u/Existing-Air-3622 — reddlx

As far as rubber-banding goes, I think Burnout implementation is the best

I get why devs add rubber banding, it fixes the issues of races becoming boring when the player get too far away from the pack, especially in high octane racing games where the core experience is less about perfect racing line, and more about jousting with other cars.

But my main issue with this system, is that the player skill become meaningless, you can play with one hand while doing your taxes, it doesn't matter, just focus for the last kilometre and you'll win.

I think Burnout (at least Takedown, not sure how the rest of the franchise works) has a good middle-ground. AI cars rubber-band like crazy, but ONLY when they are behind you, You simply can't shake them, no matter how good you drive, you will always see them in you rear view windows. But when they get ahead, the rubber banding stops, so they can easily get a 20+ seconds lead if you drive poorly, they won't wait for you.

That means as long as the race is not over, you will never feel safe, but at the same time, you have to play well to win.

Some may find this unfair or frustrating, but let's not pretend playing a single player game is supposed to be a fair competition. In Burnout AI can't use boost, your car seem to weight twice as much as your competitors when you collide, and let's not even talk about the most unfair cheat the player is constantly using without thinking about it : restarting a race. Just imagine for a second if the bots could restart a race the moment they knew they couldn't win.

And as for Burnout, having opponents staying close is also an opportunity for the player, it means you have cars you can crash to farm boost.

So of course it means you can end up in situations where a race can't be won any more. But again, that just means it's time to use your most busted ultimate joker : restarting the race.

reddit.com

u/Existing-Air-3622 — 16 hours ago

▲ 3 r/pedale

Ça existe un vélo "hollandais" pas trop cher ?

Je cherche un modèle de vélo hollandais pour une connaissance.

Elle utilise une épave pour faire quasiment tout ses déplacements en ville, c'est des déplacements relativement courts (le principal c'est le boulot, environ 5-6 km AR), mais quotidiens.

Elle fait AUCUN entretien elle-même, elle se contente simplement de l'amener à un réparateur (ou moi) quand elle fini par avoir un problème qui peut pas être ignoré.

Les fois où j'ai fais du vélo avec elle, j'ai remarqué qu'elle changeait quasiment jamais les vitesses, pour une raison qui m'échappe.

Je me dis qu'un vélo hollandais ça serait parfait pour elle, ultra simple, solide, peu d'entretien. Je trouve plein de modèles dans les prix que je cherche (300-400 balles), mais ils ont des freins V-brake, je cherche du frein à moyeu.

Et surtout il y a 27000 marques différentes, je me doute qu'il y ait de la merde dans le lot, mais perso j'ai acheté un vélo Ortler il y a quelques années, je suis même pas sûr que la marque existe encore, en tout cas c'était pas cher, et j'en suis pleinement satisfait, donc je fais pas partie de cette religion qui pense qu'il faut mettre des fortunes pour avoir de la qualité.

J'ai eu des mauvaises expériences avec l'occas, et c'est du boulot en plus de chercher la perle rare, donc si possible je préfère éviter. Et je veux plutôt un truc récent, pour que quand il faudra l'entretenir, ça soit pas l'enfer de trouver des pièces.

Bref, est-ce que quelqu'un aurait un conseil ?

reddit.com

u/Existing-Air-3622 — 4 days ago

▲ 16 r/truegaming

Rage Racer, or learning to play a game its in own terms

I have a complicated history with Rage Racer. It's a game I have a lot of nostalgia for, it's one of the first Playstation game my brothers and I got, with a racing wheel on top. I think this game has shaped me in some ways, I love racing games, and I think it's in big part because of this game.

Also for the longest time I had recurrent nightmares with a street with a super steep slopes, like 45° or higher. Either I had to walk up, and it was exhausting, or I had to drive a car, and it was scary as hell. Very recently I finally understood that this was coming from Rage Racer, more specifically from this slope : https://youtu.be/D5rfvUuhHtM?t=49

Anyway, while I got a lot of memories associated with this game, I don't remember if I actually liked the game.

Fairly recently I gave the game another try with emulation and... I hated it. The main problem is the driving model, it feels so clunky and inconsistent, the car has its own mind and start drifting seemingly randomly, and the drifts are super rigid and make you lose all your momentum, which seems completely counterintuitive, Ridge Racer is a legendary franchise precisely because of the drifts.

So I just dropped it, thinking it was just a bad game.

Regularly I would try to give it another try, but with no success.

And a few days ago, I tried again for some reason, and for some reason this time it clicked. It's fairly simple : to initiate a drift, you let go of the accelerator and turn.

That's it.

So said like this, it seem fairly simple and obvious (that's basically how all the sequels works), but the thing is the game follow a set of strict rules you have to understand to play :

As I said lifting the gas while turning make you drift. So NEVER get your finger away from the accelerator in a corner, unless you want to trigger a drift. If you want to slow down, press the brake while keeping your finger on the gas.
Drifting is a binary state. Or more precisely it has 3 states, "off", "on" and "out of control". As said going from "off" to "on" is only triggered by lifting the accelerator and turning, and going from "on" to "out of control" is mostly based on the angle, basically no amount of finesse with the break or accelerator will get you out of the "out of control" state. So never give too much angle to your drift, or the car will become literally uncontrollable and will lose all your momentum.
The brake will never make you drift, quite the opposite, you can use it to stop a drift.
Drifting should only be used for the sharpest corner, for the others just slow down, so you really have to learn the circuits, you can't improvise.
You should avoid ALL collisions at ALL TIME, you can't scrape a wall to turn, you can't block an opponent behind you, it will make you lose a lot of speed no matter what.

I know this type of comparison is a meme at this point, but in the drifts in this game are like the dodge roll in Dark Souls. You can't spam them, it's not a get out of jail free card, you have to use them thoughtfully.

Once you understand these rules, you're good to go, the thing is when you have a gamepad in your hand, it all feels wrong at first. We generally put racing game on a spectrum from "arcade" (which is a deceptive word but anyway) to "simulation", and the expectation is generally that simulations are hard and realistic, and arcade games are easier to pick up and not really concerned about realism (but still loosely based on reality).

Rage Racer is not easy to pick up, and it just doesn't care about reality. For some reasons they decided that brakes prevent you from drifting, so that's the way the game is, period.

And that's why it was so hard to get into this game, it doesn't follow any of the rules what we usually associate with racing games, its just doing its own thing.

YOU have to adapt to the game, not the other way around.

I'm not totally absolving the game of its sins, even by keeping the driving model identical, its clearly lacking some feedbacks to make it clear what is expected for the player, now it's a lot of guess work to understand the basics of the game (thank god for emulation save states, so I can try the same corner over and over).

But I can't deny this approach is way more interesting than the direction the franchise went after Ridge Racer 5. Basically all games afterwards (with the exception of the unfairly hated Unbounded) have a super easy drifting model, basically anyone can make perfect drifts after 30 seconds of play time. If I reuse my previous comparison, if Rage Racer is like Dark Souls, post-5 Ridge Racers are like Batman Arkham or Assassin's Creed.

And while it took me waaaay more time to get what the game was expecting from me in Rage Rager than in the post-5 sequels, the payoff is proportionality waaaaay more rewarding.

u/Existing-Air-3622 — 6 days ago