rec.autos.simulators

Hello,

  I just used the wonderful CARS94 patch from didnt.doit.wisc.edu and a
question came up.  Where is your engine power range configured?  Last night
I lapped the entire field using the Honda engine.  According to the
DRIVERS.TXT, with the power ranges given to Rahal & Groff, this shouldn't
have happened as easily as it did.  I don't have the expansions packs yet
so if this is answerable by "you can do it with the expansion pack", let me
know.

  The patch is great and this is not a complaint as much as a curiosity.

  Also, while more of a USAC engine than an Indycar engine, has anyone
configured in a Mercedes engine?  Again, if this is answerable by "buy the
expansion kits" then let me know.  The reason I am holding off is because I
still haven't even mastered the courses that came with the original game.  
It's those darn road courses...can't set up a chassis to turn a corner like
a lithe race car and not a garbage truck!

  Thanks for any help!

  Terrill

The Honda Engine, as far as the settings go, is comparable to the Chevy B
engine in the original cars set.  Although this is nottrue to life, it met our
needs for the ICRS series, and so was designed this way with little more
thought than an "updated selection" to choose from, to make our series more
contemporary.  New settings and cars have already been designed as precisely
tunes to the actual season as is possible at this time, but it will not be
released until the PPG World Series season has finished.  Then at that time,
the CAR94FIN should hold up until February or March of 1995.

Bottom line is the CAR94 set, and the related CARS94a set (an upgrade to the
cars' decals) was a desire to leave the original ICR car set behind, and allow
us to race against this year's drivers.

In addition, we set different opponent strengths for each of our weekly races
that in almost all cases prevents anyone from lapping the whole field, no
matter what engine you choose.  It's not a perfect system, but it seems to be
holding up.

Hope that cured your curiosity

If you need some assistance, e-mail me and I can perhaps offer some
assistance.  Also, if you have Windows, you can pick up tips about how to
tackle some of the different course, especially the road courses by reading
the tips and previews in Online Racing International magazine from the same
site you got the car set.  The path is /PublicFiles/Racing/ICR/ICRS/Magazine.

Hope this helps.

Ralf Southard
One Two Many Productions

______________________________________________________________________
  _   ____   ____    ____    
 | | /  __| | __ \  / ___|    Ralf Southard         ICRS Co-Director
 | | | |    | |_| / \ \_      Editor-In-Chief of Online Racing Int'l



______________________________________________________________________
         6 Armsby Building, University Park, PA 16802

Subject: Indycar..power question

Date: 25 Aug 1994 10:34 MST

Your power appears to be fixed. The drivers.txt file includes the human-
operated car, but changing the calue for it doesn's seem to do anything.

The opponents strength is not fixed - the enigne values in the drivers.txt
file are base figures and the game then randomizes performance in each
race.

Try a few restarts (shift-r) in a race and run for a while: the field
will
always eveolve differently.

Then: The overall opponent level is set in your options menu. Don't pay
much
attention to 100% - it rarely matches your skills. And qualifying is
different
from race performance. There are several bugs in the calibration of qual
vs.
race speeds on several tracks (track.txt files in each track subdir). If
you
want the opponents to be competitive, crank up the opp. stregth % value.
The
values in the drivers.txt file within the cars94a.zip just spread the
field
based on the ration in engine power.

Just change the name of one of the engines in the drivers.txt file to
Mercedes.
It won't change a thing compared to the engine you are replacing with it.
Engine performance (torque, revs, etc) is coded into the game. Just ratios
between AI cars can be adjusted.

Practice... More powerful engines won't help.

 [...]

I had the same feeling when I first got the game. A few weeks later, I found I
had somehow set fixed weather, and selected rain. I wouldn't recommend it, but
try pounding a go for broke attitude around Long Beach when it's wet, without
rain tires, and with "car damage" turned on. I somehow mastered it, found I
wasn't competitve, and decided to turn-on rain for fun. What a revelation THAT
was :).

Aside from that, you might try turning the turbo boost way down on your first
few laps around a new road course. I tried this after getting reasonably good
at Laguna (consistent 1:09's). Lap times increased a little over 2 seconds to
1:11's, low 1:12's without the boost. The moral: a consistently good line
through a road course is much more important than raw horsepower. You need to
know the track better than you know your wife's backside. I can't run with the
big boys, but that will come in time.

As for setup, I started with the pre-set Fast setup, mucked around a little
with the tire pressures and camber to even out the temperature, and stiffened
the front and rear roll bars to their limits. I left the wings and other
things pretty much alone. I don't know if stiffer shocks would have helped
much or not.

Mike.

like

I saw a post back a week or so ago where a hacker found the area where
boost came into play. He sector-edited that section of the code to make a
55 boost Mercredes engine but he also said that once boost was turned up
beyond 45 the engine blew. No matter what the Revs were.

Jason