Too bad the car body got removed from the newest OB, so I have to go ““redesign”” that model eventually… 
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.
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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.
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Next unforseen delay:
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.
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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
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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.
More delays and Coming Soon™ updates
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.
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Finally
I’m back
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.
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sorry for the holdup. Two things:
- 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.
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There should be a camera fixture, or in beam you can select “relative” camera and move that around with the keys you’ve set up
If you need an actual camera fixture, you may use the Export Camera Positioners (which are found in the Misc. Fixtures section of the fixtures tab):
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.
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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.
But that relative camera isn’t permanent. I have to jump in and out of sessions and views multiple times which makes doing this an even bigger PITA
Sounds less painful than doing things manually with jbeam, i think. Its what i do for challenges and it works fine usually, even with as many as 68 cars.
wait, disregard my previous question LOL I’m not sure if I was hallucinating or whether the UI got fixed with the most recent patch but the camera offset for Automation exports is back.
As I have to move the engine to achieve the correct weight balance on each car, adjusting this offset and saving it as a tune is the surest way of all.
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