Time to time I get question about the screenies I do and what is the secret about it, and it is quite easy. It helps if you have a good system working on, but it is still possible to have enjoyable graphics, if the purpose is either shooting screenshots or creating a better experience. Now, I made this small guide on how to get good graphics and to optimize your system when running NR2003, originally made for the vMaxSR team.

Until we continue any further, I like to inform you that changing these settings will effect your game to run either better or getting worse, smart thing is to make sure you have backup on the things you change, such as the .ini files. If you want to run the game having good graphics you will need a computer having the latest hardware, at least you need decent system. If you ask me, a decent system will be a computer having at least 3GHz CPU, 1024MB DDR ram, and having at least 128MB DDR graphics card. Still, I was able to run comfortable settings shooting good pictures, back then when I had a 2GHz CPU, 512MB DDR ram having a 128MB DDR graphics card.

Have in mind this is just my personal experience even if the requirements running NR2003 is way less then this.

If you have a good computer, you can try working with these settings for your own liking, or maybe you want good graphics for a short time allowing you to make quality screenshots. Although, my advice for you when doing league racing, if you want to be able perform good you need to focus on a game that has good frames per second without any drops or lag, therefore change your settings to allow this. Being at 27-30 FPS is okey, the higher the better.

I run the highest setting on my computer, and these are my specs:

P4E 3.0GHz 1Mb cache
2048Mb DDR400MHz PC3200 RAM
2x Seagate 200Gb 8Mb cache S-ATA
GeForce 7800GS 256Mb DDR3

These are the settings I am using in Windows on the graphic card:



In this test, I run the game using Direct3D in 1280x1024 resolution having my MipMapLODBias= set to "-4.00", more about that in the link below.

The first step is to configure NR2003 so runs as good as it can, using your hardware to it's limit having the optimal settings. Doing that have a look at this page: NR2003 tweaks

When you are comfortable having a game that runs good, we can start working on the graphical settings going much deeper. Let's introduce a few terms we will be using:

(these are original ingame pictures without being processed in Photoshop)

Antialiasing

This is a powerful setting that will make your game and graphics look much smoother, but it is very demanding on your system. If you think graphics is a very important factor for your game, then this is the setting you want to be able to run. You can turn it off without noticing any great different when you are racing, but it is a nice touch to the game no doubt. It will remove so call "stairsteps" that can be seen in the overall picture surrounding the edges of different object, example:



The first picture my Antialiasing is turned on to "8xS" which is the best setting you can get ("4x" is a normal setting most graphic card supports) whilst in the other it is turned off. On the first picture you can see a very smooth picture making it look photorealistic, whilst the other has these "stairsteps" particular around the car and its shadows not making the picture as smooth. You can also notice a slight difference on car paints. But you can understand the basics.

Anisotropic filtering

Compared to Antialiasing, is another setting that will improve the overall picture quality, but it is not as demanding on your system. This setting increases the image quality of textures and surfaces, both close and far away. The general feeling you get turning Anisotropic filtering on is it will give a smoother picture, whilst turning it off will give you a much more crispy image. This is the settings that brings you the best increase of quality compared to the other settings, and you can change it how you like, beside it won't slow your game speed down as much compared to antialiasing. Here is an example:



As you can clearly see in the first picture (16x Anisotropic filtering) you have a good picture quality whilst you have more edges, but, being crispier in the 2nd picture (in combination to my "MipMapLODBias" setting). This can be a good thing having in mind when shooting screenshots, as resizing the pictures having this crisp effect, sometimes make them turn out nice. Although may I say the best thing to do is having good graphics through the whole process.

To finally illustrate how big difference these settings can make, I have the original picture with all the settings for the best possible graphics, whilst in the 2nd picture I turned both Antialiasing and Anisotropic filtering completely off:



Click on link to see the full picture: Good quality and Bad quality

Obviously making the game look good, you can turn on all the graphical options inside Nascar Racing 2003 Season. Shadows, texturing, reflections, everything will improve your graphic quality.


Edit: You can find new reflections later in the thread.

This is new tires I made out of another guys update, but they weren't symmetrical to the wheel so I fixed it, they are now perfectly fit to the middle of the wheel. Here are few screens on the original tires and my updates ones:











They are a bit darker like true rubber is and has the new bigger Goodyear logos on it. As you can see I have made a CTS version too as they are racing on the Wrangler model. GNS and CUP are using the same tires so you use the same tires for both series and you will have a complete set of updated tires. They have three different speeds and I made sure the transition is as realistic as possible between the different speeds

If you like them you can send me a PM and I can give them to you, as it is not my work from the very beginning.

i have just downloaded some in game tyres for nr2003 which can be found at www.smokinggrafxix.com,huge improvement than the default ones.

Link doesn't work

One thing I remember from way back when the patch first came out was to set the Car Mega Shader to 1 to enable advanced shading with D3D cards. This can be found in your player.ini file in your player folder. Use this if you like your cars nice and shiny and your cockpit graphics really crisp. Might be worth checking to see if you have it enabled. The same applies to shadow volumes. Modern cards can render shadows much better than when the game was first launched.

[Graphic Options]
enable_CarMegaShader=1 ; set to 1 to enable advanced shaders where applicable
enable_ShadowVolumes=1 ; set to 1 to enable shadow volumes

_________________
Geoff Oliver

#15 Team West Tec Online

http://www.smokingrafix.com/

_________________
Geoff Oliver

#15 Team West Tec Online

http://www.superspeedway.net/

On this page you can find track updates, there is a "major" download on that page to update all tracks, and there is also a patch. I haven't come up any problems using these updates online and should be fully compatible, at least I have no problem with any track racing on Sierra or in the leagues. There are lots of other pages having graphical updates and quite easy to find, make sure they are compatible and make backups if you are unsure they will work.

Small guide getting the CTS pacecar truck to all series:



Instructions for putting the CTS Pace Truck into another NR2003 Series:

Download Winmip2 here http://www.horbra.de/winmip/Winmip2.htm

1. Find and unpack (under Extras) the cts.dat file in your series\cts\ directory with WinMip2

2. Browse to folder where the cts.dat was unpacked to. By default, this will be
a folder called 'Unpack'.

3. Find and copy the following files :
- fast_pace.mip
- medium_pace.mip
- pacecar2.mip
- pacecar3.mip
- pacecar4.mip
- pacecar5.mip
- pacecar.3do
- pacecar.cam
- pacecar.mip
- pacecar_lights.3do
- pacecar_shadow.3do
- shiny_pacecar.mip
- slow_pace.mip
- slowspec_pace.mip
- wheels_pace.3do

4. Paste the files you copied into your series\xxx directory, where xxx may be
cup, bgn, aero88, tptcc, pta. As usual, make sure to backup any pacecar related
files already in that directory.

Here you got some cool skins, and further down there is a 5-pack download and in each race you will have different colour on it: http://www.masgrafx.com/

Cockpit updates: http://www.masgrafx.com/

Daytona-Night is not multiplayer compatible (i ran into this problem in the first ESCORS truck race of the season.) There is a patch on their forums for this problem.

_________________
Ryan Hinks
Retired from active competition

This is the sort of post that tends to lead to me completely knackering my system for a night, but might have a play in a braver moment.

_________________
Nick Phillips
Team Shark Online Racing
rFactor Rank

Here is a finished file for the pacetrucks that has 5 skins included. Extract to each series folder you like to change: pacetrucks.zip

Another cockpit:

_________________
Dave Luoto - #91

Resize the pic

I found that one here and it looks good, that page is full of updates and stuff:

http://www.teamsbr.com/utils.php

This is another similar, but hard to navigate though:

http://www.racelinecentral.com/NR2003_mods.html

the last site is really hard to navigate yes and if u want to look a car picture in big it isnt possible.. :S.

but thanks for the link

have something to do now after a fabelous race yesterday.

kind regards,

Davey Zoutenbier

_________________



Thomas Hendrickson is a muppet...

This is 8 custom generic cars I made (downloaded and edited), the others I had looked so dull so I made new ones and they turned out pretty good. Allows you to see these instead of those green, purple, grey ones when driving online, it's a nice touch. Works for CUP and GNS, PM me and I can send you the link as I don't want to post the work of others

Tonight I found this very sweet thing - fog - which I had no idea about didn't know it was included in the game, can't find it in the ingame settings either.

Go to your player folder and open the "player.ini" file and look under "[Effects]" for the following line:



Enable it by changing the number to 1 instead.

Picture of it, it really brings a good look to it:

New smoke found on the Superspeedway.net homepage:



Download link: http://www.superspeedway.net/cms/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_download&gid=16&Itemid=3

Edit: removed the post with the older reflections, you can find the new ones later in this thread, click on the link to get there:

http://v8thunderonline.com/forum/viewto ... ght=#13147

thnx done it

_________________



Thomas Hendrickson is a muppet...