Review: netKar PRO
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Installation, Manual and Activation
Once more, a new racing sim is offered only as a download. The servers were very busy upon release, but I managed to find a US mirror that offered me a fast and stable download. As the
initial rush has subsided, I expect downloads to be easier and faster now.
From the netKar Pro site, you an also download DVD and CD covers to print and make your own ”retail” package.
Sadly there was no manual in the initial release, this oversight was corrected in patch 1.0.1 where a very basic manual was provided in html format.
Luckily I’d been browsing through various threads while waiting for my download of the initial release to complete, and I thoroughly recommend new customers to visit this thread.
Installation is very easy as you simply extract the contents of the download to any directory of your choosing. Double-click the nK Pro icon in the netKar PRO v.1.0 BASE directory and
the program loads faster than you can say ”Activation”. Right-click on the icon and send it to the desktop as a shortcut if you wish to do so.
As it was well past midnight on release-day, I must have not been paying attention, to me it seemed like I needed a license to proceed. It didn’t seem to me that there was a demo
included in the download. Later I became aware that you just create a driver and select the FF1600 at Crema to try out the unlicensed demo.
Anyway, I proceeded to request a license which was paid for with my Paypal account and I was up and running in less than 2 minutes. Some users have reported unending trouble
attempting to activate netKar PRO, I must confess to not experiencing any trouble at all.
Future patches are to be extracted to a temporary directory, and the files copied over from the temporary directory to the netKar install. Do not extract updates directly into the
main install.
When updating to v1.0.1 I had to reactivate, but the reactivation was free, so I still have 3 activations left.
Interface
netKar Pro’s interface is quite unlike any other interface we’ve seen in simulations, excepting the previous ”Namie” version of netKar. This unique interface is probably responsible
for some of the confusion that was experienced upon the release of nK Pro. Whereas we have become accustomed to GUI’s that are ”object-action” oriented, nK Pro is just the opposite.
It is ”action-object”.
To illustrate this, in any other sim you would create your player by entering your player-name and then click create. In netKar Pro you have to click the create button first (the action)
and then enter the player (the object).
For set ups you have to enter the name every time you save your set-up, otherwise it is saved as
"newfile", which I feel is not the optimal way of doing things. The current set-up should always be displayed and if you just click ”save”, the current set-up should be saved, not
"newfile".
 After adjusting to this new logic, in most cases it becomes much easier to grasp the interface. It just so happens, that over the years and so many titles, we’ve become so used to the
other way of doing things, that initially it is very hard to think differently.
Having previous experience from ”Namie” probably helped me a great deal, as I didn’t struggle as much with the interface as newcomers to netKar must have.
Setting up the controller can be a bit of a challenge too. It took me some tries until I succeeded in moving the clutch from one button on my steering wheel to another. How exactly I
did it is difficult to explain: Push the button on the steering wheel you wish to use while at the same time pointing and clicking with the mouse on the axis you wish to assign to
that button. If you're unlucky, the button is already assigned to a function and you'll have to move that
function to somewhere else, before being able to assign your new axis correctly.
When you select trackday single player, you select the car, the track and hit the ”start session” button. In the car set-up menu, you not only adjust set-up but also select the
specific car-skin you’ll be driving and enable/disable the logging of telemetry to the AIM software.
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