Thought this should get it's own thread. How many here are aware that with auto-clutch turned off, shifting can be done by holding down a shift button before the shift, then tapping clutch button to do the actual shift? This reduces the actual shift time to the time it takes to tap the clutch button.
That's not quite the same thing. One of the complaints was using a macro that would depress clutch, shift gear, release clutch. In LFS with auto-clutch off, this isn't needed. Currently in LFS with auto-clutch off the player button sequence is hold down shift button, tap clutch button to do actual shift. The shift time is how long it takes to press and release the clutch button by tapping on it. I don't think that many players here are aware of the fact that shifts can be done this way (holding shift button down, then tapping clutch button to do the actual shift).
Where the macros can help is emulating auto-blip and auto-cut in races to prevent clutch overheating. I don't think clutch overheating is an issue for hot lapping.
If you want to see real life tire overheating, look up one of the hundred or so motorcycle burnout videos on the web. A lot of these end up blowing out the tire in less than a minute.
What I don't know is how hot tires get from constant drifting. They obviously wear quickly, but I don't know about the heat failure aspect.
There are some stunt videos of cars doing donuts for quite a while, with little apparent tire smoke, so I guess these cars are using some special tires meant for this as opposed to normal or racing tires: burnout.wmv . From what I recall, they finally got this full demo run after only going through about a dozen spectators (victims?) in the pretake with "minor" mistakes.
I assume you meant Sugar Ray Robinson, not the later ones.
For me, boxing ended ages ago. When a 50 year old George Foreman still managed to reach the top 10 heavyweights, it's a good sign that thing have really gone downhill in the last 20 or so years. Plus you look at how much brain damage the famous old boxers have experienced (ever hear Quarry try to speak? Patterson was lucky that his career was short).
Since this thread has been resurrected again, I'd thought I'd point out that if auto-clutch is turned off, sequential shifter (player option not car option) is selected, and clutch is a button, then a player can press and hold the upshift or downshift button while driving, and then only have to press the clutch button to do the actual shift. After the shift takes place, the shift button has to be released and repressed and held down again, to enable the next shift via clutch button.
For a quick shift, the player just needs to press and hold the shift button a bit before pressing the clutch button to do the actual shift. No macros needed, it's a single button shift.
Another point I made earlier is that at least some LFS cars can be flat shifted (no throttle lift) without clutch overheating if the player waits until the engine reaches the rev limiter before shifting.
This was #1 song in the UK back in 1971 (#22 in USA). Sonded different when all you had was AM radio. I was on a long car trip and kept hearing this song on KOMA which reached about 1/2 the USA depending on the time of day.
Tried to unlock S1-0.3A, but it asked for a key. Then tried to unlock S1-0.3H which didn't ask for a key, but it wouldn't unlock. Any ideas? Just wanted to see what the old version was like.
Zonda is at Brands Hatch. The Porsche is at a fantasy track from ProStreet, but in reverse direction. I made a video of both tracks. Since the NFS Shift team includes 25 ex-GTR employees I used GTR Evolution's Brand's Hatch for comparason:
For the second track, I ran ProStreet Shimbashi track reverse in the Zonda. Note that Prostreet's physics are way over the top with cars pulling over 5 g's, so the Shift lap times will be much more realistic than the swoop racer like 50 seconds here, but at least you get to see the basis for the track without the crashing.
The problem is that this is a method that only works when at the limits, which can't be sanely done on a road. I did it in a very large but closed parking lot, one that is used for a few pro solo type races during the winter time (the parking lot is used for a water theme park during the summer season).
Technically it's not the equivalent of "snap" as used in reference to a snap roll on an aircraft that's induced from simply too much elevator input, causing one wing to stall a bit before the other resulting in a very fast roll, without any aileron input.
However it is appropriate term in the case of a high downforce car, like a Formula 1 race car. If the car oversteers, the angle of flow over the rear wing is yawed, reducing the downforce resulting in less grip, resulting in more oversteer, reducing the downforce, ... a vicous cycle that happens very quickly. The result of an oversteer at high speed (high downforce) in a Formula 1 car pulling over 3 g's of lateral acceleration, is a very fast spin, called snap oversteer. To prevent this, most high downforce cars have a rearwards bias in the downforce.
So now where do we get the 2005 mod for Nascar Racing Season 2003? I"ve still got my copy, but never found it that interesting, other than First, now iRacing, formerly threatened to sue any web site hosting the 2005 mod, which almost made it interesting.
Prior to computer mice, there were pucks for digitizer tablets. Rather than sense movement, these sensed position on the tablet and were mostly used to input vector information using the puck which had a button (or 2 or 3). I borrowed one of these for a while, but only after I had the Atari ST which already had a mouse.
I got an Atari ST back in 1985 (similar to Commodor Amiga, or an early color Macintosh, 8mhz Motorola 68000), which had a mouse. The software was basically MSDOS converted to run in a flat 32 bit address space, and had a windows like interface called GEM (from Digital Research) for the GUI. The racing game I remember best was super hang on.
I bought my first PC around 1990, by then 486DX cpu's and Windows 3.0 were released, so I had a mouse for that system.
As mentioned earlier it is done in real life. I recall corresponding with a guy named Warren that stated that induced understeer was needed on his "evil mid engine Clio V6 Renault Sport". This Clio is interesting, in that the engine is moved to where the rear seat used to be, and the car is rear wheel drive.
Also, you don't need to peg the steering (don't need a lot of lock) to induce understeer for spin prevention, just steer a bit beyond "critical slip angle" at the fronts, and an otherwise oversteery car will settle down.
It's just some wierd car and setup sensitive quirk. For the Lotus, the braking balance had to be around 52% to 54%, outside this range, it doesn't happen. I don't know if any other cars had this issue.
I'm not sure what issue you're having with GPL in general though. The visual perception of speed is less than the actual speed, so that takes a while to get used to. Other than the large amount of working slip angle, which makes it seem like you're drifting through every turn, GPL doesn't feel that much different than other sims to me.
As posted above, seems like speed sensitive steering. However as an interesting bit of trivia regarding braking and steering quirks in games, I offer this video from GPL where braking and steering right results in a left yaw.
An example of a real world auto-blip. It appears to be activated by depressing the clutch pedal (one way linkage from clutch to throttle), but there are also computerized auto-blip systems. I don't know if the computerized ones would move the throttle pedal. Perhaps computerized auto-blip wasn't allowed or wanted for this particular race car, so they made a mechanical "macro" driven off the clutch to implement blip without heel and toe.
That video was of a multi-class event. There was some issue that prevented the BMW from qualifying, so it started at the back of the field, with the lower class cars. That's why it passes so many cars at the start.
Some race cars use a computer to control throttle and clutch (if needed) during shifts. One example is an XTRAC shifter. Formula 1 race cars use a computerized sequential no lift shifter. In 2002 the Formula 1 trannies were fully automatic, both upshifts and downshifts. I don't know what percentage of these computerized shifters require blips on downshifts.
I did a re-check and as corrected above, there is only one NFS game to use the term "grip" to refer to a game mode (ProStreet), the older NFS games, and the current Undercover don't use the term "grip", so it didn't last long in the case of the NFS series.
I don't know if "grip" is a NFS invention or if the term was picked up. In NFS Carbon, there were 3 settings for the tires, "drift" (oversteer), middle setting, and "grip" (understeer). The NFS series include a few modes, circuit (street or track), sprint (point to point), drag, drift, wheelie, streetx (like indoor go-cart racing), url (underground racing league, track courses instead of street courses - Underground 2), outruns (get and maintain lead on opponent car, with traffic), speed (sprint almost all at top speed - ProStreet), and pursuit events. Depending on the game, separate tuning and/or cars were used for the various modes.
NFS ProStreet was the first and last (so far) NFS game to use "grip" as a term for a racing mode, but it only saved 3 letters as the only "grip" mode in ProStreet is circuit. Cars were setup for one the ProStreet modes, grip (circuit), drag, drift, wheelie, speed.
The next NFS - Undercover doesn't use the term "grip", and it only has one mode for cars (no drift or drag modes), just racing and pursuit events, all of which use the same tuning.
Link to thread via google groups below, quotes from the first post in italics:
I think it's as bad as any exploited setup in any previous sim - GPL, rFactor, or whatever.
I got a new setup for free that gained 0.4 seconds. (1:06.8 down to 1:06.4 on his initial run with new setup) The car just slows down more quickly with a ton of throttle on top of braking if you use an extremely rearward brake bias.
Link to thread via google groups:
As I mentioned before exploits have been around since the hey days of GPL.
In the case of LFS, one of the exploits in an older version was to set the front end high and rear end low because a bug in the aerodynamics caused downforce to be relative to the car body instead of perpendicular to the direction the car was traveling, so the downforce acted at thrust. This was fixed, and it's just an example.
Back to the braking with throttle on exploit, it affects both the Papy engine (GPL, NR2003, iRacing), and the ISI engine (EA's F1 series, GTR series, rFactor), two completely different physics engines, which is surprising. Comments about exploits in various racing sims have been posted over the years at RSC (race sim central), if it ever gets back up and if it archived those old threads, it may still have them.
The arcade exploits are even more bizarre, generally due to giving digital (steering) controllers or keyboards some form of advantage. In the case of NFS Undercover, they decided to give cars more accleration after a wall collision, but apparently using the handbrake triggers this "recovery" mode, and a car can quickly reach top speed after a few turns using the handbrake (better than using the nitrous in the game). Someone made a video of a tier 3 car (2 stages below the top tier) quickly reaching it's top speed of 340kph after 3 shots of "handbrake".
In spite of the huge advantage of the digital controller, most players, including myself, that are using analog controllers will not switch to digital controllers, but instead simply wait for the next NFS to be released and hope that it doesn't have the same bug. Plus players can always go back and play previous versions that don't have these quirks.
I've tried this technique in real life in an empty parking lot. Knowing it was a technique that only worked when at the limits (part of the reason it's not intuitive is that you can't test it unless at the limits), I started off with a circular skid test pattern, holding a near constant radius and increasing speed unti the car was drifting. Then I tried combinations of power induced or engine braking induced understeer, combined with oversteer and induced understeer. The induced understeer works, even under throttle, but it would be self defeating in the case of power induced oversteer (opposing acceleration). I then tried it with a figure 8 pattern, typically used for this kind of learning process.
As mentioned, I corresponded with a club racer, and he stated that induced understeer helped a great deal on his "evil Clio Sport track car", but not with any of his other track cars. The mid-engine Clio had a tendency to be nervous when setup for fastest lap times.