On Thu, 22 Jan 1998 15:03:13 +0100, you wrote:
>Alison, first I would like to thank you for the tip of moving the
>stoppers
>in the GP1 wheel, so I can get 270 degrees lock to lock, love it :o).
Great!
>My problem is this. I would really like to love F1RS, but I'm having
>real
>trouble doing so. I also drive, of course :o), with all the helps off
>and I
>cant "feel" the car as I can in GP2. I have about 800 hours in GP2,
Wow!!
>the last
>500 hours with all helps and aids off, and never over 100% processor
>occupancy. I use the GP1 wheel with T1 pedals. Doing so I have a best
>1:20.2
>at Monza in GP2 and a 1:23.8 at Monza in F1RS, only so you'll know I'm
>serious about sim racing :o). The 1:23.8 is only after an hour or so at
>Monza in F1RS. The 1:20.3 is after about 1500 laps at Monza in GP2 :o).
Geez! You are dedicated!! Also damn quick! My best time so far at
Monza in F1RS is a 1:24.3 after a lot of testing and setup development
yesterday. I am still learning how to create car setups.
>The
>tyre squeling found in GP2 telling me things that my bottom would tell
>me in
>a real racing car I find abscent in F1RS. In F1RS I dont "feel" how
>close to
>the limit I am in accelerating, braking or in corners :o(. That's my
>main
>concern really. I dont feel the car in F1RS. The only real racing car
>I've
>driven is a Formula Ford and I felt that one :o).
Yes, me too!
I think the issue is that F1RS models the real world more correctly than
GP2 in this regard. In GP2 (and ICR2) the tires squeal when you are
nearing the limit, giving you some good cues audio cues which usefully
substitute for the kinesthetic cues that are missing in a sim.
However, in the real world, on slicks, you usually don't get much
squealing until you are very close to or even a little past the optimum
slip angle. I think this is what F1RS does, too. So you have to learn
by experience when you are approaching the limit.
However, once you do, you will begin to hear squealing in some corners.
For example, I definitely get squealing through Parabolica in F1RS, with
a mildly understeering setup, when I start approaching the limit.
Remember you are comparing a game that you have thousands of hours on to
a game that you have little experience with. Think back to when you
first started driving GP2, and try to remember how hard it was to know
when the car was at the limit, and to anticipate its behavior. I think
that if you keep racing F1RS for a while, you will begin to get a feel
for it too.
>In this thread I agree most with Randy's posts about the digital
>throttle
>feeling (yes, I have sensitivity on 100% :o) ),
The "digital throttle" Randy talks about isn't a digital throttle at
all, IMHO. What is happening is that the engine is coming on the power
band and accelerating very quickly. Unlike GP2, which has a very
tractable engine with very "friendly" power curve, the engine in F1RS
has a very peaky power band. Above a certain RPM, the power simply
multiplies with a rush. When you open the throttle to a certain point,
the engine suddenly begins to develop *so* *much* power that it
instantly spins the rear wheels, thus reducing the load on the engine,
and letting it zing to redline.
Since Renault was heavily involved with the F1RS project, and its
vehicle dynamics model was written by an F1 engineer at Renault, I have
to believe that this aspect of F1RS is more accurate than GP2's. It's
hard to imagine their letting out the door a product with a less than
scrupulously accurate model of their engine's behavior!
The way I dealt with the peaky power curve was to create some "learning"
setups which had tall low gears, with first gear redlining at about 100
mph. Then I never used first gear except for starting and getting out
of gravel traps. By staying down off the peak of the power curve at low
speeds, I found the power was much more manageable, and I could learn to
drive smoothly and manage the throttle better. Now, after practicing
with these, I can drive with shorter low gears.
>canned spins
For the life of me, I cannot find these canned spins that so many people
talk about. Yes, when I get on the power in the middle of a spin, the
rotation keeps going on forever as long as I hold the power on. If I do
a donut, it's perfectly round, and I doubt if this would happen in real
life, although not having seen anyone do donuts in an F1 car I can't be
sure. For sure, CPR modeled Indycar donuts *really* well; they looked
just like Alex Zanardi's!
But I'm not into racing sims for their donuts. I was doing some data
collection on the F1RS underbody at Monza yesterday, running a very
low-downforce setup, and I did a *lot* of spins. Aside from the
aforementioned too-round rotation under power, I never once felt the car
do anything that seemed unrealistic to me. I've done a lot of spins in
real cars, having spun dirt track karts, a Formula Vee, sports cars and
stock Volkswagen Beetles more times than I care to remember. Everything
the F1RS car does seems quite real to me.
People have complained that they can't "save" the car after it gets more
than 90 degrees sideways. In GP2, if you had opposite lock help turned
on, you could save the car when it got pretty sideways, and if you
locked the brakes, the spin would stop - unless you let off the brakes,
when it was very likely to start up again! Perhaps people gotten used
to these effects in GP2.
But in a real car, long before you get 90 degrees sideways, it's gone.
In race driver school, they teach you to lock the brakes when you know
you're going to spin, so the car will go off in a straight line. In
F1RS, if you lock the brakes in a spin, the car goes off in straight
line. If the angular velocity is not too great, the rotation stops; if
it's rotating fast enough, it keeps rotating, and you get these
incredibly realistic skid marks showing the exact path of your rotating
slide off the track.
Another thing that is remarkable is the modeling of "pendulum effect"
due to the center of mass of the car being near the rear of the car.
Under certain spin conditions, when the car gets partway around, the
rate of rotation goes up due to this mass being swung around the front
wheels, which are at that point gripping better. The sensation is kind
of like being slung around in a slingshot. This can happen in almost
any rear-engined car, I believe, and is very familiar to me for the
aforementioned embarrassing reasons. In F1RS, it's eerily like the real
thing.
To me, the F1RS car's spin behavior seems to be the result of a very
sophisticated vehicle dynamics model that is accurately modeling what
the car would do under any given set of conditions.
The fact that power-on spins are more circular than they probably are in
real life is most likely due to the omission of some factors which are
likely not relevant in most other conditions, or possibly too costly to
model, such as small variations in surface roughness across small
distances.
>and the
>engine
>sound. I read somewhere that the engine sound in F1RS is recorded from a
>Renault F1 in a test rig. I dont think that's the best way of recording
>the
>engine sound for an F1 sim? The best way IMO would to let all the test
>drivers for the team take one of the cars in the team out for a spin.
>Mount
>one microphone in each ear of the driver, record a couple of laps and
>some
>special other engine events :o). Then in the sim you'll have the correct
>sound for each car as it sounds through a helmet :o))).
I think this is what Psygnosis did for their F1 game. It sounded great,
too.
After a few hundred laps in F1RS, the sound has definitely grown on me.
At first, the "stepping" really annoyed me. This is the audio
equivalent of poor frame rate, where the sound card is not updated
frequently enough and so instead of a smooth rise in pitch, you get a
series of rising notes like an organ going up the scale.
However, with a 3Dfx card, the CPU is not so busy and it updates the
sound card more often, so this stepping goes away except when I'm
spinning the wheels in first gear. Since I don't do that very much any
more, I don't notice it.
The actual wave form sounds a lot like what I hear on ESPN. It lacks
the burbles and warts present in real life, however, which GP2 models so
well. Despite this, I find that now I have grown quite fond of the
sound in F1RS. It has a crispness and immediacy that I like a lot.
>I wont mention the menus,
<grin> Better left unmentioned!
>but the AI I'll give a go at. Did a couple of
>starts at Melbourne yesterday viewing my car from the outside and even
>if
>I'm right behind another car into the first corner they ran into me from
>behind far to often :o(. Then I watched them going at each other for a
>couple of laps and they do things I haven't seen real F1 drivers do.
Some people like the AI in F1RS, and I think the AI cars are ok to race
alongside of, but I agree that at the start they tend to be a bit too
maniacal. I'd rather race against real people any day!
>Please, help me like F1RS and then perhaps we could have a race or two
>on
>Kahn or Kali :o)?
<grin> Well, I don't think I can make you like it if you don't.
However, if you give it some time, even a fraction of what you've put in
on GP2, I think you will find it growing on you. It's a complex sim,
and the car is very difficult to drive hard, as it should be. I believe
it's hard to drive for the right reasons. I think you have to get good
enough at driving it hard to get consistently near the limit in order to
really appreciate it.
I went back to GP2 last night now that I've got a fair number of hours
on F1RS. It reminded me of going back to my old 1980 RX-7 after I'd
spent some time in my new (at the time) 1986 RX-7. Familiar,
comfortable, but somehow more crude, more raw, less refined and precise.
It felt like an old car compared with a new one.
One thing I particularly noticed was the difference in
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