Hello everyone,

recently cutting in simracing made the news again, when a big team purposefully used a track area that was deemed out-of-bounds in the qualifying session for a big 24 hour race in a different sim. Track limits and the enforcement of the rules are always an issue and there are pros and cons for and against punishing these infringements. At the end of the day it comes down to event organisers and server hosts to investigate the situations and to interact with the drivers on a case by case basis. If done consequently, it takes a fair amount of work to realise it. If no InSim program is created, running and in place that relieve some of the workload all tasks can only be done by manual reviews.

I had a quick idea of mine is to give hosts and organisers options of server side automatic penalties for cutting… probably suggested some time ago by someone else, but a quick and shallow search though the history returned no result in that direction. But unlike available steward circles as autocross objects that spectate the driver, small increments of time should be added to the time as penalty. One example of an implementation in racing games would be Gran Tourismo Sport or Gran Tourismo 7. While not without criticism it is an essential element to encourage fair and sportsmanlike racing in the online races.

Live for Speed has also automatic policing systems for false starts or pit speed and Live for Speed already has a similar system in place for autocross time trails. Whenever a movable object is hit, a time penalty of two seconds is added to the final classification for the driver.

• My idea therefore could be implemented by extending the functionality of the autocross penalties to qualifying and race sessions.
• Further options could include the adjustment of the time increment as, for example for races, 0.5 seconds might feel more suitable.
• Similarly it would be nice to have a circle object, that also triggers the time increment. It could be a way to avoid object ricochets triggering time penalties for uninvolved cars. Server settings could control if objects, circles, both or none trigger a time penalty.
• In case of manual checks, the option of removing, adding or amending penalties by increasing or decreasing the total penalty time
• Lastly it would be a good option if these time penalties can be served during pit stops, so the final results are not too influenced by these little time penalties.

I am looking forward to your input and ideas. Maybe it is something feasible and a good option to improve the race quality.

For qualifying the option to enforce HLVC, where a fail means the laptime gets deleted, would probably be the simplest solution - though that would involve fixing the HLVC bugs, if they still exist, and presumably wouldn't help for open configs - maybe having checkpoint/circle objects that can trigger HLVC fail would work there.
I suppose a time-penalty option would be needed for one-shot quali.

For races, I like the idea of being able to set somewhat arbitrary time penalties, to be served either at the next pitstop or by a race time adjustment (F1 rules).

However, I'm really not a fan of instant off-track/cut penalties during races as it's often not fair. When racing in close quarters with others, you could end up running afoul of it through no fault of your own and/or without gaining an advantage.
This is usually handled IRL by having a number of strikes where you can trigger a cut timing line x number of times before gaining a penalty. In endurance races, this is usually defined as x per hour.


tl;dr for some "easy" (hah!) wins:

1. Arbitrary time penalties.
   - a) Race: issued by admin/InSim for served at stop/race time. (HLVC is too strict for this, we're not MSV I hope)
   - b) Quali: issued by admin/InSim/HLVC.
   
2. Option to have HLVC delete a lap or add time penalty in quali
   
3. Control objects to trigger HLVC (behaviour as #2)
   

For racing, I think there are so many variables, it may be too complicated for LFS to have a good general solution. InSim preferred IMO (helped by 1. above).
An x strikes system based on race length *may* be doable without settings getting out of hand, but I'm not sure how useful it would be without built-in less-strict-than-HLVC detections.

I agree insim is the way to go for races, it is then up to the organiser to build it to their requirements. The current insim checkpoints can be used for this.

Qualifying a straight remove lap time would be perfect. Thinking back to a GT2C event we tried to use track limits and we ended up having to delay the race to work out results, not an easy process to manually review and adjust times. Hence we didn't use the same system since.

A 'new' insim checkpoint/circle for HLVC would be perfect for qualifying. It should still show the amount of actual laps completed but invalidated lap times so does not effect the results shown or grid etc.

In terms of the packets we can get back, it would be useful to have a flag on a lap time to tell us if it was valid or not, thinking for things like tracker etc. So we can show the time that was completed but strike through if invalid.

I completely agree with you, that there are many situations such a simple system would not create a fair race. League races are complex and in many situations there is also the question of who is responsible for a situation and who is not. InSim could be designed more intelligently then my original purposual. I also like the idea to combine it with HLVC in some ways.