Glitchiness with Automation turbos

When I export a turbocharged engine from Automation, the turbo works intermittently - usually, it fails to hold a boost anywhere close to its rating. For some reason, though, it works in the tunnel in Utah.

 

Around 30-45

 

How big are the stutterings

 

I think its UI lagginess then

 

That is all you need to have glitches, especially if your CPU is limiting factor of your performance. Limiting FPS to 30 might reduce glitches as code likes from stable framerates, so if you can't have 60fps, try to have as stable low fps as you can by limiting your fps to value which is typically lowest you see. Game might actually appear smoother by doing that too.

 

No guys, it's an issue with the turbos, not the UI! I can prove it! Attached are two 2019 Oldsmobile Phi-85 Jetfires, one with the turbo disconnected. The N/A model is actually marginally faster from 0-60 than the turbo one, even though the turbo model supposedly has 240 HP! The turbo fails to hold a boost, except under certain circumstances (in the tunnel in Utah, for instance). Try them both out (on a proper map, like ECUSA, Utah or JRI) and tell me what you think.

 

Turbo:


NA:


Trust me, I know what I'm doing, it is your fps and CPU chocking up

 

Please use an official map, maybe Industrial Area.

 

Isn't that what I just did? 7s with turbo 11s with NA. Ok, that was more like 0-62 (0-100kph), really I know what I'm doing, try fps limiter, it 'might' help

 

Shit, didn't notice. Updated my post.

 

That is west coast drag strip, I had graphics on lowest as before I used iGPU, for this test I switched input of monitor and did it with gtx1080, I think it was enough to keep perfect 60fps

 

No, it still does not work, even with FPS limiter. I am using Utah.

 

You have disabled shadows and using lowest graphics settings? Just for a test.

I post two videos in a moment so you can see how it works here.
--- Post updated ---

 

The mechanicals should be independent of the graphics... Why do you think it's my graphics settings that are stopping the turbo from spooling?
--- Post updated ---

Update: it worked... but I shouldn't have to make the graphics look like sh*t, just so I can drive a turbocharged Automation car!

 

If you examine turbo lua in game files, you can see it does stuff each frame, whole lua part of the game is tied to FPS.

When CPU is under very high load, it does not manage to do calculation in time and lua stuff goes out of sync, which causes your turbo not to work.

For FFB it is 60fps or more where it works properly, same really for everything, game is really smooth and great when your fps stays at 60 and never changes from that, but right when your fps drops below that there are all kinds of quirks.

Many users have faced this same turbo issue.

Now reason why it might work better for official cars is that official cars are using bit better turbo setup as overall, there is more room for error so to say.

If you change wastegate start value in jbeam to be something bit lower, your Automation car turbo probably works bit better.

 

That's stupid. It should be tied to the physics framerate, not the display framerate! That is tremendously bad practice - like tying the speed of a game to the CPU frequency, as was often done on early PC games.

Plus, why are we using a scripting language for the game's internals? Those should be compiled, not interpreted or run on a VM. C, C++ or Rust is the natural choice for such things (and CUDA/OpenCL if you're feeling gutsy). May as well have written the whole thing in JavaScript and run it all in Chrome. BeamNG has no future if this horrible hack does not change. Back to the drawing board you go, @tdev.

 

It's not tied to the CPU speed. Engine simulation is still tied to the physics simulation. It's just that under high load engine simulation is cut back to keep the physics running, which messes with the turbos since they are particularly sensitive to update rates.

 

My understanding was that it was tied to the graphics rate for some reason - the bit involving CPU speed was just an example of comparably bad practices in the software industry. (Remember the turbo button? That's why they existed - it slowed the CPU to 4 MHz for compatibility with old games that depended on the PC/AT's clock speed.)

 

Physics run at 2000Hz, it is not possible to run LUA at 2000 times per second, I think that might be main reason why it is done way it is done.

They do utilize delta time quite often which takes care of variable framerate, but I think problem comes more from the fact when some calculations CPU can't make happen within time available, that is bit funny as slower framerate is giving more time to calculate, but as CPU is bogged down more it is taking even longer to compute those calculations.

I'm not sure if some more adjusting will be made to this at some point as it seems to happen mostly when turbo wastegate start and end are very close + few other parameters need to be set in certain range, which Automation exports happen to have.

Also I have been thinking if it would be possible to tie lua to physics, like to run every 33 physics cycle, but I guess that would have complications too.

Now if you limit fps so that your CPU single core is not maxing out, you should be able to have turbo working normally even with 15fps, in theory, I haven't tested that, but low FPS alone is probably not enough to cause these problems, or at least should not be.