ACC Safety Car

I see the whole point behind the ACC is to simulate the Blancpain GT series Sprint and Endurance races to the max, and I was wondering if that will also includes the Safety car, for both offline and online racing.

I suppose as well it will include the flags regulations and the Full Course Yellow, it will also include the safety car.

As it is a key player in the Blancpain races, mostly in the endurance ones, allowing cars to get back together when deployed changing the dynamic of the race in many occasions.

From the page 68 Blancpain GT Series 2018 Sporting Regulations:

SAFETY CAR
The Race Director will call for a Safety Car intervention whenever circuit vehicles are on the
track, when cars need to be guided to avoid workers, when barriers are damaged, medical
intervention is needed or other situations where it is deemed necessary.
Full-course-yellow procedures and a safety car may be used together, in which case a speed
limit will apply around the full circuit. In this case, marshal posts and timing screens will
show both FCY and SC.

https://www.blancpain-gt-series.com...in_GT_Series_2018_Sporting_Regulations_LR.pdf


I've seen different games including the safety car with different luck, but the majority didn't implement it very well.

Is there any official word that ACC will include a realistic safety car?
If so, how will it detect when to be deployed? Too much debris in the track after a crash? Oil spillage? Car stopped in the track?
will it work in both online and offline?

Thanks.

 

It would be very good, good idea

 

It'd be great to see this kind of real stuff into the game.

 

Go hard or go home Nicki would say, this needs to be in too for the full Blancpain experience (also FCY's).

 

A safety car always sounds good on paper but its implementation gives me a headache just thinking about it. I'm not even sure you can trigger some situations in the game that would need to bring the safety car in real life. Debris / oil spillage? That would mean having a very advanced damage system. Car stopped on track? So what, you'd also need to model a trailer that would tow the car back to the pits or behind the fences, create the animations and the whole AI behaviour for that trailer and so on. Or the car just disapears after a few laps? That'd be an half-assed feature then

I mean, I get your point but you raised the design questions yourself. I think the time and effort needed to implement it vs the gaming experience value is largely unfavourable at the moment. Or it needs to be perfectly done, otherwise that's just a waste of time and resources imho

 

It's in older sims and it's in some current sims it should be in this sim, someone once came up with an idea called options where if you simply tick a box you can choose to have it or not.

 

I play RF2 and i like safety car. But sometime it feel boring... It would be nice if there allow on/off in the option.

 

My view is about the same as Freddie Seng's - in reality safety car is on a track only if there's major problem that needs fixing (cleaning, taking cars and its parts away, escort injured, etc.) and it's annoying even in the reality (partially not necessary in the sim since there are other ways how to clean the track). So as part of simulation of real thing it could be there but I think it's not that high on the list, there are more important things that improve the title that I want to see in ACC that can devs focus on.

 

Or, you could go with just a virtual safetycar. There's already rolling starts in ACC, simulated virtually.
When ever a full course yellow occours, VSC could prompt on the screen, speed limit to 100kmh, no overtaking, for a small period of time.
That said, I remember Kunos talking about getting some safetycar in some matter, virtual or not. AFAIK, they want ALL the features of Blancpain in the game.

 

To be honest - the start of a race is probably the only place where I would like to see safety car at the moment. Why would anybody want to drive slow laps behind SC when you can clean the track of incidents in seconds by just throwing them into pits (no detachable parts anyway).

 

I agree that it is completely redundant in terms of the type of simulator ACC is at the moment.
One thing that VSC could do, was to recover the grid after a T1 pileup, as you also refer to I think. So, if the server does not lock the car completely, like in 'race over' upon crashing, people would teleport to pits and rejoin at the back during VSC.
The race can then go on without a restart. That should be possible if the leading car is restricted to 100kmh and no overtaking. At the same time, it raises a lot of other issues you have to deal with, like what if a driver desides to not close the gap to the car ahead during VSC, how long should the VSC last regardless if all drivers rejoin or not etc.
I imagine a huge load of work, because you have to deside in how many levels the system has to work, and as said, if there's no wrecks on track, no parts lying around that can actually damage other cars, what is the reason then for such a system?
For AC, there's a pitlimiterpenalty app, controlling also penalties if you cross the tracklimits, and you can set when in the race it kicks in. So the smart choice is to leave lap 1 open, because people are trying to avoid each other on lap 1 and in high risk of leaving the track, then let the app activate for lap 2. Similar a VSC system could work in that way, just to get the race going without restarts.

I'm quite curious what @Minolin has in the pipeline for mp tracklimits/penalties/yellowflag, if that is even his table.

 

VSC is much different from a safety car though, wouldn't make sense from a simulation standpoint.

 

Depends what kind of mechanical damage we get.

But safety car plays a big role in merging the cars together witch creates good restarts and interesting races.

If somebody gets damage tire or some heavy suspension damage and cant get the car back to pits it would be cool to give FCY and than safety car and while safety car is out driver can click get back to pits it is good feature to have but deffinetlly hard to implement.. if nothing i want to see safety car just on warm up lap.

And i want it to be drivable so i can cruise with lights on

 

Depends on what you want. Yeah, there's no safetycar, if that's what you want to look at, but if you want some "simulation" around a race, VSC could be used instead of a restart where you're driving 250kmh and get teleported to startgrid with no warning. Restarts are pain in general, though they happen less the more experienced the drivers on grid is. I'm talking VSC for multiplayer mostly, I actually think that Kunos could be doing a real safetycar system for singleplayer.

 

But it has to do with what's happening in the real thing, not what I want. From what I gather they don't use VSC in Blancpain, only a regular safety car. There is a big difference between the two, one stacks everyone up behind it while the other just slows everyone down while preserving the gaps. It's too much of a change to the real thing to be implemented imho. Also, I see no reason for "teleports". Everyone should just drive back to the grid.

 

Yeah, that's why it's interesting what Kunos is going to do, as we don't have real crashes in ACC. Though, Kunos said they wanted to simulate all the features of Blancpain. I think a safetycar could be in singleplayer at some point, not sure with mp for public rated servers, that's where a VSC could be suggested to completely kill restarts. The "easy" way would be leave it as is in AC, people crash, get teleported to pits and either drive on or leave in anger, both resulting in rating degrades.

 

I would assume mechanical damage will be simulated properly, but they aren't going to bother much with particles and cosmetic damage. Well, we'll see in a few months time

 

Mechanical damage would just force the driver to return to pits. There's no danger in having a car crashed anywhere on the track outside the tracklimits, unless it will be possible to have a compeltely dead car standing inside tracklimits, with the driver unable to Esc to pits. The only reason to add a safetycar/VSC would be to "simulate" the turnaround of a race that getting the grid back together gives, while making restarts redundant.
For singleplayer, it's another story.​

 

You're right on that, if there's no debris there won't be any need for a SC. Still, the outcome between VSC and SC is very different and changes stragies quite a lot, so I would like to see them both if able (I think they have some sort of "VSC", full track yellow or something).

 

Well, obviously in a sim there is no reason to wait for a car to be removed from a dangerous situation afer a crash, but I hope they came up with a smart solution for this, as the main value of the safety car and the FCY is the ability to regroup the cars, and change the race completely.
But if they do not include it, ACC will be missing a something big towards the races immersion.