***king cool brilliant !!!
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I've just been playing this update.
The Atlas RR track available to those on the TPP has seemingly taken some of the structural design aesthetics from WO Fusion's Temtesh bay - think of a track made by the same people who built the millennium stadium , and put them in a Sol 2 type of context, but this is racing around a structure.
It has the dreaded semi transparent track look of the FURY tracks, but ATM they are a slightly plain, untextured opaque Red, so the visual confusion you get with the Fury tracks is thankfully not a problem here...as yet.
The track seems very narrow compared to the others, much like Sol 2 in lot of places, there are two jumps. or track drop off's, both small, but there is a problem with one, and that's every time you go over it, it's like something has grabbed the back of your craft and slowed it right down....think of a plane landing on a aircraft carrier.
When I first fired up this track I opted for TT using F3000 craft.... what happened next was it loaded me into what I could only describe as being at around zone 70 speed, and the track was wavering up and down like a rubber band...unplayable...thankfully after going back to the menu and restarting things ran normally.
The other new track for those on the TPP is FURY RR, this is set in a earthquake ravaged city, and there are broken overpasses to race over.
There is one point where you run over about 5-6 broken sections of track in quick succession, you can get over most of them without being impeded, but the last couple can slow you down, by how much varies, as I haven't as yet found a rhyme or reason to it, this portion of track also effects the A.I., as I noticed it broke up the field, that up to that point were in a procession.
Not a very challenging track except for one chicane, and I think my problems with that is down to the sole racing POV which I would never use normally.
Niagara looks good, and the track is surprisingly wide, it's the widest track I've seen in a AG racer.
One problem with it is ATM is that unfortunately I found it a boring track to race on, even though it is long [think the long tracks on WO Fusion ]
I honest to God got a flash back to N64 days play F-Zero X on my first lap of this track.
Maybe R8 are intending to have a few easy tracks in the game to break people in, sort of like a Anulpha Pass in WO HD, and Niagara is FF similar type of track.
If that is so, then Niagara has certainly filled that design brief.
Blackwiggle there's a cockpit view now
Thanks, I just found it and tried it .... I suppose it's a start, but not what I wanted to see or race with.
As I mentioned in my other post, you lose peripheral vision with this sort of view.
One thing though, the up until now relatively unresponsive craft handling is absolutely twitchy in cockpit POV.
Stuff it, I got the next two days off, I'm going to take the desk top FF is on into my lounge, and plug it into my TV and play it in this new race mode and 3D
Well I've just been playing this on a much larger screen and in cockpit mode, and for the most part it's quite a bit more of a enjoyable racing experience.
I can actually steer these craft at last, in cockpit mode they feel sort of similar to HD's Assagai, a vast difference to before in the previous default racing view, at least for me. :nod
I put any handling problems down to not currently being able to alter the air brake sensitivity as you could in HD, and for me having to use a twitchy Xbox stick to steer, rather than my preferred PS D-pad.
Once you get into a rhythm with Niagara and start hitting all the speed pads, the sense of speed [first time this has been felt so far with FF ] is apparent, so it doesn't seem as boring as it did initially.
I imagine once you have quite a few racing together on this track things are going to get pretty hectic .... In a Moa Therma sort of way.
Two major things still need fixing, one more urgently than the other.
The flash at the crafts nose when hitting a speed pad, and the accompanying speed blur effect is really really off putting, this needs to be able to be turned off, it's like driving with various types of lens flare always obscuring your vision in some manner, it was bad enough in the previous default view, but it's F%#king awful in cockpit view, it now washes out all the colour in the game as well, doing TT on NY day, was like driving through a fog, and that's no exaggeration.
No point building a racing game if people can see where the hell they are going.
By the way, if R8 are reading this, I calibrate my PC monitors with a Xrite i1display pro, and use the same meter with Chromapure Pro to calibrate my TV's and PJ, so I know it's not a fault of my equipment, and me imagining things.
The other problem is the crash dynamics with the side barriers, they are not as bad as the first WO where you just suddenly jolted to a halt, but they seem only marginally better.
I know R8 could tweak this pretty easily, to what extent?
Do people want the same sort of dynamics as 2097, or the slight speed up effect of WO3 if you hit at a certain angle?
Anyway, plenty more laps to do.
Oh, buy the way, playing this game in 3D is a waste of time, don't bother.
The nose/speed pad Flare/blur issue screws the visuals that bad it's totally pointless ....I tried.....and they intent to make a VR version.
Attachment 9937
Dubious possums
I posted at the R8 forums about this.
In the cockpit preview thread...... as much as I find it a improvement, it's ultimately not what we old wipeout racers were wanting, as you could gather now you have viewed the video above and compared it against what R8 gave us..... well I hope you watched the video.
As much as I still find this view issue a frustration, it is a just tiny compared to the much bigger and constant frustration since day one of the decision to have speed blur and nose flare when running over speed pads.
These effects just ruin what could be a great game, you might as well release it at 480i because that's what it looks like when you are constantly running over speed pads....ArggHH! That's what the racers are supposed to do to get the fastest time.
It's a game killer, get rid of it ASAP ....it's not that this hasn't been mentioned before....why it's still in the game is beyond belief ....You guys at R8 do actually TRY and play this game don't you?
The ship's behaviour still feels way too rigid and stuck at a constant height from the track's surface.
This all needs to be way bouncier and floatier.
Also, love the environment of Niagara Falls, but damn does the track seem like a highway, just a bit dull. Straights, straights, straights, oh, a corner, OK I'll turn then, straights, straights, straights.
Moa Therma is like that as well for the most part, but it's a good track for online play.
I agree Niagara can seem dull, and that was my first impression, but I see potential there, maybe if they put a few inclines and declines in those straight bits it wouldn't seem as boring.....what's probably got people thinking it's boring over everything else is the long banked bends, one automatically thinks NASCAR Yawn!
As much as I have a lot of frustration with this game as it stands ATM, I keep giving myself a reality check by reminding myself, this is NOT Wipeout, it's Formula Fusion, it's a futuristic take on what formula one might be like if it were AG based, and with weapons.
FF doesn't have BR's thankfully, so there is no need for the small undulations and bumps in the tracks that gave you air to do BR's....maybe the lack of these is why we are thinking the tracks ATM are unremarkable, I think we should wait and see what they play like in Multiplayer first, that should give us a better perspective on things.
Same thing goes for the ride height and 'Floatiness', since the tracks are flat, you don't need that much travel....besides, if you remember the first concept video R8 made, it showed that the plans for the game was to open up options to adjust/ upgrade your craft as you progressed through the game, so obviously Handling would be in amongst those options, if this is still the plan, then they don't need to do anything to the craft ATM, as it will be available for you to do yourself later.
Back on the tracks topic, just ask yourself, would you play a F1 game if the tracks had lots of dips and bumps on them? Your cars handling would be terrible.
I think they have plans for this game having at least one speed class that's a lot faster than Phantom speed in HD.
When I first fired up one of the RR tracks I got accidentally thrust into a speed class that doesn't officially exist, it was a glitch, but I didn't get any error message and the game kept running, so nothing apart from a written explanation of the event for R8, rather than a TPP error report to send them.