Review: rFactor - Part 1

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GUI and Set-Up

The main screen is a study-in-simplicity and overview with just the three main buttons to access all functions. This serves as a prime example of simple and effective menu layout, and it is brilliant. SimHQ has blasted ISI previously for haphazard menu design and layout, but that was the past. In rFactor they got it "right".

Button one (Customize) contains the settings to choose your race series and vehicle, followed by settings for the player, rules, difficulty, graphical options and sound options, veterans of F1 Challenge will feel right at home.

Button two (Control) contains the different race options; testing, race weekend, championship and the replay "fridge".

The third button (Connect) concerns the options for multiplayer.

This GUI works very well and overall the menus are much easier to understand and navigate than previous ISI based titles. We'll go into details regarding the different options a little later.

Customize

The Customize section contains the following options: Player, Settings and Vehicle.

When you have entered your player name and set-up your controller, very much like you did with F1 Challenge or GTR, you will see your current car presented. Your default car is a slow and rather unexciting mini-car or, if you select the open wheel formula series, the rFactor Trainer.

Opening the "Player" screen lets you browse through the different series and mods available, and change your current series.

The "Settings" cover race rules, difficulty, AI settings, audio and graphic set-ups. They look and feel like previous ISI based titles. The maximizing and minimizing principle applies here and you open one set of settings by clicking on the maximize button.

You can then start earning money by racing either single races or race seasons until you have earned enough money to buy a racing exhaust, a racing flywheel, and all the other available upgrades. Finally, you should be able to buy faster cars as well. This concept is straight out of SCGT.

You can also decide that you found a wealthy sponsor who will invest his fortune in your racing career and use money from this sponsor to unlock all the cars and upgrades in one go. The magic phrase to buy the upgrades is "ISI_BABYFACTORY". If you choose to use this quick fix, remember to unlock the SR series, as well as the Open Wheel series. Finding a benevolent sponsor is not cheating, is it?

The "Vehicle" screen lets you choose between the available vehicles within the current series. If you look harder at the rTrainers, you will see that apart from different paint schemes there are also small variations from car-to-car. Some have the rollover bar entirely visible while on other cars it is enclosed partly in the bodywork.

Control

The "Testing", "Race Weekend" and "Race Season" options are self explanatory. When racing the AI make sure that you do not mix Formula IS with the slowest cars. As mentioned previously this will lead to the slower car being constantly rammed by the faster cars.

The "Replay Fridge" — and we have no idea why it's called a "Fridge" — has been through an overhaul as well. This area has been in dire need of improvement since the EA F1 series days.

While replays look very good and a plethora of camera views are available to you, we're a bit puzzled and disappointed that apparently the replay information does not contain the lap times and driver names.

When selecting a specific replay you are presented with information about the series used in the replay, length of replay, time of the race and other assorted information, but no indication to the lap time or name of the human driver. Imagine looking at a replay of an online session, and you can't easily make out who are the drivers and what are their lap times. A link to a temporary mod which fixes some of this, can be found at the end of this review.

A window holds the replay footage while the rest of the screen is occupied by functions that will let you create an .avi from a replay. A timeline at the bottom of the screen indicates exactly how far we are into the total replay.

The window that holds the replay can be maximized to fill the whole screen. In minimized as well as maximized state, you can start, stop, rewind, and fast forward the replays. The timeline lets you add and delete bookmarks, split the replay into different sections, cut, paste and rearrange the segments. The timeline acts as a storyboard.

Exporting the replay to .avi — after you have completed your edits — results in an .avi file located in your \replay fridge\movies folder. If you cannot get it to work initially, try changing the compression algorithm in the .plr file from "cvid" to another codec, e.g. Divx.

If you turn the music off, the music will not be present in your exported .avi's.

The inclusion of the export function is a very welcome addition to racing simulations. So far titles with such features have been few and far in between. In fact we can only remember that Xpand Rally had a similar feature although it was not quite as refined as rFactor's.

Connect

The Connect slogan refers to the multiplayer section of rFactor where we find the following options: Join, Create and Settings

To "Join" a race on the Internet is pretty easy. You can join either via the in-game browser or via Racecast. If you join via the web site, rFactor will automatically start once you click the join button for the server you have decided to use.

To start a multiplayer session as the host, you click "Create" and set your options; track, allowed driving aids, etc.

"Settings" lets you change the settings for the connection.

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