Driving physics improved?

Forza Motorsport Legacy Motorsport FM7 Discussion
21

Brake face could be a fantastic feature if implemented correctly however I feel that having brake face on “Cosmetic” damage would be a mistake. Having it on “Simulation” damage and perhaps “Fuel and Tires” could be a nice option. It would mean that if people wanted that authentic feel of braking in a classic car they would get it but like you said, if players didn’t want to “force an upgrade” they wouldn’t have to. Only trouble I see is realistically creating this “brake fade feel” for 700+ cars, that could be tricky.

As for the brakes locking up too quickly you have to remember Forza is not a full sim. In Forza 6 they had to model the braking pressure to be satisfactory for 450+cars. Remember also, a controller has lot less travel then a pedal and having experience playing on both, Forza does an adequate job in braking pressure for both giving neither an advantage. Project cars launched with around 80 cars if I’m correct. If I’m not and please correct me if I’m wrong, Forza 6 had around 5-6 times more cars that Project cars making it easier for PC to model the braking pressure for each car. ABS is also an option but honestly I haven’t used ABS since Forza 2. Taking all this into account I think Turn 10 do a decent job.

Moving on to this, “brake performance seems the same for a low end and high end car”. I don’t believe this at all and I don’t get where you are coming from on that one. The braking performance of say a Ford Fiesta compared to the Ford GT is quite sizable in difference and in regards to cars being skirmish while braking, like I said with braking pressure, Turn 10 had to model a brake bias for 450+ cars. Actually in my opinion, the brake bias is pushed too far but go figure! :stuck_out_tongue:

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22

In order to achieve brake fade effectively, they would need to simulate rotor/pad temperature and even brake fluid temperature, I don’t see it happening tbh. I would love to see the temperature simulatuon of tyres improved for the simulation mode, and even start clutch temperature simulation but I doubt we ever will.

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23

I don’t see it happening either honestly. An improvement in tire temperature would be great and I actually think FH3 improved slightly on this. Clutch temperature and wear would be nice too. Don’t think you can wear out the clutch in FM6. Also better fuel simulation. The fuel seems to wear according to the speed 9f rotation of the tires only.

24

From what I’ve seen, I think they have improved physics overall, and I hope that includes racing wheels. It definitely looks like you’re able to throw the car around a bit more, which I am definitely looking forward to.

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25

hm, you cannot destroy the clutch in FM6? I think you can. Or was that in FM5?

26

You can destroy the clutch in a crash but I don’t think you can wear it out.

27

Everyone keeps comparing FM to iRacing, AC, and PC. I’ll say it once, I’ll say it twice, I’ll say it 1000 times, as have many others. Forza. Motorsport. Is. Not. Meant. To. Compete. With. Them.

No one here is claiming Forza is more realistic than those games. It is NOT meant to be, and hopefully, NEVER will. It is meant to be a simicade game, always has been, and probably always will.

It is meant to cater to amateurs, pros, kids, adults, drifters, drag racers, racers, and cruisers all at once. That is what Forza does, and from my experiences, no other game has done that like Forza has. My 11 year old brother can pick up FM and love it, but if he picked up PC or AC, I’m willing to wager he’d get frustrated and lose interest after less than an hour.

To expect them to just change that because a minority of the community wants it, is beyond ignorant. If you want full simulation, then no, Forza Motorsport is not for you. And it probably will never change. Forza is meant to be fun, with some hints of realism. I’ve played PC, I absolutely hated it, I bought a wheel for it even, still hated it. Is it more realistic? Absolutely. Was it fun? Not in the slightest in my opinion, and if you read reviews, amongst the majority as well.

Are the physics for Forza perfect? No, they are not. There are things that could be improved upon without a doubt. But to say they are “pathetic” is just plain stupid. It’s probably the best physics engine for a racing game that caters to such a huge and diverse audience. It is extremely enjoyable with a controller, something most true sims can’t say the same for.

Wheel support has been an issue, and is why you’re having the issues you are, not physics. And as to the wheel issue being fixed in FM7, there is a very popular thread on this forums regarding this, with the title stating that Dan has confirmed FFB/Wheel support has been fixed, and greatly improved.

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28

Where I agree with you about 85% and continue to remain hopeful for better wheel support, I am cautious to get too exighted.
The weather is better by being more dynamic now and look how much Dan talked about it.
There are more cars than ever before and look how many times we heard Dan talk about it.
The driving suits are improved/ new and look how much Dan brought this up
The wheel FFB/ physics are better but I have only heard it brought up once and it was kind of low key so I am concerned just how much they improved it.
Do t get me wrong here, Forza is my favorite racing game by far! But to show off what my racing rig will do to my friends I will put Assetto Corsa in as it feels better. As for the entire game Forza all the way for me. I will probably purchase Project Cars 2, and I have Assetto Corsa, Dirt Rally, Dirt 4, and every Forza game to date back to the original Forza including all the Horizon games. I LOVE racing even though I am not very good at excelling at very fast times. I concentrate more on racing clean the being super fast as that is how I like to be raced as well. There is no form of a video game that gives me the thrill of throwing a car into a corner, making it stick (even though sometimes a bit faster than I should have) and gaining the position.the white knuckle adrenaline rush is incredible and will keep me coming back for more for ever.
Probably my favorite feature in Forza is the tune sharing as I am not a very good tuner. In Forza I can use some of the best racers tunes and really push my car a lot harder than any of my tunes will let me and I really enjoy this.( currently at Indianapolis in an Indy car I am around 250 out of 2,500,000 thanks to a great tune by a great tuner…"not mine LOL)
If one looks hard enough there are faults with every game and there are also the " I Wish this game had this in it too " but as a whole I enjoy Forza more than any other racing game I have ever owned and that is most of them available on Xbox.
Keep in mind that this is my opinion and there are as many opinions out there as there are players so many may not agree with me here but until I am proven differently Forza will be my top choice.

29

Well duh, Forza Motorports predates all of those games by years to decades. Those games were developed to compete with Forza, not the other way around. Forza was developed to compete with GT, which it absolutely destroys. Agree with your post, people are wasting their time lamenting about Forza essentially being true to its roots.

I personally love Forza’s physics (but still welcome iteration), but I couldn’t be bothered to bust out a steering wheel to setup in front of my tv most of the time. If I want an extreme sim I’ll get a PC and a wheel and lock myself in a tiny room with one of those other games. But that’s not the experience I’m looking for when I boot up Forza on my XBox.

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30

AC, PCars, and Iracing do not compete with Forza at all outside of being games with cars in them. PCars comes the closest, but it’s clear they are attempting to build a Sim with a real career mode.
And saying Forza beats GT is ridiculous, both are great and both provide hundreds of hours of entertainment, with out the need to be bothered with the other title.

OT:
Forza doesn’t really have a physics problem, from all indication the physics are great, tire modeling, properish suspension models, etc…
Forza’s biggest issue, which it has had for a long time, is it has “it’s” way of driving. The problem there is that all the other games mentioned, including GT drive the way you’d expect Sims/simcades to drive. Forza does this slightly differently. It’s probably the only game I’ve mentioned that is better on controller than on a wheel. But that doesn’t come from wheel support, it comes from the game.
And really there is nothing wrong with the way Forza drives, you just need to take a Forza mindset when playing the game, kind of like playing SF Rush games. But at the end of the day, the other Sims and GT drive in a more natural way.

31

Finally some common sense up in here. Too many people expecting FM7 to be the ultimate sim or to fully delve into all the minute accuracies that they are looking for. The vocal minority wants Forza to be designed for $3,000 professional race rigs but the majority of the audience will use controllers. If you want realism buy Assetto Corsa or go all in for iRacing. If you want arcade go with Need For Speed. If you want something that could do it all in believable way and give the most content go FM7.

I’m really not sold on GT Sport. It also makes no sense for me to go out and buy a third gaming platform after PC and XB1 and pay for another sub service just to play one game that from the looks of it is not going to surpass FM7 in most categories. Eventually I could buy Dirt 4 or PC2 or any of the others. It doesn’t really matter. You could own them all. It’s not supposed to be a pissing contest over which game is better but people really seem to get off on it.

-k

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32

Something that looks off is that when cars hit each other their bodies remeain perfectly horizontal. It looks specially bad on replays. When you hit another car the camera shakes up and down but not the body of the car. While the effect of pushing them away when you crash them (or they crash you) is fine, the body of the car should bounce up and down.

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33

@Mcfuu:
That’s not true. In GT the cars are floating over the road.
The suspension and stearing from the GT-cars are also bad for a racesim.
Forza is miles further ahead than GT.

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34

When it comes to how it feels to drive a car, GT has Forza beat. If you go watch videos of GTS you can see suspension movement, effecting body movement. Something Forza doesn’t do. The suspension movement in Forza, but the body stays too still. The big issue with Forza handling model is it feels like all the cars have 5 wheels. 4 on the corners and a giant one in the middle wherever the COG is. Front ends don’t really turn in, the car rotates around COG and that’s how the cars turn. Everything happens around the magical giant 5th wheel. It’s the opposite problem of PCars, where the front of the car and the rear of the car feel like they are always going different directions.

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35

And here is the problem with all driving games.

The centre of rotation of a car is towards the rear of a car. In the real world this doesn’t strike anyone as odd because you can sense and feel exactly what the car is doing.

When you take exactly the same car behaviour into the 2D non-sensory world of gaming things that are actually correct start to feel wrong.

This is why there is no $60 driving/racing sim on the market and probably won’t be for many years. What we have are some very good games that provide a pseudo experience that becomes believable on a console or PC. All the debate about game A being more accurate than game B is rather pointless as non of them are “real world” acurate anyway. They can’t be otherwise they’d play quite poorly.

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36

I agree and disagree with you on a few point here. I think it’s all subjective but I prefer Forza’s handling to GT’s. In both GT and Forza both suffer from front end scrubbing of the tires. Both have the initial bite but then it fades away. In GT you can never really find the peak grip and no matter what, it feels like the tires aren’t hitting the desirable amount of friction and so sometimes you feel like you’re either not turning enough or turning too much and you can hear it, the wheels are constantly screeching. In Forza it’s near perfect on a controller however on a wheel it’s very off. There is a peak grip there, but it’s so hard to find and the fall off grip is both too severe and too sudden meaning on a wheel in Forza, if you steer past the peak friction it’s catastrophic, making the handling model quite tricksy. I think project cars moddled front tires the best, though the rear tires feel very odd to me in Project cars almost like there a different compound, making cars very hard to correct, save and drift.

Suspension wise I think GT and Forza do very well and I’d say they’re neck and neck. Forza tends to have more suspension travel and softer springs than GT but the car is more rigid and stiff in terms of chassis. In GT I feel it’s the other way round. Honestly it depends on you’re taste but I feel for most both get the sweet spot right of not too stiff on suspension or roll bars but not too soft either. In Project cars I personally hated this and it was the one thing I really think needed improving. Most cars had way too much roll and away side to side when going round corners and it was worse when transitioning. The roll was also too quick to transition making cars feel snappy and I felt the suspension was too bouncy for most cars.

GT and Forza both have two rather annoying problems. For GT all cars feel weightless and feel like they have no difference in weight. It makes the cars very floaty when driving and it makes you feel disconnected from the road. In Forza, like you said, some cars tend to pivot slightly on an axis located at the centre of gravity of said car. This is fine under acceleration and under braking but off throttle some cars have a lot of lift off oversteer making them hard to handle and almost for the most part, impossible to tune out fully and therefore making the cars uncompetitive. It doesn’t affect most cars in Forza as most have enough rear end grip or downforce to disguise the effect but some do suffer. On the flip side in Project cars like you said, the rear and front tires always felt they were going in different directions and also felt that they were running at different speeds constantly. Most cars felt like they had a completely open diff.

I could go into more about the physics but here’s the short, they all have problems making which one feels best completely subjective to driving technique, play style and personal preference of driving feel.

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37

Button binding for wheels users would be a HUGE plus also!

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38

I’ve always disagreed with that thought, that the more realistic a driving game is, the harder it is to play.

As you’ve touched on, there’s two components to making a good realistic driving game. The first part is getting the physics sim correct, how the wheels move, how the tires grip, how all of the mechanicals translate to the simulated world, etc. Forza is pretty good in this department, though there are certainly other games that have gone further in recent years.

The second part is the component of the design and code that translates the players input from whatever control method they have, into driving the actual physics based vehicle. As well as the stuff that tries to communicate what the physics simulation is doing to the player, via sound, force feed back, camera motion and whatever other tricks they can come up with to get around the fact that your ass isn’t strapped into a 2500+lb piece of iron flying around a track. This code in Forza is excellent (well apparently not for wheels, I haven’t used one with it since FM4).

My point is, when you get the second part right, the game actually becomes easier to play. People often chuck up bad implementation of that code to “bad physics sim”, or they do the opposite and think it means the physics sim is just really realistic. The reality is there is no real relation in quality between those 2 areas, there are lots of games that only get one of those areas right. And in addition, driving cars in real life is easy (once you’ve learned how of course). Taking those same skills and using them to drive a car successfully in a game largely comes down to how well those 2 areas of the code were implemented.

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39

I’m not so sure about that… I spent several years driving an '89 911 out on the track, then got behind the wheel of Cayman. First time I took that mid-engine Cayman around Turn 7 at Road Atlanta, I was almost giddy as it felt like the car was rotating on the “magical giant 5th wheel”.

In Forza, I definitely notice the difference - and many cars do not (to me) feel like they’re rotating on the CoG.

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40

I’d split your “second part” in two. I think a big issue is the visuals.

@McFuu said: “If you go watch videos of GTS you can see suspension movement, effecting body movement. Something Forza doesn’t do. The suspension movement in Forza, but the body stays too still.”

If the graphics do not show what someone thinks is “enough body roll” that doesn’t mean the physics are not good. It’s entirely possible for the game to perform 100% accurate calculations on weight-transfer, suspension travel, tire compression and flex, etc, etc, etc, resulting in a very accurate simulation of what is happening to the car in terms of speed and position, while not matching that accuracy in the image rendering.

Just think back a couple versions, when the suspension components were not even visually present. Surely nobody would say the physics calculations back then totally ignored it!

I also think many people’s perception of the physics accuracy is affected by the point-of-view which they use to play the game. Since FM2, I’ve always used Bumper-Cam, because I felt it best represents what I actually see when driving on a track. Granted, this may just be me, but when I try to play Forza using 3rd-person camera, I feel totally disconnected from any sense of “driving,” and certainly the visual aspect fails to convey all the work the physics engine is doing.

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