The online racing simulator
iRacing
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Quote from PMD9409 :Well it was quite the opposite of the normal broadcasts they do. The failure in running was still there, but in different ways.

- The quality of the broadcast (as in the image) was much more clear than they have done before.
- However they managed to stare at a task bar for 2 minutes without knowing how to bring iRacing back up.
- Invisible walls
- Lag
- Cars hopping around (lag related)
- Amatuer way of skipping through laps on the replay interface.
- Playing music for 20 minutes straight during the broadcast.
- Promoting random trash talk and in a sense wreckless driving.
- Commentators laughed at the crashes.
- Cameras focused more on crashes instead of the leaders
- Cameras switched every 3 seconds
- Showed 1 lap old coverage for over a lap.
- Oval race was supposed to have cautions, however they made it 5 extra laps with no cautions on "accident".

The annoying part is how they focused on crashes more than the actual racing, and kinda just chose to laugh at it rather than watching some of the decent/great racing for the top 5-6 positions. This is the opposite of what they normally do with things like DWC and Pro series where they like to "hide" the bad stuff and only focus on the good stuff. They even like to act as if iRacing is real talking about their pit crews and stuff as if they are real people, yet the broadcast last night they were acting like it was just "some game".

Really just shot integrity and stuff out the window on that one, was a disappointment for sure. I got to spectate the oval race on server and it was just a mess. They promoted resetting your car and continuing to drive, which just lead to huge crashes where lapped cars would take out cars battling for positions.

I agree the broadcast was a fail completely.
+1, whilst traditionally real world "race of champions" type events are taken a bit less seriously, you still have to keep the coverage / commentary at normal race quality whilst the races are taking place, skip past the intro part to the actual races and listen how john hindaugh and bruce jones work during the races yet switch to general chat between races.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOynexMeBb0
Exactly. This is some American thing they use to do every year at Long Beach for charity as well. It was basically a mix between celebrities and Pros. The celebrities got a 45 second head start. It was actually quite a fun event to watch because you never knew what was going to happen. But the point is that the commentary is nearly no different than a normal race.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v ... w8GTM&feature=related

Also IROC (International Race Of Champions): http://www.youtube.com/watch?f ... &v=_tWVYQrDxqc#t=390s

The stuff might be considered "special events", but that doesn't mean take it as a joke. And even worse "promoting" a joking mentality.
Yea the iracing coverage never seems profession enough for me anyway...
They have a Celebrity race at the Australian GP, the commentary is the same you would get with a real race but just with minor humor thrown in to remind us that its a fun race at the end of the day.
But with professional race drivers you'd expect some form of respect not a slipshot broadcast like that one.
Though totes good that THE GIZ WON THE ROAD But its a win for Kiwi land not Australia
Sex and tits
They're doing a 3 months for $10 offer again for reactivating your account (just got the email), so I might indulge in a bit more discounted racing.
Quote from Crashgate3 :They're doing a 3 months for $10 offer again for reactivating your account (just got the email), so I might indulge in a bit more discounted racing.

Bloody money drainers... must.. resist...
Quote from Shotglass :precisely what am i supposed to be seeing thats the least bit fishy there?

That iRacing video with the GT car spinning is mine. iRacing changed this car in a later update so the problem no longer happens. So somebody there perhaps agreed with me.

I got involved in a really long thread on this issue at the iRacing forums. The thing that I was pointing out was that the yaw moment in steady state cornering was pretty strong understeer. As the rear slip angles increased, the understeer moment decreased slightly, then decreased more rapidly at higher slip angles, and eventually reversed directions. I.e, understeer moment turned into oversteer moment which should not generally happen.

The point was that if the rear tires have abundantly more grip in terms of their capacity to produce a larger yaw moment than the front tires do, that shouldn't simply reverse directions at some greater slip angle (the rear tires become less sticky than the fronts at some point?). At the time I made the video, primarily this car and the HPD which had just been released with the NTM suffered from this problem. It was as though the lateral force curves dropped off after the peak on the rear tires far more quickly than they did at the front as slip angle increased, eventually crossing over each other and changing the understeer moment into an oversteer moment.

In the wet with some rubber compounds I wouldn't be surprised to see this happen (I've experienced it in a real car), but not in the dry. They got too crazy with drop off after the force peak and perhaps didn't pay enough attention to how the fronts and rears were proportioned to each other in this regard.

Either that or they did it on purpose to satisfy the "real cars are extremely difficult to slide and if they aren't, it's not realistic" crowd.

Anyway, iRacing fixed it (or at least dramatically improved it) not too long after I made the video in both the FordGT and HPD cars. The HPD is dramatically different now especially.

The name of the thread was "the never ending 20mph spin" or something along those lines, and I talked about yaw moment reversal in pretty good depth in some other threads too.
i cant quite figure out what a post about steady state cornering wierdness has to do with my response on a video of a 500+hp car being whipped around from standstill with full throttle
I was waiting for someone to say that but nobody likes to argue with Todd
Nothing probably. I was explaining what was fishy in the video since you asked : "precisely what am i supposed to be seeing thats the least bit fishy there?"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEv5mf1sK5Q



I just discovered the "show statistics" button on YouTube today, saw that it displayed where the vid was linked to, and followed one of them here. I didn't read the conversation that was going on before that so forgive me if my comments seemed out of place. My intent was just to say something about the video, what it was attempting to show and why. Didn't read enough of this thread I guess, so nevermind...

EDIT: Silly me, you were talking about the other video weren't you? Now I understand.
Ok, let me try this again

Shotglass, now I understand you were talking about the first video and I failed to see that. What looks fishy about that one? Nothing at all, I agree, which is largely why I made the other video to illustrate what the original guy was trying to show with his. The iRacing "never ending spin" thread was talking about low speed spins that were really pretty out of whack and generated a lot of debate. Unfortunately one of the guys made the first video of the rapid spin with the heavy throttle blast as a way to illustrate it, but it was a bad example. Nothing fishy about it as you said. I mistakenly thought you were referring to my video.

The discussion in the thread then turned toward whether the first video showed anything odd or not which missed the point, so I made the other video to show the behavior we were talking about more clearly. Not too long after that they fixed the two main cars with this problem.
Quote from Ball Bearing Turbo :I was waiting for someone to say that but nobody likes to argue with Todd

i rather enjoy it
especially when im right
I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken. :spin:
i guess you'd never read anything about iracing before you subscribed then ?
Quote from S3ANPukekoh3 :man iracing is such a ****ing waste of money. your better off online gambling tbh, even if you ****ing useless as a **** at poker. I can't believe I was stupid enough to subscribe for an entire year on black Friday. Without spending at least 100 dollars on tracks you may as well be racing on LFS demo.

sorry to say, that you are right. Need to spend a little on content too
Quote from S3ANPukekoh3 :man iracing is such a ****ing waste of money. your better off online gambling tbh, even if you ****ing useless as a **** at poker. I can't believe I was stupid enough to subscribe for an entire year on black Friday. Without spending at least 100 dollars on tracks you may as well be racing on LFS demo.

You can do the Rookie series in 3 cars for free (and the GTC at the 2 free tracks on the schedule). You said you had the V8? That's at a free track this week. Did you buy anything else? Up until the start of season 3, I had only bought 4 cars and 6 tracks since May 2010 and was able to run almost every week with the cars I'd bought. Buy the tracks you need - i.e. the popular ones like Watkins, Philip Island for the V8, Mid Ohio, Road America, etc. ones you can get the most use out of in other series. Although you might want to wait until nearer to season 1 in 4-5 weeks to see what the next schedule will be.
well i got a 3 month for $10 deal on my old account, thought even if i don't get to do much racing its only $10
Quote from S3ANPukekoh3 :man iracing is such a ****ing waste of money. your better off online gambling tbh, even if you ****ing useless as a **** at poker. I can't believe I was stupid enough to subscribe for an entire year on black Friday. Without spending at least 100 dollars on tracks you may as well be racing on LFS demo.

LOL. It isnt' for everybody that's foresure. They have nice tracks. Other than that I can't really say much. I'm not an alien or even fast for that matter so the splits that I'm put into can be much like open server racing. Hit or miss for me. That for me is what has pissed me off the most. I'm not a huge fan although I don't think I would word things as strongly as you have. lol. For someone who is slow like me I would not recommend it.
Quote from jtw62074 :The iRacing "never ending spin" thread was talking about low speed spins that were really pretty out of whack and generated a lot of debate.

Todd. Sort of related, but I'd like to ask you about some issues, since you have knowledge on this stuff.

IMO, slow speed spins still happen in the MX5 and Skip. It feels like you countersteer and balance the throttle but there's no discernible effect, you countersteer a bit more, still no effect. Then you add a little bit more steering and it very suddenly slows the rotation and snaps back. Now I know 'snap back' is real, but it's as though you need to overcorrect to stop the rotation. And then when it snaps back (including at high speed), visually it seems to involve the car rotating around the central axis rather than the rear pendulum-ing (if that's a word) around the front. After all, that's why that sort of thing is called "fish-tailing" when it happens repeatedly. The central rotation makes it much harder to straighten in time, and lots of experienced skip drivers are snapping out of control like complete novices. I think LFS is the only sim that possible makes this look (at least) realistic by having the rear rotate more about the front rather than the rotation being about the central axis. Any thoughts?


One other *important* thing. In the Skip, when you trail off the brakes at the turn in to a corner, the faster you come off the brakes the faster the car rotates in. Surely that's the opposite of reality - where coming off the brakes should increase rear grip? Indeed, RFB-ing in real life involves coming off the brakes faster so as to get to the throttle quick whenever there's any sense the car is about to over-steer. The fast Skip drivers all come off the brakes very smoothly and it's written into the community-made manual that it's important precisely because coming off the brakes too fast is a cause of spinning. Surely that isn't how it should be?
I think you're on to something there pat. I also actually think saving slides on the oval side of things is TOO easy. Maybe if the game uses more of a central axis this is what makes it easier.
Quote from Postman Pat :Todd. Sort of related, but I'd like to ask you about some issues, since you have knowledge on this stuff.

IMO, slow speed spins still happen in the MX5 and Skip. It feels like you countersteer and balance the throttle but there's no discernible effect, you countersteer a bit more, still no effect. Then you add a little bit more steering and it very suddenly slows the rotation and snaps back. Now I know 'snap back' is real, but it's as though you need to overcorrect to stop the rotation. And then when it snaps back (including at high speed), visually it seems to involve the car rotating around the central axis rather than the rear pendulum-ing (if that's a word) around the front. After all, that's why that sort of thing is called "fish-tailing" when it happens repeatedly. The central rotation makes it much harder to straighten in time, and lots of experienced skip drivers are snapping out of control like complete novices. I think LFS is the only sim that possible makes this look (at least) realistic by having the rear rotate more about the front rather than the rotation being about the central axis. Any thoughts?


One other *important* thing. In the Skip, when you trail off the brakes at the turn in to a corner, the faster you come off the brakes the faster the car rotates in. Surely that's the opposite of reality - where coming off the brakes should increase rear grip? Indeed, RFB-ing in real life involves coming off the brakes faster so as to get to the throttle quick whenever there's any sense the car is about to over-steer. The fast Skip drivers all come off the brakes very smoothly and it's written into the community-made manual that it's important precisely because coming off the brakes too fast is a cause of spinning. Surely that isn't how it should be?

Since the update where they made such a big (positive imo) change to the FGT and HPD, I've hardly driven. It's probably been a month or two already since I've touched iRacing. I ran a few laps at Lime Rock in the MX5 and noticed much the same thing you're describing.

The only quick conclusion that sprang to mind immediately was that it seemed the cornering stiffnesses of the tires on that car were increased considerably. I.e., the lateral force peak moved to a smaller slip angle. I could tell after the first two or three turns because I was running right over the apexes and had to retrain the steering thingamabob in my head not to do it anymore. On top of that, like everybody else if I managed to slide the car I wound up snapping back the other direction at least as often as I saved it. Before that update I don't remember ever doing that once in this car...

This snap back behavior is consistent with higher stiffness tires to an extent, but I have a hard time believing the real MX 5 tires are really that stiff. These feel like they peak at 4 or 5 degrees, something more like an Indycar tire. If they were that hard to catch a slide with, the series would go bankrupt. This always reminds me of one of the times my client took me for a ride in his Donkervoort S8. This very car right here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp7g1NAMNxE

The pic is wrong in the beginning and it's Wolfgang driving my friend's car during a qualifying lap rather than the race itself, but that's not the point. What I always remember was him telling me how bloody easy it is to drift that car all over the place. Slicks or no slicks, doesn't matter. He said if you give this car to somebody in a parking lot for twenty minutes they'll be able to do it no problem. He then went sideways with heavy throttle through a few turns on a Dutch road to illustrate the point. He's an iRacing member and I can run circles around him. He can't save a slide there if his life depends on it.

Anyway, I have more thoughts on the MX5 that I'll post another time. Been up now for 22 hours and my brain is going dead...

Regarding rotation, if the car's rotating around a different axis this would be a symptom rather than a cause. Computationally this is pretty hard to mess up really. All you do is add up the torques on the car and apply them in a way that rotates it around the center of gravity. The car will rotate around a different axis than that most of the time probably, but it just comes out of the force and torque calculations so is a no brainer to do. The laws of physics are well understood in this area by sim developers everywhere so this isn't likely to be wrong. Things rotate around their center of gravity and translate at the same time, so if there's some other axis of rotation at play here it will just come out of the equations without doing anything about it. I.e., it works the same way in every sim these days, so if that axis is different it's a function of the tires and everything else doing their thing rather than the developer "choosing the wrong axis," so to speak.

I am curious about your perception of the rotation axis location though. BlueFlame seems to share it so maybe one or both of you might elaborate a bit more on the feeling. My first thought when reading your comment on that was "how can he tell what axis the car is rotating around from inside the car?" I'm sure it's some subtle (or maybe not so subtle) motion you're picking up on that gives you that feeling, I'm just at a loss to figure out what it is.

Skip Barber car: The only time I really liked this car a lot was when the NTM first went on it. The massive lift-off oversteer was finally gone, or at least reduced to the point where even I could drive the thing pretty quickly without doing anything that felt unnatural. Sadly, a later update then changed it again for the worse and I couldn't get the thing around the track without babying it. I gave it a shot for an hour or two but finally gave up on it.

On spinning while releasing the brakes: This is an interesting question and at the moment I'm not really sure. What comes to mind is that in my hobby car sim the same thing can happen if the setup or tires aren't good and I've wondered why it happens too, if there's some predominate thing that can be pointed to as a likely main cause. To give a good answer to this I'd need to look into it more. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's bad physics or miscalculations or "Teh Tire modeL is sUck" or anything like that, just that perhaps the tires or setup could use a bit more attention in this area. I'll think about this one some more, maybe test a bit in my sim, and get back to you on this one because I'm curious too...
I think there is a loud minority on the iracing forums who seem to think that hard is realistic. And I think iracing when releasing cars are very careful about not making the cars any easier to drive than they are and I'd even claim they on purpose make the cars harder to drive simply to give themselves some safety tolerance. If the cars in a pro sim are easier to drive than the real deal (or even easier to drive than the vocal minority would expect) then it's all "drifting and not realistic at all".

The corvette when first released was pretty close to what I feel is what typical isi content was in regards to tire physics. It was snappy and and had those icy powerslides you could not recover. It just snapped away from you. Small patch/fix was then released and the issue was lessened. So far that process seems to have happened with every car. With first release of any car iracing want to make absolutely sure the car is harder to drive than the real deal and then they start fixing and improving on the car. But the direction of the approach is always from hard towards realistic. The same with the ntm. First version was (I did not drive it myself almost at all) far more snappier and harder to drive than what was then released.

To me it seems iracing have the knowledge about tires and would know how to make them better but they also still have this ideology that driving race cars fast or getting over the limit is really really difficult. A bit like the gtr game developers. They had the necessary data but they did not want to believe it and adjusted the numbers to get the difficulty up where they thought it should be. I think the ideology that driving race cars is difficult sits very firmly still in the minds of the sim developers and while there are people who are not afraid to put the real data into the sim and believe it there are still many who adjust even very good data to make it harder just because "that's the way it should be".

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As for the brake release oversteer... Couldn't that be just the simple motion and tire dynamics of the car at work in a situation where releasing the brakes just makes the nose come up and that movement putting relatively more load on the front tires and taking some load off the rears which just gives the front tires more lateral grip? Not saying releasing he brakes would add load on the front tires but it would keep the front more loaded than the rear while the front tires now having more ability to achieve higher lateral Gs compared to the rear tires compared to the situations of when the brakes were still applied...

I mean after the braking the only thing the fronts need to do is to produce lateral Gs during cornering (steer the car) and now without braking the tires can produce the maximum lateral Gs because the braking isn't there adding longnitudal Gs to the mix and reducing the tires' capacity to make the car turn instead of making the car to turn AND decelarate? Of course I'd imagine the load sensitivety of the tires has an effect here too and if those load senstivety curves are too steep and have too much drop off then that should make the brake lift oversteer happen more.

Also when lifting the brakes abruptly the front shocks are in rebound and rear shocks in bump "mode". If the front shock rebound is larger than the bump of the rear shocks then that should lessen the effect of brake lift oversteer because then the roll of the car happens slower because larger rebound slows down the movement of nose going up which in turn allows the springs to release their kinetic energy slower into the tire... depending how stiff the springs are... meh I'm getting nowhere here yeah, I'm making this up as I write
I don't think there is anything fudged or wrong with regards to the axis of rotation of the cars, but I do certainly agree with the snap issue you describe Pat. It feels plain wrong to me. The HPD for example feels like the most convincing car in the sim since the last update, but there are still situations where you are in a slide (especially if high speed), whereby countersteering does nothing until you reach an "overcorrection" point where the front bites so suddenly you are spat uncontrollably the other way.

Regarding the Skip Barber, I find it behaves horribly under braking in general. The snappiness seems very violent and sensitive when totally off the throttle, and this is further conveyed with a moderate FFB setting. To drive at the limit in the sim while right foot braking is a mega challenge to do, which is why the "throttle braking" is the done thing still, even after the NTM switch. Also it's worth mentioning if you run the Skippy on grass, such as the large grassy areas at VIR, the tyres will snap you into a spin the instant you have even what feels like a fraction of a degree of yaw...

@Hyperactive: I couldn't agree more with your post, and I'm pretty much completely convinced iRacing have that view unfortunately. I hate to see the trend towards making the simulated cars far more challenging and edgy to drive than they should be. Surely that only further alienates those petrol heads who are new to sim racing and expect something comparable with any experience they have from real life.

Also as always great to have your insight Todd.
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iRacing
(13603 posts, closed, started )
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