Spring rate instead of wheel rate

Am I the only one thinking that ? Wheel rates don't make much sense when building a setup... At least I've never seen any use for it.

 

I concur.

 

I fully agree with this, but it would require some physics engine tweaks.

 

With spring rate you should also provide the engine with spring/damper angle and alignment in space, for each possible configuration (strut, dwb, trail, pushrod, pullrod, etc). This way you supply just the wheel rate and mount points positions relative to wheel hub. Calculations are done previously by developer and the engine can use plain values.

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Related to springs (suspension), it'd be nice if the "live alignment" screen was always showing numbers for level ground (like an alignment platform or a garage), and not on some kerb you ended up on joining a Touristenfahrten server.

 

Argh ... you just started a whole new topic with this post

 

When building a car setup ? Wheel rate makes more sense than spring rate. Ultimately imo you are setting up a suspension frequency not a rate.

For the flat reference I already asked Stefano in a stream and he told me it was a big and hard problem to fix. "Total nightmare" were his words iirc.

 

1. Spring setups are all about pre-defined spring rates on real cars, be it a street car that you're modifying (tho you can have custom-made springs with your desired rate) or a race car (more often than not they come in packages, either regulated by governing bodies or chosen by the race team/manufacturer). GT3's for example have different spring packages of different rates. Being able to choose between 50 to 200(?) wheel rate isn't realistic and doesn't make much sense.

2. RIP... That's kind of surprising, and not in a good way :/

 

50 to 200 are N/mm

So you'd want to limit the steps in the range or just see spring rate N/mm ?

Outside of NASCAR and maybe budget oriented spec series there is not a lot of governing bodies that regulate spring rates.
GT3 series don't afaik. Regarding what's available on the market I have not often seen pre made packages for race cars. I see a ton of spring rates available for many lengths and diameters. All of which can be bought individually. Do you have an example of a pre-selected package sold for a GT3 car?

 

IIRC the Mclaren 12C GT3 (pre-facelift at least) had 1000-1200lbs/in, 1100-1300lbs/in and 1200-1400lbs/in (front-rear). Some other cars might have more to choose from of course, I don't know all about it... For me the main part is that wheel rates just don't make sense in a setup building process.

Another thing, GT3's are supposed to have fixed gear ratios (a "standard" one for normal tracks and a "long" one for tracks like Monza). On here we can adjust every single gears by several clicks, which doesn't make sense.

 

Well here they can't lock gears as racing cars would end up being just like road cars. The only option to resemble a "package" would be leaving the final drive open and selectable, but that wouldn't make sense either...

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Eh ?

Just have two presets: "Standard" and "Tall" (a bit like the presets on the E30 Gr.A/DTM). Simple no ? Of course they'd have to get the proper gear ratios...

 

I almost never use race cars so I'm not all that expert in setting them up I admit... I think I never loaded the e30 once...

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The only time spring rate is better than wheel rate is if you happen to have a setup for the real-world car that you want to try out exactly... if you're just setting up the car with no prior knowledge, it doesn't matter any more than it being in N/mm instead of lb/in. matters, if it's too soft set it harder, and vice versa.

 

1. Wheel rates are more relevant to making a setup than spring rates if you're not comparing a real life setup to an in game one (which you won't be doing most of the time). Either way, real life setups are made with the wheel rates as the primary consideration since at the end of the day that's the only relevant thing to the handling. If you want to "play the engineer" in the sim by making your own setups, the current way is actually better than having just spring rates, as actual race engineers only care about the wheel rates.

2. Locking gear ratios is fairly pointless in a sim...there isn't much of a point in doing it, and the cars in AC aren't following any specific series rules (and since the locked gear ratios aren't universal - GTD cars can use 4 sets IIRC, it wouldn't be any more realistic to lock them, it'd just be unnecessarily limiting).

 

Yeah man, let's just not make the cars accurate, what's the point anyway ?

 

Having two locked ratio sets would be just as inaccurate (if you actually read what I wrote, GTD has 4 ratio sets - having 2 ratios is just limiting and no more realistic, so there's no point )

 

If you want to limit the GT3 cars to a "monza" set of ratios, just stick it in the server's fixed setup. That's where series regulations should go, the car should have as many options as the hardware allows (and for racing transmissions that usually means a handful of 1st, and 30-40 of every other gear)

 

The cars we have are Blancpain spec. So you know... Although this year in IMSA they are identical right ? Then maybe we could have those presets, but having completely free gearings is way overkill.

 

No, they're not. The devs have stated many times that they use the manufacturer data that they have and then BoP the cars themselves...the cars in AC run to no specific rule set. By the way, in GTD they can choose any ratios they want for their sets...you can't replicate that in any way other than...I don't know... maybe giving the opportunity to use all of the gear ratios available to the car. The gear ratio restriction IRL is a part of the BoP anyway, so since Kunos is making their own, the free ratios make sense.