rec.autos.simulators

Watkins Glen(1.1Mb)

http://www.racesimcentral.net/

: There is no easy solution to this. If I'm always 200 meters
: behind him and never use racingline, I will never even catch him and
: what racing is that?

  If you start to fall behind the person then you can still see where
they're braking and judge their driving.  You also know how fast they
are and how much room you should leave. If you brake off-line then you
can stick behind them for a lap with little risk of hitting them until
you assess what sort of driver they are and how you can best over-take them.
IMHO a lot of the problems with faster drivers rear-ending slower
drivers are caused by this kind of impatience.  

  OK it's difficult because typically we have short races in GPL and
you've nothing to lose by going for it and risking punting your opponent
but a _real_ racing driver (IMHO) doesn't drive up to a driver they're
not familiar with and then go for a "do or die" move but instead sits
and observes until they find a safe way to pass.

: No matter how good and clean driver you are, if the
: one in front of you causes danger just by driving his own race, there is
: nothing you can do to avoid collisions to happen ;)

  Yes - but there certainly are things you can do to REDUCE the
number of collisions.  I'm a pretty slow driver but there's a couple of
times in online races where I've been really annoyed by someone who rear
ended me (ruining their own race too) simply because they take a long bend
(say the long left before parabolica) at 4-5 mph faster than me and
don't lift no matter what - now I don't know _what_ I could do to get
out of the way through that bit of the track anyway but...

--
Richard G. Clegg     Only the mind is waving
Dept. of Mathematics (Network Control group) Uni. of York.

www: http://manor.york.ac.uk/top.html

A real world accident adjudicator would probably conclude that: you where going
too fast for the conditions.
A panel of racing experts would probably say:  That's racing !
Although I enjoy discussing this, it could go on forever.  Real world drivers
from karts to F1 have the same problem and haven't found a solution in almost a
century of trying.  We won't find one either.

Sorry,  I'm a TNT2 user, I have no mirrors.

--
Don Scurlock
Vancouver,B.C.

And here's even better example, this one also includes situation where
lapper can't do anything to avoid collision with backmarker.
Also there's good example of how easily backmarker can let 2 drivers pass
him at once just by braking a bit earlier in the right place: 3,9Mb full 17
laprace in WG. In the race I was suffering from quite unstabile setups which
did wear out my tires badly in the final laps and result is not pretty to
watch ;)

http://www.kolumbus.fi/ken.lie/WG_f1racing.ZIP

Geez ... either apply the mirror patch for your TNT, buy a Voodoo card or
stay offline.

Hena

The trouble is, all the little skids you make due to the overheated
tyres just makes them even hotter, and if you spin ...  ;-)

I found that even making a slightly bad gear shift (eg. not breathing
the throttle properly when changing up) could send the car into a spin,
once the tyres had gone.

Hena

oh please ... should all the girlie-view-mode-drivers (F10) go home too?
ok, agreed: the should ;-)

Lio

Hena Hakkanen kirjoitti viestiss?

As an ongoing experiment a ran a few online races last night in
both F10 view and 'extreme' F10 view (set the driving view to
5 in player.ini) to see if I was any faster/any more of a hazard.

First I have to say it can be very strange to switch ones driving
view after nearly a year of being an***pit view type of guy.
My first race at Spa was a disaster, I ran in the 'extreme' F10
view and simply couldn't keep the car on the track while going
at any rate of speed.  I certainly wasn't faster, I certainly was
more of hazard.  Often a driver would come up on me and enter
that narrow rearward facing area that I could see him in, I
would pull over only to put myself in the path of another
car that wasn't yet in that visible region when I made the
avoidance move.  Oops.  Fortunately, I think I forced
Chris Moses off the track in one such incident so it wasn't
a total loss. :-)

After that race I took to practicing at Monza, half with the
'extreme' F10 view and half with the regular F10 view.  I
ran about twenty laps of each and after a bit of adjustment
I was solidly in the low 28s.  My own personal best however
is 1:27.50 so I can't say I'm any faster in either of those
views at the moment.  Off hand I would say my driving
was somewhat smoother with the external views so there
may be some potential there to go faster.  The best I could
muster was 1:28.04, pretty good considering the short
amount of time I spent practicing, but not really a time to
get overly e***d about.

Somewhat bolstered I went back online and ran a race at
Monza.  It was on the pole and got a clean start leaving the
apparent T1 carnage that took places three and backwards
off in the distance.  I noticed pretty early that not having
mirrors made my s***with the second place car a bit,
well how shall I say, boring.  He was there, I could hear
him, but I rarely could see him, so I just went about my
business until he dropped out.  It might have been a
more telling test though if he could have applied more
pressure.  Not having to glance in ones mirrors is a
definite plus.  In lapped traffic the forward views really
seemed to pay additional dividends.  The track seems a
whole lot wider in the external view and one gets the
feeling of having many more options when passing a
backmarker.  So in this case I would say I was as fast,
and less of a hazard when leading.  Not really a telling
race though.

Lastly I took to Kyalami for a quick s***in F10 view.
Once again I had problems ramping up to the new view
but it wasn't quite as bad as Spa.  I qualified second with
a 1:20.53 lap but I felt I was still poking around and
not really pushing any boundaries.  For reference my own
personal best is a 1:19.09, but I haven't really tried hard
there since the 1.1 patch came out so it may not be an
entirely fair comparison .  I did run some high 19s in an
online race the other night in the***pit view though.
I got a good start and was in a heated battle with a
Brabham for the first two laps until my motor gave up
shifting up to top gear down the straight.  Grr, can't draw
any conclusions here other than I need more practice
in the external views.

So to summarize, for me the external views hold a slight
promise but that promise comes at an enjoyment expense.
I seem to have more fun driving in the***pit view, the
external views seem less 'connected'.  I will say that
driving all three views gave me food for thought, there
were differences in driving style that may bear fruit after
closer analysis.  Overall, the physics of GPL and my brain
interpreting those physics seem to be the limiting factor
regardless of driving view.  I'll soldier on with further
experiments though.

 - George

1)Your being a bit of a dipstick....lighten up.

2)There is no "mirror patch". Hopefully the coming upgrade will address the  
  problem.

3)I have NEVER raced online. The lack of mirrors, my current skill level, and
some of the attitudes around here make me reluctant to try it.

--
Don Scurlock
Vancouver,B.C.

Hmm, I wasn't aware of that. I though the OpenGL patch with the option to
reduce mirror refresh is a workable solution. Sorry if I was mistaken.

and

Well, this does it. You obviously have no idea what it's like racing online,
or what you've been talking about. AI cars don't brake unusually early, they
don't shift-r to the middle of the road or use all the race track just to
keep the under control. Humans do that. It's very different racing online
and offline.

You really should try online racing. The attitude is way different here in
ras than it is on the track :)

Hena