It seems the trend in sims is to have tire models that are all fancy and complex, which may be a bad thing from a modding point of view. I have absolutely no idea how I can ever design tires for rFactor 2 without some serious tools being released for it. Even then it may take hours per tire before you even know what it does..

I'm not against rF2 or other sims but I hope at some point they realize its more about having something flexible and somewhat transparant to mod rather than having the most complex finite element based einstein model. :-)

I use the ring from GTR Evolution, with the TDF file adjusted like I explain in the readme pdf file.

If rFactor doesn't start, the config.ini may not point to the right path for something like the TracksDir..

Well I don't know who is still here, I'm pretty much not, but keeping with old traditions, me and Siim have a new version of the rfactor Corvette out, and I tell here. :-)

check http://www.racedepartment.com/ ... -2012-beta-release.57464/ for details.

Niels

Oi the LFS vs rFactor tread lives!

They are different, mostly because you can't talk about rFactor as its quality depends greatly on the mod, circuit and 10000 ini settings you may have set the wrong way.

Its a proven realistic simulator nowadays with various actual racing teams, once everything is setup optimally. I now get comments that the oversteer is too easy from the drivers. Drift cars do not need 'special' physics at all, I made one with just normal drift car specs.

Admittedly, a G25 type wheel, while definitely providing realish FFB with rFactor is a bit weak, just like it is in any sim.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-6g1IpPbLg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZBq0ROvzkA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hc8153gU6eI

http://vimeo.com/6628762 this user has a huge amount of 80s/90s GTP races online, long videos too!

Woah loads of replies! I'll make sure to read the lot and decide what to do.

Thanks!

Hey guys,

My 2001 Fiesta 1.25 zetec is running on 3 cylinders, at least that is what it sounds like. Its unbalanced, different sound tone and the engine light either stays on or blinks.

I took the engine coolant cap off and let the car warm up in idle, but saw no bubbles of any kind, which I've learnt is a good gasket leak test, then again what do I know! I've checked the spark plug connections which seem all good.

It is due for maintenance, including a spark plug change, but are there a few other tests I can do to verify a few things?

Prefer to not get too ripped off taking it to a garage so the more I can rule out without killing myself, the better!

Cheers

Holy crap that's a lot of money! Sure my shanky nokia is old, but at 50 euro it's been my mp3 player and phone for years, and it texts too..

The physics dev (actually he has an account at LFSforum!) said the tire grip loss after the peak slip angle was NOT ENOUGH in hardcore mode despite it seemingly being way much already..

So *if* they do a hardcore mode, it'll probably be worse than before..

Using Foobar there is an option to enable kernel streaming. Next to a lot of nonsense about its effect on audio quality (which is probably zero) there IS a big advantage; it removes foobar (mp3 player) from your windows volume sliders..

So you can be sure you get no sounds other than your music.

I passed an Audi R8 on the highway. I was in my Ford Fiesta. The driver seemed terrified and did 105km/h on the right lane as I zoomed past at 118!

I find it somewhat ironic that once you get past the prejudice against Americans only driving ovals.. there are many excellent road circuits in the USA. There are also a few 'new' ones, High Plains Raceway and probably a few others that make sense and offer a few good bits and corners.

Tilke's signature tends to be to at least have one 270 degree 1st gear righthander followed immediately by a 180 degree lefthander.. sigh.. just sigh..

Some nice tracks appear in the USA, but .. oh no! Tilke.. Shame, big shame. If its any good, I'll eat a burger.

Oh no! Another perfectly usable car made worse and less usable!

Quote from Nikn :

that seems odd.

here is a picture of what a pacejka combined force plot looks like. (some of the params might be a tiny bit off) for some random 195/65/15 tyre

the quality is a bit bad.


Red = greater magnitude, Green = less magnitude, used blue to show band lines. an interesting note is that it's not symmetrical over braking and acceleration.

Psychedelic art! I like!

Absolutely.. I've gotten to the stage where I can complain (and back it up a little bit) why things are wrong, but creating a proper model? Pffff no idea!

Definitely respect to the physics programmers who do their best to figure this out. Its just so easy for the rest to sit on the fence and point fingers while shouting 'booh!'

Pacejka is a clever guy though, his model can ... model .. lat, long and combined slip and isn't a well known model for nothing.. But the output is only as good as the tire measurment that went before it.. And the curve fitting that people do trying to match the dozens of parameters to the raw test data.

Since it has little physical nature, you can go all nuts with the values and the curves will look very odd indeed. Plus rarely are tires measured beyond 10 degrees slip angle, and curve fitted only for this range, and its not unusual for the friction coefficient to go near 0 at higher slip angles.

You would have to tweak and adjust pacejka coefficients often to make them look believable at high slip angles and ratios, which is a little weird anyway and for simulation doesn't make much sense. Also, often, effects are linear, such as camber, where running 89 degrees camber makes the friction coefficient uber high. This is probably also due to incomplete test data, or even the magic formula not catering for extremes.

Sexist/ironic/sarcasm mode=1

I think they recently studied that the 'women multitasking' thing is actually not true at all! I always thought that. Calling, doing makeup and driving at the same time, bound to lead to problems. And all because women believe they can multitask.

Knowing you can't should help as it might bring them back to normal levels, you know like dudes, you drive, you call, you do makeup (ummmmm) but not at the same bloody time!

Sexist/ironic/sarcasm mode =0

Mods are free indeed, but I am fortunate enough to work for a simulation developer (not retail) 2 days a week, and for a GP2 team, and for Reiza Studios. I'm not complaining

I know what you mean, you enter real springrates, hopefully corrected with motion ratio and the nose dive is too great. LFS devs recently found this out as well, its in the suspension 'anti'. Anti dive is a fairly tricky result of suspension geometry currently lacking in LFS. You can angle the wishbones (in a side view of the car) such that there is zero pitch during braking even with soft springs.. I believe LFS will have this in the future update.

Tires are of course understood well, but you would be amazed how many crap you can find on the internet about them. Typically in semi scientific books such as 'tune to win' or 'going faster' and worrying titles like 'make your car handle' . Lots of bogus, little real data. Its rare for example to find complete lateral and longitudinal slip tests for the same tire tested on the same rig. Raw test data also has a lot of noise in it, and the result of curve fitting models like Pacejka often gives a horrible view of the situation at greater amounts of slip.. Its a slippery slope those tires!

Last edited by Niels Heusinkveld, Tue, 23 Mar 2010 01:26.

Quote from AndRand :

I see you play around with modding in rFactor and many of them can be found on youtube.

I just wonder - if you had proper physics simulation: you put real input data for tyres, wheels, all suspension settings, and so on and you get quite accurate output results, what minimum settings and what range of settings you need to make out of, lets say, XRG any frontengined, RWD 1T-1,5T mass available?
- mass (+-200kg), CoG, rotational (?) inertia (3 axis),
- types of suspensions?
- presets for engine types (torque, mass, inertia in transmission)
what else?

Play around!? A bit more than that! Or at least, my bills get paid now doing this. :P

You say ''if you had proper physics simulation'' .. Well in many ways current sim engines *are* proper physics simulations, and I do simply put in real settings and the results will be cars that stick to their real performance. Wether micro detials in handling are the same, thats not always the case, but its certainly not playing around, its fairly scientific. While rFactor currently models more than LFS, the physics engines are all.. physics based so enter the right weights etc etc and it should behave somewhat well, especially as these ISI guys and Scawen have their head screwed on decently well, no matter how much we complain about certain details.

While its all about entering the right numbers, you need to know what real numbers are, and especially regarding tires, you'll find a lot of conflicting and dubious data. Then you have to figure out how to translate the data so the sim works with it properly. Plus you can't isolate any part of the car. If you're an aero expect you could find lots of lift and drag data and copy it to the 0.0000x% accuracy, but if you don't know what 'tire stiffness' is, it won't bode well for mod.

In many ways I try to do what AndroidXP suggests a 'fool proof' tire model would do, enter size, and a type of compound and it will adjust the sim tire model parameters. I'm glad such a system isn't in rFactor as I like to 'invent the wheel' (at the risk of doing it wrong) and find out more and more about how they might work. If I could only enter size and compound softness, I would still be limited to what the programmer thought was realistic.

In many ways its quite amazing how decent LFS and rFactor can behave even when you know certain things are absent or poorly modelled. It bodes well for the future, provided Scawen and Terence remain functioning with their heads screwed on, which is fairly likely as I don't know many succesful decapitated programmers.

Btw, I (sadly) have no idea what direction rFactor 2 will take, but I do see they're having a real go at it, including the tire model. No matter how many people dislike rFactor, its rather impressive and even annoys Todd Wasson by being so damn clever with its suspension modelling.. There are just 1000 ways to screw it up, and thats where LFS wins, as Scawen has more knowledge than 990 of the 1000 modders so you get a far more coherent experience. Still, LFS would've been better if a true physics 'parameter' expert did the cars, as I'm sure even without the tire and suspenson physics updates, there is more to get from LFS as it is now!

As always, a 'modding platform' is only as good as the people who mod for it. If you don't know how to create nice textures and lighting, then a better graphics engine won't help. If you don't know how tires or engines work, a better physics engine won't help.

Everybody seems to think rFactor 1 is old and bad and the physics and graphics are out of date, but imo it hasn't at all been maximized yet. There just are too few tallented people involved. History shows that people seem to want 'new' and 'more' rather than learning how to actually get the most out of what they have!

There are plenty of areas where rFactor 2 should improve on 1, but with people lining up to convert the rFactor conversion of the F1c conversion of the SCGT conversion of a mod.....

Hiyas,

Dead G25 here, but a friend reported that his G27 has some play in the steering shaft. The G25s I tried are absolutely solid, the shaft can only rotate, but when you try to move it up/down/left/right/front/back, all you're going to do is flex the whole enclosure if you try hard enough.

If any of you have held both wheels, what about the G27? Just as solid or is there slight free movement in the steering shaft?

Nothing new then? :P

Its almost amusing when you read treads titled like this. I suppose having a realistic view would stop anyone attempting it so call me the old fart...

Still, career? Forget it. The chances that you have the required money / talent / luck combination that make you one of the few hundred (tops!) paid drivers in the world are so slim, its not worth it.

The reality of racing for 99% who do so is that you need a decent job, and the spend most of the earnings on fixing the kart / the car. You often see people who stop doing it because its just so much work for a few hours of racing. Doing it alone is even harder, if you have family crazy enough to spend a few thousand a year and help you do a karting championship, but even for that, you're looking at quite a high initial cost, and every year things will break and you will have to travel to the venues. It requires money and people, both don't come cheap, unless you happen to have a rich family.

Most realistic might be doing something like the UK Club100 championship, where you don't own/maintain a kart. This is much more affordable, still not realistically so for a 14y/o (i.e. the need for rich parents or drug dealing comes in)..

Then if you show your talents in a series like that, who knows! If you ever do that though, you'd be a few years down the line and a few thousand pounds lighter (in money that is, if you weigh a few thousand pounds getting into racing is an even less wise decison)

Grumpy? Perhaps.. Realistic? I think sadly so!

I believe the normal order is you do the reading / thinking about it BEFORE you buy a drum kit. :S