Hi,
Just thought I would follow up, I thought initially you were just coming on here to show off or try and “derail my thread” as you mentioned. But then I thought about it and that wouldn’t make sense. Apologies for jumping to conclusions.
I guess maybe you were looking for a common ground convo, I know making this calculator was a very lonely process, lots of hours in game evaluating and testing and re evaluating! Then even more hours in front of of an excel spreadsheet taping in formula after formula making equations from car suspension tuning books and blogs make sense!
For your comfort, you were definitely on the right track (no pun intended)! The base (stable) setup, is foremost the right place to start then be able to soften or harden to suit the car and drivers preference (both variables that cannot be calculated) I also incorporated a drivetrain denominator that uses a guesstimate weight for the differentials and driveshafts based on the fact if it has those upfront/rearward or both axles.
Also built into the calculations is a multiplier for ROAD/GR4/RACE/VGT or Formula. This give an initial shift of hardness to suit the probable physics model differences of the different suspension types.
There are many other factors that I have built into this that I’m not going to divulge here, but I can safely say that this is the most complex and accurate tuning app ever built for the game. Although I’m sure someone will put me back in my place after saying that! Haha!
If you do ever get back into the game, let me know I’ll hook you up dude!
To be fair, you don't have to apologise, you were right. To cut a long story short, too many beers, hefty natural dose of 'fight or flight' and getting triggered, ended up with the inevitable. But, to be fair, I'd been popping back under the same conditions for a while, but always managed to walk away, well until last week. Oh well, managed to get one decent post in. So will try posting when sober from now on
I did write a full on proposal/presentation for an app based on our calculator, but that along with pretty much everything else is now long gone.
I do remember a bit about the 'solution' I was thinking about (from where last post left off i.e. looking at dealing with driver variables the wrong way).
I'll see about typing it up and posting it if you want. In a way it's exactly the same as what you posted (separating problem areas i.e. braking, mid corner etc), but the ideas for how the app and user 'fixes this' are a little bit different, so maybe this might help give some ideas.
One of the negatives of using drivetrains as the starting variable is that sometimes/usually there are cars that are odd ones out (i.e. that don't conform to the handling norm for that drivetrain or type of car). At first it seemed like a problem, but then you get to realize the amount of cars that are like this are a very small minority, so dialling in an individual custom setting especially for these wasn't too much hassle. Although, sometimes they can be a right pain in the butt i.e. Z4 GT3, on GT6 I think.
Sometimes it might not be the 'handling', it might be a setting that sets them apart from the others of a similar kind, like the DTM Merc that had way more aero than the other FR DTM cars. I think we used to run that on hards and let everything else on mediums just to stop it being a 'cheat car'. As good as the drivetrain variable was to start with, there always had to be a way to deal with exceptions to the norm, but I'm guessing you got that covered.
There's a few other things that I never 'went public' with regarding the calc, obviously, got no idea about the app or your tuning history, plus haven't got GT7, so don't know if some if this would help or is stuff you already do / or know?
Sometimes I did something that I called 'reverse tuning' (others probably have different names for it or probably do it as 'normal' nowadays?). I don't think many people did it back in t'day, but happy to be corrected, but I'll try and explain it:
Car understeers, normal fix would be to change something at the front, but instead I'd change something at the rear
Car oversteers, normal fix would be to change something at the rear, but instead I'd change something at the front
i.e. you 'tune' the opposite end of the problem rather than 'tune' the end of the car which has the problem. There's more to this, but don't want to write an essay if you already know. This was the 'secret' to tyre wear (or lack of it
) on some of my setups. But hey ho, might as well go for it now the cat is out the bag, happy Xmas(!), let me know.
There was another 'reverse' trick on certain cars that was from the calc. Normally the dampers should be roughly the same approximate (%) strength as the springs and the reverse of roll bars (which gives that core stability). But on some cars that I used high default % values (i.e very stiff) at the front and low at the rear, you can switch the dampers around and put the low rear ones on the front and vica versa. Not sure if I've explained that clearly(?) or you know about this little 'trick' already. It only ever worked for dampers though and was very handy at helping out on cars that understeered like an ocean liner going into a corner.
I'll shut up now, and go see what I can dig up that I might have left and write up my proposed 'solution' to the driver variables as best as I can remember it if you want.
Keep rockin'
H
