General rambling now. Other than iRacing's large drop in prices and the ongoing increase in content, there isn't much going on at iRacing, other that some event combinations are getting sparsely attended due to the increase in content. I haven't heard if the number of active players has exceeded 20,000 yet. I had the impression that the iRacing group was expecting more like 40,000 or more active players by now.
I have an old video of the Radical at SilverStone. The Radical was easier to drive than the boringly slow and somewhat difficult to deal with Soltice, and much easier than the original Spec Racer Ford which had an excessive engine braking bug that threatened to spin the car every time you lifted the throttle. This is all I have from my one month free trial with iRacing a year or so ago, a video of the Radical at Silverstone (also another at Lime Rock not as interesting), where I use GPL like induced understeering to counter lift throttle oversteer to put the Radical into a 4 wheel drift in turns. Maybe not as fast, but it was more fun.
The initial learning curve may be easier, depending on the game and/or car being used. In the case of iRacing, I found the Radical to be relatively easy to drive. NR2003, rFactor, and the GTR series have assists that simplify the initial learning curve; NR2003 could even do most of the steering for you. Grand Prix Legends was/is probably the most difficult to learn, which is why it didn't sell that well early on. Most racing games, both arcade and sim-oriented, become challenging once you start running competitive (versus other online players) lap times, but with the arcade games, your not "managing" the car as much as you normally do with sim-oriented games.
If the rev limiter cuts fuel (which is what most of them do, if it cut's spark, then you get explosions from the fuel/air mixture in your exhaust), then it will be cutting fuel more often at 30mph than at 130mph.
Issues at play: the ratio of power consumed internally by the engine, versus power consumed by the external forces (rolling resistance and aerodynamic drag); the faster speed covers more ground per second; ...
Bottom line is the ratio between fuel consumed per distance traveled at 30mph versus 130mph. If the car was a 1.3 liter econobox, I suspect milage would be better at 30mph. If the car was something like a Z06 (which does redline at about 7100 rpm), then it might be better at 130mph.
It depends on the state you live in. If it's a monthly auto-renew, the 60 day notice doesn't apply since in effect, you get a renewal notice every 28 to 31 day, and the option to cancel after a renewal period usuallly won't apply (again depending on the state). If the renewal period is 3 months or more, most states will require an notice within 60 days of the renewal date, and the option to cancel just after a renewal period (this covers the case where the notice might get lost in the mail), would normally apply. If there's a problem with cancelling, you could always file a dispute with your credit card company, which usually try harder when you haven't already paid for the disputed charge (you're not required to pay and there's no interest until the disputed charge case is settled).
The most recent activity with auto-renewal issues was related to people who lost their homes to disasters or foreclosure, then getting auto-renew charges for annual home security systems, long after they were no longer in their homes.
I meant the original way it was handled. There were a few complaints about the early free trials, where the only mention of auto-renewal was buried well into the agreement, under what appeared to be a system requirements section. Also the early 3, 6, and 12 month auto-renewals occurred without renewal date notices and violated consumer laws in many states that require 60 day notices before renewal dates, and the option to cancel within 30 days after an auto-renewal charge shows up on a customer's credit card statement.
I assume iRacing is now compliant with consumer laws, but still auto-renewals (sub-renewals) have a tradition of being associated with the sleaziest of businesses, with Enzyte being one of the more prominent examples since the founder received an unusually harsh 25 year jail sentence (specifically for making it near impossible to stop auto-renewals). The company is still exists, but no longer does auto-renewals.
If you don't want auto-renewal, then use paypal, since money can't be withdrawn unless you specifically add it (assuming you don't tie it your bank account).
Too old now. I had one of the rare 1965 era Hobie fiberglass skateboards that I bought back in 1967. That one had the inserts used to hold the trucks come out, but I still have the later 1975 version of that board.
Players getting burnt out is more likely, although the hook is that once a player has spent all tha money on cars and tracks, they feel obligated to continue to be iRenters.
As far as competition goes, there are some players that no longer consider realism that important in a racing game, and may even consider something like NFS Shift, despite the lack of realism.
iRacing's marketing strategy is probably smart, but borderline ethically. The old auto-renewal policy with a single referece on line 84 of the agreement under the section "what you need to play" crossed that line, but they don't do that anymore. I associate auto-renewals with the sleaziest of companies, like Enzyte, whose auto-renewal policy was bad enough to give the company founder a 25 year jail sentence.
The point was that a NR2003 race took about 1/2 hour, including practice, qualify, and race time. An iRacing race (other than rookie) takes most of an hour. An LFS race typically takes 10 minutes or so, and I don't have to synchronize my schedule to iRacing's hourly schedule.
Perhaps it would be simpler to state that I'm not a "serious" sim racer and not interested in 30 or 40+ minute races, much less ones scheduled on an hourly basis.
Personally I don't do that much online racing with any game anymore, the newness is gone (I started back in 2000), and I already know from experience with other games that my lap times will be 4% to 7% slower than the aliens, depending on the game.
So if iRacing ever released a boxed retail version of the game, I (and many others) would be interested, but I'm not interested in the online service.
Even though iRacing's pricing is getting more reasonable over time, I still have an issue with hourly races. I used to play NR2003, which was 2 races per hour, but stopped after a couple of months because it was consuming too much time. iRacing lowers this to 1 race per hour, which is something I'm just not interested in.
If they ever make a retail boxed version of the game, I'd be happy to buy that.
Aren't the vast majority of racing cars amateur racing cars? Professional racing only makes up a relatively small percentage of SCCA, NASA, and all of the European club level racing events. Also, those DSR cars run around 2:10 lap times at Road America, faster than most of the cars included in Live For Speed's collection.
I was only trying to point out that there are modern bias ply slicks still in use in some racing classes today, including GT class cars in shorter distance races where the higher rate of wear on the bias play slicks isn't an issue. I think a SCCA GT1 class car would be considered a serious race car by most people that actually race.
I'm not sure why you think these are "training" tires, since they are used in many SCCA and NASA competitions, mostly lighter, non to moderate downforce cars as I mentioned before. Did you even look at the list of 13 inch wheel tires shown at Hoosier? There are only 4 radials listed, and over a dozen bias ply listed, for a variety of racing classes. Have you ever seen a SCCA DSR class type racing car, such as a Stohr WF-1 (these typically use 1 liter motorcyle engines)?
Bias ply racing slicks are still in use today, mostly in lighter, non-downforce cars (for example Formula Fords). Link to Hoosiers road racing tires, click on the link, then click on specs, the bias ply racing slicks are shown in the first table, most of these use 13 inch wheels. Note the small number of radial racing tires in the following table for 13 inch wheel size. Also if you go back to the home rrtire.htm page, click on the 03-22-10 bulletin, "next generation" GT slicks, C4000s, which are bias ply racing slicks (16 inch wheels).
Also, modern road racing radial slicks are increasingly forgiving in their design, more "bias ply" like than road racing radial slicks from 10 years ago.
Best summary so far was made by Bart Simpson, "it was all the dog's dream".
Best movie analogy to the ending is Jacob's Ladder. The movie keeps switching between ever more bizarre scenes, ending where the main character's dead daughter leads him into the light, then the movie returns to reality, where it's revealed that all the scenes in the movie were just the hallucinations of a soldier dying from a combat wound.
I never like ghost story movies like "sixth sense" or "the others", since they are usually full of plot holes and/or keep changing the rules and/or require some incredibly unlikely series of random events.
So I'll bump it up one step from Bart's summary and state that it was all just Jake's hallucinations as he died from the plane crash, then again he could have been dying from something else and the plane crash was part of the hallucination.
I never watched Lost, but seeing that there were only seven or so episodes left, I was hoping that it would end up with good story line. There was another mediocre sci-fi series called DollHouse, essentially a story line that wasn't really going anywhere because there was no end date. Once it was announced that the series was ending, the writers responded by creating a coherent story line that ended up being reasonably well done.
Isn't "really good scary handling" the point of bias ply racing slicks? ... that they are very forgiving and have almost no drop off in grip while in the "scary zone"?
In the real world most models (external ballistics for example) end up being a combination of empirical and theoretical models, why is tire modeling different?
If you really want to drive the VW Scirocco, it's now included in NFS Undercover (November 2008), NFS Shift (September 2009), and in NFS World (2010 - currently in Beta). Puts a bit of perspective on how long it's been since the announcement of the Scirocco for LFS.
I was confusing an email exchange I had with this thread (in the email the car chassis was the frame of reference, a non-conventional model). I deleted my previous message, since it would be confusing in this thread.
Or friction ellipse theory? How close are these theories to reality?
Rather than consider friction as being limited to some total maximum magnitude of force from the sum of force vectors, its' seems reasonable to assume that due to tire construction, contact patch dynamics, ... that the maximum force possible will vary depending on ratio between lateral and longitudinal forces. Speed seems like it could be a factor because of the amount of centripetal force exerted by the plies in the tires at speed. My guess it that like everything else in the real world, tire phyiscs modeling will end up complicated, requiring the equivalent of the Navier Stokes methods used to deal with aerodynamics.
This isn't something I follow much myself, so perhaps there are papers or articles that address these issues, and I'm just not aware of them.
It's not a man-hours thing when the number of man-hours exceeds the lifetime of an individual. It doesn't take much to be aware of the fact that there is a significant amount of research being done in the field of tire physics modeling, and that this research has gone beyond what any single individual can do on his own without the exchange of information between others (corporations and universities) also involved in this research.
Based on the time it's taken already, it should be obvious that it's difficult. I don't know what model LFS uses, but I would assume that it's based on information from other models.
What I do have a clue about is that many things are complicated enough to go beyond what an individual can accomplish on his own without input from others. As a programmer for a couple of computer peripheral companies, I've been exposed to a few university based research centers, such as http://cmrr.ucsd.edu where professor Jack Wolf and some of his PHD students visited and exchanged information regarding signal processing used in the channel designs for tape and hard drives, and professor Weldon http://www.ee.hawaii.edu/faculty/detail.php?usr=27 who exchanged information to be used with error correction codes, an area that I specialize in.
No individual could hope to replace the knowledge gained through man-decades of research into these or similarly complex areas, and I'm sure that tire physics modeling is just as complex as many other fields of research.
In my opinion, making a significant improvement over the current tire physics mode in LFS will end up going beyond what an individual can accomplish, without access to good documentation of the internals of newer physics models, in addition to sorting out which of the newer models will work well in a racing game environment. What I don't know is if access to such models exists.
I'm not an expert on this stuff. I only vaguely recall some of Todd Wasson's comments on tire models while he was working on his own tire model. I don't know how far he got. I recall a video of a wire frame model. Based on what I've read from people involved with this stuff, pacejka isn't all that great, especially when dealing with transitions back and forth between static and dynamic friction, something you need if the goal is to create a realistic model for a racing game. A good model is probably going to involve a large table of coefficients (the same as most other real world models, for example supersonic ballistics with tables of coefficients indexed by speed and bullet shape) and something to deal with the transition between static and dynamic friction states.
An alternative could be to assume all tires behave like an idealized bias-ply racing slick, where the dynamic friction is essentially the same as static friction (real world bias-ply racing tires come very close to this, and this "forgiving" quality makes them popular in some racing classes, examples are included here: https://www.hoosiertire.com/specrr.htm more info http://importnut.net/tiretech.htm).
The issue with a smaller development team is isolation from the rest of the development community and/or access to real world data. The larger teams generally have some ongoing influx of people and/or data that helps them keep up to date with current methods and to avoid any pitfalls already discovered by others in the community.
To this date, I'm not aware of any racing game that drives the same as a real car at the limits. The fastest laps in a game occur when a player drives it like a game, not like a real car. The setups that provide the fastest laps in a racing game would never work in the real world. Most racing games tend to reward loose setups and essentially drifting through turns more so than what works in real life. LFS isn't going to change this.
In my opinion, the segmented tire and clutch overheat models were uneeded, implemented too soon and too compromised, when there should have been more attention paid to other basic features and the core physics, which did end up with a problem.
An attempt to model tires that fails in the simplest of situations, a stopped car on an inclined or banked section of track. It's a "backwards" approach that tries to model everything based on slip ratio and slip angles, and working it's way back to forces, as opposed to the other way around. It's OK if you're happy with an 80% to 85% solution, but a 90+% solution requires a different or a hybrid approach.
LFS players knew all along that it was a small development team, and early on, many of the LFS fans seemed to be proud of the fact that the development team was so small. It was obvious to a few of us that this would result in a slow development cycle, and I was considered a pessimist when back in 2005 soon after S2 release when I estimated that S3 would get released sometime in 2009. This probably would have happened if it wasn't for the setback with the tire physics. Also S2 ended up with a bit more content than some of us expected, so what we have now is more like S2.5, compared to what S2 was back in 2005.
I don't see the Scirocco as a big deal. It's a front wheel drive econobox, not exactly an exciting car.
Actually I'm a bit surprised that they're willing to re-implement the tire physics model for S2 now rather than just live with the current model and save the physics re-do for S3, since each stage was originally planned to include physics improvments.
Other than the Scirocco, I'm not sure what else was planned to be included with S2, if anything, beyond what we have now, so maybe consider the tire physics re-do as a preview of S3.
Again, the physics re-do seems like a monumental task, I just hope they eventually get something implemented that they're happy with.
This is a wind powered cart that outruns the wind that propels it. There's a prop connected to the wheels, and as along as there's a wind (air moving with respect to the ground), then the wheels can drive the prop with sufficent thrust to slow down the wind even though the cart itself is moving faster than the wind, and outputting less power (more force but lesser speed) at the prop than it intakes at the wheels (less force but greater speed).
Spork & JB finally tested their human driven cart in natural wind on a dry lake bed.