Quote from alland44 :

You are using false terms, my friend
Audiophiles don`t live a subjective life. HiFi is very objective, because it`s trying to recreate the IRL experience, at home

You can`t argue about the sound of a violin or cello ! Either its the real sound, or it`s not

Audiophiles uses a lot of money, to get the "real deal" and your argument is the thinnest I`ve ever seen.

As a former audiophile I would say it is VERY subjective.

I went through many different setups using components from different companies, ending in very high end setup. Every component change made changes to the sound, its tone and "shape". Every piece of equipment imparts its own colour. All you are doing is picking the "shape" you prefer.

Now I mostly use MP3

In blind tests between a good solid state amp and a good valve amp you would find that a higher percentage would pick the valve amp as better. Yet valves are far less acurate but give sound a nice rose tint.

Music, Unlike a simulator, is about the emotion.

Quote from Whitmore :

Slip angles larger than 90 degrees are used as when a car spins the slip angles will exceed 90 degrees. Also the slip curve is altered by other parameters in the tyre file so you can't simply use the slip angles in the curve.

making the curves even more useless since if anything they should go up again past a certain point

BBT, I prefer ''my'' corvette for rFactor (it has improved since the release) over anything in LFS, not just because I tweaked it until I liked it, I tried to use realish numbers for everything. Therefor I think rFactor is better.. well.. one car..

And the danger about those grip curves remains that in reality you always have a few of the tyres in a combined longitudinal / lateral slip combination. This is aparantly easy to do wrongish in sims. Looking at base curves used in a game doesn't have to say a lot; Todd also mentioned the variation one gets with drum test rigs and 'flat' surface test rigs when real data came up.

Its all just a bit daunting!

While "your" car does feel much better than anything else in rF, it still, to me, doesn't feel right, rF cars have a very strange tendency to "rock" back and forth, side to side, on their suspension too easily, way to much movement IMO which gives strange handling issues, namely some really odd lift off tendencies.

So, we have different opinions here, and several valuable comments. Let me tak another example from the audiophilia world:

What do you have to measure in order to be able to recreate reality?

One argument against the variables involved is that they are really complex. Sure, some of them wieght more than others, but it is from the interaction among ALL of them that reality is modeled.

In audio they talk about waveforms, THD, DACs and such. In racing simulators about forces, centers of gravity and tyre deformation.

But are we capturing "reality"? To a point, we are just hand picking some variables and ignoring all others. We might even not know yet all the variables involved (just guessing).

Of course there are two other ways to measure if our simulation is realistic in any way, to make predictions with our model and to give it to real people and interpret what they feel.

Have anyone done this? Predictions or extensive testing with several subjects?

Niels: Btw, have you developed own tyre files for your mod or have u taken them from somewhere else?

I am just curious about how much the tyres affect the handling/physics. I still havent tested your mod though :/

Quote from frankwer :

Niels: Btw, have you developed own tyre files for your mod or have u taken them from somewhere else?

I am just curious about how much the tyres affect the handling/physics. I still havent tested your mod though :/

His own tires and I can tell you that is really big job he has done with those. Tires are major factor, but springs, dampers and masses are really important too as is suspension, but tires are perhaps biggest breaktrough in C6, imo.

That C6 you are talking about... do I need the full rFactor to try it?

Quote from Bodhidharmazen :

That C6 you are talking about... do I need the full rFactor to try it?

Yes, mods don't work in demo, I believe.

Quote from Niels Heusinkveld :

BBT, I prefer ''my'' corvette for rFactor (it has improved since the release) over anything in LFS, not just because I tweaked it until I liked it, I tried to use realish numbers for everything. Therefor I think rFactor is better.. well.. one car..

Speaking of which, Niels, how confident are you about the moments of inertia you've derived for the C6? The reason I ask is that I've been looking at the NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) inertia database (http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/v ... ertia_database_metric.pdf) and the MOIs that you're using for the C6 look to be on the low side. They're even lower than the MOIs for a 1998 Dodge Neon, which is a much smaller and lighter car. The Neon weighs 12199N (1244kg) and has MOIs of (1748, 441, 1945) kg-m^2 in the pitch, roll and yaw axes respectively. Your C6, according to the HDV, weighs 14926N (1522kg) and has MOIs of (1650,395,1942) kg-m^2.

I found a comparison between all the racing simulators on Wiki, LFS is ranked among several cathegories against the rest of the pack. Have anyone of you driven all the sims?

So far, I have tried LFS (my favorite and the only one I own) rFactor (a close second but I just have the demo) and GTR2 demo (I like somethings but no others).

I wouldn't put much faith in a comparison which just lists the feature sets of various sims. Just because a given feature is implemented does not mean that it has been implemented well. Also, look at rFactor: all mods use the same core engine yet there is a huge range of quality among them, from very poor to excellent.

I have or used to have most of the recent PC racing sims. They all have things that they do well and, on the flip side, they all have things that they do not so well. None of them are perfect and trying to come up with some definitive objective measure of which is best or whether one sim is better than another is a pointless exercise. It depends on what you're looking for.

Finally, take opinions about what is good or bad with a grain of salt. A quick look at the number of rFactor mods which are acclaimed as having excellent physics/handling yet which have glaring errors (e.g. in their suspension geometry, pushrods on one side pointing in the wrong direction is a relatively common error) should be enough to make it clear that opinions can't trusted. You know what you like, that's all that really matters.

Quote from Bodhidharmazen :

I found a comparison between all the racing simulators on Wiki, LFS is ranked among several cathegories against the rest of the pack. Have anyone of you driven all the sims?

So far, I have tried LFS (my favorite and the only one I own) rFactor (a close second but I just have the demo) and GTR2 demo (I like somethings but no others).

I have owned GPL, NR2K3, NK, RBR, LFS, F1C, rF, GTR, GTL, and most mods for the ISI based sims.

Only ones on my hard disk now are LFS & RBR.

I want to like NKP but am unable to support a dev that does not care about users.

There are a couple of sims of interest in the pipeline but for me LFS & RBR are it for the moment.

BuddhaBing, (kind like a cousing, because our names )

Thanks for your input. You are right, that comparision is just about characteristics, no word or details on how they have been implemented.


Woz,

I will check RBR, thanks.

Quote from BuddhaBing :

Speaking of which, Niels, how confident are you about the moments of inertia you've derived for the C6? The reason I ask is that I've been looking at the NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) inertia database (http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/v ... ertia_database_metric.pdf) and the MOIs that you're using for the C6 look to be on the low side. They're even lower than the MOIs for a 1998 Dodge Neon, which is a much smaller and lighter car. The Neon weighs 12199N (1244kg) and has MOIs of (1748, 441, 1945) kg-m^2 in the pitch, roll and yaw axes respectively. Your C6, according to the HDV, weighs 14926N (1522kg) and has MOIs of (1650,395,1942) kg-m^2.

Heya,

Thats a good find. I had this but didn't see any inertia numbers in there... Scrolling down a few pages helps..

Providing they tested it correctly, which seems to be a fair assumption, yep, my thoughts of using a solid box + the unsprung weights results in inertias that are a bit too low most likely. Thats really good news, the roll behaviour and yaw will become 'easier' making it, if possible, even more LFS like in some ways..

Quote from Niels Heusinkveld :

Heya,

Thats a good find. I had this but didn't see any inertia numbers in there... Scrolling down a few pages helps..

Providing they tested it correctly, which seems to be a fair assumption, yep, my thoughts of using a solid box + the unsprung weights results in inertias that are a bit too low most likely. Thats really good news, the roll behaviour and yaw will become 'easier' making it, if possible, even more LFS like in some ways..

So do you think that that calculator I sent you long time ago does it's job after all?

I have been using that calculator and also have checked those tested inertias to see if values are near there or not, it is quite rough estimate still, imo.

Those cg heights on that paper are measured from ground so make sure you take ride height (ground clearance perhaps?) off them.

I think that tires need work again if you had lot different values in inertia, that is as nobody has not real data for all tire parameters so tires need to be adjusted so that car performance and abilities stays in numbers where they should be, really annoying actually as this easily leads to situation where some bug elsewhere is corrected in tires causing unrealistic behaviour in some situations again.

Tires should come perfect in package, one should need to specify just type and size of tires, but that won't happen never I think, perfect world just does not exist

Quote from Shotglass :

sadly it isnt quite that simple
you see normally a rigid body will spin about its cog a car on a suspension however has a rotational centre thats not the cog so youre forced to transform the simplest things like moments of inertia
so far that sounds easy enough but things get messy when the suspension moves and along with it the rotational centres (not sure if youd ever notice a engine taking that into account)

That's pretty much right. Computationally, however, you can indeed treat it as rotating about the center of gravity without worrying about the transformations if you're treating the car as a single rigid mass. The suspension link and spring forces will make it rotate more or less around the roll axis all on its own, negating the need for any of the transformations.

Quote from kangaloosh :

to my knowledge there is no Sim on the market that ships with a wind-tunnel ;-)

Welcome to the other side Chris

Did you intentionally miss out the word 'yet' in that statement?

Ive raced them all. From the Papy Nascar series to rFactor and even Ratbag. Don't bother with Ratbad LOL..

I have just started with LFS and it feels the most real to me. That being said I love rFactors mods and all you can do with it.
But I got the demo last week just to try it and bought S2 after about two hours of playing with the demo.

LFS S2 is the best sim period as far as physics.