I haven't seen that once. You do mean in a perfectly straight line, right?
As I said, if 5/5 means 50/50, just about (if not) every car in the game should be able to be driven down a straight, and then brakes applied, to a point which locks only the rears. I've yet to see a single car lock the rears first at all in a straight line though, at 5/5 BB.
Does pulling the handbrake cause the car to spin around when traveling perfectly straight? It depends on how level the road surface is, and if braking with all four wheels, the chances are the car will stop before it swaps ends. Rearward brake biases only really become a problem if some from of rotational force is introduced (steering input, surface slope, chassis deformation etc.), but that doesn't prove the rears aren't locking before the fronts - in fact, the very fact that a rearward bias setting (i.e. greater than the weight distribution when braking) results in handbrake-like oversteer behaviour would suggest that the rears are ovewhelmed first.
Again, in my experience, a 50/50 brake bias (0/0, 1/1, 2/2 etc.) does feel rear-biased when braking, actually to the point that I've had the revs drop in a RWD car but no tyres were actually "locked". Also remember that most road cars' brakes are heavily front biased.
No it's not. I adjust the BB on most cars I drive with ABS, and it very much makes a difference.
Also, you're describing how real ABS works. If an ABS senses lock on the rear wheels, it limits their braking force, which essentially changes the brake bias frontward until it no longer senses slip at the rear wheels and allows full braking pressure again.
It makes much less of a difference when ABS is set to anything other than 0. I'm describing how an ideal, four-channel ABS system works, (one with zero reaction time, actually) which is what the ABS system in the game is, because it doesn't rely on measurement and the reaction and actuation of mechanical parts to get the job done. The contact force on each wheel is "known" by the physics engine, and the brakes aren't physically modelled, so the braking force can be perfectly matched per wheel with no delay - every real ABS system has a response time that is greater than zero, resulting in their oscillation (see PID control.)
Now, brake bias is essentially a relative force split between the front and rear axles. GT's ABS can change the brake force applied at each corner independently, so it is essentially changing the brake bias fore/aft
and left/right with much greater speed and accuracy than anything in the real world.
And why do the tires squeal? You said "the ABS prevents locking altogether", so why do the tires squeal intermittenly under full braking with ABS at 1?
Why do tyres squeal? It's sound, sound comes from vibrations. The vibrations (ultimately, at least according to theory) come from the stick-slip of the tyre with the road surface, which is
occuring all the time, if certain models of friction are to be believed - squeal is resonance of that stick-slip frequency with the natural frequencies of the tyre, dependent on its construction and materials. The intensity of said resonance increases with load (although the energy can dissipate to other, less audible modes in extreme cases) and with how much the tyre is actually slipping.
Now, we should probably agree on the definition of a locked wheel. I'll state that a locked wheel has zero rotational speed. Unfortunately, the rotational speed alone isn't enough to tell how much grip we have, we need a differential slip in terms of linear velocity (i.e. across the ground), and you start looking at things like
Pacejka's formula, which is pretty accurate at high speed, assuming the tyre data is correct.
Anyway, we're interested in the slip ratio and, to a lesser extent, the slip angle. The slip ratio is effectively the difference between the linear velocity of the contact patch and the car's (or the ground's) velocity, divided by the car's velocity. Basically it's a measure of how much faster or slower the tyre is spinning relative to what it "should be" for the given road speed (tyre deformation ideally taken into account). Note that the peak grip is achieved with a non-zero slip ratio, and a non-zero slip angle (a measure of the direction the contact patch is travelling relative to the direction it's "pointing"). This means two things: you need slip for optimal usage of the tyres, and that the tyres are probably going to be squealing long before the grip limit (dependent on the tyre, some squeal at the slightest provocation, others only squeal well beyond the grip limit).
In racing sims, tyre squeal is an important tool for evaluating the available grip at each corner, so the onset of squeal is often used to show the limit of grip. ABS effectively works to keep the slip ratio in the optimal region by modulating the brake pressure when the slip ratio gets too high, which would result in a loss of braking effort. Combine this with their reaction time and you'll soon realise that the slip ratio isn't going to be held constant, it's going to have to oscillate either side of the peak, resulting in that characteristic staccato sound of too much slip, followed by not enough, repeat at whatever rate the electro-mechanical assembly is capable of. GT5's ABS does not do this; the slip ratio is never allowed to exceed the optimum because the physics engine has direct and instantaneous access to the required braking forces.
To summarise: squeal doesn't mean "locking", it just means "slipping", a certain degree of which is required to extract the maximum performance from any tyre. The level of squeal is often used as a peak grip reference in sim racing. Some games squeal long before that limit, as often occurs with real tyres. GT5's ABS does not allow the threshold of grip to be breached.
I've never heard the squeal to be intermittent when braking with ABS in GT5, though.
I already said. A couple times, but I guess I'll repeat it again.
First off, every car in the game, in every game mode, starts at 5/5. Why would PD model every car with 50% braking front and rear? That doesn't make any sense. (It's often said GT5 models street cars the best, including iRacing, so how'd they pull that off with such horribly wrong brake settings?)
It's perplexing. But so are so many other development choices in the game (gear ratio screen as a quick example, or default suspension settings); it's not definitive proof of anything. Besides, with the ABS, the brake bias is determined by the weight distribution anyway.
Second off, if every car actually drove like it had 50% BB front and rear, the rears would lock way sooner then the fronts. I've yet to see any car at 5/5 lock the rear tires first at all.
So firstly, it's highly illogical. Secondly, the cars don't drive like they have a 50/50 BB.
I genuinely believe they do drive like they have a rearward bias (relative to the weight distribution). Remember the wheels don't need to lock fully in order to induce a loss in grip. You need only exceed the peak slip ratio and you're losing grip; it's essentially the reverse of wheelspin, too much and you lose grip, but it doesn't mean the tyres have to be travelling infinitely quickly for this to occur!
You just can't accept that I see things differently then you, can you?
You are lowering the BB to make it easier, you've said so yourself, and others you've quoted to back your point up have said exactly the same thing.
I never once said driving without ABS couldn't give a driver a better feel for the braking system, it most certainly could, but only if the driver doesn't get a proper feel of the system with ABS on in the first place. See the difference?
If you already feel out the braking system even with ABS on, then driving without ABS can't really improve your feel of the braking system, can it?
In fact, I've yet to see anyone that only runs with ABS off even acknowledge that braking with 100% pressure into corners isn't the fastest way to drive. So I have no choice, I know that the people claiming this don't know how to drive properly with ABS on in GT5.
If you don't know how to drive properly with ABS, you're not really qualified to say how well it works, are you?
All this "You just stomp the brake pedal and head through the corner" is complete nonsense. People make the same claims in regard to real life racing with ABS, it's not true for either.
The real bonus with ABS is that the brake bias is always optimal (at least as regards the available grip, not necessarily intended course), whereas without it, it's a compromise. Sometimes it's too forward, sometimes too rearward, and it can never account for lateral load differences, meaning the maximum applied braking force is dictated by the unloaded tyre. If that tyre locks, you can lose a great deal of the lateral grip you were relying on because you've exceeded its peak slip ratio.
This is also the reason GT's ABS has historically created severe understeer, because more braking force is naturally directed to the outer tyres, given they have more grip, so the effect is actually to yaw the car in the opposite direction to which it is being steered. Presumably an easy tweak would be to limit the ratio of brake force redistribution to limit this yaw effect, to some detriment of the rate of deceleration. No doubt updates may have tweaked / changed this behaviour, and I'm sure the higher ABS settings do this, too, to different extents - that's why a good driver can still be faster with ABS set to 1, because a good driver can manage understeer.
