rF2: Nürburgring Nordschleife Now Available

[Paul Jeffrey]

Teasing time now over and done - the epic Nurburgring Nordschleife for rFactor 2 is finally here.

Available now via the rFactor 2 Steam Store, the new laserscanned circuit comes complete in four different racing layouts, with Studio 397 planning to add further versions as free updates in the coming months.

Retailing for a very reasonable £10.66, the track is available to purchase now.

Happy lapping folks!

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[b)b]

My Porsche Cup adventures at VIR. Great car when you spend some time with it!

 

[Patrik Marek]

It's a Porsche Cup...it is also that beasty in other sims, to be fair... for example depending, on how much fuel you carry, it can make a huge difference, which brake bias setting is right, because of weight distribution(fueltank in the front, as far as i know). The more empty it is, the more you could try turning it rearwards to not lock up the front wheels...but it will get more nervous though. #justporschethings #idontlikehastags



Are you using lock to horizon in AC, rF2 and so on?
The elevation feels indeed more pronounced on this version of the circuit, but it feels like it is something about the cockpit camera.^^

Aremberg exit (3:07) in this version is the first time, i can get the exit totally intuitive by slightly touching the kerb on the left, but not running over it, i dunno how...

Nope, no lock to horizont, hate it

 

[CrimsonEminence]

Nope, no lock to horizont, hate it

maybe it gives a different impression of elevation. I don't know...

 

[Case_]

The elevation changes definitely feel/look a lot different from the other Nordschleife versions, despite all of them being lasercans.

 

[Deleted member 955978]

The elevation changes definitely feel/look a lot different from the other Nordschleife versions, despite all of them being lasercans.

No they don’t.
At first I thought so, too. But giving it some good laps in I think it’s the surrounding vegetation giving that impression.
Because driving it is intuitive as can be. No need for me to adjust lines, brake- or turn in points.
I just don’t need to lift at Quiddelbacher Höhe anymore. The jump is gone now.

 

[M D Gourley]

Care to share your FFB settings, I have a TS-PC. I generally, just modify the FFB to be 0.75 scale with zero smoothing. I use the Ferrari 599 alcantara wheel

Here are the settings from my last screenshot post...

 

[M D Gourley]

Driving Nordschleife at a much relaxed pace in the Puma using manual H-Pattern and Clutch of course...you know, so I can see the sights

 

[Patrik Marek]

at the end of the day, It doesn't really matter to me how accurate it is ( to a degree) cause there will always be some inaccuracy and even if it wan't, people re-pave race tracks quite a bit, and nobody will be re-scanning it again and again to keep it up to date

and as was proven with Zaandvort for AC, great track can be done without laser scanning as well ! ... what makes a "bad" track in my oppinon , is when things are not in right scale, the relationship of the armco, kerbs, track width, building size ..etc, that's usually what makes or breaks the visuals on a race circuit , and it's also one of the things that laserscanning is really great for, becasue you get all of this "for free" , even if elevation might be bit off here or there due to misalignment of the scans

Granturismo has been doing amazing tracks for years, and not every was laserscanned, they would often use GPS or the engineering survey type of data

 

[Miguel Batista]

Sorry to hear you're having this problem. I’m running a similar rig to yours (i7 8700K OCd to 4.9) and I'm getting phenomenal VR performance. Almost all the graphic settings are set to the max including post processing, I’m using a Valve Index set to 80 so I can super sample to 1.2. Very stable. Let me know if I can help. Happy to share my settings.

@wajdi what temps are you running? Also, what driver version are you using. I have been getting persistent microstutter with latest drivers though your problem sounds different. Check temps. If they are fine, use DDU to uninstall drivers and install them fresh. If that doesn't solve the problem, cup might be the culprit and you need to stress test it and compare results. Try the cpuz built in benchmark as you can compare it to a reference guy of the same model. Hope this helps.

 

[Case_]

No they don’t.

Well I guess you know better than me how they look/feel to me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[johnnymat]

Great looking track! I bought it to support Studio 397, but I'm not sure I'll try to race on it. I'm one of those who is known as a "slow learner". I'm afraid my head would explode if I tried to learn the track! Also, don't forget to get the VLN pack out of the Steam Workshop.

 

[Miguel Batista]

when you scan ( with static scan at least), you get a "sphere" of points, as the points get further away, you get less accuracy. Some scanners are really accurate to 60m, others 180m, etc. , and then you have to scan a additional positions, so cover gaps/holes
in the process, you have to align the spheres to each other, and this is where you could make a mistake , which would then create a noticeable difference in the scans,

I have no experience with the scanner on car, therefore I have no idea if there is no alignmnet needed, if it's more or less acurate

I suppose people who drove there could tell you

but I do find it interesting that AC version looks similar to Gran Turismo, and Pcars, while he RF2 looks different ( height in certain sections)

Well, ground scanners like aerial scanners have GPS antennas so the position of the "cameras" is known so the alignment of the spheres is not such a big problem (in fact, most scanners will include a strip map mode Where the final dataset you get in LAS or txt format will be a map already aligned and so forth). Where you gain a lot of FPSs and differences is in the mesh you generate using the point cloud data. That makes a huge difference and can yield different results. When I used LiDA r data I ended up making my own simple rectangular mesh as it was enough for what I needed and it took way less time to process than a Delaney triangulation. It was smoother too so only details that were bigger than a certain size were visible. I imagine for SIM racing the detail on the mesh translates into number of physical calculations the computer has to do so if you have sub mm detail present, your CPU AND GPU would likely take a couple of hours to process all of this in real time. If you use lookup tables however (big fan!) Then detail is not as important as you are just going through indexes in a matrix where all calculations were predone.

Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh yes, laser scan. So, yeah, mesh is where it is at. You can also generate dynamic meshes that adapt to the level of detail needed. For instance I can imagine such a mesh being useful here as the Nordschleife will require a lot more detail for a proper rendition than the nurburgring gp track which means you can get away with using like a Gaussian noise as the underlying mesh for most of the go track giving you "road vibration" and only using detailed mesh maps on the parts that really matter whereas the Nords' level of features would probably make this strategy not so good as you would be losing a lot of detail from the track like this.

As for the difference in height, a simple increase in GPS resolution could provide a lot of that feeling. It might bot be that great of a difference but a couple of cm here and there can make the track feel a lot steeper.

 

[John-Eric Saxén]

A few cm tolerance in precision here and there would still make zero difference on perceived elevation change, it would only possibly impact the sensation from curbs and short bumps. The only way you would get an observable elevation difference would be if those cm faults were cumulative, where they would slowly build up to meters of difference at the bottom of a hill, which correct me if I'm wrong, I don't believe expensive scans would generate such errors.

I notice a huge difference in depth and elevation perception when I change FOV, so that alone could be the cause why different sims feel different.

 

[MPortnoy]

Granturismo has been doing amazing tracks for years, and not every was laserscanned, they would often use GPS or the engineering survey type of data

I'm still not sure what point you're trying to make. Talking about GT in a rF2 thread is like talking about Britney Spears in a Heavy Metal thread. You're probably the only one in this thread that plays GT.
You made the point you're talking about tracks and not physics but in the end a track is useless without a car so you can't separate one from the other. I don't think most rF2 users will care about how pretty GT tracks are tbh

 

[tr1v1um]

Well, ground scanners like aerial scanners have GPS antennas so the position of the "cameras" is known so the alignment of the spheres is not such a big problem (in fact, most scanners will include a strip map mode Where the final dataset you get in LAS or txt format will be a map already aligned and so forth). Where you gain a lot of FPSs and differences is in the mesh you generate using the point cloud data. That makes a huge difference and can yield different results. When I used LiDA r data I ended up making my own simple rectangular mesh as it was enough for what I needed and it took way less time to process than a Delaney triangulation. It was smoother too so only details that were bigger than a certain size were visible. I imagine for SIM racing the detail on the mesh translates into number of physical calculations the computer has to do so if you have sub mm detail present, your CPU AND GPU would likely take a couple of hours to process all of this in real time. If you use lookup tables however (big fan!) Then detail is not as important as you are just going through indexes in a matrix where all calculations were predone.

Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh yes, laser scan. So, yeah, mesh is where it is at. You can also generate dynamic meshes that adapt to the level of detail needed. For instance I can imagine such a mesh being useful here as the Nordschleife will require a lot more detail for a proper rendition than the nurburgring gp track which means you can get away with using like a Gaussian noise as the underlying mesh for most of the go track giving you "road vibration" and only using detailed mesh maps on the parts that really matter whereas the Nords' level of features would probably make this strategy not so good as you would be losing a lot of detail from the track like this.

As for the difference in height, a simple increase in GPS resolution could provide a lot of that feeling. It might bot be that great of a difference but a couple of cm here and there can make the track feel a lot steeper.

In addition to your post it might also be important to add that the accuracy of referencing can vary alot depending on wich GPS technology is used. For standard GPS we are talking an accuracy of five meters or more wich is actually huge in relation to the scanned object, even for a big track like nordschleife. With differential GPS it will be more accurate, but it still isn't mm accuracy. A crest being 10-20 cm higher or lower can have big impact on the full track geometry.

 

[Miguel Batista]

A few cm tolerance in precision here and there would still make zero difference on perceived elevation change, it would only possibly impact the sensation from curbs and short bumps. The only way you would get an observable elevation difference would be if those cm faults were cumulative, where they would slowly build up to meters of difference at the bottom of a hill, which correct me if I'm wrong, I don't believe expensive scans would generate such errors.

I notice a huge difference in depth and elevation perception when I change FOV, so that alone could be the cause why different sims feel different.

Hmmm depends

In addition to your post it might also be important to add that the accuracy of referencing can vary alot depending on wich GPS technology is used. For standard GPS we are talking an accuracy of five meters or more wich is actually huge in relation to the scanned object, even for a big track like nordschleife. With differential GPS it will be more accurate, but it still isn't mm accuracy. A crest being 10-20 cm higher or lower can have big impact on the full track geometry.

I assume they are using RTK. No reason not to. But in post processing with full corrections provided you can get it down to mm accuracy even (right ionosphere and atmosphere corrections). Could be that I was thinking wrongly in terms of what the cm like variations can perceive. More likely if the track side objects are arranged differently it can provide the feeling of difference...

 

[M D Gourley]

Purchased the Porsche GT3 Cup car to help further development in rF2...noticed a small number of plain looking Cup cars with what I would call...'Reiza liveries'...applied, plus the FFB feels very brutal much like the Reiza Puma I just drove a few moments ago and had to increase the 'FFB Smoothing' to '20' compared to the usual '6' I normally have with S397 GT3 cars and content...'Conspiracy Theory' ...have these Porsche GT3 Cup cars had input from Reiza...not a bad thing at all

 

[Dynamitry]

No they don’t.
At first I thought so, too. But giving it some good laps in I think it’s the surrounding vegetation giving that impression.

I think about the same, the vegetation is odd in many places, and makes it feel very claustrophobic at some places.

 

[mr Sw1tchblade]

Nürburgring gp far better in ACC. Nordschleife in r3e looks better for my taste (i like r3e color pallete).

 

[Patrik Marek]

I'm still not sure what point you're trying to make. Talking about GT in a rF2 thread is like talking about Britney Spears in a Heavy Metal thread. You're probably the only one in this thread that plays GT.
You made the point you're talking about tracks and not physics but in the end a track is useless without a car so you can't separate one from the other. I don't think most rF2 users will care about how pretty GT tracks are tbh

well if you re-read few of my posts, we were comparing the quality of the Nordschleife in RF2 to other one out there, and while some of you think it's superb and masterpiece, I beg to differ

if you try to make fun of my only to steer away from discussion because you can't really give me any reasonable counter argument, that's fine and we can stop it right there

I'm not saying that RF2 is bad and you all should go somewhere else ??? so what's the problem here?? I really don't understand

why is there so much elitism and hate in sim racing, and sim in general ( xplane vs p3d vs mfs ) have their deal of similar debates

sigh anyhow