Community Question | Damage In Sim Racing - More? Less? Enough?

[Boby Kim]

So realistic that i can break everything in my body or even better...become in a state of coma for a few month or even die. That would be truly awesome! That would make simracing real

 

[roadyroad]

Are you sure? I’ve only seen wrong way drivers in Raceroom online lobbies. They appear as ghosts, you can drive through them.

Raceroom is indeed the best sim to deal with strange behaviour and unrealistic crashes, ghosting these cars, and contacts are well dealt with.

 

[roadyroad]

GTR2 damage = best damage.

Proper 3D model deformation, parts fly off the car, race is over if you go headfirst into a barrier at speed, but not so finicky that you feel its unfair.

iRacing looks good too but I don't play it so I can't speak for it.

As a GTR2 fan, I must disagree. GTR2's visual damage is awful, it's the worst part of the game, of this amazing sim. Mainly black marks with some unrealistic deformations. Physics damage is quiet sensitive and interesting though, but causes problems to the AI.

F1 Challenge did damages better...

 

[Jim Layee]

Leave as it is
Any physical damage would be a pretend /canned effect like in the games of old where it was all pretend.

To accurately model the damage to individual suspension parts, the monocoque etc would need such detailed information about the parts that no manufacturer would ever give away such sensitive engineering data. Therefore it wouldn't be a simulation and only a game feature like today

 

[passenger]

Generic damage of the bodywork and suspension, and wheels flying off, like in the spectacular game BeamNG is more than enough.

But, what do you want this damage for? Once seen, you don't want to see it again,
or do you want your race over?

 

[Alexandre]

IMHO what we have is more than enough, I imagine why would I want a drastic simulation of damage if I crash for that there are two options: left the race or restart. Heavy damage simulation just to crawl the car to the pit isn't a good feeling for me, besides, I don't like even a scratch in my car...

 

[Ghoults]

Of course nice looking crashes would be nice but I don't really see much value in it unless the game is literally built around crashing. In racing the car usually becomes undrivable as soon as the rear tires are bent even a little and most of the heavy damage is instantly game ending. Aero damage usually adds drag or changes downforce levels but in real life the bottom of the car is pretty vulnerable as well and snapping off some strakes under the front wing or rear diffuser will change things. Wings rarely bend as the carbon bits are built to stay in one place. And when they break they don't necessarily come clean off. Losing or having mirrors deformed by impacts could be fun though. I don't think game companies are interested in modelling the cars so that bodywork can come off though.

I'd guess I'd want things like grass and sand blocking the radiators when you go off. But at the same time going off is already annoying. You already lose time and have dirty tires. Especially if you go off to avoid an accident and are rewarded for it by having to pit to clear your brake ducts and/or air vents. Same thing if that causes damage to the underside of the car. And sim grass and sand is a bit too random for it. Unlike the road surface the grass and sand are typically sine wave surfaces making it impossible to visually work your way through a sand trap without breaking things.

Same thing with being hard on the car. Accelerating on rumble strips puts heavy loads of the suspension and driveshafts. Hitting the kerbs hard can eventually break something. But it might feel very random if you don't understand what is causing the car to break axles.

I'd say having parts fall off is a meaningless feature for the car who crashes but I think debris on track is undervalued. If I see a crash I think it adds a lot to atmosphere when you have to weave through the debris as well. I think this goes little bit into the track damage aspect as well. If a braking marker is removed by crashing should it stay away? Same with other bollards. What if drivers cut a certain corner all the time? Should the grass wear off and a deep hole appear there?

There are also the random elements. Plastic bags flying around the track is a bit too random but sometimes we see it. The bag gets stuck in wing or blocks an air intake. It feels a bit too random and unfair but could be nice little thing for offline racing. Other random events are things like the wiper not working or lights not working. Or being broken because of impact. There are tons of random things from electrics glitches, some random breaking of hydraulics or simply door not closing on pitstop. I think these are a bit difficult things for simracing as we want things fair and these random issues are just random. Maybe better left for single player careers.

I'd guess the biggest thing we don't have is proper tire damage. It would be to actually see the tires as they come off the car and try to visually understand if the tires look right or wrong. Also having the tire to scrub against the bodywork eventually coming apart and destroying more bodywork is definitely something I'd probably put on top of my list.

 

[Feint]

The Virtual 24h of LeMans really showed how much a damage model would help immersion. And I don't mean just damage caused by physical collisions. I mean it would be more immersive for all racing, but especially endurance racing, to have a damage and failure model similar to what flight sims have where there could be specific problems with the hardware or software of your race car which could cause you to be in the pits trying to diagnose it and fix it.

For endurance racing, to not include this is as part of the simulation is pretty unrealistic. Creeping damage would be great too, where if you rear-end another car during the start, maybe the radiator doesn't fail for another few laps. Or maybe there is fender damage that takes down your tire during braking or high speed or some body move that interacts with the tire. Or for the car you rear-end, they have damage to their headers which crack and cause an oil fire which, if caught in the pits, could be salvaged after an hour of repair, or which could end your race in a fireball if out on the circuit.

I think a lot of this could be simulated based on random chance, especially the electrical problems. But the errors need to be interactive so you're not just sitting in the pits looking at a progress bar. It could be an AI driven race engineer similar to ACC's race engineer who asks you questions about how the car was handling before the failure and then recommends fixes.

Or you could play as the driver and the engineer where you need to figure out the software issue. Maybe there's a loose ground wire that overheats your battery and then suddenly lose all electrical power. So you're back in the pits and the problem goes away, so you go back out and lose all electrics again. But after a few minutes, the car starts back up. So you come into the pits and an engineer finds the problem and you're back out onto the track and into the qualifying/race session, but now you're at a disadvantage.

How cool would an endurance sim be in multiplayer if one of the players is just playing as the pit crew/race engineer and the other is playing as the driver, and they switch half way through the race.

I feel like if you can simulate tire temps and damage across a tire, and if you can simulate oil pressure, water temp, brake duct size affecting both brake temps and aero, etc, then a lot of these things can be simulated right now with the right plugin running in the background (like in AC).

 

[Patrik Marek]

with something we see in iRacing or even project Cars, I think this is enough. sure it can be better, but so many things about racing games can be better, and you can't improve everything

I very much rather see more life around track, so that if you crash/retire,cranes will pick you up from gravel ( like they did in GP4) and you would be put on a tow track and towed to paddock / pits

 

[TrainWreck661]

I disagree. Simracing is a game. More often than not I had races wasted because some reckless or nasty fellow pushed my car against a wall. And the guy continued with minimal damage. I stopped ACC when this started to happen all the time in CPs. Damage = no fun

That's why it should be a toggle. For people who don't want to deal with damage, then they wouldn't have to. But in my case, I'm not going to driving a race car anytime soon (or ever), so a sim is the closest I'm going to get. I personally would want things as accurate as possible, including both physical and mechanical damage.

 

[TrainWreck661]

The big thing here is that most of the time you can't have damage because brands won't allow it. I think that's what really changed between now and GP4 etc

As far as I know that's not true. Even the branded cars, whether they be prototypes, GTs, or stock cars, can be completely wrecked in iRacing. Even in the F1 games the cars can take a big hit and lose a wheel, things like that.

I personally think the lack of physical damage has to do with rendering/computing power on existing machines. The physics calculations alone can put a large drain on CPUs, then if the game has to render individual breakable pieces, the number of calculations being run would be massive.

 

[TrainWreck661]

After watching so much eSports this spring, it can only be more realistic is better. Most of iRacing's oval stuff is pretty good. I don't think rFactor 2 covered itself in glory in this respect. Once things go wrong in that game, it looks broken and unnatural, and that shakes my confidence in their "physics". To be fair I haven't seen good wheel to wheel collisions in any game since Grand Prix 2, but F1 2018's wrecks look pretty good (when I'm causing them and not in them...).

rF2 definitely lacks in the visual damage department, but I feel like you can feel mechanical damage from inside the car pretty well.

 

[Isaac Chavira]

I could care less. I'd rather have those physics resources spent on tire model physics and suspension physics.

 

[Alex72]

I like when you see the damage and when parts fall off and that you have to avoid on track. Enjoy rF2 for that reason. Suddenly a wheel or a wing lying on the ground and everyone avoiding it with a new race line until someone hits it.

 

[Dr. Death]

Imagine being part of a community so content with being stuck in its place that it refuses to accept any addition or features to games.... I've been shut down and ridiculed for asking future gran turismo to add mechanical damage to the games. We should have more damage, and if possible, wear of parts due to overuse. After all your driving style will have an effect on tires, brakes, engine components and differentials, and sometimes clutch. BeamNG is almost perfect on that regard.

 

[stenovitz]

Well the topic was damage-emulator, but I interpret this as how a crash interpret on car failure and the immersion for the simmer. And not so much the visual thing. It's correct that F1C 99-02 had a bit better visual damage than GTR2 speaking crashes, but the failure immersion from impact was much better in GTR2.

If this topic includes "car failure", I think for real simmers it's far more interesting concentrating on the car failure due to car parts breaking down during endurance racing or GP distances. Some mods in rF1 have been excellent here - where you really needed to nurse the car by pure handling and concentrate on the engineering part just to figure out how to be able to bring the car home.

This really emphasize a feeling for the simmer to do the difference both in the garage and handling skills at the track. And yes, this might be an off-line thing, but for the last 15 years I've been 99,7% offline simmer (online in '96-'98, 2003-2004 and now again here in 2020). But in newer sims I don't see any development in car failure comparing to the best rF1 mods, maybe because the games want to embrace the larger costumer segment for simmers and arcaders who just want to go out in online races, which are developed for equal prerequisites for the competitors.

Sorry if that was too far from scope here.

 

[Hitman65]

Like others I feel there should be more failure type damage. IE tyre blowouts when touching another car, gear box and motor failures etc. Not a lot seems to happen in this area.

 

[maranello78]

More realistic and people could make a fairplay races, the most important part is simracing must simulate engine damages in accident, most of games simulates bodywork and suspension but never engine parts like radiator, so if you damage bodywork you still can race but never if you blow your engine on an incident.
Another part is tyres, must be have puncture if you damage some parts near them, or sometimes affect rims, so you'll must tyre puncture, and this 2 things you'll never see it on racing games, on tracks or rally games, so i think developer must study this parts before make more damage, we need more but realistic too

 

[Eckhart von Glan]

most of games simulates bodywork and suspension but never engine parts like radiator,

definitely not true for rally games, e.g. DIRT rally 1&2, where an overheating engine because you smashed the radiator early in the stage is a common problem. dunno how often i had to nurse a steaming car through whole stages because the next service was a couple of virtual miles (read: two or three stages) away, love it (sort of ...)

 

[racingdud3]

just adjust the damage as in automobilista or rfactor 2 , the rest is a bit unreal