It's nice to see such a Racer classic being revived. The base vehicle still is as solid as I remember and updating didn't hurt the experience at all.
Overall, controlling weight transfer is the challenge when driving this quickly, but it's also a nice reward when a section of road really comes together.
A few points I noted down:
- Still has the proper flat-six sound, but unfortunately no horn.
- clutch.max_torque is quite high - makes it very hard to start off slowly and smoothly, around 125% of engine peak torque is usually a good starting point unless you have specific data.
- In the pacejka section, parameter a8 was causing force reversal issues, so I changed it to -0.03. Since a111 was not set to zero yet, the vehicle was also artificially unstable over kerbs and such - basically launched by magic forces.
- Personally, I disabled ff_damping and ff_friction (set to zero), because the sensation feels fake to me and also covers actual Mz torque effects that I rely on for driving.
- There seems to be no taking into account of drivetrain losses - normally, we use the differential friction parameter to introduce them because lowering engine.max_torque would have side efffects on the revving response etc.
- If you use RLE texture compression for the .tga files, the folder size can be reduced from 32.5 to 9.5MB with no visual losses.
- On the other hand colour banding on the dashboard is visible because global texture compression is enabled by default in racer.ini. We use compression=0 in the shader files themselves to override this. In order to avoid repeating this line for every material, you can put it globally into the vf_gloss/glass/matte sections.
- You might also want to enable shadow casting globally, ie. cast_shadow=1 - Ruud decided to disable it by default for performance reasons.
- In the racer.ini.dev section you can find selections for note_ini_fallback and note_ini_unused - set to one, these two give you the full QLOG listing instead of just major errors (there are a few minor items listed as missing or obsolete).
Regarding your script related questions in the other thread, yes, these two documents list the available parameters. You can use "maxtorque factor" and "wheel X powergearing" via the system scripts to change the torque split on the fly. AWD in Racer is as weak as it was when introduced though, we're waiting for Ruud to give us control over multiple differentials still.
For the window and targa top scripts, you could have the coefficient of drag change depending on the state - you have the data already, after all