Hoping this is not a sign of things to come

[Kevin Watts]

Like most other virtual racers I eagerly awaited the release of Assetto Corsa and purchased it the day it was released. I was stunned by how polished it was as an alpha/beta/early access game and enjoyed not only the superb visuals but the crisp believable handling of the cars as I threw them around the laser scanned tracks. As each week went by I looked forward to the next batch of fortnightly content and was happy to see each new car and track was crafted as well as the last. Not even the silly bickering on the Steam forums over whose game was better could dull my enthusiasm or the banal criticism’s by the console gamers because you couldn’t ‘pimp’ your car with gaudy body-kits like Forza Motorsport or that the game didn’t already have 1000 cars like Gran Turismo. Each new announcement via their web-site or Facebook page brought more excitement – a new manufacturer license, a laser scanned Nordschleife – the future looks bright…

Then it happened. The first quick and dirty conversion quite literally ripped from another game. News spread and this track suddenly became the hot topic, the ‘must have’ despite it being taken warts-and-all from a game released nearly 10 years ago. Rather than herald this new ‘mod’ it left me despairing for the racing sim community. While many virtual racers and racing simulation sites rightly shunned discussion of this ‘rip’ there were many more making asinine excuses for the author essentially taking this work without permission and grafting it into a new sim. Theft is theft no matter if you ‘get away with it’ or not or even that you give it away freely. It reminded me of rFactor and how when it was released it showed so much promise. For months we saw 3d meshes being shown by talented mod makers working their magic on new cars and tracks made from scratch.

It all seemed so exciting and then conversion tools reared their ugly heads. All of a sudden sites like rFactor Central were awash with poorly ripped work from Grand Prix Legends, Geoff Crammonds Grand Prix 4 among others. Far from pushing the genre forward it felt like we were now going backwards. The same racers who argued over the radius of a hairpin in Simbin’s rendition of Macau were suddenly silent when rFactor became awash with low poly conversions of 10 year old games complete with poorly defined racing surfaces, low resolution textures and cardboard cut-out tree’s and track side objects which screamed ‘FAKE’ as you sped past them. Questionably legal content appeared and then disappeared from the net as lawyers and mod makers played cat and mouse.

Is this really where we want to go with Assetto Corsa? - A step backwards porting generations old content complete with all their imperfections into a next gen simulation? There was a ‘gold rush’ in rFactor when the conversion tools appeared to be ‘the first’ to bring a popular track to rFactor, be it Spa or Brands Hatch for example so why would someone spend time carefully building a track from scratch when others are just ripping it from another game and fudging it into this new sim. Have our expectations really been lowered so far that we’d accept the grave robbing zombification of old content like this?

 

[Bram Hengeveld]

Who cares how old a game is? Nobody in reality i thing. I buy for myself a game which is full modable, i use it only for private. I dont do/broadcast lets play videos or share anything with public audience if i play this/or any other game. If i want to make MY game better then i will do it.

Nobody is saying that you can't do that. Think you missed the purpose of this thread.

 

[Bernhard Schreyek]

You don't care about mods/modding itself, you just said it yourself.
You just don't want to spend any money at all and than whine all day long about the lack of new sims and advances. Pathetic.

your answer is pathetic. How do you read out of my comment that i dont care about mods? If someone build a track/car from scratch or convert it - both modding. Where i do "whine"? Or is critism in your mind "whineing"? If you want to spend so much money for your virtual racing so became almost equal then real live raceing then something is wrong with you.

 

[Bram Hengeveld]

Don't exaggerate please as sim racing is still a ridiculously cheap hobby.

 

[Chris]

I just dont get it why everybody is upset with conversations....ac supports full mod costumization and now? Instead of be happy to drive this fantastic rallystage in ac everybody complain that is ripped from another game? A game which is over 10 years old and has his own great mod support which lets it alive till today.....WHATS WRONG with the community? Is it the "new copyright laws" why everybody **** in their pants? rFactor, GTR, GTR2, SHIFT, SHIFT2, Race07 and all the other sims are just that popular cause you can do that sort of things...Instead i read almost in every simforum if its possibly to sell mods? Do you wanna kill yourself and the "mods" out of the greed for money?!?! IMO its enough...already ****ing DLC kill almost every game today out of the box and you scream for more?

So you're basically saying that you won't support a company that produces high quality products, just so you can save a few dollars?
Why wouldn't you support a company that makes good quality products? Kunos will cease to exist and then you won't get anything. It's just simple business knowledge; you cannot operate at a loss.

I support the great quality products that Kunos create so they can continue to make top quality products.

This is why the music and film industries are in serious trouble. Because people can take what they want for free, and the companies operate at a loss.

 

[Bernhard Schreyek]

Nobody is saying that you can't do that. Think you missed the purpose of this thread.

Why? If you had taken my car example with in your thinking then you would cleary see what im talking about. But you edited out of you answer....so...Or is it for you the same that when i own a car and i want to put rims from another car on it so i go to it and take it from it? or do i buy them and fit them to my car?

 

[Bernhard Schreyek]

Don't exaggerate please as sim racing is still a ridiculously cheap hobby.

I dont think so....if i buy a old car from junkyard, put a cage and safetystuff in it you can go hillclimb/rally/destruction derby/etc for almost the same amount of money then when you buy a full up to date simcockpit with a pc that could handle it.

 

[Michael Hornbuckle]

Any credibility you had went out the window with this: If you want to spend so much money for your virtual racing so became almost equal then real live raceing then something is wrong with you.

AC costs less than a tank of gas and the DLC for a laser scanned Nords and 10 cars will likely be less than a DIY oil change.

 

[Michael Hornbuckle]

Any racecar that only costs the amount I have in my sim-rig is a racecar I would never get in.

 

[Chris]

Any credibility you had went out the window with this: If you want to spend so much money for your virtual racing so became almost equal then real live raceing then something is wrong with you.

AC costs less than a tank of gas and the DLC for a laser scanned Nords and 10 cars will likely be less than a DIY oil change.

TERRIFIC point!
This is an incredible amount and high quality of content, for less than a tank of petrol.

And the fact that 1 litre of petrol costs less than 1 litre of bottled water, that should tell you just how dirt cheap this Nordshleife DLC content is.

 

[Bernhard Schreyek]

So you're basically saying that you won't support a company that produces high quality products, just so you can save a few dollars?
Why wouldn't you support a company that makes good quality products? Kunos will cease to exist and then you won't get anything. It's just simple business knowledge; you cannot operate at a loss.

I support the great quality products that Kunos create so they can continue to make top quality products.

This is why the music and film industries are in serious trouble. Because people can take what they want for free, and the companies operate at a loss.

You dont see the hole picture. I would never say that one/two dlc´s are bad. But if you see game like rrre/simraceway/iracing/the new forza/GT that in my mind is just pure greed for money and lack of respect to the costumers.

 

[Chris]

You dont see the hole picture. I would never say that one/two dlc´s are bad. But if you see game like rrre/simraceway/iracing/the new forza/GT that in my mind is just pure greed for money and lack of respect to the costumers.

Forza and Gran Turismo are multi-million dollar companies, and the sales of the primary game easily outweigh the need for DLC, but for a developer like Kunos, the need for money is the most important thing to the company's survival.

If Forza and GT produce a bad game one year, it doesn't matter too much because they have such a huge budget. Assetto corsa on the other hand cannot afford to screw this up. They need all the support they can get.

And since they're making a far better racing sim than GT and Forza combined (which are both simcade), then I'm happy to give them all the money they want, so that they can produce arguably the greatest racing simulator ever created.

 

[Bram Hengeveld]

I dont think so....if i buy a old car from junkyard, put a cage and safetystuff in it you can go hillclimb/rally/destruction derby/etc for almost the same amount of money then when you buy a full up to date simcockpit with a pc that could handle it.

I have a desk and a G27. No fancy simcockpit needed here. Very cheap, very fast still.

 

[Michael Hornbuckle]

I'm sorry but you are pretty delusional if you think you are going to get thousands of hours of enjoyment out of a $2000 race car....but enough with that; nothing to do with the topic.

There are plenty of examples (almost all) of DLC being nothing more than a money grab. DLC that actually adds to a game and prolongs the life of the game I have no problem with. Some people have no problems with the prices of those games you listed charge; some do...that is your right as a consumer to decide which if any is worth your money. But to make a blanket statement that all DLC is a rip off is incorrect.

Anyhoo, we are so off topic now we have people agreeing that were on complete opposite sides of the fence two pages ago.

 

[Bernhard Schreyek]

Forza and Gran Turismo are multi-million dollar companies, and the sales of the primary game easily outweigh the need for DLC, but for a developer like Kunos, the need for money is the most important thing to the company's survival.

If Forza and GT produce a bad game one year, it doesn't matter too much because they have such a huge budget. Assetto corsa on the other hand cannot afford to screw this up. They need all the support they can get.

And since they're making a far better racing sim than GT and Forza combined (which are both simcade), then I'm happy to give them all the money they want, so that they can produce arguably the greatest racing simulator ever created.

Yes Kunos is a small developement company. But they run simulators for f1 and other real race people i dont think that they have financial problems. The only thing is that they cant produce 50tracks and 100cars in 6 months.

 

[Bernhard Schreyek]

I have a desk and a G27. No fancy simcockpit needed here. Very cheap, very fast still.

You maybe. i run with momo ffb wheel. But when you see videos from insidesimrace and others (like the retarded video from pcgames) then you will see what the industry will sell to us. No cheap stuff. And all the kids which are now 8-10 years old will pay much more when they grow up cause they think thats the stuff they`ll need. You cant tell me that 3screens, wheel, pedals, gearshifter, raceseat and of course the computer is that cheap.

 

[Bernhard Schreyek]

Any credibility you had went out the window with this: If you want to spend so much money for your virtual racing so became almost equal then real live raceing then something is wrong with you.

AC costs less than a tank of gas and the DLC for a laser scanned Nords and 10 cars will likely be less than a DIY oil change.

LOL? Who said that i or anybody else will only play ac? There are coming few good sims out.

 

[Chris]

... i dont think that they have financial problems.

https://twitter.com/ac_assettocorsa/status/408165613056839680

Sounds to me like they're running on a tight budget...

 

[MRX]

Could Kunos be sued if/when someone converted a track from another sim, such as iRacing? I'm not so sure they could, as the conversion would be done by a third party with no affiliation to Kunos.

No. Unless Kunos hosts the files on their servers. If i go now and buy a website and dedicate it to ripped content brought to AC, its my own bussiness, my responsability. Not Kunos lol!

I dont understand OP whine? is anyone forcing you to download the ripped/converted content? is anyone forcing you to create original content for AC? any game that supports mods faces the inevitable situatio of conversions brought to it from other games. Even games without oficial mod support from the devs have managed to be fully moddable by the community itself.

Kegetys showed clueless people what can be done in AC even without official tools. When mod tools will be officially released, do you really think this will be the only converted content brought to AC? i bet 50bucks now that AC will be flooded with ripped content and conversion. Not because i say so, but because thats how PC modding is for decades and no one can change that.

I advise everyone to calm down and enjoy the game. Conversions from ripped content will make their way to AC whetever you like it or not. AC content itself will be ripped and probably end up in GTA5 PC for example ( when it's going to be released). Just as Forza content ended up. Just as every racing game has been ripped to pieces. People think only a PC game can be ripped? console exclusive triple AAA titles have been ripped to bits and their stuff converted for other games.

 

[Lars Bargmann]

Are you serious? how you come to the similarity of games and drugs?!?
I would say if i own a car and i want to put rims from another car on it i will do it. Its MY car!
I own AC and i own RB Rally and so whats wrong if someone give me the opportunity to get the best out of both games?

Yes, I am very serious.
Drugs and software piracy are both illegal, yet easily accessible to most people.
No matter what kind of excuses you come up with, or how wrong you think the owners of the content are, it is still illegal to download and use pirated software.
The stupid excuses are even being mentioned in this thread, like "they make too much money of DLC's anyway" and so on. It is, plain and simple, NOT a valid excuses to pirate something, just because you don't agree with the owner's way of doing business.
Your example about your car and your rims are invalid though, since we are talking talking about people who doesn't own RBR in this thread, basically. Of course you can put whatever rims you want on your car, but if you buy chinese copy-rims, those are probably illegal too (at least in Denmark where I live, we have tons of chinese copy-stuff being "caught" in customs every day, simply because they are illegal copies)

 

[Bernhard Schreyek]

https://twitter.com/ac_assettocorsa/status/408165613056839680

Sounds to me like they're running on a tight budget...

Yes with a small amount of employees its better to focus on really important stuff. They must moderate their forum. This is not a financial problem.