I picked this up while it's on sale, and have been going through the basic driving lessons. I've been finding the lessons that involve reversing are incredibly difficult. I managed to get past the U-turn one, but the others I was only able to do by using the overhead camera. Is there some trick to telling where your car is in relation to the cones from inside? I have a TrackIR and three monitors, so I can at least see clearly what I'm about to run over. Note that I don't know how to drive in real life, so if there's something about this that's blindingly obvious to people who do know how to drive, I'm missing it.

A caveat: I'm making life gratuitously hard for myself by using a manual transmission.

How about going reverse in the seat camera until you hit the poles, so that you can learn the view when you get too close to them ?
Maybe you can do this practice easier in free mode, since there are no time limit nor penalty limit.

PS: For me the reversing became easier when I remembered to use wing mirror. With a help of it at least I can avoid hitting from the side.

I can avoid backing into the poles I can see now, but the problem is that I still can't avoid hitting the ones I didn't see. I find that the mirrors don't really help--rather it just makes it more confusing by throwing even _more_ identical cones that I'm supposed to navigate into the mix.

I read that this game was originally developed as a driver training simulator for Russian teenagers. If that's true, and this is the sort of thing that Russians do when learning to drive, they must be much, much better drivers than Americans... :-/

You can see most of the poles when you enter the test area, and these are not randomly scattered around on the ground but are put along the route.
So you should be able to guess or imagine where the obstacles are even if you can't see them.
Actually you have been doing these kind of things in your daily life (e.g. when you ride bicycle, move large/long stuff to the upper floor using stairwell ...).

>it just makes it more confusing by throwing even _more_ identical cones that I'm supposed to navigate into the mix
I know what you mean. I think this is more difficult in the game because you can't feel the depth.

> they must be much, much better drivers than Americans... :-/
Come on, Ken Block is an American!

BOKUdayo wrote:
Perhaps I should, but I can't. I spent an hour tonight trying to do the garage and parallel parking exercises. This time I mostly was using the top down view, and I found that even when I actually could see everything clearly, I still failed a large majority of the time. However, after doing it many times and memorizing the position the wheel was in when I managed to reverse successfully, I was eventually able to manage both once from the inside-the-car view. I'm pretty sure that was more an example of the infinite monkey theorem than any actual ability on my part.

I had to look up who that was. I'm not sure someone who makes his living driving recklessly is really a good counterexample.

It turns out there is a trick to the garage exercise: don't look where you're going. What makes that one hard is that I can't tell the cones on the side of the parking space from those at the back, so I couldn't tell when to stop turning. I found that if I only look back long enough to be sure I've cleared the corner cone and then look forward, I can easily tell when I've turned 90 degrees by looking at the cones ahead which mark the far side of the exercise area.

I'm glad to know that you found the solution which works for you.

Ah, so you felt difficulty aligning your car.
As for that, what I was told in a motor school was to pop your head from the window to look your back directly. With that you can see the alignment of the body of your car with respect to the lines easier.
I think you can use this trick since you are using TrackIR. Yours supports 6DoF, doesn't it ?

>I'm not sure someone who makes his living driving recklessly is really a good counterexample.
I must say that Ken is a clean driver when it comes to city driving as you can see, but you have a point .