I can confirm, that in my limited but valuable real world experience, LFS tyre temperatures change far too slowly. (EDIT: Like - actually so far out as for me to think of them as: Work In Progress).
I can confirm, that in my limited but valuable real world experience, LFS tyre temperatures change far too slowly. (EDIT: Like - actually so far out as for me to think of them as: Work In Progress).
I would agree with the tyre temperatures reacting too slowly, I have a pyrometer for setting up before going on the track, and the surface temperature (near to surface), 1mm depth with spikey bit to measure temp, varies from the exit of one corner if you stop the car and measure, to the end of the straight immediately after the corner.
The current temps are better than any other game i've come accross, but they still only give a tyre temperature, rather than the surface you're actually running on. That would obviously change temperature based on the temp of the tyre as a whole, so hot tyres warm faster on the surface during the corner.
To clarify, we need a tyre temp, and a tyre surface temp, the tyre temp leaches temp off the surface into the tyre material itself, and off the brakes also, warming it, the hotter the tyre material, the quicker the surface temperature will heat up during cornering, and the slower it cools down on the straights.
off topic:
The TVR sagaris originally had those holes open to aid in brake cooling and aerodynamics, however, when it rained, they threw an unbelievably large amount of road surface & oil muck onto the windshield, so then they made them out of clear plastic, to look good without the muck, but then that just got covered with dirt too, so they filled them in, and decided to just forget about it.
The current temps are better than any other game i've come accross, but they still only give a tyre temperature, rather than the surface you're actually running on. That would obviously change temperature based on the temp of the tyre as a whole, so hot tyres warm faster on the surface during the corner.
To clarify, we need a tyre temp, and a tyre surface temp, the tyre temp leaches temp off the surface into the tyre material itself, and off the brakes also, warming it, the hotter the tyre material, the quicker the surface temperature will heat up during cornering, and the slower it cools down on the straights.
off topic:
The TVR sagaris originally had those holes open to aid in brake cooling and aerodynamics, however, when it rained, they threw an unbelievably large amount of road surface & oil muck onto the windshield, so then they made them out of clear plastic, to look good without the muck, but then that just got covered with dirt too, so they filled them in, and decided to just forget about it.
I think we all have to understand, especially with the open wheelers, that 100-150+mph wind (even disturbed or partially inhibited by body pieces) will cool any material exponentially faster than ambient air will.
Also, tires heating up could be a potential issue. I watched a video of a camaro with worn tires doing a burnout for nearly 8 minutes before his tires blew. If I remember correctly they were sports tires of some kind too. I've done a couple burnouts in my FWD MX-6 with Fulda's and they weren't even very hot to the touch after over a minute of wasting my money.
I am not sure what Scawen drives or if he's even willing to do it, but maybe he could go do a 30 second burnout and check the temps, or even go to a track and ask to do some investigating. Yeah it'd be time consuming but it'd put the issue to rest.
Also, tires heating up could be a potential issue. I watched a video of a camaro with worn tires doing a burnout for nearly 8 minutes before his tires blew. If I remember correctly they were sports tires of some kind too. I've done a couple burnouts in my FWD MX-6 with Fulda's and they weren't even very hot to the touch after over a minute of wasting my money.
I am not sure what Scawen drives or if he's even willing to do it, but maybe he could go do a 30 second burnout and check the temps, or even go to a track and ask to do some investigating. Yeah it'd be time consuming but it'd put the issue to rest.
i think this discussion dates back to the rsc days and its true that the model does lack more zones on the tyres especially along the radius
my guess is that the heating and cooling is more or less correct for a solid rubber block
obviously it lacks surface temps which could also be used to simulate a whole bunch of heat related tyre problems that only occur on the surface (blistering etc)
my guess is that the heating and cooling is more or less correct for a solid rubber block
obviously it lacks surface temps which could also be used to simulate a whole bunch of heat related tyre problems that only occur on the surface (blistering etc)
I think there a lot more improvements possible on the tyre-temps and wear:
I noticed too that in lfs tyres on some track/car combo' s keep warming and overheat after 5 laps. Even with R3 tyres at maximum pressure, wv international with bf1 for example.
In real world overheating of tyres is usually not a very big issue espacially on the real racers(gtr and formula cars), because the tyres were designed for high tempatures and heavy loads.
My real life experience with tyres rated for high speeds is, these will stay cold at high speeds(for a road car). They don' t heat up at all even after driving for long period of time over 200km/h. But on an other car with tyres not suited for high speeds i noticed those tyres did get mildly warm(not hot) at slower speeds of around 100km/h.
Also i think tyres in real world are not so precise about the optimum tempature, A tyre will certainly have a larger range of optimum tempature than in lfs. for example r2 on bf1 from 80 to 95 celcius. R3 from 90 to 105 and r4 from 100 to 115 celcius. Not the ridiculous narrow of lfs with 85 to 90 for r2. Regular road tyres will have a range of maximum grip between 20 and 60 celcius.
Also the tyre wear should increase as the tyre temp does, hot tyres sometimes still give decent grip, but they wear out real fast because the rubber gets too soft at high tempatures.
But, maybe it is possible in lfs to make at least the tyres cool down a lot faster on straits? Should be just changing one variable in the game and make it a lot better with just such a small change
I noticed too that in lfs tyres on some track/car combo' s keep warming and overheat after 5 laps. Even with R3 tyres at maximum pressure, wv international with bf1 for example.
In real world overheating of tyres is usually not a very big issue espacially on the real racers(gtr and formula cars), because the tyres were designed for high tempatures and heavy loads.
My real life experience with tyres rated for high speeds is, these will stay cold at high speeds(for a road car). They don' t heat up at all even after driving for long period of time over 200km/h. But on an other car with tyres not suited for high speeds i noticed those tyres did get mildly warm(not hot) at slower speeds of around 100km/h.
Also i think tyres in real world are not so precise about the optimum tempature, A tyre will certainly have a larger range of optimum tempature than in lfs. for example r2 on bf1 from 80 to 95 celcius. R3 from 90 to 105 and r4 from 100 to 115 celcius. Not the ridiculous narrow of lfs with 85 to 90 for r2. Regular road tyres will have a range of maximum grip between 20 and 60 celcius.
Also the tyre wear should increase as the tyre temp does, hot tyres sometimes still give decent grip, but they wear out real fast because the rubber gets too soft at high tempatures.
But, maybe it is possible in lfs to make at least the tyres cool down a lot faster on straits? Should be just changing one variable in the game and make it a lot better with just such a small change
Yep, we have those in LFS, called R4s.
I'm assuming here your real life experience with those speeds is just driving in a straight line on the motorway (or national equivalent), where very little heat is generated. It's cornering and braking that really heat tyres (and if you spin the wheels under power). If you drive slowly in LFS there's very little heat generated.
Mathematically it's near impossible to generate a curve that will stay perfectly flat through a given range yet be, well, curvy elsewhere. So there will always be a single optimum temperature. Looking at the tyre heating graphs AndroidXP created from LFS measurements, the slick tyres have a narrower usable temperature range the softer they are. Also road tyres are affected by temperature the least, all of which is as expected.
Remember that with tyres there are never any laws, one tyre can work quite differently to another. There is never any right way to have a tyre behave.
Yep, it already does.
Bob, you're an intelligent guy, you know what he meant. He didn't say that the curve needed to be 'perfectly flat', just that there was an 'optimum range'.
I have done 20+ laps of westhill in the xrr using R2/3 combo before and keep the tires green. It is very easy to overdrive tires in LFS because most people are pushing far harder than race drivers would IRL to cause the issues.
That said I do think a double layer (tread and structure) for all the surface areas of the tire would help loads. The sidewalls can stay as they are and the internal temps appear to work fine.
On the whole I think its dowwn to fine tuning now
This doesn't deal with the heating / cooling but this is the table from another sim, for sport road tyres. See pic. I don't know if that is correct but at least the difference between this and LFS is big!
It shows temp versus grip multiplier
It shows temp versus grip multiplier
What game is that from? Tyre temperature must make no difference what-so-ever.
My guess? NetKar.
I really like the way that LFS models tire temperature right now. The only thing that I don't like is that the tracks are all fairly cool. A lot of people drive very ragged and "on the edge" lap after lap and they can only get away with this because of the relatively cool temperature of the track in LFS. If we had variable air and track temps in LFS I think that things would be a lot different. A sunny afternoon at Fern Bay should be a lot tougher on the tires than an early morning race at Blackwood.
Abit like Hidden Valley with the V8 Supercars normal track conditions are 38 deg cel with track temp probably around 55 deg C
and inside car temps around 65 deg C 
It's a good way to loose wieght!The other thing wrong, in addition to the speed of temperature change - which in LFS is about as accurate as the male reproductive organ, with cold tyres LFS gives far too much grip. When you are driving at race speeds on cold tyres it should be like driving on ice. It's one thing to drive your road car at 40mph around the 30mph speed limitted corner at the top of your road, but do it at 110mph at race speed 'on a hotlap' with cold tyres and you'll soon learn what kerbs do to suspension and false teath.
No one worth his/her salt on a race track would ever run a car with cold tyres at race speed anyway, but yes, I know what you mean.......
As it is, the tyre model is the best on the market, bar none, is it perfect? no, but it's pretty bloody close.
I yet have to race with cold tyres in LFS...
The tyres are never really cold cold though are they, they're part heated, as if by tyre warmers before you get in the car...?
Yes they are (pre-heated).
I'm not fond of the implementation of the tire sections, flat spots, and hot spots. It's the least realistic aspect of tire physics in the current version of LFS, and in my opinion, the time spent on this would have been better spent working on other aspects of LFS.
The segmentation approach is flawed, there's not enough cpu power to make a very large number of very small segments to be realistic, and it doesn't appear that surface effects versus deep tread effects are being taken into account. It's a lot of effort and cpu power being used to model what happens with a driver makes a mistake and locks up the tires, eating up time that could be use for more realism elsewhere. It's like all players are punished with this overhead to deal with the mistakes of a few players.
Personally, I would not have bothered with the hot spotting or flat spotting at all. Flat spotting is mostly an issue for high downforce cars like a Formula 1 car due to the vibration; for most race and street cars, flat spotting isn't a big issue unless it's severe, and tire wear will round out the tire fairly quickly. Hot spotting is even less of an issue because it generally only affects a thin section of the tread and quickly dissapates.
The segmentation approach is flawed, there's not enough cpu power to make a very large number of very small segments to be realistic, and it doesn't appear that surface effects versus deep tread effects are being taken into account. It's a lot of effort and cpu power being used to model what happens with a driver makes a mistake and locks up the tires, eating up time that could be use for more realism elsewhere. It's like all players are punished with this overhead to deal with the mistakes of a few players.
Personally, I would not have bothered with the hot spotting or flat spotting at all. Flat spotting is mostly an issue for high downforce cars like a Formula 1 car due to the vibration; for most race and street cars, flat spotting isn't a big issue unless it's severe, and tire wear will round out the tire fairly quickly. Hot spotting is even less of an issue because it generally only affects a thin section of the tread and quickly dissapates.
I think you would be in the minority here. The tire sectioning is really cool and is one of the things that make LFS different from every other sim on the market.
I'm not sure where you get this idea. Flat spotting is a big problem for non-openwheel race cars. Cars in the Aussie V8 series often go clean through the tread when locking a wheel for only a fraction of a second. They must immediately pit as the vibration and grip loss are so severe. Even a small flat spot can cause problems because the tire is likely to lock on that same spot again the next time you brake.
If anything, I would say that flat spotting in LFS is not severe enough. It should be felt through the steering wheel and should upset the car much more than it does right now. I see a lot of people locking the brakes, but not too many people pitting, which needs to be addressed.
It's not realistic, tires don't have sections, and the current implentation is flawed (hot spots don't dissapate heat into neighboring sections (or at least extremely slowly), and take too long to cool off, as noted by the orignal poster.
Define fraction of a second, .99 or .01?
It's my opinion is that the other stuff left to do for LFS is more important than getting the not quite completed hot / flat spot modeling in.
What part of the physics is more important for a driving sim to get right than the tyres?
While it's true that tyres don't have sections IRL, how else do you intend to model them? Real tyres aren't made out of triangles either.
While it's true that tyres don't have sections IRL, how else do you intend to model them? Real tyres aren't made out of triangles either.
Excellent thread!
But just because the current implementation isn't perfect, it doesn't mean it would be more realistic to not have it at all! Who knows, perhaps the resolution will be increased; adding 8-12 more sections may not eat up a whole lot of power but would be a big difference. I'm kind of surprized that you would feeling this way TBH. There's nothing else on the market that even attempts to do what LFS is already doing (well, nothing stable....) Playing something where the entire tire magically heats together seems archaic by comparison now!
But I do really think that flatspots need to be more severe; esp with the GTRs or slick equipped cars. When Jaques Villeneuve drove Jeff Gordon's car, he locked up for about a second comming into a turn too hot and when he got back to the pits that tire was ridiculously flattspotted; even on TV it was dreadfully obvious how damaged it was.
Flatspots aside, it's the way the tyres heat and cool that ultimately determine how they will behave under race conditions and that is something which maybe is just fine tuning or adding a two layered approach (surface temp and tyre body temp) and is well worth the effort in my eyes 
Locking up the brakes could have been handled in a simpler fashion without all the work involved in LFS. This is something that only happens when a driver makes a mistake. If in the real world, flat spotting a tire results in having to change the tires, then just requiring a pit stop with a tire change would have been a lot simpler to implement without all the issues of a partial solution via LFS's tire sectioning. It could have been handled similar to the damage modeling in LFS.
In my opinion, this is one aspect where the accuracy isn't that important. You flat spot a tire in game; does it really matter if a game doesn't get the flat spot amount correct to the nearest thousandth of an inch?
There are other aspects to realism in a simulator not involving driver mistakes or driver style that I don't think any game will acheive, but it should be the goal to get close. This is where I think the effort on LFS should focus, rather than worrying about how to similate a condition that normally results in a pit stop and tire change.
I'm not a Nascar fan, but I did watch a race, and found that the coverage was very technical. The racing from one planed pit stop to the next planned pit stop was called a "run". The drivers and crew could detect differences between "runs" when the only change was tires (and fuel added, no setup changes). The lap times would vary between different sets of tires, even though the tires were as close to identical as possible. Maybe it was track temperatures (which weren't varying much for a few set of "runs"), or the amount of rubber build up on the track, but somehow, very minor differences were causing detectable differences. After a tire change, a car could transition from mediocre to good or vise versa, and it was affecting the outcome of the racing. I'm not sure if any simulation will be able to capture such subtle effects accurately.
The reason Nascar is a good example of such subtle effects is the closeness of the racing, and the consistency of lap times. A tenth of a second difference between cars tends to remain that way for quite a few laps in a row in Nascar. Most of the drivers are really consistent, so mechanical differences in the cars are more noticable.
Tyres cool down too slow, need a sectional tyre wear indicator too.
(110 posts, started )
FGED GREDG RDFGDR GSFDG