I have been watching a couple of hotlaps and the thing I noticed, the strange setups these hotlapcars have. Most of the time the setup is very weak, the car behaves like an american cadillac, how is it possible that such a setup can be faster than a realistic setup?
I've never seen a F1 car driving like it's on flat tyres..

I think there is something really wrong with the LFS physics.

Quote from BoneCrusher :

the car behaves like an american cadillac

can you be more specific? are you referring to "boat"-like front end dip/rise, or crappy turning radii?

For virtually every racing game ever made, including LFS (and iRacing), the expert players figure out setups and driving techniques that exploit the physics of those racing games, and most of the time it involves setups and techniques that would never work in the real world.

+1 Jeff

+2

Quote from JeffR :

For virtually every racing game ever made, including LFS (and iRacing), the expert players figure out setups and driving techniques that exploit the physics of those racing games, and most of the time it involves setups and techniques that would never work in the real world.

Or it woudn't be called a "racing game" or "racing simulation" but a "virtual near-reality racing system".

Well what can we say. Two LFS speed kings ( nick and rudy) have spoken!

in fact the problem in LFS is that the value of different setup things depend of lot of things including how the car is built. In LFS cars are considered like a solid with a center of gravity and a mass balance, and something like 4 perfect shock absorbers. When I mean perfect, this is because lot of things have infuence of how a car react especially in turn. These things aren't in LFS physic (and that's normal, the game would need such a good computer to work).

In fact LFS cars are simplied illustration of a car with lot of phenomena not taken into account. So cars reaction don't look so much far from reality but there is some tips to be faster and these tips are due to this simple illustration of reality.

I would think that each setting has an optimal setting at which it gives most grip. The further away you get from this setting, the less grip it gives (so a boat-like behaving suspension setup would never be faster that the realistic setting) . And that total grip is the sum of all these grip value's. Or is that a too simple approach..

If you don't take the driver and track into account then probably yes. But as each driver has a different driving style there is no perfect set that fits all. A driver prefering understeering sets will be slower in an oversteering set etc. Also different tracks require different settings (bumpy vs. flat). It's not just doing 2 + 2

Quote from JeffR :

For virtually every racing game ever made, including LFS (and iRacing), the expert players figure out setups and driving techniques that exploit the physics of those racing games, and most of the time it involves setups and techniques that would never work in the real world.

Combine that with physics without updates for a good time already, and the virtual races and car behaviour are pushed even further from reality.

Quote :

in fact the problem in LFS is that the value of different setup things depend of lot of things including how the car is built. In LFS cars are considered like a solid with a center of gravity and a mass balance, and something like 4 perfect shock absorbers. When I mean perfect, this is because lot of things have infuence of how a car react especially in turn. These things aren't in LFS physic (and that's normal, the game would need such a good computer to work).

In fact LFS cars are simplied illustration of a car with lot of phenomena not taken into account. So cars reaction don't look so much far from reality but there is some tips to be faster and these tips are due to this simple illustration of reality. Yesterday 19:04

Scawen have already told us that tyres are not reacting properly with the load, and the suspensions don't have the anti-squat or anti-dive systems that there are on reality, and are making a huge influence at the setups used by the fast drivers, and the technique used to drive.

that`s why were waiting for tyre physics update

There are a lot of differences between a virtual car and a real one. Some of the things not modeled include, chassis flex, bushing compression, variation in spring rate and damper efficiency, tire squirm, etc. One things I have found over the years with LFS is that by using real world chassis tuning techniques you can get to a setup this is reasonably fast, fairly predictable and will get you in to the front halve of the pack consistently given good driving skills. Beyond that it's lots of practice and some little tweaking as needed to exploit the physics model. In the end you either need to adapt your driving technique to the setup and track, adapt the setup to your driving style and track or more likely a combination of both.