Despite being a full integration in the settings, rather surprised to see little discussion about Biketerra here.
So I’ve been using Rouvy for a lot of indoor training for a bit over a year as it’s nice to have something to distract the eye while burning the calories. However Rouvy seem to be adding a lot of features and introducing new bugs that have left me a bit frustrated, as well as the general pain point that speeding up/slowing down the recorded footage often feels quite unnatural. For instance trying to climb a really steep hill but the motorbike zoomed up it at 30+kph when you’re not doing that. Also in some routes for events, the motorbike keeps getting pulled over by the police/guards which disrupts the reality a bit. Also for some reason that Rouvy can’t explain, my sessions no longer get L/R balance in the data.
Anyway, looking at some alternatives, and spotted Biketerra and thought I’d give it a try for a bit.
Some observations:
- Biketerra supports my CORE body temperature sensor! Something I asked Rouvy about but they seem uninterested in providing.
- The bots in Biketerra are quite different to the pace partners in Rouvy, much more chaotic. But they do help in making the virtual world seem less empty.
- Far fewer people in Biketerra, so less able to join more adhoc mini competitions.
- The UI could do with a few tweaks:
- sometimes I want to just ride a route in Simulation mode, and sometimes I want to do a workout with ERG mode, which require changing some settings in a few sub menus;
- Missing the little view of what’s coming up in the next 50-100 meters for elevation, especially on longer routes the elevation view can hide some hills;
- sometimes the
- A rather large mismatch in speed shown by Biketerra vs Rouvy. Importing a route that I’ve done numerous times yielded at least a 3-7kph difference in average speed with a similar eFTP. Probably for a few reasons:
- There’s custom bikes in Rouvy so you can use an aero bike with aero wheels;
- the bots in Rouvy seem better for drafting.
- The world can feel a bit lonely, as if there was an apocalypse and only cyclists survive.
- The bots don’t use lights at night, only your avatar does;
- Houses don’t often have roofs;
- Buildings are the same for every country.
- Importing a route from a .fit file downloaded from intervals.icu did not work as the elevation was all wrong. I had to convert it to a GPX file to import successfully.
- Could really do with syncing data like FTP from the intervals.icu settings.
Overall, I’ve been enjoying it. 