Who are the graphics mastered for, and why isn’t there an in-game brightness adjustment? There are no lights on, except for my IPS backlight lighting every wall and the ceiling enough to read anywhere in the room; still, I can barely see, even in day races! Night races are insane. My gamma is set correctly. I can see every black and white step from 0 to 255 clearly.
Edit: it’s certain tracks and weather conditions. There are a couple that are almost too bright. It’s inconsistent.
Forza actually has a massive over exposure & too much bloom issue. If you’re on Xbox One X or S & can access the HDR Brightness & Gamma screen under Video & Audio, I’d recommend maxing out the Gamma & HDR Brightness & then adjust the TV’s brightness manually until the black Forza logo disappears. It looks a little washed out compared to what Forza recommends but I feel it makes the game look more neutral & not so over vibrant like the recommend settings do. It also reduces the bloom effect massively & you can see so much more detail in the sky & particularly the clouds that it usually hidden when using the recommended settings.
It’s not that the HDR implementation in this game is poor, it’s not the best I’ll admit but it mainly just seems to be mis-calibrated if anything.
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I would, but I’m on PC. My LG monitor has a setting called “black stabilizer” that is correct gamma at 50, darker at 0 and brighter at 100. On 100, menus wash out, and racing scenes are still dark. Coupled with the non-adjustable FOV, and that my monitor, a 25" 21:9, is only 10 inches tall, I have to put my face within a foot of the screen to quell the fisheye effect and have any hope of judging braking distances effectively, let alone the physics and controls, it’s a **** experience. Multiplayer ultimately feels like a team effort to not see anyone fly too far off the track. I use 45 FOV in Horizon 4, chase cam. It’s about perfect when I’m 2 feet from the screen. The upgrades menu FOV in FM7 is ridiculous too, I can barely see a thing when I’m trying to pick wheels.
FH4 is downright gorgeous and always easy on the eyes (except street races and dirt drift zones during Forzathons at night). There are a lot of hints T10 could take from PG, from the graphics to the car dealer and garage sorting/navigation and beyond.
P.S. I don’t enjoy writing paragraphs about simple, dead obvious problems in either game. But when I see repeated attempts to bring them to light left in locked or unanswered threads (mostly locked) it becomes clear to me, the problem must be insufficiently clear and complete communication. I want Forza to be good. I think the people who put their name on it do, too.
Being honest, I don’t have any problems that you have, then again I’m on Xbox One X & I have a 4k 120Hz TV. Maybe it’s a PC or monitor thing? I gave no clue. No FOV adjustability is frustrating I’ll admit that. Graphically I think both games have their pros & cons. I think Forza 7 has more realistic interior lighting & better weather effects, but I think Horizon 4 has better environmental models & textures. Then again Forza 7 is 60fps, Horizon 4 30 at 4k so there should be a bit if a downgrade. Physics can be improved but the base physics are outstanding. More complex cars suffer though & simple things like TCS, ABS & STM sliders need to be a thing. We also need actual stimulation of stuff like brake face, active aero, ers, drs, kers & better tire heating & wear.
I am at PC too, my monitors r not supporting HDR, one (Asus 24") is set for photo editing (birghtness color and contrast r machtich printed photos) an the second one (Samsung 24") is optimized for games. At all races with deep standing sun, night or tunnels (Dubai, Rio) i have to raise the gamme setting in the videocard options from 0.99 (my standard setting) to 1,50 to be able to see the track good enough for racing. It’s also strange that we have highlighted Tracklimits to turn on - i have never seen another racing game where this was requested - to find your way in nightraces or to know where you r allowed to drive…
I played Horizon 4 once on a 49 inch TV. Even then I had to sit no farther than 4 feet before I couldn’t gauge braking distances properly. Exact or very close to perceptually accurate FOV is critical.
FM7’s cockpit views do look good. I drove the Raptor in career at Bermese Alps in chase cam. The embossed lettering on the tailgate all but disappears if the sun isn’t directly on it. Point being, the hyped contrast is more degrading to visual clarity in chase cam. Also, if you do a wheelie, the shadowmap lifts off the ground with the car. Horizon doesn’t do that.
I think Horizon has active aero physics. Unless it’s placebo, the 2012 Aventador handles more consistently with the Liberty Walk wing because the stock active spoiler retracts in slower corners and at high speed. Active torque vectoring would be neat. Before that I’d like the tires to be worked out, doubled resolution of toe tuning, deeper damper tuning, diff preload (which is missing because the tire physics don’t play well with it–more reason to throw away the current system entirely for one that would).
I would accept brake fade. The featured car manufacturers might not. 
I actually find Position of view is the downfall of Motorsport, not field of view. Field of view a person has is 114° I believe, so Forza 7, which has a wider FOV is closer to that but you generally sit quite far back in the car. That’s the problem imo.
Active aero is not stimulated. Here’s a way to debunk that it is. Hp in a car with an air brake. McLaren P1 is a good example. Go into running and reduce the braking pressure to 0. This will give you no brakes obviously. Slam on the brakes & you’ll see the car doesn’t decelerate any faster than just lifting off the gas. This is of course not correct as the air brake should create more drag & this stop the car quicker. That’s not saying that since aero isn’t factored in, it is, but it’s just pre-baked.
There’s nothing really too wrong about the tire model. The main problem is that Street, Sport & Race tires all have the same operating temperature which is odd. Vintage tires are the only exception & is also frustrating that every tire has the same FFB drop off graph on a wheel.
I think toe is about correct. Don’t think it needs to be changed honestly. You will make the car undriveable if you go about 2.5° either way which accurate & the game values lower toe which is also accurate.
The diff is also pretty good for the most part though some cars can’t actually have a locked diff. Take the Mercedes Tankpool Truck for example. Locking out the diff will make it more locked but not fully which is odd. Perhaps a grip or perhaps a problem with the differential physics.
Manufacturers shouldn’t have a problem with brake fade. Most high performance cars don’t have much of not any anymore & other studios such as Project Cars have done it.
Agree on the view position. Most games have a few if not a plethora of options to customize that. If they’re confident in their car models, why can’t Forza have them?
I’ll have to test active aero with the Senna in Horizon. That’s one that’s “feels” like it does have effective aero braking. Incredible stopping power. Being the cover car maybe that was the tipping point to introduce the funtionality.
I’ve often wanted 0.05 or 0.15 degrees of toe in on the rear. I believe I can feel it in certain cars. Mostly I focus on suspension, it’s rare anymore I tune that finely. The potential is there.
That’s what I mean about the diff. In games like LFS, you can choose between open, viscous LSD, clutch LSD, or spool. Clutch LSDs have accel and decel locking, like Forza, as well as clutch preload, in n/m. 200-300n/m locking makes a significant difference in stability with RWDs, and FWDs. I don’t know why Forza doesn’t have preload tuning. I assume it’s for the same reason it has auto-brake at low speeds; the methods used to approximate tire behavior have no zero values, nor true limits. Without auto-brake, and disabling tire physics when stopped, the cars would constantly be skittering slowly across the road surface. The way cars flip roll in slow-motion is part of the same–without limits to the forces the tires can generate, they can generate otherworldly extreme forces in semi-ordinary situations. I used to mod the physics configs of cars of a sim that used Pacejka tires. I don’t know if that’s what Forza uses but it seems to share many of the same quirks particularly at high slip ratios/angles. << point about the diffs being, maybe locking the wheels together causes an issue with the tires. The sim I mentioned that used Pacejka tires, I think had a problem with spools as well.
I’ll have to send you my realistic tunes I make for Forza 7 once a couple are done. You’d be surprised how good the base physics are. A lot of the problems with Forza 7 comes with the base tunes the car comes with. I’ve been doing a realistic tune for the McLaren 720s & you’d be surprised what’s wrong with it.
The gear ratios were wrong, the the spring rate was incorrect & the diff settings were wrong. I corrected all that in my realistic tune & actually use real world data to find the correct settings. In even calculated a somewhat accurate springrate for the 720s.
As for toe tuning, I do agree we need more adjustability there to make finer tuning. If you ever want a tip with tire pressure though, it’s that Metric values are more accurate than English values. In Metric form every adjustment on tire pressure is 0.1 on English it’s 0.5.
We need more tuning options. I’d love to be able to adjust the cabinet & toe of each wheel independently for example. Boost tuning, akerman angle & handbrake strength tuning would be nice editions too.
I have a question about the game’s brightness levels:
There are certain night tracks where it appears the car’s headlight beams are hardly projecting at all and the contrast on those headlight beams seems to fluctuate. I;m on a non-HDR screen with no enhancements turned on.
Drove a Vulcan on Silverstone for example, which hardly has any stadium lights to light up the track and it seemed like my car had only fog lights on instead of headlights. It was strange because I could see the beams projecting light on the nearby red/white side walls but not on the road!
Then I drove it on Yas Marina, and the beams looked fine. Why is the night time lighting so inconsistent? Are you HDR screen users experiencing the same on night tracks?
Part of it’s the eye adaptation. If you run laps at Daytona in a P-class car, near the end of turn 3, the sun is onscreen (in chase cam, at least) and eye adaptation darkens the scene. It’s not until the middle of turn 2 that the scene is as bright as it should be. Maybe some tracks aren’t calibrated overall correctly. Bernese Alps has a lot of black-hole shadows.
Track limits are for rivals or anything where a dirty lap isn’t counted equally to a clean lap, in case the limits aren’t obvious. That’s a great idea to use them for night races. I have to use braking racing line regardless because the FOV is high enough to cause fisheye on a 25" 21:9 monitor. That’s only 10 inches vertical screen space, equivalent to a 20" 16:9.
I haven’t wanted more resolution but you’re right, there are 14 steps per .1 bar, which is .1 psi per step. Strange.
I was wondering about asymmetric alignment grinding credits at Daytona. Ackerman I’ve wanted for a long time. Handbrake strength I think is tied into brake pressure? Maybe that’s LFS I’m thinking of. GT5 had a “power reduction” feature to help fit cars into lower classes; GT Sport probably has the same.
GT Sport also has spring tuning in ride frequency hz and damper tuning by % of critical damping. So easy. If Forza would even as much put those readouts next to the wheel rate and damper tuning readouts, multiplayer would improve. I played a lot of CarX on PC, until patch 1.4.8, it doesn’t feel nearly the same anymore. I eventually found perfectly balanced springs were most versatile in all possible situations. Same thing in FH4, and FM7. If they’re off by 0.1% it handles differently.
The next most important piece after spring balance is damper valving. Assetto has high-speed valving tuning. iRacing probably has it. GT Sport doesn’t but they might have better curves than Forza. I’ve tried to ask multiple times on the forums what type of dampers Forza has, if they are linear, digressive, adaptive digressive based on weight and/or spring rate, with no response. Later I’ll post links to some pics of Automation’s take on ride frequency and damping visualization. Something similar would fit in perfectly with Forza’s excellent gear ratio visualization graph and putting together great tunes a breeze, especially for those who’ve already dialled in a few cars–they would be able to translate that behavior to another car of any weight or weight distribution in almost no time.
In terms of damping, there’s a formula that works as a good baseline. I’ll fetch it for you.
Or works decently well. I don’t use it personally because I do my realistic tunes so it’s all real world data, but I’ve tried it out & it’s not bad.
General in Forza you want very high rebound & very soft bump. Start at 13 / 13 rebound & 1 / 1 bump and tune from there. That setup feels very good on every car I’ve driven but there is a sweetspot if you keep tinkering from there.
Forza’s suspension model isn’t actual bad at all. It needs work but it functions & reacts pretty accurately to what real life does. It needs some work on high downforce cars though. Forza general excels physics wise on very basic low technology cars like old muscle cars & 80s / 90s hatchbacks.
As far as things the tuning menu says, that’s one I agree with, and it applies to every game/sim I’ve tuned in–bump is usually best at 50-75% of rebound. I often use 0.8:1, even 1:1 especially in Horizon where suspension stroke is in short supply relative to the terrain it needs to absorb. LFS dampers, in cars that only have an overall damper per axle tuning, at 0.5:1. The stock setups on cars with separate bump and rebound are 0.5:1 to 0.66:1. The FFB does well at 0.75:1 or more. Real world dampers that I’ve seen dyno graphs of can be as low as 0.33:1.
High downforce cars use up to double or more the spring rates that non-aero cars use. To slow the roll moment to reasonable speeds, lots of low-speed compression is needed. I think it was F1 that pioneered bypass dampers, which have made their way into consumer level coilovers. These shocks are designed in a way, at low shaft velocities, the damping coefficient is high, to slow the motions of the vehicle from driver inputs. At high shaft velocities, like running over curbs or abrupt surface irregularities, the damping coefficient relative to the velocity is much lower, allowing the spring to absorb the energy rather than feeding as much of it into the chassis and disturbing the car.
As far as I know, nobody in the world outside of T10 knows exactly what the damper valving is in Forza, and what amount of total damping (assuming rebound and bump are the same damping force per point) is critical for X spring+weight. They’re just numbers on a slider. Any formula or correlation anyone comes up with is hardly less a shot in the dark than tuning every car by feel and lap times.