Preview: DTM Experience by Simbin

[Bram Hengeveld]

Bram Hengeveld submitted a new blog post:

Preview: DTM Experience by Simbin

After visiting the Dutch round of the DTM series I was lucky enough to have a sneak peek at SimBin's newest racing project "DTM Experience" that will be released for PC this winter. Time for a little hands-on preview.

The last time I've played an official licensed DTM game was back in the days of Codemasters' DTM Race Driver 3 which wasn't particular a full blown sim. Apart from the car models, liveries, tracks and driver names it didn't offer me an experience like in DTM Race Driver...

Continue reading the Original Blog Post

 

[Ernie]

Its all a matter of taste.

Agree. But i miss the chrome effect on that Mercedes, and it seems like the shaders in DTM-E aren't final ATM. Therefore (if i would be Simbin ) i would have selected another car without a "special effect livery" instead for the Demo.

 

[Kjell Eilertsen]

Was so stoked when I downloaded the demo, but so incredibly disappointed when I finally got to test it. Dunno if there's a issue with my PC not being good enough or some setting that I should tweak, but this game gave me absolutely no sensation of speed, what so ever. I can't see a difference between going 50 or 150 km/h, so weird. The sounds disappointed as well, which was a surprise coming from R3E (though some cars in R3E sound bland too).
Wish I knew why this is, I would love to like this game!

 

[Nox]

Was so stoked when I downloaded the demo, but so incredibly disappointed when I finally got to test it. Dunno if there's a issue with my PC not being good enough or some setting that I should tweak, but this game gave me absolutely no sensation of speed, what so ever. I can't see a difference between going 50 or 150 km/h, so weird. The sounds disappointed as well, which was a surprise coming from R3E (though some cars in R3E sound bland too).
Wish I knew why this is, I would love to like this game!

I agree with the speed thing. I often go too deep into the hairpin as I feel I'm going slower than I am. It sort of feels disconnected from the road, as Tom Endres described earlier in the thread.

I feel the controls are a bit weird. I thought it was a case of just getting the settings right, but after spending so much time on it, I am changing my mind. Driving in a straight line and making even the slightest correction, the car can easily get a wobbly back end, swaying from side to side until it spins round. It isn't the input, or deadzone (or even just my driving) it's just very twitchy from a controller aspect.

 

[Ernie]

I like the demo, but it's necessary to find some good working and satisfying Controller settings first.
First of all the default settings of my Fanatec GT3RS wheel came with inverted FFB. This makes the steering feel completely wrong, and i wonder what a person, which is new in Racing sims, is thinking at this moment and didn't know what's wrong.
I think it should technically be possible to set this parameter automatically right, depending on the connected device.

However ........... out of the box it's quite difficult to feel what the back of the car is doing. You don't feel when the back steps out, respectively not pronounced enough.
But it's good to know that you can use R3E controller files, and therefore i gave my tweaked R3E controlset a go. The FFB became better with that and i enjoyed my driven laps.

But i would like to add a question:
@Simbin: When we could expect some more informations about DTM Experience? The given informations on http://dtm-experience.com/ and http://insider.simbin.com/dtm-experience-demo/ are rather poor. There are some rumors out there, but no proven facts.

 

[Rupe Wilson]

Are we going to get the fireworks at the end of the Race, like we saw at Hockenheim on our live stream at RD...
but maybe not as much smoke please..

 

[Boby Kim]

Just tried the demo. Again im astonished by the sound. Amazing job! The graphics look clear and crisp. The car (BMW) feels good. To me it seems i have more feedback than R3E cars. Simbin should do this right with everything on it including the cherry on top: weather module, pitstops including the tyre regulations, full course yellow's, warm up laps, out laps, DRS restrictions (Zandvoort) everything! They have spent so much time on the opening video that they must make sure that everyone gets the same feeling when they start a championship. So far...DTM experience =

 

[David Frey]

Damn, I'm pretty sure I will buy this game Waited so long for a "real" DTM game and Simbin is a good developer, so we may have a chance of getting a real good racing game! Tested the demo as well and it looks very fine to me, the sound is genious hope we will see a lot of cool racing going on here in the community and by the way: BMW

 

[Dirk Cleiren]

Hi,

I was wondering how can i setup my Fanatec CSW to see the wheel turning in the cockpit exactly how the way i turn my CSW wheel?

Can someone put me in the right direction?

What ff are you guys using ingame and on the wheel?

 

[Peter]

In the vehicle settings you can set the rotation of the virtual wheel. With hands it match till 180° and without hands you have full rotation.

I disable the virtual wheel.

 

[Dirk Cleiren]

Thanks Peter

 

[Flouncy]

If the handling is weird and the car pulls left and right then check the Reverse FF option, that fixes everything.

I love it, feels fantastic to drive.

 

[anthony monteil]

Was so stoked when I downloaded the demo, but so incredibly disappointed when I finally got to test it. Dunno if there's a issue with my PC not being good enough or some setting that I should tweak, but this game gave me absolutely no sensation of speed, what so ever. I can't see a difference between going 50 or 150 km/h, so weird. The sounds disappointed as well, which was a surprise coming from R3E (though some cars in R3E sound bland too).
Wish I knew why this is, I would love to like this game!

Please, give me your suggestions about the cars sounds and I will try to improve it.
I tried to be as close to the real thing as possible with the material I had but there's always room for improvements

 

[Jay Ekkel]

But i would like to add a question:
@Simbin: When we could expect some more informations about DTM Experience? The given informations on http://dtm-experience.com/ and http://insider.simbin.com/dtm-experience-demo/ are rather poor. There are some rumors out there, but no proven facts.

The first round of info was pushed by the DTM, which was meant for (their) motorsport media and contacts. Following information will come from Raceroom/SimBin so expect some more game related information soon.

 

[Kjell Eilertsen]

I had another go at the demo yesterday and here's something I found;
Changing cam to Nose cam made a HUGE difference to the sensation of speed, suddenly I could feel what the car was doing and at what speed I was traveling, had a pretty good experience driving like this and tried swapping back to cockpit view every now and then just to compare. Cockpit view is my view of choice, always, but lack of sensation of speed makes this view on this demo undriveable for me. Dunno if there's any settings I can tweak to fix this, but I'm open for suggestions so bring em on!

Please, give me your suggestions about the cars sounds and I will try to improve it.
I tried to be as close to the real thing as possible with the material I had but there's always room for improvements

First off, thanks for taking part in the community and responding to customer "concerns", very thankful and much respect for devs who take the time to do such!
Second, putting into words how things sound is pretty hard, and even harder when typing in a language other than your own, but I'll give it a shot.

While swapping cam view I have ofc been through the tail cam a couple of times, and the sound here are far better than in cockpit, now I realise that IRL there will be a completely different sound from a car depending on whether you are in front, inside or behind, but I just wanted to point out that I'm talking about the sounds while driving in cockpit, not in tailcam or watching replays as that is a completely different matter.

While driving in cockpit (and also Nose Cam) I feel the engine/exhaust sound is far too muffled, to dampened and too tame. The ambient sounds are great, sounds of hitting kerbs, of the transmission, of gravel etc, all really really good.
But the engine/exhaust sound leaves a bit to be desired imo, particularly in the Merc. It should be a much more violent, rasping scream and I reckon driving such a car it would be a assault on your ears.

Here's a video from the demo (not mine):

And here's a video from the IRL car which to me sounds more aggressive and screaming as mentioned above;

And here's an example of a car where you guys have really NAILED the sound, it's assault on my ears make me smile every time!

Hope I am getting my point across? If not, do tell, I'll gladly try to explain better.

 

[Peter Stokman]

Yes. We've had few players reporting similar issues in the past. I believe there is an issue on certain systems with 8:5 / 16:10 aspect ratios. This is a bug on our end so my sincere apologies.

In the mean time, if you can, with some trial and error try various things such as changing the resolution. But I would first try to switch to window mode (can run full screen window mode as well), or vice versa if you actually were running window mode.

Open the same file, graphics_options.xml with notepad and change the value on line 7:

<custom type="bool">false</custom> false means it's windowed. If you set it to true it will be full screen.

Tried both settings as well as a bunch of screen resolutions...still no go.
Looks like I'll be waiting a while longer for a fix. Thanks for the assist.

Yes Terry i have the same problem Have the same with that other simbin thing
thats why not playing it and prob not buying DTM or they must fix this.

 

[Tom]

Agree. But i miss the chrome effect on that Mercedes, and it seems like the shaders in DTM-E aren't final ATM. Therefore (if i would be Simbin ) i would have selected another car without a "special effect livery" instead for the Demo.

I think the cars were meant to look quite alike for the demo, weren't they? Would make sense after all.

Tom

 

[Ernie]

I think the cars were meant to look quite alike for the demo, weren't they? Would make sense after all.

Uhmm... for me it makes no sense that virtual cars should intentional not look like their real counterparts. But it's no problem now, if the car liveries will look real in the final product.

 

[Ernie]

@anthony montail: Thanks for being here and asking for feedback.

Referring to the following video i think you've quite nailed the sound. Great work, Anthony.

... and it's very difficult to find some well recorded onboard videos for comparing. Most of all youtube videos have bad sound and are overly distorted, which makes them not to a good reference for comparing.

 

[Justin Swan]

Yeah! definitely nailed the sound

 

[Kjell Eilertsen]

The BMW sounds closer to IRL I must admit, but the real version still has more rasp, more mechanical noise, it's hard to describe but the game just sounds less aggressive.