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#4568174 - 05/12/21 01:43 PM Re: F1 2020 (the sim) [Re: DBond]  
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So since that post last week I've been playing more. I'm in a standard driver career, fifth season. I signed with Alpha Tauri first, then switched to Red Bull for two seasons, then to Ferrari for season four. At the end of season four I had managed to resurrect the fallen giant. We didn't win any silverware, finishing third, but were able to improve the car enough to have it equal to Red Bull on the performance charts by season's end. With regulation changes announced to chassis and durability departments, I was able to save much of it by stockpiling points in case the reg changes were announced. The announcement came with just three races to go, but I had 7,000 points saved, and this would go a long way toward making Fez the class of the division when season five started.

Our technical development was confirmed when I won the final two races of season four, at Interlagos and Abu Dhabi. I missed the title by about 20 points, but was well positioned going in to the new season. Then contract renewal came up. My role and results in propelling sorry-ass Ferrari up the table would surely go rewarded. Not being the greedy sort I chose the middle contract option, and expected to re-sign. But it was rejected! And just like that I was booted from the team I had saved. I was stunned, as my plans for next season were dashed. Ungrateful bastages, the lot of them!

So what to do? In the end I decided to come full circle and re-signed with Alpha Tauri, a team well off the level of the top two. Another climb up the table is in order and my chance for another title, having won two at Red Bull, is very low. Formula One is a cutthroat business smile


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#4571955 - 06/16/21 04:52 PM Re: F1 2020 (the sim) [Re: DBond]  
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Just a post to put a bookend on my F1 2020 career. Release of F1 2021 is slated for one month from today. Can't wait. As is obvious from my posts above, I rate this sim highly. I've had an absolute blast with it. As detailed I did a number of careers, from F2 to My Team to standard driver career. I just finished my fifth season in my current standard career, winning both the driver's and constructor's titles with Alpha Tauri of all teams smile

That's 80 races (5 seasons x 16 races) and the stats say that's about 12,000 miles run. Love this stuff. I won the driver's title three times, which is a little too much frankly, but only managed one constructor's. At least one title can be chalked up to Max blowing up with a couple to go too often haha, but manage it I did and with Albon as my teammate! Talk about hard work lol.

There's very little I can cite as negatives here. The main one for me is the fact that the AI cars are too much like AI cars. I pray that some sort of variance and unpredictability will be baked in to 2021. Formula One needs chaos, and there is precious little of it here. Can you imagine a five season career without a full course yellow or any type of safety car? Well, I just lived through it. This really needs to change. The regulation changes cause uneven response from the teams, which does have the nice effect of causing some teams to rise and some to fall. Mercedes finished fifth in the constructor's for example in that last season. But I think this needs fine tuning.

Maybe I can cite things like no displayed lap record and that sort of touch as well. But overall it is a fantastic racing experience for me. I find it thrilling. The weather system, the engineer voice comms, the tight racing and competent AI make for a good sim and I am very much looking forward to the next one. New teams and drivers, liveries. But the main attraction is tracks. Not sure they will all be included with release, and I desperately want Codemasters to start giving us more tracks, even those not on the current schedule so that I can mix it up. A library of all the tracks from multiple years so that I can switch up my schedule as the seasons roll by.

Release slated for July 16

F1 2021 @ Steam


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#4571956 - 06/16/21 04:57 PM Re: F1 2020 (the sim) [Re: DBond]  
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Originally Posted by DBond
The main one for me is the fact that the AI cars are too much like AI cars. I pray that some sort of variance and unpredictability will be baked in to 2021. Formula One needs chaos, and there is precious little of it here.



One of the many things that made "Grand Prix Legends" such an awesome and timeless sim is the AI. On many occasions I would see an AI car make a mistake and spin out or crash into another AI car. These AI cars definitely did not "drive on rails" like so many other racing sims I've played.


“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
#4571962 - 06/16/21 05:45 PM Re: F1 2020 (the sim) [Re: DBond]  
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In some ways still, GPL is the gold standard. thumbsup

It's an interesting thing, AI. The phrase "good AI" has a lot of leeway. One of the best I've ever seen is in the old sim MiG Alley.

When many people say a sim has good AI, I think they usually mean that the AI is good at whatever the sim is. Racing, fighter planes, chess, doesn't matter. It performs the task well and efficiently, whether it is running around a track or dogfighting against a competent human. But I want more. A good AI isn't only good, but bad. What I mean is that a really good AI mimics in some way the unpredictability and non-infallibility of a human. It simulates mistakes.

A racing sim needs this. A corner run too wide, a spin, a crash in to the armco when least expected. You see it in virtually every real Formula One race, aside from, amazingly, this year's Monaco Grand Prix. eek

Codemaster's version of F1 is too sterile in this regard and it really stands out to me. I don't want AI cars to crash to improve my chances, but to both make it more realistic as I see it and to introduce that sort of unpredictability and chaos on race strategy. A sudden safety car is potentially race changing. Do you come in? Stay out? Will the car right behind you do the opposite of you? Will it add a stop or eliminate a scheduled one? Do you now try and run to the end on hards when you otherwise would have come in 10 laps from now to take on mediums?

On a more personal level, as a human, last time I looked, I make mistakes. Get sideways on exit and you will always lose time to the infallible AI with no chance it will be returned at some point in kind. What this means is that every mistake the player makes is punished, and encourages AI pace settings that allow some rubber banding, a slight pace advantage that allows the player to recover his time lost through his mistakes. I try not to do this, and set the AI to a pace competitive with my own. To the point, in those 80 races I set fast lap 20 times and sat on pole 18. But some chaos is needed and will make this sim series better, in my view anyway.

I mentioned MiG Alley and it's really old now and not sure how many still around played this sim. But the AI was so convincing in appearing to be human. AI skill range was visible, seriously. You could tell how skilled the AI was by the way his jet was flown. As the most striking example, the lowest level AI could be scared in to losing control. A simple burst of tracer might cause him to punch out even if not hit with any gunfire. Pilot induced oscillation was a thing. You could get the AI to lose control of his jet, begin fishtailing uncontrollably until he spun and crashed. It really was great, and that was 22 years ago.


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#4575660 - 07/28/21 12:36 PM Re: F1 2020 (the sim) [Re: DBond]  
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F1 2021 is out, and reviews and player comments are good once again.

F1 2021 on Steam

I have not picked it up yet. I definitely will, but frankly I really want Imola and that track didn't ship, to be added later. I may wait until it does.

Codemasters have kept last year's modes, but also added Braking Point, which is a narrative-driven mode that puts the player in to a rivalry and has him deal with various situational challenges. I'm not too interested in that, although I'm sure I'll give it a go at some point. They have also added a two-player career mode which sounds awesome. Another change is they have reworked the practice sessions, with a major change to programmes, but I have few details.

It would have been difficult to mess up what was such a fantastic version in 2020. It''s a really good sim and Codemasters needs to just keep on keeping on. Personally, I'd like to see a growing track library, rather than limit us to each season's schedule, but perhaps there are contractual limitations with F1. Still it would be great to create my career seasons with an evolving list of tracks to keep it fresh as the seasons roll by.


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#4575661 - 07/28/21 12:40 PM Re: F1 2020 (the sim) [Re: DBond]  
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I will eventually buy F1 2021 but I'm in no rush. I still have lots to do with 2020.

Last edited by PanzerMeyer; 07/28/21 12:41 PM.

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
#4575665 - 07/28/21 12:45 PM Re: F1 2020 (the sim) [Re: DBond]  
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I think I'm at the end. I dropped 300+ hours in to 2020 and did a little of everything -- F2, My Team and driver career. In all about 10 full seasons worth of racing. I'm ready for some new tracks and liveries, an updated driver lineup and team names. I wonder if sprint qualifying is in the new game?

My Team is great, but needs some tweaking in terms of technical progression in my view. Driver career is where I had the most fun, signing for Alpha Tauri, moving to Red Bull, then to Ferrari and then back to Alpha Tauri. That was a fun career.


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#4575666 - 07/28/21 12:48 PM Re: F1 2020 (the sim) [Re: DBond]  
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Originally Posted by DBond
I dropped 300+ hours in to 2020 and did a little of everything --.




Heh, i just checked Steam and I currently have 58 hours in it so you blew me away in that game. biggrin


“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
#4575808 - 07/29/21 12:25 PM Re: F1 2020 (the sim) [Re: DBond]  
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I checked too and it is actually 419.9. Got my money's worth. Very nearly bought the new sim last night but didn't pull the trigger. Just a matter of time and then lights out. I want the new tracks, especially Imola, but who knows when that will be so I'll probably get it despite this.

Turns out that sprint qualifying is not in F1 2021. Too bad, that.


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#4575954 - 07/30/21 12:33 PM Re: F1 2020 (the sim) [Re: DBond]  
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I failed to resist and bought F1 2021. Installed it, and did some hotlapping at Austria to get everything configured. Turned a solid 1:05.4 which puts me about 19,000th of the laps others have done in just two weeks! Haha.

Then straight to career, choosing standard driver career, and signing for Alpine, the best sounding car on the grid, alongside Fernado. Performance hierarchy at the start is a snap shot of last year's finish, not this year's order. So Alpine are the 6th best chassis at the outset, with Aston Martin reflecting Racing Point's strong season, but which they have not carried over in to this season. Ferrari are worse than reality, but it is a fair reflection of last year's finishing order.

The sim is much the same as 2020, and of course is missing three tracks, well four actually. But Imola, Jeddah and Portimao did not ship with the release and are intended to be released down the line as free DLC. I like having the new driver lineup and liveries along with the team name changes. Up to date. Just need the tracks now. The fourth missing track is Turkey, which will not be made. Turkey replaces Canada, which is cancelled due to coronavirus restrictions, but Codemasters has no plans to include it.

The menus and UI got an overhaul and everything is a little more streamlined. Race weekends seem to go a little faster, with load times between sessions seemingly a little zippier. Practice also got an overhaul, but under the hood is still mostly the same. Practice programmes are still there, all the same ones as before. But instead of having all six to run each race weekend, three are randomly chosen. They've added an ability to automate it for those who don't want to go through these paces. I love the whole thing myself, so I choose the 'manual' option, but it's a nice change for those who just want to get on with it. And if you hit the bonuses from the practice programmes you get a boost to one of the dev departments.

They've also added the Braking Point mode, which is a narrative with situational challenges to complete, similar to Madden's Longshot. My Team makes a return and I'll be giving that a go to see if they've tweaked it.

After just a couple hours, and a 50% Bahrain race in the books, my impressions are very favorable. It's like F1 2020, only a little better smile


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#4575955 - 07/30/21 12:40 PM Re: F1 2020 (the sim) [Re: DBond]  
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Originally Posted by DBond
I failed to resist and bought F1 2021. Installed it, and did some hotlapping at Austria to get everything configured. Turned a solid 1:05.4 which puts me about 19,000th of the laps others have done in just two weeks! Haha.




I take those public rankings with a grain of salt because there is some very obvious cheating/hacking going on. I remember recently looking at the hot lap public rank times in F1 2020 for some of the tracks and the #1 ranked player for some of those tracks had an impossible lap time. By "impossible" I mean a lap time that was several seconds faster than the real world lap record.


“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
#4575959 - 07/30/21 12:46 PM Re: F1 2020/21 (the sim) [Re: DBond]  
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Yeah, no doubt about that. We could probably cull the top 10% and delete them as invalid, but Codemasters doesn't seem to care about that. I don't put much stock in it either, especially as I don't run public, but it's still a decent gauge and these laps become your ghost car when hotlapping.

I mentioned it earlier, and will again, that they have also added a two-player career mode. Split screen returns too.

Performance is fantastic. It defaulted to Ultra High for me and runs like glass. Looks great, runs great. Presentation is nice, about the same as 2020.


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#4575972 - 07/30/21 02:31 PM Re: F1 2020/21 (the sim) [Re: DBond]  
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One other thing I forgot to mention. If you've read through this thread you'll know that my main gripe with F1 2020 was how much like AI the AI is. No chaos, few mistakes from the AI. They drive too well. Few crashes, spins or collisions. I remarked that I had just finished five seasons of my last career with zero safety cars or full course yellows. That needs to change.

In reading up on the new version in advance of getting it I saw a number of comments that this has changed. That there are spins now in the AI, with one person noting how Hamilton spun twice on the same corner on consecutive laps. That may be a bit over the top, but if this is true, that the AI can make 'mistakes' and have a bit of variability to their laps then the sim will be immensely improved.

I've run one race event so far, the season opener in Bahrain. There is a new race length available now, and to get 50% it is now called 'long'. There's also a quick 5 laps, short 25% and full 100%. I run the long option. In the race, I qualified 7th, and did a two-stopper, starting on softs, pitting for mediums on lap 7, then again with 8 to go for another set of softs. The leaders also were on a two-stop, but most went soft-soft-medium. The upshot is that when they came in for their second stop I was still on mediums and that allowed me to lead the Grand Prix.

Hamilton came out and got by a couple cars and, with both a faster car and fresher tires, quickly caught me as we approached turn 10, the tightest on the track, a lefthander. No sense in defending too hard, so I got off the line to the left as we braked to negotiate the turn. He charged up the outside on the right to get by but got his right hand wheels on the kerb, which upset his balance and he ran wide on to the apron, as I kept on. He lost probably 6 or 8 seconds as he recovered on to the track.

A minor thing, but something I had not seen in a couple hundred races in F1 2020. It looked like a natural mistake! I didn't notice any other stuff like this during the race, and only one retirement, Yuki for mechanical reasons. But if this is indeed a thing now that will make F1 2021 a big improvement in my view. Looking forward to seeing more of this stuff.


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#4575973 - 07/30/21 02:36 PM Re: F1 2020/21 (the sim) [Re: DBond]  
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One of the MANY things that made Grand Prix Legends a classic of the game genre is that the AI drivers would make mistakes just like real-world drivers do. And of course even the top tier drivers in the real world like Hamilton, Clark, Schumacher, Gordon, Andretti, Earnhardt, etc. would make mistakes from time to time.

Last edited by PanzerMeyer; 07/30/21 02:36 PM.

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
#4576011 - 07/30/21 07:38 PM Re: F1 2020/21 (the sim) [Re: DBond]  
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I drove the wheels off GPL back in the day, and I just don't remember that. Partly it's due to probably 90% of my track time was spent in online racing or hotlapping. I moved on from AI races pretty quickly, even though they were a lot of fun. But once I found a crowd to run with I focused on league racing. And those guys were all over the place biggrin

Except Frank (in case he reads this)

The guys I raced with nicknamed me The Robot, due to my low lap deviation. yeah, those were the days. I even had that as my avatar in the Frugalsworld days, which is where I ran the league. Need a time machine frankly. I'd love to experience that all over again.


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#4576080 - 07/31/21 12:23 PM Re: F1 2020/21 (the sim) [Re: DBond]  
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I ran the next two races in my first season last night, at Spain and Canada.

I'm pretty poor in Spain, and I suspect it's just one of those tracks where the AI runs relatively faster for any given setting. I have them cranked up a bit so that I run in the midfield with my midfield car. And at Spain I just can't quite match them. Qualified 17th and crossed the line 13th. Canada's not much better really, qualified 13th and finished 11th, just out of the points in a race that went from sunny and dry to pouring rain by the end. Teammate Alonso has yet to score.

In Spain I saw a AI spin! Perez was running third and just lost it under braking in to turn 15, spun and stopped along the side of the track, bringing out a safety car, which fouled my race, but that's another story. I came across it seconds later and just missed him as he tried to rejoin. I only saw what happened by watching the replay after the race. But unforced errors like this are great to see. It's the one thing I think the sim needed most and I'm happy to see some evidence of it being there.

And things are definitely faster through the event sessions, the load times after the workstation screen are much faster now.


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#4576285 - 08/02/21 11:31 AM Re: F1 2020 (the sim) [Re: DBond]  
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A few shots. I turned everything from ultra-high to high. It ran like glass, but my video card was running a little hot so I knocked it all down a notch.

A few shots from yesterday's action

The Alpine cockpit


[Linked Image]


The field runs the first lap in the rain

[Linked Image]


I started My Team and this is the #21 Black River Racing car, ahead of rival Raikkonen

[Linked Image]


Here I try to fight off Max Verstappen at Paul Ricard


[Linked Image]

Attached Files Alpinepit.jpgBRR.jpgrain.jpgsidebyside.jpg

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#4576286 - 08/02/21 11:34 AM Re: F1 2020 (the sim) [Re: DBond]  
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Do the graphics in 2021 look noticeably better than 2020?


“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
#4576289 - 08/02/21 12:09 PM Re: F1 2020 (the sim) [Re: DBond]  
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No, I can't say the graphics are any better. About the same I reckon. But it looks fantastic and more importantly, runs beautifully.


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#4576290 - 08/02/21 12:16 PM Re: F1 2020 (the sim) [Re: DBond]  
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Originally Posted by DBond
No, I can't say the graphics are any better. About the same I reckon. But it looks fantastic and more importantly, runs beautifully.



Ok thanks. I'll be buying it eventually this year but I'm in no rush I'm still playing 2020.


“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
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