Solid tire barriers.

[Elpants]

I bought GRID a while ago during that big spring sale thing.

First I thought all was dandy and great, I noticed the tire barriers on the tracks were solid, which kinda bothered me as I expected tires to go flying everywhere when they were slammed into like in DIRT 2. I just assumed it wasn't a feature.

I stopped playing for a while, then the other day my buddy was decided to play on my PC and he also noticed it, but he had played GRID before on his PC and said the tire barriers are not supposed to be solid.

I talked to another friend on Steam who owned GRID, he claims his tire barriers are not solid.

For the life of me, I cannot figure out how to enable physics for the barriers so my when my car slams into them it doesn't stop dead in it's tracks as if they were immovable objects. I went all through my settings, disabled and enabled Physx on my nVidia GPU settings to no avail. Done the standard defrag of game files and verify too.

Short of completely redownloading the game, is there anything I can do?

[Transmeta]

ALL tire barriers are solid since they only bounce you off of what is behind them, like walls, I think those are painted red and white, there are a few tracks that use black tires to mark the track out and are not against walls, perhaps that could be the problem?
They are set up like water barrels on a highway exit, you hit em it's gonna slow you down, you hit em and the wall behind it, you're gonna stop.

The only thing I can recommend is that you capture a video with something like xfire or fraps so we can see exactly what you mean.

[Elpants]

Alright, here is some video from both my PC (with immovable objects for tire barriers) and a buddies PC (tires go flying when crashed into)

First, here is a video of me crashing head on into a red tire barrier about 15 seconds or so into the Circuto Di Milano track. My vehicle is totaled instantly but the red tire barrier remains solid.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIuHIS50MxU

Here is a second video of me hitting the same barrier at a slightly different spot from a slightly different angle. Tires remain solid.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXoZohMpm9I

Now I had a buddy record him slamming into the same barrier on the same track, with the same vehicle.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rG4ZmybxFmg

If you didn't quite see it. Here is a screenshot of that same crash.

http://i.imgur.com/Ry8wS.jpg

[plastik892]

In your example(s) you hit the tires either straight on or at such an angle that you slide against them. Your friend's hit pushed the car nose into the air and popped a few tires off, including his own.

The tire walls that parallel the track have a support system that keeps it organized and the tires from falling onto the track. Also in your case a building is directly behind it. If you think about this a 'hard' tire wall, one that doesn't move at least, makes perfect sense. Whether the car is traveling at 150mph or 250 its the same result for the property and people on the other side if it went through. The tires are only there to soften the blow. If you've played the demolition tracks you know the ability is in-game but track cars cannot handle anything more than a spotless road surface and light contact to still be competitive. Dirt2, being rally, is under entirely different conditions.

You're not dealing with a bug and the physics are fine. You shouldn't be hitting anything but air and smoke anyways ;D

[Elpants]

I don't know about that, every crash video I can find has the barriers coming apart when impacted. Yet when I try to duplicate the crashes, my car just crumples against the tires rather than fly through them like in other videos.

I hit the same barrier as my post above again (twice) from similar angles to my buddy. Once again, no tire movement. The last part of the video is me slamming into a tire barrier that is unsupported by a brick wall. If my buddy crashes into this wall, the barrier gives out, tires go flying and his car get's violently thrown over the barrier. I stop dead in my tracks. We even did it in multiplayer on hitting that wall, he would go flying over, I stop dead. Every time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G66idgVrthY

Example from the same Circuito Di Milano track, just some random video on youtube. About 2 minutes in he hits the same wall I do. Yes I know it's a PS3, but it's the same crash results my buddies get on PC.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28FL_EqRvVQ

Here is my video of me hitting the same tire barrier at a very similar angle. (Sorry about the music, I forgot the mute the video when I compressed it)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFB1TWJtUb4

Here's a last video, just me dicking around crashing into a few walls, the one near the end where I drag the other car into the barrier is also in the PS3 video above. In none of these crashes do the barriers have any physics at all. Once again, sorry about the music, was just in the background and I forgot to mute it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMcGopM9wzg

[xerog_0]

Elpants, I thought this would be an excuse to dust of Grid and see for myself. I raced on the Milan track with a CCGT, and every single time I hit the tires they flew, so I can confirm that your videos are displaying different behavior than on my PC. Even if you hit the tires "dead-on", they should still move a little, but they were pretty clearly locked in place in the videos you have. As I recall, several of the settings in Grid aren't accessible from the settings menu, so I have an idea. There should be a file on your computer called "hardware_settings_config.xml" which may be of value. Can you find that on your computer and post it? It should be under your "My Documents" or "Documents" folder (in XP or 7, respectively) in the folder "Codemasters\GRID\hardwaresettings". Once you have it, open it in either Internet Explorer or Notepad or some other text editor, copy all of its contents, and paste them in a reply here (you should probably surround it with code tags). Then we can see if there's a significant difference between your settings and mine.

[Elpants]

I didn't even see those files earlier!

The config.xml had a physics value set to "False". I used Notepad++ to edit it to "True"

Works great now, tires everywhere, like there should be!

Thanks for alerting me to these config files.

[xerog_0]

Great :). Notepad++ is the best, by the way. I actually stumbled across that file while looking for a way to run Grid in a window. There's a utility I saw on another forum to make configuration changes a little more user-friendly if you do so often: http://community.codemasters.com/forum/grid-pc-modifications-1022/282633-grid-launcher-utility.html.

[seseorang]

This game doesn't use PhysX. So installing/uninstalling isn't going to reap any benefits for this game