rec.autos.simulators

1. Reduce the magic grip values (all 4 of them).  This creates cars
that will drift through turns and brakes that lock very nicely,
without changing anything else.
2. Stiffen the suspension variables/move the ballast rearward.  The
problem with lowering the grip to a realistic level is that the car
will push to a degree that is far from realistic.  Significantly
stiffening the bars and moving the ballast/brake bias back (even with
default grip) will actually induce the cars into a spin!  Now someone
just needs to find the starting range where that magical inability to
spin kicks in and the end range where driving the car is literally
impossible and come up with a compromise.  The default suspension
rates and ballast settings are definitely way too low as using
lower/realistic grip demonstrates - the car just refuses to turn.  The
Razorworks guys offered similar suggestions as someone posted on the
High Gear forums, and I would follow their advice as far as
suspension/ballast tuning goes.  

Aside from inside the tuner, also make sure that the controller rates
are set to 1.0 and the deadzone to 0.0.  I'd also reduce the friction
for all surfaces besides tarmac in the surfaces.dat file.  Simply
setting them all to 0.001 (the tarmac value) creates grass/gravel that
is still slippery and has depth/bounce (since razorworks modeled this,
yay) but doesn't bring the car to an immediate stop.

If anyone fixes these problems and wants honest feedback, let me know.
I'd love to see this sim shine.  If only we could convince RWorks to
do an in-house "realism patch".

Jason

1. As Razorworks suggests, a value of 20-25 for "magic grip" is closer
to reality than the default 30.  I'm use 20, and the brake lockup
model is much more convincing.  Full travel on the brake will cause
lockup, but you can modulate the brakes and achieve good braking
distances.

2. The weight distribution is totally wrong because it appears that
basically setting up a car with the weight ballast at 50% will simply
add more weight to the middle of the car.  This is nice, but in order
to create a truly balanced car you need to move the ballast all the
way to the side that doesn't have the motor.  Simple fix?  Change the
weight of the motor so that it's centered in the car - suddenly the
car with a neutral default setup (50% weight ballast) will get nervous
on curved straights and even spin if you're not concentrating fully on
driving.  In theory this is a totally unrealistic solution to the
problem, but in practice it means that the weight distribution/ballast
slider in the setup menu acts as it does in the sims most of us know
and love.  At 50%, the car will have its weight roughly even
distributed between the front and rear.  Slide it forward, and more
weight will be on the front, the car will understeer and generally not
want to turn or spin.  Put it back and watch out, tail happy time.

Just to give an example, the Audi has its engine weight placed over
the front wheels.  A default setup has the ballast set to 50%, which
basically means that the car still has way too much weight over the
front wheels (since it's just adding weight to the center, not
changing the balance).  You have to put the slider nearly fully back
to actually balance the car's weight evenly over all 4 tires at rest.
Clearly that's going to cause big understeer problems in the game.

Not a great solution so far (i'd prefer using the "ballast" setting
but for the Audi TT at least it seems to have 0 effect) but the
improvement in realism is immediately noticeable.  A car setup with
the default setting will drift through fast corners, get nervous at
high speeds, etc.  Put the slider all the way back, and the car is
undriveably loose as you would expect - all the way front and it
refuses to turn.  

I still think some work could be done to the suspension model to
stiffen up, but this feels much better, at least to me.

Jason