Why do stock tuning setups handle so poorly?

The sad thing is that the settings aren’t even similar to IRL cars. The gear ratios have always been off. The ratios on many cars are easily accessible on line.

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They are clearly not trying to get these details and nuances right for each car - be it physics and visual modelling or audio and car tech/systems such as KERS and DRS.

I think Forza will scurry away like a scared kitten and retreat into the shadows quietly once AC Evo drops and that new PCARS game, Motor something, I forget what it’s called.

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I wouldn’t count on AC Evo being much more than a tech demo, at least initially. It’s only going to have about 20 cars and 5 tracks when it releases in Early Access in a couple of weeks. Even when it hits 1.0 this coming Fall, devs have stated those numbers are still only going to be around 100 and 15. I’m sure there’ll be a few more added post-1.0 and then maybe more whenever the console version is released.

As others have said, it took both the original AC and ACC a couple of years to iron out the kinks and develop into mature, well-functioning games and I fully expect this to be the case for Evo as well. I do hope that the game eventually delivers on its promises, but I think the limited scope (particularly in the number of cars on offer) is going to disappoint people who are looking for the game to be a “Forza killer”.

Project Motor Racing. If the fact that it’s being developed with a version of the Farming Simulator engine wasn’t enough to give me pause, the fact that it’s being headed up by the most rude, arrogant, egotistical project manager ever (in the form of one Ian Bell) certainly is. That guy will never get another dime of my money after the way he treated paying customers during the PCARS 1 and 2 days.

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This is interesting, might mean that they didn’t bother or had time to re tune the stock settings based on the new fidelity of the physics engine. But shouldn’t stock settings “always” be correct?

You are aware that different types of games can run on the same engine? Fable runs on the same engine as FM for example.

If you read the article about the engine, it’s actually very clear why they chose the partnership with GIANTS and should be a step forward no doubt. They also explain how they have combined GIANTS engine with their own physics engine to create what they have for PMR.

Driving Project Motor Racing with the GIANTS Engine | Project Motor Racing

Well aware, thanks. Still have absolutely no interest in buying the game.

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Glad for you. Just wanted to clarify your misleading comment for other people reading.

Sorry you felt misled, but I feel the point is valid. Looking for reassurance, it’s not like there is a long list of other racing games that have utilized the GIANTS engine, in fact as far as I can tell, PMR is the first. So that alone was enough to make me say hmm…I wonder why.

And to be fair, the article you linked to is written by the game developers… so of course they’re going to talk up the benefits and paper over any faults or concerns: they want people to buy their game, and to feel confident in doing so.

Who knows, maybe PMR will turn out to be a great game after all. Personally, I have my doubts. As always, time will tell.

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No worries, I’ve been following for awhile now so I wasn’t mislead but I saw how it could be misconstrued by someone who hasn’t.

Like you said, time will tell! I’m just happy to see this push in sim racing, for the longest racing titles were quite limited. Competition is good for us and the genre.

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I see that this post was created after the Bathurst update.

I think they have nerfed the control on pad again. I just created a post about this. The cars feel unresponsive especially around the centre as if there is an invisible 5% deadzone or something. Also, you have to go full analogue stick lock on every turn just to force the front wheels to bite down.

This is getting quite silly, Forza should be called Understeer Motorsport.

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Stock setups have never been great in any forza. I think with this game they did actually go in and tune them to be the way they are. Some are definitely extreme, but most are fine to just get in and drive against the ai.

I think with this game they wanted people to tune their own cars. It was part of the marketing, it was why car progression was originally so slow. They wanted people to get a car, slowly earn points, slowly add upgrades, with each upgrade youd have to test and tweak things to get more performance.

Although not received well it did allow people to feel the differences each upgraded part had. So if you only had anti-roll bars and adjusted them, youd feel the effects of just what the anti-roll bars had on the car. Since the adjustments youd make to arb’s are similiar to other suspension settings, ie stiff rear soft front=oversteer the opposite is understeer, then people could then start tweaking those other settings as well.

This game isnt a simulator, there isnt a simulator out there with over 500 cars with real life accurate settings, we’re not there yet. Its a simcade and like every other simcade settings are not basic, but theyre certainly not true to real life.

I also think sometimes people forget road cars arent race cars and while some are fast in a straight line, they arent set up for track use. Most are set up to understeer so people dont lose control and crash. I think they went with this reality when tuning stock setups in the game.

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Reality? There are cars that are incapable of achieving the factory settings for the vehicle, and the spring rates are not even in the same zipcode as correct.
I can list them, or you can Google them.

The roll center tuning is another complete fail. There are approximately zero cars currently sold where the suspension roll center and the center of gravity are in exact alignment (which would indicate a 0.00 value). All vehicles have this either higher or lower, depending on where the engineers wanted the weight to go during cornering- so why aren’t those values listed? If they went to the trouble of adding the mechanic to the game, why was the roll center values not added accurately?
Why does lowering or raising ride height not affect it (as it does in the real world)?

The physics engine also seems to lack the ability to simulate variable rate springs- a technology present on at least 75% of vehicles on the road. Electronically variable dampers are also absent, as are differences between low speed and high speed damping- which is a thing on even the cheapest Red Rider from autozone.

Tire Rack has tons of videos on the differences between road tires, as does Tyre Reviews, but rather than go to the trouble of simulating the type of tire equipped from factory (or even the style), they seemingly went with “the worst ones that the AI (because you know no humans tested anything) could drive without crashing”.
The “stock” tires on a 2018 Mustang feel nearly identical to those on the 83 VW GTI, which is a complete departure from reality.

They ignored suspension geometry, settings, rates,and technology. The ignored tire tech. But the end result is… accuracy? Gonna go with a hard “no” here.

They phoned in the stock settings- The End.

If manufacturers actually sold cars that handle as poorly as they do in game, they’d be sued into oblivion.

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I think it highly depends on the car.
The '17 Ford GT for example is pretty neat with stock suspension and with a rear heavy ARB setting it works better for me than with race suspension.

But then there are cars like the McLaren 600LT and 620R that are atrocious and understeer like a five tonnes bus. I’ve driven some McLaren of the Sports Series and if they would handle like here McLaren would not sell a single one.

I hardly doubt anyone at T10 thoroughly test drives any of the programmed cars. It takes me 2 minutes to feel if a car is poorly implemented.

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Reality in the sense of feel, not in the sense of tuning set ups. So if a car is known to understeer or oversteer, or be heavy or pointy, these things are often taken into account and the car is adjusted in whatever way to make it feel more acceptable by whoever is creating that vehicle.

Data is inserted into the physics engine and spits out a digital representation of that car. Things are then tweaked where needed to improve the base assett. Sometimes its anecdotal data like car reviews, sometimes they tweak cars to fit in a category better to fill out a division, whatever they want to do. These things can also be affected by the dev doing the work, they didnt drive these cars in real life they use whatever data is available and do the best they can, some are better than others.

Tuning settings bounds have largely been the same for 2 decades. At the time it was fine and maybe they should do a better job at updating it, but maybe its been kept simple because most people never open the tuning menu. Gt7, the real driving simulator, is just as basic, because it knows what it is and who their customers are.

This is a video game its not real life. Every racing video game does the same thing, iracing is often claimed to be the best simulator and in many ways it is for consumers but its not used for anything but entertainment, it is also just a video game. It has its downsides, its not fully accurate in any and all situations. Its a constant evolution to get better and more realistic, but it will always be a game and will always have constraints and concessions.

Every game this include sims, has its own quirks and exploitations. They all have their own meta tuning set ups that would never work in reality but work in the game. Sometimes they’re fixed, most time theyre not.

So while you may find the disparities between real life and in game as unacceptable, i personally could care less because i dont feel as though it matters, theyre games. Theres numerous games to choose from with their own interpretations of reality mixed with the constraints as well as excess’ of being a game. None of them are real. You play the one you have the most fun in. If your idea of fun is absolute realism then this isnt exactly the best option.

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Some definitely are bad. I remember when fm7 released the demo after e3 and the 911 gt2 cover car was atrocious. All i kept thinking was, wow thats embarrassing i hope no one from Porsche tried it, but it was what it was. It has since been tweaked and is driveable.

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That’s no excuse to abandon authenticity for the sake of unnaturally forcing players into game mechanics. With the exception of Motorsport 5, every single Forza has always had an aura of authenticity around it’s physics, whether you were on a wheel or a controller. Cars behaved largely as you would expect them to behave, making tuning them an ideal way to improve upon and maximize their performance if you so desired.

That authenticity is gone in Motorsport 2023. Whether it be through deliberate malice (manual & clutch nerf) or sheer incompetence, the performance of most of the cars in this game have been degraded to such a degree that players are forced to invest time and effort into tuning not to push their chosen car beyond what they are capable of but to return them to what their baseline performance should have been in the first place.

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This is why I still only play forza 7. Come back to this game every once in a while. But it’s
a disappointment. Forza7 is much better in every aspect.

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Out of more than 500 cars you think “most” dont behave in a believable way. I dont think most stock cars are that different from past games. I say this being someone who drives the cars stock more than upgraded, my favorite multiplayer lobby for over a decade was cycled production. Some cars were fine, some werent, some were believable others were not.

One of forzas main complaints over the years was how easy cars oversteered, how it was a drift simulator under a racing guise. With this game they added more understeer to stock tunes. Gt7 is also tuned more towards understeer and every car i have in that game is tuned to get rid of it.

I still believe this change was made to highlight the changes upgrades make. Whether they went to far or not imo is on a car by car basis as some are truly horrible. But if theres one thing they got right in this game, its that small changes in tuning, even just changes in tire pressures make a big difference in how the car handles. I think they wanted people to tune.

I personally think whatever authenticity forza had has faded due to time and other games becoming more authentic. Im more disappointed that race cars can still drift more so than stock street cars not performing well on track especially when in real life most street cars dont actually perform well on track.

One of my favorite racing series was the project gotham series. One of the reasons was that all the cars were stock and it was purely about driver skill. Forza Motorsport is not that same type of game, it never has been. Its about getting a car, upgrading it, tuning it and racing a car above its natuve class.

So the focus has never been on the stock tunes and if you go back and look at stock car tunes in past forzas, they will be just as wrong. The little performance stats of 0-60 and top speed, are all wrong. Should this be changed in the future, sure if they want to, but if they dont thats fine as well because thats not what this game is about.

When this game released people lost their minds because they couldnt upgrade their cars fast enough and now a year later cars with no upgrades are the problem.

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No, the problem is having to upgrade cars to perform like they are supposed to in stock form.
Somewhere along the line, someone at Turn10 decided that “factory” was synonymous with “understeers like a pig”, and through whatever mental gymnastics were necessary , justified to themselves putting absolutely no effort into getting the stock setups remotely accurate.

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Once again, its a video game, once again no games use real life setups, because, they are video games. Even if a game did show numbers that align with real life, it would be for show. When you tune any setting, youre not setting a physical thing. The numbers we see only correlate to whatever bounds that are set in the physics engine.

Games like forza and gt7 are much more limited in these bounds than full sims. They also have hundreds of cars, much more than any sim. To expect each and every car to be accurately represented in these types of games is just not going to happen.

Games like Acc which are focused on a smaller group of cars that all work within the same bounds, is easier to be more accurate with each. A game like iracing only comes with 26 cars and charges $12 more per car after, in a game that requires a membership, so they better be more accurate.

Games like forza and gt7 come with 400-500 cars from the start. You give up accuracy for more content. They both give the options to upgrade cars, which inevitably takes the focus off the stock set ups as most people dont use them. Right off the bat in career, the builders cup, you’re given 300 car points to upgrade your car, the game literally guides you to upgrade the car.

Of course its your choice if you upgrade or not, you can play how you want. I think it’d be great if things were 100% accurate and one day there will be games that are, but we’re not there yet. I was hoping with this built from the ground up game they would have added tuning for individual wheels, but they didnt its still just front and back.

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