Digital -vs- Physical | Handling Discrepancies

  • Thread starter Thread starter JLawrence
  • 113 comments
  • 6,588 views
If you can't drive the S7 you should give up now! Apart from it's weird first/second gear ratios, it's brilliant to drive!
 
I find the GT-350R to be a pretty good drifter, and on some good tyres It's a good racecar if you learn to control its wildness.
 
The GT350 is great fun. Excellent for drift seasonals, great for some old-school, Bullitt-style oversteer on city courses. Honestly, is this thread just for people who aren't very good at GT and can only drive GT300 cars on racing softs?
 
But even better than that is having people who know what they're talking about.

There is potentially some value in owning the car as far as this discussion goes, but ownership does not make someone an expert on cars.

No it doesn't.
But yeah... someone who's at least driven a Samba bus would know more than me... I had a neighbor once whose boyfriend tipped his into our back yard, and I gave him some rope & watched him winch it out... and that's about the extent of my contact with the vehicle.
Never been in one.
Car expert or not, anyone who's been inside one for a ride is going to be able to say something I wouldn't even begin to about the gt5 version as it relates to the real world van.
That was my only point.
 
If you can't drive the S7 you should give up now! Apart from it's weird first/second gear ratios, it's brilliant to drive!

JBanton
I find the GT-350R to be a pretty good drifter, and on some good tyres It's a good racecar if you learn to control its wildness.

peter_vod69
The GT350 is great fun. Excellent for drift seasonals, great for some old-school, Bullitt-style oversteer on city courses. Honestly, is this thread just for people who aren't very good at GT and can only drive GT300 cars on racing softs?

+1 👍
 
No it doesn't.
But yeah... someone who's at least driven a Samba bus would know more than me... I had a neighbor once whose boyfriend tipped his into our back yard, and I gave him some rope & watched him winch it out... and that's about the extent of my contact with the vehicle.
Never been in one.
Car expert or not, anyone who's been inside one for a ride is going to be able to say something I wouldn't even begin to about the gt5 version as it relates to the real world van.
That was my only point.

But what would that person say if you asked about the Samba's track performance? You can walk up and ask someone as they step out of their car how flat it is through a turn at the limit, doesn't mean they will have any idea.

I've driven some plain FWD cars on the street. Didn't tell me anything about how they would handle in any situation except the absolutely mundane. Like Morgoth_666, my experience does not provide very much useful info on this subject. I only know to watch out for lift off oversteer because it's a general issue for FF cars. I've never been in a situation where I felt that oversteer. I'd assume the same for most people. Also, even I had found out about lift off oversteer through experience, it wouldn't mean that I'd be able to put a good objective reason behind it. On the other hand, knowing the physics behind lift off oversteer would probably let me predict conditions when it would occur.

You may not have ever been in a Samba, but you know it's got a relatively high CG and isn't all that wide. You already know that it's going to be prone to tipping over, much more so than a sports car. You could infer that the suspension is probably going to be softer than a race cars, so the Samba would be kind of sluggish. If you drove a Samba in GT, and it was out turning sports cars, you'd probably say that something was wrong, even if you had never driven one.
 
Cannot believe the v16t was not mentioned..

Another car that isn't actually very difficult to drive at all, it's just in here because it isn't completely idiot proof like say a TC Evo on racing soft tyres.
 
My only complaint about the Cizeta is that it looks really fast but it's really not.


And I can now confirm that the One-Make bots are much much much harder to beat in Oullim Spirras than they are in Spyker C8s despite me feeling like I drove the Spirra significantly better. I almost want to say they were faster outright, which seems impossible around Spa, but I didn't note for sure whether the C8s were running mid :40s or mid :50s (low :50s for the Spirras and I needed Sports Hards to keep up).
 
I think some of you are missing the point of this thread entirely. This is not about driver skill, this is about how many cars in the game handle nothing like their real life counterparts, the reasoning behind it, and possibly some informed examples from people who have raced (legally or illegally), or have extensive knowledge of any of these machines in the real world.

I apologize for the bad thread title, and I will be changing it as soon as I figure out a better description.
 
Sorry but if you are after that information you should've said so originally. Your initial post wasn't at all clear, hence the pages of misunderstanding.

Here, let me try to help:

Is there a reason that some of the cars in this game are so categorically bad despite their real life counterparts being quite great drivers? It just doesn't seem like the sort of discrepancy that should come from a game billed as the "Real Driving Simulator"

What I think you meant was this:

Hello Friends,

Why do some cars in the game behave in an unexpected fashion (uncharacteristic understeer/oversteer, slow acceleration, lack of traction etc) compared to their real life counterparts? I am confounded by these apparent discrepancies from a game calling itself the "Real Driving Simulator". Has anyone some real-world experience they would care to share which either correlates with the in-game counterpart or contradicts it? I'm especially keen to hear from TVR Speed 12 owners or Saleen S7 owners. Heck, even just people who pretend they own/drive/have driven them will do.

Love Always,
JLawrence
 
Last edited:
Love Always,
JLawrence

You're smokin' somethin'. :lol:


(Note: It is a much better thread title. 👍 But there will always be people who have to harp on the driving skill issue. Most likely the hard-core gamers that have never driven in real life at all, let alone one of the shnazzy cars in this game. :lol:)
 
Very mature Peter.

Now, since you have clarified my woefully muddled question do you have anything to contribute?

I believe I am safe to assume that no one participating in this thread owns any one of the aforementioned exotic cars, so let's focus on vehicles that we might actually have some actual experience with.

Side question: Is the physics model that PD has been using something that is generic and not individually modifiable for any given car? That would certainly explain their lack of response to people's complaints about some of the more popular cars.
 
Very mature Peter.

Now, since you have clarified my woefully muddled question do you have anything to contribute?

Well since you ask, the in-game version of the Lancer GSR Evo 7 accurately mirrors it's real-world counterpart. It behaves exactly as it should when driven hard (I've tracked mine and drive it fairly hard occasionally on the street).

Love Always,
Peter

PS - Glad to help 👍
 
so let's focus on vehicles that we might actually have some actual experience with.

I seem to recall someone telling me their game counterpart car "felt" very much like their real every day driver commuter car they have in real life, right now.
I'll try & point him to this thread.

Not exactly what you were looking for, I know. And it's not a vintage example. But obviously some are reported to be modeled quite well.

(I'm still saying the issue is that PD skimped on the less popular vintage cars. Pfft.)
 
Side question: Is the physics model that PD has been using something that is generic and not individually modifiable for any given car? That would certainly explain their lack of response to people's complaints about some of the more popular cars.

In general, a physics model should be able to accept anything that obeys the laws of physics. However, computers only have so much power, so naturally, you can't replicate everything.

The best way that I can think of to answer your question is with an example, I hope this helps:

A car in GT5 might look like this:
weight - 1000
power - 500
drag - .3
front track - 50
rear track - 50

Any car that you can describe with those parameters can be modeled. But consider a car with no rear track (ie, a single rear wheel, like the T-Rex). The physics engine would not be able to model such a car because it wasn't build for such a thing. Without seeing the actual code for the game, it's hard to know where the limits are. All we can do is guess that cars that are similar to those in game would be easy to simulate. Porsches, any missing mainstream Ferrari, Lamborghini, etc, should be very easy to simulate.

Well since you ask, the in-game version of the Lancer GSR Evo 7 accurately mirrors it's real-world counterpart. It behaves exactly as it should when driven hard (I've tracked mine and drive it fairly hard occasionally on the street).

Without numbers, and only anecdotal evidence (and not very much I might add) this does not seem very reliable. I already know that nothing in GT acts exactly like it does in the real world because higher order effects like chassis deformation aren't modeled, and the PS3 can't run an infinitely fine mesh of Navier Stokes equations on the car body to determine the aero forces. So strictly speaking, your statement is incorrect.
 
Without numbers, and only anecdotal evidence (and not very much I might add) this does not seem very reliable. I already know that nothing in GT acts exactly like it does in the real world because higher order effects like chassis deformation aren't modeled, and the PS3 can't run an infinitely fine mesh of Navier Stokes equations on the car body to determine the aero forces. So strictly speaking, your statement is incorrect.

Ok, how about "In a given driving situation, the car in the game responds in much the same fashion as the real thing." Unless you want to give me some money to take my car to Spa, Laguna or the Nurburgring, that's about as good as anyone is likely to do.

Better?

PS haven't we done this thread before?
 
Alright. I'm kinda followin along with you there Exorcet. So in that case cars that don't conform to the standards of modern street/race cars wouldn't necessarily come out with proper characteristics simply because of the limitations of the computers, correct?
 
Ok, how about "In a given driving situation, the car in the game responds in much the same fashion as the real thing." Unless you want to give me some money to take my car to Spa, Laguna or the Nurburgring, that's about as good as anyone is likely to do.

Don't worry, I'm aware that I was playing a word game there. But I hope my point is visible. Just because you* own and have driven the car, doesn't mean that what you say is necessarily accurate. "Exactly" was wrong, but everyone knew that. But in place of that word, you use vague terms like "much the same". How far is it off? Can you even be sure that you were driving the real thing at the limit (telemetry?) What about beyond the limit? Even though you have experience with the car, there isn't much proof that things are as you say.

I can think of a few ways to "do better" that wouldn't cost any money, or would at least be cheaper than shipping a car across the ocean. Something like modeling one of the cars by hand and then comparing that simulation to GT. But unfortunately, that's a time consuming project by itself. It would probably provide better results and be more insightful than having someone take their car on a track day without any measuring equipment at all though.

At least in my case, with the S7, I have something objective. The car in GT is just too slow. It's a 4 second car at worst in real life, but it struggles to put down sedan times in GT. Generally, cars modeled in GT are slow off the line, but the Saleen seems to have it even worse, and the traction issue persists in the corners. The car's weight balance is in reverse, the game tells you this itself. Just below that level of evidence is the fact that the car drives nothing like reviewers (these people have a lot of experience, and generally understand vehicle dynamics. They also have the ability supplement this with real data, and are generally independent from one another.) say it does; the virtual car doesn't appear to have any downforce, and it completely lacks the stability that the testers describe. In GT5, the car is basically always in a state of oversteer except in very slow corners. Yet, if I remember, understeer was the dominant trait that the reviewers described. Sometimes I wonder if it's not just the weight balance that's backwards, but the entire virtual chassis. If they switched the sizes of the front and rear wheels, it might explain why the car drives like it does.

*not picking on you, this goes for anyone/everyone

Alright. I'm kinda followin along with you there Exorcet. So in that case cars that don't conform to the standards of modern street/race cars wouldn't necessarily come out with proper characteristics simply because of the limitations of the computers, correct?

That's basically the idea. If GT uses a physics model that can only capture the properties of modern cars, then older cars will behave less accurately.

Another example would be air dams vs front splitters. GT seems to only work with net forces when it comes to aerodynamics. An air dam creates intense high pressure that pushes up on the car ahead of itself, but downforce producing low pressure behind it, the downforce is usually greater than the lift, and the result is net downforce. A splitter creates low pressure all along the bottom the car. However since GT only models the net force, an air dam and splitter act exactly the same.
 
Last edited:
Well when someone gives me a Red Bull X2010 in real life, I'll be happy to tell you why it's so different from the game. However I'll probably be dead shortly thereafter because I'll pull so many lateral G's on my first turn that my brains will slide out of my ears.
 
Back