It's better, but there's still no compensation for speed. (ie changes in turning based on how fast you're going) I still had a problem with oversteering at times.
I'm not sure, but playing it back to back with Virtua Racing Deluxe 32x and SVP for the Genesis, the road seem less cramped than in Checkered Flag.
The framerate is definitely still a big issue, even in Project Tempest (it's choppy, but I think there's more slowdown on real hardware). I actually noticed more aliasing issues in Virtua Racing Deluxe on the 32x (some z-fighting and clipping stuff) and more obvious limits of 256 color shading and dithering in place of alpha blending (plus lower detail models in general -much more so in the SVP game obviously -and the fact its clipped to 320x192 or 256x192 on the Genesis), but the framerate is far more important for its playability. (granted, those games were programmed by some of Sega's top development teams and based on a well designed -if simple- arcade game, so that's obviously a factor too)
It seems like Rebellion should have been more willing to cut detail and maybe suffer some visible on-screen clipping issues (possibly drop to a somewhat smaller window rather than full-screen) to maintain a sold framerate (at least a solid 15 FPS if not topping at 20-30 FPS). Some of the models actually could have looked better than they do now with fewer polygons (the in-game car models look a bit odd compared to VR on the Genesis even). Cutting detail to the environment would detract somewhat, but the framerate would be worth it, plus you'd still have the nice highcolor (CRY?) shading effects and any translucency used as well. (hell, one good way to help offset lower polygon counts would be to design the game around a smooth gouraud shaded look and take advantage of the blitter's very fast g-shading capabilities both for general smoothing of lower polygon count models and for smoother lighting effects).
For NTSC users, dropping to 288x192 wouldn't have been bad at all for the time. (especially if they modified the score/throttle/track map display to take up less space on-screen or move it to a totally separate boarder outside of the game window) For PAL, 192 lines would leave a much larger boarder though. (like most Master System games, Virtua Racing, etc)
I'm not sure about the flexibility of the dot clock options for the Jag, but if they're fairly flexible, maybe it would be desirable to actually drop the horizonatal screen resolution rather than clipping, or at least with less of a boarder. (dropping to a 5.37 MHz dot clock would mean the same pixel size as the SNES and some genesis games -Virtua Racing uses that- but something a bit higher like 6 MHz would be even more convenient for NTSC as it's very close to square pixels -I think 6.25 MHz is perfectly square for NTSC; 6 MHz is exactly what the Neo Geo uses and gives just under 288 pixels visable on most normally calibrated NTSC TVs)
What they did made the game look good in screenshots, but not much else. (though gouraud-shaded optimized models would probably have looked better in screenshots too, even if the on-screen poly count was dialed back a fair bit)
Edited by kool kitty89, Tue Mar 22, 2011 3:44 PM.
5
This is the first real fix made available for the weird steering in CF. Thank you Remo for tidy little script 
