Automobilista 2 April 2022 Development Update

It was indeed improved, but as dirty air is now on what I'd say are realistic levels (slipstream, to me, seems maybe a little too weak, at least in the F-V10 Gen2), you can race in these cars as well as you could in the early 2000's, which means, barely. These years were famous for boring races without overtakes.

At least that was my experience when racing on Hockenheim 2001 online yesterday with several drivers on my pace; it was just impossible to get below the 0.5 second mark before the start of any straight, which was not enough for overtaking.

 

It's an old problem concerning simulating racing (instead of simulating physics):

"If the real series was boring with one car dominating and little passing happening, should the simulated race series still provide exciting racing with all cars having roughly equal performance?"

 

Well in this case it's about simulating physics. I can get behind the need to accurately represent the kind of racing that actually happened back then.

But, as I said in the feature request thread, we already are accustomed to make compromises on that so everyone can set up things to his liking: Tire wear can be turned off (or scaled), damage can be turned off (or scaled), fuel consumption can be turned off (or scaled) - so why not introduce an opportunity to turn off (or scale) slipstream and dirty air?

These two things affect racing excessively, so there would be a lot of benefits in making them adjustable, just as there is benefit in being able to adjust damage.

(And of course, there is benefit in being able to set cars to equal performance, but as you can at least always just use equal cars, the need seems not that great to me).

 

OK, @Alain Fry , just please explain to me how adding an option to be able to customize something is a disagreeable thing to ask for.

That's taking away nothing for nobody, but making the game better for everybody who wants to use it, and most likely not at a lot of development cost, as these things get changed by Reiza regularly anyway.

 

I'm not disagreeing with adding an option to reduce realism as much as I'm disagreeing that realism in a racing simulator, is a negative.

 

Realism itself is neither negative nor positive, because it depends on what you want to achieve. If the goal is to mimic the whole racing experience as closely as possible, you have to drive with damage, without restarts, with fuel and tire wear and with accurate amounts of dirty air. But of course, there are circumstances where going beyond reality can make an experience subjectively more rewarding, e.g. adding traction control to a car that doesn't actually have it.

Is having no damage realistic? Not at all. But maybe the goal is to hold a 5-lap no practice quick fun race in multiplayer with no skill requirements for entrance (which are circumstances VERY far removed from reality that happen often in sims). Some might not consider it beneficial to the experience if you can destroyed by a random guy from behind in T1 without any chance to catch up, so it's reasonable that it can be turned off.

Likewise, if they could turn off dirty air in real life, they'd do so in a heartbeat. In F1, they're spending millions of dollars to figure out how to minimize it as much as possible. In sim racing, this could be as much as a single click to the left.
That shouldn't be forced on anyone, of course, because some might just want to get as close to how it was as possible. But some might also want to race these cars in a way they weren't allowed to in real life because of unfortunate effects of the ways wings interact with air.

 

5 laps is not a race, its like someone calling 5 meters a jog. Unless you are on a 10km+ track like Nords, obviously.

This is one of the things that is not in Reiza's control that I really dislike: 99% of the MP lobbies are lame 5-7 lappers... go figure. And don't tell me its because "I've no time to do longer races", because the very same people are jumping from a 5 lap server to another, session after session after session.

Instead of 8 trashy 5 lapper sessions in a row, how about 1 quality 40 laps session? Probably because people leave the server after their first spin, I imagine.

 

Yes, but next thing would be “power-ups” like turbo-boost or rockets to eliminate opponents. If they could use those in real life some would do so in a heartbeat too…
Or options to alter gravity…

Funny mods but nothing most users would expect from a sim like AMS2.

Developers work hard to implement features like slipstream or dirty air and then they should use their time and money to implement options to turn it off?

 

I think with the increase in quality of MP (whenever that happens, while physics are already at great level on average) more and more serious racers will spend time on AMS2 and with that abandonment rates will go down logically.
But the experience must be good quality so that people who are investing quite some time in honing their racecraft get rewarded with a reliable and enjoyable experience. Until then, those players will choose iracing or ACC where they can have a higher chance of starting and ending the MP race as intended.

 

Again, depends on your definition of race. It's a pick up and have fun style of playing the game that can be good fun if the people playing it are somewhat able to get to grips with a car quickly. It's more about instant gratification and short-term pace.

In a longer race, you have to invest more time. You also have a high likelihood to be bored to tears, because there's simply no one around on your pace. On the other hand, you can actually manage this race, you can plan ahead, and it's actually a better trade-off if you invested, say, 30 minutes of qualifying before race start.

I personally like longer races far better as well, especially because it gives me time to get accustomed to a car/track combo before feeling the need to push flat-out, but sadly this is more of a league thing. Whenever I try to create lobbies with longer races, no one joins.

 

This is a completely out of proportion comparison, as slipstream and dirty air are actually things that already happen and not some arbitrary items added to the game.

The Brazilian Stock Car does not have rockets, or turbo boosts, or anything else, but I can race with that car just fine. Same for basically any other tin top, even the Cadillacs, which are relatively aerodynamically refined.

Now, unfortunately, I enjoy the driving behaviour of the formula cars more. If I want to be able to have a similarly good battle with these cars, like I can with any of the tin tops or the old formula cars, that's the same as giving them turbo boosts or removing gravity?

I'd argue that it's far more unrealistic to create no damage cars than a car whose wings don't get as affected by the car in front as real life. Damage is another feature where they put in a lot of work, why make that adjustable again?

But of course, there aren't any sims that allow for manipulations of dirty air currently, and somehow, things that are custom in sim racing are always argued as ok, but everything beyond that is just "making Mario Kart out of it", because less dirty air=turbo boost.

(If you wanna see it that way, real life F1 even features a turbo boost because they can't combat the dirty air any other way.)

 

Haha, yes you are right and by the way I have no problem with your anti-dirty-air-option, just think that they won’t program it soon because they have already promised so many other things and therefore have a lot to do already, but let’s see…

 

Even if Reiza could add a "no dirty air" option, there might well be a technical reason that makes it difficult to implement. The aero, chassis, drivetrain and tyre calculations are now so complex and interdependent that the removal of one element might have an undesirable effect on the physics model.

 

That's always very hard to judge for those not involved in the development, as myself. Could be that dirty air and slipstream are irreversibly linked, or that it influences the aerodynamics model of the cars in some way.

I think it doesn't, as there has been talk about overhauling the dirty air model of the formula cars, which suggests it's an independent thing, but I know as much as most, which is nothing.

 

Well, at least you have asked for it in the Feature Request thread. Keep your fingers crossed.

 

This link is very likely. The examples you've given are (likely) systems that are more stand alone parts of the engine.
Damage is its own thing, so are driving aids/electronics.

Since aero is (again likely) way more interlinked in the fundamental physics of the car behaviour, such a setting is more difficult to implement, without introducing weird behaviour.

I personally think this time/effort should be spent on other issues (e.g. the race dynamics required for the next racing USA pack).

Quick edit:
Fixing these other issues, might also fix the issue already, since they add more realistic race scenarios, which offer more overtaking opportunities.

 

I add that victims of t1 incidents should be given bullet bills to make up the time lost

 

But we know what Reiza want to achieve, cause it says so on the box; an advanced and diverse racing simulator. So, realism for AMS2, is a positive.
It's a fair point to say the universal option to turn of damage isn't realistic, but it's not in the same category as your request.

You would like Reiza to (give the option to) reduce realism for the F1 cars because it's difficult to overtake in them. But where does that stop?
Should there also be a grip multiplier to please someone who doesn't like the Caterhams sliding around?
Should there be a power multiplier to please someone who doesn't like how slow the Uno's accelerate?

I would firmly say no, as it strays from what AMS2 tries to be at it's core. Realistic.

 

Exactly there. Your "blurring the line" argument does not work, because the very important realism line you say this would blur is actually not blurred at all. You say it's a racing simulator, but then proceed to give examples how to influence the fundamental driving behaviour of the cars.

In short: You can do that, it's called tuning, and it's done in real life. But no, it's not desirable to have sliders for this, because these cars would then become different cars. Their fundamental characteristics would be altered. But if you don't like a car, you can just drive another car.

But that's the interesting thing here, isn't it: This is a case where it's actually possible to like everything a car does. Only once it interacts with a car in front - so in a situation that's not even something the car on its own can do - it becomes a bit of a chore.

If you make dirty air something that can be adjusted, you don't alter the fundamental driving behaviour of the car. You don't add anything. You just give the user an option to reduce the effect of an outside source that affects car behaviour in an undesirable way. And that is the fundamental difference: Not adding anything to the car that isn't there, or changing what it does, just adjusting unwanted reactions to influences from the outside.

Just like, when you drive your car at speed, it needs a lot of fuel, but you can choose you don't want that. Or when you drive your cars in walls, your car might react by being broken, but you can choose you don't want that. Or you can choose you want it far more than it actually happens.

Or when you drive a car in dirty air, and your car has wings that are normally extremely affected by that, but you should be able to choose you don't want that.

This is a simulator, yes, but it's also a game. And if there are things in real life that prevent or at least make it more difficult to have fun in certain scenarios, there's really no reason (except of course time and resources, which are always an important thing in game development) to just keep it that way. The game itself knows that: This is, for example, why we have a "reset to pits" button: Because slowly driving back to the pits on your own is obnoxious, even if it's the realistic thing to do.

Oh, and by the way, this fundamentally realistic to the core game also features a "reset car" button that can be used in races to port yourself back to the track after a spin. Now that is something that's actually problematic in terms of realism, because that can't even be forced off and breaks basically every law of physics in real life and in the game.

I've never heard complaints about how that fundamentally calls into question AMS2's realism, strangely. The status quo is often judged as non-problematic, but something unusual and new is difficult to get people to be for.

 

I see where you are coming from with the dirty air toggle as a way to turn formula classes into perfect world scenarios. The issue isn't necessarily the physics side of things. However increasing options to tailor the game for each player is unsustainable. There are already likely some people who would like to have mechanical damage without clutch damage. At some point there are so many options that it becomes annoying to set up gameplay preferences. Not to mention how fragmented MP lobbies might become if some of them had dirty air and some of them didn't.

At the end of the day dirty air is just one of the variables that could be removed or changed optionally to improve close racing. So the question really is if we'd want to complicate and fragment the game with a variety of such options.