Levi,

Do you have or can you post a replay of that? I can't do it and end up in big slow left/right slides that look a bit dubious! Yet your video looks pretty convincing..

Well.. Easy to drive is a good thing in many ways.. I don't quite like everything yet but yes.. the BF1 is easy to drive.. Until you realise that a laptime of 57 seconds at Blackwood is 3 seconds off the pace. Auch.

It does say 'car volume' indeed, slightly confusing as I thought that wouldn't include the rest, but thats me I suppose

Perhaps the easiest / nicest thing to do is to allow the other sliders to be set from zero instead of from 1.0 so people can tweak to their liking?

A 'sollution' is to open the RAW files in something like Cooledit and reduce them by 12dB..

Pretty good chance that a good LFSer will take the prize home! It seems that they use a large FOV, I can't see the mirrors with my preferred 70ish degrees..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9flAHP52f4

its caught on video.. slow these days though, its 'theirtube' as 'mytube' is taking ages..

Well its not much the actual warming of the tyres, its more a very interesting test for LFS physics.

Hi guys,

I think its really quite impressive to see Alonso and others heat their rear tyres by flicking the car left/right/left very quickly with TC disabled (I think!). We saw this is not without risks as someone left the track (Monty?) doing that a few races ago. But if it was *really* risky I doubt they'd do it so we should be able to do it to a good extent as well for a few seconds before we loose it..

Has anyone tried and replicated this in LFS? Its quite quick in real life and is a good 'physics test' as the tyres experience constant changing straight on and sideways spin and slip. I haven't been able to do it in LFS myself yet (seems to be too slow left/right, bit sluggish and soon too 'long' periods of oversteer) but I'm looking for some impressive replays here..

Lets all have a go!

I can't find a vid of F1 guys doing it, that would be nice to compare against.. :/

Hmm yes that is probably it.

LFS *can* rule though, thats obvious. With normal front tyres, trying to do scandinavian flicks in the Fz50 is such a joy / challenge. It really doesn't want to just throw the back around, you have to do some serious provoking. This replay shows some non expert but still cool action imho.

Another very interesting thing might be TC. Now that you can have it on the Fz50, its kind of 'strange'. With an understeery setup and normal front tyres, you can provoke understeer: i.e. the car more or less goes straight. However, if you do that with TC enabled and your gas pedal to the floor, throttle will drop to 0% by the TC! So you're more or less going straight with loads of understeer, yet TC thinks there is 4% slip and cuts throttle? If TC on the Fz50 is cutting the throttle when rear wheelspin is >xx% then I'm not sure why front tyre understeer would lead to enough rear wheelspin to make the throttle stop completely... Who can explain that?

Of course if TC on the car acts when any of the wheels, driven or not driven, slip this is easy to explain..

Anyway even though I'm not that good yet this replay shows off the best side of LFS imo.

Yes true.. Look at the different opinions on current sims. Simracing is very subjective.. some points:

1) Skill level varies a lot: someone doing a 2 minute lap isn't really driving the same as someone who does a 1:55..

2) What is skill? You can learn the limits of the sim but does that mean you're applying real driving skill? Are you stomping on 3 pedals at the same time with overly stiff / oversteery setups that noone would ever use in real life? Even two people who do a 1:55 (lets say thats a near WR time somewhere) will do this in quite different ways. It seems like you drive your 'style' and form an opinion on how the sim reacts to your style...

3) Style is overrated, 95% of simracers suck! (me included!) A LOT of simracers with their opinions have the relative skill level of ending up somewhere mid/backfield in a national celebrity Citroen Saxo race.

4) Computer limitations.. Some points here.. a 'flat' 3D image, some sound.. thats it.. Sims using a different FOV or use more 'head shaking' will make people conclude they 'feel different' even before you get to the physics.

5) Controller limitations. If 95% of simracers are poor (again me included), 98% probably use horrible controls. Standard off the highstreet store shelve pedals are very poor, and my recent trials with a Logitech DFP made me quite sad! Horrible! It made me understand part of the subjective differences. FF settings vary from person to person, totally changing the virtual drivers capability of judging the simulation. Its obvious that FF is flawed with the affordable wheels. Everytime a sim comes out people discuss the FF.. It shouldn't be a point of discussion. A good wheel with a good sim simply 'does' FF, yet the incredibly compromised Logitech designs are causing more grief than giving you feedback. So, sadly, mass produced wheels and pedals are more of a gimmick than good.

High quality pedals are often poor when it comes to brake sensitivity (I ranted about that in AutoSimSport jan/feb issue page 47 if you're interested). Thankfully the high end wheels don't have FF so in that respect they don't add another subjective parameter to the equation.

Then what is happening! We use office chairs and often race in fairly uncomfortable positions, mostly pressing and turning Logitech toys. A squashball makes the brake 'feel nice' (whilst screwing up its sensitivity).. the FF 'is great' while having little relation on the actual steering torque calculated by the sim....

Auch! What can I conclude? We call it simracing but in most cases this is certainly not true looking at the hardware we use. It seems that people look for the immersion and 'thrill'.. This is fine, but hampers your ability to objectively judge something. I can fall for it too! GTR with the canned FF effects and shaking view and sampled sounds has the 'wow' factor. It should however have nothing to do with judging its realism as far as physics go.

7) sims? I think Stefano (Netkar) said that sims are getting more and more alike and that this was a 'good thing' as it showed that basically 'we're getting there'. I disagree. First of all sims are worlds apart, and that is using proper pedals and for the sake of there not being good FF, a non FF smooth wheel. Sims are not all alike, and even if they would be, it might well be that they all would be making the same mistakes..

I always wanted to believe that sims came a 'fair way' since GPL in 1998 but I honestly don't think so. Yes we now have multilink suspensions, brake fade, semi complex aero... but thats no use if the tyre model and/or the data that feeds them is far off. Or if weight transfer is wrong..

Sims aren't good enough yet. Now I can't code more than a multiple choice QuickBasic questionaire so its a stellar achievement that these small programming teams come up with physics and graphics engines at all, but from a pure realism point of view, sims are not truly sims yet.

8)games? I think in 2006 racing sims are not professional and there are few people actually interested in ultimate realism. For some rF does great, for some LFS, for some NKpro, for some N2003. The general maturity of the players shows a lot too.. "I want this car in the game" "I want special drift tyres" "The reversed weight bias Porsche mod is GREAT" etc..

Am I a moaning old man? Well.. yes.. I demand a lot and can't be satisfied when all sims on my harddrive are so different. What if THE real sim showed up tomorrow? I think peoples opinions would still vary a lot because of their poor controls, poor interpretation skills and poor demand for realism.

There is light on the horizon with Todd Wasson's new ideas about tyre modelling, Eero's new sim, and good ol Kaemmer apparantly working on something. I can't wait to try these as its about damn time the bar gets raised! I just hope there are more than 3 people out there who actually care about it.

Language barrier I suppose I mean it DID get better from s1 to s2 to yesterdays patch. But it was 'far off' and still is 'far off'.. just less far off..

Yes there is an improvement over the previous version. However, over the years LFS has gone from 'some really huge problems' to 'some pretty huge problems'...

I don't know and I'm annoyed Scawen isn't joining discussions.. But all seems to indicate that the actual tyre MODEL hasn't really changed! Only the parameters that feed it have gotten a bit better. In many ways exactly the same things happen as before, only now they happen a little bit less 'easy' but that is only under certain circumstances. Straight line stuff improved, but as soon as there are lateral forces (and no downforce to mask the problem) its the same old issue.

I don't think you can say its 'high speed' or 'low speed'. This has often been mentioned in sims, and its true that most have different low speed physics.. but that is near 0 speed. Above 10km/h most sims will use their pacejkas or whatever model they run. Problems might be more apparant at certain speeds. At low speeds the car can change direction a bit faster, perhaps highlighting some issues with that. At high speed the car carries a lot of momentum which might cause different symptoms to show.

The thing is that it seems that tweaking a 'not optimal' tyre physics model isn't the sollution. Sadly I don't know how you *can* model tyres properly so I'm not of much help.

Scawen's 'avoiding of physics forum threads' doesn't help. How has he debugged LFS physics? How much situations has he put in the sim to calculate later by hand to see if weight transfer etc is 'close'? We all think its the tyres, and that is quite likely, but perhaps thats not the only thing..

Since I can have absolutely 0 input on making LFS 'better' (up to a point) I do get annoyed at its very slow physics progress. LFS is an awesome achievement in many ways but there are just a few too big things too wrong.

I just find it hard to believe that people call the tyres such a big improvement! It does seem that the slicks have improved 'more'... But then thats a risky statement as except one they all have considerable downforce. A bit more long. grip makes it harder to spin the tyres, and once at speed you have the magic downforce hand pushing them on the tarmac..

Here is a collection of replays where, most of the time, I don't countersteer.. There is just SOOO little required, both on and off throttle to make the car oversteer. And even when you don't truly 'spin out' the car still wants to turn so eagerly.

I don't run 'oversteery' sets, on a whole my front wheelrates are a bit stiffer than the weight thats on that side of the car and the front rollbar is considerably stiffer than the rear. Diff locking is non insane.

Out of the box, LFS still is wrong. Fixing 'normal' front tyres helps.. but we're masking a real problem. I don't even know if the tyres are the real cause, perhaps yaw forces are 4 times too high or inertia calculations are wrong.. I have no clue. But its too obviously not realistic imo.

It was like this before the patch but increasing the engine sound boost has a linear effect on increasing 'the other' sounds too (wind/tyres)..

Must be a bug surely as why would you have separate sliders for them yet the car engine influencing the wind and tyre sound?

hear the mp3, what happens when i put the engine boost slider from full left to full right to full left. (warning some distortion..)

I don't think there have been much fundamental changes made. The biggest one is that the tyres are a big more grippy in longitudinal direction and a bit less in lateral. This means that it takes a bit more 'right foot' or wildness before..... the same old happens. Big scary "BMW would never allow any of their road cars in LFS" style. And while it might be slightly less quickly oversteering away from you on regular turn in / exit, a quick slalom type course shows that you have a lot of rear end catching to do, roughly the same problem that plagues LFS since S1. It seems that you can't tweak something that is flawed somewhere and make it better.

I really like that they got a real F1 car in there, lets hope it'll boost license sales as the devs deserve that.

If nothing changes in the (considerable) brain of Scawen, then I don't think LFS will have really good tyres (or whatever is wrong now) even with S3.

Then again, if this boosts sales, lets hope Scawen does a Kaemmer and does some race schools in a variety of cars, with aim of comparing it to the sim. Perhaps Michelin can be tricked into more than supplying their name.. The future is still bright, but I don't have my shades handy as the chance I need em is slim..

you can use LFS calibration 'lock' here:

1) press brake a tiny bit and keep it this way
2) calibrate in lfs
3) don't press gas fully! leave some end deadzone
4) don't take your foot totally of the brake!
5) tick calibration lock
6) release brake fully

I think that should work..
Of course you just have to make your own real pedals someday as Logi's aren't really good..

IMO it shouldn't be under or overrated.. We'll see it this month! It could be great news for the devs as these things might make the sim sell a lot more. However they might not have had any data from the team so the whole car could be a 'very general rough idea F1' as far as physics go. I bet Michelin (edit: or is it Bridgestone this year..) didn't provide any details and surely detailed suspension info etc won't be available..

One thing is for sure, they HAD to improve tyre physics to make this drivable

Last edited by Niels Heusinkveld, Tue, 18 Apr 2006 08:32.

looked it up, its actually very cheap so its not worth the hassle. I'll drop it by the post office hopefully later this week

Hi all,

I have 2 working DFP circuit boards, these are 100% UNsupported by Logitech and neither them nor me is responsible if they make your house catch fire... But aside from this legal note, they work as they should so if you're sure your logi DFP has dead electronics, shout and I'll send one you for just shipping cost.

/Niels

Victor, would it be possible to give some details about the tyre model changes? Recent investigation seemed to reveal that the tyres have a quite narrow peak of optimum temperature which in reality appears to be 'fairly broad' near optimum until really too hot when they drop off. Any changes to this?

And would any changes in grip / combining of forces be considered 'tweaks' to the old model or basically a totally new model / method?

Yes I know its unlikely that you'll answer this in detail

In both cases its 'wait and see'.. and we won't have to wait long

Competition is a good thing.. Perhaps this will one day mean that there are no dodgy tyre models in sims... but that might be wishfull thinking

Worth it, but you must (yes must ) clock that venice higher, it doesn't break a sweat at clock speed and if your mobo is decent can do an easy 2.4 / 2.5ghz which really makes it near the fastest single core chips available today. Seeing as you overclocked your 6800 you're into this and its worth it

Well, BTCC had them all IIRC some years ago.. 4WD audis, RWD beemers and loads of FWD cars. I seem to recall the audis being good in the rain but 'close but not quite there' on dry stuff, and slower on the straight.

FWD and RWD is close in speed but if you are a bit like Tiff Needel, i.e. enjoy controlling cars near the limit, you'll curse everything that is front wheel drive as you can't play with them. And even racing, you don't get that 'balance the nose direction with throttle' with front wheel drive.

If racing was all FWD, I wouldn't be into simracing. The pure challenge of car control imo is only possible with RWD. FWD is more about being very clean and precise. Of course RWD is that as well but sooooo much more interesting. The right foot steers the car (well.. ish)

Interesting guys!

I don't have data for it but Grant Reeve (simmer /ex papy staff) owns a .. MR2 I think, and he got noticable higher long. grip (1.3g I think) than lateral grip (1.1 iirc).

Another point to make, can we see how quickly the rubber (i.e. not the inside of the tyre) heats up? If this reacts quickly to wheelspin this means that it might explain that 'once you have wheelspin you can keep it going through the gears' feeling especially with the F08.. If first gear wheelspin heats up the tyres you loose enough grip to continue spinning them in most gears!

I think, but again I'm plagued by not having data, that rubber doesn't peak that much but has a wider 'near optimum' range until it gets really hot probably..