Lost my first game save in 6 years

As the title says I had my first game save glitch in a Forza games across 3 profiles a 4 releases, so 1 in 12 crapped out. It was a little used FM3 save, so no big loss.

Last night I decided to pump up my Forza Rewards points on two of my gamertags that are only Tier 4. Forza 3 was my least favorite of the franchise and the one where these accounts have the most left to do. Looking at the achievements I had gotten it looks like I never even played FM3 with the problem gamertag until just before FM4 was released and even then I think I just created a save to get bonus FM4 cars for having them in my FM3 garage. It looks like I then played it for about a day on 12/9/2011 to get the driver level up to 5 so the FM3 garage transfer bonus would trigger. I haven’t used it since. According to the rewards site I had 41 cars in that save which seems excessively high considering how little I used it.

It’s not a catastrophe, but I’m not sure what caused it to fail. The one thing that comes to mind is that I changed my gamertag at some point during FM4. The FM3 game save should have still worked like the FM4 save did. There was a save file on the internal 4GB flash drive on my slim for the correct current gamertag, but a vinyl group for the old gametag. Another thing that was out of the ordinary was a title update to be applied when I started FM3, but I have cleared my cache since I last played FM3 on this console. Regardless, I got back up to driver level 5 in about 3 hours and picked up 9 new achievements for that gamertag along the way.

Starting over in FM3 after FM4 and FH sure hits home how crappy that game was to me. I felt like I was driving on ice and Turn 10 was really stingy with the credits in that one. The lack of credits alone was the single biggest reason I didn’t like it much. Even in the starter car I didn’t have enough credits to max it out in F-class until I had played demolition derby with the AI for a couple races. However, the early races are a problem in all Forzas, start from the back and have to bash your way to the front in races that are too short on tracks that would be better suited to go carts

AI seems a little wacked. In some of the early races I was posting times in the top 1% with the starter Fiesta, but the AI is still faster. This is only a problem on the short 3 lap sprints like Ladera, not so much in the longer more fluid tracks. Looking at my review of FM3 I did dumb down the AI back then, but didn’t upgrade my cars at all to save money. That’s why I never published a Kitchen Sink for FM3. I do have one my hard drive, but it only has 10 cars listed as modified out of the 122 it shows as in my garage. Since I wasn’t modifying cars I wasn’t tuning and the Tonka Toy was never adjusted to FM3. Last night I did upgradewhen I could and had the AI set on Hard and just accepted I wasn’t going to win every race.

New Tool: Color Converter

Updated to links to point to Version 1.2 on November 30, 2011 – I deleted CMYK conversion.  The algorithm was really poor in coming up with color matches.  I also added a note about using the Analysis ToolPak Add-In for the Hexidecimal conversion.

Getting shapes right is only part of the problem in producing accurate logos. Color reproduction can make or break a logo reproduction. Everyone perceives color a little differently and add to this variations of individual monitors, color shift due to lighting in photos and it’s anybody’s guess how close reality is to what you see on screen. The monitor I used for FM3 had some color issues I never could correct out of it and it showed in the logos I did. The monitor over drove green to the point most grassy areas seemed to fluoresce. When I imported these into FM4 I had to do a lot of color correcting to get things to look right. But I was still eyeballing things in the game compared to images I was viewing on my laptop. Neither screen could be considered “calibrated”, a better method would be to go to the source and just find a value for the colors.

There are multiple methods available to obtain accurate color data for logos. Corporate design guidelines put out by various companies sometimes detail colors of corporate branding or if you can find an official logo file just use a color picker tool available in various apps to select color. This won’t work for everything, but is a good start. For older logos, you may have to search a corporate history to find images. My least trusted source for color is a photograph. Pigments fade over time. The developer may have “corrected” the image in processing. Images found on the internet older than about 2000 were scanned at some point and that adds another layer of uncertainty. Even with digital photos, colors shift with lighting and who knows what kind of processing it’s been through.

The Color Converter contains a set of tools to translate from a couple of the more widely used standards to Forza Settings. When choosing a color, select the X button for advanced options and you get three sliders to adjust Hue, Saturation and Brightness. It appears Forza uses a variation on the HSV (also known as HSB) color model with values normalized to a range of 0-1. However, RGB values may be more easy to find. Transformations exist to directly calculate HSV values from RGB. RGB information is commonly presented as either 3 numbers for red, green and blue with a range of 0-255 or as a hexidecimal string in the format #RRGGBB. In rare cases it may be 0-100% in these cases mulitply the RGB values by 255 to get the range for input in the converter.

The Forza color sliders have a range of clicks for each displayed number. For example it may take two to three clicks with the d-pad to go from .50 to .51. The converters make use of this by indicating which side of the range to use to get closest to the desired number. This is represented by L, M & R in the converter results. The converter results are truncated (not rounded) to a whole number and remainder values are translated as (L<4, 4<M<6, R>6). For example 94.9% translates to 0.94R and 95.1% becomes 0.95L. If you don’t have enough clicks to use a middle setting, just put it where it’s closest. My Mk 1 eyeball isn’t calibrated fine enough to see a one click difference most of the time.

This tool will be another tab in the next Kitchen Sink, but for now I’m making it available as a stand alone spreadsheet. The tool is available here or by following the link under spreadsheets to the right.

Moving Game Saves and Multiple Consoles Revisited

Cloud Storage Update 12/11:

With the fall 2012 Dashboard Update Microsoft has added Cloud Storage as an option.  This doesn’t invalidate anything written below, but depending on your need Cloud Storage may make my old article obsolete. Everything I originally wrote still works, but using Cloud Storage is a simpler and official method to use multiple consoles. I’ve since added an article on using the Cloud with Forza 4.

DLC is still a problem when using the Cloud. Before trying to play your Cloud save on a different console you will need make sure all DLC is installed on the other Xbox.  DLC includes :

1. Launch Bonus Pack
2. LCE VIP Pack
3. BMW Art Car Pack
4. Up to 5 Pre-Order Cars
5. Forza Disc 2
6. Monthly DLC Packs
7. Porche Expansion Pack
8. Hyundai Veloster Bonus Pack
9. 2013 SRT Viper GTS Bonus Pack

You see #5 in that list?  This is a gotcha.  Disc 2 includes car packs that are seen as DLC by the game. If you installed it on your hard drive, you need to have it installed on the hard drive of the machine you are trying to play on. But run into a Catch-22, you can only install it from in the game and if you load a save that used it when you don’t have it installed you run risk of losing cars.  In this case use a different gamertag or a different save location to start Forza and run the first race then install Disc 2. After Disc 2 is installed and you have all the DLC installed from your download history you shouldn’t have problems.  If you get an warning message when you start the game about unlicensed content, you missed something. Since a single disc version of FM4 was bundled with some Xboxes you can now buy the disc 2 DLC from the Marketplace as well.

Notes on Revision:

Since I originally wrote this Microsoft has introduced a couple features that needed to be addressed and FM4 launched.

First off, Microsoft enabled USB flash drive support when the “Slim” consoles were introduced. I’ve since moved to flash drives instead of the memory unit. I’ve updated the text the reflect this. Use of memory units should be avoided at this point in time.

Whenever I mention a USB flash drive below an older memory unit could be used in it’s place on a first generation Xbox, but there’s no reason why you should. The USB flash drives are large enough they could replace hard drives that shipped with my original Xbox. Memory Unit support was dropped completely from the the Slim consoles. I went ahead and bought the officially licensed Xbox Flash Drive by Sandisk even though there were cheaper alternatives. The Xbox supposedly verifies the performance of the device when it formats it and will reject low performance flash drives. I’ve used 3 different devices (FM3’s LCE Flashdrive, and older 8GB Sandisk and the Xbox Flash Drive) and all have worked. For the month leading up to FM4’s launch I played Mass Effect 2 and Forza 3 off the USB drive without problems.

The second change was the introduction of Xbox Live Family Plans. You break even on 2 accounts and start saving at 3 accounts. It also simplifies account management. Even though my girlfriend had her own account I was paying for it and doing all the management. She also usually left it to me to buy points and download DLC. I had 3 accounts from the FM2 days where I ran one account in each region in the game. So, I had 4 accounts I was managing with different expiration dates. It seemed whenever I used one of my secondary accounts it needed to be renewed. Collecting them into one family just made sense. The only drawback I’ve seen is the primary account is the only one that can buy points now. For a secondary account to get points you have to do a transfer.

Lastly the Xbox 360 Slim was introduced that changed the form factor for the hard drive accessory and did away with memory unit support. This really only comes into play if your first generation Xbox craps out and you replace it with a slim. Migrating your data may be more difficult.

*** UPDATED October 2011***

I see a lot of crap spewed over on FM.net by users with no clue about what they are talking about. It’s pretty shitty that Turn 10 relies on their players to be the first line of customer support. For technical issues they need someone to monitor the boards and weed out bad information. One of the most frequent post whores over there seems to just post up “contact Xbox support” for a reply and appears to have no relevant experience about which he speaks, so I decided to write up my experience with Xbox DRM, multiple consoles and moving game saves.

I have two Xboxes in my house and play on either depending on which one is open. My girlfriend uses one exclusively and I use the other primarily and it travels with me when I go out of town for work on extended projects. In FM2 I lost count of the number of times I moved my game save, and in FM3 I moved the save 5 or 6 times between the two Xboxes before deciding to just leave it on a USB flash drive to plug in to which ever machine I wanted, I’ve never recovered my gamertag or had a need to. From what I’ve read, gamertag recovery is intended to be used only when your harddrive has been formatted or you buy a new console and don’t migrate from the old one. The hard drive is removable, but this wasn’t to make it easy to take to a friend’s house. It is so Microsoft can sell a cheap drive less version and rape you for a hard drive later without the customer needing to crack open the case to install it.

All problems with game saves and DLC come from Microsoft’s use of DRM on game content. When you buy content the license is registered for your gamertag and your console ID. When you try to use it, the DLC tries to authenticate against the console ID and only if that fails uses the purchasing gamertag. The console ID check doesn’t need an internet connection, but the gamertag check requires an internet connection. It’s really simple, when you download content all gamertags on that Xbox can use it. If you swap consoles only the gamertag that purchased the content can use it and then only after authenticating over Xbox Live. Where you will have problems is when you swap consoles for any reason and your internet connection drops offline. Since you are no longer on the original console that check fails and without internet it can’t verify the gamertag, so you can’t use the DLC.

It was this way in FM2, when I ran into my first RROD. I bought a new Xbox while my original Xbox was getting repaired. I used the migration cable to move my hard drive contents to the new Xbox since it was larger, but when I lost my internet connection I would get kicked out of the game with an error about “This profile uses missng content”. Different gamertags saw different content and it was a real nuisance. Eventually Microsoft came out with their licence migration tool and that fixed my problems. To avoid this in the future I took some steps that, though not cheap, have been bulletproof:

1. Set up a gold account associated with each Xbox. Tonka Crash is my original gamertag on what I consider my primary Xbox. Zen Driver is a gold account on my secondary Xbox even though I use the Tonka Crash gamertag most frequently on this box. A Family Plan makes this cheaper.
2. Use only the gamertag associated with each Xbox to download DLC to it’s hard drive. Tonka Crash is used to download content on my primary Xbox and Zen Driver downloads content on my second Xbox. You can’t use the same gamertag for multiple consoles, because Microsoft maintains a history and knows you already bought it, so they don’t offer it up for sale again. Your download history can be used to download it on multiple consoles, but the license is still associated with the original console you used to buy it.
3. Buy a copy of the game for each Xbox. Since there is zero day DLC in the game case that you cannot buy from the Marketplace the only option is to get another copy of the game. In my case this was 2 preordered LCE copies.
4. Buy DLC for each console. That meant 2 Season Passes, one for Tonka Crash and one for Zen Driver. Pre-order DLC complicated this. In FM3, pre-order DLC was only available from Gamestop, so I bought 2 pre-orders to keep the DLC matched. In FM4 there were 5 unique Pre-order DLC cars. Since I was already planning to get 2 copies of the game I went ahead and got them from different places to get 2 of the pre-order cars and tracked down the other 3 on e-bay. These got installed on my primary console, so both my girlfriend and I could use them. She really wanted the CR-Z and I wanted them all. I then redownloaded the DLC on my secondary xbox using my download history for Tonka Crash. When I play as Tonka Crash, the original purchaser, I have access to the pre-order cars on both Xboxes, but Zen Driver cannot see them on the secondary console. I’m running a risk that the cars will disappear from my garage if Xbox Live is offline (see below). These cars are cheap in game to replace so I’m not too worried if that happens.

So now I have two Xboxes with DLC installed for each Xbox. What about moving the save? 

1. Get a USB flash drive, 16GB 32GB (as of Nov 2012) is the largest the Xbox supports.
2. Put your Gamertag on the USB flash drive. Go into System Settings->Memory->Hard Drive->Profiles find your gamertag and MOVE it to the USB flash drive. It will show up in the
3.  System Settings->Memory as a memory unit. You have to log out for this step, but the system will prompt you. Once it’s on the USB flash drive log into that profile. I always move the gamertag before moving any of the game files.
4. Put your game save files on the USB flash drive. You need to be signed in to the gamertag you just moved for this step. Go into System Settings->Memory->Hard Drive->Game Content. Find FM4 and find all the files owned by your gamertag. These are save files for FM4 One has “saved game” in it’s name, the rest contain your tunes, paints, etc. The only files we are concerned with are owned by your gamertag. All the other files in the directory are DLC, and the data installed from the game disks. The game save file can only exist in one place at a time, so it must be MOVED to the USB flash drive, but the save files for tunes and paints can be copied so you can backup your tunes and paints across systems or on multiple keys. A lot of people seem to think the game save can’t be moved because they try to copy it and get an error that it can’t be copied. Which is true; you can’t copy the game save, but it can be moved. A lot of people think the game save consists of the entire directory. That’s not true. The game save is one file, the other files are saved data, but not considered saved game. Only the game save cannot be copied everything else can be copied as much as you want and I recommend backing up vinyls, tunes and designs. These can get corrupted and if it does you have to delete that file. If you have a backup you can recover, if not the contents of a corrupt file are gone.
5. Do not copy any of the DLC packs, you should already have them downloaded on the other console. If they are properly licensed on the hard drive you will be able to use them even when playing from your USB flash drive.
6. If you want to copy any other game saves, now is the time to do it. Some games let you copy game saves, some will only let you move them. It really depends on the game and whether or not the gamer would gain an advantage by being able to load an old save. I have copies of my Mass Effect 1 & 2 saves on both of my systems just in case one system dies, since it was one of the first games I ran into that made having a history relevant to the next release of the game series.
7. Do you have the desktop theme? Leave it behind. It was DLC too, so use your gamertag associated with the console to download it. Like game content, once it’s downloaded you should be able to use it. I am.

Now your gamertag and gamesave exist on the USB flash drive, but all add on content is on the hard drives. You can play off the USB flash drive or move your gamertag and content to the hard drive of a different Xbox. I have the Tonka Crash gamertag and save on my USB flash drive.When I plug it into my secondary console Zen Driver has already download all necessary DLC, and it’s licensed to that console, so the Tonka Crash gamertag can use it without needing an internet connection.

On to the problems:

1. “I took my hard drive over to my friend’s/parent’s/dealer’s house to get the DLC and it doesn’t work when I brought it home” No shit, Sherlock, in this case the DLC is licensed to the xbox you used for downloading, not yours. There is no licensing scheme to associate it to a hard drive, only the console ID and gamertag. If you suffer from this problem get your console on the internet and migrate the licenses. If you just copied your friend’s DLC files, go into your Memory Settings, delete it, then go buy it. A copy of someone else’s DLC will never work. I’m surprised how often this problem and variations on the same thing keep coming up. If you are going to use someone else’s internet to download DLC, take your console, not just the hard drive. It’s not that difficult to pull the cables loose from the back of your Xbox and take your console to your friend’s house. Depending on the relative generations of your console and your friends, you may be able to take just the console and leave your cables and power supply at home. BUT there are gotchas, not all consoles have HDMI and the power plug changed on the newer generation consoles. Remember to take out any disks before moving the console. I fubar’d a FM2 disk after it flew to Florida in the drive.
2. “I used a different gamertag to download the DLC and it doesn’t work on my console” This is usually some dumb ass that was home for Christmas and wasted his LCE code on his family’s xbox using his brother’s gamertag and now can’t use the code when he went back to school. You need to migrate the license to your console using the gamertag that originally downloaded it, or buy another copy of the game to get a fresh set of cards. If it was Marketplace DLC just buy a new set if you can’t migrate the licenses. This might be a circumstance where recoverying the gamertag might be worthwhile. Recover the gamertag and migrate the licenses then all users should be able to use the DLC.
3. “I just bought a bigger hard drive and my DLC doesn’t work on the new drive” Personally I’ve never seen this issue and since DLC isn’t licensed to the hard drive it can’t be the real problem. Usually the guy complaining bought a new Xbox with a bigger hard drive, moved his content, but still needs to migrate his licenses. During the time I was playing FM2, the NXE update came out that let you install games to your hard drive. I swapped out the 20GB drive on my secondary system for a 120GB drive. I used the included migration cable and didn’t have any issues with DRM since I was still playing on the same console.
4. “My DLC cars disappeared from my garage.” I’ve never seen this, and hopefully never will. However, I do have an idea about what’s going on. In FM2 you couldn’t play at all if you used unlicensed DLC. In FM3 it seems T10 decided to let you play, but they would fuck you over in the process and delete any cars that came from unlicensed DLC. You do get a warning message expliciting telling you this will happen, but apparently idiots can’t read and just click through it. It’s real simple: If you change Xbox consoles since you bought DLC, you must migrate your licenses to avoid this problem. Never rely on the connection to Xbox live to be online for authenticating your gamertag. If you take your save on a USB key to a friends house make sure he has the DLC, and it’s licenses are tied to the console before loading your game. If your buddy didn’t do a license migration after his last RROD and you load your game save, say bye-bye to your DLC cars. This has been happening to several people that take their hard drive to a friend’s house without internet. As soon as they load their game save, “Poof”, bye bye DLC cars. With 30 DLC cars at launch and another 10 per month odds are you will have DLC in your garage. If you connect your hard drive to any console other than the one licensed for the DLC you must be connected to Xbox Live or the DLC will be deleted from your garage. There is no recovery other than to purchase the cars again in game.
5. “I used a Datel Xport to backup my game save and I can’t use my game save” To put it bluntly: You’re fucked and it’s all your fault. In Microsoft marketing speak, 3rd party peripherals are not supported by Xbox or Xbox Live. In reality, the Datel Xport was used for glitching game credits and Turn 10 introduced code changes to combat this. Moving your game save by any method not native to the Xbox runs the risk for corrupting your game save. I’ve been lucky, I’ve never had a game save get corrupted, and would like a supported method to backup the thousands of hours spent in the forza games. The best I can do is try to avoid behavior likely to corrupt a save. My primary Xbox is plugged into an UPS to avoid power cutouts. Necessary or not, I still make it a habit to back out to the start screen before shutting down or jumping to the dashboard. I come from PC gamer background where all games had a method to exit the game and return to the desktop. On the Xbox I’ve found it odd that most games don’t have a designated exit.
6. “My Xbox died and I bought a new one, how do I recover my game” If your hard drive failed, you’re screwed. You should have used the Cloud Storage feature. Start over. If it was a RROD or E74 error your console is toast, but your hard drive should be fine. You have a couple options here. If you get a new xbox of the same generation you can just put your old drive on it and use it right away if you want. Personally I would go ahead and move my stuff to the newer hard drive. Here you have a choice, you can either use the official Xbox migration cable or a USB flash drive to move stuff between the hard drives. I’ve done both methods and either way works. If you have a migration cable go for it, if you have to order one, I’d probably use the USB flash drive. The migration cable is only usable for this one task and once you use it, odds are you will never need it again. There are also 2 version of the cable one for the 1st gen only and one that does both. My preference for the USB flash drive is that it is a flexible device useful beyond just storing Xbox data. BUT, and this is a big but, to use a USB flash drive you need access to a console the same generation as your dead console since you need someplace to plug in your old hard drive.  (You could pull the drive out of the 1st gen enclosure and plug it directly into the slim console, but this violates the warranty on the hard drive) This may force you to get a migration cable. In my case I have 2 consoles in the house. If you don’t have a spare, you need to borrow a friends or maybe Geek Squad at Best Buy could help you out. You need to mount your old drive onto a working console, move your profile and game save data like I describe above to the USB flash drive and then put on the new hard drive and move the data off the USB flash drive to the new drive. It may take a couple passes to get everything if you had a lot of stuff. Skip copying installed game disks and DLC can be re-downloaded using your download history in Account Management. After you get everything moved you need to migrate your licenses to the new console and you’re ready to go again.
7. “How do I move my game to a different gamertag.” If you just renamed your existing gamertag the existing save should still be accessible. If you want to change to a completely new account you can’t. The save is tied to your gamertag and there is no renaming the game save. You have to start over. However, you can gift stuff to the new account to make the transition less painful. This requires both accounts have Gold Xbox Live accounts. You can gift cars, designs, tunes and vinyl groups. I routinely gift copies of designs and vinyl groups between accounts to act as a save just in case something gets corrupted. To move credits between accounts have the cash poor account put up an auction with a buyout for you to purchase from the account with the credits. If you can’t access the old save because you can’t log into the old gamertag for whatever reason, contact Xbox support, they should be able to help you recover your login information.

Always verify that DLC exists before loading the game when you move from console to console. Go into the System Settings->Memory->Hard Drive->Games and make sure all DLC is there. Whenever I buy DLC, I take the time to do it on both consoles so I know it’s there.

The waiting is the worst

I didn’t sleep much last night. I’m 43 and feel like a kid waiting for Christmas. I’m surprised I’m getting this excited about FM4 after the disappoint of FM3. I’ve got 2 copies of LCE preordered, one from Amazon that is “Out for Delivery” as I write this and one from the Microsoft Store with no idea when it will ship that didn’t ship until this morning. It seems ridiculous that Microsoft makes the game, but you have to order from anywhere but them to get it on release day. For a company that provides the OS of so many servers I’m extremely disappointed in their web store. I also spent time and tracked down pre-order codes for the cars I don’t have coming with my orders.  I found 2 of the 3 so far. After I get the game, I’ll find out if they work.

Last night I dug out my old MS Wireless Wheel. I’m going to need some practice, I haven’t used it in years. The power supply went missing when we did a remodel of the living room and I just got a replacement off ebay this week. I bought it back in FM2 and it helped me get a handle on driving since FM2 was the first driving game I’d played outside a Dave and Busters. Since then I’ve primarily been a controller user. The wheel just took too much space in the living room and the controller could be used laying on the couch. Now that I’m playing in my office, I don’t have to worry about putting it away when I’m done, and my seating position lends itself to using the wheel.

I like using the controller with the chat pad attachment, but it’s getting painful to use for any length of time.  Since I passed 40 I’ve really noticed my body aging.  Creaky knees going down stairs and I think I’m developing carpal tunnel. I use a mouse all day and it still doesn’t flair up doing that.  But, my hands are hurting with as little as 15 minutes of racing. I bought a carpal tunnel glove to support my right wrist and have been tinkering with the controller a little. Mainly to make it so my hand doesn’t have to wrap so tightly around it to hold it.  I swapped to a wired controller which has a flat back since there’s no battery.  I was finding my fingers would cramp being wedged against the battery on the wireless controller. I also added some self adhesive non-slip grips to the controller to bulk up the controller and make it so that my grip doesn’t need to be as tight holding it. I’ve been using a Speed Freek since they came out during FM2. That has all helped, but I have a feeling the wheel will probably be the best for my hands. I’m just not thrilled about being locked into a fixed seating position and the wheel isn’t as user friendly in the menus. Also I lose the chat pad which I think is one of the most overlooked accessories Xbox has made.

The honeymoon is over

When FM2 came out it I played for 18 months straight every chance I could. It’s been about 3 months since FM3 launched and I think I may be over it. I don’t know that I’ll buy a FM4 if it ever shows up. I think the last straw was Che coming out saying the latest glitch probably wouldn’t be fixed because T10 didn’t think it was a “showstopper” even though several players pointed out they could shave seconds off a lap in F-Class using it. I don’t get it, this is a racing game, and if you cheat racing it’s fine, but cheat the game for credits, you get banned.

I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I finished an actual race and I hadn’t done anything beyond logging in to check my storefront sale all week. Last night my FM3 disk came out of the Xbox for the first time since I bought it and I spent the evening getting back into Mass Effect.   I’d made it about halfway through the ME campaign before something got me sidetracked and I’d never gotten back to it. With ME2’s release, I thought it would be nice to finish the first one before grabbing the sequel.  I’m not one to bounce back and forth between lots of different games. I usually play one to completion or at least for a couple weeks before switching.  I started around 8:30pm and next thing I know it was 12:30am and I had no idea where the time went.

I see T10 announced their first DLC track pack. I just can’t get excited about it, because it’s of no use to me with the fubar’d online play. I’m seriously considering a PS3 as soon as GT5 comes out, or maybe even sooner to use as a bluray player. I added bluray to my HTPC around Xmas and I’m not impressed with the software used for playback so a standalone unit is sounding more appealing.

What is a Replica?

Webster’s calls a replica “An exact copy in every detail” That’s a definition I strive for in my painting, but I seem to be in the minority. Judging by the comments on FM.net, people look at anything with numbers on the sides as a replica. A true replica is a copy of a car at a specific event. Anything else is an orignal work or knockoff. To me an original race livery is really no different than the fantasy liveries. Some can be quite well done, but not anything that interests me. The worst are the cheap knockoffs. They just dilute the storefront for those of us trying to create accurate replicas. Just put some shapes that are close and throw some in game manufacturer decals and sell tons cheap. Not to sound bitter, but it’s is annoying to spend days on a spot on replica and not be able to sell any because some asshat is giving away a poorly done knockoff. I keep thinking someone that cares will know the difference and chose quality over price, but I have a feeling not too many people care. Or if they care, they don’t know the difference.

Part of the fun for me with a game like Forza is the research into the cars. One thing you will find from reading about the history of automobiles is that if it had a motor in it, someone, somewhere probably raced it. Those are the cars I find interesting. The Celica-Supra was a car I thought was cool as a kid, seeing one in good shape is still eye catching to me. It took a while, but found that there were a handful that raced for a couple seasons in Europe. It then becomes a challenge to find enough good photos to recreate a replica. Doing a modern race car is pretty simple. If it raced in the last couple years, you will usually be able to find tons of photos. Especially if it a high profile car like Sébastien Loeb’s, Citroën C4 WRC. Finding detailed photos of a car at a race in a minor series from 40 years ago brings another level of difficulty to doing an accurate replica. I spent around 8 hours hunting for photos of the Skyline KPGC10 #15 at Fuji in 1972 just to identify the logos. Nothing was good enough to see what all the logos were. I even bought a couple designs to see what the logos were, but no one had them right. Eventually I followed a link to a website in Japanese that sold reproductions of the decals on that car. In addition to being good enough to see all the text, they gave dimensions which helped get the proportions right.

I come from an engineering background and have built scale model as a hobby for about 35 years. I consider myself more of a draftsman than an artist. Personally I insist on getting the logos as correct as possible to start with. I joined the Logo Swap Coop thinking this would save time, but am ready to give up on them. It’s provided very few usable logos and I’ve since found that members are circulating the cars to people not in the group which was supposed to be verboten and apparently some are also intentionally sabotaging their submissions. Also since the group splintered into subgroups I have the feeling that my group leader has quit playing the game. I haven’t seen a car in weeks, where the founder used to send cars out weekly.  I’ve been very disappointed in the quality of the work by most people. The two biggest problems are it appears no one gives a shit about getting logos to look right in the first place and they are increadibly wasteful of layers. I’ve had to do several of the logos over from scratch just to cut the layer count down enough that they would fit on a car with all the other necessary logos.  The latest mess is a Monster Energy Logo I was looking to use.  700+ layers and even then it’s looks like absolute garbage. With shit like this it’s easier to buy one that’s better looking and trace it than trying to polish the turd.

The following is taken from a post I made criticizing the Coop over on FM.net, but the suggestions are valid to anyone doing their own logos

1. Default Forza font characters are not acceptable when a unique font is used to define the logo. I don’t mind the default fonts for the fine print text that probably won’t be visible anyway, but when the primary logo is a unique font, do it right or don’t bother. If I see that the logo is built of default font characters without any embellishments, I assume it’s crap and go looking for a reference photo for what it should look like.
2. If there is a manufacturer logo in the game use it to trace out a new logo instead of trying to free hand it. Not all manufacturer logos appear for all cars, so sometimes you have to hunt around i.e. don’t expect to find a Toyota logo when trying to paint a Porsche.
3. If I can’t find a logo in game, I pull up a reference photo and go shopping in the storefront to find one to trace. It’s easier to trace than to lay it out from scratch. Shop with a reference to look at, buy based on which logo looks best, not which is rated highest as that is often a bogus rating anyway.
4. When I can’t find a logo in the storefront that is good enough, I pull up a reference photo in photoshop and crop and resize it to fit the logo on grid on my laptop that corresponds to the grid in the group editor. I get it so that one square on my laptop is one square on the group editor. Using the grid you should be able to get the proportions pretty good. The more complicated the logo the more essential it is to use the grid. If you don’t have photoshop, The Gimp is free and does much the same stuff.
5. Most logos are layed out on the cardinal axes. 0, 90, 180, 270, 360 learn these angles, if things look vertical or horizontal the spin will correspond exactly to one of these primary angles. Skew is easier to use than spin for slanted parallel lines.
6. Make the logo huge and shrink it. One click when the logo is the size of the screen is more precise than one click when it’s the height of a running board. I’ve had to redo logos that showed all the edges between vinyls when blown up. These logos were done very small and what isn’t obvious when small becomes obvious when large. I generally build the logo full screen group it, Turn OFF the grid so you can see if the edges are are smooth. Then shrink it to a useful size, lastly ungroup/regroup to reset the group size to 1.0 and save.
7. It looks like people get too hung up on trying to get dimensions perfect, when being close is good enough. Think about how the logo will be used. If you draw a logo large and shrink it down to the final size no one will be able to tell if you were off a click or two in a dimension. If you are trying to draw a rectangle it should take exactly 1 vinyl to define a rectangular shape, not 2-9 like I’ve seen on a lot of logos
8. Too many people seem to use “skinny” shapes to trace an edge outline and fill in the middle of the logo with lots of little vinyls to cover the gaps. I tend to use fatter shapes “circles, rounded square, half circle” that will provide coverage into the middle of the logo. When I get through defining the outline shape I’ll try to cover remaing gaps with only a couple vinyls or look at stretching adjacent vinyls a little to overlap. Remember close enough is often good enough for a logo that will probably end up being pretty small. Especially if it’s something that a lot of people won’t be familiar with. I find it preferable to bump a dimension a click or two on a vinyl versus throwing on another layer. When I ungroup a logo and it consists of a lot of tiny crescent shapes that are barely visible I know the layer count can be condensed.
9. A lot of logos use outlined text. The simple way to do this is stamp multiple copies of the original text with an offset behind the text being outlined. Usually a minimum of 4 copies. That works but wastes layers. If you treat the outline as its own font set you can cut a lot of layers out of the finished logo. A lot of the characters made up of straight strokes, (A,T,L, etc..) can be outlined with just a few layers.
10. This last thing is just a suggestion to make using some logos easier. When you lay out a logo that use a mask of the underlying car color try to group these together. I will often try to group all the pieces that need to change to the car color together in one or two groups, so I can load the layer group, ungroup it, select the background color groups and change it to the correct color and the regroup the logo. This is a lot easier than ungrouping a logo down to individual layers and hunting through layer by layer for all pieces that need to be set to the background color. Also distributing the logo with the background color set to something like lime green or hot pink makes it easier to find the background groups.

Moving game saves and using multiple consoles

Update 10/31/2011 I did more recent update available here

I see a lot of crap spewed over on FM.net by users with no clue about what they are talking about. It’s pretty shitty that Turn 10 relies on their players to be the first line of customer support. For technical issues they need someone to monitor the boards and weed out bad information.  One of the most frequent post whores over there always seems to post up “contact Xbox support” for a reply and appears to have no relevant experience about which he speaks, so I decided to write up my experience with Xbox DRM, multiple consoles and moving game saves.

I have two Xboxes in my house and play on either depending on which one is open. My live-in girlfriend uses one and the other often travels with me for work.  In FM2 I lost count of the number of times I moved my game save, and in FM3 I moved the save 5 or 6 times between the two Xboxes before deciding to just leave it on a memory unit to plug in to which ever machine is open. I’ve never recovered my gamertag, and from what I’ve read, gamertag recovery is intended to be used only when your harddrive has been formatted or you buy a new console and don’t migrate from the old one. The hard drive is removable, but this wasn’t to make it easy to take to a friend’s house. It is so Microsoft can sell a cheap drive less version and rape you for a hard drive later without the customer needing to crack open the case to install it.

All problems with game saves come from Microsoft’s use of DRM on game content. When you buy content the license is registered for your gamertag and your console ID. When you try to use it, the DLC tries to authenticate against the console ID and only if that fails uses the purchasing gamertag. The console ID check doesn’t need an internet connection, but the gamertag check requires an internet connection. It’s really simple, when you download content all gamertags on that Xbox can use it. If you swap consoles only the gamertag that purchased the content can use it and then only after authenticating over Xbox Live. Where you will have problems is when you swap consoles for any reason and your internet connection drops offline. Since the console changed the DLC license fails that check and without internet it can’t verify the gamertag, so you can’t use the DLC.

It was this way in FM2, when I ran into my first RROD. I bought a new Xbox while my original Xbox was getting repaired. I used the migration kit to move my hard drive contents to the new Xbox, but when I lost my internet connection I would get kicked out of the game with an error about “This profile uses missing content”.  Different gamertags saw different content and it was a real nuisance.  Eventually Microsoft came out with their licence migration tool and that fixed my problems.  To avoid this in the future I took some steps that,  though not cheap, have been bulletproof:

1. Set up a gold account associated with each Xbox. Tonka Crash is my main gamertag on what I consider my primary Xbox. Zen Driver is a gold account on my secondary Xbox.
2. Use the gamertag associated with the Xbox to download DLC to it’s hard drive. Tonka Crash is used to download content on my primary Xbox and Zen Driver downloads content on my second Xbox. You can’t use the same gamertag for multiple consoles, because Microsoft maintains a history and knows you already bought it, so they don’t offer it up for sale again. Your download history can be used to download it on multiple consoles, but the license is still associated with the original console you used to buy it.
3. Buy a copy of the game for each Xbox. Since there is DLC in the game case that you cannot buy from the Marketplace the only option is to get another copy of the game. In my case this was 2 preordered LCE copies so all DLC would match between the two consoles.

So now I have two Xboxes with all DLC bought and licensed for each Xbox. What about moving the save?   I’m blowing off work to type this up, so I’ll update it when I next sit in front of my Xbox if there are any errors.

1. Get an official licensed Xbox Memory Unit, as big as possible. Microsoft has a poor track record supporting 3rd party peripherals, and in the fall update disabled a bunch of them, so stick with official products.  I’m using about 120MB on a 512MB unit currently.
2. Put your Gamertag on the memory unit.  Go into System Settings->Memory->Hard Drive->Profiles find your gamertag and MOVE it to the memory unit.  I think you have to log out for this step, but the system will prompt you.  Once it’s on the memory unit log into that profile.  I always move the gamertag before moving any of the game files.
3. Put your game save files on the memory unit.  You need to be signed in to the gamertag you just moved for this step.  Go into System Settings->Memory->Hard Drive->Game Content.  Find FM3 and find all the files owned by your gamertag.  These are save files for FM3  One has “saved game” in it’s name, the rest contain your tunes, paints, etc.    The only files we are concerned with are owned by your gamertag.  All the other files in the directory are DLC, and the data installed from the game disks.   The game save file can only exist in one place at a time, so it must be MOVED to the memory unit, but the save files can be copied so you can backup your tunes and paints.  A lot of people seem to think the game save can’t be moved because they try to copy it and get an error that it can’t be copied.  Which is true; you can’t copy the game save, but it can be moved.
4. Do not copy any of the DLC packs, you should already have them downloaded on the other console and they are too big for the memory card anyway.  If they are properly licensed on the hard drive you will be able to use them even when playing from your memory unit.
5. If you want to copy any other game saves, now is the time to do it.  Some games let you copy game saves, some will only let you move them.  It really depends on the game and whether or not the gamer would gain an advantage by being able to load an old save.
6. Do you have the FM3 desktop theme?  Leave it behind. It was DLC too, so use your gamertag associated with the console to download it.  Like game content, once it’s downloaded you should be able to use it.  I am.

Now your gamertag and gamesave exist on the memory unit, but all add on content is on the hard drives.  You can play off the memory unit or move your gamertag and content to the hard drive of a different Xbox.  I have the Tonka Crash gamertag and save on my memory unit.  When I plug it into my secondary console Zen Driver has already download all necessary DLC, and it’s licensed to that console, so the Tonka Crash gamertag can use it without needing an internet connection.

On to the problems:

1. “I took my hard drive over to my friend’s/parent’s/dealer’s house to get the DLC and it doesn’t work when I brought it home” No shit, Sherlock, in this case the DLC is licensed to the xbox you used for downloading, not yours. There is no licensing scheme to associate it to a hard drive, only the console ID and gamertag. If you suffer from this problem get your console on the internet and migrate the licenses.  If you just copied your friend’s DLC files,  go into your Memory Settings, delete it, then go buy it.  A copy of someone else’s DLC will never work.  I’m surprised how often this problem and variations on the same thing keep coming up.  If you are going to use someone else’s internet to download DLC, take your console, not just the hard drive.  It’s not that difficult to pull the cables loose from the back of your Xbox and take your console to your friend’s house.  Depending on the relative generations of your console and your friends, you may be able to take just the console and leave your cables and power supply at home. BUT there are gotchas, not all consoles have HDMI and the power plug changed on the newer generation consoles. Remember to take out any disks before moving the console. I fubar’d a FM2 disk after it flew to Florida in the drive.
2. “I used a different gamertag to download the DLC and it doesn’t work on my console” This is usually some dumb ass that was home for Christmas and wasted his LCE code on his family’s xbox using his brother’s gamertag and now can’t use the code when he went back to school.   You need to migrate the license to your console using the gamertag that originally downloaded it, or buy another copy of the game to get a fresh set of cards.  If it was Marketplace DLC just buy a new set if you can’t migrate the licenses.  This might be a circumstance where recoverying the gamertag might be worthwhile.  Recover the gamertag and migrate the licenses then all users should be able to use the DLC.
3. “I just bought a bigger hard drive and my DLC doesn’t work on the new drive” Personally I’ve never seen this issue and since DLC isn’t licensed to the hard drive it can’t be the real problem.  Usually the guy complaining bought a new Xbox with a bigger hard drive, moved his content, but still needs to migrate his licenses.  During the time I was playing FM2, the NXE update came out that let you install games to your hard drive. I swapped out the 20GB drive on my secondary system for a 120GB drive.  I used the included migration kit and didn’t have any issues with DRM since I was still playing on the same console.
4. “My DLC cars disappeared from my garage.” I’ve never seen this, and hopefully never will.  However, I do have an idea about what’s going on.  In FM2 you couldn’t play at all if you used unlicensed DLC.  In FM3 it seems T10 decided to let you play, but they would fuck you over in the process and delete any cars that came from unlicensed DLC.  It’s real simple: If you change Xbox consoles since you bought DLC, you must migrate your licenses to avoid this problem. Never rely on the connection to Xbox live to be online for authenticating your gamertag.  If you take your save to a friends house make sure he has the DLC, and it’s licenses are tied to the console before loading your game.  If your buddy didn’t do a license migration after his last RROD and you load your game save, say bye-bye to your DLC cars.
5. “I used a Datel Xport to backup my game save and I can’t use my game save” To put it bluntly: You’re fucked.  In Microsoft marketing speak, 3rd party peripherals are not supported by Xbox or Xbox Live.  In reality, the Datel Xport was used for glitching game credits and Turn 10 introduced code changes to combat this. Moving your game save by any method not native to the Xbox runs the risk for corrupting your game save.  I’ve been lucky I guess, I’ve never had a game save get corrupted, and would like a supported method to backup the thousands of hours spent in the forza games.  The best I can do is try to avoid behavior likely to corrupt a save.  My primary Xbox is  plugged into an UPS to avoid power cutouts. Necessary or not, I still make it a habit to back out to the start screen before shutting down or jumping to the dashboard.  I come from PC gamer background where all games had a method to exit the game and return to the desktop.  On the Xbox I’ve found it odd that  most games don’t have a designated exit.
6. Always verify that DLC exists before loading the game when you move from console to console.  Go into the System Settings->Memory->Hard Drive->Games and make sure all DLC is there.  Whenever I buy DLC, I take the time to do it on both consoles so I know it’s there.

Underwhelming Weekend of Excitement Courtesy of Turn 10

Turn 10 had a sale on unicorns this last weekend, but unless you read about it on the “official” forums you probably wouldn’t have known about it.  I never saw any evidence of a blowout sale on the auction house.   A trickle of  cars that get snapped up in seconds does not make a blowout.  When Halo 3 launched T10 had a blowout sale that put dozens of each unicorn car up for auction every 2 hours for a week.  There were always some in the auction house during that week.  I got 6 of them during that time for minimal effort and cost.  I never saw one during this weekend and I had FM3 running for about 12 hours a day Friday, Saturday and Sunday.  Here’s a thread from Forza-Tuning.Net where everyone had pretty much the same experience

On a different note:  T10 forced users to buy DLC if they wanted the the latest gift car.  In FM2 they never gifted a DLC car or allowed users to pick a DLC car as a contest prize, but here it’s a new game and new ways to milk the customer.  Like I said previously I didn’t see the point of buying DLC when I can’t afford to the cars in game and to be honest none of them really got me all that excited.    This stunt did get me to purchase the DLC.  The gift itself went on the auction house when I found it had a 100cr resale value in game.  The Porsche 911-GT 1 was more appreciated. I don’t know if someone read my post over on daught net, but it was nice to see a million+ credit car with a real resell value.

Lack of updates.

If anyone has noticed the updates here are few and far between. It’s mainly due to a lack of motivation. I created this blog in the days before launch figuring I would get sucked into FM3 like I did with FM2 and could use this as an outlet for some of the stuff I used to host on my own web page. What I’m finding is that as I approach 2 months with FM3 I’m getting more and more disillusioned with this game.   I still play daily, but lately that’s just been painting replica rally cars while I watch TV.   The joy is gone to be replaced by RPG grinding.

I’m tired of the money grind.   Credits are too scarce.   I never understood why game developers think grinding for resources is good game design.  This is something that wasn’t thought out too well. I had about 100 hours playing (racing & painting) to get around 9 million credits.  It takes about $160 million to buy all the cars or around 1800 hours.  That is asking a hell of a commitment from your players.   I didn’t buy the Holiday Pack DLC because it would wipe me out to buy the cars.   Looking back I think FM2 was much better balanced.

The scarcity of credits has impacted my enjoyment of the game in several ways.

1. There isn’t the crazy money for players to spend in the storefront, so sales there suffer and prices are probably a lot lower than they should be for the level of work.  The stuff that gets high ratings and lots of downloads is free shit.  And I mean shit.  It’s very rare to run across well done accurate replicas or logos for free and most morons can’t tell or don’t care between an accurate replica and a crap knock off.   I don’t understand why T10 think capping the storefront serves any real purpose when most players have very little money to spend there anyway.
2. I’m limited to lower classes with the exception of gift cars.  With many of the R-Class cars being over a million I’m not buying them unless I’m force to for a race series.
3. Upgrades are too expensive for experimentation.  I have a VW I bought every upgrade available to play with different combinations.  I looked at doing that with a Lamborghini and decided it wasn’t worth the money.
4. Forget about painting expensive cars.  I have a paint scheme I would like to do on a McLaren F1 GT, but I would have to sell 76 of them at $50K to break even.  I’m still in single digit for each car design I’ve done and overall still at a net loss but this hopefully will turn around in a couple weeks.
5. Forget about DLC.  The Holiday Car Pack is mostly million dollar supercars, so they are cost prohibitive in game even though the cost of the DLC is inconsequential in real world money.  Why buy DLC I can’t use in game?   To those that think driving in free play is adequate enjoyment of the content more power to you.  It’s not good enough for me and my opinion is the only one I care about.  There is a huge difference between taking a test drive and being able to upgrade/tune/paint a car you really like.

Related to the money grind is the event list grind.  I enjoyed season play, but was disappointed to find it only got through about 25% of the events.   What was very annoying was finding how many cars I had to buy to have eligible (but not necessarily competetive) cars in the event list.  Also the event list is highly repetitive without any decent payoff.  I hit level 50 well before the end of season 6 and with no cars for completing events there isn’t really any incentive to buy cars to compete in some of these.   It’s ridiculous to force a player to buy a car that costs more than the payout on the series it’s required for.  With no event scoreboards theres also no point in trying to better your times since you can’t see what they were.  In the end it’s just all about grinding.

Tonka Toy Tuning Tool

In FM2 I designed what became known as the Tonka Toy as a tuning tool.  I had collected the default suspension settings of all the R-Class cars as well as a large number of the production cars.  Collecting all the data I looked at happened over several months with the help of several people at http://forza-tuning.net.   With this data it was obvious there were distinct trends that Turn 10 used to set up the springs, arbs and shocks of all cars and it was very apparent that the R-Classes boiled down to some simple relationships.   I implemented these trends in a spreadsheet that let you pick an R-Class to mimic with your production car and it would provide suspension settings based on Blooze’s concept of weight bias tuning.

Until I have the time to collect this data in FM3 the Tonka Toy is on hold.  For now I’m primarily running solo career with stock cars.  It will be a few weeks at least before I dive into gathering all the stats that I need to do this again in FM3.  Even though I offered it up for free, I never pimped out my work over at the main Forza forum, so I never had the following of some of the other tuners.  I received very little feedback overall, so I have no idea how many people used it.

Biting the hand that feeds you.

As much as I like this game, and I do think it’s mostly an improvement over FM2, I am beginning to wonder about the long term viability of this game. FM2 launched in June of 2007 and I played pretty every chance I could for the next 18 months right up to Christmas of 2008. Why did I stop? Boredom mostly, I completed hotlapping and time trials in all classes (except exhibition mode). I’d run 3 different gamertags up to level 50 and had about $80 million spread between the different gamertags. It was just that there was nothing new. Whenever DLC came out I’d get a renewed interest for a few weeks, but Turn 10 announced they were working on their “next big thing” less than a year after launch and quit providing content to keep it fresh. FM2 suffered from a severe lack of tracks. The number of tracks has improved out of the box in FM3, but I don’t think it will matter in the long run. Turn 10 seems intent on killing the online community. Their attitude towards the community appears to be adversarial.

1. User configured public lobbies are gone and not coming back according to this post or this one. This is despite pre release hype that stated “The game’s online modes have more than 100 rule types to tweak giving players an almost limitless ability to customize the way they want to play” Korey Krausopf (Turn 10). But that turned out not to be the case. FYI, Turn 10, I can’t play the way I want to play. Private rooms are a non-starter, I don’t have a friends list to support it. I may be old fashioned, but I really only have people in my friend’s list that I consider friends, not just every punk I run across with an Xbox that plays the latest game. In FM2 I used the public lobbies to find people to race with. If I didn’t like a room there was always something else close. Usually no one liked leaderboard cars or demolition derby and WE could enforce that. I ran into lots of rooms like that. I added several people to my friends list just because they were good hosts. Now no one hosts, no one has any control and it’s just more frustrating than fun.
2. It’s now almost 2 weeks since launch in Japan and Europe and still have not made one configuration change in the hopper setup. I don’t know how many people remember how much Turn 10 talked about the “awesome” tournaments they were going to have in FM2 and then never changed the tournament settings. I’m really worried that if they turn on F-B class hoppers we’ll never see another change. Why would they? The game is out, fuck the followup support. Turn 10 responses on multiplayer went from “we’ll look into it” soon after release to now locking threads that bring up multiplayer and refusing to discuss their reasons why multiplayer is this fucked up. As a player I may not like their reasons, but I would like to know their rationale .
3. Storefront caps are set ridiculously low. Again Landon has a reply which makes me wonder if anyone at Turn 10 actually has played this game.  Currently the cap is in place to keep items reasonably priced for everyone. Considering artists and tuners can sell an unlimited number of items we feel that even with the cap these players are still getting a fair bit of compensation for their hard work 🙂 <– His smiley not mine. $10K, Seriously? When it can cost millions to buy a car just so you can paint it, you have to sell a hell of a lot at $10K to recoup the up front expense. I image this will just drive serious artists back to the auction house at the same prices as FM2.
4. Where are the web features?  We keep hearing promises, but again coming up on 2 weeks after launch and all we have is the ability to grab photos off the web. And even that behaves oddly on one of my computers running windows 7 and Chrome. I have yet to successfully get a video to upload, not that I will use that much. I rarely went through the scoreboards in the game because the web app was much more useful. My time monopolizing my TV is limited and anything I can do game related without my Xbox is welcomed. You spoiled us with FM2 (BTW, thanks for breaking it’s website) and again the promises get rolled out with the marketing bullshit, but there’s very little to show for any of it. I really don’t think Turn 10 was ready for this release.
5. Nice debut on the XBL activity list Major Nelson puts out.  Debut week of FM2 you managed 7th, on FM3 just 10th.   I tracked the XBL activity of FM2 until it completely dropped out of the top 10 about a year after release. FM3 may barely make a blip for what should be the better game.  Do you think that might have anything to do with the multiplayer fiasco?
6. Why the fuck is Che posting at neogaf?  There is a community site set up and maintained by Turn 10, but rather than interact with the community Turn 10 created and an environment Turn 10 lets continue, the Forza community manager goes posting at other sites.  My theory is that following FM2’s release that Che got burnt out when the fan base ass kissing ended and the bitching began, so he just quit interacting with the community much at all.  Then Landon got hired so Che could do whatever Che does and Landon could deal with the pissed off players.  My impression is that Landon is now burnt out.  Turn 10, cut these guys loose and give us someone that will interact.

Finally I have some small gripes about things deleted or that are just plain wonky.

1. Where are the local scoreboards?
2. Where are the car level awards?  I’d like to know which makes give me which discounts, but it looks like it’s been stripped.
3. Why no zoom in the vinyl group editor?  I can work around it, but it would have been easier on me to just have zoom available.
4. Who did the lighting in the paint editor?  When I paint (IRL) I like lots of diffuse light to see what I’m doing.  In game, it feels like I’m painting in a warehouse with a couple droplights hanging from the rafters.
5. Did you farm out the livery editor to China?  The text character sets have a vertical orientation that are completely illogical.  What I’m talking about is when you go to get a alphabet character, A,B,C, etc., instead of the screen being arranged like a qwerty keyboard or a row like ABCDEFG…  you get columns of letters so the top row is ABCD run to the left side of the screen.  It’s disorienting and just plain weird.
6. I can’t use manufacturer decals in vinyl group editor.  Not a big deal, but most of the manufacturer decals are unusable in actual liveries, either they are incorrect style or the wrong color.  The work around is to create your own by tracing the original.  It would be simpler in the vinyl group editor, but works fine in the car editor.
7. AI difficulty is still not well balanced.  At higher levels there is too much spread between easy and medium and not enough between medium and hard. There should probably be 5 levels.  Since cash is so tight I’m just racing the AI with stock cars at medium difficulty.  At hard I have to be better than the AI car or drive completely flawless. I’m finding the racing fun just because the AI is usually in a better car than I have available.  So far the only time I had to buy a car was for a F-Class speedway tour.  At the first two track the AI braked too much allowing me to win with a car that wasn’t as fast, but on the old Nissan/Sunset speedway the AI didn’t brake so I had to have something that could keep up with them.
8. Lighting in the game is weird.  I think the game looks worse than FM2 overall because the lighting is so bad.  It’s both too dark and too bright.  Whites bloom ridiculously and blacks are crushed eliminating all shadow detail.  I’ve had to change my TV settings just for Forza and that pisses me off since it was set up properly for everything else.  I’m guessing no one used calibrated monitors when they play tested or designed this game or Turn 10 just rushed delivery.
9. Please implement real weather or at a setting for time of day in the next game so I can move the sun. What bastard decided that people only race with the sun low in the sky? Give me the option to get rid of the glare.  Combined with the shit lighting this looks really bad.
10. Why don’t searches remember any history?  The auction house search function in FM2 worked better.
11. Why no ability to search storefronts by gamertag?
12. What is the filtered word list?  There are some words that made the list for reasons that I think can only be for marketing/corporate bullshit than being legitimately “bad” words.  Why filter words in searches anyway?  If you find a hit for “naked” or “sex” it’s probably something that should be reported anyway.  It would certainly make it easier to find cars that should be banned if you could search for them directly.
13. Why do tunes lock out upgrades?  If i have a good suspension setup shouldn’t I be able to change the horsepower?  I don’t need to see the settings, but being able to change parts would be nice.  In FM2 if you downloaded a setup that didn’t match the parts you got a warning, but it at least applied the tune to what you had.
14. Why are bone stock auction house cars locked?  Were the programmers too lazy to differentiate between stock on modified?

It’s here, now what?

I wish I had more time to play today than I did, but my copy wasn’t delivered until late in the day.  Since it’s my girlfriend’s night off, I can’t really hog the TV all night.  I only got about an hour in. Likes:

• At least right off the bat nothing seems hopelessly fucked up.
• Season Play is a winner.  Guiding me through the races for cars I have in my garage is at least giving me competitive races without me spending a lot on upgrades and new cars. Money is still tight, but there are  a lot of races to go.  I’m just worried about how many races will have to be done outside of the Season play to complete all races.
• The girlfriend likes FM3.  This is a major plus.  If she at least enjoys the game, she won’t get that annoyed when I get completely obsessed.
• Upgrades change the balance of the car.  This is interesting. In FM2, the balance of a car stayed the same regardless of upgrades.  Over on forza-tuning we theorized that Turn 10 had a generic car model and they basically gave cars character by moving the default settings away from this ideal.  The whole concept of weight bias tuning is trying to get to this ideal.  In FM3 my first guess is that upgrades move your car closer to the ideal as you upgrade.

Dislikes:

• The start animation blows.  Besides being annoyingly repetitive, it really should end when the clock starts counting down.  I hate that I can’t get a decent start because I’m not allowed to have control of my throttle until a split second before the start.  My offline career is training for online racing, that includes starting.
• I don’t really like the short races you start with.  Starting last on the grid on a 3 lap sprint around a half mile loop really doesn’t encourage learning clean racing techniques.  At least tonight, I don’t think I ever made a single clean lap.  At least rubbing doesn’t seam to harm you too bad.  I was really disappointed when I saw the track list and saw how short the tracks were on the new environments.  If you are going to the trouble of making a full environment at least make it a track worth running.
• I expected bugs from the start, but I’m still disappointed they appeared so quickly.  Some people are complaining of glitched PI cars at the top  of the leaderboards. The infamous missile cars are still around which should not have been allowed to happen at all.  No matter how much Turn 10 claims they are doing a sim, having missile cars climb the leaderboard seems to refute that.  A simple fix would be for tires to blowout for excessive wear AND force tire damage on for certified laps.  Since we can now roll cars, shredding tires would seem to be a no brainer.
• The music is bad, as in the worst muzak crap I’ve heard in a video game in a long time.  This doesn’t even qualify as music.  It’s so uninspired it’s just background noise.  I made it through my first race and my girlfriend complained the music was putting her to sleep.  She and I both enjoyed the soundtrack in the last game: LCD Soundsystem, Oakenfold, Goldfrapp, The Prodigy, The Crystal Method are artists I listened to before FM2 and still listen to.  FM1 had about what I expected of a video game, FM2 blew me away, FM3 is not worthy of being in a modern game.  When you have a slew of brand names cars through out the game, why not have brand name music.
• Turn 10 is not ready for launch:  The website is not yet fully functional,  I’m wondering how much we’ve been promised will appear.  DLC isn’t working for people.  Online multiplayer is neutered and what is there doesn’t offer much variety.

Hits and Misses

Well the bugs started to crawl out of the code and Turn 10 has announced their first patch before the game is even released in the USA.

1. Shock settings are changing in online multiplayer.  This is supposed to be fixed next week.
2. VIP DLC codes are not working for the LCEDashboard  Theme.  (TBD)
3. Painting glitches in cars have started to appear, probably never fixed like FM2.
4. Auction house end of auction time sounds broken.  Once the clock runs out, the auction continues like FM2, but the clock doesn’t reflect 2 minute resets.  Not yet acknowledged by Turn 10.

I’m not surprised.  QA hasn’t not been T10 strong suit.  On the lack of custom public lobbies it sounds like T10’s attitude is “we know what you want better than you do.“

Emerging Concerns

I’m reserving final judgement until I have the game in my hands, but early indicators are that Turn 10 has seriously fucked up some aspects of the online experience.

1. Tuning in lobbies unavailable – Many racers will have a tune for each track.   To be taken seriously as a hardcore sim the ability to change tunes for each track would seem to be a no brainer.
2. Public Room configuration – This may be FM3’s  fatal flaw. I found it very rare to have many friends online at the same time and we counted on strangers to fill out our rooms.  If the only way to play strangers is to rely on T10’s server configs, I doubt I will play much online.  T10 track record in post launch support doesn’t give me any faith that this will be improved.
3. System Link gone.  I have 2 Xboxes and preordered 2 LCE copies of the game anticipating being able to play head to head.  This isn’t a deal breaker, but would have been nice.
4. Che Chou continued failure as “community manager”.  I wonder what he does because he doesn’t seem to interact in any meaningful way with the online community that T10 has grown on the official Forza site.  For all the hype over the last couple months, Turn 10 employees have gone surprisingly quiet in the days leading up to launch.   A lot of the concerns I’ve mentioned should have been addressed with official statement to the users when the concerns became known.  At most we get a snarky post that doesn’t do anything but fan the flames. Letting the boards implode with irate users is not the best way to manage a community, but this seems to be standard operating procedure for Turn 10.

With the problems that are coming to light it seems that despite Turn 10’s marketing claims about the online modes, they really don’t  seem to want players to play the game the way the players want to.  And it seems that as developers they have no clue how their players actually play their games.