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Maybe this is the place for this, maybe not. regardless i am looking for anyone who has information on which video games if any have the following tracks;
Infineon
Thunderhill
Buttonwillow
That is all i am interested in at the moment, but maybe this thread can be a place to note where to find video game versions of our favorite tracks…
Try rfactor. I found they had all the midwest tracks but one. I can’t be bothered to find if those tracks are on there. rfactor2 is out now but I don’t have it. The tracks are basically made by racers. It’s a pain to try and copy and paste files into the program but there is no other program where I could get those tracks.
Which Midwest tracks have you added to rfactor? I’m mostly interested in Putnam, ACC, G-man, Summit, Road-America, and Mid-Ohio. How good are the rfactor racer add-ons? To do a really good job on tracks takes a boatload of money,time, and expensive equipment plus cooperation of the track owner. I’m sure the club racing community has to take a different approach.
Thunderhill is in there. Not sure about other 2. All three variations of autobahn are on there. Putnam park, Road America, and another 75 North American road courses are on there. Once I got spec miatas and autobahn installed and working I did a 142 when I was able to keep it on the track.
Autobahn track map was made with the cooperation of the owners while it was in the final stages of construction. As a result the track is accurate but the scenery isn’t. The must have cut down a lot of trees since 2004.
http://www.rfactorcentral.com/list.cfm?cat=Tracks&type=Permanent%20Circuits
Do you feel like driving the ACC sim on rfactor helped your times there when you finally got to drive it in the flesh?
I think the sims help you learn a new track better than just watching videos but if you’ve been there before it’s pretty much just for fun.
Hi Guys,
Maybe I can shed some light on this topic about racing games and the race tracks they contain. And in particular, simulated versions of Infineon (Sonoma Raceway), Thunderhill and Buttonwillow.
First of all, only iRacing contains a native version of Infineon (none of the others) but you have to purchase iRacing base game and then buy tracks individually. We don’t use it here at our sim training center at Infineon (many reasons too numersous to list here).
rFactor is also a “base racing game” that you must install tracks (and various cars) into it and that can be tedious if you are not computer-savvy. But it isn’t that hard. The problem with rFactor Racing Game is the tracks are not built by 3D gaming professionals. They are built by “users” who have variable skills (some are real racers but not many). In general, rFactor tracks are somewhat comic-book (some worse than others) and have in-accuracies in track configuration (turn radius, camber, placement of curbing, etc.). They are fun to drive of course, and perhaps can be used to learn at a superficial level of where the track goes left/right/straight, but that is about it. rFactor does have Infineon, Thunderhill and Buttonwillow available for download install but on a scale of 1-10 (10 best) I would give them a #5 or less racing (in other words, pretty comic book stuff).
GTR2 is another native racing game that is a little more serious than rFactor and has tracks also available for download and install. Generally speaking, tracks in rFactor have also been converted to users to run in GTR2 - but they are still the same level of comic-book ratings.
GTR2, iRacing and rFactor take a pretty stout computer system even by today’s standards and of course if you use cheap store-bought controls (wheels/pedals) you are pretty much wasting time for anything other than just have fun playing a racing game on your computer.
And Rob Rhodes is correct about the cost of building simulated racing tracks being extremely costly in both money and man-hours. iRacing for example uses a laser imaging device which produces a point-cloud of the racing surface and objects. And that takes days to capture the data and then hundreds of man-hours to add textures and process it for use in a racing game. Based on known averages and my experience with scope-of-work for building simulated tracks (I’ve been building simulated tracks myself as a “user” since 1998) I would guess an iRacing individual track would cost between $50K to $75K to get it in-game. I built a from-scratch version of Infineon for our training simulator and have about 1600 man hours in the project. Even at a cheap labor rate for 3D modeling and textures of $75/hour…that’s about $120K in costs!
Simulated racing tracks are not cheap to acquire!
I could write many pages on this topic but hope that helps put things in perspective for you guys who asked about tracks in racing games.
Best,
Tom Pabst