Physics realism?

[Christopher Junkins]

Hi, new here and indeed to racing sims/games in general.

I've been doing a little bit of searching for the most realistic driving/racing sims/games out there, and I've landed on "Racer". Looks nice, and the fact that it's free is great, and for PC! (GT5 is PS3 only! what an outrage!)

My question is, in comparison to Reality and the Newtonian and Non-Newtonian physics of this universe of ours, how realistic is the physics and driving "feel" of this sim.? Also, how much difference in the physics is there between cars, or is the physics completely separate from the vehicles? (I.E... in other games (this is my first actual sim) while the physics engine is separate from the vehicles, each vehicle can behave wildly different outside of the differences in the builds... one car will kick it's back end around like a rodeo bull, while another car of similar weight and build will drive perfectly, irrespective of the driver's abilities).

 

[KS95]

Cheers!

 

[Christopher Junkins]

I'd host, but 14k up and 1M down probably isn't good for hosting... I'm available untill around 10 am EST... give or take a few min...

 

[KS95]

Yeah.

 

[EngineOfDarkness]

I felt like uploading a video to YT and driving a round in that car, maybe it somehow helps seeing it visually.

Though I myself haven't play racer for about 6 or more Months. I think I did pretty decent. I turned on the Control output so you can see the input I've given to the wheel.

You could try to drive around the track in 6th gear, that way it's harder to spin out. You can still do times below 1:15 that way. So you can get used to the track and go from there.

Also when the rear is sliding in corner, do NOT countersteer to full lock and remove the throttle, that will most likely send you spinning out. You need to do smooth throttle control and countersteer in a way so that the rear slowly retains grip.

How much you need to countersteer and throttle at the same time is just something you need to learn to "feel". I know it sounds bad, but I spun out quite often yesterday when I touched drove in racer after such a long time (the lap in the video was done after I did about 20 warm up laps yesterday).

I did another set of 35 Laps today and I managed some nice powerslides. I was especially happy sliding the long corner before the finishing straight. What a feeling ! Quite refreshing from Shifts *I'm sticking to the road till I die or understeer*

Though racer feels a little bit too loose once you slide. Afaik that's due to some stuff Whippy mentioned in the 0.8.33 release topic on the first page.

 

[QuadCoreMax]

Yeah.

Lol KS !

Been testing it via the site, ROFL ~ 23MB down + 3MB upload
That is speed of light really.

@EngineOfDarkness

+1

 

[Ian Strom]

This is the best that I can get in my area. I am also stuck with a 6GB per month cap and $2.50 per additional GB. cbeat:

/wrists

It was sold as 1/1.. then unofficially lowered to 1/0.512 and now I guess the upload speed has gone down even more...

 

[KS95]

Okay... you NEED to move lol.

 

[Alexander Knoll]

^^ Loool

...different server different resoult...

 

[Christopher Junkins]

Well, in the end... it seems a few of you could host races. Now it just seems we need to sort out the glitches and we'll be able to get things together lol.

 

[EngineOfDarkness]

This is the best that I can get in my area. I am also stuck with a 6GB per month cap and $2.50 per additional GB. cbeat:

/wrists

It was sold as 1/1.. then unofficially lowered to 1/0.512 and now I guess the upload speed has gone down even more...

I feel you pai... wait no I don't. At least I got no real traffic limit for this Slo-Mo-Connection here.

I really need to check the possibility to switch to cable (tv) provided internet. Would yield about 32mbit and 1mbit up here as far as I informed myself till now. Would be a welcome change to me.

But as far as I remember, back when i played with Minion driving around Lienz, it still worked quite good given the distance (germany <-> usa).

 

[KS95]

Is minion still around or did EA catch him?

 

[Knut Omdal Tveito]

I have never tried Racer online, but would like to. Since I started online racing I haven driven offline in my usual sims, but with Racer I usually end up driving on a deserted track. Do you ever have races online in Racer? Is it stable for a 1h race lets say?

EDIT

 

[EngineOfDarkness]

Is minion still around or did EA catch him?

He's still around, I'm currently having a chat with him on xfire.

I have never tried Racer online, but would like to. Since I started online racing I haven driven offline in my usual sims, but with Racer I usually end up driving on a deserted track. Do you ever have races online in Racer? Is it stable for a 1h race lets say?

It seemed rather stable back in the days when Gizmo (I think it was him) was running a server. If I remember right you could drive there for quite some time. I think I drove there for about 40 Minutes one time.

 

[Mr Whippy]

Cosmo and I have been doing laps on my beta track (soon to be released), for hours on end... it's run like a track day though, so no lap timing and all that stuff.

Solid as a rock really, and assuming both on good PC's with good connections it appears really solid, so if you hit each other it feels really fluid and realistic. Some odd issues with sounds disappearing was a recent issue, but only when some collide sounds (bottom out) played really loud.

Not sure how it copes as car count goes up though, many Racer cars are not LOD optimised which may be a concern!

Dave

 

[Some1]

Cosmo and I have been doing laps on my beta track (soon to be released), for hours on end... it's run like a track day though, so no lap timing and all that stuff.

Solid as a rock really, and assuming both on good PC's with good connections it appears really solid, so if you hit each other it feels really fluid and realistic. Some odd issues with sounds disappearing was a recent issue, but only when some collide sounds (bottom out) played really loud.

Not sure how it copes as car count goes up though, many Racer cars are not LOD optimised which may be a concern!

Dave

If you have a decent GFX card, you can have a surprising amount triangles rendered on screen with decent FPS.

 

[Mr Whippy]

I guess the issue is if you have 10 unique cars each with stupid amounts of high resolution maps for stuff like wheels and things, suddenly all your gfx ram will be gone

Big textures can be pretty bad too... I guess that is why GT5 for example, uses a generic tyre texture/system for all cars, as it keeps memory down that bit more for investment in other things...

LOD isn't essential, it just depends on the cars. The Lambo for example isn't really high to start with, so LOD'ing it down isn't important either. Texture count is lower than it used to be now too (due to dumping wheel/tyre textures, and reducing some map sizes)

Plenty of these iffy conversions have solid colour textures but 2048x2048 in size haha... things like that are instant killers for fps vs quality trade-off!

Dave

 

[Some1]

I guess the issue is if you have 10 unique cars each with stupid amounts of high resolution maps for stuff like wheels and things, suddenly all your gfx ram will be gone

Big textures can be pretty bad too... I guess that is why GT5 for example, uses a generic tyre texture/system for all cars, as it keeps memory down that bit more for investment in other things...

LOD isn't essential, it just depends on the cars. The Lambo for example isn't really high to start with, so LOD'ing it down isn't important either. Texture count is lower than it used to be now too (due to dumping wheel/tyre textures, and reducing some map sizes)

Plenty of these iffy conversions have solid colour textures but 2048x2048 in size haha... things like that are instant killers for fps vs quality trade-off!

Dave

Yes, use more polies and smaller textures!

This is where 3d bodylines come in handy When the car mesh is reasonably medium-to-high poly, you can have smaller body textures since you don't need the resolution for bumpmapped bodylines for example.

I think the high quality interiors, that use high quality textures are what mostly eat up GFX ram. My Supra (for rFactor) has a 2048x2048 main texture with alpha plus 2048x2048 bumpmap plus 1024x1024 additional textures.

For the Corvette C6 remodel, I'm going with a high-poly interior with smaller textures.

 

[Mr Whippy]

Well there are loads of nice techniques for interiors

My Z4 interior has mainly generic materials patterns, but the problem is repeating them without using lots of texture fragments... If we could use multiple UVW coords per material it'd be nice, so I can map the interior with say 1024x1024 diffuse that was just the general colour/AO shaded into it for the bulk of the interior, and then use a 'detail' bump map/spec map that repeats to get the HQ appearance.

Like you say, the colour and general shading don't need many pixels really, and we can repeat patterns and scale them down to get the nice look back...

Just not sure if there is a solution that works. Something like using world co-ords for the detail textures perhaps, then scale it appropriately, so the diffuse/ao info is mapped/atlased, but the detail map is just a large detail map that is cube mapped to the object with only a scale variable?!

All that said, an interior can use some resources. You don't see your wheels, you don't need to draw other cars interiors etc, so I think you can invest quite a bit in that ONE interior that you will see in detail... especially as it takes up more screen real-estate, for the longest time, than anything else, even outside views have the car take up less space!

Dave

 

[Christopher Junkins]

Well, in the end... it sounds like you do some small hosting to test your track between yourself and your friend(s). Would it be possible to set up a date/time in which it would be possible to run some laps with ya for learning? I work 3rd now during the week, but weekends are free, along with from 9am till 11 am week days, all times being EST.

 

[KS95]

And can I join for fun? :tongue: Try to anyway, not sure how my BT will fair..