So after about about hour of iRacing, I gave LFS a spin, then gave NKPro a spin. It's the first time I've played the 3 back-to-back-to-back.
I can't tell you which one's better, or which one's more realistic. In fact I'm more confused than ever.
I can say that NKP feels really weird, and by feel, feels the least believable handling. Not sure why that is. I swear I had it as the best a few months ago. Oh well.
"Perception"... Bah... If perception was any good we wouldn't need rulers or thermometers. From this point on I will only judge a SIM by the telemetry it puts out. Or something.
I've also tried running all three in quick succession. For me, nKP is the one which stands out as being clearly different from the other two. I can't put my finger on it, but something just makes close racing very very difficult in that one. I feel like I could do 200 laps on a circuit and still not be confident enough to run two wide through the whole thing! Also the sound just doesn't give me enough feedback.
iRacing and LFS are more similar IMO. It's very hard to compare them, because I think it's hard to tell how much of the difference is simply down to the track surface detail. iRacing's FFB is very good indeed at conveying those bumps and cracks. In LFS, the bumps at South City for example just "kill" the force feedback alltogether for an instance (like you're airborne). It doesn't jerk your wheel around like iRacing, it's just "FFB on or off".
On the other hand, LFS is better at telling you where your front wheels are pointing (you get a very strong "self correction force feedback" which I like very much). In iRacing this tends to get overshadowed by all the bumps which jerk your wheel all over the place. Particularly in the Skip Barber car. I have to turn down FFB to not have the bumps rip my arms off, and then there's hardly any self correcting FFB left.
The big difference, though, is in the tire model. I'm getting more and more convinced that iRacing's tire model is way more realistic. Yesterday I was trying out the FZ5 at Westhill Rev., and that thing feels like an elephant on ice.. I very much doubt that a real world Porsche will slide around like that in real life. In iRacing the cars have more grip, and this feels a lot more realistic intuitively. (to someone who's never raced a real race car, mind you).
I had the same problem, I found some post on the iRacing forums that seemed to make this better for me. I could check my settings when I get home, but if I remember correctly the trick was to crank the FFB strength way up in the Logitech profiler(like 150%) and then turn it down in game(7 or 8 maybe?). If you don't have a Logitech wheel then use whatever Windows setting you need to turn it up outside the game. This brought the self correction feedback more in line with the bumps and made everything feel more "right". My subscription just ended so I can't go on the forums and try to dig up the reasoning behind this change unfortunately.
I have it at 119 % in the profiler and 3 ingame... And the reason is that the Logitech drivers - when set over 100 % - exaggerate weak forces but keep strong forces the same (100 % is still 100 %)...
That's not too far off from the truth IMO. Although the problem is not that iRacing has more grip because cars in LFS do pull over 1G. The problem is that in LFS, the transition into and out of grip is way too smooth. That's part of the reason why it's so darn easy to drift in LFS.
Take "drifting" the Solstice as an example. When the car starts to oversteer it's a very noticeable break. When the car regains grip it's a very noticeable bite. You gotta be very quick with the steering otherwise you'll spin or tankslap, because that grip-slip transition is a lot more (realistically) abrupt.
Oversteer in the snow feels like LFS.
Oversteer on the track feels like iRacing.
It's quite good in the Solstice, but other cars have some problems still... Also, the tyres seem to be regarded as a solid object - it's too much following a curve (a very good one even by now, mind you), too sterile... As a consequence, induced understeer is very much promoted - something that on wide slicks (with downforce) would end in disaster afaik...
Anyway, the longer I go on, the more I'm disappointed... It's missing key elements that other sims had for some time... But for this price, it shouldn't... Don't get me wrong, it's still very good and hats off to the pace of development, but I can get an incomplete sim for a lot less than iRacing - and I don't pay them a cent for waiting...
I agree on this as well. As a foundation (with it's tire deformations and flatspotting and such) LFS is still better. The feel of LFS is much more dynamic than iRacing is at the moment. That's also reflected in the better FFB.
Seems with some tweaking in input values, LFS can easily compete/surpass iRacing in terms of physics experience.
Indeed! I have the same feeling. For that to happen, they just need a) better (snappier) transition from grip to sliding and b) more detailed track surfaces and the way bumps are transferred through the FFB. The LFS tracks feel extremely sterile compared to the iRacing tracks. But you don't need laser scanning to make somthing similar! Surely it can't be that hard to make some random bumps and cracks in the tarmac..?
Problem is the amount of actual data you have available and implementing it. I don't think dev team is just going to tweak in some numbers until car feels nice because it could produce very odd results on different setups in different situations. iRacing has the advantage here of having much more connections to get some hard data on tires.
While I agree that LFS tire model has more features such as deformation, tires feel very generic and not all that different between each car, mostly just different amounts of grip.
Gnomie: You certainly can make bumps and dips manually, but it is very time consuming to make them natural. There's always reason behind road surface imperfections and they are further shaped by cars racing over them.
They even market a superior tyre model by having their own testing facility - alledgedly not a single line of this data (if they have any yet) has dropped into the sim...
As for tire data, is that a fact or your opinion?
Kaemmer wrote about the tire physics some time ago and made it pretty clear that they have plenty of data but it has proven to be quite challenging implement all of it into the sim.
Well.. iRacing makes a lot of noise about the contacts that it has and the data that is provided to it, but it also sells itself as a tool to help real racing drivers set up their cars. I certainly dispute that.
I'm sure iRacing has value regarding learning tracks, but I don't think it's a credible claim regarding setting up a car, given the utterly static racing conditions and environment in iRacing, the absence of variable atmospheric conditions, track temperatures, track moisture and a gazillion other factors that dramatically affect the behaviour of a car on a track at any given time of the day.
iRacing has a well-formed marketing strategy, and it's very active in singing its own praises. I respect that, but I don't necessarily fall for it. LFS may well have access to copious quantities of tyre data from Michelin and Avon etc, but because of the nature of LFS - a simulator with absolutely no marketing aspirations whatsoever - we will probably never ever know any detail on it. That doesn't mean there's nothing to know, though.
I understand what you mean and ofcourse one shouldn't believe everything marketing department says, but it's pretty bold claim to say that there's no actual data behind tire model. (which would also make tire testing facility just one big expensive marketing tool)
How can it be fact when I put allegedly (yeah, spelled wrong in my previous post)???
It's just something that crept up continually in those "curb issues" or "car handles unrealisticly" threads on the iforums (yes, they really called it that), and from guys that beta-tested the sim...
In addition, I think iRacing, just like LFS, has proved to be a very credible and valuable tool for real racing drivers to understand a lot more about the variables that come with setting up a car for racing. Whenever I have managed to get out on track, having driven LFS, and now iRacing, I can pin point a few of the variables I need to tweak to get more from the car to suit my driving style. I wouldn't say its iRacing specific or makes iRacing sifferent from other games but its certainly there as a helpful tool and does make a difference.
I've also been spending a lot of time in "iRacing Member Forums" (as they're titled, I haven't noticed the word "iforum" anywhere on the page).
From what I've seen most cars have really no issues, both Mazda and Silverado got a whole lot better after physics update, leaving Radical as the source of most valid complaints. With Radical, front end just doesn't feel quite right but it doesn't make it undrivable, just slightly more difficult. As for topic that is often debated on all racing sims, tire slip angles are pretty much different on cars with different tires. There was a lot of debating going during beta about aliens drifting Skippy but on "Going Faster" Skip Barber himself mentions that tires have optimal slip angle between 7-9 degrees, which is roughly what you see on Huttu's replays.
Curbs I don't have an issue with because I make my own setups with reasonable ride height so there's enough suspension travel to soak in the "bump" as you ride over curbs. I agree that they have much less grip than tarmac, but most complaints come from situations where curbs have high profile or just do not follow road's curvature (road has slight camber but curb is level to the ground).
It was something along the lines of the testing facility just started out so there couldn't have been any data from that in the sim yet and that come autumn we may see the first batch of data finding its way into the sim...
Another thing: tyres differ from track to track (that's confirmed by staff) and I seriously doubt they've gotten/are getting that much tyres from Goodyear, Michelin, Avon and others...
I was under impression that they've been using Calspan Tire Research Facility (http://www.calspan.com/tire.htm) located in Buffalo for some time already? Even if there's no fresh tire data implemented lately, it doesn't mean that current model is not based on actual information gathered from licensing partners. Benefit of simulating real cars is that you don't have to guess what kind of tires car should run on and for most part reading what people who have professional backround seem to be quite satisfied with current model even if there's few things missing, like flatspots. I'd rather trust a development engineer from Goodyear than random simracer when it comes to these things.
According to post you referred to, tires differ from track to track in terms of compound, on road courses COT runs with road tires and probably different type of oval tires for various oval types.
I have no problem pointing out what flaws there are, but let's stick to facts and not make stuff up.
Ps. Whatever it says in url, doesn't mean they're named that way or would you say that offtopic forums here are called "forumdisplay.php?f=42"
I've only had an hour or so on it on my next door neighbour's trial. I won't be paying monthly for it. I wanted to know if laser scanning really made that much difference, and I concluded that it does.
I seriously doubt any racing driver deserving of the title "racing driver" will be taught anything new by iRacing, about adjustments that they can make to their real-life equivalent racing car. They'd have to be at an extraordinarily early stage in their racing careers for that to actually happen. I realise that iRacing wants to give the impression that a sim can be a real-life substitute for the real thing, but I'm afraid I just don't see it. No question, both iRacing and LFS can provide massive insight into the effects of car setup, to lay people and people who are starting out.. but not really beyond that.
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