Let's talk about the rain 1.6

For me there's two issues

• Way too much grip in light rain. I just finished a 25 minute LFM race in light rain and the grip with slicks was as good as in the dry, I was only like 0.5 off my pb on a soaked visually very wet looking track
• No puddles! Used to be the coolest part of driving in the rain, was figuring out the best line as puddles get worse and being very careful when going through them to minimise aqua-planing. This great aspect of gameplay is now totally gone

I really hope Reiza know about this, AMS2 used to have my favourite rain implementation, which is now ruined. There's no need to reinvent the wheel, please just bring back 1.5 rain Reiza!

 

My comments still apply to the latest update. Haven't seen any puddles and the race I mentioned with dry grip in light rain was also post update.

 

Check my video posted in the first page, personally like I said I'd still like to see some more standing water but most modern tracks wont see that much puddle formation irl.
Completely agree with the slick tyre on a dry track, although with the light rain scenario there's also an element of the visuals not accurately showing how wet the track is, on a light rain scenario there's 0 spray comming from the back of the car, so it really isn't that wet.

 

Puddles only form during a Thunderstorm. Even if it rains for 24 hours straight, they won’t appear under normal rain conditions. I think this is quite inaccurate, but that’s how rain works in AMS2 because it’s based on 1-hour slots rather than a dynamic system.

 

Which Circuit?

 

All

 

Have you driven all tracks and layouts? Seems odd that not one would have had puddles

 

I’ve driven on several tracks, and they all behave the same way.

 

i Dont report it in the bugreporting because is not a bug, it just like AMS2 work.
I’d like to ask Renato about the future plans for rain behavior. Do they intend to improve it at some point? Will they make wet curbs more realistic, add more dynamic elements, etc.?

 

This is just my opinion, but I do not like the way the rain looks on the windshield.
As an example, if you watch the video @Inkta posted (in cockpit view at the start), the water trails are instantly visible, and they don't change.
Also, if you have the game set for light rain, you don't need to turn on the wipers, as after a couple of seconds, the windshield miraculously clears by itself; then reappears before disappearing again.
I hadn't driven AC in a long time, but yesterday I gave it a go again, and I'd forgotten how good PURE looked for the rain.

 

I really like AMS2 so far, but I wish the wet conditions were improved. For me, it's the game's biggest flaw. It's often completely unrealistic, especially in heavy rain. It feels like driving a Fiat Panda with wooden tires, even on rain tires. Thanks for everything else, Reiza

 

One of the things that I found that helps that out a lot is to NOT accelerate the weather conditions.

The way AMS2 works, is each weather slot is a hour. So when you go to 2x speed, that becomes 30 minutes, and so on. The way the game is programmed, It will dump an entire storms worth of water onto the track inside of whatever that time slot is.

So you can literally go from a completely dry track to a monsoon with massive puddles in a matter of seconds if you have the weather acceleration turned up too high. Because it's literally simulating an hour's worth of rainfall in a matter of minutes or seconds, and that can easily overwhelm the tires and make them drive like crap.

Same thing with the track drying. Anything above 2x you won't see a drying line, or at least you won't see it for long, and that again can wreak havoc on the tires.

When you run the weather simulation at a more realistic pace, you will find it is much more gradual and grainal and you'll avoid that feeling of "wooden tires" as you called it.

 

I am not so sure about that. We often use four weather slots in a one hour race. We set weather progression to "adopted to race length" (or whatever it is called in the English version). So the weather roughly changes every 15 minutes and to me it all looks pretty realistic. I don´t feel like e.g. the amount of rain of an hour pours down within 15 minutes. Light rain is exactly that: light rain. Maybe worth a try?

 

Yes, okay, I've noticed the issue with accelerated conditions, but I'm mainly referring to the fact that even in wet conditions right from the start and with rain tires, the grip is excessively poor. I speak from experience, having driven on the track in these conditions, and with the right tires, it doesn't feel like ice. I'd just like a little more grip.

 

With these, which are semi-slicks for mixed wet conditions on high-performance road cars and in rainy conditions, I assure you, you won't have to struggle as much as you do with AMS2. Imagine with 100% rain racing tires. That said, it was just my opinion as an amateur trackday enthusiast. I imagine simulating both dry and wet conditions well isn't easy; in fact, other games are no exception.

 

From my experience, this used to be how it worked, but I think Reiza fixed it in one of the big updates a few months ago. Earlier today I had a race that went from cloudy to sudden heavy rain and, after a brief light drizzle in the transition, when the rain picked up, it took something like 3 or 4 laps (GT3 at Bathurst, so 2 minutes each lap) for the track to get properly soaked, pretty much the time I would expect in real life based on the conditions I faced from the car, and that was on 5x acceleration.

Specifically at the start of races, I think that the issue might be related to the track state options - we only have two settings: "damp", which is very little water on track, not enough for a full wet tyre, but already enough for the slicks to not work, so just terrible for classes like GT3 for example which don't have inters; and "wet", which is absolutely soaked, and already a very extreme condition. I feel like the current "wet" option should be renamed to something like "soaked" and we need another option, about halfway between these two, called "wet".
But I don't feel like the wet weather driving in general lacks grip - in the same GT3 Bathurst race I didn't struggle too much to control the car if I was cautious enough - obviously that car has ABS and TC, but I don't remember having a race where my car was undrivable in the wet. Frequently the AI is very fast, especially in transitions, but I feel like it's more of an issue with them being too fast (not properly affected by the track state and tyre temps) than me being too slow.

 

Honestly, rain is more of a gimmick than a meaningful simulation in any simulation. Reiza has been working on tire physics for seven years, but aquaplaning is supposed to be perfected in one fell swoop? That's just a few parameter changes here and there. And I'll skip the night driving in VR. There are only a handful of tracks that offer anything worthwhile in the dark. I just drive at the Gold Standard setting, and everything is silky smooth.
It's more about ego and having to crank the sliders all the way up than it is a game-changer. The real game-changer with the Madness Engine only comes when you leave 30% headroom.

 

Rain definitely is a gimmick in AMS2 since the puddles have been completely removed a long time ago and those that are visible are only a fake texture.