Driving Simulators

[ChrisF1]

I am sure this will interest a few people on here:

http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-news/9 ... -simulator

[ChrisDanger]

Looks interesting. It seems like they're trying to recreate something like the below, which I've seen with a much larger footprint, and looks like it would be the ultimate sim experience.

[dero]

Looks interesting. It seems like they're trying to recreate something like the below, which I've seen with a much larger footprint, and looks like it would be the ultimate sim experience.

http://www.zercustoms.com/news/images/T ... ator-5.jpg

WTH is this thing? A giant X/Y table to simulate loads/accelerations in X/Y direction?
How does it work? How do you create arbitrary acceleration in any direction at any rate?
Of course if you need lets say: +1g backwards you accelerate the thing forward at 1g. But what happens then? You are now at constant speed until you run out of movement. How do they solve this? Slowly reducing speed resulting in a small accelearion you dont notice?

cheers Stefan

[Jef Patat]

This might explain a bit the use:


g forces are not that important, it's not a F1 simulator. The purpose is to give realism. It's all about the degrees of freedom. Also tilting the dome gives g forces because you're using the earths gravity field. Remember that in normal situations road cars do not go over 1 g and only for a limited amount of time.

[dero]

This might explain a bit the use:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi_GkDqON_s

g forces are not that important, it's not a F1 simulator. The purpose is to give realism. It's all about the degrees of freedom. Also tilting the dome gives g forces because you're using the earths gravity field. Remember that in normal situations road cars do not go over 1 g and only for a limited amount of time.

Thanks for clearing that up, i was indeed thinking about >1g F1 World

cheer Stefan

[Jef Patat]

There's little information about those. The closest I know of is this fragment. Remember this is an old vid of an at that time old simulator. Just look at the steering wheel, it doesn't resemble the real thing so it's probably rebuild, but anyway, it gives an idea.



This is a recent vid posted by Alonso:


It doesn't show the mechanical setup, but if you look at the amount of steering correction you can see that the drive is smoother than reality. I would guess they have different modes, to get the circuit in the fingers, to practice the buttons, to practice rain, more engine realistic, less engine realistic, more wind, less wind, to practice this, to practice that, ...

[SimRacer]

Motion simulators are way overrated and over-hyped. Understandably so up to some point as they are definitely eye catching and sort of "make sense" since cars do actually move...

But I'm pretty confident that the motion aspect of a sim by itself is probably the least important aspect that one should care in order to produce a good or even a great car simulator. Not to mention the almost impossible to fix latency delay and inconsistent information that they will always be doomed to provide to the user, etc, etc, etc.

[Ciro Pabón]

Hey, thanks a lot, ChrisF1 and ChrisDanger. Lovely.

These days I'm submerged in calibrating a car simulator, but for traffic, nothing as entertaining (well, for me, simulating traffic is really cool, but, well, I'm kind of lonely in that).

I wonder if there are any traffic engineer around this place.

[ChrisDanger]

Motion simulators are way overrated and over-hyped. Understandably so up to some point as they are definitely eye catching and sort of "make sense" since cars do actually move...

But I'm pretty confident that the motion aspect of a sim by itself is probably the least important aspect that one should care in order to produce a good or even a great car simulator. Not to mention the almost impossible to fix latency delay and inconsistent information that they will always be doomed to provide to the user, etc, etc, etc.

I've often heard people talk about driving "by the seat of their pants" which I think is an absolute necessity for a racing driver. When I was playing GTR2 I had the vehicle weight transfer fed through the wheel force feedback, otherwise I had little idea of how the car was behaving. The feeling you get from the movement of the car helps you make tiny micro-adjustments at all times. To do this by purely visual means is impossible, as you need a drastic movement to notice a change. And the latency in this realisation would be far greater than that of a motion system, which is probably a fraction of typical reaction speeds anyway.

[ChrisF1]

I am sure that driving precision comes from the bum on the seat. It's a genuine feeling of the car moving beneath you and knowing exactly what it is doing.

[theblackangus]

I have to agree on the bum feedback.
I have been doing track days for a few years now and I have finally gotten to the point where I can feel certain things about the cars rotation 1st in my bum before the wheel.
I do a good amount of simulator driving and while good its just not the same. I'm not throwing my sim away, it still gives you a great amount of understanding (especially when the FF of of the wheel is good) however even the best FF wheel still doesn't really get it perfect.

I would re-state it this way the bum feed back is the last 5% of driving, but once you feel it its the early warning indicator of what the car is doing. Its not the least important just that everything else needs to be understood before the bum really starts to make a difference.

For instance my instructor was able to verbalize to me that the car was going to spin by the time I saw it or even felt it in the steering. His bum was able to tell and allow him to verbalize in the time it took me to make the reaction from the steering/visual feel. So he was a tenth or two ahead of me from just the physical feeling in the passenger seat. That really opened my eyes.

[Jersey Tom]

I would re-state it this way the bum feed back is the last 5% of driving

That's probably a fair assessment. In any sort of simulation work it's super easy to be totally out to lunch on suspension, aero, tires... feeling the car move around is important but small in the grand scheme of things.

[SimRacer]

delete please

[ChrisF1]

Can you link your signature instead of embedding video, it's extremely distracting when you're posting multiple times on one page in discussions

[SimRacer]

delete please