A year or so ago, I starting paying attention to roadracing again long enough to notice that there was a new sanctioning body called NASA that seemed to have some interesting series running.
This week I starting thinking briefly about digging out my wheel and pedals and doing some simulation driving again. Poking around online, I found the NASASimRacing site and they seem to be doing some good stuff. I'm wondering if you guys know about it, or anything else of the sort.
Also, it looks like they're using rFactor as their main racing platform. Know about this? (And I apologize in advance--to Ells mainly, I'm guessing--if you've remarked on it already and your comments went over, under, or through my head.)
I spent several hours on Thursday reading through a text file that I kept of our emails when Tom, Ells, and I got started with Grand Prix Legends. It's a 440KB file, and remarkably the whole episode lasted less than two months for me. Tom mentioned being interested in the simulator at the end of September 2002, and as far as I can tell I never drove it again after Thanksgiving of that year.
If I could ever maintain enthusiasm for anything for more two months, maybe I might have amounted to something. :-)
5 comments:
As I wrote to Tom somewhat recently, "My racing sim of choice these days is rFactor. There are really great track and vehicle files freely available - just take a look at the "Cars" and "Tracks" tabs of rFactor Central (http://www.rfactorcentral.com/), a very elaborate community forum for users. There's everything from modern street vehicles to contemporary F1, and just about any road-racing track of which you've heard.
Even if we could get an hour a month in, it would be gratifying. Yes, of course it will take time to first set up and troubleshoot (though rFactor has been quite robust and straightforward to use), but with luck we might actually get to drive together.
Thanks a bunch for the comments, Ells. I'll see about getting that up and running. It looks like a lot of fun.
Let me know if you get up and running, Tim. I'm always up for an online multiplayer session. I drive rFactor almost daily, varying tracks and vehicles as my mood changes.
If I see or plan to watch a motorsprorts event on television, I'll often drive the appropriate vehicles on the appropriate track (that's how deep the user-submitted track and vehicle model culture is). I recently saw a show on Speed about Sam Posey driving early '70's Challenger in Trans-Am at Laguna Seca - I happened to already have the track and his car, in appropriate livery. I tend to swing back and forth between big lumbering door-slammers at one end of the spectrum and contemporary F1 - with so much seat-time, I can actually translate well enough to use track time in one kind of vehicle to inform me how to approach first laps in another. It's perhaps taken years and thousands of laps to get these kinds of chops, but the results are rewarding.
Cool, I definitely will. I'm a little uncertain about the purchasing options though. Am I right that it's available as both a free download w/paid activation and as a disc purchase with less activation hijinx required?
I don't know if I'm following that correctly, or which would be the better way to go. Suggestion?
Thanks for the comments. I saw that show in the listings and was interested but I guess I either fell asleep or forgot to flip over to it. It sounds really interesting. I'll try to check it out when/if it re-airs. (More likely when, given that it's on Speed.)
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