Very bad road adherence physics

[pppoposition]

Hello there,

I just noticed this:

if Racer is supposed to be a racing simulator and not just another crappy Need for Speed thing ... then at least the car it ships with (Lamborghini) should perform reasonably well on the road. Most importantly, you should not be able to tell the difference between the real life on-the-road behavior and game-play on-the-road behavior. What do I mean?

Well, just try to accelerate to approximately 30km/h. And then apply the full brake. What happens in real life? The car stops almost immediately. And what happens in the game? Well, the car just slowly decreases speed, ... then it stops. This is just wrong. Don't you have that feeling?

Also, try to turn off the ABS. In real life, braking without ABS from 30km/h will make maybe a very little skid, but the car stops almost instantly. And in the game ... woohoo ... you can play skid games when braking from such a little speeds. Not even trying to talk about braking from 130km/h ...

Another thing: Try to accelerate to about 70km/h and suddenly turn the wheel all the way in some direction. What happens in real life? Your car will be firmly dragged in that direction and maybe it will make several spins until it finally stops. And in the game? The car almost doesn't slow down and the turned wheels make very little contribution to the actual bearing. Does it seem real to you?

And one more thing: If you happen to drive off the road into the sand (or whatever it is, e.g. around the first bend in Carlswood) ... you almost cannot control the car, even at little speeds. What do you think about that? To be honest, I don't have any experience with sand driving. But it seems to me just unreal. I think it can not be that bad. Is it really that bad?

Well, to sum up, at least on the asphalt roads, the Lamborghini car absolutely doesn't behave like a real car. I don't know what kind of cars you are used to when driving. But to me, considering the road adherence physics, Racer is definitely not a realistic game. Not in the present state.

 

[Mr Whippy]

The pacejka is a bit iffy in it's curve mixing when things get slippy and slidy.

BUT, I think it's still quite ok... it's far from bad at all. I'd say generally it feels as good as anything else out there. Just we are a picky bunch around here.

In GT5 if you start doing weird stuff, the cars do weird things. Ie, starting off from stopped gently, or parking sideways on a steep banking and then steering in neutral and watching the different tyres float around...

But both in motion generally tend to do quite ok...

I've happily hot-lapped the Lambo in anger against Cosmo in a Nissan GTR on-line for lap after lap and really found it both challenging and fun and rewarding, only very rarely does it get out of shape badly and then it might get a bit snappy. But it is a big powerful AWD car that weighs a fair bit. To imagine it can just play around on the limit and be easy to catch or control is being a bit optimistic.

Anyone here played netKar in the early days. The Zonda was a great car to drive, totally nice up to 80%, then the last 10% and it would bite hard if you took a liberty. If you tried to work it anything over 90% it just got messy and didn't play nicely at all... one mistake and it'd be an un-controllable spin out!

I think sometimes games like NFS Shift and things give us a false sense of stability in many cars on and over the limit. The prevalence of drifting may account for that somewhat too... if you can't drift a car through a bend perfectly 50% of the time it's not an accurate game kinda logic.


I'll be working on the Lambo more in the future... main things are a nice ABS script and hopefully a decent AWD bias script... I'd love to write an ESP script too but I think that is beyond my skills right now

Dave

 

[Harey]

Hm would like to see AWD and ABS done better, as well as maybe a way to limit the cars top speed? (my Iota-R I release I wanted to limit to about 180, but it was either I limit it, or it has TC, proper awd would help it as well).

I can remember playing NFS underground 2, and I felt like that was terribly off (Civic that goes 200+mph yeah okay /sarcasm). I haven't playing NFS Shift, but I imagine it to be quite arcadish, like doing 70 mph in a turn, that really you could really push the same car through at about 40 mph.

I have driven, without being insane in some of my cars (I'll admit they aren't released yet). But Racer responded well to easy take offs and braking, only part that was annoying was with the automatic shifting vehicles I had to manually shift earlier. (maybe another script that can be worked up using the gas pedal and torque curve as a variable?)

 

[Stereo]

as well as maybe a way to limit the cars top speed?

This is pretty easy, though getting specifics to work right might be trickier. I'll write up a basic script and see how it performs, anyway.

 

[Harey]

This is pretty easy, though getting specifics to work right might be trickier. I'll write up a basic script and see how it performs, anyway.

yeah, I wouldn't think that would be overly hard, even though I haven't looked into scripting yet. quick look at commands makes me wonder, with scripting could we really enhance the clutch "feel" instead of being this tiny spot at the very bottom, make it a larger friction point near the top. Of course I don't know how far we can go with just scripting.

 

[Mr Whippy]

It's easy to limit top speed via a script.

The problem is doing it elegantly, and in a way that doesn't mess with other things going on.

It soon becomes a minefield when scripting things

Dave

 

[Stereo]

I ended up posting a couple scripts over in the Physics/Technical section thread on scripting, either one gets the job done. Hopefully having a few examples around will help people understand the system better.