SimHQ.com - Motorsports Zone - Review: Xpand Rally

Xpand Rally ships with a working multiplayer mode for up to four players and connecting to a server is pretty straightforward. The game comes with an in-game browser that shows which Internet games are available, if any of them are password-protected and the ping to the server. I experienced pretty good pings in the region of approximately 60 to a maximum of 140.

The game does a good job of putting you into an existing session as it simply waits for any ongoing races to finish and then it counts you down to the race you are in. You can make a quick visit to the garage to tune the car you selected for this specific race while you wait and there's a chat function as well.

First surprise when you start the multiplayer race is that the cars that participate may be fully drawn, i.e. you are not seeing ghosts but fully rendered cars. It turns out that the host of the multiplayer session can alternate between two modes; "collision", i.e. fully rendered, and "ghost" which is the more well known way of doing multiplayer in rally games.

Having your opponents' cars fully rendered in game during a race at first seemed like a major attraction to me, but as the race started the frame rates dropped through the floor. From normal fps of about 50 to 60, I was down in the 20's — or worse. At times it was impossible to drive like that. Not quite a slideshow but pretty bad. This slowdown continued even as the cars spread out and the other cars were not in sight, and it seems that even if you try out a multiplayer session with yourself only, you will experience some slowdown.

Fraps was used to measure the frame rates.

Setting up a multiplayer sessions is as straight forward as joining a session. You have good control over the settings. As far as I could determine it is not possible to view nor save replays of multiplayer sessions. The option simply does not exist.

Replays

Xpand does not forget those of us who like to view our best, or perhaps rather "most spectacular" drives and crashes. The game lets you save and review replays. Apart from offering a lot of different camera angles you can change through yourself or just let the game handle a "director's cut" selection of views. You can also add special effects filters like black & white, motion blur, soft-focus etc.

AVI files

Yet another good idea that made it into the game is the built-in AVI video format capture. Start a previously stored replay and then push a button that will capture the replay and turn it into an AVI file which you can then load into Windows Movie Maker, or other video-editing software. If you wish to keep the very high graphical quality in your movie and start the AVI capture using a high-resolution replay, be prepared to go watch a ball-game while the replay is being turned into an AVI. I tried converting a replay which was in 1280x1024x32. After 20 minutes of work, the resulting AVI file was 93MB and it lasted all of 41 seconds. No doubt you can speed this process up considerably by selecting lower resolutions when you wish to turn some of your replays into movies.

Track Editor

Xpand seems to be filled with extremely good ideas. The game comes with a fully-equipped track editor that lets you try out your talent for building new tracks and rally stages. You can build closed tracks as well as regular, open rally stages.

You can have your first track working within the amount of time it takes to go to the manual's correct page and follow a few brief and simple instructions. When you have done that, that particular track is available in the game for you to drive.

The reason why it is so quick to make your first custom track is that whatever you call the track, it will be a small oval with a mud surface, if you select the track type to be of the closed sort. I searched for a way to make an open, rally stage type of track but failed to find where or how to tell the editor to do this operation.

I know my talent is very limited with editors so I'll recommend R.E.G. as a good place to look for new tracks and they are certainly the place to go for help with your track projects. There are already some tutorials posted on their forum.

Car Importer

A car importer is not on the CD, but it was released shortly after Xpand went onto the retail shelves upon it's European release. Clearly, Techland supports modders who wish to create new tracks and new cars by making these tools available.

As implied by its name, the car importer lets car modelers import car shapes from 3D modeling tools to Xpand.

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