Here is the core idea, you can create a tune that shows the complete part list and all the settings for that tune in game.
But because players earn various rewards for sharing their tune, just having an open tune someone can copy is not a great idea as things are now.
But consider having such a capability in the game, perhaps living along side the existing tune system. Players would have to opt-in to it. And once in, they should not be allowed to leave it for some given amount of time to help prevent profiteering. Alt accounts would still be a problem though.
A new tune derived for another tune would have a means to reference the original so the original creator would get credit (though actual CR or influence rewards would need to be carefully considered).
This idea isn’t without its issues. I already mentioned the issue of someone using an alt to profit from an open source tune by copying it on an account that did not opt in. Maybe that’s an issue, maybe not. Perhaps a way to combat that is to apply a sort of salt to some of the unit-less tuning values like ARB strength or dampers. That may not be effective though and it ruins the idea of this as a teaching tool.
Another possible issue are players making small changes to the base tune like changing a single tire pressure value by a half PSI. That excess could obscure the original tune.
Is this the sort of thing that FH players could support? Can some smart people help refine the idea further?
You do understand that changing actual settings on car components, can totally transform cars behavior, even if using same components?
After 2 years there are many tunes and surely somebody came up with same components, but whats with actual settings, performance bars mean nothing anyway and they don’t change when you’re playing with settings.
So now lets say 2 persons share same components, first just slapped everything together and be done with, other after putting everything together, spent hour or so to fine tune it. So now second person will be called copy cat, when their product is high performance machine and first is something that just drags along.
There is also opposite option, but how to distinguish that?
At the end uses show if thats what people like, so why compliance things that don’t need be?
I am indeed aware that a tune is a collection of both parts and settings for those parts. I am also aware of the limits of what changing things like tire pressure, gear ratios, suspension geometry, etc can achieve.
Unless Turn 10 or PG tried a system along the lines of what I suggested above in one of the few Forza games I haven’t played, the tuning system has existed pretty much like it is now for a long time.
I had a similar thought when I first started, that tunes would be open so you could see how the cars were tuned and that would help with your future tunes. But I can’t think of a way that would not lead it to immediate abuse.
If the tune were able to be modified, then all someone would need to do is change one setting, save the new tune, then open it back up and change it back again…then profit from the tune they did no work for. If not able to be modified, then they would simply copy down the settings and replicate it for their own tune. Or if DLing the open tune locked it to the car somehow, they could easily buy another car and transfer it over.
In seeing all the no-effort paints that are out there, only tells me that tunes would fall the same way. So then the system just becomes clotted up for everyone else actually trying to find a decent tune.
I understand the goal…but am not one of those smart enough to keep it from being abused.
That’s what the opt-in system is about.
If you opt-in, then you cannot publish any standard tunes to get the standard rewards from. All your tunes will be published as open source as well. A means to reward tuners in the system needs to be considered. Personally I wouldn’t care if no rewards were provided because the potential to learn would be so valuable.
To prevent copying a tune, a player who leaves cannot get rewards for tunes created for a certain period of time after leaving the system. Lets just say 30 days for the sake of argument. Any tune created by a player who leaves the open source tune system over the next 30 days will never be able to earn credits for the creator.
To prevent people using alt accounts or sharing with friends who are not part of the system, certain values could be scaled differently. For example, damper values and ARB values don’t have any units attached to them. They are fairly arbitrary meaning that a random value could be generated and applied to them when the tune is first created. This would mean that straight up copying the tune would have some bad values in the copied tune. This is a pretty weak protection as a random scale factor would be pretty easy to reverse engineer. I think it would take some sort of non-linear system to really obscure these values but that also makes it really hard to transfer the knowledge gained by working with others if a player decides to leave the system later. Perhaps there are other options though.
Another thought might be to use clubs as a way to limit who has access to a tuning group. Smaller groups might allow for easier policing by members but at the cost of reaching the widest possible audience.