I know who you mean, and I can't find the thread either. But he was saying it was actually pretty darn good, with a few details not quite right (mostly caused by the fact people are sitting in a chair not in a race car etc).
I believe he was saying the setup-options didn't mirror the RL car in many ways... I think his only gripe was that LfS doesn't model a monoshock front...
I love how everyone ignored this and went off on a tangent about the Formula BMW...
To try and answer your question, I believe the MRT in-game would give you a pretty good idea how a real FSAE will behave, because it was based on a real car.
Of course there may be detail differences, but I agree with you: the "soul" of the car will be recognisable.
It's a wonder there hasn't been more real world to sim testing of the actual RL cars in LFS. Nobody really pushes for hard info about how the FBM handles compared to the real thing, nor the MRT, nor the Raceabout. On the forum, where you're guaranteed endless circular discussions about the realism of the LFS physics compared to reality and other sims, it's strange that someone hasn't gone the distance to compare actual cars in depth.
Above our computer labs at RMIT there's an FSAE, looks remarkably like the one in LFS. Of course, I'm not gonna get to drive it, but someone should- and write up a comparison to the LFS one. Scawen also hasn't said anything about the FBM and how it compares with his track experience.
I have the same, and it's really annoying. :/ The walls in this house are so thin that if my neighbour is home I feel like I have to either drive very silently or not drive at all. But I guess something good might come out of it, because it "forces" me to drive more smooth (smooth = silent). Some times I even avoid braking on rumble strips and such to make less noise.
I get the stuttering particularly when I forget to adjust AA/AF for race conditions on Blackwood or South City. Then the first lap is a nightmare.
Gnomie, if you want to solve the problem of the neighbours, get a pair of these. They're not as good as speakers, obviously, but they do have one of the best frequency ranges of any headphones I've ever used for anything approaching this price, and they come with a decent microphone as well.
I do have headphones, it's the vibration of my wheel that I'm worried about. I have a pretty rackety table too, so it all gets pretty noisy I'm afraid. The one thing I liked better about my old momo compared to the G25 was the sound.
That is a very hard thing to do. If you get a real racer to do it, chances are they won't relate well to the sim environment. They won't really be able to compare because they are lacking g forces and everything else that comes with a real car.
If you get a sim guy to do it, unless they are really gifted, they won't be able to push the real car to the limit for a long time. And even if they do, they won't be able to provide you with much usable feedback.
I think the best tactic is to do what Scawen is doing. Model the physics as best you can, test the heck out of it, and then balance the cars using actual physical characteristics. I think you will get better results that way than doing testing in the real cars (in general).
I can think of a great way to test but will need a few hundred thousand to pull it off
Take a FBMW to a skid pad, setup a PC with LFS and FBMW at skid pad. Setup sensors on the real FBMW for steering, throttle, brake, etc which send the same inputs back to the game test drive real car which will also control LFS at same time then compare.
I understand that it's a potentially very difficult (impossible) thing to do right, that you'll never get those 'lab' conditions. The thing that concerns me is something that Frokki said on the first page of this thread, how 'The more you play LFS, the closer to real life it starts to feel.' That makes me somewhat suspicious... I am hopeless at physics, so I can't really get into a debate about this, but I wonder how much exposure to LFS over time colours ones perception of reality. Does it feel right because it IS right, or merely because you're used to the physics of the simulation, in the same way someone begins to emphasize with a character in a TV show through familiarisation? How many people coming off different sims have had trouble adjusting to the LFS physics, before finally settling in. Or do people who play lots of LFS need time to adjust into other sims? It's an interesting question. :detective
I agree - I think one becomes used to judging speeds/distances and then things start to click. Becoming more experienced also leads to less time spent worrying about doing the basics right (shifting, braking, etc), freeing up some mental processing and allowing the handling subtleties to become more apparent. In other words, "new drivers" can't appreciate the physics in the same way because their minds are too busy trying to judge speeds and distances to sort out how to stay on the black stuff or experiment with tossing the cars around a little.
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.
Yesterday I was remembering this topic about real cars and LFS.
I posted a response about if my university FSAE car will react closely to the one in the game.
Finally we got the car done and we went to Silverstone and Hockenheim and I was one of the drivers...
When I came back at home I tryed the game's Fsae car and I can say that is quite close, but in the game the car tend to spin more fast than in the real life. (I had no time to set up the car , so maybe is a setup problem) In general our car was softer. We had more roll than in game. I'll try to set up MRX and I'll tell you what happen.
I can confirm that it's actually quite similar.
I've got the G25 steering wheel, and i'm using the turning degrees matched to the cars in LFS.
I was excited when my dad finally made me drive his Focus once, i was 14 at the time.
The main thing i noticed was the fact that you actually feel the car, body roll etcetera. Which, in my opinion makes it easier to drive. The pedals are stiffer then the ones from the G25, and the gear change really needs alot more smoothing. That was really the only thing that took most of my attention. That's the only thing that is much different from LFS. All of the other things went pretty much automatically. I found the forces from the steering wheel in the Focus similar to the road cars in LFS, and not at all more powerful. In my opinion, driving a car on the road or something like that, isn't much different at all.
Ofcourse, racing is so much different.. i can except the forces from the steering wheel to be much stronger, such as G forces etcetera.
I do kart sometimes however. And i've gone karting once before i started playing LFS. I finished last, and i had pretty bad time.
I went to that same track a few years later, supplied with the experience from LFS, and i actually made it to the top-10 of the day. That has got to do something with LFS. Right?