Sounds like it would suck the life out me, nice, I'll pick it up soon.

Sorry, I forgot to reply to this! It's definitely a lot easier than making a Beam car mod from scratch would be. There are some quirks of the export process that require a bit of trial-and-error to work with (a car that understeers somewhat in Automaton is generally a lot nicer to drive in Beam), but you don't need to be an expert to get something decent. Aesthetically, it depends on how close your starting point is in Automation; the little bright green coupe only took me a couple of hours, including making the engine and getting a rough tune of the suspension, but the Morgan-like one took significantly longer because I basically had to hide the entire front end of the car in Automation and built it up from scratch. I personally find the process of making the cars quite enjoyable in its own right, though, so that helps a lot

I didn't know this was officially supported, does it take a lot of effort/time?

In addition to what ultranaut said, I think a lot of people started to suspect it was being dropped when Kunos abandoned the original roadmap. Fortunately that seems to have been a misplaced fear!

Correct, yeah. A very limited version of career mode was in some of the earlier builds of it, but it has been stripped out since. At the time they said that they weren't happy with how it was turning out and that they wanted to focus on the core experience, which to me suggests that they were aware they were falling behind their roadmap and wanted to divert effort towards stuff like the freeroam. They did explicitly say that they weren't ruling out adding a career mode in future, but don't expect it any time soon

I think it was career mode that was canceled.

Excited to see the free roam coming soon, but I could've sworn I'd seen them say they were cancelling the free roam feature for EVO a little while back. Anyone know if my memory is right or not? And if so, I'm curious what's changed.

Great! I forgot to mention before - if you're not using them already, if you need them, "pylinux wheel" and "oversteer" will let you mess around with the settings a bit, for force feedback strength etc.

Coming back for another reply as I remembered what I wanted to say. You mentioned a lack of buttons and I feel that too. I have a little buildable macropad (Duckeypad) that is fully programmable and has pages of colored keys with labels that show on a little screen. I think you can just buy a kit with the PCBs (if you have keys and switches) or a kit with everything in it. It's nice for games because I can program the keys to have different colors so I can easily orient myself at a glance, even across multiple pages (built in layouts). If you're a build-it-yourself person, this might be a good solution for you too.

Thank you for your reply. It was very detailed and I feel lucky to have found another Linux user with some experience in the hobby. I picked up a used G920 with shifter for a good price. It wasn't exclusively because of your comment, because I was actually hoping to find a G29. Based on my research the wheels are nearly the same but the G29 has rev lights and an extra scroll axis. That said, this is what popped up for sale in my area and the price was right. I've been having a blast on Asseto Corsa, BeamNG,and Motortown, but couldn't get F1 2012 to play nice with my widescreen monitor (likely on account of being made for consoles nearly 15 years ago)! :D

The force feedback strikes me as slightly weaker than the Wingman in regular driving (the Wingman had a nice rumble that made it feel like the wheel was going to jerk out of your hands and break to pieces if you hit a big bump. Where the G920 does shine is general driving feel (feels like my car), precision (no jumpy steering), and preventing you from turning the wheel when you want to turn it but the force feedback is working against you. In that last scenario it feels much stronger than the Wingman, much more akin to the wheel in a real car. I'd say my performance is at least 200% of how well I was driving before and continues to improve rapidly. It made a massive difference and the FUN factor is also through the roof.

I also appreciate the comment about the direct drive wheels. One of the hard things about getting into a new hobby is there is a base level of gear that you have to have to try out the hobby properly. You could play golf with plastic wiffle balls and a toy club, but you're not going to get the real experience like you would if you picked up some cheap clubs at a secondhand shop. There's also the ability to spend unlimited sums of money chasing smaller and smaller improvements. Only people already in the hobby know where that sweet spot is and I think the G920 and similar wheels seem to be plenty good. I'm glad I chose an affordable wheel and I don't think I need to upgrade anytime soon. If I upgrade anything, I need to go to the junkyard and get the front half of a car to mount some screens in and have even more fun! :P

I'm also a top 10,000 kind of player. My preference is often for roaming open worlds at sightly (hehe) faster than the speed limit. I forgot about Euro Truck Simulator, which I already own, and American Truck Simulator, which has my own U.S. state as one of the DLCs.

If someone comes after me with a similar question:

Logitech G290 is pretty good and the shifter is worth having. I wouldn't go back to having no clutch and shifter because I drive a standard in real life and it feels very correct and real, both shifter and the clutch (though my real clutch requires a lot more force. Seems I can tune that.

Thanks again for the reply!

I've used a G920 with pedals and shifter for years now, and I think I've been exclusively a Linux user for 10 - 15 years. I play everything you listed above, as well as other varied driving games. It really made each one of those games so much more fun and I'm really glad I got it.

I upgraded this from a "Driving Force GT", which didn't have a proper gearstick (Probably similar to your Wingman). I really wanted a proper gearstick and clutch pedal, for playing stuff like Euro Truck, My Summer Car, Revhead etc.

A new boxed one is £230 at Argos (a UK shop, I don't know where you're based), and I think that's probably fair to be honest, though you can probably get new ones for between £150 and £200 if you shop around or wait for a bit.

If you can afford a new one, it's probably worth getting a new one - wear and tear on a 2nd hand one could be problematic. However, if you're getting a 2nd hand one, I've seen them on Ebay for significantly less than £100.

I don't think I'd bother upgrading to a "better" one, unless I was really into competitive Sim Racing etc - and good enough to notice the difference. I'd possibly change/upgrade if there was better Linux support, or support for some particular game.

I think it's worth spending extra on one with force feedback, three pedals, a proper gearstick. If there were a few extra buttons for lights/windscreen wipers/etc, that'd be great.

The price jump up to "direct drive" force feedback etc, isn't worth it for someone like me. If I was top 20 in the world at Dirt Rally or whatever, it would probably give me better times, but I'm more of a "top 10,000" sort of player :)

The wheel I do have though, absolutely completely 100% worth it over just using a controller.

ACR is a moving target at the moment for evaluation. They released 0.5 recently, but today they released 0.5.1 and it's a big enough change in physics that they wiped all the leaderboards again like 2 weeks after the last wipe. People are saying that tarmac times are a lot faster, but gravel times are a lot slower thanks to the change, which is interesting (I think it is down to them changing coefficients for rolling resistance and the ratio of traction to bulldozing effect?)

At any rate, it's great to see them continue to refine and tweak further! Also—and in my mind this is almost more important than all that other stuff—they added filtering for online races! So now you can search by stage name, country, or host name instead of just randomly scrolling down the list trying to find one that fits your current desires.

Having said all that, yes RBR could potentially be king for years to come still. It all depends on if ACR allows 3rd part stages and cars or not. If so, then people will start publishing and converting stages for ACR instead of RBR most likely whereas if not… well, it is hard to argue with literally hundreds of stages like RBR has, not to mention a price of free (or donationware if you want to support the stage makers) if you really want to drive a lot of rally…

The video, of course, doesn't show the half hour or so's worth of attempts that ended in rolling it or smashing into a rock while I was figuring it out

That's a really fun idea, and I'm incredibly impressed by how well you controlled the vehicle. I was expecting it to be constantly crashing off the edge etc, but you pretty much finished the course without any major mistakes.

Hell yeah, I hope you have a good time!

I'm in.

Interesting. On my end, the title is standard text. I guess this is one of those fediverse quirks.

Getting the hang of using pitch controls to control slides by increasing grip at one end of the vehicle is incredibly satisfying

Oh, on my instance the post title links to that page! Thanks for letting me know, I will put one in the description too

Using the thrusters to increase down force is such a cool mechanic

Would be nice to have a link...

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2262020/Exo_Rally_Championship/

Sweet.

Nice timing, there's due to be some news about it on PC Gamer's show this Sunday!

This is the first I've heard of this game. It looks brilliant. I've registered my interest.

Classic Monza T1 behaviour.