Timed races and rolling starts

With the game been focused on GT racing, it would be good to get some reflection from real life GT events/racing in the game, and general real racing from what I've experienced.

Timed and distance based races - alot of GT races, in fact all of them that I can think of, plus many national UK series base the races on length of time in minutes, rather than laps. For instance, 60 minutes plus a lap for the standard British GT race. From what I've seen, time based races are actually the norm compared to laps. It's probably because of televised series such as F1, BTCC, V8 Supercars which have races based on laps which implies this is most popular - but it's only laps because it's worked on distance covered in the race. It would be nice to have another option to set (in km) the distance a race can be.

Rolling starts. Again, alot of (if not all) GT races have rolling starts. Whilst this is possible in multiplayer by using lap 1 as the warm up lap, it would be good to have this option against the AI, like in rFactor 2 which has a few options for rolling starts. Keep the standing starts of course as single seaters use them, but all GT's tend to have rolling starts.

 

If there is a "won't happen", why will it not happen? You could finally put cars with different drivetrains on the grid and be (mostly) done with starting advantages. For those who don't know, there's a myriad of real racing series using rolling starts as well..

 

From what I gathered from Stefano's streams, AI limitations, mostly. AI would have trouble calculating their fuel load for timed races, and with rolling starts come a lot of rules and possible player and AI behavior that would need to be accounted for. The AC engine was not written with those things in mind, so there would be a very high work load to properly implement that.

 

AI not smart enough in AC, its why the game doesnt have many features... sadly Would be nice if Kunos would split offline and online like most of games have. In some games offline and online completely different... AI limits Kunos to add more features to MP. Its already different, some offline features are not in MP and opposite, may be they dont want to make them completely different in features term, but I wouldn't care.

 

How about a speed limit on the first lap then? That seems the same as a pit lane speed limiter, and would automatically release everyone when they pass the start?

 

So then it would start you 'automatically' when the lights go green and you may have little control over how much throttle you're giving when it releases. Also everyone starts at the same time, taking away the thrill of the start and eliminates reaction time as a factor, and the AI would still need a new routine to know they're not in racey fightey mode and new AI lines for the pace lap. And tell me, would you like a pace lap without a pace car? I know I wouldn't.

Don't get me wrong, I'd really like to have this in AC, I just don't see it happening before a possible AC2.

 

Huh? A speed limit would act the same as in the pits now, throttle control doesn't seem to be an issue for that?

Eliminating reaction time is indeed what I'm after for race starts, so I (and many league admins with me) don't have to watch replays to check if someone went 101 km/h instead of 100. Like weight ballast, this "1 lap speed limiter" wouldn't necessarily have to be for offline as well.. Again, it's pretty much the same as the pit lane speed limiter.