Had to upgrade from my late 2009 macbook which was way to slow to keep up with this program…so now I feel that I can give a little better feedback.
I noticed that some riders looks like this blue ghost. Not sure what is the purpose of those guys and/or if they are even riders like me, or like computer riders.
Spotted the squirrel!
It would be great if there was a kind of “race my ghost” feature where one can race against their avatar on previous rides which would include how many meters they are ahead or behind you.
I noticed that although my computer has more than adequate tech, the game doesn’t really capture the feeling of moving fast, or moving very slow for the matter. Not sure if this could be helped by building in more wind noise that would reflect a more real world ride, of if the speed of the scenery passing would be need to increase or decrease at a more rigorous rate.
Glad to hear about your new experience and kick-butt MBP!
These are “A.I.” riders - they were originally intended to keep the island from feeling empty when we first started, but now we have so many people riding around now that we tend to turn them off most of the time. This means that lots of newer riders might have never seen them before
Scotty the Squirrel can be difficult to spot at times (though he seems to not care too much about running right out into the middle of the road)
That would be great and I believe it’s on our (very long) list!
Interesting. Do you feel that the way the background moves is too similar despite your speed?
In response to #4, after thinking about it a little more, it may not be just the background but also the ground… hard to put my finger on it but just felt like, wow, I feel like I’m moving so slow but I’m at 15 mph. I guess I’m comparing when I used to use another cycling app that used prerecorded video rides that sped up and slowed down according to speed of the cyclist. Not saying the Zwift doesn’t do this, but it seems to me it could use more tweaking to get a more realistic feel of speed.
Agree, also posted this moving issue in my previous posting (along with a lot of other things). But I am not receiving any feedback on it.
Tried to figure out what exactly causes the idea of moving slow giving the same feeling as moving fast. I would say the game can calculate exactly how fast the terrain is passing and that this is right. So it must be the visual appearance.
The strongest influencer seems to be the road surface. In real life the faster you move, the less details you see. The slower, the more details. In Zwift the details going fast and going slow looks sort of the same.
As mentioned the sound ads to the speed feeling too. There is an increase/decrease in wind noises, but that could be more probably. Not sure regarding environment noises. My volume setting is not too high and the Kickr makes some noise too.
I think the roadside environment in Zwift does a great job conveying speed, but that the rider avatars are a bit stiff. It’s helpful that they get out of the saddle when power increases, but the bikes aren’t angling side to side the way they should when intensely sprinting or climbing.
It may be effective to have the view somehow change as we go faster to indicate speed. This could be done with motion blur, a progressively shakier image or other effects. Of course, the challenge would be do it in a way that’s helpful and not annoying (or nauseating).
I think motion blur could be a thing. It’s certainly used in car racing simulations. You just don’t process the little details at speed, and I think Zwift always shows them (or seems to) so you don’t get that “feeling of speed”.
In my opinion, it would be cool to lose some details and get some motion blur once you start going fast (25mph+?) At those speeds you’re not doing that much to focus on the details anyways, you’re worried about the rider in front of you or you’re drooling on yourself.
I’m running Zwift quite satisfactorily on a mid-2012 MacBook Pro Retina w/a 2.6Ghz Core I7 processor and discrete graphics card. I suspect just about any MacBook Pro you could get currently would meet/beat these specs.
