rec.autos.simulators

Jesse

{Header was intentionally scrambled and then put back together so that it
looks just the way it used to be}

Basically what is contained in the quote above . Pironi rear ended prost,
only
their tires touched and this launched him over prost (who thought he was
almost killed in the incident).

--

Header address intentionally scrambled to ward off the spamming hordes.

cisko [AT] ix [DOT] netcom [DOT] com

Anyway, to get back to your original question, have you actually tried
driving a sim in the rain? The only one I know of is good old GP1 and I
never got *anywhere* in the rain on that. I'd crank up the downforce to try
and get some grip, only for the AI to leave me for dead down the straights
and still corner faster than me. The reduced visibility was modelled pretty
well, as in you could see practically nothing with another car right in
front of you, but I thought it was a waste of time. Succeeding programmers
seem to agree and drop rain first when the project is running late (skip
this bollocks about the physics being too complicated - Papyrus just wanted
to get the damn thing out the door).

Tony Whitley
Please remove 'spam' to reply.

The most realistic flightsims use SOME not so accurate "cheats" to maintain
a needed minimum framerate.

l8er
ronny

--
How to get rid of censorship in German game releases
<http://www.gamesmania.com/german/maniac/freedom/freedom.htm>

          |\      _,,,---,,_        I want to die like my Grandfather,
   ZZZzz /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_              in his sleep.
        |,4-  ) )-,_. ,\ (  `'-'     Not like the people in his car,
       '---''(_/--'  `-'\_)            screaming their heads off!

l8er
ronny

--
How to get rid of censorship in German game releases
<http://www.gamesmania.com/german/maniac/freedom/freedom.htm>

          |\      _,,,---,,_        I want to die like my Grandfather,
   ZZZzz /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_              in his sleep.
        |,4-  ) )-,_. ,\ (  `'-'     Not like the people in his car,
       '---''(_/--'  `-'\_)            screaming their heads off!

It was at the 1982 German GP in Hockenheim. Prost was out in Saturday
practice, and taking it quite easy (it was torrential rain). Pironi, a
contender for the championship, was out trying to get as much track
time in as possible in case of a wet race, and ploughed into the back
of Pros. His Ferrari was launched over the back of Prost's Renault,
crashed down to earth again on the track and Pironi was badly injured.
He survived the accident, although I don't know if he ever cam back to
F1, but he was killed in a powerboat race in, I think, 1987.
Ironically enough there was talk of an F1 comeback around the time he
was killed.

Cheers!
John

You need to work on your writing clarity - whether or not that's what
you were talking about we can't hear you. We can only ready what you
write.

Bumps are there insofar as they are in any other sim - that is, far
from perfect so far, but well worthy of comparison with anything else
on the market.

Cheers!
John

It was a low-visibility wheel-over-wheel accident. Pironi's crash was
much like his team-mate Villeneuve's at Zolder the same year. He was
very lucky not to suffer the same fate as well.

--
Cheers!
Graeme Nash

http://www.karisma1.demon.co.uk
ICQ# 11257824

1998 Xoom GP2 League Champion

Now, it is different.  You have to worry about hydroplaning, the heating
model is different, etc.  But that doesn't take more processing power.  
It just takes more development time.

Mighty

I would think that dynamic grip indeed does add to the need of
processing power.

Remco

You mean track elevations - not bumps in the track surface.

--Tel

"Apparently"? You did take a poll of everyone's comprehension (or
otherwise) of your remark before letting forth this pearl of sweeping
generalisation? No? Bzzzzt, thanks for playing...

No, I mean bumps. B-U-M-P-S - quite different from
E-L-E-V-A-T-I-O-N-S. What Cleaseau might have called "boompee", "ze
trek, at zat point, ken be veree boompee"

Cheers!
John

Even without understanding it, I'd wager that it's possible to build a
few lookup tables to handle it.  One for each type of tire that takes
into account the water depth, car speed and the angle of incidence.  That
implies some sort of drainage model for the tracks, which would also be
pre-calculated and stored with the track.  None of it sounds too
expensive in processor time.  Just very time consuming for the track and
tire modelers.  And time consuming for the programmers to experiment to
see what needs to be modeled at that detail and what can be fudged with
simple modifiers to what's already there.

Today's machines have so much memory that it can really change the nature
of a problem.  On a flight sim I just worked on, the lead programmer used
SGIs to model the airflow over the airfoils at one-degree increments and
at similarly smooth transitions in airspeed and altitude (don't remember
those increments.)  It took about a week for each airfoil.  All of that
info was stored in some megabyte-or-so tables that are used at runtime.  
The flight sim is Fighter Squadron:Screamin' Demons over Europe (I hate
that name :-) and its flight models are considered very high fidelity.

Obviously, I'm doing a lot of guessing here.  But my contention is that
the bottleneck was probably development time, not processor usage at
runtime.

Mighty

For my money GPL is a good product with mostly good compromises in
focus (such as missing out weather (anyone seen a thermometer in GPL, or
wind? (something that was in ICR)) in favor of better things in the
basics). What pappy have done they have done well. As a testbed for
technology which must form the strategic backbone of pappys next
generation of racing sims, it bodes of lurvley succulent little
simulators for our delictation in the future. Mmmmm, yum.

--
Suck The Goat