Need For Speed Gear Shift
Kiera Mcintyde
This is really making me rage... The reply "missing a gear during an epic chase could be costly" is sooo out of order... In the old MW you could actually shift yourself, which made it awesome as hell. Ofcourse missing out a gear is horrible but thats a part of the thrill!
Im prolly raging at someone who cant do much about it tho, but its been like this for the last couple of games now... I bought hot pursuit cause i am used to shifting in nfs... i played it for 22 min and then never looked back at the game for the same reason. And that reason is now also stopping me to buy Most Wanted. Just add in a little feature that makes "a lot" of ppl happy... also makes a lot more revenues too. Ppl that dont want to use the manual shift because its too "costly" dont have to touch the setting, but please let ppl decide for their own wether or not that is "costly"
NFS MW isn't realistic, so why would you have manual gearing? Go play a racing sim, MW is an arcade racing game, if you want to simulate a gear change, release the throttle before the driver shifts up or down.
Realistic or not, to anyone outside of the US an automatic gearbox is something you try and persuade your grandad to use because he keeps grinding the gears in your car now that his clutch foot is a little shaky. It is something that people use because they have failed their driving test 5 times in a NORMAL car.
Why have such great European cars represented if you are going to mock their very existence by putting an automatic gearbox in them - something they would never even contemplate in reality. Did Ariel really license you using their name and associating it with an idiot box ?
then the people who will get butt hurt over missing a gear will set it to automatic. seriously most games have both but set auto as the default. its not that hard. i really dont like the fact that you cannot see what gear you are in even if it is an auto. id like that atleast.
In classroom we are told to NEVER switch from low to high, or high to low range with tranny in neutral..... so my question is how do you recover from a missed gear if your say in 6th going to 7th......mess up, and in neutral, but road speed is dropped to low for 6th and you need to get into 5th gear?
In other words, it's not going to make any changes to the range selection unless you're in neutral or passing through neutral but you can pre-select the range shift while you're in gear. It will not damage anything by making the range shift while in neutral.
Haven't you guys noticed that you can flip that range selector switch 1000 times while you're in gear and it doesn't do anything? That's because it will only shift from low to high range in the transmission itself while you're in neutral. So if you're in 5th on a 10 speed and you switch the range selector to high, nothing happens until you take it out of 5th and into neutral. At that point the transmission will switch from low to high range and you can go ahead and put it in 6th.
Honestly that was just a matter of inexperience. A lot of things could have happened that prevented you from getting back into gear. You might have lost track of whether you were in low or high range, you may have switched between the two and tried putting it in gear without giving it time to make the change in the transmission, you might have pushed the clutch too far and started hitting the clutch brake which slowed the transmission speed too far - could have been 100 things. But it would have gone into gear just like any other time if you would have matched up the engine speed, transmission speed, and road speed properly. But you did the right thing. You got it stopped, reset everything, and continued on. Great job :-)
Now we always talk about big rig transmissions not having synchronizers, but in fact they do in one area - the high/low range. Nobody has mentioned it yet but haven't you guys wondered what that whining or "winding up" sound is you hear sometimes when you shift from high range to low range? That's the sound of the transmission shaft speeding up to engage low range. Now you may not be able to hear it with all transmissions, but try this....downshift from the lowest gear in high range to the highest gear in low range - like 6th to 5th in a 10 speed. Listen closely to see if you can hear a whining or "winding up" sound in between gears when the gear lever is in neutral. That's the sound of the synchronizer speeding up the shaft to engage low range. That's why you have to give it a second after hitting the splitter, especially going from high to low range.
If your head is spinning from all that - here's the takeaway.....you can hit the splitter while you're in neutral. Just make sure you give the transmission a second to make the change before putting it into gear. Hitting the splitter only tells the transmission you want to shift from low to high range (or vice versa). The transmission has to synchronize internal speeds and meet other criteria before the actual change will take place. That's why you have to wait a moment before putting it into gear.
Obviously, rookies aren't good at shifting yet. So they want to make sure that if you're ever in neutral that you're either upshifting or downshifting. If you be in neutral for too long on your test, it's an automatic fail - so they want to discourage any actions by you when in neutral. In other words, they want you to go from gear to gear as fast as possible. Playing with the High/Low could perhaps stumble you.
It's to make it less confusing for you and to protect the equipment. You should never be in neutral anyways so they want to drill it in your head that when you go in neutral, you want to be in a gear as quickly as possible.
ButtonUp and Brian - awesome job of grabbing that information from the manual and quoting it here. There's nothing better than a well-educated debate on a topic and citing the manual is a great way to go. I looked through the manual a bit and found some interesting stuff to cover so let's knock some of this out....
First of all let me state my position again, and indeed it goes directly against what the operator's manual says for the transmission. My position is that you do not have to preselect the hi/lo range before beginning the shift. But don't worry, we're not done yet. I'm going to go directly against what the operator's manual says on some other items in a minute.
You're exactly right about "Ghost Gear" Brian...if you shift incorrectly you will get incorrect results. That didn't happen because you waited until you were in neutral to hit the range selector. It happened because you didn't wait for the transmission to complete the range shift before putting it into the next gear. Your timing was off. Now if you preselect the range before beginning the shift it will give the transmission the maximum time possible to complete the range change which in turn will give you a better chance of completing the shift smoothly. But is it necessary to shift that way? Well I'd say....
Exactly. I have about a million miles in standard transmissions (and about 1/2 million in automatics which doesn't apply here). It doesn't hurt the transmission to shift the range selector while you're in neutral but it does reduce your chances of completing the shift smoothly. Admittedly it can be tricky if you're upshifting and you wait until you're in neutral to hit the range selector because the timing gets a bit tighter. By the time the transmission completes the range change the rpm's may have dropped too low to get it into 6th (on a 10 speed) so you'll have to kick the throttle a bit to get the rpm's back up. Timing is everything.
So thanks to ButtonUp and Brian let me clarify my position. You do not have to preselect the range finder before beginning a shift but it does help give the transmission the maximum amount of time to complete the range change, which in turn gives you the best opportunity to complete the shift smoothly. So preselecting is a recommended procedure but mechanical knowledge about how these transmissions work and years of experience shifting them dictates that you can wait until you're in neutral to switch the range selector.
Do we even need to discuss double-clutching versus floating gears? 99.999% of the drivers in America have floated gears for 50+ years. So do you always need to use normal double-clutching procedures? Of course not.
I know they say you're "out of control" if you're coasting in neutral but I've probably coasted 500 miles in neutral over the years and I lived to tell about it and so did all of my transmissions. Again I'm not recommending you do that, but I don't want you guys to think you'll tear up the transmission if you do because it's listed in the operator's manual.
Talk about vague....what the h*ll does that mean???? If they mean, "Don't try to downshift if you're going to fast for the next lower gear" then I wouldn't call that a "tip" so much as I would say it isn't physically possible to do so. You can only kick the rpm's up to a certain level. If they won't go high enough to downshift to the next lower gear then you simply won't be able to complete the shift. So they really don't have to tell you not to do that because it isn't physically possible to do that anyhow.
This is what we we've been referring to as "Ghost Gear" where the lever is in gear but you're not putting power to the wheels because the range selector wasn't able to complete the range change in time. So you have to put the lever in neutral and allow the range selection to complete. Normally by the time you've done that your rpm's have dropped to idle so you have to kick the rpm's up where they belong to select the next gear. When you're new to driving this can be really tricky because your mind is spinning when something like this happens. Suddenly you're out of gear, you're not sure why, and you're trying to figure out on the fly what happened. You're trying to figure out what gear you belong in, where the range selector should be, and at what rpm's based on your current road speed. This is what happened to Mountain Girl when she said:
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