car tuning thoughts

[zimluura]

so i've been working on the le's tuning a little bit and something i've been thinking would be kinda nice is an ingame car parameter editor.

basically a way to see the car model, drawn partially transparent. then see all the locations (engine, suspension, weight particles) drawn as boxes or something, and see the results of a % f/r weight distribution.

i guess the *editor* isn't really necessary. so long as there's a way to reload the current car; you could do it all in notepad.

hmm, and when thinking about that the easiest way to implement something like this would be to have a rendering option to:
* draw the car + locations as i said before.
* show a readout of where the f/r % weight is.

then it could just be done on whatever track. wait, is something like this already in the game??

[thelusiv]

This has come up before. So far, car tuning is all done through playing with config files, and then running VDrift with the new car, and playing the game to test. Thus testing can not be empirically quantified at all, instead car developers must rely on the virtual butt dyno, that is like the real-world butt dyno (sitting in the car, driving it and seeing how it makes you feel through your butt's connection to the seat), except you're not really sitting in the car...

There are lots of options here. We can add car debug output into the game that displays different car variables while driving. We could also put together a car editor that would let you tweak things and test the car all in one. This would take a lot more work.

Another option, that I just thought of, would be to set up a set of test macros of sorts that would put any car through standard tests. These tests might include braking from a certain speed to stop, accelerating to a certain speed, cornering at a certain angle and speed, etc. and giving back results in the form of a report that would be useful to the car developer. In fact this would possibly tie in nicely with some other planned features, like a car data API that would allow external applications access to the car data during the game, and could also make use of the existing AI system.