I dislike those that use the 'it's not finished' argument all the time. But in this case he's his complaining of something thats ONLY been in a ALPHA version for a few months. Of course it's going to have flaws, but his posts don't seem to take into account the newness of anything.
S2 is a great product already, but comparing it to a finished & released game (eg rFactor - it's not meant to be a WIP and it's no better than LFS in some areas, and worse in most) isn't totally fair.
LFS is not rubbish. I've never thought so, or I wouldn't be planning on buying S3 as I've have mentioned before. Owning a Caterham doesn't have anything to do with what I've posted here. I've compared the LX6 to my Caterham in the past, but that's not the point now. My suggestions are based on what I read from knowledgable sources, not my own experiences with just one car.
My reason for these comments is the fact the LFS is a game that is still in development, and that I'm hoping that the final result is a good simulation where the cars in LFS behave very much like their real world counter parts; the same amount of stability, the same reaction to control inputs, the same reaction to the environment (driving over wet spots, grass, dirt, gravel, weather effects, ...). I also want to experience a simulation that lets me push the cars to the limits of my ability, not to the limitation of the simulation.
As far as comparson to other games, my comments:
Grand Prix Legends has some wierd quirks in it's physics, but it's seems to have captured the essence of a good simulation in that the cars behave pretty close to their real life counterparts (based on expert testimonials), except since there's no personal risk of being splattered somewhere unpleasant, you can push harder than the real drivers did. (Example of wierd quirk, reverse reaction to steering when braking heavy, in this short video gplrs.wmv . This behavior (induced understeer) would be expected while cornering, but not while going straight).
In the original German release of GTR (1.0), with all assists off, just about any minor loss of control of the car meant you ended up facing backwards. This may have been part of the reason that an actual GT class racer commented that GTR was more realistic with some of the assists turned on (as opposed to all assist off), the reason probably being that the physics weren't quite right. It was improved through the various versions, now up to version 1.4.
Nascar Racing Season 2003 is popular, 300 to 500 players online, but most are running superspeedway races, where the only time you lift on the throttle is to avoid drafting into the car in front of you. Little skill required (probably why it is so popular), mostly wreck avoidance, braking points for pitting, and the luck of exiting the pits right into a draft. I've won my share of these, but lost interest when I realized that other than qualifying, no skill was being developed (I went back to hot lapping Nordschliefe in GPL, wanting to get a sub 500 second (8:20) lap time, I got it down to an 8:15.32). The road courses require skill but far fewer players run on all two tracks (few add-on road courses used online). The main thing going for NR2003 is that it seems to handle 40 players in a single race fairly well, and the GTP mod is cool.
Tristan, I don't get you. Do you have some kind of personal problem with JeffR? All of his points are very well made and it's obvious that he is only trying to help improve LFS.
All I read from you is rubbishing his suggestions, while you fail to make any!
I for my part appreciate his input on this matter because of his obvious technical knowledge. His new thread about the diffs just proves my point.
I absolutely think the same. Tristan behaves like a marketing manager or spokesman of LFS
I agree with JeffR's 3 suggestions about tyre physics: the transition between grip and slide needs to be slower/smoother, the effect of dirty tyres is exaggerated, the same with heating up when sliding.
Well, about the segments with different temperatures: I didn't make any tests but every time I locked up tyres in races (for example because of a hard braking) the temperature difference between the cool and hot parts of the tyre seemed to be decreasing and after a while it completely disappeared.
IMO the next step should be a dynamic track surface so rubber left on track would result in increasing grip throughout the race. (As I suggested it in my topic here at Improvement Suggestions.)
No, it's not a personal dig at JeffR. That would be silly.
The issue I have is with a) the number of JeffR's posts on the same subject. If you were 'at' RSC you'd have seen many from him and b) the negative way they are put forward (although I know that reading them is very different sometimes from what's originally intended!).
He makes some good points, but none I (and therefore Scawen probably) haven't heard him make before. And I personally (which is by no means the right way, just my way) would start of with the problem, and then go into detail about a solution. Jeff's style appears to me to be 5 paragraphs of moan (but maybe I'm just reading it differently from what is intended. It's not like I have a major problem with the English language though).
As stated, I'm just requesting some improvements for S2, while trying to provide techincal explanations for my requests. I'm assuming that this is a new audience here.
Also S2 is a big improvement over S1. The tire model and limited slip differential have greatly increased the stability. I'm just hoping to see this trend continue.
Ah, the bad old days and my moaning about the LX6 in S1. Well, now all those posts are gone. I left RSC and had them delete all my posts.
optional off-topic reading follows:
I had an issue with their undocumented public warning policy and guilty until proven innocent attitude. When I pointed out that their public warnings violated their rule 4.1 about abuse, harassment, defamation, .... Mbrio demanded I mail a written letter agreeing to their undocumented policies or leave. I chose to leave.
Don't mind the occasional ad hominem attack - on the net, people usually type far faster than they can think rationally, which means they have to rely exclusively on preconceived notions and prejudice for the intellectual part. Happens to the best of us, I know it happened to me.
What comes to grip generally, i think the most important thing missing from LFS is G-forces, and we will never get them. Many peoples seems to compare LFS cars to their IRL cars. It's just isn't that ez think to do. You can't do the comparision based to what you feel in your bottom. Coz you are lacking that feeling in LFS. Also the sense of speed you see with your eyes is an issue. In real live your view of vision is much wider than in LFS, which means it seems you are going way faster with your IRL car than in LFS when going actually the same speed.
16:9 monitor may help with that, or using 3 monitors simulteousnly.
Take your IRL car and go to the parking area. Try to drive a circle. How fast you can do (see your speedometer), and what is the radius of that circle? Now, do the same in LFS. You will see that there is much much more grip in LFS, you just don't feel or see it in the same level than IRL.
It really depends on your tires and suspension you know. Generally, the more grip you have, the more you lose when sliding. The less grip you have, the less you lose when sliding. In racing cars, depending on setups, there is plenty of grip, much more than normal road car. Which means, you lose it more when starting to slide.
It's very ez to notice IRL, just drive on gravel and tarmac to the limit and drift a bit. On tarmac, the edge between grip and slide is much much more than on gravel. It's harder to drift on tarmac than on gravel.
Also you may try different tyres. I've got two set of tyres in my own car. 195 50R16 and 225 30R18. I use larger ones when im driving on the track. They give me much more grip, but it's much harder to drift with them. Coz when they lose it, they really _lose_ it. Also got my winter tyres, they are very smooth to drive on tarmac. They slide and wheeze all the time when going fast to the corner. It's very easy to drift with them, coz they lose grip so smoothly.. You got plenty of time to react. But in the other hand, they don't have much of it in the first place.
But in LFS the tyres maybe lose a little bit too much of it, im not sure. It's really hard to say, when you don't feel the G's.
Maybe if we take a equal IRL racing car and drive it with data logging systems, and then make the same in LFS, and compare the logged data, we can see.
Again, try this with your IRL road car:
- First try to drift in dry tarmac (not sure how much HP you got?)..
- Then drive thru a grass, maybe sliding a bit, like in LFS
- Then go back to the tarmac.. take it ez, i'm not responsible if you crash. The difference is HUGE!
But maybe it takes a bit too long before your tires cleans in LFS.
God damnit, haven't you ever slide with a car IRL? Just slide a few seconds on tarmac, go out immetiadely, and feel your tyres. They are actually melting. Now, in your car i doubt you got slicks on it. The more grip, the more heat when sliding. So racing tyres heats up even a more than road tyres, a way more.
Again, it may take too long to cool down in LFS. Havent tried how long it takes if you drive slowly.
Actually, rubber is very damn good heat isolator. But this is true, it's too good in LFS. The hotspot should start to spread accross the tire. Not much, but some.
With slicks on my Caterham, it will pull about 1.4g's while cornering, but this is not the issue, as I think the amount of grip in LFS is fine. It's the reaction to loss of grip that seems to be exaggerated, which could be a differential or suspension issue and not a grip issue.
This time I'm more of a typical example. The slicks and DOT racing tires for my car and almost all non-downforce cars are bias-ply (do a web search for bias ply racing tires). The amount of grip lost when sliding is much less than that of a typical radial street tire. Even radial racing tires lose less grip than street tires. The reaction to losing it is more severe simply because there is more lateral force on the car.
Depending on the setup, one trick that can be used is driver induced understeer, by steering the front tires inwards a bit past the point of maximum grip (slip angle). It allows a driver to force the car to respond to sliding with understeer instead of oversteer, assuming that it's not a case of very excessive throttle. You can't do this everywhere, or else the front tires will overheat.
Gravel is a special case because the surface (the gravel) moves). For a beter example, try drifting on ice versus pavement, pavement will be easier.
You should try bias ply tires, they will be much easier to drift than street radials. I've already mentioned that higher g forces lead to a faster reaction by the car when you do lose it.
Check out this web site, the recent videos include data logging on the screen:
This happens all the time, from fun runs to formula 1 cars. The cars go off track quite often, and after getting back on track, they're back up to speed in a very short time.
I agree that the tires should develop hot spots, it's just that these hot spots are very small and don't spread out over time. I was sitting still watching two very small hot spots take over 3 minutes to cool down from 120+ degrees to 100 degrees (Farenheight), while the adjacent areas didn't heat up at all. You can repeat this experiement for yourself.
I'd say your very close to the mark JeffR. Remember the beta physics test video where you could see side by side the reactions of the real car test and the GTi on the autocross layout? It might have been on RSC.
I have always felt, like most, that the physics seemed just wrong, but could never put my finger on it. At first I thought it was the general grip levels but they have been shown to be pretty accurate. Then I saw that video and it cleared it up for me. The easiest way to see and describe where the physics dont add up is in "Direction change"
You will notice direction change is very muddy and imprecise in LFS, as opposed to sharp and responsive on the real car. I have never been able to "chuck" a car in LFS into a corner with confidence the way I can in real life. Now sure, a lot of this has to do with the lack of tactile feedback (Gforces and what not) but its quite obvious from the video that direction change is not only off, its very off. I'd have a stab at it and say weight transfer and distribution arent modeled sharply enough along with a fudged or simplistic tyre model, but you seem to really know waht your talking about Jeff, so I'll leave it in your hands.
This time I'm just reporting results from LFS experiements using the g meters. I chose the LX6 and road supers since it's a reasonably fast non-downforce car (also I own a similar car).
Under heavy braking the loss in grip if the tires are locked up is small (until they get overheated); looking at the g meter it's hard to even seen an initial loss in grip, but I'll "gestimate" it as less than 10%.
Cornering is a much different issue. I set a huge steering lock factor on the car to see what happens at large slip angles similar to what you get from a big oversteer reaction. The car pulls about 1.15g's in a corner, and drops to about 1.00 g's with both fronts a bit into the red (slipping). As I keep increasing the turn in to maximum lock, the cornering force continues to drop down, ending up below 0.8g's, a 30+% loss in cornering force. This would explain why once you lose it, it's so hard to recover.
thats the link to the video. I think its very early S2 Alpha, it is stated some physics chnages have taken place after this but it still might be off a bit. Its a good watch, the test needs to be done again using current code
Yet another experiement, again with the LX6, set height to .30, set springs, rebound, and swaybars to max, bump to 5.0 (front and rear), and no camber (not needed with maxed out swaybars). Set diff to 60/60 % . This creates a car with near critcal oversteer. You initiate a turn with just a bit of steering, and then relax or counter steer through the turn, the car pretty much drifts through turns. If you keep the car from getting too far sideways, it responds almost imediately to steering inputs. Will keep working on this to see if I can control it. Very little steering lock is needed because once it's turning the fronts are mostly straightened out relative to the car while it drifts, sort of like an alien setup in GPL.
On the drag strip, I tried spinning the car, and grip remains very high, with the car almost sideways, over 1.1 with this setup. I'll have to try to see if I can get smaller slip angles on the slides to see whats going on.
i'm using a FFwheel with analog pedals and actually I DO hold the wheel tight and the pedals pressed and hope all goes well!
nah just kiddin`...i've bought a wheel because of this game, all i have to do now is buy a license
i really like the way cars handle in the game, it's realistic enough...the main difference is that if you have a RWD car and it starts to slide you feel it in your whole body, not only in the steering wheel.one more thing, does anybody have force feedback pedals? you know that ABS systems push the pedal back a little, so you can actually feel when ABS does its job. that would be nice to feel
In LFS no ABS-cars are allowed. That's be against the rules of the racing-organizations. So no need for FF-pedals.
Though I think it would be nice to have your wheel and pedals/pedalset shake when you jump over curbs...
As far as I know the LFS-braking-assistance doesn't work like the ABS (brake pushing back when wheel lock is detected) but just won't increase the braking force over the maximum of the tyres, regardless the pedal-input.
I don't mean this as a personal attack in any way. I don't mean it to sound as negative as it's going to, but it's going to...
I am so completely done with this argument. It's gotten totally out of hand. Yes! Of course we don't get G forces with the typical home sim setup! But that does not mean we can't feel them!!! A lot of sims have allowed for the feeling of Gs, and done a damn proper job of it too. LFS is at the top of that list. Once we get involved with the GUI/AUI/FUI, which is probably more a matter of seat time than anything else - besides horrendously bad programing - we subconsciously fill in the blanks and start to feel *everything*. That is exactly the reason we are narrowing in on what the problem is in LFS. It is a real problem, that can be felt due to the excellent feel provided by LFSs excellent interface. As far as sense of speed goes, I use less trackside markers in LFS than I've been able to in any other sim. Driving by feel, with flow, is more possible than ever.
The problem is in the tires.
And JeffR nailed a few things on the head. In my experience, you can run the racing slicks we use on karts at full wheelspin for the duration of their tread life with only a slightly noticable loss of grip. (Unfortunately the usual place you would drive with constant wheelspin, like concrete, doesn't offer up much grip in a proper racing line, so it's hard to tell how much the tires have lost. On the other hand, sometimes I drive a couple of laps aluminum-to-chromemoly-lock-sideways steering only with the right foot on asphalt because I think it's fun. When I decide to drive normal again the kart works very well. I can't tell a difference, but I'm about a 2 seconds a minute from the champions. In a kart, 2 seconds a minute is a career of practice and accuracy, and that skill that I don't yet have may be the difference in grip I'm missing.) Driving the tires like that will limit life however, to 6 or 10 minutes. Road tires, like the BFG T/A are insane once they overheat. They lose grip and it doesn't come back for a long time. You have to stop and let the car sit. I've never overheated a road tire in a road car, but in a race car it's almost too easy. As far as temps goes, it seem LFS has the race tire, road tire thing backwards. But my road experience far outweighs my track experience.
On racing slicks I've driven on drying tracks, through puddles big enough to splash my visor, gotten sideways in the water (because I think it's fun) and had commandable grip by the next corner. Unfortunately to this discussion, when ever I've put wheels in gravel, I've never followed that with rejoining the track. I've practiced in enough dusty parking lots to know that a wheel in dirt does compromise grip quite a bit, and it seems to be cumulative. Once or twice, no problem, the stuff scrubs off pretty quickly. (I wouldn't say more quickly than LFS, because while I can see the dirt linger in F9 view, the tires feel right. So I don't know. I can't argue with the way the dirt is now.) If you keep going through the dirt, it's like the tire eventually becomes made of the dirt and you've got nothing. Trying to burn it off doesn't seem to help. You just ruined a tire. Dirt is bad on racing slicks. On road tires, well... once again, it's never bothered me and I go from asphalt to dirt 80 times on my way to work, and 80 times on my way home. Granted, I'm usually only at 8 or 9/10ths, and never over that, but the Michelin LTX A/T doesn't seem to care either way. And I do spend a lot of energy experimenting with things like: sliding sidways on ashpalt - into downhill corner on camber - into dirt at exit off camber - over shoulder crown back onto asphalt. Then every permutation of that kind of thing that Hyde Park Rd. has to offer. There are at least 4 jumps in the middle of corners that land in either pavement or dirt, your choice.... You can see, I do spend a good deal of real time on street tires in dirt... Of course there is less grip in the dirt. That is adjusted for with anticipation. Once back on the black stuff there is then a time when the tires produce less grip. That time is very, very short. The street tires regain grip from dirt so fast it's hard to guage sometimes. I am almost always mentally prepared for the lessened grip to last longer than it really does and return of grip catches me by surprise frequently. (But I think that's fun too.) I am certainly missing that lateral "wall" the tires hit when they regain grip. At 10/10ths, I can understand, you've got nowhere to go but around. But when I know I've over shot and am going to put a wheel off no matter what, and pull up a bit and get the car back to 8 or 9/10ths asphalt limit, it shoud feel a certain way and it does not. That's that. It's not bad... it just is. That's the problem, lateral grip curves. I know that because I can really feel the car in LFS.
Water and street tires is different, but since no water in LFS I'll leave that but to say that I find dirt slightly more predictable.
Jeasus people! If you suck at driving LFS shouldn't be modelled to make you look good. Do you drive your super-realistic GTR with driving aids on? Because when I drive a powerful RWD car in GTR the tail slides with TC off. Perhaps even more than LFS... (but that may just be GTR's lack of proper damper feedback, because I don't slide in LFS as many claim to). Go on the auto-cross area and learn to CATCH A SLIDE, and KEEP THE SLIDE UNDER CONTROL. Do you think any of the real racing drivers just went and drove on a track and all was good and well? No. So why do you expect you should be able to?
Admitedly there is a problem with the tyre physics at low speeds but it is nothing that affects a race at racing speeds...
