Clean Driving and Racing

Well, Beamng has this really nice softbody physics and because of that its the best crashing simulator on the market. Crashing your car is great and crashing your car is fun even after >100h of playtime. A lot of threads and posts on this forum are about crashing and the mayority of the videos on Youtube contain almost only crashing.

There is no problem with that. But i have a hard time to find any footage or posts about clean driving or racing in Beamng. Thats kind of sad because there are some fine driving physics hiding behind the big sellingpoint of this game. Driving right on the edge for many laps or completing a huge jump without a dent can be as satisfactory as watching your car crumble into a pile of garbage in slowmotion.


So this thread could be a meet-up for

• videos of casual driving, dicking around, drifting and racing without accidents and crashes.
• anybody who wants to improve their driving in general.
• advices for good racinglines on certain tracks, courses or jumps.
• help for building own setups and configurations. eg for drifting or a certain course
• gamepad and wheel configurations.

Tutorials to better your driving

• Driving Fast Guide
• Empty Box Sim Racing 101 Youtube Playlist
• iRacing Driving School Youtube Playlist
• Shakedown University Youtube Playlist
• AMG Driving Academy Performance Youtube Playlist
• Skip Barber Going Faster
  
• Slightly related: Brian Beckman: The Physics in Games - Real Time Simulation Explained
• Setup guide for F1 cars in German (sehr ausführlicher Einstieg den man auch auf andere Spiele und Fahrzeugklassen übertragen kann)

PS If you people have any good additions to this post i'm going to edit them in. Even if its just a spellcheck, i'm also happy to edit out some bad english.

 

Sure man, I'm down for this.

Critique my driving:



Things to note:
- This was a year ago:
> - The tire model wasn't as refined as it is now
> - The SBR4 had troubles with ESC and ABS
- These were my first laps, not my best laps. I don't have the disk space to record multiple laps.
- My braking is WEAK and LATE and I know it; it's because I rarely ever use cars with ABS ingame and I'm not use to the idea of just slamming on the brakes and not threshold braking. As a result, I'm only putting in like 60% brake force which is ideal for preventing lockup but with ABS means very little braking actually occurs.
- Don't make fun of my automatic shifting, please! . It was for a lap test and I didn't want my shifting to get in the way. I usually use manual.
- I'm using a DS3 controller using Direct filtering to steering. Not really a handicap, but it's not as good as a G27 or something like that.

 

every half of the time i like to just get a car and cruise/race around maps instead of racing. It is fun, actully

 

I honestly agree with OP. Too many videos of crashing. Its starting to get very boring just watching cars become disintegrated. Everytime I play the game, I usually cruise around ECA instead of smashing my car down a cliff. I rally around the small trails too.

 

I tapped a wall at some point but overall it was clean. It's only 720p because I had trouble recording at 1440p (hard drives dont have the bandwidth to record that high so i need to set it to my SSD next time)

I'll post more attempts tomorrow when I am not as tired.

The music is something I wrote, Temple of Doom. If you enjoy the song, the full version is on my channel too. I opted for my own music to avoid copyright issues

I play using an Xbox 360 controller

 

I don't have any videos to share, but I really like to make some fun configs or use presets and then try to drive a lap around East Coast USA as fast as I can without damaging it. Sometimes its quite hard, because I usually try to speed through some certain corners and I don't manage to hold car on the road

 

I usually drive around aimlessly or drift in beamng, I rarely do any crashing. I hope this thread doesn't get buried too quickly...

This was my first lap with this mod: http://www.beamng.com/resources/oxnitron-electronics.949/
It sure makes a difference even with a steering wheel. Almost too easy

Sorry for lower quality. My laptop won't do miracles.

 

If you want my thoughts, it seems your driving shortcomings come from either too little or too much steering input. Either you're not fully utilizing the Sunburst's grip (you roll through many corners with no throttle input and the tires aren't put to work), or the other is you're steering too much. The latter is what caused your oversteer-drift at 0:24 and your understeer-wipeout at 0:58... although you were going a little fast for that corner on second look. Otherwise, a great lap, as you hit the apex of most corners and maximized your acceleration opportunity.

And of course the song is really impressive if you wrote it yourself.

 

Thanks for the feedback! Its really hard to control steering with 1cm of travel so its taken a lot of practice to get smooth input.

 

I'd record a lap if I knew how, but I'm going to ask for your opinions on the best way to navigate Hirochi Raceway's final corner.
I try to straighten out the corner exit as much as possible, but I don't know how much time I'm losing if I were to keep a low line. The wall on exit isn't a problem with this line and I believe I'm able to gain lost time back on the main straightaway. But this may be dependent on what car you're driving, cars such as the 200BX (race) may benefit from the flatter exit, but cars like the Covet may be faster low through the corner since it doesn't have too much high end power.

What do you guys say?

 

Couldn't agree more with OP, I see this thread being relevant for a very long time. Here is a head to head I did between the Barstow and the 200BX. I just picked two cars that were within the same supposed performance category. If you all would like to see two cars battle it out drop a suggestion! My driving isn't super refined, I didn't spend to much time trying to get perfect laps but I think it's good enough for comparisons sake. Critiques welcome!



Edit: You can see some of my heel toe action as well I'm using the G27, full manual, and relative camera placed in the cockpit view as I prefer it.

Re: I also think we can attribute the lack of clean racing videos to the fact that they're really aren't any enticing dedicated race tracks that come with the game. Hirochi Raceway just doesn't do it for me. This is why I'm most excited for West Coast USA. What do you guys think?

 

Oh I know very well, I use a DS3 controller using Direct input instead of any sort of smoothing. Needs very smooth and very subtle thumb movements otherwise the steering wheel ends up whipping everywhere. Honestly console controllers aren't ideal for precision driving, but it's the best I have.

 

I can say I tend to just drive around most of the time in BeamnG, usually zoning out on large highway maps and yeah, driving with an xbox controller is incredibly hard to drive with where even the slightest nudge to the thumbstick sends the steering wheel abruptly whipping all over the place, pretty much making certain high powered cars impossible for me to drive to their fullest potential due to not being able to control the steering precisely.
The Bolide is an especially hard car for me to drive... probably the hardest car to drive with a console controller, due to it's very sensitive steering and high power and having no traction and stability control owing to it's age in an era where such features didn't even exist yet. I usually can never catch the rear wheels of this car once it breaks loose into a fishtail and I end up slamming the analog stick side to side in the heat of trying to correct the car's path, and I end up over correcting the car and spinning out because of it's sensitive steering, as the car seems to react faster than my left thumb could keep up (usually ending in a crash). I tend to favor the Grand Marshal a lot for it's slower steering response, even the high powered Stage 2 GM I can somewhat keep it in line depending on what road I take it down to and that car too doesn't have traction stability control.

Though after all that, I do not expect myself to get any good race times with the current peripherals I use to drive with.

 

The Bolide is an extremely mercurial beast, but once you get the hang of it, it's so much fun to drive. It's easy competitive with the SBR4 in respective trim levels, and it has very balanced handling up until it breaks loose and tries to kill you. My point is, don't blow off the Bolide - it's not un-drivable and it is a competitive track car. You know better than traction control.

 

Couldn't agree more, thinking about including the Bolide in my next head to head. Speaking of which, show me some love guys, any constructive criticism on my racing line?

 

Try and work on your petal control, the braking is alright but could possibly be done a little harder, but it's hard to tell without a G-force meter. Throttle control needs work on exit, you are applying too much throttle too quickly, causing the cars to over-steer a little on exits. What would help on your exits would be somewhat less throttle in general but I would put more emphasis on a more smooth input of throttle. It will take some time to get right, and you will correctly observe you are exiting slower at first but eventually you will be exiting faster and smoother. Racing is all about smoothness; fast laps generally look like they are slow to an observer, even if the driver is full on gas or brake as its done smoothly while using as much of the wheels traction without locking or spinning.

 

@derpfleet55 Thank you for the feedback my friend. I will definitely include the G meter in my future videos as it will help a lot when studying them afterwards, don't know why I didn't think of that. Also yeah, I totally agree I can be much more smooth on the accelerator. I need to work on my timing as I often break lateral traction with applying too much linear force too soon, which as you mentioned just overloads the tires. Way I see it, if I'm using 90% of my grip for turning, that leaves the remaining 10% of grip for acceleration and can't go slamming on the throttle or brakes. Visa versa. Still trying to find that balance in BeamNG. Watching that back I see I need to work on smoothly unwinding while proportionally applying throttle to get the best exit speeds. Appreciate the reply and I make note of your comments.

 

That's the kind of kewl stuff you just don't often see for this game... also, whatever sound you were using for the 200BX sounds niiiiiice... though I now have to wonder whether it was actually a mod or just a dub, because the Barstow's sound visibly didn't match up with the tachometer in several instances early on and can additionally be recognized as either a Mustang Mach 1 from Race Driver GRID or something from iRacing that I don't remember.

Also interesting to see that the Barstow is losing ground not just in the corners, but also on the long straights where it runs out of gears fairly quickly... I wonder if @gabester would consider adding a wide ratio gearbox or highway rear end to get that car up to 140+ MPH, as such options were common at the time in real life.

 

I am glad I found this thread as I am really into simracing. I can link a good lap on Baja Hills I recorded for a competition in Desert Rage scenario. Although I lost some seconds on the last 10 % of the lap, I think it is quite fast. Maybe someone here tries to challenge the fastest scenario time (4:55.25 min) ? ;-)

 

This thread is turning into racing only (nothing against that), I promise you my next video will be something else (drifting maybe?)

As you can see I added a few apps so you can see better what I'm doing. I know there are many things I could do to drive better, critique me.
I also tried a few laps with Bolide but nope I'm not uploading that