Make sure you check these sites out if you want good baseline setups - Assetto corsa - www.racedepartment.com/downloads/the-setup-market.10149/ - iRacing virtualracingschool.com/academy/category/iracing-career-guide/setups/ - LET ME KNOW FOR OTHER SIMS SO I CAN ADD THEM !
I remember a great sim racing called RACE 07 ( made by SIMBIN) with its many addons. There was actually a possibility in game to upload own setup or download other ppl config. I addition you can rate setup from 1-10 points, and look for those withe highest score.
yes if you use ptracker (and the server uses stracker) you can send setups to other people on the server or store them on the server. In any case just install The Setup Market and you're mostly good to go in Assetto Corsa. Also , The Setup Market allows you to UPLOAD your setups for everyone else to use.. so.. donate setups!
thats what i said yes :) ptracker if stracker.... you can also make setups public with ptracker. anyone with ptracker can download it. in this case i think ptracker is similar to lfs. it has many more usable features with sounds....
It would be handy if these games had a test mode where you could select a car and a track and after driving a few laps, select pre-determined feedback responses for a virtual engineer such as understeer, not enough speed on the straights, lefts overheating etc... and the engineer could suggest setup changes to address those issues. You'd then be able to save your setups once you're done and eventually learn how to setup a car without assistance.
Virtual Race Car Engineer 2017 apparently does exactly that. Haven't tried it though. store.steampowered.com/app/523220/Virtual_Race_Car_Engineer_2017/
My intuition is that the Pcars2 engineer system will be awesome to teach what setup changes do which is fantastic , but I don't think it will help in giving people that basic setup that's up to pace assuming a driver is "good"
GamerMuscleVideos, if it's the same as MotoGP game race engineer it will be fantastic! It has always been very good. I always managed to find a setup that fit me perfectly, and having have raced motorcycles myself in real life, I learnt that it takes you years to really learn everything with regards to setups. Even then you will learn more every race
GamerMuscleVideos from what vids I've seen it's fairly rudimentary. Still a great start but would love to see it encompass bump stops, toe,away,accel/deck lock, slip preload, brake maps etc... all the stuff that I don't get !
Well, I've been downloading setups since the days of GTR 2 and good old nogrip forums. Wanna know the secret of the secret? All sims have certain setup values that make you fast when it shouldn't or give you grip or whatever, no sim is perfect as we all know, so every time a new sim or car comes out those who know what to look for go straight for those thresholds to find where is the weak point there. Usually it involves flattening your tire angles (camber and toe) as most as you can while still being able to drive the car (you would be surprised the crazy values in the so called "secret" setups), depending on the sim it would involve reducing the downforce, again, starting with no downforce (front and rear wings) and working till the car is driveable (and many are with zeroed values there), you can also close the brake ducts, again, the closer the quicker. So the whole deal is maximize aerodynamics for speed and work around the quirks of each sim to keep the car on the road, being it unreal values that the engine will accept, being it the race line to take advantage of some extra grippy patch to make a turn otherwise you would have to bring grip to the setup and so on so forth... And what I described you here is basically why some hardcore sim racers complain about our simulation software so much, but basically, until you can simulate every nut and bolt of a car physics you will always have exploitable shortcuts. As a developer I understand your pre made setups argument, taking into account that some sims have better defaults than others I have to say that if you give the optimal setup as default then what is the purpose of making these elaborated setup options, etc...? I believe most developers try to give a default setup that better represents that car driving style and with an acceptable basic performance setup, then you have leeway to improve it and we are not even talking about personal driving styles. And about people sharing setups that have all to do with the people, i.e. I been to many closed leagues where the best setups where shared among all, etc.. but take into account that these were all buddies, all people you know and talk online, I wouldn't expect the same on random open lobbies. And like i said before, after a while i knew exactly what to change from the setups to fit my driving style, to the point where i knew that if X friend of mine gave me his setup I knew to i.e. increase a notch or two of camber or suspension softness, so again, drive style has a lot to do, usually you can't do the same time as the original setup creator, and if you knew what to look for you could take his setup and make it faster for you. And to wrap it up, these days I know how to setup, but I don't like to, and that's why I use things like the setup marketplace you cited, but only because I know what to look for on these setups, and not to forget *I have seen plenty of crap setups in there*, again, some people do crappy setups that works just for them, somehow they get around the track that way but you won't unless you change your driving style, anyway, I wanted to tell you about making setups, and that is hard work, because just for starters, just to begin changing any value you should be able to put 25-20 extremely consistent laps, I mean, less than 1 sec apart, when you driving reliably by instinct, then, you can start changing values, and then doing at least 5-10 laps, then you check the times, change a notch on another parameter, go back and 5-10 laps, you see, that is the only right and consistent way of doing it that I know that you are not trusting the setup and guessing, and when you'll learn to really be fast. Well, those are my 2 cents of experience, Cheers on the channel and good races!
I wish more people realised this, its something I found out a few years back after speaking with people that have been finalists in big competitions and also after driving some insane setups that made no logical sense and nothing close to any real world setup but were redculously fast even when driven by a slightly better than average driver like myself.
My biggest problem with race sims exactly. I want to SIM RACE. Not sim a mechanic who also drives. It would be great if they simulatie mechanics and you can tell them though menu,s want you want from the car. Like more speed on the straight so chance the wing and the gearing for example. Now i have to ask another player or search the internet for a setup and thats got nothing to do with simracing on a higher level. Maybe in amateur classes but nothing above that.
well a nice idea with the telling an engineer/mechanic what you want... but the problem is... it becomes realy complex... for example it's usually not things like I want more speed on the straight.. what is tricky in the setup.... but things like those nuances at turn in and mid turn.. or turn exit.. stability on/off the brakes.. on/off the accelration.. ... too less rotation on corner entry.. or too much? too nervous... or not agile enough... in t1 4 5 6 the car is fine.. in t2 3 8 it's terrible... car is fast allover the track but has problems on bumps ... or only on a bump in a particular turn .. or whatever.... it would be an immense algorithm if you just can tell it what the car feels like and what you prefer to change and so on.. it would be much much more complicated then the sim itself... it would be much more advanced then todays AI I think ... yes you could make such stuff in a very very simple way... bui that wouldn't be much more then those "more speed less turning" options on arcade games... and it would pretty much stuff everyone can do by themself if they now at least a bit about driving... which you usually do if setups make a difference... it's all that detailed complex stuff that are hard to setup... and I think would be most unlikely able to tell an artificial assistend so that the algorithm understands you... if you do it in a way of menus.. you end up with someting very similar to the usual setup screen again :D .. like too edgy on the brakes = bump dampers or differential...
Bambeakz I know this is an old comment but, Project Cars 2 has this exact feature under the Race Engineer menu. Would be nice to see it in Sims like Assetto Corsa
Then when you get more speed on the straights and your overall laptime gets slower, what do you do? And that´s an easy one, think about solving an "oversteering at corner entry and exit, understeering mid corner" problem in such a way... And that´s assuming that the driver is not actually the only components who needs to be tuned...
No matter how great of a baseline setup devs could build for every car/track/weather combination there will always be people that make one better and find the extra time. That’s just how it is. If you don’t want to have to worry about setups winning races (which they don’t always do) then there are tons of fixed setup options in many of the sims. That’s really the only option. There will always be the disconnect between the causal players who just want to drive and the drivers who have the experience and knowledge on how to setup the cars to extract every tenth available. That’s how it is in real life as well. Casual racers exist in many series around the world. They are called gentlemen drivers. They roll their suitcase of drivers gear into the track, drive, and go home while their pro co-driver or teammate works with the team to build the right setup for the race. It all just boils down to what you want out of sim racing. We want the most realistic sim services we can. But when they give them to us with really in depth physics and car setups we can’t just default to we want understeer and oversteer sliders to do all the work for us or better yet have the devs build setups for us. It just doesn’t work that way. I’ll even admit that I use lots of VRS setups. But by no means are they by default going to make you run away from the field. I always have things I want to change to make it more comfortable for me. So how could a dev take all the time to make multiple setups for each car and track combo? It just isn’t possible. Especially with all the weather variables built into sims now that each require their own tweaks. There is no easy button here. Except fixed setup races. That’s the easy button.
The Race Engineer tool in Project Cars 2 was really pretty good. Pretty much simulated how it works in real life - you as the driver communicate to your engineer the symptoms that you're experiencing (mid-corner understeer for example) and it suggests setup tweaks to make. Might not be perfect, but worked pretty well. I'd like to see idea get built on by other sims...
I believe sim games should have an engineer app that gives you advice on your setup direction as it relates to the type of track and your laptimes. For example running too much downforce at monza the engineer app could suggest decreasing front or rear downforce dependent on perfomance of laptimes. It could also analyze the forces going through the suspension during braking and corner to know if you are losing time over a bumpy surface because of a too stiff suspension and where to make adjustments.
I believe if this is implemented there would be a possibility for sim games to truly establish themselves have place in training ground for new drivers and engineers.
I think Assetto Corsa has done a reasonably good job in the setup screen where you hover over each variable and it tells you what lowering or raising each setting does. It's taught me a fair amount about setups and getting them right. I'm still no expert but I'm certainly much quicker than when using default setups.
Fully agree and on top of your points I would add that there is a clear learning curve in AC. The underestimated carrer mode helps you discovering this car setup learning curve (if you raise AI high enough). Carrer mode starts with almost street cars in absolutly stock definitions, thus setups variables are very few... tyre pressure basically, then some cars alow you to play with camber, tyre coumpond and so on... But it's the most important things to setup correctly! When you end the carrer you have some F1 cars with ludicrous (but realistic anyway) amount of setup variables, but hopefully you'll have learned a lot before and mastered the major setup topics that must be adjusted first before you start tweeking the enery recovery system... (what's the gain of adjusting 1mm bump stop, if your tyre compound choice is wrong and pressure absurd...) Using setups you've downloaded doesn't mean you don't have to understand the parameters themselves, is the setup doesn't fit your driving style, you must know what to do to improve it, downloading a base is saving you some time not making it in the best scenario :-)
For all its flaws Project Cars 2 addressed this issue, and did a relatively good job. For every car you have at least a stable and a loose setup to choose from, and in some cases you may have the original setup that comes with the car when you buy it from a dealer. They also introduced a race engineer, where you can specify what issue you're having, and the race engineer adjusts things to solve it.
Im abit late to comment, but it's wild that so many people disliked someone suggesting ways to put all drivers on a more equal ground. If you're a great competitor you should want other people to have the same advantage as you so when you beat them it feels much better.
I couldn't agree more. A good car setup is like a cheat code in sim racing. Not only getting 2-3 second faster lap times but with a good setup, a car can feel so much more pleasurable and manageable to drive, even though you are going faster! I agree that sims really should have some 'basic' setup options to at least get new players started and understanding the important of applying different type compounds, pressures, ride heights, gear ratios, etc. Without doing all the work for the player, sims could offer a 'basic' or 'street' setup. One for 'endurance', another for 'drift', etc. And maybe a brief description of how the different setups affect the ride, even if it's a couple lines of text on the screen. I'm new to sim racing and have only been playing AC for 2 months now with a wheel and VR headset and every day my mine continues to be blown. Around a month ago i was just doing some hotlaps on a Laguna Seca server and another driver in the same car I was in was consistently doing 4-5 second faster laps than every one else. I praised his driving skills in chat and said something along the lines of that laptime is brilliant! Before I knew it, a msg popped up saying "x wants to send you a setup file for x car" I clicked accept and within seconds I now had his setup for the car. That was the day the door to setup world (better than disneyworld) opened for me and I realized we had all of these settings to play around with for the cars, plus I got first hand experience of what a difference it makes on track too. Of course there's also the fact that I'm a noob and the other driver has probably been at sim racing longer so it's not just about a good setup and you'll be fastest on the track, but it does help a lot.
Great video, GM. I'm one of those guys who just wants to drive. I have no interest in being an engineer. I'd go one step further than your suggestion, and as others have mentioned, would like to see a virtual engineer in the sim. Someone who I could just tell "it's pushing in turn 1" or "it's loose in turn 10", and he would make the adjustments. And after doing some practice laps with some AI cars, he could make some suggestions on his own. Also, I'd like to see fixed setups enforced on public server races. Let the league guys have their super secret setups. Spend hours dialing in a setup? Ain't nobody got time for that.
I think one of the esports sims (can't recall which one) fixed it by simply exposing a database of all races/sessions to date along with each driver's setup available for download. Problem gone when everybody can try and use everybody else's setup.
been in this camp for years, i want to drive, not tune. just want a competitive default tunes, competitive is all, not the best, just something i know is in ballpark of good. most of us will be better served with track time.
Liked the video. I've always wished for games to include some half decent setups for each track and each car, but have never seen it. I've tried to learn doing setups myself from articles, but it's a lot to take on and as you said, I dont necessarily want to spend the time doing that. So in AC I generally race with the defaults. Now that I know about the setup market, itll be much easier. Definitely something the race sims should find a way to tackle.
Well said and i 100% agree. Setups bug me a lot. Tweaking the camber, or caster, ARB, fast rebound all these things its ridiculous. We want to race the car not work on it. There should be a set of different setups for each car and track like you said for example one for more oversteer, one for understeer etc.
Set up is part of racing, although I can understand it´s intimidating for a non techy guy to cope with so many options (that are also often explained in atrocious ways...). Point is, there is no way any default set up can come any close to a personally tailored one: the latter will always have that further 1 or 2 seconds that can only come by having a car which is really suited to your driving style (which is not JUST under-/over-steering but takes into consideration a gazillion other vehicle dynamics). A range of default set-ups might improve a little bit the situation, but will never really deliver any really useful result. Setting up your car is first of all a matter of improving your driving: you need to improve your consistency to feel the differences, you must understand where you are driving "well" and where (and what, obviously) is limiting you. Real race drivers don´t make setup changes only when engineers are available, but any decent driver would be absolutely capable to do that to some extent simply because they have gathered enough testing experience to recognize what these effects are (and also to understand side effects that the team might not forecast from the pit). Also, any grassroot racer will do its own setup simply because that´s the only thing he can do. I believe the real improvement would be to simply have better description to what every parameter does, including the situation where the effect is most notable and possible non linearities. In the end, it´s not rocket science once you have a decent description and you use it as a way to improve your driving. Also especially at the beginning you don´t really need to develop a different set up for each and every track, you should mostly think about tailoring yourself a car which is easy and predictable to drive (again: ACCORDING TO YOUR DRIVING STYLE) and can give you good consistency; use the same basic setup every time you go to a new circuit, make quick adjustements to what you have to adapt to each circuit/conditions (e.g. gearing, radiator openings) and keep working on the remaining "core" of the set up, time after time after time... You will get to an overall setup which will probably be better than anything you might have found online. Or, in the worst case, you will have learned something trying :)
Set up is part of racing, but it's also its own professional discipline on a race team. There's only so many hours in a day and if you want to be a better driver, then driving is the skill you want to practice. There's definitely value to understanding how the car works but given how deep the subject can go, something like a virtual engineer to assist players in tweaking set ups would be helpful.
@@jzyyz I believe it would be helpful on paper, but impossible to be properly implemented in reality... Real engineers struggle with many professional drivers that can´t explain the problems and only complain about too much under/oversteer, and that usually ends up with either poor performances or the engineer developing a sixth sense to understand what the unspoken problem is. That´s not something that a virtual engineer can do.. a virtual one with standard questions could be a start, but then either the number of possible solutions explode or the answers remain too general, so you would still need to work you way around it... there are simply too many interacting effects for a standard answer to be a working solution. Also, drivers often create the problem themselves, and that´s the reason why tuning your own car improves your driving skills much more than keep on lapping and lapping hoping to put together a faster lap. Driving for tuning is first of all driving for consistency, and when you develop consistency you´ll be faster much quicker.
Finding a good group to race with and practice helps alot. I run with a group on project cars 2 and a few of us make our own setups and when they turn out really fast we share setups and run practice. Also you can take setups from the top 30 times on each track through the time trials. Helps a lot and makes for great competitive racing.
AMS has option to fetch setup for time trial results. Probably not the best for the full race, but a good start to see what people tweak for top times.
At least in iRacing you have races with fixed setup or at least three setups (high, medium, low downforce). But you are totally right and good that you bring this topic up. Was never discussed openly.
Yah I think Fixed setup racing is a really good thing in general , open setup racing has its place I think but id love to see a general trend for it to be acceptable for high level racing to also have fixed setup events. Its a bit like how in F1 , I think most of us would love to see all the current drivers take part in matched cars as well as a constructors champ. In the 80s they had support races where they did that with road cars , but how amazing would it be to have the current world champs take part in a fixed spec f2 race and then do the F1 race ! ROC and some special events are interesting as well but they are mostly done a gimmick rather than a serous thing.
F1 drivers in fixed spec F2 would be mint. I was considering making F1 my go to series this year but I got put off once again after seeing predictable results, GT3 is where its at - the cars have strengths and weaknesses but BoP makes every race interesting..
F1 is good if you can get an on-board view and sometimes you see amazing moves or just flat out amazing driving. but in-terms of time watched to exciting viewing I agree I think its really not up there with other series at the moment.
Great topic! I study full time, work part time and have a family I want to spend time with too. When I have time for gaming, I just wan't to play and not fiddle with numbers for hours.
This is the best video I've ever seen on the entire internet, in my whole life.....ever! Exactly this is what me and my friends have been talking about for the last 6-7 years. Thank you for brining it up and hopefully there will be a change.
I agree with all that 100%. I find that changing one thing then effects something else, as per descriptions for each item in Assetto Corsa setup screens, and ultimately I end up 9/10 making the car worse.....not better. The problem as you mentioned is that I dont have an interest in it and to put hours into learning something which Im not interested in is something that I just dont bother doing in the gaming world. I love driving, not tinkering with setups.
So Ive been running the BMW z4 gt3 at Nurburgring GT track consistently at 2:05-2:06 with the stock setup. After watching this video and checking out the setup market app, downloading a setup, I now run consistently 2:00-2:01. This is crazy, I never realize how important setups are. The car immediately feels different!
Need Setup help? Monza - Higher front ride height than rear, Low to 0 downforce, quick steering ratio Bathurst- High overall ride height, Low to Medium downforce, Soft springs but stiffer roll bars Nurburgring- Medium Downforce, medium ride height, medium stiffness Spa- Low downforce, Low ride height, stiff springs, medium-high steering ratio Dubai- Medium/High downforce, Low ride height, Minimal camber & caster lots of cooling for brakes & engine Silverstone- Low/Medium downforce, very low ride height, Soft rear roll bar, stiff Brands Hatch/Brno- Medium/High downforce, Stiff, Stiff, Stiff, No right side camber and high left side tire pressures
I agree. I think GT Legends had a slider bar where you could move it towards oversteer or understeer. Then you could go into the garage and see what numbers it changed. Also Nascar 2003 had general setups named Qualifying, Fast, etc.. and I'd do what you said, I'd load Qualifying setup, change tires, add fuel, remove tape off the grill, maybe lower max revs so it would live longer.
This issue is persistent and it won't change. Few years back iracing had a open ruf cup series. I was about a 1-2 seconds off the ultimate pace without making any substantial changes to the setup. Then iracing switched the series to fixed setup because people were whining too much. And guess what? I was still 1-2 seconds off the pace. Who would've thought. If the baseline is drivable setup won't matter much. People have second thoughts cause they always think they should be faster than they actually are. The speed is in practice, a lot of it. Practicing optimal line (and I mean using every inch of the track), steering with throttle input, getting turnin/brake points spot on are far more important than setups. Plz don't kill, it's just my opinion.
I like the virtual engineer idea mentioned in these comments. ACC has the safe and aggressive setups, which I like, but would be nice during practice to input a few items of feedback - not enough front grip in fast left handers, too much understeer at the hairpin etc.
Yeah, the basic setup is usually oversteer, I just give a bit of understeer/stability to the cars. It is not faster, but it allows me to have some fun and make clean laps. The defaults in all the game are garbage, for me at least. You are right and I am glad you brought this up. Problem is that there is no simple formula for setups that everyone will understand.
A moderate skilled driver should be able to download a general setup and put in a lap time with it that's within 0.500 , of course there might be some general trends to a setup a driver wants or a driver might just be utterly useless and no setup would help. but at worse having a set thats proven to do X time is better than not having anything at all to go by and then ether make something from nothing or go with a setup that's never done a good time.
It would be nice if we had some way to upload setups to the sim itself, and then anyone could download those setups once you've launched the sim. This would require a server of some sort to host the setups, though. Perhaps the developers could create a community depository where anyone could post these setups, and then the devs could place these setups in the sim by default using a patch. Just a thought...
This is why I love iRacing's fixed setup races. Makes it all driver for those of us who are passionate but only have time to race and not test and tune for hours
Absolutely mate!! Great video. These are games you buy to enjoy. I don't have time to even bother with sets ups. And if I did there are simply so many car and track combinations I would send more time doing that then racing. After playing the GT Sport beta. Is seems as they might have a solution. As they have 6 slots to save sets ups for each track. And hopefully you can download popular ones. Keep the vids coming
Could not agree more. I enjoy driving simulators for driving, not for having to spend endless hours building setups. This is why I used to drive the fixed setup series in iRacing more than any other.
Love the channel and this is a great insight that I agree with. The problem is that 90% of sim racers are such a pantsload of screeching complainers that you could never please even 10 percent of the population. The race engineer option for PC2 is the most innovative solution I have seen so far.
Once tire models get better or even already for longer races you could try to set the car up to make the tires last or make it handle just right mid stint, I feel you though, a selection of baselines for all cars all tracks would be ideal
The problem most people have with setups is just that they keep tweaking the setup instead of trying to adapt to the car, at least 1 of those 1.5-2.5 seconds comes from that. Every time you make any kind of significant setup tweak it sends you back to square 1, you might think downloading someones alien setup gained you 2 seconds but mostly you only gained that because after downloading their setup you stopped screwing with every setting and trusted that the car could do the times the setup uploader told you it could.
100% agree with your video. The biggest pain for me is both Project Cars games. How much time do they think the average Joe has to mess about with car set up?... particularly as you already spent an age getting the wheel to feel like you weren't steering a boat! It winds me up no end and is why I always get frustrated and stick on GT Sport. Even though the execution of the penalty system is awful, you can be sure that you don't require an engineering degree to enjoy the product you have spent your hard earned d'oh on. Grr.
Could not agree more, this option has been missing from most racing games for years, I think Project Cars 2 has a system within the game where an "Engineer" provides you with an interactive session and then makes changes based on some simple questions and answers, he then adjusts the car based on your answers. iracing is not too bad because it has a huge community who share setups and their easy to upload via some third party apps. If the new option in PC2 is popular then it may force other devs to copy!
I totally agree with your idea of multiple set-ups available for each car and for each track. I don't get excited about creating a set-up, it's not practical or realistic that a driver should know all of the engineering of every car. I just purchased project cars 2 and I'm now faced with mucking around with set-ups for cars for hours and hours, and not least the setting up of the ridiculous AI that are constantly running you off the track. Common developers, let's make racing sims more realistic and accessible.
What you describe is a baseline setup and those are always slower than the optimal setup because not everyone likes the same thing. The only thing drivers should aim for is a safe setup that doesn't try to kill you at the limit.
Everything you said is 100% true. And every racing simulator this should be understeer oversteer slider with little bit more detail than that plus an advanced car settings. Some games do offer that like Dirt Rally but not all
Virtual Racing School has a team of really good drivers on iracing that upload setups for most official races weekly. Another thing is to meet some nice people who drive what you like and practice with them while the do their tuning. So far I now have a group of around 6 people who collaborate and share sets. Other than that there's forums that have sets usually with a lap video so you know it can be good. I really don't see the problem here lol, although I only do iracing where there is a huge community of nice people.
Racing sims, as everything else in life, are easy to learn, but hard to master. If you invest only dozens of hours, you learn to drive a car for a few laps without crashing. But is you wanna be competitive, get ready to throw hundreds to thousands of hours into learning the tracks, cars, racecraft, buying and assembling a cockpit and so on. This also includes the knowledge of setups. My recommendation is to concentrate on one series, say GT3 and a few cars, with which you'll play competitive MP.. The point of a setup is to give you confidence to push the car faster through the corners. Everyone can be fast in a straight line, the trick is to plant the car through the corners and this is where all the black magic of suspension setups comes alive. Good setup allows you to carry higher speed through the corners, making a car sharper to turn in and balanced on powering out of the corner. This also allows for more confidence and control to hit all the kerbs and apexes, when you know the car will hold the grip with ease.
I totally agree. Another possible solution is more fixed-setup servers? Either way competing on a level playing field is way more fun... most of us aren't competing for money and prizes here (I wish)
Twinging's no argument , anyone that disagrees should be executed on the spot by north Korean firing squad. I mean Twinings is so good that despite being annoyingly portentous and also rude to me in the London original store I still get them. DAMN YOU TWININGS TEA !!
honestly im a mechanic by trade and do enjoy messing with setups and have a decent idea irl and in game but would love this option, its a pain to try join a race and end up spending the whole evening setting up a car, satisfying when done but frustrating at first and sometimes i just wanna race
I have a love/hate witb setups. Any time you go to a new game, it takes man, many, many hours to find the tips and tricks for that game. And then the same for each car. A 488 GT3 setup in Assetto Corsa may make sense and fly on a particular track and then a similar setup on PCars 2 will be an absolute brick. Tuning can be fun, but when you start spending as much time or even more tuning rather than driving, well then that becomes miserable. You're exactly right on this stuff. F1 2019 seems like it wasn't even tested, on another note. LB setups are absolutely not based in any sort of reality.
What exactly was "exposed?" 'That guys who put in extra work to be faster are actually faster? Imagine that!!! Click bait tag line. Working on setups helps one to learn the car and its driving dynamics. It's also pretty damn rewarding when you get the car dialed in for your driving abilities and the track. Why copy someone else's work when their work is tailored to how they drive? Once you know what you're doing, it's not that hard to properly set up a car.
Great video, I've always wondered why there seems to be an idea that everyone also wants to be a mechanic. I just want to drive, and not feel greatly handicapped for it. And at least if there is a setup part of the game, how about there being decent guides and/or hints as to what the settings actually do? Take ACC for example. No information what so ever, which is slightly absurd imho.
what u ask for would require a mountain of work for the devs. your talking thousands of manhours per car for each track for each setup type. ive always thought a great addition would be a whole career mode around setting up a car with scenarios showing what "a" vs "b" setting on the castor angle does to the handling characteristics. again though like u say not everyone wants to do that work so i think a good compromise is to allow a robust setup sharing feature with a voting system along with specific race settings that either allow custom setups or a baseline setup for everyone, or even allow people to use other players setups in the race if they wanted to allow it. more options are always better in the end. great video
Yeah setting up a car is not my thing as well. I usually just fiddle with the aero a bit and leave it at that. When I'm feeling adventurous I might twiddle with the gear ratios or camber settings but that's about it. I always feel like I would be much faster if I had someone who would do the setup properly for me. I mean it's great that a sim offers such depth but it would be even greater if they also offered a simpler way for those who are not really interested in the nitty gritty of car mechanics. I would be happy with just a wizard-like tool that asks a few questions on what you would like to improve on the car and would then dial in an appropriate setup. Or maybe just a few sliders that chance some basic stuff.
Only reason i don't care about the really realistic racing-games, other than watching you play them, is just this. You need to be a semi-good mechanic to be able to drive the thing without spinning out like a spastic. Give me a damn car that is pre-setup for each race and we're golden.
I agree with this specially for online games that you cannot compete with people live, like Dirt Rally. I have some basic understanding of setups and can get much quicker in DR from the setups but when I see people online that are 30 seconds or in some cases 1 whole minute faster than me on a course it just makes me wonder how on earth they could be that much faster. It has to be either cheaters or pro drivers with some sort of setup that makes no real world sense to actually work. I do not think I am fast but I also know I am not slow but some of these times that I see online are just insanely quicker that it has me scratching my head.
The biggest problems will setups is that people have formed their setups towards their wheel and ffb, so when you use a user created setup, it's not good and it doesn't feel right
Monza Oval portion especially is a tough track a lot of bumps took me awhile with a borrowed set up but I ranked 6th globally just takes time and a solid line. Wheel can really help for that track. Stick with it you'll be awesome
Good point. But also consider this: If your setup has 30 laps of fuel in it for a 5 lap race then you are losing time just because of the setup. A good setup helps the driver to drive the car like he wants/needs to. So in other words good driving and setup go hand in hand. But for sure. Learn the track and some basic driving skills before even considering adjusting the car setups. Maybe just change the tire compound and fuel but not much other then that at first. Once you get better you may want to adjust the settings to make the car behave more like you'd expect it. Also in setup there are things that make the car faster (mechanical grip) and things that make the driver faster (handling behavior).
I always bang my head on the table to forget the track layout after making changes to my setup so any time improvements are actually because of the setup and not because I got better at racing the track.
Lol , well thats the other side you really need to be lapping consistently within 0.300 each lap to then really benefit from setup tweeking / tweeking setup yourself. That's why I think having a good default is better than teaching people setups at first , at least then they will eventually hit what is that setups general pace, then they can tweak it to there liking / get more from it.
Paul Keeble Even a track description featuring general tips how to GENERALLY tune a car for a track would be nice. Something like "soft sprung, hard damped, aero set towards cornering speed".
The answer to your "problem" can be to have some kind of Virtual Race Engineer. One of the good attempts as what I've seen on TH-cam is the Project CARS 2. You just tell him what's wrong with the car and he will correct the setup for you. This is very good idea, I think, because you can learn from it. I think it's better solution than to have the "default" setups, because the "good" setup depends on the car, track, tyre choice, whether conditions, driving style and many other variables. You cannot make a "good" default setups for all the variables.The setup is a PERSONAL preference!
The problem is the Race Engineer wont help a person develop a setup that's actually fast it will just help them develop a setup that's to there taste. I think it will help people learn how to make setups over time and explain what does what but you really need to A) be able to drive fast to develop a fast setup and B) know the random funky things with a given sim or a given car and a given track to know what setup stuff gets more speed. "You cannot make a "good" default setups for all the variables." That's true , but you can make a good default setup that gets 1.5 -2.5 seconds over a bad generic setup that is typically found in most simulators for lots of cars. "The setup is a PERSONAL preference!" It is in some ways but at the same time what gets a setup within the 0.500 of the best laps is not really personal preference , those things are mostly fundamentals like down force within 1-2 clicks , gearing and tire pressures within a given range.
+GamerMuscleVideos goodtopic of discussion yes you are right about games should come with atleast a basic setup which is fairly balanced BUT there is something else missing in the sim racers. Back in the day when I still played good old GTR2 we had this telemetry application that you could use on the side with GTR2 in order to start making your own setup or atleast guide you in the right direction by using the telemetry tool. I really love to play around in project cars , asseto corsa , dirt rally but when it comes to setups I usually make things worse because I don't know which direction I should be tweaking the car because there simply isnt enough information on what the car is doing while u drive it. Simple example your car bottoms out ... why you wonder ? adjust ride height or stiffen springs ? I don't know the game won't tell me I can not read any actual data so you change one thing to find out its the other and its a frustrating process. Just simple applications we could use to give us an idea of in which direction to start setting up the cars would be great so you wont waste so much time fiddling with the many different options.
One possible solution is to make all setups publicly available in game. So you can create your setup, but anyone else is free to download it and use it too.
i agree 100% even those that want to fiddle it would be a huge help in getting a new car set up. with the knowlage that the default is going to be crap i have spent hours trying to fix a problem with the car that just couldn't be fixed. i didnt know at first cause the defaults crap. if the case was that the default was decent and i hop in the new car and its way to tail happy, i know its always going to be like that and maybe its not a good car for me.
With the Steam Workshop there's no reason they can't utilize VALVe's infrastructure to make posting and downloading car setups possible and easy for then end user. I agree with the "Drivers aren't engineers" kind of thing you're saying. I'm not interested in trying to figure out what amount of camber is going to get me around the track faster and neither is most professional racing drivers, that's why race engineers exist. I just want to live out my fantasy of being a pro driver. I'm one of those not great drivers and I really rely on other people's work on setups to help me through most race games. Thanks for the link to the setup market.
Even Forza does this. You are forced to upgrade you car to the top of a class and usually auto upgrade is way slower. But I can't be bothered to tune every one of 350+ cars manually so it's competitive. And I race all of them randomly
Ive never been strong on doing setups although am not bad if i put the time into it. I find the league im in requires some serious tuning and practice. I do miss doing more racing than practice and setting ups. Good point, some basic decent setups would be nice so we could spend more time racing.
Really good video and good point! I rarely play with simulators anymore. I was playing quite a lot with Nascar Racing 2003 but stopped long time ago. Recently installed Project Cars 2 and Nascar '15 to have some fun and both games fucked my mind up so much with the setups. I don't have all fucking day to try to tweak the car to have some fun. For me these days are over. I just want to drive, practice and have a good time. I would really like to have a marketplace or something, where casual players can download setups. I would even pay a couple of extra bucks to same time and most importantly my nerves.
The problem that I see in this video is, one - in the absolute best case scenario a good setup will gain you the said time(1.5-2sec), best case scenario being a very fast, lot's of downforce, lot's of setup options car on Spa or similar, secondly - setup is so dependent on driver preference that might make more harm than good, I always asked RW for setups and when I was lucky enough to have them I found that they don't suit me at all and was barely any faster! Most important thing is laps and laps and more laps, even with stock setup you should be within 1-1.5sec of the fastest time, again car-track combo. so I personally think it's more of a clickbait than anything else, some videos are good some are so so
Caramidaru Andrei Bogdan but at a track like spa everyone assumes that you need a lot of downforce and it's not the case. Spa is a low downforce track your full throttle 85-90% of the lap. On Pcars the difference. between a low downforce setup & high downforce set isn't that much different maybe half a second but if your running high downforce you depend more on aero than the others around you, so if you get caught in dirty it's affects your car more than others around you not to mention you lack 5-8mph topspeed and you burn fuel faster, and it's more difficult to regulate tire temps through a corner, same with Silverstone, Bathurst & Road America
At least with street cars the first thing to do in AC is to change the camber settings -> should be significantly lower than in street default setup. With GT3 cars I would start with wings & ride height -> depending on track layout
This is the most intelligent sim-racing video I have ever watched. I know nothing about sets and never will. I pay my money and am beaten by nerds that cannot drive better than myself and that takes all the fun out of it for me. Sim-racing is more of an engineers (nerds) game than a drivers game and I think that its wrong at least it is for me, and now I only race AI. I have big respect for nerds, lord knows we don't have enough of them here in the usa. But sim racing is supposed to be fun, and its only fun for those that can unravel the mystery (numbers) of sets. Thanks for this vid, I hope someone at some studio listens to this. You have my respect sir.
This is a bigger problem for the sim racing industry than many imagine. How many sims down the years have newbie racers simply dropped because there are no proper setups with the game and they just feel they are rubbish and get frustrated. That's not good for business because how many of those newbies have then abandoned the hobby never to return? There's also a missed marketing opportunity here in terms of getting "celebrity" race engineers to create a set of setups that ship with the game.
Dilmah Extra Strong :P I was actually sipping it r4ight aS mentioned ur tea. lol. At least Poms & aussies (if nothing else) have a love of tea in common. Nice video matey!
All of this has been fixed in Project Cars 2. Anyone can do a Time Trial against a real human Ghost car that has set a record (or not) and download that person's setup. Also, you can simply tell the engineer what's going on and he'll do the changes for you. And also, there are explanation about what everything does on the setup thing.
Great video! Console racer games tend to become race engineer simulators when in a league. Your forget the guys who don't know how to do a good set up make it worse and end up 4 secs slower after stuffing it up.
Tyre pressure, Gearing and Aero is where you're going to gain most time. Thinking setups are difficult is the first mistake. There are many easy to follow setup guides. Spend some time on it and get the satisfaction of achieving Alien status by yourself, it's far more rewarding than having it gifted to you imo.
I mean racing in real life using someone else’s car means someone else has set it up already. When it turns to league racing, you are your own team so you’ll have to be your own engineer as well. There’s also the option of turning on stock setups which a lot of games have now so this is a legit complaint but if you’re competitve and want to find more time you’ll probably make a setup.
Downloaded a profile for my Audi R8 LMS, no more understeer, you're a legend, thank you. I don't understand the inner workings of a car nor do i have time to figure it out, i now have a point of reference. Cheers. subbed an liked There absolutely should be a test mode of some description, pitting and then leaving the pit takes an age, should be on the fly. Pcars 2 has an engineer mode but in all honesty pcars 2 works with the defaults just fine, now assetto for the Audio r8 at least is the same as that, AC is a mess without a decent setup. F1 cars strangely seem unaffected to me. Slower cars like the BMW 1M, ewwwww it's just an understeering shitstorm. thanks again.
Your point of the drivers not making the setup isn't really fair. Sure they won't pull up with exact measurements but they will ask for generalized changes (stiffer in the rear/front shocks, and aero changes) and they usually have complete control of diff and brake bias and other changes. Drivers in real life also usually develop the car. They literally tell the exact parts the team needs to improve, and big directional changes they need. Juan Pablo Montoya is known for literally making his team redesign the front suspension. I assure you, if these setup changes didn't require the labor and physical power of a crew of mechanics, the drivers would likely do it themselves.
Hey mate, love your videos. Very informative! I am just a novelist online occasional racer. One reason why I stopped online racing is because I was always in the back of the pack and didn’t have a set up. Thanks to The Set Up Market that has changed, but I wanted to know, is there a website where they have online racing and all the simulated cars are always the same. That way everybody is always even. And it’s all about the driving. Please let me know I would really appreciate it. Thanks. Keep coming with those videos. (Maybe I racing?)
I don't mind setups but there's a couple that piss me off. In one race at Spa, dude was redlining directly after every shift and jumping mph by the 10s by the engine straining so much
everyones setup is different. when a driver sets their car up its built around their personal driving style and will work well for them. so downloading someones setup that says "good setup" isnt always going to make you faster because you may not be able to drive their setup the way they do. it may be too twitchy or it may be pulling wide too much. you must build a setup around yourself
f1 2016 has profiles" for setups in career mode. Also for Pc you can select setups from the steam comunity (so you can select a setup from the yt drivers).
Setups, setups, setups!!! I for one wished more games would make track specific defaults that would at the very least give you a good neutral suspension, areo, and transmission setting to work with. That way you could at least save yourself some time and not have to drive around for ten minutes breaking in the car and tires, than piddle around with the tunings for another 10 to 15, all just to find a neutral setting and get your gearing, just to go back out and run another 10 minutes to then try and fine tune it more and repeat over and over again until your crazy. I've said this so many times, I buy the game to sim race, not sim race mechanic. It sucks for those of us who have only a rudimentary understanding of setups, even more for those who have no clue like most people starting out.
Its not like all the fast drivers with good setups just came and instantly made a perfect setup. I for example spent 800 hours on AC and have 11000km on the AMG GT3 and can still improve my setup. I think its only fair for those who put in the most work to be the fastest. Also the stock/base setup in real life isnt an universal setup. The mechanics have a clue how to setup a certain track. Atleast Ive never seen a GT3 run super low downforce and stiff springs on the Nordschleife :)
I agree and disagree. The very basics, proper aero vs drag and gear ratios will sometimes give you quite a bit of extra time.. but the small details will only enhance the driving if it suits you. So yeah, some setups give more time but these are ONLY the basics which everybody should be able to tweak. Tiny camber, springs and dampers changes will NOT gain you 2 seconds per lap on a basic track.. that's just bollocks. iRacing sessions that have locked setups prove this pretty definitely. This video only puts more on fuel on the fire that setups make such a huge difference.. they don't. It's human nature to look for reasons why you are slower than the competition. Naturally setups are the feature many gravitate towards saying that they are the main reason for slower laptimes. In short: CHANGE THE AERO and GEAR RATIOS to match the track. Those are the two main things you need to tweak. Two frigging things.. okay, maybe you need to adjust the springs a bit too if you deviate a lot with the aero balance but still.. these are simple things.
So what you said with the driver (irl) tells their team what they thought about the setup and they'd try and fix it, gave me an idea. So what if they could add something like what they got in NFS15 where you could choose how ''drifty'' your car is.
if they added something like that in sim racers, where i'd be more where you choose hoe under steering/over steering ect. youd like your car, it could help people who want a good setup, but either doesn't know how cars work, or really don't wanna put the time into it normally, since i'd be a fast option. But it would still reward people who went through the actual setup, since you'd have much more options as to what you'd want.
Remember that "rookie" sim racers could maybe not drive the "good setup"... That's why street cars have very stable and understeery setup ! A good setup becomes one only with the driving technics
i have 3 children and lots and lots of other things to do than setup a car for hours on end...when i have some spare time i just want to race. the problem is that racers dont like giving out their secret setups and most of the time they mess with them a bit so they are not as fast even when they give those setups to you.... YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE. its always been the same in racing games.
for me personally the setup doesn't change much in most situations.. im usually in the top 5 on most servers.. but for example gt3 on Spa i´m running mid 2:17´s it´s not bad but the pros still take at least 2 seconds off of that. and i tried one of their setups.. it did not change a thing. My own setups usually just make me more Consistent and not really faster.
F1 Drivers pressured to learn theoretical car mechanics in order to be better convey to the engineers and mechanics how the car handles. They need to know how car setups work. They might not be super involved in the process but their required to know enough. I used to race RC Cars competitively. Everyone set up their own car on a per track, per weekend basis. It's a part of racing. If you have a team of people behind you helping you build car setups then more power to you but that''s an exception in sim racing and real world racing rather than the norm.
I don't have a problem with cars don't having a set up I have problem when community don't share them because it's some fucking secret "I'm better then you" shit. I rememberer early days of LFS S1 and S2 when your drive race or a quali/practice whatever and other gamers say to you "hey I think if you get my set up you be quicker" They give you set up and that was it, now you fight for podium. And that happen to me many times. Try to fucking get good setup for RRE or whatever, you have to be member of some secret site, somehow know a guy who run this site ... oh fuck off.
*Yes. I too would want to give away my teams secrets on say the Indianapolis Speedway because my car had the highest top speed in qualifying for the 500. Then I'd give away my pit strategy too.*
It's a fucking game asswipe there's no reason not to share that info to make everyone enjoy it more. You're not hard because you can win a virtual fucking race.
The Domikonis you don't get it do you. Who would even bother tuning and trying to get the most out of the car just to give it to the next guy that doesn't want to learn anything and thinks he should be competitive.
Make sure you check these sites out if you want good baseline setups
- Assetto corsa - www.racedepartment.com/downloads/the-setup-market.10149/
- iRacing virtualracingschool.com/academy/category/iracing-career-guide/setups/
- LET ME KNOW FOR OTHER SIMS SO I CAN ADD THEM !
also ptracker if the server has stracker....
it also has features like it saves current setup if you made new personal best.
I remember a great sim racing called RACE 07 ( made by SIMBIN) with its many addons. There was actually a possibility in game to upload own setup or download other ppl config. I addition you can rate setup from 1-10 points, and look for those withe highest score.
yes if you use ptracker (and the server uses stracker) you can send setups to other people on the server or store them on the server. In any case just install The Setup Market and you're mostly good to go in Assetto Corsa. Also , The Setup Market allows you to UPLOAD your setups for everyone else to use.. so.. donate setups!
setupsync for iracing
thats what i said yes :) ptracker if stracker.... you can also make setups public with ptracker. anyone with ptracker can download it. in this case i think ptracker is similar to lfs. it has many more usable features with sounds....
It would be handy if these games had a test mode where you could select a car and a track and after driving a few laps, select pre-determined feedback responses for a virtual engineer such as understeer, not enough speed on the straights, lefts overheating etc... and the engineer could suggest setup changes to address those issues. You'd then be able to save your setups once you're done and eventually learn how to setup a car without assistance.
Virtual Race Car Engineer 2017 apparently does exactly that. Haven't tried it though.
store.steampowered.com/app/523220/Virtual_Race_Car_Engineer_2017/
My intuition is that the Pcars2 engineer system will be awesome to teach what setup changes do which is fantastic , but I don't think it will help in giving people that basic setup that's up to pace assuming a driver is "good"
GamerMuscleVideos, if it's the same as MotoGP game race engineer it will be fantastic! It has always been very good. I always managed to find a setup that fit me perfectly, and having have raced motorcycles myself in real life, I learnt that it takes you years to really learn everything with regards to setups. Even then you will learn more every race
I have always wondered why car sims don't have the same "engineer" as the Motogp games.
GamerMuscleVideos from what vids I've seen it's fairly rudimentary. Still a great start but would love to see it encompass bump stops, toe,away,accel/deck lock, slip preload, brake maps etc... all the stuff that I don't get !
Well, I've been downloading setups since the days of GTR 2 and good old nogrip forums.
Wanna know the secret of the secret? All sims have certain setup values that make you fast when it shouldn't or give you grip or whatever, no sim is perfect as we all know, so every time a new sim or car comes out those who know what to look for go straight for those thresholds to find where is the weak point there.
Usually it involves flattening your tire angles (camber and toe) as most as you can while still being able to drive the car (you would be surprised the crazy values in the so called "secret" setups), depending on the sim it would involve reducing the downforce, again, starting with no downforce (front and rear wings) and working till the car is driveable (and many are with zeroed values there), you can also close the brake ducts, again, the closer the quicker.
So the whole deal is maximize aerodynamics for speed and work around the quirks of each sim to keep the car on the road, being it unreal values that the engine will accept, being it the race line to take advantage of some extra grippy patch to make a turn otherwise you would have to bring grip to the setup and so on so forth...
And what I described you here is basically why some hardcore sim racers complain about our simulation software so much, but basically, until you can simulate every nut and bolt of a car physics you will always have exploitable shortcuts.
As a developer I understand your pre made setups argument, taking into account that some sims have better defaults than others I have to say that if you give the optimal setup as default then what is the purpose of making these elaborated setup options, etc...?
I believe most developers try to give a default setup that better represents that car driving style and with an acceptable basic performance setup, then you have leeway to improve it and we are not even talking about personal driving styles.
And about people sharing setups that have all to do with the people, i.e. I been to many closed leagues where the best setups where shared among all, etc.. but take into account that these were all buddies, all people you know and talk online, I wouldn't expect the same on random open lobbies. And like i said before, after a while i knew exactly what to change from the setups to fit my driving style, to the point where i knew that if X friend of mine gave me his setup I knew to i.e. increase a notch or two of camber or suspension softness, so again, drive style has a lot to do, usually you can't do the same time as the original setup creator, and if you knew what to look for you could take his setup and make it faster for you.
And to wrap it up, these days I know how to setup, but I don't like to, and that's why I use things like the setup marketplace you cited, but only because I know what to look for on these setups, and not to forget *I have seen plenty of crap setups in there*, again, some people do crappy setups that works just for them, somehow they get around the track that way but you won't unless you change your driving style, anyway, I wanted to tell you about making setups, and that is hard work, because just for starters, just to begin changing any value you should be able to put 25-20 extremely consistent laps, I mean, less than 1 sec apart, when you driving reliably by instinct, then, you can start changing values, and then doing at least 5-10 laps, then you check the times, change a notch on another parameter, go back and 5-10 laps, you see, that is the only right and consistent way of doing it that I know that you are not trusting the setup and guessing, and when you'll learn to really be fast.
Well, those are my 2 cents of experience, Cheers on the channel and good races!
I wish more people realised this, its something I found out a few years back after speaking with people that have been finalists in big competitions and also after driving some insane setups that made no logical sense and nothing close to any real world setup but were redculously fast even when driven by a slightly better than average driver like myself.
Thanks for the reply, yeah, at the end of the day we all want to have a good old time racing so that's why I'm always inclined to fixed setup races.
Simulation is mostly a simulation with a default setup. Definitely not with the fastest one.
Been saying this for years. It's iRacing, for example, not iGarage.
lol
iRacing baseline setups tend to be competitive
pCars 2 actully does this really well.
good to hear :) .....hurry up next month
My biggest problem with race sims exactly. I want to SIM RACE. Not sim a mechanic who also drives. It would be great if they simulatie mechanics and you can tell them though menu,s want you want from the car. Like more speed on the straight so chance the wing and the gearing for example. Now i have to ask another player or search the internet for a setup and thats got nothing to do with simracing on a higher level. Maybe in amateur classes but nothing above that.
well a nice idea with the telling an engineer/mechanic what you want... but the problem is... it becomes realy complex... for example it's usually not things like I want more speed on the straight.. what is tricky in the setup.... but things like those nuances at turn in and mid turn.. or turn exit.. stability on/off the brakes.. on/off the accelration.. ... too less rotation on corner entry.. or too much? too nervous... or not agile enough... in t1 4 5 6 the car is fine.. in t2 3 8 it's terrible... car is fast allover the track but has problems on bumps ... or only on a bump in a particular turn .. or whatever....
it would be an immense algorithm if you just can tell it what the car feels like and what you prefer to change and so on.. it would be much much more complicated then the sim itself... it would be much more advanced then todays AI I think ...
yes you could make such stuff in a very very simple way... bui that wouldn't be much more then those "more speed less turning" options on arcade games...
and it would pretty much stuff everyone can do by themself if they now at least a bit about driving... which you usually do if setups make a difference...
it's all that detailed complex stuff that are hard to setup... and I think would be most unlikely able to tell an artificial assistend so that the algorithm understands you...
if you do it in a way of menus.. you end up with someting very similar to the usual setup screen again :D .. like too edgy on the brakes = bump dampers or differential...
Bambeakz I know this is an old comment but, Project Cars 2 has this exact feature under the Race Engineer menu. Would be nice to see it in Sims like Assetto Corsa
Then when you get more speed on the straights and your overall laptime gets slower, what do you do? And that´s an easy one, think about solving an "oversteering at corner entry and exit, understeering mid corner" problem in such a way...
And that´s assuming that the driver is not actually the only components who needs to be tuned...
No matter how great of a baseline setup devs could build for every car/track/weather combination there will always be people that make one better and find the extra time. That’s just how it is. If you don’t want to have to worry about setups winning races (which they don’t always do) then there are tons of fixed setup options in many of the sims. That’s really the only option. There will always be the disconnect between the causal players who just want to drive and the drivers who have the experience and knowledge on how to setup the cars to extract every tenth available. That’s how it is in real life as well. Casual racers exist in many series around the world. They are called gentlemen drivers. They roll their suitcase of drivers gear into the track, drive, and go home while their pro co-driver or teammate works with the team to build the right setup for the race. It all just boils down to what you want out of sim racing. We want the most realistic sim services we can. But when they give them to us with really in depth physics and car setups we can’t just default to we want understeer and oversteer sliders to do all the work for us or better yet have the devs build setups for us. It just doesn’t work that way. I’ll even admit that I use lots of VRS setups. But by no means are they by default going to make you run away from the field. I always have things I want to change to make it more comfortable for me. So how could a dev take all the time to make multiple setups for each car and track combo? It just isn’t possible. Especially with all the weather variables built into sims now that each require their own tweaks. There is no easy button here. Except fixed setup races. That’s the easy button.
The Race Engineer tool in Project Cars 2 was really pretty good. Pretty much simulated how it works in real life - you as the driver communicate to your engineer the symptoms that you're experiencing (mid-corner understeer for example) and it suggests setup tweaks to make. Might not be perfect, but worked pretty well. I'd like to see idea get built on by other sims...
I believe sim games should have an engineer app that gives you advice on your setup direction as it relates to the type of track and your laptimes. For example running too much downforce at monza the engineer app could suggest decreasing front or rear downforce dependent on perfomance of laptimes. It could also analyze the forces going through the suspension during braking and corner to know if you are losing time over a bumpy surface because of a too stiff suspension and where to make adjustments.
I believe if this is implemented there would be a possibility for sim games to truly establish themselves have place in training ground for new drivers and engineers.
project cars has exactly this option though not as extensive as I would like.
Not a bad idea! 😍 This way players won't be spoonfed better setups but actually be encuraged to invest some time to learn how to make setups instead 👍
I think Assetto Corsa has done a reasonably good job in the setup screen where you hover over each variable and it tells you what lowering or raising each setting does.
It's taught me a fair amount about setups and getting them right. I'm still no expert but I'm certainly much quicker than when using default setups.
I agree it could be much worse !
Fully agree and on top of your points I would add that there is a clear learning curve in AC.
The underestimated carrer mode helps you discovering this car setup learning curve (if you raise AI high enough).
Carrer mode starts with almost street cars in absolutly stock definitions, thus setups variables are very few... tyre pressure basically, then some cars alow you to play with camber, tyre coumpond and so on...
But it's the most important things to setup correctly!
When you end the carrer you have some F1 cars with ludicrous (but realistic anyway) amount of setup variables, but hopefully you'll have learned a lot before and mastered the major setup topics that must be adjusted first before you start tweeking the enery recovery system... (what's the gain of adjusting 1mm bump stop, if your tyre compound choice is wrong and pressure absurd...)
Using setups you've downloaded doesn't mean you don't have to understand the parameters themselves, is the setup doesn't fit your driving style, you must know what to do to improve it, downloading a base is saving you some time not making it in the best scenario :-)
BigBawMcGraw pro tip. watch game&track tutorial videos. Aris who does the physics for Assetto has made a few very good vids.
Thanks for the tip! I just got a Logitech G29 wheel and started playing Assetto Corsa and these videos will help me a lot.
For all its flaws Project Cars 2 addressed this issue, and did a relatively good job. For every car you have at least a stable and a loose setup to choose from, and in some cases you may have the original setup that comes with the car when you buy it from a dealer. They also introduced a race engineer, where you can specify what issue you're having, and the race engineer adjusts things to solve it.
Im abit late to comment, but it's wild that so many people disliked someone suggesting ways to put all drivers on a more equal ground. If you're a great competitor you should want other people to have the same advantage as you so when you beat them it feels much better.
I couldn't agree more. A good car setup is like a cheat code in sim racing. Not only getting 2-3 second faster lap times but with a good setup, a car can feel so much more pleasurable and manageable to drive, even though you are going faster! I agree that sims really should have some 'basic' setup options to at least get new players started and understanding the important of applying different type compounds, pressures, ride heights, gear ratios, etc. Without doing all the work for the player, sims could offer a 'basic' or 'street' setup. One for 'endurance', another for 'drift', etc. And maybe a brief description of how the different setups affect the ride, even if it's a couple lines of text on the screen.
I'm new to sim racing and have only been playing AC for 2 months now with a wheel and VR headset and every day my mine continues to be blown. Around a month ago i was just doing some hotlaps on a Laguna Seca server and another driver in the same car I was in was consistently doing 4-5 second faster laps than every one else. I praised his driving skills in chat and said something along the lines of that laptime is brilliant! Before I knew it, a msg popped up saying "x wants to send you a setup file for x car" I clicked accept and within seconds I now had his setup for the car. That was the day the door to setup world (better than disneyworld) opened for me and I realized we had all of these settings to play around with for the cars, plus I got first hand experience of what a difference it makes on track too. Of course there's also the fact that I'm a noob and the other driver has probably been at sim racing longer so it's not just about a good setup and you'll be fastest on the track, but it does help a lot.
Great video, GM. I'm one of those guys who just wants to drive. I have no interest in being an engineer. I'd go one step further than your suggestion, and as others have mentioned, would like to see a virtual engineer in the sim. Someone who I could just tell "it's pushing in turn 1" or "it's loose in turn 10", and he would make the adjustments. And after doing some practice laps with some AI cars, he could make some suggestions on his own.
Also, I'd like to see fixed setups enforced on public server races. Let the league guys have their super secret setups.
Spend hours dialing in a setup? Ain't nobody got time for that.
I think one of the esports sims (can't recall which one) fixed it by simply exposing a database of all races/sessions to date along with each driver's setup available for download. Problem gone when everybody can try and use everybody else's setup.
no longer hiding the thing would be best.
I have been thinking this for so long I thought I was the only one
YOU ARE NOT ALONE !
been in this camp for years, i want to drive, not tune.
just want a competitive default tunes, competitive is all, not the best, just something i know is in ballpark of good.
most of us will be better served with track time.
Liked the video. I've always wished for games to include some half decent setups for each track and each car, but have never seen it. I've tried to learn doing setups myself from articles, but it's a lot to take on and as you said, I dont necessarily want to spend the time doing that. So in AC I generally race with the defaults. Now that I know about the setup market, itll be much easier.
Definitely something the race sims should find a way to tackle.
I hope they do , maybe they will see my video want to punch me but then think about giving it as a job for the beta testers to do !
Well said and i 100% agree. Setups bug me a lot. Tweaking the camber, or caster, ARB, fast rebound all these things its ridiculous. We want to race the car not work on it. There should be a set of different setups for each car and track like you said for example one for more oversteer, one for understeer etc.
Set up is part of racing, although I can understand it´s intimidating for a non techy guy to cope with so many options (that are also often explained in atrocious ways...). Point is, there is no way any default set up can come any close to a personally tailored one: the latter will always have that further 1 or 2 seconds that can only come by having a car which is really suited to your driving style (which is not JUST under-/over-steering but takes into consideration a gazillion other vehicle dynamics). A range of default set-ups might improve a little bit the situation, but will never really deliver any really useful result.
Setting up your car is first of all a matter of improving your driving: you need to improve your consistency to feel the differences, you must understand where you are driving "well" and where (and what, obviously) is limiting you. Real race drivers don´t make setup changes only when engineers are available, but any decent driver would be absolutely capable to do that to some extent simply because they have gathered enough testing experience to recognize what these effects are (and also to understand side effects that the team might not forecast from the pit). Also, any grassroot racer will do its own setup simply because that´s the only thing he can do.
I believe the real improvement would be to simply have better description to what every parameter does, including the situation where the effect is most notable and possible non linearities. In the end, it´s not rocket science once you have a decent description and you use it as a way to improve your driving. Also especially at the beginning you don´t really need to develop a different set up for each and every track, you should mostly think about tailoring yourself a car which is easy and predictable to drive (again: ACCORDING TO YOUR DRIVING STYLE) and can give you good consistency; use the same basic setup every time you go to a new circuit, make quick adjustements to what you have to adapt to each circuit/conditions (e.g. gearing, radiator openings) and keep working on the remaining "core" of the set up, time after time after time... You will get to an overall setup which will probably be better than anything you might have found online. Or, in the worst case, you will have learned something trying :)
Set up is part of racing, but it's also its own professional discipline on a race team. There's only so many hours in a day and if you want to be a better driver, then driving is the skill you want to practice. There's definitely value to understanding how the car works but given how deep the subject can go, something like a virtual engineer to assist players in tweaking set ups would be helpful.
@@jzyyz I believe it would be helpful on paper, but impossible to be properly implemented in reality... Real engineers struggle with many professional drivers that can´t explain the problems and only complain about too much under/oversteer, and that usually ends up with either poor performances or the engineer developing a sixth sense to understand what the unspoken problem is. That´s not something that a virtual engineer can do.. a virtual one with standard questions could be a start, but then either the number of possible solutions explode or the answers remain too general, so you would still need to work you way around it... there are simply too many interacting effects for a standard answer to be a working solution.
Also, drivers often create the problem themselves, and that´s the reason why tuning your own car improves your driving skills much more than keep on lapping and lapping hoping to put together a faster lap. Driving for tuning is first of all driving for consistency, and when you develop consistency you´ll be faster much quicker.
Finding a good group to race with and practice helps alot. I run with a group on project cars 2 and a few of us make our own setups and when they turn out really fast we share setups and run practice. Also you can take setups from the top 30 times on each track through the time trials. Helps a lot and makes for great competitive racing.
AMS has option to fetch setup for time trial results. Probably not the best for the full race, but a good start to see what people tweak for top times.
what is AMS? sorry
Automobilista
store.steampowered.com/app/431600/Automobilista/
At least in iRacing you have races with fixed setup or at least three setups (high, medium, low downforce). But you are totally right and good that you bring this topic up. Was never discussed openly.
Oogie Boogie they also have limited setup options in lower tiers which is good. Skip barber comes to mind..
Yah I think Fixed setup racing is a really good thing in general , open setup racing has its place I think but id love to see a general trend for it to be acceptable for high level racing to also have fixed setup events.
Its a bit like how in F1 , I think most of us would love to see all the current drivers take part in matched cars as well as a constructors champ.
In the 80s they had support races where they did that with road cars , but how amazing would it be to have the current world champs take part in a fixed spec f2 race and then do the F1 race !
ROC and some special events are interesting as well but they are mostly done a gimmick rather than a serous thing.
F1 drivers in fixed spec F2 would be mint. I was considering making F1 my go to series this year but I got put off once again after seeing predictable results, GT3 is where its at - the cars have strengths and weaknesses but BoP makes every race interesting..
F1 is good if you can get an on-board view and sometimes you see amazing moves or just flat out amazing driving. but in-terms of time watched to exciting viewing I agree I think its really not up there with other series at the moment.
Great topic! I study full time, work part time and have a family I want to spend time with too. When I have time for gaming, I just wan't to play and not fiddle with numbers for hours.
This is the best video I've ever seen on the entire internet, in my whole life.....ever!
Exactly this is what me and my friends have been talking about for the last 6-7 years. Thank you for brining it up and hopefully there will be a change.
I agree with all that 100%. I find that changing one thing then effects something else, as per descriptions for each item in Assetto Corsa setup screens, and ultimately I end up 9/10 making the car worse.....not better. The problem as you mentioned is that I dont have an interest in it and to put hours into learning something which Im not interested in is something that I just dont bother doing in the gaming world. I love driving, not tinkering with setups.
So Ive been running the BMW z4 gt3 at Nurburgring GT track consistently at 2:05-2:06 with the stock setup. After watching this video and checking out the setup market app, downloading a setup, I now run consistently 2:00-2:01. This is crazy, I never realize how important setups are. The car immediately feels different!
Need Setup help?
Monza - Higher front ride height than rear, Low to 0 downforce, quick steering ratio
Bathurst- High overall ride height, Low to Medium downforce, Soft springs but stiffer roll bars
Nurburgring- Medium Downforce, medium ride height, medium stiffness
Spa- Low downforce, Low ride height, stiff springs, medium-high steering ratio
Dubai- Medium/High downforce, Low ride height, Minimal camber & caster lots of cooling for brakes & engine
Silverstone- Low/Medium downforce, very low ride height, Soft rear roll bar, stiff
Brands Hatch/Brno- Medium/High downforce, Stiff, Stiff, Stiff, No right side camber and high left side tire pressures
I agree. I think GT Legends had a slider bar where you could move it towards oversteer or understeer. Then you could go into the garage and see what numbers it changed. Also Nascar 2003 had general setups named Qualifying, Fast, etc.. and I'd do what you said, I'd load Qualifying setup, change tires, add fuel, remove tape off the grill, maybe lower max revs so it would live longer.
This issue is persistent and it won't change. Few years back iracing had a open ruf cup series. I was about a 1-2 seconds off the ultimate pace without making any substantial changes to the setup. Then iracing switched the series to fixed setup because people were whining too much. And guess what? I was still 1-2 seconds off the pace. Who would've thought.
If the baseline is drivable setup won't matter much. People have second thoughts cause they always think they should be faster than they actually are. The speed is in practice, a lot of it. Practicing optimal line (and I mean using every inch of the track), steering with throttle input, getting turnin/brake points spot on are far more important than setups.
Plz don't kill, it's just my opinion.
I like the virtual engineer idea mentioned in these comments. ACC has the safe and aggressive setups, which I like, but would be nice during practice to input a few items of feedback - not enough front grip in fast left handers, too much understeer at the hairpin etc.
Yeah, the basic setup is usually oversteer, I just give a bit of understeer/stability to the cars. It is not faster, but it allows me to have some fun and make clean laps. The defaults in all the game are garbage, for me at least. You are right and I am glad you brought this up. Problem is that there is no simple formula for setups that everyone will understand.
A moderate skilled driver should be able to download a general setup and put in a lap time with it that's within 0.500 , of course there might be some general trends to a setup a driver wants or a driver might just be utterly useless and no setup would help.
but at worse having a set thats proven to do X time is better than not having anything at all to go by and then ether make something from nothing or go with a setup that's never done a good time.
It would be nice if we had some way to upload setups to the sim itself, and then anyone could download those setups once you've launched the sim. This would require a server of some sort to host the setups, though. Perhaps the developers could create a community depository where anyone could post these setups, and then the devs could place these setups in the sim by default using a patch. Just a thought...
This is why I love iRacing's fixed setup races. Makes it all driver for those of us who are passionate but only have time to race and not test and tune for hours
Absolutely mate!! Great video. These are games you buy to enjoy. I don't have time to even bother with sets ups. And if I did there are simply so many car and track combinations I would send more time doing that then racing. After playing the GT Sport beta. Is seems as they might have a solution. As they have 6 slots to save sets ups for each track. And hopefully you can download popular ones. Keep the vids coming
Could not agree more. I enjoy driving simulators for driving, not for having to spend endless hours building setups. This is why I used to drive the fixed setup series in iRacing more than any other.
Love the channel and this is a great insight that I agree with. The problem is that 90% of sim racers are such a pantsload of screeching complainers that you could never please even 10 percent of the population. The race engineer option for PC2 is the most innovative solution I have seen so far.
Once tire models get better or even already for longer races you could try to set the car up to make the tires last or make it handle just right mid stint, I feel you though, a selection of baselines for all cars all tracks would be ideal
I couldn't agree with you more!! Thanks for bring that up!
The problem most people have with setups is just that they keep tweaking the setup instead of trying to adapt to the car, at least 1 of those 1.5-2.5 seconds comes from that. Every time you make any kind of significant setup tweak it sends you back to square 1, you might think downloading someones alien setup gained you 2 seconds but mostly you only gained that because after downloading their setup you stopped screwing with every setting and trusted that the car could do the times the setup uploader told you it could.
100% agree with your video. The biggest pain for me is both Project Cars games. How much time do they think the average Joe has to mess about with car set up?... particularly as you already spent an age getting the wheel to feel like you weren't steering a boat! It winds me up no end and is why I always get frustrated and stick on GT Sport. Even though the execution of the penalty system is awful, you can be sure that you don't require an engineering degree to enjoy the product you have spent your hard earned d'oh on. Grr.
Could not agree more, this option has been missing from most racing games for years, I think Project Cars 2 has a system within the game where an "Engineer" provides you with an interactive session and then makes changes based on some simple questions and answers, he then adjusts the car based on your answers. iracing is not too bad because it has a huge community who share setups and their easy to upload via some third party apps. If the new option in PC2 is popular then it may force other devs to copy!
I totally agree with your idea of multiple set-ups available for each car and for each track. I don't get excited about creating a set-up, it's not practical or realistic that a driver should know all of the engineering of every car. I just purchased project cars 2 and I'm now faced with mucking around with set-ups for cars for hours and hours, and not least the setting up of the ridiculous AI that are constantly running you off the track. Common developers, let's make racing sims more realistic and accessible.
What you describe is a baseline setup and those are always slower than the optimal setup because not everyone likes the same thing. The only thing drivers should aim for is a safe setup that doesn't try to kill you at the limit.
Everything you said is 100% true. And every racing simulator this should be understeer oversteer slider with little bit more detail than that plus an advanced car settings. Some games do offer that like Dirt Rally but not all
Virtual Racing School has a team of really good drivers on iracing that upload setups for most official races weekly. Another thing is to meet some nice people who drive what you like and practice with them while the do their tuning. So far I now have a group of around 6 people who collaborate and share sets. Other than that there's forums that have sets usually with a lap video so you know it can be good. I really don't see the problem here lol, although I only do iracing where there is a huge community of nice people.
Racing sims, as everything else in life, are easy to learn, but hard to master. If you invest only dozens of hours, you learn to drive a car for a few laps without crashing.
But is you wanna be competitive, get ready to throw hundreds to thousands of hours into learning the tracks, cars, racecraft, buying and assembling a cockpit and so on. This also includes the knowledge of setups.
My recommendation is to concentrate on one series, say GT3 and a few cars, with which you'll play competitive MP..
The point of a setup is to give you confidence to push the car faster through the corners. Everyone can be fast in a straight line, the trick is to plant the car through the corners and this is where all the black magic of suspension setups comes alive. Good setup allows you to carry higher speed through the corners, making a car sharper to turn in and balanced on powering out of the corner. This also allows for more confidence and control to hit all the kerbs and apexes, when you know the car will hold the grip with ease.
Liked for Tea discussion
PG Tips ftw
I totally agree. Another possible solution is more fixed-setup servers? Either way competing on a level playing field is way more fun... most of us aren't competing for money and prizes here (I wish)
Twinging's no argument , anyone that disagrees should be executed on the spot by north Korean firing squad.
I mean Twinings is so good that despite being annoyingly portentous and also rude to me in the London original store I still get them. DAMN YOU TWININGS TEA !!
I am from germany, so what do I know?!? Twinings tjough strikes me to be just some special kind of monkeyshit... I'll see myself out...
- LET IT BE KNOWN jjulian3000 HAS NO TASTE !!
honestly im a mechanic by trade and do enjoy messing with setups and have a decent idea irl and in game but would love this option, its a pain to try join a race and end up spending the whole evening setting up a car, satisfying when done but frustrating at first and sometimes i just wanna race
The thing is, a good setup for one person is bad for another.
I have a love/hate witb setups. Any time you go to a new game, it takes man, many, many hours to find the tips and tricks for that game. And then the same for each car. A 488 GT3 setup in Assetto Corsa may make sense and fly on a particular track and then a similar setup on PCars 2 will be an absolute brick.
Tuning can be fun, but when you start spending as much time or even more tuning rather than driving, well then that becomes miserable.
You're exactly right on this stuff. F1 2019 seems like it wasn't even tested, on another note. LB setups are absolutely not based in any sort of reality.
What exactly was "exposed?" 'That guys who put in extra work to be faster are actually faster? Imagine that!!! Click bait tag line. Working on setups helps one to learn the car and its driving dynamics. It's also pretty damn rewarding when you get the car dialed in for your driving abilities and the track. Why copy someone else's work when their work is tailored to how they drive? Once you know what you're doing, it's not that hard to properly set up a car.
Great video, I've always wondered why there seems to be an idea that everyone also wants to be a mechanic. I just want to drive, and not feel greatly handicapped for it.
And at least if there is a setup part of the game, how about there being decent guides and/or hints as to what the settings actually do?
Take ACC for example. No information what so ever, which is slightly absurd imho.
what u ask for would require a mountain of work for the devs. your talking thousands of manhours per car for each track for each setup type. ive always thought a great addition would be a whole career mode around setting up a car with scenarios showing what "a" vs "b" setting on the castor angle does to the handling characteristics. again though like u say not everyone wants to do that work so i think a good compromise is to allow a robust setup sharing feature with a voting system along with specific race settings that either allow custom setups or a baseline setup for everyone, or even allow people to use other players setups in the race if they wanted to allow it. more options are always better in the end. great video
Yeah setting up a car is not my thing as well. I usually just fiddle with the aero a bit and leave it at that. When I'm feeling adventurous I might twiddle with the gear ratios or camber settings but that's about it. I always feel like I would be much faster if I had someone who would do the setup properly for me. I mean it's great that a sim offers such depth but it would be even greater if they also offered a simpler way for those who are not really interested in the nitty gritty of car mechanics. I would be happy with just a wizard-like tool that asks a few questions on what you would like to improve on the car and would then dial in an appropriate setup. Or maybe just a few sliders that chance some basic stuff.
Only reason i don't care about the really realistic racing-games, other than watching you play them, is just this. You need to be a semi-good mechanic to be able to drive the thing without spinning out like a spastic. Give me a damn car that is pre-setup for each race and we're golden.
I agree with this specially for online games that you cannot compete with people live, like Dirt Rally. I have some basic understanding of setups and can get much quicker in DR from the setups but when I see people online that are 30 seconds or in some cases 1 whole minute faster than me on a course it just makes me wonder how on earth they could be that much faster. It has to be either cheaters or pro drivers with some sort of setup that makes no real world sense to actually work. I do not think I am fast but I also know I am not slow but some of these times that I see online are just insanely quicker that it has me scratching my head.
The biggest problems will setups is that people have formed their setups towards their wheel and ffb, so when you use a user created setup, it's not good and it doesn't feel right
you just made 4k people think theyre bad only because of setup and not their driving.
Haha very true.So many times we are saying to peoples on forum its not setup if you 2 sec of the pace and now this,lol
Actually he is right... With a 458 GT2 car i hit 1:53 on monza. I got a setup from the internt 1:49 tell me how that is not BS?
Monza Oval portion especially is a tough track a lot of bumps took me awhile with a borrowed set up but I ranked 6th globally just takes time and a solid line. Wheel can really help for that track. Stick with it you'll be awesome
Good point. But also consider this: If your setup has 30 laps of fuel in it for a 5 lap race then you are losing time just because of the setup.
A good setup helps the driver to drive the car like he wants/needs to. So in other words good driving and setup go hand in hand.
But for sure. Learn the track and some basic driving skills before even considering adjusting the car setups. Maybe just change the tire compound and fuel but not much other then that at first. Once you get better you may want to adjust the settings to make the car behave more like you'd expect it.
Also in setup there are things that make the car faster (mechanical grip) and things that make the driver faster (handling behavior).
I always bang my head on the table to forget the track layout after making changes to my setup so any time improvements are actually because of the setup and not because I got better at racing the track.
Lol , well thats the other side you really need to be lapping consistently within 0.300 each lap to then really benefit from setup tweeking / tweeking setup yourself.
That's why I think having a good default is better than teaching people setups at first , at least then they will eventually hit what is that setups general pace, then they can tweak it to there liking / get more from it.
Paul Keeble
Even a track description featuring general tips how to GENERALLY tune a car for a track would be nice. Something like "soft sprung, hard damped, aero set towards cornering speed".
The answer to your "problem" can be to have some kind of Virtual Race Engineer. One of the good attempts as what I've seen on TH-cam is the Project CARS 2. You just tell him what's wrong with the car and he will correct the setup for you. This is very good idea, I think, because you can learn from it.
I think it's better solution than to have the "default" setups, because the "good" setup depends on the car, track, tyre choice, whether conditions, driving style and many other variables. You cannot make a "good" default setups for all the variables.The setup is a PERSONAL preference!
The problem is the Race Engineer wont help a person develop a setup that's actually fast it will just help them develop a setup that's to there taste. I think it will help people learn how to make setups over time and explain what does what but you really need to A) be able to drive fast to develop a fast setup and B) know the random funky things with a given sim or a given car and a given track to know what setup stuff gets more speed.
"You cannot make a "good" default setups for all the variables."
That's true , but you can make a good default setup that gets 1.5 -2.5 seconds over a bad generic setup that is typically found in most simulators for lots of cars.
"The setup is a PERSONAL preference!"
It is in some ways but at the same time what gets a setup within the 0.500 of the best laps is not really personal preference , those things are mostly fundamentals like down force within 1-2 clicks , gearing and tire pressures within a given range.
+GamerMuscleVideos goodtopic of discussion yes you are right about games should come with atleast a basic setup which is fairly balanced BUT there is something else missing in the sim racers.
Back in the day when I still played good old GTR2 we had this telemetry application that you could use on the side with GTR2 in order to start making your own setup or atleast guide you in the right direction by using the telemetry tool.
I really love to play around in project cars , asseto corsa , dirt rally but when it comes to setups I usually make things worse because I don't know which direction I should be tweaking the car because there simply isnt enough information on what the car is doing while u drive it.
Simple example your car bottoms out ... why you wonder ? adjust ride height or stiffen springs ? I don't know the game won't tell me I can not read any actual data so you change one thing to find out its the other and its a frustrating process.
Just simple applications we could use to give us an idea of in which direction to start setting up the cars would be great so you wont waste so much time fiddling with the many different options.
Knuckism when you bottom out adjust fast bump, ride height, fast rebound, and bump stop.
One possible solution is to make all setups publicly available in game. So you can create your setup, but anyone else is free to download it and use it too.
i agree 100% even those that want to fiddle it would be a huge help in getting a new car set up. with the knowlage that the default is going to be crap i have spent hours trying to fix a problem with the car that just couldn't be fixed. i didnt know at first cause the defaults crap. if the case was that the default was decent and i hop in the new car and its way to tail happy, i know its always going to be like that and maybe its not a good car for me.
With the Steam Workshop there's no reason they can't utilize VALVe's infrastructure to make posting and downloading car setups possible and easy for then end user.
I agree with the "Drivers aren't engineers" kind of thing you're saying. I'm not interested in trying to figure out what amount of camber is going to get me around the track faster and neither is most professional racing drivers, that's why race engineers exist. I just want to live out my fantasy of being a pro driver.
I'm one of those not great drivers and I really rely on other people's work on setups to help me through most race games. Thanks for the link to the setup market.
Even Forza does this. You are forced to upgrade you car to the top of a class and usually auto upgrade is way slower. But I can't be bothered to tune every one of 350+ cars manually so it's competitive. And I race all of them randomly
Ive never been strong on doing setups although am not bad if i put the time into it. I find the league im in requires some serious tuning and practice. I do miss doing more racing than practice and setting ups. Good point, some basic decent setups would be nice so we could spend more time racing.
Really good video and good point!
I rarely play with simulators anymore. I was playing quite a lot with Nascar Racing 2003 but stopped long time ago.
Recently installed Project Cars 2 and Nascar '15 to have some fun and both games fucked my mind up so much with the setups. I don't have all fucking day to try to tweak the car to have some fun. For me these days are over. I just want to drive, practice and have a good time.
I would really like to have a marketplace or something, where casual players can download setups. I would even pay a couple of extra bucks to same time and most importantly my nerves.
The problem that I see in this video is, one - in the absolute best case scenario a good setup will gain you the said time(1.5-2sec), best case scenario being a very fast, lot's of downforce, lot's of setup options car on Spa or similar, secondly - setup is so dependent on driver preference that might make more harm than good, I always asked RW for setups and when I was lucky enough to have them I found that they don't suit me at all and was barely any faster!
Most important thing is laps and laps and more laps, even with stock setup you should be within 1-1.5sec of the fastest time, again car-track combo.
so I personally think it's more of a clickbait than anything else, some videos are good some are so so
Caramidaru Andrei Bogdan but at a track like spa everyone assumes that you need a lot of downforce and it's not the case. Spa is a low downforce track your full throttle 85-90% of the lap. On Pcars the difference. between a low downforce setup & high downforce set isn't that much different maybe half a second but if your running high downforce you depend more on aero than the others around you, so if you get caught in dirty it's affects your car more than others around you not to mention you lack 5-8mph topspeed and you burn fuel faster, and it's more difficult to regulate tire temps through a corner, same with Silverstone, Bathurst & Road America
At least with street cars the first thing to do in AC is to change the camber settings -> should be significantly lower than in street default setup. With GT3 cars I would start with wings & ride height -> depending on track layout
This is the most intelligent sim-racing video I have ever watched. I know nothing about sets and never will. I pay my money and am beaten by nerds that cannot drive better than myself and that takes all the fun out of it for me. Sim-racing is more of an engineers (nerds) game than a drivers game and I think that its wrong at least it is for me, and now I only race AI. I have big respect for nerds, lord knows we don't have enough of them here in the usa. But sim racing is supposed to be fun, and its only fun for those that can unravel the mystery (numbers) of sets. Thanks for this vid, I hope someone at some studio listens to this. You have my respect sir.
This is a bigger problem for the sim racing industry than many imagine. How many sims down the years have newbie racers simply dropped because there are no proper setups with the game and they just feel they are rubbish and get frustrated. That's not good for business because how many of those newbies have then abandoned the hobby never to return? There's also a missed marketing opportunity here in terms of getting "celebrity" race engineers to create a set of setups that ship with the game.
Dilmah Extra Strong :P I was actually sipping it r4ight aS mentioned ur tea. lol. At least Poms & aussies (if nothing else) have a love of tea in common. Nice video matey!
All of this has been fixed in Project Cars 2. Anyone can do a Time Trial against a real human Ghost car that has set a record (or not) and download that person's setup.
Also, you can simply tell the engineer what's going on and he'll do the changes for you.
And also, there are explanation about what everything does on the setup thing.
Completely agree. I've been saying for years that i'm a racer, not a mechanic
Great video! Console racer games tend to become race engineer simulators when in a league. Your forget the guys who don't know how to do a good set up make it worse and end up 4 secs slower after stuffing it up.
Good vid , I'm awful with my setups but I managed to get quite a good one the other day and made up 3 sec per lap instantly !!
Tyre pressure, Gearing and Aero is where you're going to gain most time. Thinking setups are difficult is the first mistake. There are many easy to follow setup guides. Spend some time on it and get the satisfaction of achieving Alien status by yourself, it's far more rewarding than having it gifted to you imo.
6:10 GTR did that! The setups were pretty fantastic. Obviously, you could make them even quicker, but for 95% of the people, they were great.
I mean racing in real life using someone else’s car means someone else has set it up already. When it turns to league racing, you are your own team so you’ll have to be your own engineer as well. There’s also the option of turning on stock setups which a lot of games have now so this is a legit complaint but if you’re competitve and want to find more time you’ll probably make a setup.
Downloaded a profile for my Audi R8 LMS, no more understeer, you're a legend, thank you.
I don't understand the inner workings of a car nor do i have time to figure it out, i now have a point of reference.
Cheers.
subbed an liked
There absolutely should be a test mode of some description, pitting and then leaving the pit takes an age, should be on the fly.
Pcars 2 has an engineer mode but in all honesty pcars 2 works with the defaults just fine, now assetto for the Audio r8 at least is the same as that, AC is a mess without a decent setup. F1 cars strangely seem unaffected to me.
Slower cars like the BMW 1M, ewwwww it's just an understeering shitstorm.
thanks again.
Your point of the drivers not making the setup isn't really fair. Sure they won't pull up with exact measurements but they will ask for generalized changes (stiffer in the rear/front shocks, and aero changes) and they usually have complete control of diff and brake bias and other changes. Drivers in real life also usually develop the car. They literally tell the exact parts the team needs to improve, and big directional changes they need. Juan Pablo Montoya is known for literally making his team redesign the front suspension. I assure you, if these setup changes didn't require the labor and physical power of a crew of mechanics, the drivers would likely do it themselves.
Hey mate, love your videos. Very informative! I am just a novelist online occasional racer. One reason why I stopped online racing is because I was always in the back of the pack and didn’t have a set up. Thanks to The Set Up Market that has changed, but I wanted to know, is there a website where they have online racing and all the simulated cars are always the same. That way everybody is always even. And it’s all about the driving. Please let me know I would really appreciate it. Thanks. Keep coming with those videos. (Maybe I racing?)
I don't mind setups but there's a couple that piss me off. In one race at Spa, dude was redlining directly after every shift and jumping mph by the 10s by the engine straining so much
everyones setup is different. when a driver sets their car up its built around their personal driving style and will work well for them. so downloading someones setup that says "good setup" isnt always going to make you faster because you may not be able to drive their setup the way they do. it may be too twitchy or it may be pulling wide too much. you must build a setup around yourself
Good thoughts... keep thinking
f1 2016 has profiles" for setups in career mode. Also for Pc you can select setups from the steam comunity (so you can select a setup from the yt drivers).
Setups, setups, setups!!! I for one wished more games would make track specific defaults that would at the very least give you a good neutral suspension, areo, and transmission setting to work with. That way you could at least save yourself some time and not have to drive around for ten minutes breaking in the car and tires, than piddle around with the tunings for another 10 to 15, all just to find a neutral setting and get your gearing, just to go back out and run another 10 minutes to then try and fine tune it more and repeat over and over again until your crazy. I've said this so many times, I buy the game to sim race, not sim race mechanic. It sucks for those of us who have only a rudimentary understanding of setups, even more for those who have no clue like most people starting out.
Yes, this... 10000x this!
Its not like all the fast drivers with good setups just came and instantly made a perfect setup. I for example spent 800 hours on AC and have 11000km on the AMG GT3 and can still improve my setup. I think its only fair for those who put in the most work to be the fastest.
Also the stock/base setup in real life isnt an universal setup. The mechanics have a clue how to setup a certain track. Atleast Ive never seen a GT3 run super low downforce and stiff springs on the Nordschleife :)
I agree and disagree. The very basics, proper aero vs drag and gear ratios will sometimes give you quite a bit of extra time.. but the small details will only enhance the driving if it suits you. So yeah, some setups give more time but these are ONLY the basics which everybody should be able to tweak. Tiny camber, springs and dampers changes will NOT gain you 2 seconds per lap on a basic track.. that's just bollocks. iRacing sessions that have locked setups prove this pretty definitely. This video only puts more on fuel on the fire that setups make such a huge difference.. they don't. It's human nature to look for reasons why you are slower than the competition. Naturally setups are the feature many gravitate towards saying that they are the main reason for slower laptimes.
In short: CHANGE THE AERO and GEAR RATIOS to match the track. Those are the two main things you need to tweak. Two frigging things.. okay, maybe you need to adjust the springs a bit too if you deviate a lot with the aero balance but still.. these are simple things.
So what you said with the driver (irl) tells their team what they thought about the setup and they'd try and fix it, gave me an idea. So what if they could add something like what they got in NFS15 where you could choose how ''drifty'' your car is.
if they added something like that in sim racers, where i'd be more where you choose hoe under steering/over steering ect. youd like your car, it could help people who want a good setup, but either doesn't know how cars work, or really don't wanna put the time into it normally, since i'd be a fast option. But it would still reward people who went through the actual setup, since you'd have much more options as to what you'd want.
thank you GM ,keep up the good work.i live in wales,wish you were next door so i could try DD wheel and i would know it would leave to separation.lol
I've joined "fixed setup" races and found the same sort of gaps due to people with way more time, money or .ini tweaks than me. :(
Remember that "rookie" sim racers could maybe not drive the "good setup"... That's why street cars have very stable and understeery setup !
A good setup becomes one only with the driving technics
I never understand why other sims don't copy Live for Speed ideas. It was great, I for one agree with this video 100%
i have 3 children and lots and lots of other things to do than setup a car for hours on end...when i have some spare time i just want to race. the problem is that racers dont like giving out their secret setups and most of the time they mess with them a bit so they are not as fast even when they give those setups to you.... YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE. its always been the same in racing games.
Thank you so much for bringing this up.
Is it weird I make baseline setups for cars that I drive often then fine tune them for tracks?
for me personally the setup doesn't change much in most situations.. im usually in the top 5 on most servers.. but for example gt3 on Spa i´m running mid 2:17´s it´s not bad but the pros still take at least 2 seconds off of that. and i tried one of their setups.. it did not change a thing. My own setups usually just make me more Consistent and not really faster.
F1 Drivers pressured to learn theoretical car mechanics in order to be better convey to the engineers and mechanics how the car handles. They need to know how car setups work. They might not be super involved in the process but their required to know enough.
I used to race RC Cars competitively. Everyone set up their own car on a per track, per weekend basis. It's a part of racing. If you have a team of people behind you helping you build car setups then more power to you but that''s an exception in sim racing and real world racing rather than the norm.
I don't have a problem with cars don't having a set up I have problem when community don't share them because it's some fucking secret "I'm better then you" shit. I rememberer early days of LFS S1 and S2 when your drive race or a quali/practice whatever and other gamers say to you "hey I think if you get my set up you be quicker" They give you set up and that was it, now you fight for podium. And that happen to me many times. Try to fucking get good setup for RRE or whatever, you have to be member of some secret site, somehow know a guy who run this site ... oh fuck off.
*Yes. I too would want to give away my teams secrets on say the Indianapolis Speedway because my car had the highest top speed in qualifying for the 500. Then I'd give away my pit strategy too.*
It's a fucking game asswipe there's no reason not to share that info to make everyone enjoy it more. You're not hard because you can win a virtual fucking race.
The Domikonis you don't get it do you. Who would even bother tuning and trying to get the most out of the car just to give it to the next guy that doesn't want to learn anything and thinks he should be competitive.