one comment I will make is that with the change in Beam export tyre model, this test is demonstrating that what matters most is 1) the profile 2) the ratio between front and rear widths. With what I’ve learnt from this test, I made a 1250kg 450hp mule (the maximum power and power to weight ratio) car which was only allowed 235 on the rear (and that was with 2 penalty points)… and with 215 on the front it controls just as well if not better than a lot of the current entries with much much wider tyres. It was also the fastest overall by a huge margin. I also made a 1600kg entry which was allowed 285 on the rear, and well, the corner speeds weren’t any faster but it was slower to accelerate due to being heavier. All of this on 40 profile tyres front and rear.
I’ll put in a much more detailed commentary later, but while this is a very incomplete physics model, there are some relevant aspects to the arguments about how much tyre one really needs in real life track and performance driving. I am still debating whether I need to go full send and invest in widebody and get up to 295-305 when I big power the Civic (which will happen next year), or should I keep it on 265 square for lighter response and better handling. The current tyres can handle the current power no problem… that said this is also FWD so that’s another consideration altogether.
Okay so aside from the unfortunate issue with Riley’s car in the 00s, we were going quite ok with the meshes exporting and all that. But the 90s yielded some interesting problems:
@Riley 's car has some, uh, parts that generate meshes where they shouldn’t. I hope this doesn’t cause me to crash into stuff. Also that lip for some reason generating a node box far lower than it should is going to cause braking issues. This is all part of testing, of course, so I’ll report on that in detail when I get to it.
@NormanVauxhall 's car generates a mesh that’s lower than the car itself. I think this is a known issue with that body. It doesn’t stop driving normally but on bumps, steep elevation changes and heavy braking there may be some sparking.
@Xepy this is why I said don’t go ham on the interior. Each interior fixture counts for a surprising amount of weight and so this is what happens when I try to get the weight to spec (kerb weight plus 80kg driver). As a result the minimum weight the car stays intact is at 1130kg which is equivalent to a 50kg penalty, so, let’s say, me and my wife riding passenger for this particular test.
Actually you know what, you might as well! I won’t be getting to drive it for several hours yet.
EDIT: so Xepy did send me an interiorless version and the weight didn’t exactly change much at all. Maybe 6kg at most. I’ll take that 6kg but still, clearly my original impression was a bit wrong. Maybe this body is just heavy in general because it’s node dense?
Next update: thanks to having parental leave, I’ve managed to squeeze in the rest of the driving of the 90s at Bathurst, so can declare testing at Bathurst is complete.
Again photos not reflect of vehicle performance, but I had to make a bit of a joke because somebody submitted a Soviet New York Taxi that looks like it has no business being at today’s test
I’m going to make some graphs and charts and hopefully string together a video or something and that’ll probably take me a week or so. As to when I can get the other 2 segments of testing done, I honestly don’t know because I’ll be back at work by then. But at least the exports are all taken care of and I’m aware that the tyre model appears to have changed again with the new Ellisbury update, but nonetheless we should get some relevant info.
Thankfully, aesthetics is not a judging criterion here, but it could redeem itself if it drives well enough in your hands.
As for my entries, I will most likely revisit them to account for the changes implemented in 4.3, now that I am currently running the open beta instead of the 4.2 stable release.
The body in question is a holdover from the Kee days, and suffered from a lack of sizes and body styles. Its replacement in 4.3, the '87 Boat, is decidedly smoother, and is available in a far greater number of sizes and body styles compared to its predecessor.
On the subject of 4.3, with weight distribution calculations the way they currently are, all cars now have their engines mounted further forward than before, which makes FR cars more understeery than they had been in 4.2. As such, had FM4 been held in 4.3, every entrant would have had to set the weight distribution as far to the rear as the game could have allowed just to get anywhere near the 50/50 figure claimed for many real-world FR performance cars.
Sorry about the delays everyone! I compiled the data and footage for the 90s cars, then my parental leave finished and I went back to work so now my life is work, look after baby, sleep (sometimes).
I’m on call this week and next week will be the absolute peak of the baby’s first “I don’t know how to sleep so I will scream at you for most of the afternoon” phase while his figurative BIOS boots up, so hopefully that dies down in another 2 weeks, we’ll catch a break and I can resume.
Once again apologies. This time I’m quite embarrassed to admit that I haven’t been able to get the replay footage substantiating my assessments recorded. Why? Because I ran out of PC hard drive space
I have a 4TB SSD on the way though so this should be solved in a few days. Then I’ll resume the process of compiling the footage and graphs and comments from the Track round.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone! I don’t normally do gifts (that’s what sales are for, ho ho ho), but since for the first time since I started working I actually had an entire week off, this means that I actually got enough time to make some meaningful progress on this (already obsolete) challenge!
As mentioned I’ve finished driving all the cars on Bathurst. This was the most important of the tests, followed by the mountain track for calibration to see if lighter vehicles had less of a disadvantage there despite the grip to weight limitations. Some initial notes:
The sports tyre in the previous version was more akin to a semi-slick or even a super 200TW kinda semi slick. This is evidenced by the raw numbers on the skidpan: on stock sport tyres the FD RX-7 Spirit R was good for some 0.96g or so on small circle. The Automation version, and the Beam version both achieved 1.12g. For comparison, my 2020 Civic gets 1.06g on stock sport tyres. Use proper track tyres that are somewhat wider and it’ll do over 1.2g.
The mule cars are by no means optimised at all, they are simply replicas of real world cars that had some kind of legendary status in this class and are more of a benchmark
There will be two general analyses of the stats: one will be the (semi-objective, semi-subjective) spider plot of characteristics: speed, braking, responsiveness and stability. As you can imagine these are conceptually binary in a manner of speaking so the broader the range you have on the spider plot axes the better. But the other will be the entirely subjective “fun factor”. Often this will correlate to the area covered by the spider plot, but not always and it’s in the differences that perhaps the pace notes will be helpful.
My question to you all is: I still haven’t recorded the videos yet because that’s the most time consuming part. Should I:
Release the graphs and notes first and upload the videos when I get to it
Release the graphs and the notes with the videos, but by the decade
Release the graphs, notes and video all together only when completely done
I’ve found sports tires to be nerfed in 4.3, which makes semi-slicks more viable for extreme high-performance road car builds. Moreover, as of the latest 4.3 update, race tires of various types are now available - but those aren’t road legal, and are even more expensive than semi-slick road tires.
Almost had a heart attack. I went to open Beam to start recording replays and something in my install’s gone awry, throwing me a weird fatal lua error and refusing to load vehicles. So I backed up the mod and replay folder and am doing a clean reinstall. Unfortunately I misplaced the backup folder and it got sent to the shadow realm when I uninstalled, and I temporarily feared that I had rendered the replay files all unusable, which would have rendered this challenge unrecoverable because Automation has since been updated
Fortunately I’ve located the files. I do hope they still work after this fresh install though otherwise this will join the very large pile of failed challenges and I will be very sorry to all of you for it.
EDIT: okay so there’s good news and bad news.
Good news: the cars survived the update as they should.
Bad news: the replay files did not. I’ll have to do the driving over from scratch which is very unfortunate as it’s going to take a while. This time around I’ll actually save the footage as I go as opposed to assume that it’ll be accessible from .rpl file.
Lots of teething issues to go through, including having to fix the vehicle weights and the camera positions from scratch and getting used to the changes in Beam after 9 months away. Also my G27 shifter did not survive its 14th year of hard service and refuses to stay in gear so I now have to shift with the paddles and clutch which is completely bonkers especially considering I actually shift faster in real life than the game (lots of synchro abuse inbound). The other issue is that my ancient GPU bottleneck (a 1060 lol) is on its last legs so the videos are not gonna be pretty. They’re just gonna have some quick driving in them plus commentary.
All the mods seem to work. They seem to be unchanged. My promise is that I will redo all the runs and will only settle when my laptime is as good as or better than the original runs. It’ll take me some time because I only have a short window on some late evenings but it’s enough.
Got informed by my professional governing body that I needed to submit this project I’d been sitting on and it’s currently burning an absolute hole in all of my free time so I have to finish that first
Also how the hell do you change the camera position? Last year I could just move everything in the Advanced Tuning section but for the life of me I can’t find it since the update. Many of these cars export with really janky camera placement and that’s severely getting in the way.
While the Driver Cam Export Positioner variant is meant to be placed at eye level on the driver’s side, the Bonnet Cam Export Positioner variant should be placed on the bonnet, just ahead of the base of the windscreen on the centerline. Just make sure to set their material to transparent once you’re ready to export your car.
This is what i was referring to, yes. I dont ever place bonnet cam on the actual bonnet, i place it on the roof for a sort of “roof cam” like in gran turismo.
Hm, I don’t want to/am not sure I can do that because the export may either 1) be broken 2) differ quite markedly from the originals which is what I was aiming to test. But I do need a fixed camera position. I guess worst comes to worst I’ll have to see if the coordinates are in the .jbeam file like they used to be but that’s going to be a PITA.
Once again, you can use relative camera to place camera position while in beamng with the keys you have set up, meaning you dont have to do anything with jbeam or anything like that.
