The Big Forza 2 Thread *

Phil said:
We weren't talking about most instances in real life - we were talking about how the IGN reviewer feels that on a racing track, there's not enough room for drivers ability to make the difference in a race.
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If you read the much more extensive review from OP Sports you'll see this is just not the case:

I think that they really managed to pull of the handicapping system the way that they hoped...cars with crazy acceleration and speed will get eaten up in the corners, and cars that can take the corners on rails will get gobbled in the straights. I haven't found one 'can do everything' car in any class yet other than the R1's, which only have 2 cars available out of the gates and both are identical other than looks.

If anything, the top speed value is a huge factor this time, which is the case any time you're racing cars. In one particular race Jon had a car that was .5 better top speed than the one I was racing, and he would just yard me every straightaway. But getting it stopped and through a corner was another issue, as I kept closing the gap and pulling up to his bumper every time the road curved. In the end, the top speed won on that particular track, but if we have that same race on another windy track with the same cars I would guarantee the slower, more nimble car would win it.
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Phil said:
That's the problem. A better driver in a car that might also have a higher cornering speed might be able to carry a lot more speed out of the corner. As a result, at that point, the slower car in your specific case would already have a speed advantage over the faster car that would have to accelerate up to and beyond the speed of the slower car to beat it. This is by some, at times, refered to as a sling-shot overtake. Racing has a lot more to do than in-gear acceleration and which is the fastest car - I thought that was pretty much obvious.
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This is great in theory but the faster car in front will simply use a point and shoot approach to block the drive of the slower car behind. Protect your line on the brakes, park that damn thing mid corner, forcing the car behind to check up and then fire out of the corner. Getting by a faster car with a driver who knows how to use the HP to their advantage will make life tough for the trailing low hp/high corner speed car. Even when I was motorcycle racing, this was a major complaint in practise sessions. And that's on a much narrower bike. Now on a car, this issue is much more exaggerated. Even during car trackdays, this is generally the most common complaint. Unfortunately, at trackdays, people are not doing it intentionally but it still shows the effect of how point and shoot strategy of a high HP car can prove troubling for the car behind. Ofcourse, it's even more apparant on faster tracks than really tight circuits.

A lot of time the lower HP car behind has to hound the faster car infront into a mistake, make it run wide and get underneath it. Otherwise, be prepared to either take a huge risk to get by or get frustrated being stuck behind.

What's really fun is to let the slower vehicle get right on your ass on the exit, trying to get that killer drive and then roll off throttle abruptly making the person behind check up quickly and then go full throttle. You'll create good seperation and don't have to worry about them coming up on the inside of the next corner. No, life isn't fair :)
 
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RobertR1 said:
What's really fun is to let the slower vehicle get right on your ass on the exit, trying to get that killer drive and then roll off throttle abruptly making the person behind check up quickly and then go full throttle. You'll create good seperation and don't have to worry about them coming up on the inside of the next corner. No, life isn't fair :)
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That's just wrong :LOL:.

@Phil: Some of the stuff in the IGN review is subjective so he's entitled to his opinion, but other stuff is just plain inaccurate. He was tasked with reviewing a game that he had no interest in and it shows in the quality (actually the lack thereof) of the piece. They should have borrowed somebody from IGN Cars to do the review or to at least provide "another take" from a car-nut's perspective.
 
Many of Hilary's reviews have been suspect for years... that said 8.9 review is a damned good score.

GameSpot who is usually much harder to score well gave it a 9.2 review.
 
Tap In said:
GameSpot who is usually much harder to score....
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I'd argue with that. I don't think any of the reviewers out there give real scores. Doom3 getting a 9.0+, comes to mind. And the same with Half Life 2, honestly. And Oblivion. Especially Oblivion (what a flawed game!)

Computer Gaming World, before they folded into Microsoft's mag, had a sweet "no rating" review system going for a while that was great, IMO.

I don't even really read reviews at all anymore. For anything in life, lol. I usually head over to a forum and read what people are saying about the game. Like right now.
 
Phil said:
That's the problem. A better driver in a car that might also have a higher cornering speed might be able to carry a lot more speed out of the corner. As a result, at that point, the slower car in your specific case would already have a speed advantage over the faster car that would have to accelerate up to and beyond the speed of the slower car to beat it. This is by some, at times, refered to as a sling-shot overtake. Racing has a lot more to do than in-gear acceleration and which is the fastest car - I thought that was pretty much obvious.



We weren't talking about most instances in real life - we were talking about how the IGN reviewer feels that on a racing track, there's not enough room for drivers ability to make the difference in a race. You disagreed with his observation stating that it is very hard to beat a driver *who has learned the basics* with a faster car in front. Not to mention that I doubt the simulated AI drivers in Forza 2 are driving maniacs that will do anything to not let the player past - my point is that there are a lot more factors that determin if a slower car is able to beat a faster one. Drivers ability, the point of the reviewer, is surely one of them - other car characteristics like cornering speed, handling, weight, grunt, etc are also relevant factors.
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Stop being so goddamn elitists, stop assuming that other people are morons, just because they don't share your opinion.

If you start counting lap times, i agree, driver makes all the difference in the world. If your racing somebody, car factors in a lot. The faster car (which usually also has better acceleration) will get in front quick. From there, you can give the guy behind you hell, as long as you learned the basics of cornering.

Yes, i know all about drafting, and sling-shot overtakes. That works only if the driver in front of you has to go as fast as he can (and your able to keep up with him). Once your in the lead, you don't really need to go as fast as you can, you just have to stay infront. What the AI in Forza does or not is irrelevant regarding that. (Besides, your the one who kept talking about real life, suddenly you forgot about that?)

Stop being so rude.
 
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Phil, what exactly do you mean by a "better" car? It seems that by better you are simply saying faster (acceleration and/or top speed). With this game that is an incredibly flawed assumption.

I have two cars that show this well. One is a D-Class Muscle Car (1970 Chevelle, I think). It maxes out at about 130 stock and a simple transmission upgrade bumps that to around 150-160. A few more parts and it goes even faster. The other car is an A-Class Elise Lotus that maxes out at around 130-140 (it only has around 180 HP). Which do you think will win anything besides a drag race? The A-Class Lotus. It can pass the muscle car on a turn even if it has to take a horrible line and drives like a go-cart.

Driver skill matters, but the way the ranking system is set up you won't have a lower ranked car that has a significant enough advantage at either cornering or acceleration to beat a higher ranked car. The system works well enough that disparate vehicles are accurately matched with each other.

ps. I am having the AI run an endurance race, and the way the dirt builds up on the car is just amazing...
 
Well, here is a guide (that may be helpful for some people) on how to make settings adjustments to improve your car's performance, make it unique, adapt it to your driving style, etc.

It's been written in forzamotorsport.net forums by someone whose nick is Hadoq.

This little guide, short and contrite as it is -for what it offers-, is completely fabulous.

the magic lap time you're looking for on tsukuba is 1 minute, a car that brakes the minute out there is what one can call a "good race car"

for reference, irl, regular sport honda cars (civic type R, integra type R, S2k), stock, run that circuit around 1'05" to 1'07", spoon/mugen versions tend to be between 1'00" and 1'05"

now ingame you should pick up a well balanced FR/MR car, not as good as the ferrari, with a good progression possibility, here are a few guesses:

- Mazda Rx7 (old or new)
- Mazda Rx8
- Honda S2000
- Lotus elise/exige (harder to tune IMO)
- honda NSX

personnaly I'd go with the old Rx7 cause I like the look of it and it's quite abit of a "cornering machine"


anyway, get some of that car, start with upgrading all you can in shocks, weight etc... maybe not slick tires you won't need it, you want a car that's easy to drive wich means not too powerfull. In FM1 only weight and tires would make you go up in category so manage to get chassis upgrade so you're around B2/B1, then upgrade engine so you stick to B1 at MAx (wich means in the new notation, right before you get in A category), leave the turbo alone for now.

drive the car on tsukuba until you get regular laps, preferably in a mode you can see a ghost car of your best lap that's a good reference to start tuning, if you're in front then your setup is better if not, go back (try and save every modification, I mean save your setup under "a" then next time you save it, save it under "b", once you sure b is better than a, then overwrite a, so you can allways go back).

first thing I do then is stiffen the anti roll bars a little, those will make your car more responsive (it's not necessary a good thing but I tend to modify both at the same time, trying to have the same "ratio" between both of them), if they're in the 1st tier, move the cursor up a bit, equally with both, try, if you don't move that too far it should be better, then move them up little by little (I do it usually by 2 to 5 "clics") once you feel it was better before, move them back. then you're ready to move to the next parameter.


the next parameter would be camber/toe/caster (in that order in the settings), that depending on how you car behaves in the corners.

for camber you want negative camber for your car to stick in the turns and not slide too much, you want control here (also keep in mind that 1 parameter will not give you the absolute control), if during a slide your front tires slide more, add negative camber (i.e. move the bar to your left) usually it's -0.5 stock I tend to leave that, same goes for the rear, personnaly I go between -0.7 to -1.2 depending on the car.

for toe it's really simple since it's an FR I'll try to describe it for you.

your chassis is not a piece of frozen wood, it moves and has deformation, try to imagine your rear wheels are stuck to the ground and have a vertical pivot from ground to top (vertical ^^) going through the center of each wheel (only talking bout rear wheels) so they're free to rotate around that pivot

[|]---[|] would be a "front view" the | being the said pivot

now from a top view we would have someting like this, when the car starts moving and the rear tires are stuck to the ground:

reartoe.jpg


now in real live wheels are not stuck, but they have resistance to the movement so this will actually happen on a very small scale. if you want optimal grip, you want your wheels to be in a straight line when accelerating, so you have to put some negative angle here, I mean something really small, like -0.1 to -0.3. on a FR or MR car you don't want to put positive angle here, not at all, unless you want to drift. on FF cars having this one positive will help the rear to slide wich would be cool for cornering.


for front wheels it's abit different, basically having them pointing outwards will make you turn in easier, but will hurt abit of stability in a straight line, the car will follow the track imperfections much more. it's a matter of compromise here. I usually put a 0.2 to 0.3 angle here, 0.2 will do the job.



now caster is a magical thing, it'll increment your negative camber angle while you turn and decrement it when you're in straight, all good you might think, well not exactly.

actually most german autobahn cars have high caster angle, it helps for stability at high speed, but the problem with that, is that it'll make your car feeling abit "heavier". move that to the right a little bit if you want better turn in, but if you do that too much it wouldn't help, 3 to 5 "clics" are usually the way I go on that setup.

for advanced suspension setting, I can do it a little bit but I wouldn't be able to explain it very well, so try a few clics here and there (one parameter at a time, this is where tsukuba comes in handy so you only need 1 minute/1 lap to see how the modification goes) and see what happens, I tend to make rear (damn forgot the word in english, the 2 parameters on the top), "top parameter" a little bit harder (5 to 10 "clics) and then try out with the others, I cannot explain this so I'd rather not do it)

for the LSD, well this too depends very much on the car, try like 10 clics up, make a lap, 10 clics down, make a lap, see what happens.

at this point, you didn't touch ride height, this pretty much depends on the track, but "all the way down" will usually screw most of the work you did before, now it sure looks cool, but it's definately not the way to go, unless your track is a pure billiard table (silverstone maybe).


now the tire pressure, I got that from another post on this forum, and once the setup is all done I still manage to get a few seconds out of tire pressure, it's boring to do but really easy.

run a benchmark test/dyno, write down the lateral g's with stock setting, then move the cursors to get those numbers up, at first I move both cursors at the same time, and once I managed to get the top number, I try and move them independantly to usually increase these numbers a little more.



tuning a car is a matter of compromise, you will never find out the "perfect handling setup", it depends on the track, the car, the upgrades etc... but doing that I could manage to get quite decent hotlaps on several tracks (my favorite was one that's not anymore on FM2, downhill section).

last thing to keep in mind when you tune your car, if you're faster on the track, you might have to brake earlier, so to really see if a modification did some good, you might want to run more than one lap cause it might take a whole lap just to get used to the new modification, once you get used to tuning it'll go faster, but at first you'll have to give it some time.

normally in the tuning section you should have a "test drive" option, go there and you might be able to set your car up bringing up the pause menu and directly see the difference on the track.



for the gear ratio, it's simple, depending on the track you want to
- be at the max torque revving when starting to reaccelerate in 2nd gear out of the track's slowest corner
- be around the max power/max rev in the longest straight in the last gear


I hope it was comprehensive enough, I'm no engineer whatsoever, but I've been through a whole bunch of ressources to learn that for Forza 1, and I just saw the tuning menu was exactly the same, so what did work for me in Forza 1, might as well work in Forza 2.


very last thing if you want to see nice tsukuba very short (5 laps usually) races with street and tuner cars driven by top drivers, look on the internet for "best motoring" Japanese TV shows, those are hosted by keichi tsushiya (A.k.a "drift king" although I'm talking about races, not drift here). So you can have references for lap times corresponding to the exact type of cars you can have in Forza, passing lines, racing lines etc... last I've seen it was mine's skyline vs spoon s2k vs Re amemiya Rx7 etc... all those cars are in the game, so what they can do in the show, you can do it in the game. if you're into cars you will love this show. I'd recommend as well the special "Best Motoring: Drift bible" if you want to learn about how a car behaves at limits and how you can make the car doing special moves, it comes in handy even in grip racing, and it's really comprehensive
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Another two basic tutorials written by some mate whose nick is z0mbi (all credits and cheers to him). He is also a member of the forzamotorsport.net forums.

The first one is about lettering and outlining a text. He uses the text "General Lee" as an example, but, of course, it works with different texts.

The second one is great for starters, for those -like me- having problems with basic shapes, colour selection for shapes, etc.

Doing the lettering

Creating text:

Pick a 'G' from one of the fonts.
Place it on the car
Hit 'Y' to stamp another
Move the duplicate over to the right until it is right next to the original, with a small space
Now hit 'Y' again and repeat the above until you have a whole row of 'G's' equal to the number of letters in the phrase you are creating (in this case 'General Lee')

Now, select the second 'G' layer and hit 'A'
Choose the option from the menu 'Change vinyl shape'
Hit yes when it warns you about overwriting
Now, choose the 'E'
Do the same for all the rest of the letters until you have the whole phrase

This is much easier than manually lining up text, and faster!

Creating an outline

Now, you want a white outline around your blue 'General Lee'
Select and lock all the blue letters together
hold in the left thumbstick and 'copy' the locked layers
now, paste the copied layers underneath the original blue text
change the color of the newly copied layers to white
move all the white locked layers at once a few pixels up, and over
stamp them, and move them down, and over
repeat on each corner until you have a perfect white outline

Hope that helped! It's very simple.

------------------------

go into the editor
rotate to the drivers door side of my car
pick the first layer
pick a circle vinyl, paint it black
place the black circle vinyl on the car (resizing and moving to where I want it)

copy the black vinyl circle
paste it into a new layer
color it white
resize it evenly so it is just a tad smaller than the black circle

choose the third layer
choose the number 0 from the vinyl library
paint it black
place the decal within the circle you just created

choose the fourth layer
choose the number 1 from the vinyl library
paint it black
place the decal within the circle you just created, next to the 0

This gives you a white circle with a black outline, and black numbers inside it. Drawing an image of a cartoon head is done the exact same way, except there are no 'eye' vinyls, for instance. You have to create them from scratch by using all the shapes available to you in the library.

A good tip is that you can use vinyls to 'erase' things, too...so if you have a vinyl that is a shape that you want, but one part of it you dont need, you can paste another vinyl on top of the part you dont need and make it the same color as the body of the car. That will essentially erase the extraneous stuff.
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I thought being addicted to Ephedra was bad! this is much worse :(

Arcade mode done now time to waste a few months of life on career. If you do the Maple Valley arcade time trail with the 950+ hp supra, do it without TCS. You can pretty much just light it up all the way around the track....good times! :D
 
phat said:
In real life, I don't leave much in the way of skid marks with each lap. The visible "racing line" on a track is usually not laid down because of skid marks, but gradual rubber and oil deposits over many, many laps. In short, I think you're overstating the "real life" relevance of skid marks, at least in the manner they are implemented in most racing games.

Anyway, in my books, a game that has good physics and handling but no skid marks or damage is much preferable to a game that has skid marks and damage but poor physics and handling. (That doesn't mean I think Forza has poor physics and handling--I don't know the game well enough to say much about these aspects of it.)
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I'd like to know who gave me a negative rep for this post of mine quoted above. It seems like there's no recourse for abuse of the rep system, except to complain publicly?
 
My one word review: Brilliant!

Kept waiting to be let down based on all the comments but after about 15 hours or so, I love it. 9/10.
 
phat said:
I'd like to know who gave me a negative rep for this post of mine quoted above. It seems like there's no recourse for abuse of the rep system, except to complain publicly?
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Click on User CP it should show who dinged you.
 
Ostepop said:
What the AI in Forza does or not is irrelevant regarding that. (Besides, your the one who kept talking about real life, suddenly you forgot about that?)
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Actually, it was you. Check your post with the number 1264 - I think it's pretty clear with what I was disagreeing then and still disagree with now.

To quote you again:

Ostepop said:
In case you haven't realized, if you have an inferior car, your gonna be slower. Once your ahead of somebody in real life, making him stay behind you, is a much easier task than overtaking someone, especially if you got the faster car. If i go to nurburgring with my car, and Schumacher does a lap vs me in a Lupo, im going to win.
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In other words, you were putting down the IGN review with supposedly "real life" facts, taking his/her argument out of context while doing so. The fact that the AI in Forza 2 isn't as agressive that it would defend a lead position by pulling maniac stunts - something that is btw prohibited in most motorsport leagues and isn't very sportsmanship - goes to the point of the reviewer, that it should be possible to be very competitive even if one isn't in the fastest car, but what I would assume to be a car with different strengths, like better cornering, quicker off the line etc. Your argument, wasn't very conclusive nor very accurate in the way you presented it when taking a low hit to the review you obviously disagree with.

There's nothing rude about pointing that out.

Without taking sides and commenting on the accuracy or validity of the IGN review - your counter-argument was simply badly chosen or just weak to beginn with.
 
I'm not quite sure what any of this argument really has to do with Forza anymore.

The game is great.

The white speckles are not fixed (at least completely) by the update, certain cars don't seem to show the issue, other cars do. It wouldn't be so bad, except the graphics are very good (highly underrated), and IMO it looks alot more next gen than any other racer on any platform. One little mar on what I think is a pretty stellar implementation.

The gameplay and feel of the cars is unmatched. If only the MS wheel didn't have hair triggered pedals with very weak springs.
 
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