rec.autos.simulators

Has anyone else had this happen to them in ICR: you qualify dead last by
at least 2-3 sec but when you start the race, you're much faster than the
cars ahead of you. I figure that if I'm running the same lap times as
the leaders in the race, I should be qualifiyng near the front too. I
ended up messing with the BLAP settings to try to get the cars to qualify
close to the same speed as me, as well as race at the same speed as me.
Anyone else have any similar experiences?

Just a guess, but I bet you're racing at Long Beach?  Some of the tracks
are like this.  I seem to remember Cleveland being that way too, and maybe
Australia.
--

Brian Wong                              Product Marketing Engineering

Yes, I have!! I have qualified last at Clev. by a good 10 seconds
and still by 5-10 laps I am usually leading.  It doesn't hurt that by
the first turn I have passed 20 cars on a standing start.  Is it that
qualifying times a wrong? or is it that the are racing too slow?
I would like to know anything you find out.

The problem of unrealistic discrepancies between qualifying times and race
times can be easily remedied by going into the track.txt file and changing
the BLAP to 99999.  The AI cars will then go out and "really" qualify with
speeds much closer to their actual on-track performance.  You will have to
have several (usually three or four) qualifying sessions so that all of
the cars will get a chance to go out and set a time.

This only works for road and street circuits, not ovals!  

E-Mail me if you have any problems.

says...

Good guess - Long Beach, Australia, Vancouver, Cleveland, Elkhart  
Toronto, Milwaukee, Nazareth and Loudon. I don't know what to think. I'm
either really good at race setups or really crappy at qualifying setups.
(Probably the latter ;)

What I've been doing is I've raised the BLAP in the appropriate track.txt
file to what I think is a reasonable qualifying time for a given track.
For example, at Long Beach, the best I've ever qualified was about 57.4
seconds, which puts me last in the field by several seconds. I set the
BLAP in the longbch.txt file to 56800, which is the lap time expressed in
thousands of seconds, which really menas that the fastest lap that any
computer car will ever do is 56.800 seconds. You can also adjust the RELS
setting, which governs how fast the computer cars will go during the
race, thus simulating a slower race setup. Note that for times greater
than 1 minute, the BLAP would look something like 70105, which is really
1:10.105. This takes a lot trial and error, but what I've been striving
for is a setting with which I can consistently qualify in the top 10, but
not first every time, thus making for a more exciting race. I'll let you
know how I make out.

There's a simple explanation for this, guys.... the BLAP variable in
the track text file determines the absolute best lap the opponent cars
will be capable of driving during the race (if you have opponent
strength at 100%).  So, in the race, you guys are driving faster laps
than the BLAP setting.  There's also a variable RELS, i.e. 'relative
speed'.  At Detroit, for example, try setting BLAP to 71700, and RELS
to 109, and the opponent strength to 100%.  Those are the settings
we're using right now at the IICC2 Detroit race - the polesitter
qualifies at a 1:07.9xx, and during the race runs 1:11.700's - he
pulls away slightly on full tanks, but you can catch him as you use
up your fuel (assuming you've got a pretty good car setup, of course).

-Brad
--
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|   .    .    .   .   .  .  .,___/--/|)        Brad W Traweek      |

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Same for Mid-Ohio for me.  I don't even bother qualifying there anymore; it's
just as easy to start dead last.  Within 20-25 laps I'm leading the race.  I also found
this at Long Beach as someone mentioned above.