Perhaps you could get the grey to match the grey in the rest of the light area, that woudl be an improvment over the original.

3 1/2 years of LFS has definatly had a positive impact on my real life driving. I have better control of my car, I am more aware of the traffic around me and can better anticipate the stupid ass moves the average american driver makes on a daily basis. More then once I have been able to identify and avoid a bad situation because of the time I have spent in LFS. Although I do some times drive a little more agressivly then I need to its not the norm and find that I often drive at a more sedate pace now then before I started playing. Racing is for the track, not the street, at least for me.

Simple fix to prevent a wrecker jumping to the garage is to not allow anyone to join mid race from the garage or spectating. About the only series where you can move your car bahind the wall to the garage and repair and then back out on the track is endurance racing. In every other form of motor sports going behind the wall to the garage is a retirment from the race.

Just this morning I took a freeway interchange at a fast enough speed to make the tires growl through all 270 degreed of the uphill positive camber interchange. The back end steped out at about 5 degrees and the rear tires in their optimal slip angle. When i got to work i took a good look at the tires. The new wear was half way between the edge of the tread where is rolls down toward the sidewall and the point where the tread blends in to the side wall, so still squarly on the tread of the tire.

I am running 205/50R15 Yokohama tires rated to 150mph, inflated to 35psi and about -2 degrees of camber. If i set the GTT or GT up this way I would roll the tires right over on the sidewalls and loose grip, have slugish handeling and be slow around the track. Somthing is just not right there.

Dam Becky this looks interesting, can't wait to see how this develops in the future.

It is already included in LFS. Most race cars use some setting between full ackerman and full parallel. LFS allow you to set the steering at any point between the two settings.

It has been my experance that my time in LFS has allowed me to learn and practice skills and behaviours that have translated very well in to my normal driving on a day to day basis. I have avoided several accidents and close calls because of the experance i have gained in LFS, watching the other drives, learning to predict what they will do, knowing what I need to do and how the car will react.

When I finaly got a sporty car and went to the autocross school, I found I could easily catch, hold and correct slides. This is somthing I had never done in a real car, yet there I was on the autocross course drifting with a passable effort. Not only did my times increase over the day but in the end I beat my instructors time by over 3 seconds. In a car I had owned for little over a month.

So yes I feel its time well spent, my daughter when older will learn in LFS or its follow up and she will be much better prepaired for the road then I was. Everything you learn in LFS, if you use a setup that is close to a real car will be directly translatable to a real car with similar handeling propperties. Some things though you just have to learn in the real world.

I do not think that speed alone does a good driver make and as such would be a poor indicator of a drivers skill. But to each their own.

In my opinion, the best way to get a new or younger driver to advance or even and old hat for that matter is to put them in a very loose and hard to control car. Turn off all the aids and allow them to learn the car. Once they figgure out how to control that beast, its become much easier to drive the more incontrol cars.

But the key as others have mentioned is being smooth. The exit of a corner is the most important part of a corner so entering slower and getting a better line for the exit is often times then fastest line through a corner. I still struggle with this myself.

There is no good way to identify a wrecker. Yes is is posible to identify who likely was the casue of an impact but there is not way to be certin that they intentialy caused that wreck. About the only tool you have to to compair direction of travel relitive to car facing at the time of imapact and compair relitive speeds. But even with all that info a human woudl be hard pressed to determin who was at fault.

Simple you have to pit between races if you want to fix or change tires, add fuel etc. Basicly the normal state of the system would just keep the persistant state of your cars. Damage would take time to repair nothing crazy but long enough to make you not want to crash, much longer then repairs take now in the pits. But you would have an unlimited pool of parts to use. Leagues could impliment a limited pool of parts to help encourge racers to save their cars for the long haul.

Time to repair could be somthing like this:
Time per corner:

Tires - 15 Sec
Light Damage - 30 Sec
Heavy Damage - 60 Sec

When we get more detailed damage then each componant could have a time to repair.

Last edited by Gimpster, Wed 6 Sep 2006, 19:56.

This was one thing in nKPro that was very interesting. The state of your car was saved from session to session. So unrepaired damage and the wear of your tires would be the same when you log on or start a race as they were when you left your last session. This made things interesting as tires started out a little slippery as new, gained traction as they started to wear in, and then would loose traction as they started to wear out. So tires ovten would last several races and often be best in the races after the first few laps. used on them.

This could alos later be applied to other wear parts like brakes, engines and the like, or even adding a league feature limiting the number of each part that can be used during a season.

I would rather see the RAC GTR fit in to the XFR/UFR class and the XRR/FXR get a larger non-turbo engine to be more even with the FZR.

For awile i was racing under their flag, but I and and always will be parts of GURU first and formost. Hell I am the head of the N/A division not that there is really one at this point.

You can adjust the understeer out of a meduim to hich pressure tire though. It takes a completely different approach to setup though and a different driving style i need to go back and build a set around this approach to prove the point and test my theory but will not have a chance until tomarrow.

To a point yes. But is a tire rolled over on its sidewall more grippy then a tire still frimly on its contact patch. One thing that stood out to me when learning to autocross was that they told us all to increese the pressure in our tires before coming to the event. They made a point of emphisizing that preventing tire rollover was the most important thing to achieve in tire setup. Optimaly you want to run just enough pressure to prevent the tires from rolling on to the sidewall under max cornering force. I don't see that as being the case in LFS. Tire manufactures allso would not design a tire that would require a pressure so low as to make the tire dangerous to achieve the optimal running temp, yet this seems to be the way it works in LFS currently.

When I was testing the FZ50 using a low camber, medium pressure setup I found that the inner tire temps on the back of the car and the tires surface temps were performing like i imagin they should. The right side of the tires got warm on left hand turns, the left sides got warm on right hand turns, the centers heated more and the sides cooled on the straights and under acceleration and braking and the overal effect was very dynamic over the course of a lap. But to achieve this effect the tires end up running at about 5-10C below optimal and sidewall fles was still a little bit of an issue.

The car also responded to smaller inputs and was over all much more responsive. I think though that the benifts of using a more realistic setup like this is still not being rewarded enough in the way the physics work, as it is plainly clear from the WR sets that the fastest sets are nothing like would be used on a real car.

When I look that the way the tire loading on the contact patch affects heat generation i see a problem and it may be a contibuting factor. With the pressure set right to develop optimal head at the center of the contact patch and camber set to allow the bst grip in cornering the inside of the tires run very warm 10 ro 20 above optimal and the outer edged loose heat. The entire contact patch is still touching the road, and is generating friction yet the outer edges don't generate any heat and thus never generate thier optimal grip. I think that the there is a decmel misplaced in the calculation that in effect looks somthing like this. Heat = Load % * Friction, when maybe it should be Heat = (Load % + 1)*Friction. Even a tire running at -5 degrees camber should be building heat in the outer portion of the contact patch, though friction, heat exchange from the inside air temp and throguh the media of the tire as well. There should be a blead effect to some degree by which the less used portion of the tire helps cool the warmer portion and vice versa. I only see this happeing when a much less sever camber and higher pressure is use. This tells me that only when the relitive differences are small does the system work, so somthing is getting multiplied to the wrong power in my opinion. I need to explain that better but I am not sure how to yet.

Last edited by Gimpster, Sun 3 Sep 2006, 20:51.

Is there a reason som many people are still posting in this thread? We are not going to get any real world cars in LFS unless the devs strike it rich. The licencing costs are just not worth the trouble. If we are lucky we migth find some small manufacture or rac eteam that wants to use LFS as a showcase for their car or for testign of their cars, but those are more likely to happen of we as a comunoty approach these teams and manufactures to get them interested. In the end though any such deals also slow down work on planed features.

Recently I have starting to take a closer look at the physics and design of the cars in LFS in an effort to try and understand why the street cars in some cases do not feel as good as they did in S1 and why often times setup changes do not have the effect on the cars handling as I think they should. Some of the things I observed while doing this have made me rethink my approach to car setup but I still do not know enough to really make any hard assumptions. Up to this point I have gone back and forth on whether even loading or even temp is the best solution for tire grip. I am still torn on the subject but I am starting to think that either is just as important as the other, but the current model does not allow one to achieve both even heating and loading, you have to choose which you want to use.

Then next thing I started playing with was tire pressure. I am convinced that some of the handling issues stem from under inflated tires. So I took my set which now felt good and handled the way I liked and added 10psi to the tires in an attempt to try and reduce sidewall flex with out and regard for its effect on tire heating but retaining the camber needed to keep tire heating even. The result was that the car became extremely responsive to input, so much so that I actually got the car to do that snap back to straight on a throttle lift that we all know happens in a real car when you get the back out of shape. I found that it was almost too responsive though and I was still getting more sidewall flex that I wanted.

At this point which the tires starting to behave like I expect them to on my real car changes to the other setting also started to have the effects I know they should. Over damping with the shocks became a liability were before it was necessary to help add responsiveness lost do to soft tires. Adjustments to springs rate started to have the desired effects, when before they seemed to have very little effect. In the end I found that when setup in this way the car now feels like my sporty car instead of like my truck with its narrow, tall soft tires.

So my questions to the community are thus:

Is it more optimal to achieve even tire surface heating or even surface loading under cornering to achieve optimal and predictable handling?

Is it more optimal to have tires running at optimal temp or to have enough pressure to prevent the sidewall from rolling on its side?

Would it be better for online racing for people to use setups based around real world ideas and have a slightly slower more predictable car then a faster car with a much narrower performance envelope?

And lastly what have the rest of you observed in terms of how the cars in LFS compare to cars you drive in real life? Do they handle the same and do changes have the effects you think they should?

Oblivion is a good example. One interesting not is that HRD also disables AA and AF, which at first i though was odd but with HDR the light sources and shadows are in constant flux based on the point of view of the camera and the worlds movment. In effect it blends in such a dynamic sceen that you don't even see that there are jaggies because they are always moving and changing shape.

Was I the only one that got chills while watcing the GT5 video when it cut tot he pit lane. HOLY COW!

The FZR is definatly a beast, handles like a dream up to about 95% after that it goes from being all nice to deing a beast from hell that is just looking for an oppertunity to bite. The car is built like a Porsche, all the weight is in the back on the rear tires. That rear weight bias make it accelerate like a cheata but in the corners and under breaking it wants to lead the way. Controling that weight and how it moves around is the key.

The setup will only get you so far, at some point you need to learn to use that weight to help you control the car. I find that I will more times then not have understeer in fast corners which i try and compensate for with setup and the truth of the matter is I am using too much steering input. The result is a very oversteery set in slow speed corners and during rapid direction changes like the final chicane.

Another common pitfall in the FZR is that reduced grip in the rear end can be either from springs and ARBs too soft or too hard. So untill you get it close it will not react to adjustments like it would in a R/F car like the XRR. Too soft and the too much weigth can transfer, too hard and you don't allow enough weight to transfer. Both situations lead to loose of grip at the back.

The FZR is very sensitive to small changes in tire and suspension changes so make them in small ammounts. AS National is also not the best track for building a set on as it has limited corner types to test against and what works there may not work anywhere else. But sets built for tracks like AS Historic and GP will work almost anywhere with minor adjustments.

So where does that leave me?

Glen, the TBO class has always had different performance levels between the cars. Its been that way since the begining and we don't know how the cars would compair if their only differences were their design and not specs. Right now the cars in any given class differ by so many different ways that ballancing is overly complex. If they were the same in many ways then fewer adjustments would be needed to even then out reasonably well.

I think the biggest reason one car is faster then another in the TBO class is because the lightest fastest car also has the most static grip. If the GTT was better able to get the power down it would close the performance gap nicely, the RB4 sufferes in this way too in addition to having a poor power to weight ratio. I just think the putting all the cars on an even footing will lead to better ballance down the road. Its diffacult to compair oranges to apples, but its even more diffacult to compair an orange with a steak.

Several recent threads have made me rethink my ideas of a few of the things that I feel need to change in LFS. Those two areas are class balance and the tire model. These are two areas which many of us feel need to be adjusted for various reasons and we do not all feel the same way. Since these discussions are spread though several threads I created this new one as I think the solution which will improve both issues is very interlinked.

Class Balance:
Let’s first look at class balance as it will lead to the changes in the tire model. LFS is a racing simulator which contains variety of car types, classes and racing styles. One major difference between the classes in LFS and the classes in real racing is the way the cars are grouped. In live for speed in any given class which has more then a single car the cars them selves are very different in terms of design and performance. This makes balancing the class even more difficult then it needs to be. I can understand that the intent in doing so was to make each car unique in its own way.

The truth of the matter is though that even if they all shared the same weight, power and tire size they would all still be very different in their handling. A FWD car will behave differently then a RWD car, each will perform better in different situations and will cater to different styles of driving. And AWD is also a very different animal then either a FWD or RWD. The next point is that for the more part in most organized racing classes all the cars will be limited to a minimum weight and maximum power. Most cars are going to be built to be as close to these limits as they can, why would you ever intentionally make your car heavier then a competitor or run will less power? The last point is that all the cars in a given class also have maximum tire size and width restrictions.

So I say make the cars in a given class just about the same weight maybe give or take 10kg, give them all about the same HP and torque, but with torque curves that fit the vehicles design, and give them all the same size tires so they all have the same static grip. Let the cars design allow it to be unique, without forcing it to be so and if they still prove to be unbalanced then a few small adjustments to weight or power should get them sorted with less difficulty then it may be now.

The Tire Model:
This brings us nicely in to the changes that I think need to be made to the tire model, but first lets look at why the changes need to be made. Tire in the real world are designed to perform ideally under different situations. As such each tire has different characteristics that define its performance based on its intended use. The tires in LFS appear to be all of very similar design with the only differences being optimal temp, static grip and wear rate. Now with the upcoming changed that tire brands will introduce new possibilities are open. Before the devs get too entrenched in the changes I want to throw out a few ideas for the community to discuss.

The first idea is that the every tire type be designed for its intended purpose and not just be copies of the base with altered grip/wear/optimal temp. To do that we need to also change how tire are linked with the cars. As it is now every car has a predefined wheel diameter and tire width/profile. I think that wheel diameter should be the only spec that should be linked to the vehicle and or vehicle class. The design of the wheel should be free and we should have several choices. The wheel width, tire width, profile, and specs should all be based on the type of tire for a given class. I know this is a big change and may require some major code reworking if it’s not already going to be reworked to allow different brands to have different specs, but in the end it will allow each tire type to be different in more then one or two ways and as a result till allow for more realistic tire physics.

In a given class all the tires types should have the same overall diameter, but each should have a different tread width and profile to suit is purpose and design. For the street cars, an off road tire will be narrower and taller and made form a longer wearing compound then a street tire. A normal road tire is going to be designed to provide a softer ride and longer life then a performance road tire at the cost of handling. In essence every type of tire should vary in more then just the three ways they do now. Each should have a unique combination of tread width, sidewall height and sidewall stiffness in addition to tire compound (which equates to the wear rate, static grip and optimal temp differences we have now.)

The racing tires are another area where we need to change. There is no point in having different tire compounds in the racing tires at this point because different tires compounds are use primarily to suit the ambient temperature differences on any given day or location then they are for any other reason. Since all the tracks in LFS have the same ambient and racing surface temps we need only one compound at this time. Make it easy on yourselves and us and concentrate on making that one compound feel right. When we get varying weather conditions that effect ambient and track temps then introduce different racing compounds. I would also be inclined to ask that when we do get to the point where we need more then one racing tire compound for a given racing class that we have a large number of choices as having to choose between having a little more grip or a little longer wear will make races interesting. So having the differenced between compounds small will ensues that for any given condition there are at least two useable choices.

This brings is to the last point in that when we do get brands that have different handling there will now be many more choices in how they can differ and the differences can be smaller. This will only serve to make the choice to use one brand over another a matter of driving style instead of which is a better tire. With very small differences the only advantage of one brand over another brand would be because that brand just works a little better for the way you drive instead of being just a clearly better tire. It would also be nice if certain handling traits remain persistent through out a brands tire range. For example say Evostar tires offer a slight grip advantage but wear a little faster or that Torro tires like to run little warmer, etc.

Well that my piece and I hope some useful discussion will come of this. The thread is now yours, so discuss.

I think the point is not whether the deformation is possible in real life, but rather are the tires used in LFS accurate for what tires would be used in a street tire, club racing series or track day? This is where I think the problem is. The Road Normal tires I think act as they should, rolling very easily as they have thinner sidewalls to absorb bumps and provide a smooth ride. The Road Supers are are more akin to a performance driving tire like a Potenza or Advan, these tires are made from a softer compount and will run warmer but will also be lower profile and have a thicker sidewall. These types of tires are designed to have high grip levels, but ride comfort is a secondary thought.

When I went to the local autocross school they told everyone to increese the pressure in their tires so as to not roll the tires over on the sidewalls. Their recomendation was 45psi front and 40psi rear in a FWD and 40psi all the way around for RWD and AWD cars. Lighter cars with lower profile tires did not need to run this high to achieve the desidered results. My miata has 195/50R15 tires with a speed rating of 150mph which should be equilivent to a road super. I ran 35psi front and 30psi rear and under max lateral grip and in drift the rear tires never rolled over on to the sidewalls. They showed wear right to the edge of the tread and no further.

Now when I setup the XR GT the same way as my miata which is very close but just a little heaver and with a little more power, the tires have way too much sidewall flex. The result is that you need to run much more negitive camber to cominsate or run tire pressure way too high for optimal heating. This causes the handeling of the car to suffer and is just wrong.

In LFS all the cars are being used on a track of some sort. As such they should be using tires approate for the activity. I have a few ideas but they go deeper then just the issue of sidewall flex. I will be starting a dissusion on that elsewwere but here are the bits that are relevent here.

Wheel size and tire size need to be made more standardized, not by car but by class and application. For any given car/class the wheel diamiter should be fixed. The width should be based on the tire being used. So with a system like this lets look at the TBO class as an example. In the TBO class all the cars would run with 15" wheels. Now depending on the tires used the width and sidewall hight would change. So the knobby dirt tires might be 185/65R tires, the hypbrid might be 195/60R, the Road Normal might be 205/55R and the Road Super a 215/50R tire. This way each tire remains the same diamiter but is now designed more for the application used. You get the idea, but this can be taken even further.

Each type of tire really has two parts, the tread and sidewall. Each is tailered to the tires application. So the knobby tire, being intended for use off-road, will have long lasting tread and a semi stiff side wall to help resist roll over but still absorb impact. The hybrid a softer tread for dual purpose use and a semi stiff sidewall to absorb impact and resist rollover. The road normal is an evey day tire, designed for long life and ride comfort, as such is will have a tread that is medium to medium hard and a soft sidewall to absorb impact but be less resistant to rollover. The road super is a performance tire designed to provide the best gip a street tire can and everything else is secondary, it will has a soft tread and semi-stiff side wall.

Last edited by Gimpster, Wed 30 Aug 2006, 06:14.