scottishwildcat

Well, they just bought SMS. It remains to be seen what good or ill will come from that.

It should be dialled in for the majority of people who buy it, and that's not wheel users I'm afraid.

I quite enjoyed it, to be honest. I spend most of my time in any year's game doing quick races anyway, so I wasn't bothered about the lack of game modes.

3D Grand Prix on the ZX81. Unplayably difficult.

Codemasters say that all reasonable suggestions posted here reach the developers, and I've no reason to doubt that. I know when I've worked on projects with a large community, even when they've had a community manager, the developers still used to read the forums themselves as much as possible (provided the conversations were reasonable and not just toxic). I agree that Codemasters have never really found a good structured way for us to report bugs and suggest improvements, however. Web forums just aren't designed for doing that.

We're not going to get any significant graphical improvements unless/until they re-write the EGO engine again, which I doubt we'll see happening before the next gen consoles are released.

They've been running a televised esports series with the same sorts of issues for 3 years, so I doubt yesterday's events will change much. The reality is, most casual viewers (e.g. my father-in-law, who'd never watched a video game stream in his life before yesterday) won't even have noticed half the things that we did. They'd just have seen some spectacular crashes on lap 1 and some decent battles after that, i.e. some reasonable entertainment. The only things he thought were "wrong" was a) no captions to say which driver we were looking at, and b) no replays. (And all the waffle at the beginning, which was presumably exacerbated by the reduction to a 25% race.)

I was going to, until I realised it also included a bunch of the usual YouTube clowns rather than just actual racing drivers.

Hi Barry!

There is, it's just not made by Codemasters (and it's mobile-only): https://www.hutchgames.com/f1-manager/ There's also Sega's effort that's been around a bit longer, which isn't mobile-only but has no official licensing: https://store.steampowered.com/app/415200/Motorsport_Manager/

They literally record actual F1 engines every year. That's about as real as it gets. (Not that modern F1 cars sound very exciting anyway.)

Ah, it's been a while since we've had a good "this idea sounds simple, so it must be easy to fix" post 🙂

F1 Race Stars is also an officially licensed F1 game.

Much as I'd love to see them, cranes and flatbeds would be a nightmare to code... or at least, ones that didn't just appear and vanish like the cars do. They'd have to drive themselves from somewhere and position themselves exactly right, all without colliding with any other track buildings or track furniture. Then lift the car and take it away somewhere sensible, all without hitting anything again. Given how much trouble they've had implementing a safety car that only has to drive from the pit lane to the track and back now and again, I hate to think how wrong they could get this 😉

Paradox also have about 100 employees, and having worked at many big and small companies in my time, it's a lot easier to do the sort of things that Paradox do when you're a small company and everyone literally knows everyone else.