Would anyone else like to see a car 'class' filter?

Just wondered if anyone else would welcome an official 'Class' tab that you could filter cars by on the select screen? What I mean by this is a tab that would sort cars by some kind of cohesive racing era/specs, in the same way that we have a 'Manufactures' tab, to make it easier to put together fields of mix cars for races.

The problem with this of course is coming to some kind of consensus on the exact parameters that define a class, but if the tab is some kind of loose guideline rather than a locked in rule set, I don't see that being too much of a problem. We already have a great bunch of contemporary GT3 cars that would make an obvious first class, although I don't know how strictly they abide by FIA / Blancpain etc regs.

A potential bonus of having this tab could be modders focusing new projects on fleshing out class fields instead of just creating disparate one offs. Its great having all these varied cars being created, but it would be even better if that creative energy was focused toward whole fields of cars from the same era/class that could be raced together. If Kunos put out a 'mid 90's DTM' guidelines filter to go along with their 'Alpha 155' announcement, modders could start working on the Opel Calibra V6 4x4 and Mercedes C-Class V6 to launch with it, or any of the cars from the awesome 1996 BPR Global / 1997 FIA GT season to go along with Kunos' McLaren F1 GTR announcement. This tab might also be an elegant way for modders to put together complete racing series like the DRM mod, HistorX and any number of other R-Factor 1 mods without all the mess that total conversions can cause.

I've been away from the mod for a while, so perhaps this is a suggestion that has already been made, or is actually already included in the sim in some way, so please forgive my ignorance if this is the case*

 

click on a car and go to tag has all the filters there. Has different classes e.g A6 is hypercars like the laferrari

 

As above, TAG is your friend here. If a modded car is made correctly, the author should include the correct tag for the car.

What I would like to see however is some colour banding and ranking in multi-class races, like iRacing does. So you could be in a field of GTE/GT2, GT3 and GT4 cars, and compete in an overall race for position, but also be racing your own class for position too.

But I digress slightly

 

I agree, less cause myself, but people who are new to sims or even motorsport.
The tags are ok for me and probably most others. Still, there are many people, who don't know what the differences are between GTE/GT2/GT3/GT4.
As for someone, who doesn't cared to much about cars and motorsport besides playing Forza, AC and look into a carmagazines while waiting to get tortured by the dentist, I needed to look for some cars online, to get a clue in which series they drive and which other cars drive in there.

Especially for people new to motorsport or simracing, it could be made easier to know what they actually pick and somehow more appealing.
The tags are quite easy to be overseen and instead of a small tag, you could offer a alternative select screen where you pick different classes of streetcars and racingseries.

I allready illustrated it:

 

I think the tags do cover it pretty well, but I guess the fact I didn't notice them means that Plaid's suggestion is a good one.

 

Can you point me at a reference that lists all these #A(n) tags please? I posted a question in General Modding, but got no response.

 

The A tags were a way for the devs to group several cars. But they still used other tags for different kind of series and other types of group cars. Just enter the game, search a car by TAG, then click every A(n) tag, you'll see the cars included.

 

Tag system works fine IMO, as long as modders actually put stuff in the right category, although you can edit it yourself anyway.

 

So there is a way to edit tags for any car, and regroup them however you want? Cuz that would be awesome.

 

Yeah, it's in one of the INI files that can be found in the car folders. It may take a bit of fooling around to get it to work properly though.

 

carname/ui/ui_car.json (it's a plain text file, use notepad)

"tags": ["fwd", "street"],

once you look at a couple, you'll get the idea. Note: you have to restart the game to get it to re-read the tags.

 

Thank you, good sir! I've actually edited some ui_car.json files, can't believe I didn't notice the tags...

 

IMO while tags work, if someone needs to be educated on the forum to use it then it's a UI problem which should be addressed.

The UI should be easy enough to understand so that anyone looking at it can use it, not use the few who ask for help on the forum.

 

Couldn't agree more. However, "bigger fish to fry" applies here me thinks.

Right now, I'd be happy if we could get the modding community to agree on some basic standards. eg; tracks have a country tag. America != US != USA != U.S.A != United States != united states != United States of America (yes, I've seen, and fixed, them all). There is an ISO standard for country names. And, before you ask, the correct answer is "United States".

 

Yes perhaps the bigger issue here is setting up standards for the tags so that we don't have different tags for the same thing.

 

Another reason that speaks for the type-select would be to encourage people to host servers with something different then GT's.
I could imagine, that people consider hosting servers with a balanced mixed field, if they got a better idea, which cars can race against each other. With the GT's its more or less obivious while you often see servers with GTE's, GT3's, GT4's and the P4/5 mixed together.
But I have no idea how the screen looks in which you host a server.

 

I would like to see the option that I could save/download previous selections on included car types for a racing event, like I could save and download car setups. So that I can switch easily between mixtures of car models without hand-selecting any desired cars once again when I meanwhile changed the menu choice.