Understeer.

I love the new update, but I was really hoping the understeer would improve. Seems like it may have gotten better at high speed but at 15-30mph cars seem to have a bit of trouble turning...

Actually I'm convinced that my 90hp Peugeot 306 could set a better time around a track than any of the cars in game if they were actual cars handling like that.

Apart from that I'm having loads of fun with the new update looking forward to the east coast map!

 

I think, well not 100% opposite, but...the low speed handling is 1000% better, especially in the covet race. high speed is also improved, but not to perfection. its an alpha, its going to get better. that's how I think about it!! as of right now, especially with imporved speeds in FPS and physics, this game is literally 2x as good as it was pre-pre-race update lols

 

Yeah that sounds about right, but when it lets go it really lets go. Doesn't seem to wanna grab traction again as easily as it should. It's not that bad, but it feels off.

EDIT: Biggest problem right now is high speed random oversteering and general floatiness.

 

It does feel like things understeer more than they should, but I'm not convinced it's the physics that are the main reason. I think it either has to do with the controls or the feedback.

Whenever you steer with the keyboard or the controller, you are steering all the way whether you're doing 20 MPH or 200 MPH if you hold full input for around a quarter of a second. There is no speed sensitive steering. The steering is always capable of achieving full lock, and doing so in the same period of time (0.25-ish seconds), while the car often needs only less than a quarter of maximum steering angle to be using all traction for turning at moderately high speeds. That's roughly 0.0625 seconds of sustained steering input before you are past the threshold of grip and creating mechanical understeer or whipping the rear end out at moderately high speeds. This means that the faster you go, the more difficult it is to reasonably control the car with these controls. Trying to smoothly steer the Grand Marshal custom at 180 MPH, even at 8 times slower than realtime, is extremely difficult even with a controller. With the default steering configuration as it is, the only way I see to fix this is to get a wheel, or steer very, very sensitively with a controller. You could also try this at slow motion so you have more control of your exact steering position, but good luck being fast and accurate enough to drive any performance vehicle at a leaderboard competitive pace in realtime without a wheel.

With console sims, completely disregarding physics, they have more advanced steering buffer systems for controller users. The steering angles become more limited the faster you go and the rate at which steering increases is also limited, so it's nearly impossible to ever create mechanical understeer in any car with a production tune using just steering. If you ever look at telemetry on one of these games, it's also why people are constantly tapping the steering on and off of max input with various techniques. They're using the buffers to try and hit the sweet spot for the speed, acceleration and racing line they're aiming for. However, if you connect a steering wheel and turn all the way left or right, every car will experience mechanical understeer immediately unless you're going very slow (10-15 MPH sounds about right). Another thing that's different are steering corrections. Whenever you oversteer, if you give a countersteer input, the system temporarily increases the turning rate and max steering angle so you can catch the slide. Forza Motorsport 4 specifically also has a normal and simulation steering setting which adjusts this system. I don't remember the exact value changes, but simulation steering makes it far easier to accidentally over-correct when countersteering and feels much more snappy (though still fairly manageable). If you want to see some telemetry, look here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yV7enLGoVAc (Note that Forza replays of controller users are even twitchier than live gameplay, as the replay algorithms seem to approximate the telemetry data to save on hard drive space or memory.) I believe a number of PC sims also allow you to customize these options yourself to try and make whatever controller you have more comfortable to use, but I don't know if any allow you to get as advanced as adjusting corrective steering multipliers and whatnot.

Another possibility for the understeering sensation may be the audio feedback. You don't have any of the physical feedback of being in a car while playing a racing sim (unless you have a badass hydraulic racing cockpit setup), and BeamNG doesn't have force feedback or vibration either, so all of your feedback is either visual or auditory. The sound system is still placeholder, as I believe has been stated. In my opinion, the tire sounds aren't very visceral and don't seem to be very dynamic or have much direction to them currently. I can be peeling out in the Bolide 390 GTR fitted with low grip steel wheels, or steering at full lock at 100 MPH, or slamming and locking the brakes while steering at full lock, and I couldn't tell you which side of the car is being affected by any of this just by the sound. Put me in front of most console sims or PC sims with basic stereo and I could literally tell you which side and end of the car is being affected and what the state of traction is with my eyes closed, just based on the tire and road noises. If you don't have enough information to sufficiently understand what the car is doing, you're more likely to misjudge how well it should be able to take a turn, and if the car is pushing off your attempted line and not turning as well as you'd expect, then it is understeering. I feel that as soon as BeamNG has some more advanced sound design in place, your overall sense of control is going to be vastly improved. To hear some sounds at the limit in an example PC sim (Live for Speed, simply what came up first in a search), go here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYWNmpW1jEU

Until then, try using your speed (I have the airspeed tachometer mod and all of my telemetry to the sides for extra accuracy) and the radius of your racing lines as your main guideline for whether or not you'll make the corner and adjust your speed and/or expectations accordingly. The G-meter is also a useful gauge.

PS, if someone on the team or someone with racing game development knowledge could let me know how accurate (or inaccurate) I am with my thoughts, I'd appreciate it.

 

all of the factors you mentioned play a part of it. another important factor is the sense of speed in beamng right now - it's practically nonexistant. i compared some real life footage that uses trackvision (car telemetry overlayed on video) and the speed/gforces lined up pretty well - but when i drive at those speeds in beamng i feel like i'm at a snails pace. further, i'm still completely unable to hold a nice and smooth racing line at these snail speeds because of problems with controls, throttle response, bumpiness in maps, floatiness at high speeds, and not enough visual/auditory/physical feedback among other things. this is with my steering wheel as an input device.

a notable example of trackvision can be found here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nmhwl0rxCs - a presumably somewhat-stock 350z

also, specracerz, please keep posting here and consider playing the game more, i've subscribed to you on youtube for a while waiting for more beamng videos - you're one of 3 people i know who tries to actually drive in beamng rather than crash stuff.

 

That wind tunnel UI sounds like it'd be helpful. I wonder how that will effect aircraft designing for BeamNG as well.

Motion blur can definitely affect the sense of speed, but I don't think it's most important. Some things that I believe affect sense of speed more are camera effects, like shaking, vignetting, and dynamic FOV (such as the camera pulling back at high speed). FOV in general can also have an effect, as a wider field of vision allows you to see more of the environment to your sides, so you feel how fast you're moving past the scenery. Sound also plays a big role sense of speed just as it does in feel. Things like ambient wind noise, wind noise as you pass by scenery objects, road noise, powerful sounding engines, and limited sound insulation (although a smooth riding luxury estate with heavy sound insulation isn't going to feel as fast at 200 MPH as a twitchy open-top track car with stiff suspension at 200 MPH, and that's not a bad thing). It all comes together to make you either feel or miss the power of a 3,000 lbs vehicle at 200 MPH. However, one thing BeamNG does have in spades is a sense of consequence. You know you're going to be obliterated if you hit anything at high speed, and I think that alone keeps the sense of speed on certain tracks from not being too bad, even if it could be much improved.

Some examples of speed from Forza Horizon, one of a guttural CCX-R at 250 MPH through traffic (http://youtu.be/11wRovyoc_E), and another of a heavily sound insulated luxury sedan (S65 AMG) at 200 MPH through traffic (http://youtu.be/MXyN77nah0I). And an example of a Hennessey Venom doing 270 MPH on a runway: http://youtu.be/gWAavCjVQvM?t=50s (You may want to turn your volume down a little.) And, to cover all of my bases, some footage of low altitude flying in what looks like a PC flight sim: http://youtu.be/lX2m379JLHk

I'll be sure to increase my BeamNG content. I was busy with school and tired of the low, stuttery frame rates when recording coupled with the codec issues I was having. Now, I have a new hard drive for storage, the update and new settings I'm using have allowed me to at least stay around 30 FPS during recording on some tracks, and I spent the better portion of two whole days researching transcoding and experimenting until I finally found something that works consistently. So, look forward to a handful of videos before the end of the night.

EDIT: Severely overestimated how well my weak processor would be able to encode video. An 8 minute clip takes nearly an hour and a half to transcode with good quality. Here you go. http://youtu.be/ZqC5YvXD07M

 

That sounds like a great idea!

One thing we all have to contend with is reality vs expectation, for instance most people (myself included) expect sports cars to generate more downforce than standard cars, the reality in most cases is that all cars generate negative downforce or "lift" and everything done to the sport car is to reduce that lift. Most sports cars have equipment like spoilers or front defusers that help reduce the increased lift that is generated at speed but very few street cars have anything that produces positive downforce that will push the car into the tarmac. That was a big surprise to me!

I think having a tunnel would really help everyone when it comes to demonstrating what actually affects a car.

 

Why not give raptr a try? My friend with an FX 4130 had a 5 minute FC3 clip recorded and uploaded within an hour.

And I totally agree with everyone else here- a better sense of speed and steering controls would be helpful here. I just hope that the steering system won't be as "extreme" as RoR's in terms of letting you turn the wheel.

 

while i really like your idea, vehicle handling looks to be far more complicated than just having tires that seem to perform similarly to real tires. this sort of mentality might end up as an excuse to ignore real problems that people are facing - "i'm having trouble driving at high speeds, it doesn't seem quite right" -> "the tire model performs close to real life data, you just suck at driving! the game is perfect!"

 

Just my opinion but as far as I know it just sounds like clever marketing to me...

 

But what's a modern AAA video game without clever marketing that makes the game look appealing but says nothing substantial about the gameplay itself? You know BeamNG's first sentence of their goal? "Our main focus is on how things move rather than how things look on the screen." Flip it around and you have the modern marketing machine. I won't comment on the quality of Forza 4's physics however. I'll just say that I still have fun with it, and the racing and driving techniques I've learned in Forza (and Gran Turismo, and other console sims) in Cycled Production, the Spec Hot Laps rivals events and league specification racing have fairly directly translated into quick driving in BeamNG, the few PC sims I've played with a wheel, and the times I've actually gone go-karting.

Also, I like the idea of taking some ideas from wheel and suspension manufacturers for vehicle development. I'm sure BeamNG is intricate enough for those types of real life tests to be created, and it'd be cool to mess around with them for fun as well.

It's more my videophile tendencies and simultaneous need for very small files that don't push us towards our monthly data cap than it is the actual recording software, but thank you for the suggestion.

 

i'm not so sure you would like it if representatives from other sim games bashed your game with no real provocation or evidence to back up any claims

if you really believe that forza is so far gone and think you can demonstrate your points well enough, it might be a good marketing move to directly compare the 'driving experience' in beamng to other games - maybe you can prove a decent point and make a few more sales along the way.

 

Yea, but the whole tire data from Perelli is most likely just an advert for Perelli. What's not to say they didn't use the data or anything and all the cars running on Perelli's sounds pretty unrealistic in itself (although I'm not sure haven't played Forza for a while) but even if the tires were they best in the world the suspension geometry is likely way off what it is in reality. Not to mention the lack of chassis and body flex.

And yes Forza and GT are fun games and will un-deniably help you out when doing real racing however not so much through the physics of the vehicles but just more because they will help ypu greatly in understanding the breaking limits, racing line etc.