Assetto Corsa Competizione - Generic discussion

( http://esport.akinformatica.it/ )

So where to start.. Not easy to put this weekend into words, writing it down seems like some kind of filter removing the actual sensation(s).
(Most pictures are shamelessly stolen from @zelimper - great shots mate)

Of course the "weekend" started weeks ago for us, it wasn't planned long way so we had very little time to actually work on what is needed for an competition event like this, while still respecting the schedule to the actual Early Access version. My major problem here was that the so called "online services" (which include the leaderboard and ratings) are primarily designed to work at home, where the permanent identity is given by the steam environment. But during the events, basically every session needs it's own identity (and even worse: needs on-the-fly input of names for the leaderboards), so we had to invent a few sidesteps here, that obviously are hard to test in a comparable way.

Thursday at 10am we opened the gates for public access, and people would start flooding to our 3 simulators. During the first hours we had a tough time to balance receiving feedback, watching people and numbers, while learning about possible technical issues in preparation of the start of the hotlap contest starting friday morning. And (of course) we found issues, so in between some were solved by just handling them operationally, for a quite severe backend server problem we even exchanged code files, fixes and binaries via discord - pretty fun action actually. Thanks to @6S.Manu we had a really necessary patch done and deployed by thursday noon - thanks again to our amazing back office. Great teamwork during the whole event.

Starting the contest at friday was lots of pressure and last-minute actions up front, but I really was starting to love it. At this point I also started to realize the kind of magic the whole scenery and event is developing during this huge 24h event. You need to have seen this in your life, it's unbelievable. Back to the contest, I was slightly worried that our location inside the paddock area (which requires an extra ticket) could result in too few people around at some point. Didn't ever happen, not even during the start of the actual race. To see how long the queue is, you needed to get outside most of the time:


It was set up in a way that you queue up (which sadly took serious time), then you have 6 minutes (basically 2 laps + 1 min spare time) in the Huracan and nail 2 laps in quite good and dry conditions in the hotlap game mode - which means the track is static and the car's state (incl. tyres and brakes) is reset on the finish line, in order to have every lap 100% comparable. We also had a category for real drivers (FIA list or attending to any event in the 24h) and developers, which were expressed by green and blue markers and ofc. excluded from the actual contest.

However, the combo is quite tricky, even the aliens were pointing this out. No way to flatout Eau Rouge / Raidillon (except you're Mirko Bortolotti), Stavelot (T16) needs a very tricky lift, Blanchimont needs insane precision. We also had tight track limits, so most of the laps haven't been valid at all. I've often heared that "GT3 cars are so boring and easy to drive" before, but somehow nobody mentioned this after actually driving it.

During friday, we had quite many of the real drivers coming by and giving feedback, as they weren't as busy then. Especially amazing David Perel (who won the Pro/Am cup in the #333) gave us much time again, testing the improvements we made due to his feedback in Misano, and giving us a walkthrough regarding the track details right on the state of this weekend. But many others joined us, @Aristotelis had a full-time job to cover them and collect all the information and feedback.



Very remarkable was Mirko Bortolotti, who was cursing a lot (maybe Aris covers this more in detail), but did a terrific job at actual driving. Everybody (I mean people like Aristotelis and Enzo Bonito) were 100% sure you cannot flatout Eau Rouge in this car/setup/condition, but Mirko somehow did it - quite messy, risky and most probably slower, but I was highly impressed. Despite the fact that he was cursing a lot and his team told him he had to get out now, he rejected to leave (also commanded his teammate Christian Engelhart to sit down) for 3 or 4 more sessions.

Spoiler: Personal side story: My first 4 lines with Mirko

Me: "blabla" (shortly explaining the scenario)
Mirko: "You're german, right?"
Me: "So obvious?"
Mirko: "Ja!"

Actually almost all of the drivers wouldn't leave us on friday without having his name on the #1 rank in the driver category. Guys are so competitive
Romain Monti (winning the Silver Cup for Ombra) was there with his team mates early on friday, but sneaked in mutliple times again - even on saturday, until he was at least the #1 in the "real driver" category.


Starting friday afternoon/evening, the leaderboard competition started to become serious, when @Hany joined us while Enzo Bonito and Kamil Franczak started to really attack low 2:18s laptimes.


One of the highlights was the SRO press conference at friday 16:30 - first the announcement of a new GT2 series (yay!) and next years schedules, then our @Licensing Master on air releasing the trailer, EA date and roadmap. So epic!


(GT2 is starting at 26:23, ACC at 45:36)

After very tough thursday/friday for me, saturday started to become highly enjoyable. Systems were 100% working, roadmap was public, so I could roam around and talk a lot while enjoying the ongoing battle between the 3 top aliens. I've met so many incredible people there, both drivers, famous aliens and more or less "normal" simracers, what a day. Everybody is friendly, enthusiastic, helpful both in positive and negative critism (yes, looking at you, dear forum "community").

Towards the end of our competition we had Enzo on top with an incredibly fast 2:17.352, Kamil on 2nd with a 2:17.8xx. Close to the start of the race, the internet was starting to break down. Our code (remember: "special" stuff because of the contest environment) would handle almost every loss of connection, but then Kamil improved to a new 2:17.622 - and the lap didn't show up on the leaderboard. I felt the sweat running down my back Of course I knew situations where the "special" code wouldn't cover weird connection behaviour within a very improbable timing situation, and we had backup plans for almost anything. Still spent some time to verify the laptime was valid (it was), organise the additional information and try to put it in manually.

Gladly I didn't even need to, as Kamil was able to improve another time, down to the final 2:17.427 - things became *very* interesting then. You could see Enzo getting nervous a bit, Kamil was pushed a lot and even got a round of applause for this little wonder.

For my personal experience this was even the best moment. Of course I'm using the whole competition to check the stats ACC assigns to laps and drivers, while I can see them driving and this way get the finetuning done for the EA release. Especially the Car Control rating is exciting, because I already know it works well for 99.99% of the drivers, but I was always afraid of aliens. It's entirely possible that they are so good that their inputs are looking like a mistake to my rating, while they are actually doing extremely good (also, how do you test for this?). So Misano was interesting, I could see many real drivers - but this was the only chance to actually observe aliens before the EA.

Just a few minutes before Kamil was doing this lap I had a quick glance at my stats and noticed that we had one lap with a Car Control Rating of flat 100% - something I considered impossible (so far they were around 97-99%). So I went to Kamil and asked him if he knew the name, then he asked about what the rating means and we talked about it for a while. Then in his 17.427 lap he obviously did very well, just lost a tenth each in the hairpin exit and the chicane. Both weren't exactly control issues, more line related: The hairpin exit was slightly mis-aimed, and he was like 0.5m late in the chicane. So I was incredibly curious about the resulting car control rating - and bamm! It was the 2nd 100% one we've ever recorded. Ofc. it means nothing, sample size of maybe a thousand drivers isn't a lot - but still this point I felt so relieved.



At this point (saturday 20pm), the competition was basically over - which was very good as it didn't do us much of a favour in terms of feedback. Aris was trying to get people driving in the wet or night conditions, but everybody wanted to drive the (daytime/dry) competition - regardless of the impossible laptimes already were set. @Aristotelis really got angry about it, so he created this for you


At least it was becoming a bit better on sunday when the competition was over, and also the contestants had a few feedback sessions in wet conditions - followed by a spontanous mini-contest between Enzo, Kamil and @Hany - we set up a sunset, rainy event on slick tyres (= raised the wetness until i started to spin), and gave them 3 hotlaps in this surprise box.

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=2263769346972298

Already posted this, (english) interview and a recap starts at ~12:40.


At this point we were exhausted like hell, and had so many good moments that I thought it's basically over, can't become better. I was so wrong:
During the last few laps of the race we met in Parc fermé, getting prepared for the podium ceremony. There is some serious magic going on there, I can tell you.


Then you actually see the guys getting on the freakin real podium, in front of the crowd and just before the drivers - a m a z i n g:



Video:

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10156635904938069

Sadly everything was quite in a rush (with so many classes to celebrate), so the guys had to have their celebrations downstairs, but I guess you can see & feel how special this was:


I will stop now, although many more stories could be told (especially regarding mud-covered cloth and sleeping in cars). Thanks to anybody involved - this was our first event like this, and it turned out to be the money-can't-buy experience SRO promised in before. We can improve many things, and I really hope have the chance to do so by repeating this in the future
So much thanks to everybody involved: None of this would have happened without an amazing development team, the simracers and drivers who joined us during the weekend, and of course the partners who made this possible (especially SRO, AK-Informatica, Pirelli, Fanatech, @flomo , RSeat). I don't state this for marketing reasons, but because it's 100% true.

But my actual thanks have to go to you, the AC community - without you, I wouldn't have experienced anything of this.

 

Maybe some of this is lost in double-translation, but to be honest not everything he "picked" up is close to the truth. Handle with care

Edit: Also it's a common scheme that you may chat about ideas and where something could end up in implementation, and then you see it sold as "will be like that" (with some additions that weren't even mentioned).
Always consider rumors that are totally new may be an expression of what KS devs would like to see, or what their general attitude is - but don't add it to your baseline of expectations at a 1:1 ratio pls

 

imho the least exciting one

 

Ah don't mind, nothing of importance so you guys can just ignore it while talking about VR, content and what's coming next
Actually we just placed the rating names on that roadmap to fill up some space