SOPHY 2.1 Hidden Use: Test Your Tune

[Revengel]

Sophy 2.1 is my favorite thing to race against offline. I've curated a list of cars that are under 591PP (there are a couple that are just above 590pp) and I do a 10 lap race at Spa. I'm using an H-shifter and driving a heavily modified 512BB. The field consists of cars ranging from bone stock ('24 Nissan GTR) to heavily modified ('02 NSX) and all are on SH tires. This way I don't beat a car by having better tires; Sophy only drives on the stock tire from my experience.

With many of these cars, I have a tune I've placed on the ride. Some have a sport/fully customizable suspension, others have aero, some LSD, etc. As I drive in the race, I'll notice that some cars always fall towards the back of the pack. I'll see them having issues at Radion, and other spots and while they're all within about 4PP of one another, some cars just don't measure up to snuff.

Enter the "Sophy Test."

I'll look at the behavior of the car on track, drive it around to see what I think the issue is, make my adjustments and see what my times are. This sounds great but if I've really solved the issue, Sophy should be able to perform better than before in the car with my updated tune.

I've done this with several cars and Sophy's really helped me confirm what the best changes are for each ride. It's now to the point where I don't win that race most of the time because the NSX - which used to finish in the bottom 25% no matter where I started him - now is the car to beat and often finishes a good second or few ahead of me.

There are those who already know how to crate an awesome tune for a car. Most players/drivers here know their personal preferences for how a car feels and how they drive.

However, these tunes are not always well translated across the board.

Sophy I think is a great tool to make sure you tune a car to be stable . . . not just to what you like.


Granted, this is just my opinion. But what do you all think? I'd be curios to hear what others think on the potential of this as a tuning tool.



- Revengel

 

[Desert_Ranger]

I think Sophy is a great tool for verifying that your tuneI are actually viable in a race.

I have a Trans Am series grid full of muscle cars, both with and without engine swaps, all tuned to 700PP, that I've raced with both the standard AI and Sophy. With the standard AI, there were always the same front-runners, as well as the same cars that had trouble keeping pace, and they stayed the same no matter what track was being used. It was also always easy to be at the front of the pack, if not winning outright.

With Sophy, that changed pretty dramatically. All of my tuned cars kept a very tight pace (which I wasn't able to keep up with), and the usual front-runners were nowhere to be found. Even the cars that usually had trouble keeping pace with the pack were battling for position. There was only one car that consistently had issues (the 1970 Chevelle SS), so that's a tune I'll have to look at.

Overall, Sophy performed much better and more consistently than the standard AI, and showed me that I have a lot of work to do on my racing skills in general 🤣

 

[05XR8]

The main difference are the aids used. SOPHY only uses ABS. Reggie(Regular AI) use all aids available. It’s probably why we’re able to have Grid starts with Reggie and not SOPHY(hopefully it’s something SAI(Sony AI) are working on.

I tune my cars so I can replicate the attitudes of the era of cars I enjoy racing. To see that reflected in how SOPHY tries to control the car is awesome. SOPHY drifts, four wheel drifts, makes mistakes, recovers, spins out, has tank slapping moments and backs off to regain composure and then carries on. The aids on with Reggie, it is more artificial as the aids hinder the behaviour of the car I’m trying to achieve.

As I mentioned in another thread, following SOPHY, as a controller user, I see where I can make more gains with the haptic feedback and where SOPHY programming calculates the various trajectories. Just when I think I’m at optimum, I’ll try a move SOPHY made and it sticks. Good stuff!

 

[sjs]

i discovered this use as well. i filled a field with a bunch of cars i've tuned over the years, and in the very first race, it was very obvious that several of the setups were completely broken and unfinished. i started fixing one of them, but they're actually kind of fun to keep unstable. it makes them unpredictable and always a hazard when lapping them. it's almost always chaos and a good opportunity to work on wreck avoidance.

i took it a step further and started using chatgpt to track points in my own championships. i take screenshots of my results, upload to chatgpt, and then it keeps track of all the points. then i generate some event winner imagery just for my own kicks. but it'll be neat to see how the points battle changes as i do start tuning some of the undrivable backmarkers.