Does AC really need mods ?

[Alexandre Guzu]

A friend of mine said recently :

"Without mods, AC will last 1 year. With mods, it'll last 10."

What do you think ?

 

[Mr Whippy]

Looks like about 37 miles long, but needing a 16km x 16km box to fit it inside... that is quite large actually haha...

At the most you are about 6.5 miles from the 'centre' of the world (if you place the 0,0,0 coordinates in the geometric centre of the track)... so about 10km max, but maybe 6km average.

I know some sims struggle if you are a long way from the world centre point.

I guess you could test this really easily in AC once we get the dev tools.



It's a massive track though... soooo much work. For modders to build I think the task of getting it accurate and being happy with it would be the downfall.

Would be do-able with some scan data (lidar) as a base though, even say 25cm aerial lidar of the road and 100m each side would be amply good for a 'good' reproduction in my view.

Hmmmm

 

[Miroslav Davidovic]

To me most of what you said doesn't make sense, so you are saying laser scanning is pointless?!

First of, if it doesn't make sense why are you making such an assumption?
Second I never said it's pointless, to quote myself: "As long as you are not doing scientific research work for a racing team or tire manufacturer or what ever it's just not a must have."

Yes the track will change over time what with asphalt moving about etc, but its still the best way to get the most accurate representation of a track we can (obviously a rally stage is always changing due to the nature of its materials), including, width, height, bumps, location of objects etc.

it is very accurate yes, but I doubt the alternatives are much worse TBH.

And to me (and 30,000 iRacing members) this is a very important part of sim racing, now it might not be everybody else's "bag" but its deffinately created the best tracks available to us in the sim world.

Don't get me wrong here but I doubt you can speak for all iRacing members.
I as one of them disagree with you. But to each his own.

 

[Mark Quigley]

We have been surveying land accurately using analogue tools for a long time.
"Laser scanning" only makes it easier and quicker.
You will get better results from a retired engineer who knows his tools than a fresh out of education twenty something with laser (pewpewpew, sry) equipment.

 

[Mark Quigley]

To whomever disagrees with me

Do the roads you drive on go where they are meant, do junctions and crossings meet up and align as desired?
Do the buildings that are built in urban environments fit the spaces they were designed to fit?
We have all seen the result of bad civil engineering from China and Russia.
One last thing, every single race track with the exception of a few were designed and built using analogue equipment a long time ago.

 

[Tobbe Bergman]

To whomever disagrees with me


Do the roads you drive on go where they are meant, do junctions and crossings meet up and align as desired?
Do the buildings that are built in urban environments fit the spaces they were designed to fit?
We have all seen the result of bad civil engineering from China and Russia.
One last thing, every single race track with the exception of a few were designed and built using analogue equipment a long time ago.

You are being a bit too anal here !

You confuse the concepts !

The higher precision, the more enjoyment ! Why just Simulate a little bit ?

I am having a blast with AC with the awesome roadfeel and when the Live Track feature is implemented I am going to be even more happy !

 

[Mark Quigley]

A moot point because if you got the money for a civil engineer then you definatley have the money for a laser scan. We have been doing accurate surveys for a long time before lasers.
Go find an old civil engineer, ask him about the tolerances he or she used to work within, you may be surprised.

 

[Mark Quigley]

You are being a bit too anal here !

Yes, yes I am

 

[Mark Quigley]

It's my birthday, I can say and do what I want
I don't think I am confusing anything, surveying land is surveying land and that is what laser scanning a track is.
You want to put a bridge between two uneven surfaces down a hill on a slope at an angle , you are going to do a survey to find out the shape of the gap you want to put your thingy into
I'm playing devil's advocate because of course, if you are going to survey a track to put in a game, you are going to use lasers, thats the way we do it these days but i'm sure someone with the time, skill and tools could do as good a job the old fashioned way.

 

[Tobbe Bergman]

A moot point because if you got the money for a civil engineer then you definatley have the money for a laser scan. We have been doing accurate surveys for a long time before lasers.
Go find an old civil engineer, ask him about the tolerances he or she used to work within, you may be surprised.

A civil engineer must be a lot more expensive plus the factor of human error must be a lot higher than using laser scanning.

However in the end (For me anyway), if a non laser track has great road feel (and is graphicaly appealing of course ) it is probably a keeper !

Simbin's Race07 has some really great tracks with really good road feel and those where not laser scanned from what I know !

 

[Tobbe Bergman]

I wonder when they will have laser scanned rally stages !

Imagine full length stages !

That would be something for us RBR fanatics

 

[Stuart Whitehead]

Happy Birthday Mark

 

[Mark Quigley]

Cheers.
Bottle of tequila and an irating I could not care less for, be glad AC has no multiplayer today

 

[Davy Lauwereys]

you confuse the concepts !

The higher precision, the more enjoyment ! Why just Simulate a little bit ?

I guess this is the heart of the matter right here
You keep talking about how good it looks and how accurate the laserscanning etc etc... and that is what you perceive as beeing "the best", because a car has a few more polygones and a track is 100% accurate.

What we are trying to say is, that for SIMracing (emphasis on RACING, in leagues, in competition with other teams, and humans) all that sort of stuff takes a back seat... who gives a monkeys butt about eyecandy, as long as the physics are good, and the foundations are there to allow great racing!
I'm an endurance fan (that probably explains abit lol, we have a different outlook on what real racing is, compared to most of the other forms of racing) and we have driven 3 RD Le Mans Series seasons here at RD, currently competing in VWEC... the first 3 where in Rf1, almost 10 years old, 3rd party mod, 3rd party track, oh and guess what, everyone who competes scales there graphics down to allow 40 teams to duke it out in 4 classes from a 6 hour race to a 24 hour race...
BEST RACING enjoyment i have had in my entire simracing "career"... how in gods green earth, could a few polygones more on a car, or the fact that a tracks is laserscanned ever top that??? And ask me for money on top?

Is the tyremodel outdated? Yes! Are the graphics lower then an all-eyecandy-no-substance NFS shift title? Yes! Are the enduracer physics abit wonky? Yes (imho, before i get a french dagger sent my way ) ! Was the infield of the tracks exactly as they are irl? No !
Did anybody care? NO ! Did we have some epic racing going on? HELL Yes!

THAT is the point i am trying to make:

The higher amount of options/choices, the more enjoyment ! Why enjoy just a little bit of what can be had?

Mark is right, it's 2013... making qaulity mods has never been as easy as today with all the tools available... question is, who is going to step up and provide a platform for it? at this stage, those platforms are still the 10 year old games, because there isn't a new out that has progressed far enough to earn that attention.
Offcourse we all strive for as much accuracy in models etc or we wouldn't be into SIMs, but that's not the most important bit for most simracers out there, i would bet

This thread has gone some ugly places, for the people who argues that most mods are bad, maybe you should do what I did long ago, once upon a time there was a severe lack of decent mods of a car I liked, that annoyed me to no end, so I decided to make it myself, it sure wasn't easy and didn't look great, but was a start and I loved it.

I just think that people who waste time complaining on forums should put that time into being productive towards what they would like to have.

This

 

[Tobbe Bergman]

I guess this is the heart of the matter right here
You keep talking about how good it looks and how accurate the laserscanning etc etc... and that is what you perceive as beeing "the best", because a car has a few more polygones and a track is 100% accurate.

What we are trying to say is, that for SIMracing (emphasis on RACING, in leagues, in competition with other teams, and humans) all that sort of stuff takes a back seat... who gives a monkeys butt about eyecandy, as long as the physics are good, and the foundations are there to allow great racing!
I'm an endurance fan (that probably explains abit lol, we have a different outlook on what real racing is, compared to most of the other forms of racing) and we have driven 3 RD Le Mans Series seasons here at RD, currently competing in VWEC... the first 3 where in Rf1, almost 10 years old, 3rd party mod, 3rd party track, oh and guess what, everyone who competes scales there graphics down to allow 40 teams to duke it out in 4 classes from a 6 hour race to a 24 hour race...
BEST RACING enjoyment i have had in my entire simracing "career"... how in gods green earth, could a few polygones more on a car, or the fact that a tracks is laserscanned ever top that??? And ask me for money on top?

Is the tyremodel outdated? Yes! Are the graphics lower then an all-eyecandy-no-substance NFS shift title? Yes! Are the enduracer physics abit wonky? Yes (imho, before i get a french dagger sent my way ) ! Was the infield of the tracks exactly as they are irl? No !
Did anybody care? NO ! Did we have some epic racing going on? HELL Yes!

THAT is the point i am trying to make:

The higher amount of options/choices, the more enjoyment ! Why enjoy just a little bit of what can be had?

Mark is right, it's 2013... making qaulity mods has never been as easy as today with all the tools available... question is, who is going to step up and provide a platform for it? at this stage, those platforms are still the 10 year old games, because there isn't a new out that has progressed far enough to earn that attention.
Offcourse we all strive for as much accuracy in models etc or we wouldn't be into SIMs, but that's not the most important bit for most simracers out there, i would bet



This

You're confusing me with someone else ( I've only mentioned looks once in this thread I believe )

Physics is always paramount, the rest is just icing on the cake ! ( That is why RBR is still around by the way, and yes I love that Sim above all others still to this day )

1 Physics (Feel the race) Best feedback
2 Audio (Hear the race) Good feedback
3 Graphics (See the race) Good feedback
4 Taste (Not implemented)
5 Smell (Not implemented)

All we need is the ability to taste and smell the Race and all our 5 senses are involved.

If there is a pot hole I don't have time to see it but I can feel it every time I run over it with my car.

Hence it does NOT have to look as good as it feels !



You reminds me about an iRacing fanboy I was discussing tracks with.

He said that the surroundings had nothing to do with the track experience.

I told him ( After working a bit with BTB knowing how it looks with just the track and absolutely nothing else ) if there was only the track and nothing else it would probably be a quite boring experience.

He did not reply ! ( Understandably )

Kunos haven't revealed what tools the modders will have other than "a real simple editor"

 

[XN-Sigma]

Looks like about 37 miles long, but needing a 16km x 16km box to fit it inside... that is quite large actually haha...

At the most you are about 6.5 miles from the 'centre' of the world (if you place the 0,0,0 coordinates in the geometric centre of the track)... so about 10km max, but maybe 6km average.

I know some sims struggle if you are a long way from the world centre point.

I guess you could test this really easily in AC once we get the dev tools.



It's a massive track though... soooo much work. For modders to build I think the task of getting it accurate and being happy with it would be the downfall.

Would be do-able with some scan data (lidar) as a base though, even say 25cm aerial lidar of the road and 100m each side would be amply good for a 'good' reproduction in my view.

Hmmmm

This seems to be a common problem through various game engines, for example, both CryEngine and Unreal Engine can not display a map bigger than 16km x 16km, in fact, if you move the camera to any place more than 8km away from the center, things will... happen, like weird glitches and general **** ups, at some point the engine ends up crashing.

 

[Mark Quigley]

The mountain course and Targa Florio, developers sort it out!

 

[Mr Whippy]

It's my birthday, I can say and do what I want
I don't think I am confusing anything, surveying land is surveying land and that is what laser scanning a track is.
You want to put a bridge between two uneven surfaces down a hill on a slope at an angle , you are going to do a survey to find out the shape of the gap you want to put your thingy into
I'm playing devil's advocate because of course, if you are going to survey a track to put in a game, you are going to use lasers, thats the way we do it these days but i'm sure someone with the time, skill and tools could do as good a job the old fashioned way.

Old fashioned techniques are still very valid too.

I hit uni in the late 90's and being interested in civil engineering at the time (don't ask me why haha) we had to go around part of the campus using the theodolite and wafty ruler method and the requirement was about 50 data points and returning back to our origin within 1cm error or something.
Pretty impressive for what was in effect a spirit level telescope and a ruler!


As said, the laser is only really good for getting the surface super accurate. You can have say a 2cm density grid with ~ 5mm vertical accuracy, probably less even. You'd never do that any other way than with a laser or some advanced photogrammetry solution.

Also point clouds are nice to model from because it's like a reference model to model off. A bit like modelling cars for many studios now is just modelling over a CAD model. Retopo work rather than pouring your eyes over blueprints and photos etc...


Laser makes it easier to do a good job, and get a super accurate driving surface.

The only thing modders can't do is the super accurate driving surface.

BUT, modders can still probably get the vertical outline to ~5cm accuracy and a vertical accuracy at outside line, centreline and inside line of the track to say 10cm overall accuracy.

In my view that would be visually indistinguishable from a laser track.

The only missing elements would be 'noise' and bumps in the track surface. Bumps you can add in (maybe not totally accurate, but you can do so), and the noise is generally so repetitively equal that a simple 'noise' to the surface would suffice.


Amply good enough for anyone not doing critical engineering work imo.


Just my 2p any way.

Give me scan data any day of the week if I'm making a track as fast and cheaply as possible... but if I can't get that data it's still possible to do a track very well without it

Dave

 

[Davy Lauwereys]

You're confusing me with someone else ( I've only mentioned looks once in this thread I believe )

You are correct! My apologies! my only defence is that i have been up since 4.30am for work, and somehow in the proces of thinking about what i wanted to post and posting what i posted, some wires must have crossed

 

[Simon Roberts]

Laser makes it easier to do a good job, and get a super accurate driving surface.

The only thing modders can't do is the super accurate driving surface.

This is what im talking about when i say give me the pew pew track any day of the week.

 

[Tobbe Bergman]

You are correct! My apologies! my only defence is that i have been up since 4.30am for work, and somehow in the proces of thinking about what i wanted to post and posting what i posted, some wires must have crossed

Bless you my son you are forgiven

Now we are just waiting for some new goodies from Kunos !

Mmmmmm Feels like X-Mas again !

Cant wait to try the Zonda R @ Mugello