I have been playing around with a number of sims over the last month or so and one of the setup feature in rFactor would be great ported to LFS.

There are two ways to effect setup in rFactor. The first gives access to all the normal setup options, the other is a basic page with a few sliders.

These adjust things like ride height, under vs oversteer, speed vs downforce, speed vs accel etc These in turn then effect the normal settings.

This sort of thing would make LFS far more accessable and allow people to simply tweak setup without having to know too much. In the same way a driver says to mechs the tail is too loose and the mech tweaks to correct.

I can see you point but I can not agree on the examples you've given us. These are taking things way too simple IMO. You cannot just make a car ultimately understeer or oversteer, there's so many more factors that influence that. The car can behave totally different regarding under-/oversteer on corner entry, apex and corner exit. How to adjust that?

Also, what values would you choose to set under-/oversteer? Downforce? What about cars that don't have downforce? Rollbars? These can really screw up the car if you have to go over curbs. Etc, etc, etc.

More accessibility is good, but this is no game for the casual player, this is a sim for the serious simracer. Sooner or later they'd have to use the "complex" setup screens anyways.


And to give a bad example of simplification: I remember there was this under-/oversteer bar in the GTL demo. Well after the first few laps I simply couldn't get the back to swing around so I decided to put it fully to oversteer. Now I'm not quite sure what it did but it surely didn't make the car more oversteery during corner. It kinda felt like it just put the brake balance rearwards... guess how I found out (That rear bumper was ugly anyways).

In LFS you don't necessarily have to know in detail everything about setups. There exist plenty of good setups one can test or modify. If you're in a team, there's usually one or two members, who know a lot about creating setups.

So one can take it quite easy in the beginning and just focus on driving properly with existing setups. After a few weeks of racing it happens automatically that one gets a basic understanding of how different settings influence driving.

And, last but not least, there exist some really good setup guides in the web.

despite the fact lfs is a sim, it shouldn't mean it's got to be complicated.
so +1 here Woz.
On the other hand, show me any professsional real driver that screws on his car, instead of talking to the mechs.
I like the concept cause, I don't know very much about car-specs and "what " to change to get "this" effect.

Problem is, to get "this" effect you probably need to change a whole bunch of things, without affecting the balance of the whole...

I don't think any simplification will yield satisfactory results. Just include bob's easy race setups and point people to sites with loads of 'em ready for download.

Quote from micha1980de :

despite the fact lfs is a sim, it souldn't mean it's got to be complicated.
so +1 here Woz.
On the other hand, show me any professsional real driver that screws on his car, instead of talking to the mechs.
I like the concept cause, I don't know very much about car-specs and "what " to change to get "this" effect.

there's a lot more folk that race who set their car up than those that don't... lfs doesn't simulate the 'professional' side of things at all as far as I'm aware

I think it'd be more suitable to have a section in the tutorial dedicated to very basic setup, ie the rollbars, the final drive, and maybe tyre pressure. It's really not very difficult to learn how to adjust these things, and they can change the nature of the car enough to suit particular driving styles and race tracks.

Practice is the best way to learn how to set up the cars. Someone made a setup guide for LFS so if you have a look about, maybe in the links page you should find it

I vote no for the sliders because they really aren't great. Proper setups are always going to be better because there are more changes to make.

Keiran

perhaps the simple answer is to provide rather more realistic setups than at present, not wr set ups but maybe setups that are a little bit easier to drive straight out of box.

maybe you could even provide 3 different setups for each surface to cover the ends of set up spectrum and a middle point, i know a lot of people who if they tried the demo straight off would be put off by being unable to string a couple of laps together without first changing setups.

a lot of first timers will be unaware of the level of comunity support and setup availability and the idea of finding something that works could be very offputting to someone whos idea of set ups is from a typical console racer

I'm all for making LFS simplier to attract more people, however, I think you mostly have a point about it being too difficult to do right and unlikely to be truely successful.

As tinyvek has suggested, the default race setups are generally bollocks, but thats to be expected as its difficult to make a stable setup for all tracks. So perhaps the solution is to include Bob's easy drive, the standard and the race_1's.

heres another viewpoint, you all have your points in your argumentation no doubt about it.
A bit drastic, maybee but please think for a moment about what happens to those who follow the same rules of learning.
They specialize themselves more and more they get involved into things.
And thats not bad if youre hunting your setup.

On the other hand you (still) learn your "system" from only one point of view.
I'm talking about looking at a chart of numbers and don't see the big picture, because you're to much concerned about details.

For example take any track you like and any car too, now measure/calculate the vector of travelling you car will take after all corners are added/substracted together (left 60° minus right 87°...etc).
after this walkaround, you can say if a asymetric set would be good.

So if you start analyzing you data, driven by yourself or not doesn't matter, you'll sometimes find some interessting things you would'nt expect them to be there in the first place.

And don't flame me if all this doesn't make any sense to you, im not completely sure if what I was about to say really got expressed.

off topic:
Whats to stop you putting the start and finish checkpoints next to each other and setting new wr's?

Because you cannot use layouts in hotlap mode? If you mean PBs, they don't mean anything anyways (read: they can be archieved via modding (mechanik) or the dirty trick mentioned by you)

I knew this would get the "No No No" mob out in force and that people would say its too simple or their are setups available, you only have to ask people.

1) I do use Bob's setups and if people search around they will know I am all for his setups being the default setups in LFS.

2) When you get setups from other people you have NO idea what they have been tweaked to do or what their driving style is like.

3) So what if the sliders are too "simple" for some people. I am on about the rest of us that want to drive and not spend all our time tweaking.

4) Yes a slider that effects if the car oversteers/understeers has to effect more than one parameter. Good, because I dont know the exact relationship between all the settings so will make a pigs ear of it if I set this.

5) You DO NOT have to use the simple sliders.

6) You CAN use the simple sliders and then tweak the normal settings from there.

7) NO, it is NOT unrealistic for a driver to say to a mech "please make the rear a little more loose" etc and then let the mech tweak the setup. Lets face it, this is part of the pit crew's job.

8) Who cares if LFS is simulating professional or club racing. I am sure there are drivers that do not fully understand car setup in all forms or driving. Making a car stay on the track and go fast does not require you to understand the relationship between every moving part on the car.

For those that just said NO without thinking go and at least "look" at the rFactor settings screen so you have some idea what I am asking for.

Also to set up suspension properly you need to know a GREAT DEAL about the car's sprung, unsprung weight etc etc etc and these effect you settings. Make a false assumption and you will NOT get the effect you are after. These figures are NOT published with the game, in fact Bob had to extract from data files etc. He then based all his maths on these.

Do you expect new players to have this level of dedication?

Heh, my name has come up a lot in this thread and I've yet to type anything. Personally I've no argument against an optional simplified setup menu. But I would have thought it would be very difficult to do well. I'd be up for the challenge though.

It would certainly be worth it, I know some LFS players who have no interest in touching setups what-so-ever, yet they are important. They know they need to learn lots to really make use of the setup screen, so don't bother. But if there were just a handle of sliders that did the hard work, I'm sure some people would find it very handy.

For those of us want complete control, we're not affected in any way, except we might have closer racing with newbies.

I think something like these suspension analyzer excel sheets (sorry, forgot who made them, colob?) have would be far better.

1) Info for each slider on what it does (mouse-hover quickinfo)
2) A bar that shows the general under-/oversteer tendency

With this, the players wouldn't have to go look somewhere else to find out what a setting does and they would have a little bar that shows the result of their messing around. Learning by doing, with immediate visual feedback. How much better can it get?

Quote from AndroidXP :

I think something like these suspension analyzer excel sheets (sorry, forgot who made them, colob?) have would be far better.

1) Info for each slider on what it does (mouse-hover quickinfo)
2) A bar that shows the general under-/oversteer tendency

With this, the players wouldn't have to go look somewhere else to find out what a setting does and they would have a little bar that shows the result of their messing around. Learning by doing, with immediate visual feedback. How much better can it get?

Thats a very good suggestion AndriodXP.

The only way to get that soon would be to clone Colcob so at least one of them has spare time from family/work.

Work has started on an up-to-date version of the analyser, you'll just need some patience. Hopefully once things kick off again we'll soon be up to having something usable about.

FYI, I meant something like Colcob's excel sheets (actually just the under-/oversteer bar) inside of LFS, so unfortunately even a clone of him won't help us

Ah, with you now.

or how about some "practice mode" ONLY usable things like some yellow->red indicator bar that represents the tyre grip level.
Supposed to learn how much max. throttle to apply when in a rwd car at the apex of a hairpin. (like a visualized indicator analog to the sound of the squealing tyres).
And a second one for the braking bar to know when they are about to block instead of rolling.

These two are for practice mode ONLY...