busybee fluffy rambles

I’ve also been having a lot of fun doing VR driving with Assetto Corsa and American Truck Simulator, which do a really good job of triggering my driving anxiety in a safe situation where I feel more comfortable with things. Also thanks to an Assetto Corsa mod I have now finally driven two of the cars I’ve really wanted to own at some point, namely a Miata and an Ioniq 5N. Of the two I definitely prefer the Ioniq, and it continues to be my “if money were no object and I needed a new car” car. (I have no idea how accurate the simulation is, though, especially for the Ioniq; the Miata was built-in to the game but the Ioniq was a third-party addon.)

I’m still trying to find any of the city driving mods for either of those games, and also it’d be cool if American Truck Simulator let you just jump straight into roadtrips instead of having to do the career mode up front.

When I bought ATS I of course bought two of the DLC packs, namely Pacific Northwest (where I live now) and New Mexico (where I grew up). I haven’t tried the New Mexico pack yet, but the PNW is great in how accurate it is for the parts which are modeled. However, one of the first jobs I took in it was hauling some lumber from SODO to Bellingham and it was a little hilarious how much of I-5 got skipped; basically, once you get past the SODO mess, you’re basically transported right to Everett (skipping the entirety of Seattle itself), and then it’s not much longer before you’re in Bellingham, which is normally about a 3-hour drive at semi truck speeds. But I guess they were focusing more on gameplay than realism, and also, like, that’d be a lot of content to model.

With Assetto Corsa I found it very helpful to pay the $2 for AC Content Manager, which actually makes the experience of selecting a car and track (and installing mods thereof) reasonable. For the actual mods themselves I’ve mostly been going to assettocorsamods.io which has a pretty good selection of cars (although the actual car browser is a bit fucky, especially for EVs), although unfortunately there’s something wrong with it that stops it from working from within the Content Manager UI.

I’m pretty impressed at the driving feel of the Logitech G29 I picked up a while back. The force feedback on it is especially convincing. I opted for the shifterless model but I’m finding the paddle shifters obnoxious to use so I’ll probably buy a shifter at some point too, although for now I’m happy just driving AT vehicles anyway. (Or, rather, the Ioniq 5N which doesn’t even have any sort of variable transmission, being a fixed-gear EV.)

I think the main thing I’ve realized from this, though, is that the framerate on my 2080Ti is a bit chunky and I really want to upgrade my GPU. Someday.