An Interview with Reiza Studios’ Renato Simioni - Big hint at new content!

I really appreciate all of the positive feedback!

I had a great time speaking with Renato, and I appreciate him taking the time for me and for being so honest and positive throughout the interview.

November ... paging Josef Newgarden....

@Renato Simioni & @Mike Smith
It’s not about physics, FFB, sound, graphic or content anymore. It’s already there.
Different times.
Give me your mods or give me your multiplayer.
Or some big marketing hype.
Or just give us Automobilista 3. PS5, Xbox
Worth a read

Kind of quietly in the middle of all of that "it made sense, because madness engine is based on ISI technology"....

So Madness Engine is the ISIMotor 2.5... Rfactor engine on steroids?

Learned something new, and enjoyed the review by Niels after googling the isimotor a bit more. Damn its in nearly every game!?

AMS2 is my go to and agree, the V10 . Now need so desperately LeMans to utilise the Sauber properly. My most important question is…how do I get my hands on one of the AMS2 shirts???

I just want to say to Renato Simioni: Thank you for this GREAT game, don't listen to the people that talk negative nonsense about the car handling/physics/bumping/ffb. I've played this game since the first release, in my opinion the current state of the car handling/ffb/physics etc. is close to perfect now. It WAS not good in the start, but now it's close to perfect. So enjoyable to drive and it feels so realistic/natural with direct drive wheels(I have a DD2). Some cars could be finetuned even more but in my opinion AMS2 is leading regarding this subject now. It the only sim that drives "really natural" realistic way imo, in my opinion your team really nailed it. So the basics are all there, please DON'T change this. Some people are simply used to AC/ACC etc. physics/handling/stiffness on the road. In my opinion your current model is way better then those games. Don't try to please the folks that are used to this kind of car handling/physics, your system is better! And you cannot please everyone, I am sure that in time people will understand that AMS2 is better, but it is simply so much different/ahead of others that the people that are used to the old games; are afraid to try and get used to what's better/new. The current state of the game is awesome, things that can be improved are: Multiplayer, Sound, extra cars/tracks, finetuning graphics, finetuning cars, VR performance in rain/night/overcast, configurable mirror positions per car! and something important: The marketing department, AMS2 deserves to be more popular, it really needs more attention so that the online user base can grow further. I really hope that you're able to make more sales and that you can let more people to stay and race online. In the end I just hope that you continue this great development, all updates and future plans are great. Don't listen to the negative people and just keep on track with what you and your team is doing. It's already great and it can online get better. Thanks!

Did he tell people who feel the physics/steering is not quite right or broken to learn how to drive or to screw off? He's good at not taking feedback like that.

gamma123152 said:

Don't listen to the negative people

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Ugh, you are one of those...

The game still has a lot to improve, it's only fair people are negative about it. No product gets better by just praising it.

Louis Wedding said:

Did he tell people who feel the physics/steering is not quite right or broken to learn how to drive or to screw off? He's good at not taking feedback like that.

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No, he didn't say that. Everything that the community is saying is more outrageous than anything Renato said. Like people judging how "natural" or realistic the steering feels, in cars that have powersteering IRL while the sim is implementing a manual rack. Mostly nonsense and misguided subjective criteria IMO.

Oh well, it's almost the best you can do in an engine that's closed off from real physics modding like Madness is. If it was open, someone skilled could just confirm how good the sim can correlate a car.

They switched to Madness because they were not able to develop gMotor further like Renato said. IMO I don't think they switched to Madness because it has better physics, they switched to Madness because it's a better engine for their dev needs. I'm still of the opinion that you're likely gonna have an easier time correlating a car on AMS1's gMotor compared to AMS2's Madness, at least based on everything we've seen.

The thing is though that these consumer sims are not supposed to be driver training products with high correlation; it's not like for example DCS where the Ka-50 and A-10C originated as border guard training modules (?) and then got cleared to be turned into products. These sims are products from the get-go and while the devs do their best, how "good the physics are" almost doesn't matter until you get to some point in the car module's accuracy IMO. So it is not very unreasonable to switch to a (hypothetically) more ill-suited-for-maximum-accuracy physics implementation.

PickABetterUsername01 said:

Ugh, you are one of those...

The game still has a lot to improve, it's only fair people are negative about it. No product gets better by just praising it.

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"One of those..." ? One of what? Fans of AMS2 and Reiza? Yes I am indeed.

"The game still has a lot to improve, it's only fair people are negative about it. No product gets better by just praising it."
I am praising the good parts of it, my opinion is that Reiza came very far with the car handling/physics/ffb and that the current state of this subject is VERY good and should not be changed in a massive way. I don't agree with Ugh, one of those others... that wants AMS2 is to feel exactly the same as AC/ACC. AMS2 is different and it will and should never be like AC. In my opinion the cars feel much more alive in AMS2 and it should stay that way, if the bumpiness of the road gets removed and the ffb gets "flatter" as with ACC the case is and many AC-drivers complain about, then it's not AMS2 anymore and then the games loses what makes it stand out of the others. So this is a subject to agree to disagree on; this is simply different and shouldn't be changed. The majority of the complains about AMS2 are about this subject and in my opinion Reiza/Renato should keep it this way. Finetuning cars/details(as Renato tells in the interview) is great and I fully agree with him on this subject, the basis is there and it should be taken from there. I admire his strong standpoint on this subject because the comments on the internet regarding this subject are huge.

If you read my message further then you can see that I also see room for improvement as I wrote: "Multiplayer, Sound, extra cars/tracks, finetuning graphics, finetuning cars, VR performance in rain/night/overcast, configurable mirror positions per car and something important: The marketing department". To be more specific, they IMO really need to hurry up with implementing a proper ranking MP system. So many are waiting for this, people want to be "rewarded" for their online time. It would also be great to have weekly events like CodeMaster games have for example, just anything to expand the multiplayer userbase is welcome. It's written in so many places, so I fully agree with the Column that @Incredible Hulk wrote here: "Automobilista 2 – The best sim racing game nobody plays". The marketing and multiplayer should both get more of their focus.

Frankly the conversation over sims and their physics being realistic or not throughout the community has become a bit dull.
It is most of the times used as a weapon to discredit sims that a given person doesn't gel with or that may do something different from what they are used to with the sim of his choice, often by people with little to no knowledge of real cars physics and what would be a correct behavior for a car in that situation, basing their conclusions on advertising or just their liking.
It is quite evident that all sims have quirks, some even very evident and basic: good known examples are ACC tire model and their static optimal pressures together with their suspensions behaving quite obviously unrealistically, RF2 allowing cars to go faster with disconnected ARBs when it is known that real cars use them, all the quirks with tires, brake bias, fuel saving that everyone knows about iracing and we could keep going, but to what end?

I think as a community we should refrain from becoming fanatics of this or that sim and try and bring in more objective judgment over them, rather than the prejudice and hatred Madness Engine is always met with because of its SMS/PC2 past.
If we look at it with a bit of objectivity, we must recognize it is probably the most advanced engine currently available and we need to give credit to SMS for devising something with such great simulation detail level and potential.
The flip side of the coin (and I am talking as a backer of PC1 and PC2 unhappy with the way things ended there) is that unfortunately SMS abandoned the project without sorting the majority of the flaws and without achieving a great level of tuning and this definitely enraged a lot of us.

Here is where IMHO Reiza is to be praised: their are going through the long difficult tuning process that SMS skipped, slowly bringing AMS2 to levels of detail that other engines will probably never reach.
I think they deserve praise and support for being brave and undertake this path, not the blind hate and bashing some of the community is giving to their title often based on prejudice: every flaw or potential issue to improve on is seen as a sign of damnation in a 18 months old sim from a small developer firm, while equally blatant and fundamental flaws in 4 to 13 years old sims racking up many millions already seems to be acceptable and condoned.
I think as a sim community we should try and be more balanced and patient, cut a slack to Reiza and let them go about their targets the way they feel it's right: give our feedbacks both positive and negative in a constructive and respectful way, avoid sh......g on someone else's work just out of cheap fanatism.
Eventually, if we support them, classes will be more filled, MP and ranking will be integral part of the sim and so on. Rome wasn't built in a day.

MadDriver11 said:

It is quite evident that all sims have quirks, some even very evident and basic: good known examples are ACC tire model and their static optimal pressures together with their suspensions behaving quite obviously unrealistically

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While the static optimal pressure thing is true, do bear in mind the delta for that is really not very large at all. I've only seen max about IIRC 3 psi delta between basically no load and very high load, something like 9000N. The deltaFY around that peak is almost nonexistent, it's almost a flat peak, and only really becomes significant once you're 2psi or more away from the optimal. With significant I mean like 0.3 to 0.4% less FY per psi.

The trend is non-linear, it doesn't linearly go up and down in what I've seen so it will kind of average around one value, and that's what you set as your optimal pressure. It's not going to be something you will ever notice as a driver but I suppose it might just show up on the telemetry as a minor FY discrepancy. I think most of the time it won't show up on telemetry. Hence I don't think this is such a serious and gamebreaking issue. If you have some data to contradict it then I'm interested.

I don't know what you mean by suspensions behaving unrealistically. The kinematics are correct and the springs, dampers etc. work fine, the only significant problem in vanilla AC is a bad implementation for antisquat. CSP has fixed that (And made anti-lift a tiny bit more accurate) and it's really a quite serious thing indeed, not gonna deny that. However if you're not talking about that then I'd like to get something more concrete than "quite obviously unrealistic". Are you mixing up bad car parameters in official KS cars with bad implementation? They are not the same thing and luckily with AC being open, you can separate them.

Kyuubeey said:

While the static optimal pressure thing is true, do bear in mind the delta for that is really not very large at all. I've only seen max about IIRC 3 psi delta between basically no load and very high load, something like 9000N. The deltaFY around that peak is almost nonexistent, it's almost a flat peak, and only really becomes significant once you're 2psi or more away from the optimal. With significant I mean like 0.3 to 0.4% less FY per psi.

The trend is non-linear, it doesn't linearly go up and down in what I've seen so it will kind of average around one value, and that's what you set as your optimal pressure. It's not going to be something you will ever notice as a driver but I suppose it might just show up on the telemetry as a minor FY discrepancy. I think most of the time it won't show up on telemetry. Hence I don't think this is such a serious and gamebreaking issue. If you have some data to contradict it then I'm interested.

I don't know what you mean by suspensions behaving unrealistically. The kinematics are correct and the springs, dampers etc. work fine, the only significant problem in vanilla AC is a bad implementation for antisquat. CSP has fixed that (And made anti-lift a tiny bit more accurate) and it's really a quite serious thing indeed, not gonna deny that. However if you're not talking about that then I'd like to get something more concrete than "quite obviously unrealistic". Are you mixing up bad car parameters in official KS cars with bad implementation? They are not the same thing and luckily with AC being open, you can separate them.

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LOL, you always write long pages of stuff to make a lot of verbose discussions but the fact is one: apart from track's condition, suspensions geometry and everything else, when you move from low to high downforce there are several hundreds kg more that push down on the tires and need to be compensated. So even if you want to just compensate those the pressures will move significantly so as not to affect the tire walls integrity as well as having a decent contact patch. In some cases rolling resistance is also of concern when racing on very fast tracks.
Also, it is ridiculous that cars with a completely different weight distribution like the AMG or the AM and Audi or the Ferrari have the same optimal pressures on all the axles. Then there is the whole conversations on camber, caster, springs and dampers stiffness, tracks temperatures, all completely ignored. It just doesn't make any physical sense and self explains about the evident simplifications that are being used in the tire modeling.
Regarding suspensions, it doesn't take a genius to realize that wheels shooting upward inside the wheel well like a Rolls Royce with the car's chassis not moving at all while going on high kerbs isn't consistent with reality, actually very far from it: it's enough to watch SROs videos on YT and see the difference between ACC cars behavior at Variante Alta at Imola for instance and the real thing.

MadDriver11 said:

LOL, you always write long pages of stuff to make a lot of verbose discussions but the fact is one: apart from track's condition, suspensions geometry and everything else, when you move from low to high downforce there are several hundreds kg more that push down on the tires and need to be compensated. So even if you want to just compensate those the pressures will move significantly so as not to affect the tire walls integrity as well as having a decent contact patch. In some cases rolling resistance is also of concern when racing on very fast tracks.
Also, it is ridiculous that cars with a completely different weight distribution like the AMG or the AM and Audi or the Ferrari have the same optimal pressures on all the axles. Then there is the whole conversations on camber, caster, springs and dampers stiffness, tracks temperatures, all completely ignored. It just doesn't make any physical sense and self explains about the evident simplifications that are being used in the tire modeling.
Regarding suspensions, it doesn't take a genius to realize that wheels shooting upward inside the wheel well like a Rolls Royce with the car's chassis not moving at all while going on high kerbs isn't consistent with reality, actually very far from it: it's enough to watch SROs videos on YT and see the difference between ACC cars behavior at Variante Alta at Imola for instance and the real thing.

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These aren't very verbose, if you don't understand basic VD terminology then maybe you shouldn't be typing posts about it, what can I say.

9000N is about 917~ kilograms, which is quite a high single tire load. I also told you the deltaFY around optimal is not typically very high, nor is the delta for optimal pressure vs load very high either. It sounds like you are assuming things. Are your views informed by data or correlation?

"Then there is the whole conversations on camber, caster, springs and dampers stiffness, tracks temperatures, all completely ignored. It just doesn't make any physical sense and self explains about the evident simplifications that are being used in the tire modeling."

I don't understand what you mean by that. Is there something wrong with how they are modeled in AC? What doesn't make physical sense? You should have at least mentioned the tire thermal model which is indeed pretty limited in vanilla AC, and might be better in Madness. CSP does fix that.

Those things are also largely parameter based, to do with the car models themselves. The chosen alignment or stiffnesses or whatever doesn't have to do with the actual implementation so much. I just said not to mix those up.

I know what kind of discrepancies can show up in caster/camber/toe (Mainly due to missing elastokinematics in IIRC all of the consumer sims) but you're just saying things without providing some kind of basis to them. What exactly is wrong at an engine level, and why?

In terms of pressure, you can decide to put in whatever optimal pressure you want, and generally it is not very unreasonable to assume the same tire will have the same optimal pressure on two cars which only differ slightly in axle loading. If you have some data to post that says otherwise, I'm all ears.

I'm not talking about ACC, it isn't open nor do I have the data to confirm or deny most of the parameters in most of the cars in ACC* so you might be right; but I'm not referring to ACC. It's not a secret that bumpstop graphs are linear in vanilla AC and probably in ACC as well, but you can just put in the graph you want with CSP. There might be a hysteresis implementation in the future as well.

EDIT: *Corrected AC to ACC.

Regarding income Reiza played a safe game. They got the big project cars userbase. No gamer complained as they were all familiar with project cars game behaviour. AMS 1 is still one of the best race games i own. Projects Cars by far one of the worse. I bought AMS2 and refunded the game asap....it was like playing project cars...it was that bad! But Reiza wanted to make money and they surely achieved that with AMS2.

Boby Kim said:

Regarding income Reiza played a safe game. They got the big project cars userbase. No gamer complained as they were all familiar with project cars game behaviour. AMS 1 is still one of the best race games i own. Projects Cars by far one of the worse. I bought AMS2 and refunded the game asap....it was like playing project cars...it was that bad! But Reiza wanted to make money and they surely achieved that with AMS2.

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Very weird. I also have Project Cars 2. I hate that game, it's unplayable/undrivable for me. Completely different game then AMS2 on every single subject, I never liked it. And as you can read back: I'm a huge fan of AMS2. I have no idea what you tried in AMS2 but many people seem to have "bias" about the Slightly Mad Studios engine.

I must say that there was a bad time in the beginning of AMS2 but the game has grown out of this situation long ago but especially since 1.2.0.0. it's uncomparable. Maybe you need to give it an another try since so much has changed. But this is only possible if you're able to step over your bias of your previous experiences, which is always an difficult thing to do... In my opinion it was "a safe game" if Reiza released the game a year later and started on a higher level as the game is now, they released the game too quick because of this many people with bias regarding PC1/PC2 got disappointed. And the problem is, these people won't try it again because they will be stuck with their negative experiences of the state of the game at it's release.

gamma123152 said:

Very weird. I also have Project Cars 2. I hate that game, it's unplayable/undrivable for me. Completely different game then AMS2 on every single subject, I never liked it. And as you can read back: I'm a huge fan of AMS2. I have no idea what you tried in AMS2 but many people seem to have "bias" about the Slightly Mad Studios engine.

I must say that there was a bad time in the beginning of AMS2 but the game has grown out of this situation long ago but especially since 1.2.0.0. it's uncomparable. Maybe you need to give it an another try since so much has changed. But this is only possible if you're able to step over your bias of your previous experiences, which is always an difficult thing to do... In my opinion it was "a safe game" if Reiza released the game a year later and started on a higher level as the game is now, they released the game too quick because of this many people with bias regarding PC1/PC2 got disappointed. And the problem is, these people won't try it again because they will be stuck with their negative experiences of the state of the game at it's release.

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There are clearly problems with many cars in PC2 - mainly how some cars rotate much too freely as if they have no rotational inertia - but it was a surprise to me how much better that game drives with a properly developed custom FFB file and how a few cars feel almost as good as the good cars in AMS2. Many people confuse bad, uninformative or confusing FFB with "bad physics". However, there is a lot that the Madness Engine does well or at least attempts to do with more detail than the competition.

Now AMS2 fixed much of what was wrong in PC2, although in fairness they did introduce their own issues - both open diffs and LSDs weren't working properly at release, the tyre models they built around v1.0 were wrong in many places (finally fixed in v1.2), and they still struggle getting some of the wet compounds to feel consistent in varying conditions. Some cars still have too much drivetrain inertia, leading to sluggish throttle responses and lack of wheel spin at low gears. But part of it is also that AMS2 is very much not a static sim in terms of vehicle handling. Even if you limit yourself to 12 o'clock noon conditions as many sim racers do, the setup, the tyre temperatures, the track rubbering and the driving style have a large impact on the car handling, more so than in any other sim I've tried. The Seta tyre model is more permissive in terms of one-lap driving, but if you do overdrive the tyres your car will quickly turn into a slidey mess with blistered tyres, necessitating a pit stop. That to me makes it more interesting than the usual "let's hotlap in ideal conditions at Monza for 15 minutes in GT3 cars" affair that has become the de facto sim racing experience.

For me I think the single biggest contributor to the "it's great v it's crap" camps is FFB and getting settings that work for your wheel.
I walked away from AMS2 a couple of times (back to AMS 1 and even GTR2) and then tried one of the custom FFB setups, only to find the game completely changed for me. The "driving on ice" feeling disappeared, though i still suffered from a lack of feel when the rear end swings around in slow corners. Every time, by the time i realised i was gonna spin, it was too late to save it. I lived with that, thinking that on a low end wheel its hard to replicate a feeling that in a real car you would get more from your bum in the seat. However last week i saw this suggestion for tweaking some settings:

Its eliminated some very late corner exit throttle oversteer effect on little tail happy cars like the Ginnetta gt5 and the Caterham. Give this minor changes a try and see what you think.
(front_tyre_stretch_feel 0.12)
(rear_tyre_stretch_feel 0.10)
(relax_os_line2_start_y 0.0004) #relax_os used for over-steer: relax_os
(relax_os_pos 0.00144)
(relax_os_width 0.00316)
(relax_os_coef -0.015)

With these, the car was horribly skitty so i played around with the values and moved them back towards what the original settings in the custom file were. I have now found a place that works for me and am spinning out less on slow corners (tho once significant tyre wear kicks in i still have the same slow corner spin out issue).
Guess what i am saying is that the FFB values (not just the sliders) can make things feel from pretty crap to pretty good depending on where you set everything.
Am sure many people never find settings that they like and simply give up, which is a shame. I am using a TM TMX wheel, so pretty low end.

Stingraymx said:

For me I think the single biggest contributor to the "it's great v it's crap" camps is FFB and getting settings that work for your wheel.
I walked away from AMS2 a couple of times (back to AMS 1 and even GTR2) and then tried one of the custom FFB setups, only to find the game completely changed for me. The "driving on ice" feeling disappeared, though i still suffered from a lack of feel when the rear end swings around in slow corners. Every time, by the time i realised i was gonna spin, it was too late to save it. I lived with that, thinking that on a low end wheel its hard to replicate a feeling that in a real car you would get more from your bum in the seat. However last week i saw this suggestion for tweaking some settings:

Its eliminated some very late corner exit throttle oversteer effect on little tail happy cars like the Ginnetta gt5 and the Caterham. Give this minor changes a try and see what you think.
(front_tyre_stretch_feel 0.12)
(rear_tyre_stretch_feel 0.10)
(relax_os_line2_start_y 0.0004) #relax_os used for over-steer: relax_os
(relax_os_pos 0.00144)
(relax_os_width 0.00316)
(relax_os_coef -0.015)

With these, the car was horribly skitty so i played around with the values and moved them back towards what the original settings in the custom file were. I have now found a place that works for me and am spinning out less on slow corners (tho once significant tyre wear kicks in i still have the same slow corner spin out issue).
Guess what i am saying is that the FFB values (not just the sliders) can make things feel from pretty crap to pretty good depending on where you set everything.
Am sure many people never find settings that they like and simply give up, which is a shame. I am using a TM TMX wheel, so pretty low end.

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Is there a way to get the FFB to load up in the corners? I can't seem to find that in any of the custom or default files?