Top 100 selling games -March 2 ... US and Western Europe.htm Apparently having a fan base and some advertisement pushed NFS Prostreet to the top racing game at #6 overall inspite of a worse rating than last year's NFS Carbon which was #10. Having a version for PC and most of the consoles probably helped push the sales of Prostreet though. The 2nd highest racing game was Forza 2 at #20. Nascar 08 is down to #96 compared Nascar 07 at #87. Tombraider's Anniversary was down to #69 compared to Tombraider Legend at #42. However total sales for most of the games were up, mostly because of all the different platforms, but I recall reading that PC gaming sales are down.
Doesn't seem like there's been much discussion about the "real" issue, which is how a car behaves when it's pushed a bit beyond the limits, since this happens quite often in real life racing.
Obviously, a car in LFS will not respond identically to the same control inputs as a real car. So how close is LFS or any racing sim to real life? Will an expert LFS player develop "bad habits" that produce great LFS lap times by exploiting physics weaknesses in the game with somewhat unrealistic control inputs, that would end up being a potential problem when driving at the limits in real life?
For example, would driver induced understeer (steering inwards while slowing to prevent or recover from oversteer by washing the front end out) work as well in real life as it does in LFS?
In the C6.R at LimeRock video below, the driver is feathering the throttle quite a bit in the turns, something that I don't think could be done as precisely in a racing game because of the lack of feel. The C6.R uses a no lift sequential shifter, the pedal is kept pegged on upshifts, but the driver is blipping on downshifts, and the video includes a view of the pedals and drivers foot, so you get a good idea of how to blip using the ball of the foot. The "ratty" engine sound you sometimes hear in low gear at full throttle is the traction control kicking in, where fuel is cut off to 1 or 2 cylinders in a pattern depending on the amount of torque reduction.
Regarding how harmful oversteer is in real world race cars, it depends on the car. In Nascar, it's quite common for a driver to be stuck running a car that's loose, and the oversteer is very obvious from an on-car view of a trailing car, yet the driver manages to run reasonably competitive laps for a 20 or 30 lap run without having the rear tires go away. Maybe Nascar tires are simply designed (or spec'ed by the rules) to deal with slippage better than other race car tires.
Regarding top hinged versus bottom hinged pedals, a Catherham I used to own and a Corvette Z06 I now own have all top hinged pedals. I don't know how common this is in sports oriented cars. The racing Corvette C6.R also has all 3 pedals top hinged as seen in the video above.
Regarding the mishap factor, the high end drivers are paid to push their team's vehicles to the limits, and this means they will occasionally lose control of them, and sometimes this will lead to a crash. Plus the high end cars themselves are pushing the limits, and mechanical failures or driver errors are sometimes fatal. The fear is there, but just like a soldier in combat, those involved just deal with it.
Removing auto-cut and auto-blip didn't make LFS more realistic, since the players that were truly concerned about the realism weren't using those features anyway. It only affected the players that didn't care about the "ultimate" in realism in the first place.
If auto-cut and auto-blip were giving an unfair advantage, then they should have been tweaked to remove the advantage, rather than completely removed. NFS's Prostreet mangaged to handicap the assists quite nicely, why can't LFS do the same? All other racing sims have assists that allow a wider range of players to enjoy those games, and as long as servers can specify what assists are allowed I don't see why LFS should want to restrict it's potential customer base.
Regarding the cost of controllers, one option players have is to buy a controller with good macro features to re-implement the features that LFS removes, like auto-cut, auto-blip, auto-clutch, which makes removal of those features moot.
If you want the NSX or other road cars, get NFS, or one of the console racing games. I'm not sure how EA manages to get so many companies to allow their cars in NFS games, especially in the way that NFS changes the relative peformance of in game cars versus their real world equivalents. For example, in Underground 2, a souped up Toyota Corolla is the fastest road racing car in the game, mostly because all of the other cars, even when souped up, were given poor cornering grip, typically less their real world stock counterparts.
Ferrari is one of the few car makers no longer in NFS, which resulted in the Sun Times page 3 ad for Prostreet being pulled, since it featured a Ferrari (apparently the topless models weren't the issue).
So the real issue here is the autoclutch behavior combined with the very tall first gear? I assume a non-autoclutch isn't going to have this same issue, as the tires could be spun instead.
Didn't think about the autoclutch issue while going backwards at high speeds. I do recall that going slow while in a high gear with autoclutch enabled was an issue, since it let's the clutch slip. I put the LX6 into 6th gear and slowed to 10mph, then went full throttle, and the clutch slipped until I reach about 30mph. Two cycles of this and the clutch was gone. With auto-clutch off, there was no clutch slippage or heat issue, as expected.
Does autoclutch slip the clutch if going backwards at high speeds in a tall gear? If autoclutch isn't on, and the driver doesn't use the clutch, does the engine end up spinning backwards, killing it?
If the goal of this was to stop no lift shifts (what I call flat shifting), it didn't do it as shown in the replay below. I used auto-clutch and did full throttle, no lift shifts on the LX6 at Blackwood and only got about 2 slivers of orange on the clutch heat, which remained about the same on a 3 lap run.
My point was that the clutches virtually don't slip, only the tires. In F1 type race cars, with small 4 lb flywheels, they are using high rpms and heavy throttle to launch. Note that a typical F1 race car has 1st gear set for about 85mph to 100mph, depending on the track.
My Suzuki Hayabusa, 175hp, 750lb, doesn't have anywhere near the power to weight ratio of a F1 race car (800hp, 1400lb), and it's 1st gear redlines at 81mph. The drag racers slip the heck out of the stock clutches on bikes like these, and get quite a few runs before having to replace the clutch packs.
I don't see how spinning itself a car is going to overheat the clutch, regardless of gear or throttle position. If in a low gear the tires will slip, if in a high gear the engine will end up spinning backwards. Trying to take off in a high gear after a spin could heat up a clutch, but not the spin itself. If a LFS car gets hit hard, then clutch damage sometimes happens.
[quote]Flat shifting with auto-clutch isn't an issue if you flat shift close enough to redline so the engine rpms don't raise before dropping because of the gear shift. I have a replay of this in a LX6:
Still this doesn't mean the clutch heating is bug-free. Tall gearing shouldn't be an issue. I've driven a car with a tall first gear (62mph) and a light flywheel (Caterham SV with 250hp), and it required a lot of clutch slipping and throttle to launch, even in stop and go traffic, and it never overheated the clutch.
Real race cars have very light flywheels, that make the engines prone to stalling if trying to use a normal launch. Also, a lot of race clutches are either "on or off" like devices. They're very grabby, and typically it's very difficult to slip these clutches, which is another reason (in addition to a light flywheel), that it's so easy to stall an engine when exiting the pits unless the driver uses a lot of throttle and just drops the clutch in order let the tires spin, since the clutch doesn't want to slip, and the engine has too light a flywheel for inertia to keep the launch going.
Regarding oval shapes, camber thrust. Put two cups with smaller "inside" diameters than "outside" diamters, into a frame so both cups' axis's are parallel. The device will go straight, not turn:
Motorcycles turn because the front tire is not pointed in the same direction as the outside tire. If the turn is coordinated, then the lean angle is held, if not, the lean angle changes.
Regarding not couner-steering once leaned over, it depends on the riders position. If the rider doesn't hang off, then the trail geometry will create an inwards torque force on the front wheel trying to straighten up the motorcycle. In order to hold a lean angle, some amount of counter-steering torque needs to be constantly applied to counter the self correcting torque from the trail geometry.
At very high speeds (100+mmph), gyroscopic forces reduce the self-correction to virtually nill, and instead result in a tendency maintain a lean angle, and very little counter-steering effort is required to maintain the lean angle.
If a rider hangs off, then the center of gravity is off to one side, and with the reduced lean angle of the motorcyle, there is less corrective steering torque, and this changes the steering inputs required to hold a turn.
A motorcycle is a "uni-track" vehicle. The center of mass of the rider / motorcycle system can't be shifted sideways without an external force, such as the pavement responding with an "inwards" reaction force to the tires "outward" force caused by the front tire's direction being different than the rear tire's direction, or by a rider's body movement creating a torque, similar to a person riding a bicycle on a high wire (where the wheels can't turn) by rotatain his arms or upper body, and then letting gravity continue to supply a torque force until the rider re-corrects before the bicycle leans too far. Trials riders sometimes swing a leg back and forth to balance a stationary motorcycle. In these cases, the ratio of rider to motorcycle mass is higher than a typical situaion (trials motorcyles are mcuh lighter than normal motorcycles).
Riding with no hands or body leaning is an indirect method of counter-steering. A rider leans inwards, the bicycle, or motorcycle leans outwards, and the trail geometry results in an outwards (counter) steering response to the outwards lean of the bicycle or motorcycle.
This only works with in a certain range of speeds. Too slow and there's not enough trail response, too fast (100+mph) and gyroscopic forces dominate, slowing the bikes lean response to the point that body leaning has virtually no effect.
As far as only using counter-steering to control a motorcycle, link to videos of a computerized "robot" driven motorcycle that only countersteers, run 4 is the best. The bike is able to recover from collisions.
Radio control motorcyles don't use any "body" lean, they just counter-steer, on a small bike with a lot of trail, and a servo with enough give to allow the self-correcting geometry of the trail to maintain a lean. The use "training" wheels to limit the lean when the bike is moving too slow.
The old (1970s) European GP (formula 1 500cc two-stroke motorcycles) riders stayed tucked and didn't use any body lean when turning either.
Considering the tire temps are being constantly monitored, and fed via a live stream back to even more computers, it's possible that the GM team's software can approximate core temperatures based on telemetry inputs, knowledge of the tire's physics, and the temperature readings.
I wasn't aware of the fact this is done with real race cars. I read about this in reference to an article about Corvette's testing of this years C6.R GT1 lemans style race car.
The method used is to install multiple infrared sensors in each wheel well of the car to measure temperatures across the width of the tires.
According to that article, the pit stall has 23 flat screens, as many lap tops as will fit in a double decker pit stall; some watching video feeds, the others tracking telemetry. The car's onboard computer can be expanded to support up to 280 channels with up to 96 of them being live feeds (the rest are downloaded post test or race). The other interesting fact was that a lot of air sensors are used on the car to measure airflows inside and around the car (almost a virtual wind tunnel).
Corvette is probably glad that Aston Martin with their faster but more prone to break DBR9 is racing GT2 class this year leaving them almost to themselves in the GT1 class.
Why isn't there more activity on this poll? This thread should continue until the next release of LFS, when it will then become clear that LFS is more realistic than NFS Underground 2.