SYNFORMATION

When Turn 10 offered Forza Motorsport 2, I bought an XBOX360 just to play this game. And I didn’t regret it. During more than two years I played approximately 3.000 games online, most of them in the public lobby system that Forza Motorsport had. I’m not a good racer, but I improved over time. I primarily try to have fun while racing clean.

During the first month of Forza Motorsport 2 online gaming, one of my new online friends I met in the public lobbies tuned one of my cars for me. Wow, what a difference that was compared to the not tuned car. It handled much better and was faster, too. Armed with the knowledge that tuned cars can have better handling and can be faster, I tried tuning some of my other cars myself. Hmm, was much more difficult than I had thought. Most of it was trial and error, and I got tired fast.

But I really wanted my cars to be and behave better. So I turned to the theory necessary to understand what was needed to be successful with that. It was complicated, and although I understood the interaction of the various settings better, the quality of the results was only slightly better than before.

And then, I found FEUERDOGs suspension calculator for Forza Motorsport 2. The settings it produced were much better than those of my own efforts. And to be honest, I wanted to race. You have to like tuning in order to like it – haha! It’s not my thing. But by trying to tune cars in Forza Motorsport 2 myself, I got a glimpse of what it means to become a successful tuner.

Then came Forza Motorsport 3, and I was eager to get it. I used the same tuning calculator for the new version of the game, and it still produced better tuning setups than I was able to come up with myself. FEUERDOG started working on a version for Forza Motorsport 3 and eventually he released it to the public.

I have no idea how many hours FEUERDOG spent to create the tuning calculators he did create. He might have spend more hours on it than I was spending on racing. Maybe he had as much fun doing the tuning calculator as I had during racing. But his work alone made it much more fun for me.

So today, I’m releasing ForzaDroid, the implementation of FEUERDOGs tuning calculator FM3-December Update-4 as an Android application on the Android market for free. There can be no other way, because I’m standing on the shoulders of giants here.

What does it offer? Well, here’s a list:

• based entirely on FEUERDOGs FM3-December Update-4 spreadsheet, you’ll get the same results
• added “Transmission” selection for RWD differential settings (see FEUERDOGs remark in the spreadsheet for details)
• available in English and German
• it’s available at the Android Market and free (as in beer)
• it’s simple and fast (hey, I’m not a designer, I’m a programmer)
• no gear spreader – yet

If you have never tuned a car in Forza Motorsport 3 before, you can head over to ForzaTune were you can find more information. They’re offering an iPhone application that does roughly the same thing – even more, it supports Forza Motorsport 2 – as ForzaDroid. It’s also based on FEUERDOGs work. But it has been around much longer.

If you like the Android application ForzaDroid, find a bug or have some suggestions, feel free to contact me. I won’t promise anything, but at least I’ll listen.