model them and just use a photo of the road on a wall.And the track textures are so low res and the main menu area with your car parked at not only does what the London track does but also has insanely low res photo textures, can't they do a better job when it something that is right in front of you most of the time?
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Yes, but taking into account that the cars in the distance also take up less power, increased FOV doesn't have to be a real problem.
Anyway, the game definitely passes my hotlapping test. I've had fun. Finally settled on 193th out of 341,815 laptimes entered for the Audi ...
By the way, I like che, I don't like Dan - he's always such a testosterone filled loudmouth. I guess it's his job, but I prefer a more modest style!
Ah!! After the ROD in FM2 went I blow a motor… I got the MS wheel force feedback brake when I splash the Audi… Damned! I really don't like when games go to be too realist!!
Very good times Arwin! Don't expect to match you, I have to relearn all with the Pad…
Hoping MS made a Wheel pack …
(((interference)))
Veteran
But you also have more input lag with a 30 fps title, which matters to a driving simulator.
iRacing is quite photo realistic by going by the same approach as GT5 (flat looking but photo based textures).
Otherwise Shift only has a brightness slider and IMO a gamma and contrast slider is needed. For gamma/contrast override program is the solution for me.
I am very impressed with it's visuals, very. 1 2
Forza is also nice looking in some places and others a bit rough. Though the color palette is a bit to rich. I would make a TV custom profile with tweaked saturation, gamma and contrast. I did it with Forza and it improved visuals quite a bit. PGR2 was king though, was no need to mess with anything. Think it would help quite a bit.
Not really. You can have input go on about its business regardless of framerate. However of course you will not see the result of your input until the next frame anyway
what i rly like about FM3 are tracks. Big step forward in compare with FM2 vid. Looks like i am the only one who is pleased with gfx, cars looks great and overall gfx is much nicer, menu have nice fresh look. Sure its 5 years old hardware so maybe more focus on art side and some new clever gimmicks to cheat eyes. The place for improvement is always here as long as someone is willing to do it and have required skills .
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what i rly like about FM3 are tracks. Big step forward in compare with FM2 vid. Looks like i am the only one who is pleased with gfx, cars looks great and overall gfx is much nicer, menu have nice fresh look. Sure its 5 years old hardware so maybe more focus on art side and some new clever gimmicks to cheat eyes. The place for improvement is always here as long as someone is willing to do it and have required skills
Nah, most people like the graphics, trust me, and definitely all those coming from FM2. For me, it passes the basic tests I require of racing games - do I like looking at the cars (yes), do I enjoy hotlapping (yes), and can I save replays (not in the demo, but probably yes).
If those basics are present, then the most important thing for the final game is whether online is any good. Forza 2 failed there for me in a big way, so we'll have to wait and see what happens with Forza 3.
My final verdict will come once I get the full game. I'll be sure to make a good review for all my friends on various boards who really are into racing games.
Despite some initial disappointment over the in-game car models, as soon as I started hotlapping in Bumper-cam, I have been very very impressed with the track/scenery detail, it's quite impressive indeed.
I know it's hard to swallow the innacuracies (being kind) that T10's PR have put out, but I honestly would not cut my nose off to spite my face by boycotting the game, especially since it seems many PR innacuracies have been made in the past from many developers.
It'll be interesting to see sales of FM3, from the storm that has landed around the net, it's clear that the majority of people really just want a pretty game, everything else is secondary, and I don't think FM is about that..
I know it's hard to swallow the innacuracies (being kind) that T10's PR have put out, but I honestly would not cut my nose off to spite my face by boycotting the game, especially since it seems many PR innacuracies have been made in the past from many developers.
It'll be interesting to see sales of FM3, from the storm that has landed around the net, it's clear that the majority of people really just want a pretty game, everything else is secondary, and I don't think FM is about that..
couldnt have said it better, yes Turn 10 mislead with their PR & yes that was wrong, but its still a great looking & great playing game.
And wrt online I'd like to stress that every racing game has failed for me online with the exception being PGR 3 & PGR 4...hopefully Forza 3 changes that.
ihamoitc2005
Veteran
I am sorry to disagree.
Hello my friend. My feeling is not to be impressed with Shift. I feel car shapes are not quite right (that BMW is missing curves and side is too flat) and building textures are not so great. Interior view is ok, some parts have good textures and shadows some parts have bad textures and no shadows. Also in console version there is not enogh polygons for the interior. Too many edges. In PC version the road texture is really sharp but it isn't as good in the console versions.
Hello my friend. My feeling is not to be impressed with Shift. I feel car shapes are not quite right (that BMW is missing curves and side is too flat) and building textures are not so great. Interior view is ok, some parts have good textures and shadows some parts have bad textures and no shadows. Also in console version there is not enogh polygons for the interior. Too many edges. In PC version the road texture is really sharp but it isn't as good in the console versions.
That is what I have seen/heard/observed. FM3 is a huge jump as a total package over FM2. I still have complaints and nit-picks and no, the final IQ is not exactly up to the IQ of photomode (duh). There is some aliasing; 2xMSAA is only going to cover so much. Even 4x isn't perfect. But Turn10 also addressed some of the issues that screwed up MSAA in FM2 (e.g. their HDR seems to be applied after the MSAA resolve so you ended up with hard high-contrast non-aliased edges and white artifacting in highly reflective areas). So the game has some jaggies, fences aren't as clean as you may desire, etc but the jump between FM2 and FM3 is huge. Texture aliasing is a big improvement as well. Is it perfect? No. You can see swimming at the starting line and it looks like they may be using bilinear filtering, but road markings are a lot sharper and can be spotted clearly in the distance. It doesn't have the IQ of GRiD on the 360, but it doesn't look bad. It looks good. Toss in that it runs at a silky 60fps I am not sure what people expected?
FM3 has some problems. e.g. The tail lights look excellent at a distance (4+ car lengths) but anything closer and you can see it is the same effect used for the brakes and it looks pretty poor. Ok, really poor. There is no real windshield in the interior view. The contrast in light intensity in shadows and in the light appears to be nominal at best (I loved PGR3's iris effect). Damage decals are too simplistic in that a bump does the same precanned scratches all over a panel--they just aren't fine grained enough. It also seems "simulation" damage is even more forgiving than FM2--they really need "ultra realism" where cars being disabled happens after a significant knock. And while all the cars don't looks like 16xMSAA 100k photomode cars at the highest LOD the cars on track do have a good sense of being "solid." They are shadowed and lit well. Reflections aren't over the top (and they appear to update at 60fps AND are much, much higher resolution than FM2). There is a real cohesiveness between the cars and the world. Yeah, the palette is too bright for my tastes (I really prefer GRiD's look) but it works.
I think FM3 hangs with the best racers on the consoles in terms of graphics, but with the difference being most are 30fps and FM3 is 60fps. The tracks look reall nice and once the 'other' details (like custom paint jobs, robust car customization) come into factor I think that needs to be accounted for.
I think FM2's online pretty much lapped everyone else. Between match making, private lobbies with AI/friend slots, single race and circuit events, a large selection of course layouts, and a driving model that pretty much has no competition on the 360 it really set itself apart as a serious racer on the console. If you don't play long enough to get a proper match-making rank you will be stuck with smucks all the time, especially if you don't have a B3D/Gamersyde group of friends to play with or the like. But what I found quickly is the online component (people gifting me sweet cars and designs all the time!!) is you quickly find other good racers who will draw you into their clicks. You race clean, talk (get a mic!), and give it a fair shake it works it way out much like Halo 3 does very quickly.
FM3 decided to diminish the "offroad" penalty (big mistake IMO but something you guys clamoured for) and the driving model is more forgiving in turns of spin outs (like more side-by-side grinding will be possible) but instead is really going to reward good drivers who master the nuances of a course.
Arwin's hot lap times should mean he will have no problem intimidating the newbs around the first couple corners and jump all over them once they take a turn too hot.
One thing that's strange in FM2 is that the reflection maps were not AA'd at all. That's a freebie right there (ala MSAA'd lower res particles). In FM3, it looks like that's been... resolved.
There's gotta be some LOD bias trickery going on there. Gotta look at that some more sometime.
Yeah, you asked earlier what I meant when I commented on those, and it looks like now you know.
You remember a long time ago we heard about how PGR4 did its reflections (e.g. using the framebuffer from the previous frame) and speculated that Forza 3 would be using it? Well I'm guessing that came through.
I mostly agree with you, but one thing I think is that most other racers on the 360 also have more than 8 cars on track though?
Definitely
Well, don't forget PGR though, it was very good.
FM2 was fine in terms of features, but the peer-to-peer netcode in it just wasn't very hot, imho. No tolerance for firewalls, no UPnP support, required connection from everybody to everybody instead of just having good host auto-selection, etc. I had a genuine and honest-to-god 'wtf am I paying 59,95 euro per year for?' moment after my first week of Forza 2, and after two more weeks (if that) I had my fill. I'm really expecting things to be much better this time, but for obvious reasons I can't and won't judge it until I've actually tried it.
That my MS Wheel's headset connector seems to be broken somehow doesn't help either. People always complain about the sound to the point that I just have to unplug or mute it during the race. Though I don't mind not talking while racing!
(though it is sometimes nice to say 'nice move' )Actually what almost always works no matter which game or platform, is just choosing a track/car/difficulty combination that's sufficiently high to attract only good drivers. I've never really had problems in that regard, even if I didn't play a whole lot.
It's just a bit weird that gras now always seems to feel like dry, sticky clay in that it slows you down so quickly. It's not that different from Forza 2 now even I think. But it does mostly work - you can't get fast times most of the time if you go off-track, always slows you down. The question is now though how far the online stuff goes in terms of having black flags, blue flags and so on. I'm not expecting much there, but the way the driving works right now, it's not as easy to take someone out as it used to be, and you don't seem to be able to cheat very easily by cutting grass. so it seems mostly good. Fingers crossed, but even then you can generally find good friends to race with - even among my trusted GT friends there are always a few hardcore guys that also race other games like Sims or (up-to now to a slightly lesser extent, but still enough) Forza.
Yep, spinning out is becoming really hard. I did like racing in GT5 Prologue with cars like the Ferrari 430 on Suzuka, with completely no assists and professional mode where it's just hard enough to complete a lap, let alone go fast and/or overtake - it gives you something to work at for a long time and strive with the competition. But those are just flavors and nuances, and Forza 3 should give plenty of flavor and nuance of its own. Again, we'll see next month!
Even more important here is my online PC sim and GT3/4 iLink/LAN Party experience, and a little bit GT5 Prologue experience - particularly in the LAN parties for GT I learnt where to overtake, where to expect lesser players to make mistakes, how to pressure them, etc. Great fun, I love overtaking almost as much as hotlapping
. Look forward to racing with you guys, even if it means I have to start paying again for Live (I lasted a full three months, lol). How successful Forza will be in keeping my attention will be directly linked to my Live Gold subscription ... I think you give me way too much credit, I have little influence on the gameplay side of things, just graphics
I hear you though. It is impressive to get 60fps working on these machines. Plus they play great which is most important anyways, I'll be buying them all. And the visuals are nice, just not "wow check this out" nice if you know what I mean. But if they have the talent to pull that off at 60fps, then I can't help but wonder what they could have added given an extra 16ms. Maybe 4xmsaa? 24hour lighting? More trackside details? Weather? A little more texture detail to take that cg look away? All of the above? Oh well, not to be I guess 