Hello everyone, recently i purchased this amazing game and i must say im having lots of fun!
Now i have a couple of qustions.
First, more a question to the developers, what level of realism this game claims to provide? like rFactor \ Live for Speed or more like DiRT and F1 2012? and how it is close to reality?
There is one rule i know which is significant between all the engine specs (real life) and that is the relationship between torque, hp and rpm. for example, the more torque, the less hp and the less rpm the engine achieves its maximum torque and hp for the same capacity and the opposite.
For another example i know that sometimes manufacturers tune an existing engine to produce less hp for more torque and more power at low rpm’s to suit larger vehicles.
Another example is ferrari which tune their engines to produce low torque but high hp at high rpm’s
And i know that more torque should mean more hp but im talking about the relationship between them on the same engine capacity.
Now what i find very hard in automation is controlling this relationship, its very easy to make high power but revy engine, but when i wanna make an economical (not necessarily the most fuel efficiant) engine that gets his peak power at around 5000 - 5500 rpm i discover that most of the time i need to sacrifice a big amount of power which makes the engine not sensible. I noticed that many parameters affecting it, so i will be happy if someone can enlight me on this subject
A thing that confuses me is the compression ratio, i know what it means and what its direct implications but most of the time i find it easier to make more power and better fuel efficiency from lower ratio’s cause then i can set more advanced ignition, lower cam profile (good for low rpm’s) and more economical air \ fuel ratio, and it seems to me that the main thing it does is rising the RON sky high, which makes it looks impossible to replicate what mazda call “skyactive” engine that runs on 95 octane
Heyya! Glad you are enjoying the little there is of this game so far
The level of realism we aim for in the engine designer is ~95% accuracy. That would mean that if you build an engine in Automation to its real-life specs, invest some time in tweaking our more arbitrary stats like cam profile, timings and fuel mixture, then you should get “pretty close” to the real thing. Turbos are not quite that close to reality yet, but hopefully will be once we add the other forced induction methods and revamp that system.
Ahh, the topic of power vs. torque. Definitely read this thread: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1719 and the article linked in it. There is so much nonsense out there about it, even in car related press, that it can be highly confusing.
We try and be as realistic as possible, although we do simplify some concepts such as just getting you to set how rich the fuel mixture is on average instead of doing a full fueling map or anything.
As power = Torque X RPM, you’re always going to lose a lot of power by building a low RPM engine as you’re only going to have the same or less torque but a lot less RPM, thus a lot less power.
I just built a 2013 2.0ltr test engine now to see what I could work out for you, and got 228nm @ 3700rpm (with over 200nm from 2000rpm!), which is plenty torquey, and 115kw @ 5500rpm, which is a fair amount of power for such low RPM. To get that I built a DOHC 2.0ltr I4 with Direct Injection at +4 quality, 11.8:1 compression, a cam profile of 8 for the low cam, dual VVT and a cam profile of 51 for the VVT high cam, fuel mixture 12.5:1, Ignition timing 79. Exhaust setup was tubular headers, 1.75" exhaust, high flow cat, 1 reverse flow and one straight through muffler. That’s about 10% less torque per liter than the most torquey per liter engine ever built (458 Italia) and it does it all at just below 4000rpm.
That same engine with a better exhaust and wilder cams will make 145kw @ 7400rpm, whist still having nearly 200nm at 2000rpm, which is phenomenally high. (peak is 227nm @ 5200rpm)
Just as in real life, you can get away with a lot of compression (13:1+) with the aid of a really high quality direct injection system, smaller bore and better exhaust help, as well as optimizing fuel and timing of course.
