Those of you who play motorcycle racing video games...

Your body would never feel right... You'd be having to hold yourself up instead of the g's keeping you on the bike.

 

That's what baffles me. I bet there are several thousands of us racers, track-dayers, and other just bikers who would pay $1k+ for one of these type gadgets.

 

Yea, I thought of that. They can build a simulator for fighter jets. Can a motorcycle be that much more difficult?

 

Yes...yes it can.

None of the motion sims can do the one thing that is really required. They can all generate the correct momentary forces but they can not generate sustained forces. That's hard to pull off. Can they make a set of controls on an apparatus that leans? Yep...it's been done. Can they do it at a price point that will sell in volume to console gamers....maybe but not likely.

 

OK, so what if the sim didn't actually lean, but the screen rotated based on handlebar input and speed? Not perfect, but better than a joystick.
I think the first and most important thing is to lose the joystick and get something that looks/feels something like a bike.

 

You can do a complete set of bike controls easily enough. The foot controls would need a little thought to make them good. The game would also have to be programmed to allow for independent axis control of the front and rear brake but that shouldn't be too hard for them either.

 

I saw at Fontana in February that there was a "trainer" stationary road race motorcycle. It had resistance bands, handle bars and hand foot controls. Its about $1500. I told them they need to incorporate that into a game. That would be fricken awesome. With motorcycle games, I have found the more "realistic" they try to make the steering etc.. The less it is "realistic". The older games were better.

 

I've thought about it a lot over the years myself. The only thing they could do to approximate some of the forces involved in riding a bike would be to have the entire room lean forward and backward to simulate braking and acceleration, and then the room would need to swivel left and right to simulate lean. My theoretical environment also had rotating disks on the floor where your knee slider would touch to simulate sliding it across the tarmac while in motion. Making all this rotation happen without it feeling like the entire room was moving would be the trick of course, but if the visual cues were compelling enough it might be possible to sell the rest. You'd also need wind. And brolly girls.

 

I definitely don't expect it to feel realistic. I imagine something like this, but with game controls.

http://cku28.com/en/

 

G suits instead of leathers? I could see that working out really well for car sims where the driver is still fully connected to the machine.

 

Negative. I play the Ride video games mostly. I only play NBA Jams when I want to hurt Eddie's feelings.

I try to play the CoD games, but after a few minutes I feel like I have to puke. Even after I am done playing, I will feel dizzy and shitty for 30 minutes.

As far as the steering controls, I just use the left stick.

 

Exactly. I've argued this many times when people used to say you had to run full sim settings in these stupid games. If it's hard to do a lap at speed without crashing, it's not a simulation. Riding a motorcycle isn't that difficult.

I've just accepted that the physics of riding a motorcycle will never carry over to games and waste my time pretending to race cars, fly airliners, and play in the NHL instead.

 

i liked SBK X ... only game physics that ive seen that are close.. very dull turn feeling at speed, you can actually loose the front, highside avoidance requires you to press throttle on and off rapidly on corner exit... sucks that almost every ps3 game no longer has online races..."met" some cool people over seas.

 

i can't even get down fucking bray hill most of the time, pushing forward all the time on the stick or not. it has me catch air going past the grandstands. there's no fucking jump there.

i don't want to say fuck this game because i fucking need it but god damn. it is just not fuckin playable.

fuckity fuck fuck fuckerson, and one more fuck for good fuckin measure.

in other words, i am frustrated.

 

Ride 2 has the most realistic handling of any game I have ever played. But it doesn't have the TT circuit.

It seems in most of the games the bike isn't actually rolling across the pavement, it is kinda floating in the air with the pavement going underneath it. And when you turn, the pavement moves under the bike, rather than the bike changing positions on the pavement. I don't really know how to explain it, but it is fucked up.

The current software used on the Ride games, and on MotoGP 17 (at least, I didn't get 15 or 16) fixes that.