The BRC is dead... [NEW CHALLENGE DISCUSSION]

[quote=“NormanVauxhall”]

Can be also taken into acount that powerfull and stressful car to drive could increase the fatigue of the driver and tire him/her quicker? So on the long run the performance of the driver too will be reduced a bit.[/quote]

I guess it’d be easier to calculate the fatigue of the driver based on the tameness of the car, rather than on its power.

so, in case there wasn’t already enough YES in this thread…

YESSS! :smiley:

Based Der Bayer is BASED! We shall see a new era of competitions rise!?

I say yes. :exclamation:

The driver will make more errors with more difficult to drive cars, yes. I haven’t thought about how that effect is changed over time. We’ll see, I’ll put it on my nice-to-have list. Thanks for the suggestion :slight_smile:

Drafting already works, single multiple car crashes are planned. The effects of these crashes will be reduced performance (which can be fixed in pits, hopefully the driver will decide to go there when it’s worth it but not one lap before finish) or retirement, depending on the severity of the crash. Yellow flags and safety cars are definitely a must and planned, that shouldn’t be too hard to do.

Yes, I know, because I prototyped it. :slight_smile: And I know it has some quirks which should be fixed at some point. I’ll write you a PM on how the track drawing works later today.

All hail Lord Der Bayer!

I can definitely say that I will work my butt off in order to get an entry in for this. One quick question (as it is the BRC): will teams be allowed? I only thought of that recently and realised that nobody has asked that question in ages. Should hopefully add another interesting aspect to this

If teams are allowed, if anybody wants to join me feel free to let me know, but I will say now that I am not the best when it comes to making a race car (just good at reviewing them)

[size=60]Pleb’s philosophy seems far more interesting than Descartes, Nietzsche and others that I am made to study here. Must be implemented into education system.[/size]

I would say it’s the usual one car per participant rule. I don’t care where you got your car from, so using the same cars is allowed. If you can specify a teammate you don’t want to fight with? Should be possible, but that’s not high priority.

What are the rules/restrictions to enter this race? I didn’t notice any in the OP and might have overlooked them in the other pages

This will address my two major frustrations with current Automation community challenges.

  1. Fuel consumption is not a factor.
  2. Reliability is not a factor, provided you meet an arbitrary minimum.

The inevitable result is that the best way to perform well in an Automation community challenge is to set your air-fuel ratio as low as it will go, then run as much boost as you can while meeting reliability specifications. Adding fuel consumption and reliability to the mix adds more challenge - you can have high power, low fuel burn, good reliability, but not all at once. In endurance racing you need all three.

With that said, is it possible to use the specific fuel efficiency data produced in the Engine Designer (the data must exist in a readable form somewhere, given that it’s used to draw the fuel consumption graph) to simulate fuel burn by tracking it against engine RPMs during the race? If not, I suppose it would be possible to just take the specific fuel efficiency stat and work from there, but I am not sure how accurate this would be for engines with weird fuel efficiency curves (particularly those running very high boost).

Regarding tire wear - could you use the tire quality slider value as an ersatz “soft vs hard” slider? Positive values being a soft compound - better grip but lower lifespan in the simulation, and negative values the inverse.

Combine all this with the 24 Hours of Le Mans rules on pit stops (crews may not refuel while performing any other work on the vehicle) and reducing the need to make pit stops suddenly becomes very important.

Just as an example, an imaginary pit stop:
Pit lane transit: 34 seconds (actual time on Mt. Panorama pit lane)
Refuel: 28 seconds from a near-empty tank (4l/s into a 120 liter fuel cell)
Tires: 5 seconds, 12-15 if rules do not allow sufficient crew members to change all four tires at once

Even assuming tires and fuel are allowed to be done simultaneously, a full-fuel pit stop will take over a minute. A gas-guzzling car that maximizes power above all else will no longer be a competitive entry, and that’s the way it should be.

It would be nice to run “teams” of a pair of the same car entered by the same player, if number of entries allows. Nobody likes being denied a podium because they ran over a conrod from somebody else’s engine.

I think this is more a “information” post to collect opinions and suggestion while DerBayer is refining the program.


Yes, I’m doing exactly that.

I think I will use the different tyre compounds Automation already offers instead of the quality sliders. Tyres are a very important balancing factor and I will probably make a rule to use only 0 quality and a maximum tyre width / minimum profile. This is best for close competitions. And it is like if there was only one tyre supplier for the racing series.

A tyre wearing, reliability (for example, if the car had a average reliability of 3, once the car makes 300km, the car stops.

The thing is, that stat is average reliability.

Let say I made 5 cars with 5 reliability.

Car one might fail at 400km, car 2 at 600km, car 3 at 100, car 4 at 900 and car 5 at 500, and it would still be true.

Also, I thought MTBF was reliability x 1000km.

But anyway, if reliability is taken into account, there should be a random aspect to it.

How did I miss this topic?! THIS IS ABSOLUTELY AMAZING MARTIN!
Keep up the good work!

At first I was lamenting the demise of the Car Tycoon Challenge, but after looking at this…Wow! Thanks for taking the time to create this new challenge!

I noticed in the UI you have columns for speed and fuel. Will we be able to choose between different units (so mph vs kph, and gallons vs liters)?

[quote=“trackpaduser”]The thing is, that stat is average reliability.

Let say I made 5 cars with 5 reliability.

Car one might fail at 400km, car 2 at 600km, car 3 at 100, car 4 at 900 and car 5 at 500, and it would still be true.

Also, I thought MTBF was reliability x 1000km.

But anyway, if reliability is taken into account, there should be a random aspect to it.[/quote]

Yes, reliability will have a random aspect, but the average reliability will be a lot smaller than MTBF because this is racing, not cruising.

What do you mean with “choose”? There will be only videos, so you cannot choose actively. I cannot give the Matlab programs away or convert it to any other language and give the program away then because it contains core code from the game.

I don’t know how much data I will show when I’m done. I would like to show a lot more, but I already have not enough space for that, so I will never show the same thing in two different units at the same time. And if I show something, it will be metric, sorry.

I cannot make 2 videos with the same race showing different units either because of all the randomness. No race is the same.

Maybe I will move away from showing a lot of data anyway. Timing without sector times could maybe be enough.

Fuel right now is shown in kilograms. Liters wouldn’t be hard of course, but kg is the usual unit in motorsport.

The CTC will be continued soon.

I will admit… I just squee’d…

@Der Bayer - OK, I think that’s where the confusion set in… I didn’t realize these would be videos. Thanks for clarifying!

Metric only is fine. I’ll probably be too busy watching the action to notice the numbers anyway. :wink: I was just curious.

[quote=“VicVictory”]

I will admit… I just squee’d…[/quote]

Same here… :laughing: …and thanks Der Bayer! Looking for to that as well.

I think running teams of one, two or even three of the same or different cars from the same company should be allowed if they pass a qualifying round. That way we have only the best cars on the track to have an awesome race. Then if there is one company whose car never qualifies, they can team up with another company.
Also if we run multiple cars from the same company I think it’s be really cool if we have separate classes. One class for all out race cars and another for race versions of our street cars (lets say to meet that requirement the street version must be displayed on our Automationhub page??)