Following up on a fantastic interview with @SimRacing604 over at the the Race Department, @Renato Simioni graciously spent a couple of hours with the Boltcast27 allowing us to dig a bit deeper into many interesting subjects. If you are interested in sim racing development and not just a sneak peak, but a full blown guided tour of the inner workings of AMS2, we did our best to put this together for you. Enjoy!
TL;DW; Renato's house doubles as a Brazilian steakhouse. Edit: it's a bit too much for me to try to summarise now, but I'm sure me and a bunch of others will refer to info nuggets from Renato in later discussions .
As far as I remember this was the best interview with a sim racing dev that I've ever heard. So many little golden nuggets of information about the developing process not just of AMS2 but racing sims in general.
A partial summary of what Renato said about car physics @Marius H : Madness provided a partially overlapping platform with the ISI engine / rFactor1 that they were used to building cars for Tire model and driveline are completely new, but for example suspension and chassis are familiar They could not have gone with any engine that didn't provide overlap with the ISI engine they were so familiar with AMS1 was not perfect even in the final version: when importing cars from AMS1 to AMS2, they found new clear issues in the AMS1 cars that they didn't know about before After they've tweaked a car for months and after many revisions, the differences in the car file comparing original and current revision are very minimal Sometimes small things have a huge impact on how the car drives: for example changing the center of gravity by a few millimeters can be impactful At one point they learned that the inherited way of building tires and drivelines was too simplistic: they started doing more bespoke components for different cars In the new driveline system you have bearing variables as well and at one point they realised that the inherited ones were not good enough In at least one case they thought that a bouncy car was due to a suspension flaw, but in fact it was the flexible tire collapsing and causing the suspension to bottom out often as a consequence of that On the other hand Porsches had a bug in the helper spring model that caused it to work in reverse which caused them to be mega bouncy There are still improvements to come, but Reiza is aware that the continuous improvements also hurt our experience so the decision to keep changing some cars is not done lightly They aim to release a good batch of physics improvements around November similar to the famous 1.2 release At the end of the year they see themselves as being with physics where they hoped to be already earlier this year
@Renato Simioni Kudos for the great open and extremely informative interview. Really enjoyed what you had to say and I'm glad you were allowed to speak without much interruption. The story about the real Brazilian Stock Car racers with Race sim experience and vastly varying opinion on accuracy of the "Game stock Car" physics is spot on! There is still subjectivity to the feeling of "games" where not all physical, aural, aromatic stimuli are represented and we all rely on these things in the real world to varying degrees sub consciously. The necessity of any of them effect us all in different ways to interpreting the world around us. Reducing any of them will have varying effects for different people. Look forward to more in depth "interviews" like this where you are allowed to speak openly and freely without too much targeted prompting or directing from the interviewer. Excellent. can't say enough about how great and refreshing this was.
Grateful to @steelreserv and @oez for this interview. It humanized Reiza and hearing about their development process helped me understand why some cars were “1 step forward, 2 steps back” at times. I have a much greater appreciation for the Reiza team and AMS2 now. These interviews with Renato could go a long way to reshaping the narrative in the community. @Renato Simioni should do this monthly!