Team Meeting - Dnote's Notes 01/10/15

[hobbsy777 0]

nobbymilo said:

Are the various bugs in qualifying (AI speed, prime tyres in Q2) going to be fixed?

I am beginning to wonder that myself.

[Chromatic 127]

@Dnote Thank you for an answer on the Safety Car. That aside their needs to be public lobbies lists for sprint mode and Custom GP in 2016.

If you could make a game like F1 2012 with the physics of F1 2015 with a formation lap and a twenty two car multiplayer which connection bars on the right hand side just like 2014 which is really needed I'd be happy with that at least.

On a side note off topic New Consumers Rights are putting gamers in the driving seat so please don't  feck it up again

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-10-01-new-consumer-rights-act-puts-gamers-in-the-driving-seat

[greenmind73 0]

Every time I get to Q1 in my season Maldonado gets a blocking pit road DSQ. I followed him around to see & he did nothing wrong & still got DSQed. It's happened now 5 times. Please fix. 

[Dnote 0]

Operator1 said:

So it "just isn't feasible" for the game's creators to fix it with their "commitment to providing another game next year?"

There is a difference between fixing and adding/changing. We're fixing the game, what more we can do on top of that is and always was, going to be limited.

[EricAustin 0]

Hello!

Ok! I hope the Safety Car comes back in F1 2016. I miss the Safety Car in F1 2015.

[hobbsy777 0]

Dnote said:

Operator1 said:

So it "just isn't feasible" for the game's creators to fix it with their "commitment to providing another game next year?"

There is a difference between fixing and adding/changing. We're fixing the game, what more we can do on top of that is and always was, going to be limited.

Yes but is there going to be an argument as to what CM considers a change and not a fix?

[Chromatic 127]

As much I like the bug fixes in 2015 some are good I feel like they should throw in the towel with 2015 after a few more patches and focus with 2016. Problem is a lot of people feel cheated with 2015 will it be the same with 2016 when it comes to buying? I hope not but I'II be waiting for review's next time I think

[hobbsy777 0]

Chromatic said:

As much I like the bug fixes in 2015 some are good I feel like they should throw in the towel with 2015 after a few more patches and focus with 2016. Problem is a lot of people feel cheated with 2015 will it be the same with 2016 when it comes to buying? I hope not but I'II be waiting for review's next time I think

I will not buy F1 2016 unless they fix F1 2015. The only way I will change my mind is a free download  (if the latter does not happen)

[RAP878 0]

... Or giving a big discount fot those who buys F1 2015... B)

[Lescadres 22]

Dnote said:

Multiplayer

We're still working on this and the more information you can provide us on the issues you're experience with online multiplayer, the better. Lozzy has been posting in some of the threads about multiplayer issues, please help him out with providing any information he's asking for so he can get it into the right hands within the dev team.

To get the full experience of multiplayer problems, I suggest that a race could be organised by a league (like PRL) in which a Codemasters employee or two could be part as racers and/or observers. In that way, Codemasters could take notes of any glitch and disconnect that occurs during a race and get database on the multiplayer game. I suggest that the race could be 100% full race to get maximum datas.

[MotokoZeratul 0]

A quick resume of @Dnote feedback to us:

Sorry, but some of your requested features / changing features and season updates are in another game. Just like the Mario meme.

I'm sure this will happen with F1 2016 and so on.

Meanwhile i'm unable to do 100% races because some D3D device error that crashes the game to desktop. My NVIDIA drivers are up to date, just in case.

This game was realeased 4 months ago and your team is already thinking into the next installment before fixing this up. Great, just great.

[FRACTURED 30]

I'm not disappointed. I'm angry.

Safety Car: Well ok if you insist we can't have it, fine.

Penalties/Track Extension/Cutting: Your reasoning just sounds lazy to be honest. Dripping defeat. If you don't fix this for 15, don't bother with 16. Much trust will be lost. Any fixes you could implement now could surely be carried over? We can test it for you, get you the information you need about what corners need looked at in terms of 4 wheels off and no penalty/warnings being given. Most tracks will have the same limits next year!!! Get some free early testing done on the code for next year. Have some pride guys.

Multiplayer Lobbies: Hoppers are almost universally hated. It can't be so hard to make a public version of the private lobby and give us a list. Project Cars devs were able to implement so it must at least be possible. 

Multiplayer Stability: Any leagues running? Not that I know of. Its impossible. Fuel glitches, desyncs, Xbox echo audio glitch (pcars has this too, issue with extra Xbox core sharing? Can't pretend to understand but I'll give you a pass on that).

In season updates: I could care less about these if multiplayer worked BUT...many bought this game based on your advertisement of "in season updates". Sounded exciting. Imagine running career mode week to week alongside real life qualifying data and car performance, liveries etc? Shame on us for imagining such things. Unless your law department can call fixing broken stuff "in season updates" I think many have grounds for a refund.

I've bought all the F1 games on 360 and if I worked out how many hours play I got for my money, we're talking all of them, even 12 and bloody 14 we're talking pennies and fractions of pennies for hour played. This game is currently running at about £10 per hour played and most of that was restarting first career race 80 times due to Terriblly-stupid-in-pack-situations AI (for me anyways).

Appreciate the honesty, but equally, don't expect too many high fives after that. It's looking like previous years where known bugs were just left alone and we roll onto next year, we get full of hope and its same ish different year.

[enrico68 0]

There will be the Safety Cars ? not good but receive it waiting to get it back in F1 in 2016 !! You can not fix the penalties on the cuts of the circuit? not good but we accept waiting for a better job for F1 2016? Xbox One with the multiplayer you can not play because of lag and bugs ? This you can not accept , here you have to solve by force , we spent money for the game , we pay the live and the game should work !! Talk to Microsoft or do what you want but do work !!

[Lozzy 0]

moogleslam said:

Multiplayer: You are still asking us to figure it out for you.  That's really disappointing.  Unless you pay me to figure it out in which case it's awesome.... but actually, I already paid you with the expectation that I wouldn't have to figure it out.... this is awkward.

If we just get told it's broken we have no idea where to start looking. It's not your job no, but if you see an issue and can report it to us then we can at least narrow our search.

moogleslam said:

if you get to the end of the path without having your rectangle go fully outside the lines, you win.  If you do go complete outside the lines, you lose.  Boom; there's your flawless corner cutting penalty system.

Back in 2010 we had a very strict system along those lines for Time Trial, if you didn't have two wheels inside the white line your lap was invalidated. It was incredibly frustrating.
The problem with this system come when people go off track for reasons other than gaining time. What happens if there is an accident by an apex and you go off the track to avoid it? Or if you outbrake yourself and run across a chicane? You've just been penalised for corner cutting when you probably lost time. Therefore the system has to be more intelligent than that. We try to gauge how much time has been gained by the corner cut and decide if it warrants a warning or penalty accordingly. I've previously asked for some examples of where people think they can cut a corner, gain time and get away with it, often the perception is that more time has been gained than there actually has.
The other aspect to this is cutting a corner and not gaining time there but carrying more speed in to the next part of the track, those are more difficult to spot and are the reason we invalidate some subsequent laps in time trial (Canada's final turn is a good example of this).
So in summary, it's complicated.

4ZA said:

Here's an EASY option to add: Pit Stop Camera from ANY angle (instead of the cockpit default)

This would help the t-cammers out there remain 'immersed' in their preferred view whilst in the box.

Not a priority... but something we would all appreciate.

Cheers.

And then you can change to chase cam and clip the camera through all of the crew and garages and it will look awful.

pOkiz said:

Car setup name:
- When you load your car setup, change some settings and save again, at most of time you just need to save with the same name, but when the name's popup comes, it brings empty and you need to rewrite the same name again, if it brings with the same name that already be saved will help a lot, cause you just click confirm and done.

Voice Commands - Add some commands like (I'm running BR version of the game):
- Current position: tell your current position, I just need to listen my current position, not "Full Race Update"
- Especific driver position: Asking, for example, "Vettel's position" enginner tell you the Vettel's positon and how many seconds you are compared to him.
- First Driver: tell you the drivers name in P1 and how many seconds you are compared to him.

I found one bug in game sound:
- When you are on practice or  qualifying, if you press X button you go to lap time screens and so on, if you go to last tab to see another drivers driving and back to the track to drive your car, it sounds horrible, there's a bug in car sounds when you do it. (driving like F. Massa)

I'll get a bug logged to improve the handling of car setups so you don't have to keep entering the name over and over.
I'll pass those suggestions on to the designer but the limitation with voice commands is the number of commands we can have (I think this is limited by the number of key words we can define on console) and the space on the OSD to display the list.
I will have a look in to that bug.

RAP878 said:

Is it difficult to do different liveries for each race? Example: the livery from McLaren in Melbourne..

Our game has one car model for each team presently so having a different livery for different races while nice is not technically possible and I cannot see it being a high priority to implement for a while sorry.

greenmind73 said:

Every time I get to Q1 in my season Maldonado gets a blocking pit road DSQ. I followed him around to see & he did nothing wrong & still got DSQed. It's happened now 5 times. Please fix. 

Which track is this on?

Bobino12 said:

To get the full experience of multiplayer problems, I suggest that a race could be organised by a league (like PRL) in which a Codemasters employee or two could be part as racers and/or observers. In that way, Codemasters could take notes of any glitch and disconnect that occurs during a race and get database on the multiplayer game. I suggest that the race could be 100% full race to get maximum datas.

That's a good idea and it's something we've done to help find issues on previous games. Ideally this would need to be done on PC as we can most easily get debug information from this platform.

FRACTURED said:

Multiplayer Lobbies: Hoppers are almost universally hated. It can't be so hard to make a public version of the private lobby and give us a list.

Do not assume that we're sat here thinking Hoppers are great, I can assure you we're not. but when the network system for a game was (wrongly with hindsight) built around this system it takes time to change. It also takes the work of UI Programmers, UI Artists and Audio Designers to make what would be a whole new interface to find sessions. That takes time and that's something that's at a premium on a game that releases every 12 months. Finally once it's done it needs testing and bugs fixing, that means QA time which is divided between all the games we release and more time for the above developers to fix any bugs. Then rinse and repeat until it's finished.
So, in short, while I will push to get this work done for F1 2015 and patched in that's not going to be an easy fight to win and if we can do it it's not going to appear quickly. I know that's rubbish but that's the reality here I'm afraid.

[Fizzy2k 0]

Lozzy said:

Do not assume that we're sat here thinking Hoppers are great, I can assure you we're not. but when the network system for a game was (wrongly with hindsight) built around this system it takes time to change. It also takes the work of UI Programmers, UI Artists and Audio Designers to make what would be a whole new interface to find sessions. That takes time and that's something that's at a premium on a game that releases every 12 months. Finally once it's done it needs testing and bugs fixing, that means QA time which is divided between all the games we release and more time for the above developers to fix any bugs. Then rinse and repeat until it's finished.So, in short, while I will push to get this work done for F1 2015 and patched in that's not going to be an easy fight to win and if we can do it it's not going to appear quickly. I know that's rubbish but that's the reality here I'm afraid.

I and everyone else appreciates this, some recognition from you guys about the hoppers system not working.

As I've said before, the hopper system isn't too bad... but it should compliment an actual lobby list/custom lobbies, it shouldn't outright replace it.

I think if you guys were able to keep the hoppers as some default preset lobby types for people who just want to select a game mode and play... BUT add an option to manually view a list of all the active lobbies it would go a long way to solving all the issues we're having. That and bringing back the ready-up functionality to public lobbies. A public lobby list can display all the sessions and tell the player if a session is one of the preset hopper game types, or a custom game mode. 

I've been pretty p*ssed about the state of F1 2015's multiplayer and been pretty harsh with my comments so I'm sorry, as I've waited since about 2012/13 for a next-gen version of my favorite game... and when I say my favorite game, I mean it... F1 was about the only game I played day in day out, and the multiplayer portion. So to have to wait another year or 9-12 months to play some F1 multiplayer is frustrating. Especially since I had to rush down to argos and pay like £45 for a 2nd copy of  F1 2015 on release day when my copy from Zavvi never arrived.

Adding a lobby list in addition to the hoppers instead of replacing them, surely would be less work. And maybe if you did that for F1 2015 the work could roll over to F1 2016's project to be improved upon?

[UnderZice 0]

Lozzy said:

Do not assume that we're sat here thinking Hoppers are great, I can assure you we're not. but when the network system for a game was (wrongly with hindsight) built around this system it takes time to change. It also takes the work of UI Programmers, UI Artists and Audio Designers to make what would be a whole new interface to find sessions. That takes time and that's something that's at a premium on a game that releases every 12 months. Finally once it's done it needs testing and bugs fixing, that means QA time which is divided between all the games we release and more time for the above developers to fix any bugs. Then rinse and repeat until it's finished.

So, in short, while I will push to get this work done for F1 2015 and patched in that's not going to be an easy fight to win and if we can do it it's not going to appear quickly. I know that's rubbish but that's the reality here I'm afraid.

3 months to admit that this system is bad and now you need a lot of time to fix it then you remove half of the hoppers last week.
are you kidding us ?
just replace the 25% or 50% hoppers, it need only 5 minutes to do it and i never asking anything else for this game.
but no it was too easy, you need to remove more things or to broke even more the game, what a pity can you think one minute to your customers.

[speeddemon8021 0]

Im sure the vast majority of league racers and multiplayer enthusiasts would agree when I say the 2 most important things in this game that need to be adressed are having custom lobbies and stable lobbies because let's face it anyone playing the championship season would of finished that and got bored of it by now and there is little else on the game in terms of features so multiplayer is about all that stands between the game being dead in the water! No one wants to hear that it's hard to do or it will take time to do we just want to hear that if it's possible it will be done and has top priority which I believe it absolutely should be for the above reasons.I don't see how you can possibly move on to 2016 when 2015 is such an unmitigated disaster surely there needs to be a solid foundation to build on and the way to do that is get this game playable first.Im sure no one on this forum would mind a delayed 2016 if it ment a fully working 2015 and therefore a much better 2016.

[FRACTURED 30]

We choose to fix the multiplayer. We choose fix the multiplayer before Christmas, and fix the penalties; not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. And then we can use those experiences on 16.

I read a good book. The Martian. The codemasters version would be awesome. Spoilers ahead!

Lozzy was trapped on Mars. Biglee, dnote, hatta and your other guy left him behind as he wasnt spending enough time on the 16 moneygrab. Surviving was going to be difficult. He gave up. The end.





Anger has subsided now. Your answers have made me laugh the more I consider this.

[Lozzy 0]

Fizzy2k said:

Adding a lobby list in addition to the hoppers instead of replacing them, surely would be less work. And maybe if you did that for F1 2015 the work could roll over to F1 2016's project to be improved upon?

The amount of work required to add a server list is the same regardless of what we do with the hopper system. It's a whole new system to build regardless.

UnderZice said:

just replace the 25% or 50% hoppers, it need only 5 minutes to do it and i never asking anything else for this game.
but no it was too easy, you need to remove more things or to broke even more the game, what a pity can you think one minute to your customers.

We've explained the logic behind reducing the number of hoppers. Less options = more likely to find a game because people are less spread out, if that means your preferred session type has gone then I'm sorry.

speeddemon8021 said:

I'm sure the vast majority of league racers and multiplayer enthusiasts would agree when I say the 2 most important things in this game that need to be addressed are having custom lobbies and stable lobbies...

There are custom lobbies and have been since launch. The difference to previous games is they're not open to everyone, you either need to be invited or join via the friends list depending on the settings. I don't understand how that can be a blocker for leagues because presumably you wouldn't run a public session anyway. Stability I can see would be an issue though.

[UnderZice 0]

Lozzy said:

We've explained the logic behind reducing the number of hoppers. Less options = more likely to find a game because people are less spread out, if that means your preferred session type has gone then I'm sorry.

so just replace the suzuka special feature by a 25% hopper races with a random choice between the 19 tracks , i'm just a little tired to play suzuka night & day for 2 weeks. 

[LGS469 1]

Lozzy said:

speeddemon8021 said:

I'm sure the vast majority of league racers and multiplayer enthusiasts would agree when I say the 2 most important things in this game that need to be addressed are having custom lobbies and stable lobbies...

There are custom lobbies and have been since launch. The difference to previous games is they're not open to everyone, you either need to be invited or join via the friends list depending on the settings. I don't understand how that can be a blocker for leagues because presumably you wouldn't run a public session anyway. Stability I can see would be an issue though.

He means public custom lobbies. Ever since project cars removed hoppers & implemented public custom lobbies, a lot of people started playing online again.
whats stopping league racing is the lag spikes that's your number one priority 

[Lozzy 0]

UnderZice said:

Lozzy said:

We've explained the logic behind reducing the number of hoppers. Less options = more likely to find a game because people are less spread out, if that means your preferred session type has gone then I'm sorry.

so just replace the suzuka special feature by a 25% hopper races with a random choice between the 19 tracks , i'm just a little tired to play suzuka night & day for 2 weeks. 

I don't disagree about feature race, I think it was a nice idea on paper but hasn't worked out particularly well.
Hardcore - No Assists is a 25% race what's the issue with that hopper?

LGS469 said:

He means public custom lobbies. Ever since project cars removed hoppers & implemented public custom lobbies, a lot of people started playing online again.
whats stopping league racing is the lag spikes that's your number one priority 

I don't see that a league race is going to start from a public lobby though, that's the complete opposite of what I would expect. @speeddemon8021 please can you clarify what you meant.

[unknown113 0]

Tourgott said:

unknown113 said:

Tourgott said:

Could you please FINALLY add an realistic damage system (including mechanical failures) to the list for F1 2016?

It annoys me that you said 'an realistic'. 

Sorry for not being a native trying to speak your language. Next time I will write in perfect German.

Sorry! ha. You're english was great apart from that bit, so I thought you were English!

[speeddemon8021 0]

@lozzy I ment for the game in general not just for league racers the friends only custom works for league racing but for the general multiplayer enthusiast who wants to do a 25% or 50% race there is nothing the hardcore hopper just never finds anyone or finds one person and a load of AI then the one person invariably quits out and your left with basically a quick race vs AI.The system from the last 2 versions of the game where you could see who was in the lobby and at what stage of the race they were at and make an informed choice about which lobby to join was spot on so if it ain't broke don't fix it.

[UnderZice 0]

Lozzy said:

I don't disagree about feature race, I think it was a nice idea on paper but hasn't worked out particularly well.
Hardcore - No Assists is a 25% race what's the issue with that hopper?

the problem is that i use some assists (i'm not strong as you are) so my only choice to play more than 5 laps race is the suzuka hopper.