RDHCS - Merged Previous Season Admin Threads

[Bram Hengeveld]

RDHGP S3 - Merged Season Admin Threads

RDHGP 2009 - RaceDepartment Historic Grand Prix 2009

Details: TBA!

 

[Neil Gault]

an easy way to see the differences between each model on track is if you were to use the GTL mod for GTR2 then you can try the cars in time trial mode and see where each car is better and on which part of the track, it is what i use now for a quick practice for any GTL races.

 

[Stuart Thomson]

Good to know - it never really dawned on me - but for this purpose, we'll stay all GTL

 

[Senad Subasic]

2. 20 timed laps per car. If you supply more, I'll be removing the extremes - ie fastest lap & slowest non-accident lap as the average is most important

Ah, okay. I figured it was 20 lap times total, for any amount of cars one wants to try.

EDIT: Now that I have some coffee in me, I'm beginning to realize that my interpretation wouldn't have made much sense.

Daytona, Vette65 & 289Cobra - they should be your lower limit.

*gulp*

 

[Stuart Thomson]

*gulp*

Look at it this way, there are faster cars that are easier to drive than any of those 3, just as there are slower cars that are harder to drive.

 

[Stuart Thomson]

An additional thing for Leagues - I will not be allowing any 3rd party skins/cars to be specified as a League livery.

From this coming season onwards, the choices will be skins already included in whatever mods are in the Season, skins in any pre-existing RD skinpack, User created skins or Paint Team requests ONLY.

A lot of the cars people have previously chosen often include additional or non standard 3d items in them, and this bloats out the livery packs and adds instability.

Pure, "paint only" skinpacks compress up much, much smaller - eg the RS2000 pack contains 23 cars, but is only 5.9Mb. As a contrast, S8's Abarth pack has 22 cars but is over double the size at 13.5Mb.

 

[Senad Subasic]

Look at it this way, there are faster cars that are easier to drive than any of those 3, just as there are slower cars that are harder to drive.

It's not (just) how easy or hard they are to drive for me, I can just race better (or race at all) with slower cars.

Slower cars are like casual Bathurst 1000s in the 60s; standard cars off the streets, people with hats and suits chatting, smoking pipes, eating oranges while racing...
Faster cars are serious business, you need helmets for those

 

[Stuart Thomson]

Understood, but the Leagues are for everyone, and some like the faster cars more than the slower cars, so we spread it around a bit to try and cover all the bases.

 

[Bob Miley]

I will be away for the next round, GPCOS updated.

 

[Stuart Thomson]

All - it looks like there might be a track bug on Turagua that I never encountered during testing, but Hans has identified it, I tried it and got the same reaction - the Fulvia just flips end over end in the middle of the S/F straight.

Be prepared for a last minute track substitution - Sorry for the inconvenience

 

[Senad Subasic]

And here I was thinking that was normal Lancia behaviour. No wonder my performance has been so poor this season.

 

[Stuart Thomson]

Nice try, Senad

It is odd though, and my apologies to all for not picking it up through testing.

Wierdest thing was that I did 10 straight laps in a Fulvia without incident in Practice mode, but as soon as I moved to race and there were other cars around - Smash!

I will stay with a tight, but not overly complicated, short length / high lapcount track so the balance of the season remains as it was.

And you all know what that means...Scandinavia, baby!

 

[Tim Ling]

Bugger! I liked Turagua, and I never encountered any problems in races either. Oh well, once more with my foot to the floor

 

[Stuart Thomson]

You wouldn't have liked finding out about the bug the hard way, mate - it's a full on A-Team flipperoo

 

[Predrag Drobac]

Another reason why we are putting addon mods on the side for the next season, sadly.

Anyway, I'm still dreaming a league where all the cars are the SAME, where we can't blame the cars (too slow, too twitchy, big oversteer, bla bla), and on paper the races will be closer, not much but enough.
I know that GTL is unique because of it's variety of vehicles and driving styles, and we're using every bit of it, but I'm sure the leauge will be a success with the car that is a blast to drive, like Boss or something.

 

[Senad Subasic]

Anyway, I'm still dreaming a league where all the cars are the SAME, where we can't blame the cars (too slow, too twitchy, big oversteer, bla bla), and on paper the races will be closer, not much but enough.
I know that GTL is unique because of it's variety of vehicles and driving styles, and we're using every bit of it, but I'm sure the leauge will be a success with the car that is a blast to drive, like Boss or something.

I prefer the system used here by miles, much more fun. For me.

 

[Stuart Thomson]

Another reason why we are putting addon mods on the side for the next season, sadly.

I'm not sure where you are getting that from? - there will almost certainly be mod cars next season.

This behaviour is more than likely a track based thing and the Lancia is just set up where it suffers the most.

 

[Stuart Thomson]

if it's this:

I do reserve the right to refuse mod cars on quality/stability or legality concerns

That just means that if the specific mod car in question is close in time to the final group - but it is flakey or troublesome - then I won't include it.

Stable, high quality mods that fit the group will of course be in the mix.

I know what you're saying about single-make Leagues, but the issue with them is that there are no variables: track layout/power/weight etc to make some cars suited to some tracks better than others.

Every race will, yes, be totally level, but because of that the grids will be the same, the races will be the same, the results will be the same...

 

[Predrag Drobac]

Every race will, yes, be totally level, but because of that the grids will be the same, the races will be the same, the results will be the same...

I don't agree, some tracks will suit one group of drivers, while others will strugle. We are not professional race drivers to be able to drive every race on maximum level, so variability is not the problem. Incosistency is, and it will be always two edged sword, in one hand there will be a number of DNF's and uncostistent perfomances, and in the other hand you will get variability in races.
By the way, before every RDHGP season you can guess who will be conistent and very fast, and probably who will be the backmarker. For severel seasons we have almost the same drivers participating, so we met eachother on track, and automatically we can presume how certain drivers will perform and in what positions they could finish the race.
Another two edged sword is the fact that the differences in "first" and "last" driver in standings are huge, so we will never get very close races. For example I finish almost every race at least 10 seconds behind and 10 seconds in front other drivers, so it's another example how different are the classes of drivers participating in RDHGP.
I just wanted to say that maybe we could narrow that differences with single-make leagues, at least on season to to try, and again I'm pointing for example at Boss mod, where cup races were awesome, as I could saw in the club forum.

 

[Senad Subasic]

I'm not following your logic. Good drivers are good drivers, regardless of track. Same goes for backmarkers. I'm not suddenly going to get a podium on a certain track whilst being crap on all the rest.

If anything, same cars would exacerbate the differences. With different cars, different drivers will have advantages on different tracks.
Car differences surely play a much much bigger role in driver performance than track differences, no?

Take the last race of last season. I finished in 11th (*proud* ). P20 in other races. Exclusively because of the car. Would've happened on any similar track, but if I had the same car as the rest, I wouldn't have been able to do it, and would have finished in 20th as usual.

 

[Neil Gault]

Myself i am not a lover of single series races and certainly not in GTL where you have fixed wings and all but fixed gears as you tend to get a lot more incidents as it gets harder to pass the car in front when you have so little to change in the car to give you an advantage anywhere.

The RDGTL league is maybe the most successful league at RD and has worked very well in seasons past so i see no real need to change things especially when the same drivers keep coming back over and over again. If you compare it to some of the other leagues here like the RDGTC or RDTCC then you will see they have a big turn around of drivers from one season to the next.

One thing i did like from another league i was in last year with GTL was when we had a free choice of cars from the class to pick from for each race as long as you did not use the same kind of car more than once, so over the length of the season it was about as even as you could make it and still make it interesting as you never knew just what your competitor was going to choose.