VERY frustrated with UI, please help

[Bahger]

I really like this sim and considered it the answer to a long-held desire to race against AI again, as opposed to the iracing environment.

However, even though I realise this is not a custom-made single-player game but an adaptation of a multiplayer product, certain aspects of organising races and setting options are making me grind my teeth. I'll need to resolve this, or it won't last long on my PC. Here is my problem:

- On finding that the game won't save between sessions in "Single Race" I started a Championship series in order to race the F3 at Interlagos. I managed to save after spending several hours working hard to qualify 4th of 20. After exiting the game, I was brought back to the "Warmup" session.

- I did the warmup, ended the session and elected to start the race. Rather than 4th, I was in last place on the grid, it would not honor my qualification position. No reload of the session would recognise my qual time, I would have to start again.

- As a workaround I launched a "Single race" after fixing my position on the grid as 4th in general Options. I set up the Single Race with no practice sessions. On starting the Single Race session, I was put in a Qualification session. I hit "Finish Session" in order to start the race as 4th on the grid. No dice. Once on the grid, I was last again, presumably because I had not qualified.

As you can see, I just can't engineer any way to race in the starting position I qualified for without doing the race immediately after qualifying, which is silly; I need to be able to save and come back to race. I never drove rFactor but I am very familiar with GTR2 and GTL and I know that these games allowed saving between sessions in every module. They also allowed you not to have to qualify. It seems like a huge oversight/glitch to me that this sim imposes a qual session that invalidates the race starting position the player has already selected.

The bottom line is that I cannot race in the starting grid position I've qualified to race in, either by saving my qual performance so that it carries over to the race (either in Single race or Championship) or by forcing it by selecting that position for the same event in Single Race, because it imposes a qual session whose result determines grid position.

I'm very frustrated by this. I would really appreciate guidance, or this game will not be the go-to sim for me I was hoping for and I'll uninstall it and go back to iRacing. Unless there is a solution I'm missing, then either there are huge single-player design features missing from the sim, or the UI is impenetrable.

 

[Sicario Del Toro]

I would hit Next Session not Finish Session ,see if this helps get your correct grid position.

 

[Bahger]

I would hit Next Session not Finish Session ,see if this helps get your correct grid position.

Nope, doesn't work.

As always, I'm ready to look sheepish at having missed something obvious but if I have not, then this is a really major design error. I like the driving, the tracks, the AI, but if it is not possible either to save after qualifying and return to a race with qual position intact, or to get a simple "start race in X position on grid" function to work, then I've wasted $30 and I'm angry with both the devs and the reviewers. Devs, if the above is true, please patch asap, it's a really foolish oversight.

 

[Sicario Del Toro]

I just started a championship , qualified first , next session warmup ,next session race , and i was still in first position .
Maybe you are missing a file , have you tried to download it again and a fresh install ? dont get to annoyed as im sure it will be sorted .

I do hope you can get it working correctly

 

[morsify]

I really like this sim and considered it the answer to a long-held desire to race against AI again, as opposed to the iracing environment.

- On finding that the game won't save between sessions in "Single Race" I started a Championship series in order to race the F3 at Interlagos. I managed to save after spending several hours working hard to qualify 4th of 20. After exiting the game, I was brought back to the "Warmup" session.

- I did the warmup, ended the session and elected to start the race. Rather than 4th, I was in last place on the grid, it would not honor my qualification position. No reload of the session would recognise my qual time, I would have to start again.

First, are you sure, when you qualified 4th, that you were still in 4th at the very end of the session?
I found that as long as I made certain the session was over, then went to next session, then leave track, the game would put me back into that next session, and my qualifying position is correct. So I am not sure why this is happening unless you are mistaken about the final qualifying position.
I did suffer from save problems similar to you, but once I moved on as described above, I have not had the problem again.

 

[Bahger]

Thanks, guys.

Yes, I was in 4th position when the qual session finished. And it preserved it when I next launched the Championship module, but put me in a warmup session and after I finsihed that and elected to race, I was last on the grid and lost my save.

Does anyone know why the function to pre-set starting grid position for a Single Race series does not work?

I might try to re-launch the Championship and requalify, one more time. But if it won't hold my start position as set in the qual session after I've saved and come back, I'm out, because this is just sloppy. As it is, I'm pretty sure I've established that the save feature only works in Championship Module, not Single Race, which is sloppier still.

 

[oppolo]

yep, you're right, "Save" doesn't work well. I realized this some days before, now I tried to go to warmup, and here I see my time of qual (6 position), and exit the game hoping they are saved. When I return to warmup and skip warmup with "end session", I was first in the grid at the start of race.

So, now we know this issue, we have to play qual and race without exit the game, never mind.

 

[Bahger]

Thanks for confirming the issue, oppolo.

The non-functionality of the "start on grid" feature is even more sloppy than the broken save system. The only way to get the "start on grid" feature to work would be to opt out of the qualification stage but, unlike GTR2, GTL and (I believe) rfactor, this sim does not provide the ability to do so in the UI.

I'd like to hear from the devs now, or I'm going to ask for my $30 back. I know it's a good sim in most respects and great value for money, and I also know that it's an adaptation of a product never built for SP, but this seeems like very sloppy coding and I believe I'm within my rights to expect them to fix it.

 

[Sérgio Marques]

Bahger, I understand your frustration, but for me the best way to fix it, is to join a league and you will have a lot more fun than racing against AI.

 

[Bahger]

I am experienced in racing online, Sergio, but I bought this sim because I heard the AI is exceptionally good. That is true, it is, but the failure of the save feature and being able to start in a pre-set position on the grid is really sloppy coding. If these features are included in the sim's functionality, as they undoubtedly are, we are entitled to expect them to work. It needs to be patched or I will actively discourage all other racing sim players from buying GSC2012 if they expect an acceptable level of SP functionality.

 

[Bahger]

The facts, now largely confirmed, here and in my thread about this in the sim racing section of the SimHQ forums, are:

- It is not possible to save between sessions in Single Race mode.

- Saving in Championship mode works but a race grid position previously set in quals is invalidated by the Warmup session, which cannot be cancelled in advance via the UI.

- The "set position on start grid" feature is completely broken. It can only be set in the main options menu, rather than in the individual session setup UI and any grid position set in the main options menu is invalidated by the qualification session that the player cannot opt out of.

 

[oppolo]

well, I think the "save" issue is not a so important problem that make me not to play GSC anymore, because AI aren't humans, so, after about 5 laps of qualication, all position are, more or less, determined, also my position.

I can consider it as a workaround, 5 laps of qual before go to race, in my opinion, is not so a big problem.

Instead today I had another problem more important, a race with F:Reiza, and set type of start "formation standing", well, at the race I was in a "fast rolling"

 

[Bahger]

Yeah, I have not had any luck with getting the start format selection to work as advertised either. I was willing to put up with it though. I understand why this would be a bigger issue for you when trying to replicate an F1 event.

 

[oppolo]

but a race grid position previously set in quals is invalidated by the Warmup session, which cannot be cancelled in advance via the UI.

Yes, you are right, I suspected the warmup too, so I saw in the PLR for rid off of it via PLR, but, there was already this row "Run Warmup="0""

EDIT
maybe this is done for not to be able to change the kind of startup with V8, that is the main goal of this sim

 

[Bahger]

In case a dev is reading this, I have now written to Reiza support twice, asking politely for acknowledgement of this big issue regarding singleplayer functionality. I have received no reply. I need to hear from you, if only as a courtesy, even if you cannot, or will not, fix it. If you do not acknowledge the problem you will be creating a very disaffected customer who will actively campaign to prevent other players primarily intseristed in SP from buying a product with a major, unacknowledged but indisputable flaw.

 

[Daniel Pérez]

You can change to standing start by setting the line RACECOND_formation=0 in the reizaX.cch files in your user folder. Reiza1=V8s, reiza2=Mini, reiza3=F3 and reiza4=formula reiza.

 

[Bahger]

This does not address my issue, Daniel, but thank you anyway.

 

[Renato Simioni]

Hello Bahger, first off we do apologise to you and anyone who might have found support to be slower than usual recently - we did have your email fowarded from support but release weeks are usually a bit more hectic than usual.

With regards to the point you´re raising - unfortunately as you have noticed, GSC2012 does not have save function during a race weekend, and we also dont have the possibility to set grid position for the race. The latter is a complicated issue and our inability to fix it and other related niggles is indeed tied to the limited access we´ve got to the engine source code.

It is fair criticism to point out how these restrictions limit the potential enjoyment you can have from GSC2012 single player. We can certainly see that point and fully plan to offer something a little less restrictive in future products.

While we understand and accept the criticism from your perspective, how serious these issues may actually be will inevitably vary depending on how one intends to run his offline races. If you plan to run full weekends with practice sessions, qualifying and a 100% race, than yes, the Game will demand you to invest quite a bit of time to get through it all in one go.

However, to suggest that GSC2012 is not suitable for offline play solely because of those limitations really is far from universally valid. One can for instance easily run a weekend with qualifying (speeding through the inactive bits) and a good solid 50% distance race within 60 to 90 minutes of gameplay, which is quite reasonable and probably within what many players will find satisfactory.

It´s also worth pointing out we dont really mean to suggest, let alone advertise this game to have the features you miss. The original GSC UI was misleading in the sense that the session menu still had an entry for grid position which did not work - this was removed in GSC2012. We still have mistakenly left the option on the "Rules" menu, that is however an UI mistake - the simple fact is that we dont mean to offer that option in this sim.

Ultimately, if you come to the conclusion those limitations seriously hamper your enjoyment of the Game and your order is within the 30-day guarantee period, you will have the option to request a full refund.

 

[Bahger]

Thank you for such a welcome and articulate response.

It is unfortunate that the combination of a misleading UI and an undocumented save system requires the player to discover for himself certain severe and unwelcome omissions in this sim's singleplayer funtionality. I understand the restrictions you have been working under due to limited access to the base code and I also realise that most people appear more interested in multiplayer; however, it is regrettable that these shortcomings in GSC 2012's singleplayer functionality are either unacknowledged or subject to misinterpretation by users. I think you should eliminate the misleading UI feature that appears to enable a preset grid start position and explain the very limited save features (including none at all in the Single Race module) in official documentation.

Having said that, I admire you and your team for having produced a racing simulation that obviously springs from of a great passion for the sport and for pricing it reasonably, i.e. well below what PC gaming corporations charge for their products these days. GSC 2012 is made by and for enthusiasts and adapted from a licensed, aging engine, so I would expect there to be "quirks". These particular quirks, however, are pretty significant, given the feature set that most of us have grown accustomed to in high-end singleplayer PC racing sims (including several built from the same ISI code) so I'm sure you can understand my frustration at finding these features to be either severely curtailed, non-existent or inexplicably absent.

As an enthusiast, I could never ask a fellow enthusiast to refund my $30, especially as I do not believe these omissions, which would be quite serious in a complete, i.e. non-beta, retail sim published by a corporation, were made in bad faith. I may race GSC 2012 online at SimHQ but I am sad that the holes in singleplayer functionality are likely to discourage me from using it for the purpose I had in mind when I first bought it. All the workarounds you mentioned are valid but I feel obliged to point out, again, that "workarounds" devised by the consumer should not be a necessary part of any end-user's experience of a paid, finished, commercial product. I believe you are under an ethical, possibly even legal, obligation to document these shortcomings where they apply to reasonable user expectations of the sim's singleplayer functionality and to get rid of misleading aspects of the UI as soon as possible.

I shall continue to look out for a fully-functional, ultra-realistic singleplayer racing sim; I haven't driven one since GTR2 and GTL and, sadly, GSC2012 cannot meet my expectations in this regard with such an incomplete, almost jury-rigged save system. I'll probably go back to iRacing for online competition.

Once again, thank you for such a considerate response, and good luck.

 

[Ho3n3r]

Thank you for such a welcome and articulate response.

It is unfortunate that the combination of a misleading UI and an undocumented save system requires the player to discover for himself certain severe and unwelcome omissions in this sim's singleplayer funtionality. I understand the restrictions you have been working under due to limited access to the base code and I also realise that most people appear more interested in multiplayer; however, it is regrettable that these shortcomings in GSC 2012's singleplayer functionality are either unacknowledged or subject to misinterpretation by users. I think you should eliminate the misleading UI feature that appears to enable a preset grid start position and explain the very limited save features (including none at all in the Single Race module) in official documentation.

Having said that, I admire you and your team for having produced a racing simulation that obviously springs from of a great passion for the sport and for pricing it reasonably, i.e. well below what PC gaming corporations charge for their products these days. GSC 2012 is made by and for enthusiasts and adapted from a licensed, aging engine, so I would expect there to be "quirks". These particular quirks, however, are pretty significant, given the feature set that most of us have grown accustomed to in high-end singleplayer PC racing sims (including several built from the same ISI code) so I'm sure you can understand my frustration at finding these features to be either severely curtailed, non-existent or inexplicably absent.

As an enthusiast, I could never ask a fellow enthusiast to refund my $30, especially as I do not believe these omissions, which would be quite serious in a complete, i.e. non-beta, retail sim published by a corporation, were made in bad faith. I may race GSC 2012 online at SimHQ but I am sad that the holes in singleplayer functionality are likely to discourage me from using it for the purpose I had in mind when I first bought it. All the workarounds you mentioned are valid but I feel obliged to point out, again, that "workarounds" devised by the consumer should not be a necessary part of any end-user's experience of a paid, finished, commercial product. I believe you are under an ethical, possibly even legal, obligation to document these shortcomings where they apply to reasonable user expectations of the sim's singleplayer functionality and to get rid of misleading aspects of the UI as soon as possible.

I shall continue to look out for a fully-functional, ultra-realistic singleplayer racing sim; I haven't driven one since GTR2 and GTL and, sadly, GSC2012 cannot meet my expectations in this regard with such an incomplete, almost jury-rigged save system. I'll probably go back to iRacing for online competition.

Once again, thank you for such a considerate response, and good luck.

I really hope you get into online. This game has transformed me into an online addict, as I was also previously also mostly an offline racer.