1/14/98: The following was last revised in mid-December, when I was feeling rather benevolent and hopeful towards CPR, anticipating the patch that was yet to be released.
Since this detailed analysys was written, I've spent some serious time on Ubi Soft's F1RS, which dramatically altered my standards for a contemporary racing sim. The arrival of the patch and my subsequent review of the patched CPR made me realize how seriously deficient CPR really is in the most important aspects of a racing sim, and how starry-eyed I was about CPR's potential when I wrote this.
Look for a dramatically revised version of this page soon. As soon as I can tear myself away from F1RS.
Hmm. On second thought, don't hold your breath.
I tried CPR first on my primary machine, an Asus TX motherboard with Pentium 166, 32 mb SDRAM, Sierra Screamin' 3D card (with the latest Sierra 2.1 Rendition drivers), and Thrustmaster T2 with adapter, and then on my other machine, an "Intel" VX with Pentium 133, 32 mb non-EDO RAM, Intergraph Intense 3D card, and Thrustmaster GP2 and CH Pedals. Both machines have Thrustmaster ACM game controllers and NE 2000 compatible network cards.
I saw the beautiful and well-organized menus, all the car setup options, and then heard the excellent engine sounds and saw the car laying rubber at Homestead, and thought, "Well, John must have just had some quirky problems or else he's too picky. This sim is really well designed. It can't be as bad as he said."
Unfortunately, after considerable time and effort, I found myself agreeing with John rather emphatically. I had two severe problems on my primary machine that made the sim virtually unplayable. One of those problems and another problem on the second machine made the sim unplayable there, too, while a third problem suspended my experiments on that machine for fear I would irrevocably corrupt my operating system installation.
I consulted with other experienced sim racers, but found no solutions; rather, I found confirmation that many of my concerns were shared by others. I notified Microsoft of my problems, but after several business days passed and I received no response, I published my initial review. This review prompted a heated response from a Microsoft representative and raised a firestorm of controversy in the rec.autos.simulators newsgroup. Although many people strongly disagreed with my experiences and conclusions, many others said that they had similar difficulties with CPR, and thanked me for my forthright review.
Since publishing my initial review, I've worked around three of the serious problems I encountered, and I have learned that Microsoft has promised a patch which addresses the fourth problem. My impressions of CPR have altered dramatically for the better since I have been able to drive it in a way that I think it was intended to be.
Also, it seems clear from many comments in rec.autos.simulators that CPR performs quite differently on machines equipped with 3Dfx cards than it does on machines like mine, which have only Rendition cards. I am hoping to acquire a 3Dfx card in the near future, and am very much looking forward to experiencing CPR in that environment.
Note: Due to the size of this review, I've split the discussion of my serious problems, other bugs, and miscellaneous design issues out into a second page.
CPR presents an awesome experience in several ways. It has forced me to re-examine the way I evaluate racing sims, and to more clearly delineate the qualities which I find most essential in determining whether I consider a sim to be acceptably authentic.
When evaluating a racing sim, I find I can broadly divide realism factors into four distinct categories: track and car configuration and appearance, racing logistics, sensory factors, and physics, or vehicle dynamics. The sensory factors category includes such things as sounds, graphical display characteristics, and overall visual impact. The vehicle dynamics category includes all of the ways in which the car responds to my inputs and interacts with objects in its environment, including the track surface, walls, and other cars.
I would rate CPR very highly - among the best I've encountered - in the sensory factors category. It also shows a strong commitment to authenticity in the area of racing logistics, with things such as race weekends with practice, qualifying, and warmup sessions, and things like pit stops and such, although there are some mystifying oversights in this area, such as the lack of yellow flags. Accuracy of tracks and cars also seems quite good.
CPR fares more poorly in the physics category. I have a lifelong background of racing, starting with slot cars when I was a young teenager, and proceeding through autocrossing, dirt track and sprint karting, and into formula cars, and 24-hour endurance racing in sports cars. This experience has given me strong opinions about how a car behaves at the limits of adhesion, and when it comes into contact with other objects. A sim which accurately reproduces the sensations and behaviors which are so familiar to me from real racing is a sim which I value very highly, which is primarily why I like ICR2 and SODA so much. CPR does not evoke in me the same kind of "Oh, yes!" response, for a variety of reasons which I will elaborate on below.
But CPR's excellent sensory factors still make it a potentially exciting experience. Its well laid out menus, extensive configurability, and racing logistics give it an edge over many other sims. Its excellent network play promises a new dimension for fans of formula car racing sims, as does the upcoming track editor.
In hardware-accelerated mode on my Rendition-equipped machines, the graphics are indeed impressive, with a great deal of detail. Realistic, transparent shadows are cast by the walls and other cars, and the walls themselves are in shadow or sunlight, depending on their position relative to the imaginary sun. CPR makes use of smoothing to impart a very lush and realistic feel to the cars, the track surface, and to the objects around the track.
Unfortunately, on a Rendition card, the whole effect is very dark, making it difficult to see opponents' cars until I am about to overtake them. Microsoft is addressing this issue in the upcoming patch with sliders to adjust the gamma for both track and cars.
In unaccelerated mode, the graphics are brighter, but are very blocky. I found it difficult to pick out essential details, such as braking markers, at a useful distance.
A well thought out variety of graphics options allows you to adjust display details until you get the optimal frame rate that your hardware can deliver. On my machine, a P-166 in a TX motherboard with 32 mb SDRAM and a Sierra Screamin' 3D video card, I get 15-25 fps with hills, trackside objects, dash, and pit board turned off, and the screen area shrunk one step, but with hardware acceleration and smoothing turned on. Smoothing seemed to cost very little in terms of frame rate, but gave a large improvement in drivability because the details were so much more visible.
A detail selector allowing good/better/best options seemed to give the best results in "better" position; the "good" position gave blocky graphics, while I saw no improvement with the "best" option. Perhaps on a 3Dfx card this renders additional improvement.
If you have a Rendition card, I suggest that you download the latest reference drivers from the Rendition Web site. These address a serious problem with what is called the "clipping distance", which is easily confused with the paint-ahead control built into the game. More on this issue in the paint-ahead section of my CPR bugs page.
One of the readers of my original review said, "I think the sounds in CPR are the most accurate to date and they sound exactly like what you hear in real life or on T.V. I especially like the sound of the car on the rev limiter or during shifts." I totally agree. The sounds are fantastic on my computers, and they do sound very much like real cars. I love the scream of the turbine and the burp when the engine transitions from power on to power off. There are also cute whisking and scrunching sounds when you run through the grass (although in real life you wouldn't be able to hear them).
I rate the sounds in CPR as the best I have experienced in any racing sim. It's hard to imagine them being any better. Great job!
Some other experienced sim racers have noted that the sound seems disconnected from the actual behavior of the car, but I have not noticed that. It seems to track very well to engine RPM on my machine.
Several people have noted that the engine note seems to drop in sixth gear near the end of straights. This does occur, but I believe it is due to the car bottoming as increasing aerodynamic downforce forces the car down till the chassis touches the ground, causing additional drag and slowing the car slightly. I found that if I raise the car so there is more ground clearance, the engine note does not drop till I get farther down the straight. However, then the car does not handle so well; the reduction in downforce reduces the available grip and can change the balance as well. This is quite realistic.
The game includes music which plays during the menus, which I find annoying, but this is easily turned off. There is also commentary from Bob Varsha at times, which gets old fast because he says the same things every time you load a given track. However, his comments about your progress during a race are fun.
By default, CPR also plays music from audio tracks on the CPR CD-ROM while you are racing. This feature caused me considerable difficulty, and I suspect that many others who experience very poor frame rate may be suffering from the same problem. Fortunately, it is very easy to fix. More about this in the frame rate section of my CPR bugs page.
I've just gotten my first look at Ubi Soft's F1RS, and the annoying, tinny engine sounds in F1RS have made me appreciate CPR's excellent sound even more.
To me, vehicle dynamics is the heart of a racing sim. I want something that accurately reproduces the reactions and "feel" of a real race car at the limits of adhesion. Note: for a general discussion of vehicle dynamics and explanations of some of the terms used here, see my overview of vehicle dynamics.
Six Degrees of Freedom. Microsoft has placed great emphasis on the accuracy and completeness of the vehicle dynamics engine in CPR. They say it is the first racing sim with a full six degrees of freedom model - though I would beg to differ with that. GP2 has six degrees of freedom, although it cheats a bit with some canned behaviors, and it does not appear that the model allows the car to actually roll over or tumble. Walls limit its horizontal travel as well.
SODA's model, however, clearly incorporates full six degrees of freedom. The buggies and trucks can tumble or roll. In addition, the vehicles can move anywhere within the "world" defined by the perimeter of the SODA track editor. When you follow an opponent, you can see the other vehicle roll on its axis in corners, and the wheels moving up and down as it works over bumps, dropping to the stops when it leaps off of yumps. Behavior in powerslides - the essence of racing on dirt - is eerily reminiscent of my experience racing dirt track karts, and the cars realistically scrub off speed beyond a certain slip angle, as mud piles up outside of the tires. Despite a few shortcomings - such as what seems to be canned behavior in collisions - in my opinion, the SODA vehicle dynamics engine is a stunning achievement. SODA has raised the bar for racing sim vehicle dynamics engines.
A Sophisticated Model. CPR's vehicle dynamics engine is even more ambitious than SODA's. It also includes aerodynamics, and includes a far greater number of parameters which can be adjusted by the user, even more than GP2, the previous champ in this department. Things such as ride height, bump and rebound damper characteristics, third spring, toe-in, and many other factors are modeled here. Adjustments by the user have a tangible impact.
CPR also models what is happening at each tire. This is good; boiled down to the essentials, and putting aerodynamics aside, a race car is as successful as its ability to maximize the efficiency of force transmission through those four little contact patches between rubber and asphalt.
I've been told that this model was developed by an aerospace engineer who is very committed to its authenticity, and its sophistication is a strong testimony to this.
But.
What's It Like Out There, Mario? There is an essential element missing from the mix. Tire temperatures. Tire temperatures tell volumes about what is happening at that critical contact patch. I would venture to say that no professional race engineer in the world (on four-wheel asphalt racing machines) could imagine working effectively without knowing tire temperatures at the inner, middle, and outside edge of each tire. Tire pressure, camber, and toe-in are all affected directly by tire temperatures, and it is difficult to know if you are at or near the optimum adjustment of any of these without knowing tire temperatures. Yet there is no way for the user to view the tire temperatures in CPR, nor any indication of whether they are being calculated.
This makes me wonder whether there were any auto racing engineers involved in this project. Although the laws of physics are the same for race cars and airplanes, the models which humans have devised to understand them and predict behavior are still just that: models. At the limits of vehicle performance, very subtle things happen which are not easily fully described with mathematical models. In my opinion, experience is just as crucial as a basic understanding of the principles of physics.
Confidence. On the track, driving a CPR Indycar is exciting indeed. The car leaps around over curbs, judders when pushed to the limit in certain corners, scrunches down on its suspension when the speed goes up, and does a lot of things to telegraph to the driver that this is, indeed an 800 hp monster needing a skilled hand to keep it under control. If the setup is good, you can slide it beautifully in some corners, hanging the tail out in a long ecstatic cacophony of sim racing glory. The luscious sounds underline the experience.
But as I delve deeper into the behavior of the car, things happen which begin to undermine my confidence in the accuracy of implementation of its physical model. Collision behavior is grossly, at times laughably inaccurate. In professional mode, the car rebounds off of walls like a pinball, after all but the smallest tap. My car sometimes registers a collision with another car when it's 20 feet ahead, while at other times the opponent has his wheel in my cockpit and nothing at all happens.
Collision behavior aside, there are a number of aspects of race car handling that make me wonder what got lost between the aerospace engineer's drafting table and the compiled code that went out the door. Things like the car rolling backwards uphill when I stop - even when I've got my foot on the brake! Front tires spinning when the car is sitting still. How accurate can the implementation of the physics model be, if it does this kind of thing?
Subtlety in the Midst of Violence. Don't get me wrong; I really like a lot of the aspects of the physics model in CPR; I love pitching the car over the curb, and having it skitter sideways a little as it settles back down on the track afterwards. This is really cool!
However, when stacked up against the current state of the art, CPR's vehicle dynamics implementation seems be lacking a bit somewhere. With good setups, the ICR2 cars handle incredibly realistically. I can get trailing throttle oversteer, to tuck the nose in, and I can use trail braking to rotate the car during turn in. So far, I haven't been able to do either of these things with a CPR car.
Also, some very subtle things happen in ICR2 cars, like the sideways "walking" up the track at Milwaukee that I first experienced in ICR2, and then later heard real drivers talking about in interviews! And the delicate way the car "hooks up" down near the apex if you're just on line and have just the right amount of brakes trailing off at Loudon is incredibly reminiscent of my experience in dirt track karts.
So far, that subtlety is missing for me in CPR, in part because of the steering bug, and in part because the chassis cannot be made to trail brake properly, and doesn't seem able to do trailing throttle oversteer. I can't put my finger on it exactly, but it seems to me that there is something not quite right in what is happening with the weight transfer under braking, at the moment of turn in, and once into the corner.
Slip Angle. Another issue is the tire slip angle curve, a critical aspect of race car handling. In CPR, it's far easier to recover from incipient slides than GP2's Formula One cars, which seem to go into a canned spin routine once they are more than 2 millimeters sideways. I'd much rather do without the canned spin routines. But in CPR, it's almost too easy to recover. It makes me wonder how well this curve is being modeled, if at all. Again, ICR2 seems to me to have very accurately modeled behavior in this area.
To elaborate just a bit: to a point, as a tire's slip angle increases, the grip it produces increases as well. At a certain slip angle, however, the grip begins to fall off. It's the driver's job to keep the tire right at this optimum slip angle in corners. Too little slip angle, and you're not generating enough sideways force. Too much, and you've lost efficiency and are on the way to a spin.
In CPR, it's almost as if this slip angle curve is flat; no matter how sideways I get - even way beyond what I would expect to be recoverable - I can still save it if I put in enough opposite lock.
The Incredible Hopping Indycar. A strange phenomenon has showed up for me in testing at Mid-Ohio. In many of the corners, the CPR car signals that it is on the cornering limit by hopping, rather than by sliding and generating tire squealing sounds. I know it sounds odd, but it feels even more odd! As I approach the limit, the car begins to visibly hop up an down. If I don't lift off the throttle at this point, the car will spin.
The first thing that came to mind is that the setup has inadequate damping, so I stiffened up the shocks. I've played with additional slow and fast bump and rebound damping, as well as stiffer springs, but so far none of these cure the problem. As I try progressively stiffer settings, grip begins to deteriorate before the hopping goes away. So far all of the Mid-Ohio setups I've downloaded from CPR Web sites also exhibit this problem.
I have a hard time believing this hopping is realistic behavior. Certainly no race or street car I've ever driven has exhibited this behavior (live axle tramp under hard acceleration is somewhat similar, but that's not what this is). I've watched virtually every lap of every CART race in the last several years on TV or live, and I've never seen a real CART car do this.
Caster. One item missing from the garage, and presumably from the vehicle dynamics model, is front wheel caster. Till recently, this was essentially irrelevant, because its principle impact on grip is a relatively small effect on camber as the front wheels are turned. However, with the arrival of force feedback wheels, the effect of caster on the self-centering effect of the front wheels, and the steering effort needed to move the wheel off-center, becomes a significant part of the picture.
Ghostly Opponents. There is also another phenomenon, relating to opponents' cars, which is so difficult to put a finger on that I hesitate to mention it. In both ICR2 and GP2, I have the sensation that the opponents' cars are really there - solid, tangible objects tracking realistically across the earth, and that will react with me if I hit them. In CPR, the opponents' cars seem ghostly, ephemeral. Perhaps this will improve with gamma correction (so I will be able to see them better), but I have a feeling that there is also something not quite right with the way their position in space, relative to both my car and to the track, is modeled.
Conclusion. To be sure, these complaints are subtle, and perhaps the vast majority of racing sim fans will likely not notice them. But to someone looking for a really authentic racing experience, the fact that CPR's developers seem to have slipped up on a number small but crucial aspects of vehicle behavior is unsettling. I know that Mark Blundell and Mauricio Gugelmin tested CPR and provided input which influenced the final product, but I find myself wondering how many experienced racers, both engineers and drivers, were intimately involved in the project throughout the development cycle.
Nonetheless, CPR's vehicle dynamics are impressive, and I think we have reason to hope that with further refinement, CPR may well set a new standard in this department.
Enough has been said elsewhere about the ghastly AI for racing against computer-controlled cars, so I will not go into that here. The upcoming patch is said to address this issue.
I have read that Terminal Reality actually sent people out to each of the tracks to map them using a GPS receiver. Certainly many of the items in the tracks, and their overall configurations, seem very realistic to me. However, I have some doubts about the total accuracy. GPS is wonderful, but it does have some limitations, in part because the military degrades the signals from the satellites for civilian use. Also, GPS is not very reliable for altitude; sometimes, depending on satellite locations in the sky, it can be off by well over 100 feet.
Nevertheless, with that kind of commitment from the game developers, we can expect some very realistic renditions of the tracks on the CART circuit. And CPR delivers. The only track in CPR that I have driven real race cars on is Mid-Ohio, so I decided to evaluate that to see how accurate it seems to me. I spent some time running at Mid-Ohio in CPR, and then watching the real 1997 CART race on videotape to refresh my memory, and then back to CPR. There is no question that, despite some niggling details, it is far more accurate than the Mid-Ohio in ICR2 (admittedly one of ICR2's least accurate tracks).
And yet..I can't shake the impression that there's something not quite right here. Corners that should need heavy braking, such as turn 4, at the end of the long backstraight, require just a stab at the brake. Everything seems a bit longer, smoother, less dramatic than the real thing. It's almost as if many of the corners have been gentled out, relaxed in radius, and then the straights lengthened to keep the lap times in line.
Also, the elevation changes may be accurate, but I just don't get quite the impression of their drama that I do in other sims. This is particularly true in Laguna Seca, where I think some rolling hills leading up to the corkscrew are absent, and the dramatic drop after the corkscrew and down through the following left-hander seems much less dramatic than in real life.
An incorrect chicane in Cleveland also raises some serious questions. I believe the reason given for this is that TRI could not get access to the airport runways to measure them, so the track wound up having too low a lap time and the chicane was added to get the times in line with the real world course at Cleveland. However, almost any pilot has on hand a scale layout of every airport, with runway lengths. These diagrams are available at most airports or from various pilot supply mail order houses.
Nevertheless, on the whole these are reasonably convincing representations of these tracks. My concerns will become moot the moment Microsoft releases the track editor, anyway, particularly if they release the source for the included tracks (hint, hint). The track editor is a potentially fantastic feature. If it's well implemented, and it's possible to zip up newly created or modified tracks and ship them off via the Internet to share with our friends, this capability could have a huge impact on the development of online racing. Plus when CART goes to a new venue like Houston or Twin Ring Motegi, we can whip up a new version of that track without having to wait for the manufacturers to deal with licensing issues, distribution, packaging, and such.
Needless to say, I'm excited about the pending release of the track editor, for sure!
The user interface system in CPR is, for the most part, superb. It leaves older sims like ICR2 in the dust. I really like the row of buttons across the bottom that let me go directly to the garage, the tracks, or whatever, and the drop-down menus from the menu bar, with graphics, sound, realism, and driver aid options and such are very well designed and logical. Also, the row of tabs for sheets within the garage works quite well, although I wish it weren't necessary to scroll to get to the ends of these tabs. Dropdown lists abound, and loading and saving various file types is done through the normal, excellent Windows 95 file access mechanism.
Configurability. The range of configurability in many areas is impressive. Sound, graphics, realism, driver aids, race length, sessions to run, and other aspects of the game are generally well chosen and logically laid out. Functions controlled by the keyboard and controller buttons can be configured by the user, which is great. Also, I really like the Hall of Fame feature, in which my best lap times - and my name - are recorded and can be viewed later. I also like the fact that different drivers, with different configurations for realism and driver aids, can be defined and named. This is a very thoughtful and appreciated feature.
Some Quibbles. However, I do find the relationship between the replay and the Pi analysis - and what gets saved when - to be a little confusing. Also, in the garage, the dropdown list of setups is sorted by the position of the file in the DOS directory structure (!) instead of alphabetically or by track or by date. As the number of setups grows, this oversight begins to have maddening effects, as you search for your latest setup, buried somewhere in the slot vacated by the one you last deleted.
I must say that I really dislike the switch to an external view during pit stops. This smacks of arcade games and I'd much rather have the option of sitting in the car and having the crew work around me, as in GP2 and ICR2. Also, I wish there were a way to have the pit board display split times, along with previous lap time and best for the session. This would be much lower overhead than the existing realtime clock, which significantly impacts frame rate so that usually I leave it off. Without the dash, which also has a big frame rate hit, I have no way of knowing my last lap time unless I switch on the pit board, glance at it, and turn it off, an exercise which invariably distracts me enough to mess me up for the next turn. Finally, I really wish it were possible to go to the garage during a practice or qualifying session without ending the session.
In Perspective. The cumbersome, non-intuitive, and painfully slow menus in Ubi Soft's F1RS made me appreciate how good CPR's user interface really is. Also F1RS is so lacking in configuration flexibility that it is unplayable on my P-166 with Rendition, simply because I cannot turn off enough graphics display features, such as CPU-hungry a real-time clock, and the dashboard, to get a playable frame rate. By comparison, CPR is a model of user configurability.
On the whole, CPR's user interface is excellent, in my opinion, and gives other sim manufacturers something to shoot for.
The garage is another area which shows a lot of thought. The selection of items that can be adjusted by the user seems quite appropriate and complete to me, and their presentation is very logical and well laid out.
There are some other nice touches. When you save a setup for a track, go to another track, and then return to the first track, the garage will reload your last setup for that track and will show the name of the setup in the dropdown list. Also, if you make changes without saving them, the garage saves them anyway in a track-specific "Custom" setup file just in case. These little details are much appreciated.
In the garage is an innovative feature, a Race Engineer who will explain the function and effect of each item which you can adjust. He will also ask you questions about the car's behavior, and, depending on your answers, suggest adjustments to address the things you don't like about the handling. If you wish, he'll even make these changes for you. This is great, but I found his questions rather simplistic, and his approach to problem-solving also rather simplistic. For example, when I complained of understeer in slow corners, he just kept increasing the negative front camber till it was at its limit. It would be better if he had a more sophisticated selection of tools in his toolbag. Still, the Race Engineer is a clever innovation, and one with great potential.
Aside from the aforementioned sort order of setup files in the dropdown list, my only major complaint about the garage is the limited range of the brake balance and steering lock sliders, and the latter is addressed by the upcoming patch.
If you like to play in the garage, make sure you read Jim Getzin's setup guide. Also check out my overview of vehicle dynamics. If you just want to get going, download setups from Jim and from the Apex.
Overall, I feel that the CPR garage sets a new standard for sims. Great work, TRI and Microsoft!
As is typical with modern sims, CPR allows you to save and review replays of your last few laps. It also provides graphs of these laps in a "Pi Analysis", which allows you to select speed, g-forces, or other factors and compare the graphs of these factors for two laps, either from the same session or another saved session. This is well implemented, aside from some bizarre behaviors which disappeared after I installed the 2.1 reference driver from Rendition, and much appreciated. Also, the replay files are in text, so you could conceivably import the data into a spreadsheet and create your own analysis and graphs, as my brother and I have done with ICR2 replay files.
I had a few complaints: I found it confusing going back and forth from the replay screen to the Pi analysis screen, and am still not clear on how to save both a replay file and a Pi analysis file for the same session - or whether this is even necessary. Also, the replays lack sound, but this is addressed in the upcoming patch. Also, I would like to be able to view several different factors, such as speed and g-forces, at the same time, as I can do in GP2 and F1RS.
Overall, I feel this feature is reasonably well implemented and solid, and I much appreciate it.
Network play is the obvious trend in game development, and in racing sims it provides an exciting new dimension in the racing experience. I am very excited about this (as you can tell if you read my vision of the future) and I have been eagerly awaiting a formula car sim with networking capabilities built in.
CPR does not disappoint at all in this area. Its networking implementation is superb. Starting a race between two machines on my LAN was delightfully simple. An impromptu race with my brother in our first practice session occurred within moments. Quite impressive.
Once I installed MS IE 4.0 (a bug prevented the 3.02 version which came with CPR from submitting the sign-up form ) I was able to join Microsoft's Internet Gaming Zone, chat with other CPR racers, and join in some races. The Zone software that automatically downloaded worked well, and even automatically started CPR for me once I'd joined a race. The whole process was smooth as silk.
In the races, there was considerable ghosting due to poor latency from one player, but players with good latency (meaning their machines could send packets across the Internet to the Zone reasonably quickly) didn't move around too terribly much. Current modem and Internet technology imposes packet transmission time limitations that simply cannot be gotten around. I have little Internet gaming experience, but it seems to me that CPR has as good performance as one might expect at this time.
Note that CPR, like SODA, has TCP/IP built in. This allows you to do networked play over the Internet without any additional software, unlike N2 and F1RS, which require separate software to play over the Internet.
As N2 showed, network sim racing has great potential. A good implementation can be a challenge. It looks to me like Microsoft and TRI got this part right the first time.
Note: if you are doing network play on a LAN, make sure you have the IPX protocol installed on all machines which will be participating. Also, you may need to set the Frame Type to Ethernet 802.3 in the Advanced Properties sheet for the IPX protocol (see Control Panel, Networks) on the ethernet adapter on each machine in order for the games to see each other.
A car paint editor has already been released, and user-developed carsets are already available as I write this from Jeff Antley at Redwolf30 and Devin Pruzin at Jim Getzin's site. Since I'm sure these guys are doing a much better job of developing carsets than I could, I'll leave it to 'em!
Bugs and design issues are discussed in the next page.