Racer - Ruud van Gaal - An appreciation :)

Hi all.

I've been meaning to post this ages ago, but its never to late.

I tried a recent Racer beta and was blown away by how much it had
evolved since I last checked it out. AI cars, network play, many tracks
& cars, etc.

After the crappy arcade racers that have been on offer lately, it was
nice to find a game which at least attempts to model realistic
handling. it may not be perfect yet, but its the work of a dedicated
author and is getting better IMO.

I raced the skyline gtr around donington for a while this evening and
its so much improved. I've watched scirocco and netkar evolving as
well and I hope these authors maintain their efforts. They are much
appreciated. Its especially satisfying to note that they at least
respond to emails and one gets the sense that they are listening to the
comments on RAS and other forums.

Thanks also to the community for developing addon cars and tracks to
keep it alive between releases.

Lastly, let me mention that the reason i checked racer out again was
after seeing a bunch of students playing racer on 3 networked pc's
running Novell's linux desktop with logitech wheels and pedals. they
had a ball and didn't seem to realise that they were running under
Linux instead of Windows. These machines were on display at a recent
Linuxworld/ Brainshare conference in Johannesburg, South Africa and the
amount of interested people queuing up to play racer was pretty cool.

thanks again guys.
istoff

istoff wrote:
> Hi all.
>
> I've been meaning to post this ages ago, but its never to late.
>
> I tried a recent Racer beta and was blown away by how much it had
> evolved since I last checked it out. AI cars, network play, many tracks
> & cars, etc.
>
> After the crappy arcade racers that have been on offer lately, it was
> nice to find a game which at least attempts to model realistic
> handling. it may not be perfect yet, but its the work of a dedicated
> author and is getting better IMO.
>
> I raced the skyline gtr around donington for a while this evening and
> its so much improved. I've watched scirocco and netkar evolving as
> well and I hope these authors maintain their efforts. They are much
> appreciated. Its especially satisfying to note that they at least
> respond to emails and one gets the sense that they are listening to the
> comments on RAS and other forums.
>
> Thanks also to the community for developing addon cars and tracks to
> keep it alive between releases.
>
> Lastly, let me mention that the reason i checked racer out again was
> after seeing a bunch of students playing racer on 3 networked pc's
> running Novell's linux desktop with logitech wheels and pedals. they
> had a ball and didn't seem to realise that they were running under
> Linux instead of Windows. These machines were on display at a recent
> Linuxworld/ Brainshare conference in Johannesburg, South Africa and the
> amount of interested people queuing up to play racer was pretty cool.
>
> thanks again guys.
> istoff
>

RACER is so good, that on some tracks I cant believe that it is free.
The ai needs to be worked on, though. You have to manually record a lap,
but maybe it will automatically create ai in the future.

On Tue, 31 May 2005 10:43:12 +0200, Uwe Schürkamp
> wrote:

>On Mon, 30 May 2005 18:55:37 -0400, Joe F wrote:
>>
>> RACER is so good, that on some tracks I cant believe that it is free.

Thanks.

>> The ai needs to be worked on, though. You have to manually record a lap,
>> but maybe it will automatically create ai in the future.

It might; probably will do some kind of neural network steering. Seems
easier to make 'm learn. But that's quite a bit of work.

>I've been out of the loop with Racer for a while, but your posts have
>convinced me it's time to look at it again. Is the source still
>available for those newer versions, too?

I'm afraid not, v0.5.0 is the latest. However, a Linux version
(relatively recent) is available and we're working to get the Mac
version back working.

(PS I hardly ever get back to RAS again, just noticed this one)

Cheers,
Ruud