Should ACC have safety cars and FCY rules also how important to you is their not being in the game.

[Kenny Paton]

Moving from the Challengers Pack DLC discussion.
I tend to regard GTR2 as the gold standard of racing game releases, it had a safety car but in all the hours I've played I don't remember it ever being deployed.
So although it would be nice I don't regard it as essential.

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[Richard Wilks]

FCY and Safety cars are integral part of the sport today. I am not a fan myself, but it is what it is. We had an F1 championship decided with a safety car period (regardless of the decisions after that, the safety car coming out potentiated the events).

Not having it is simply not simulating the racing as it is done today.

 

[BrightCandle]

Its a big area that is lacking in a lot of the sims in how they simulate racing currently, the rule book of racing in having all the flags and their implementation. The focus has been on driving simulation and a lot less on racing simulation, they often forget to put a lot of the game/sport in around the driving.

 

[Jempy]

Moving from the Challengers Pack DLC discussion.
I tend to regard GTR2 as the gold standard of racing game releases, it had a safety car but in all the hours I've played I don't remember it ever being deployed.
So although it would be nice I don't regard it as essential.

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In fact, I already had a few laps Full Course Yellow in GTR2 at Le Mans ...but never knew if the Safety Car was or wasn't present on track at the lead of the cars as it is for the formation lap. ( I wasn't at the front when it happened as I mostly choose a mid range car )

So if one FCY is present in a sim, Safety Car should be too.
It should be present in a simulation .... and also in multiplayer when an online race has stewards and available if needed.

 

[MJQT]

Given that the real world GT World Challenge has FCYs with safety cars, I don't understand how the official game of the series can choose to not have them simulated.

(I mean... I do technically understand how. They chose to concentrate dev effort elsewhere. But you have to wonder if a FCY and safety car implementation should have happened before 'incremental' refinements like higher-refresh rate physics calculations and AI blue flag behaviour.)

Another oversight like this is "driver swaps" in single player ACC, which as I understand it mean you pull into the pits, and then keep driving and pretend to be a different driver. EDIT: am I right about this? Or is there a way to 'game the system' and toggle AI control of your car when you leave the pits or something?

I don't own ACC, and knowing there are no full course yellows or meaningful driver swaps as an offline racer does not encourage me to pick it up. But, if they added FCYs, ensured there was super solid AI pit strategy that responded to FCYs, added AI driver swaps, and added GTR2-style mid-race saving of races... heavens, I'd buy this game immediately!

The focus has been on driving simulation and a lot less on racing simulation, they often forget to put a lot of the game/sport in around the driving.

I cannot say how much I agree with this! Flexible simulation of various rulesets for racing have been such a blind spot in recent sim racing titles... who knows why. There are also sims like rFactor 2 which technically have FCYs and oval-specific rules, but neither of them are in state that's advisable to be used in single player with AI.

One serious area for innovation in the sim racing space would be a general framework within which (kinda like the SRS files for Automobilista or RFM for rFactor 1 and 2) you could tweak a variety of settings related to rulesets, race start procedures, and so on for each series of cars. All it would take is a well-thought-out system of text file settings!

 

[theguy69]

This is an interesting discussion. I can sort of understand why kunos didn't add it. For multiplayer its not the best feature. It makes sense for single player for immersion but sp isnt as important as mp nowadays. I guess thats the reason gtr2 and older sims have this features but not acc. Same goes for driver swaps. I really do wish we could do some type of driver swap where we let the AI driver drive for sometime or skip that part of race altogether. SC's are also nice to have as irl they spice up the action in endurance races and add more spice in the race but for mp it can be very entertaining. At any rate this discussion is sort of pointless for acc cause I don't think sc can be added to acc now.

 

[Kenny Paton]

I don't think sc can be added to acc now.

I wonder if @StefanoCasillo could maybe give us a perspective on that and how much work would be involved.

 

[James Cook]

Its a big area that is lacking in a lot of the sims in how they simulate racing currently, the rule book of racing in having all the flags and their implementation. The focus has been on driving simulation and a lot less on racing simulation, they often forget to put a lot of the game/sport in around the driving.

Indeed.

As an offline racer I've seen nothing (accidents, failures) in ACC that would trigger a full course yellow. The drama of a race is largely absent against the AI.

This isn't just an ACC problem - nearly all the current sims are guilty of it.

 

[Deleted member 197115]

I wonder if @StefanoCasillo could maybe give us a perspective on that and how much work would be involved.

You mean sailing simulator guy?

 

[StefanoCasillo]

I wonder if @StefanoCasillo could maybe give us a perspective on that and how much work would be involved.

it doesnt really matter. It's not that a game studio ever has devs sitting there idle and decides to keep them idle "just because".

There's a fundamental disalignment between what people think working in a game studio looks like and what actually working in a game studio looks like.

Reading some comments here (but it's a general problem when it comes to relationship gamers/devs) people think of Kunos (or any other devs) as a buch of dudes sitting in the sun sipping coffee.. then at 4pm somebody wakes up and says "hey guys.. how about that FCY and safety car?".. the the rest grunts away and answer "ah.. **** that.. let me sit in the sun sipping coffee for the next 7 months".

Reality (at least the reality I am familiar with) is much more like this... a guy wakes up in the morning and has a 300 lines long list of bugs to fix, things to improve and things to add... then looks at the team of devs he has available and realizes only 6-7 of those things can actually be accomplished in the next 3-4 months window.. and has to go.. right.. "let's do number 7, 113, 76, 248,99 and 33 then".

FCY, safety car or whatever personal pet favourite feature is not in your fav game was probably just part of those 293 items that didn't make the cut because their priority never made it to the top... (yet) as simple as that... welcome to the club.. I AM A SIM DEV and have my own personal list of features/cars/tracks/whatever that never made into AC/ACC for that EXACT reason

 

[Kenny Paton]

FCY, safety car or whatever personal pet favourite feature is not in your fav game was probably just part of those 293 items that didn't make the cut because their priority never made it to the top...

Thanks for that inside look, if you were involved in another racing game would you make it a priority to include it, or do you consider it unnecessary?

 

[StefanoCasillo]

Thanks for that inside look, if you were involved in another racing game would you make it a priority to include it, or do you consider it unnecessary?

I rank its priority super low to be honest... we'd get rid of it in real life as well if we could. It's dumb, dull to drive and dull to watch as a spectator.

Making a comparison with a sailing game.. it's like waiting in the water for 3 hours for the wind to pick up or calm down in order to be in the allowed range.. yeah it is part of RL sailing, should it be part of a sailing game? I dont think so.

If I was making a game purely for my own pleasure I wouldn't even consider it but I totally understand people who miss it, it is afterall (sadly) an integral part of modern racing.

 

[Gergo Panker]

For the record, I have nothing against SC/FCY as a feature, one my personal pet favourite would be the ability to yeet around in an SC like Maylander.

The two key decisive factors are:
Complexity, integration and making sure all bases are covered and you don't end up with something that takes away from the driving/racing experience if you can't feasibly do that, i.e. leaving open outrageous exploits or not finding a threshold that keeps it a cool novelty rather than a frustrating chore.

Gameplay value, as I mentioned earlier, there is the competitive aspect, where it really only exists in real life as a safety necessity with ugly side effects, and more often than not it has a detrimental effect on the outcome of the race, but even if we discard that, there are things higher on the imaginary list that also didn't make the cut - more destructive damage, terminal damage without ability to RTG, debris scattered around, track damage - the lack of which make it rather pointless and arbitrary for no real immersive value and without obvious justification from the virtual environment.

I understand that we could just do all that and that would be cool, but there's always price to pay somewhere else, and prioritizing other things have allowed more immersion elsewhere that arguably maybe hold more actual value. Also, devs are a limited species and the ones that may be tasked with tyre models and physics fidelity know jackshit about gameplay code and vice versa, so saying that we could do this or that instead of adding cars/updating tyres/adding graphical features doesn't really hold up. I've been personally offered €1,000 by a user if "I fixed VR", but unfortunately that's not how it works.

The reality of game development is that if there's enough complaints or feedback supporting the need for a feature, it usually gets added eventually or in the next project a studio might get involved with, but resources are finite so that would always happen to the detriment of something else, and in the end you can evaluate which group's complaints were worthy for the exchange.
One day you might get your SC but it won't be without casualties, and this is what developers juggle with on a daily basis, and then you still get told off when some other thing from 1993 that is supposed to be on Moses' stone tablet of simracing standards gets omitted for one reason or another.

 

[RasmusP]

This all got me thinking:
I don't really need a safety car, since I don't need the simulation of wrecks lying around etc.

But I would like some penalty system for ignoring yellow flags.
Maybe sons algorithm that checks how close the car is to the ideal line and then giving a message on the hud and in the wheel display that tells you how much you need to slow down.

Like the delta times for real life fcy.

I don't really need all the "crashing and accidents + wrecks" simulation, although a safety car can spice things up for spectators and fun races. But it's super annoying when you're competitively involved.

But I would really really like a feature to slow down the field when there is an accident.
In most sims, everyone pushes through the accidents as fast as possible, trying to snatch as many positions as possible.
Often leading to massive crashes...

 

[Kenny Paton]

One day you might get your SC but it won't be without casualties, and this is what developers juggle with on a daily basis, and then you still get told off when some other thing from 1993 that is supposed to be on Moses' stone tablet of simracing standards gets omitted for one reason or another.

This seems to be an ongoing thing in many types of video games, where over the years features that were common get removed in their more modern equivalents.
In some case reintroduced some years later and trumpeted as a new feature.
Now it may be that the complexity of new games is such that making them feature complete is now to difficult or maybe we forget the features that older games were missing because they had ones that we were particularly interested in.
Who can forget no wipers in GTR2.

 

[theguy69]

This seems to be an ongoing thing in many types of video games, where over the years features that were common get removed in their more modern equivalents.
In some case reintroduced some years later and trumpeted as a new feature.
Now it may be that the complexity of new games is such that making them feature complete is now to difficult or maybe we forget the features that older games were missing because they had ones that we were particularly interested in.
Who can forget no wipers in GTR2.

wipers have actually been added now to gtr2 via modding but what the devs said makes a lot of sense and people need to understand how difficult it is to code these games, especially with a small team and in a sim this complex.

 

[BCJM76]

This seems to be an ongoing thing in many types of video games, where over the years features that were common get removed in their more modern equivalents.
In some case reintroduced some years later and trumpeted as a new feature.
Now it may be that the complexity of new games is such that making them feature complete is now to difficult or maybe we forget the features that older games were missing because they had ones that we were particularly interested in.
Who can forget no wipers in GTR2.

Ahh!! The EA sports effect!

 

[Richard Wilks]

So i suppose the devs of GTR2, indycar racing, etc etc were either super human, had a time machine, or what?

Honestly, i dont feel sorry for Stefano or any dev for that matter. This is a business not charity, and your product is inferior to something that came out eons ago. I know i sound harsh, and i am sorry for it, but this is the cold hard truth.

Sure, we can debate the priority of such a feature in comparison to others (wipers?...) but i will just ask, why is this feature not being worked on RIGHT NOW? What are the devs doing now then? Since we get all this mantra about "Long support", and years of DLC, what is that is stopping Kunos from getting the safety car in in the last 3 years?...

And for the record, i know very well how software development is done. So i dont see anything stopping this from happening, unless its some specific technical problem (and those can be overcame), or most probably, they don't deem it important enough, so there are no plans of allocating any resources to it.

Which considering that they still sell DLC for the game, is the point of contention i have with this "business model"... because i would much rather see the game being fleshed out, than just trying to get more DLC into it, which was my point in the beginning of all this. The DLC would be fine, if the game would be improving. But it's not.

 

[Gergo Panker]

The DLC would be fine, if the game would be improving. But it's not.

You must be taking the piss at this point.

 

[Gergo Panker]

This seems to be an ongoing thing in many types of video games, where over the years features that were common get removed in their more modern equivalents.

The sad truth is that there is no common library of features you can cherrypick everything from and your only limitation is how arsed you are about completing the shopping list to then just press the magic button to make it work. Every new game (that isn't a direct continuation or evolution of the previous) has its unique codebase and feature list where any additional feature has to be added from scratch, especially if none of your previous games included it.
The implementation from some Indycar game from 1993 is not going to be compatible in whatever modern sim comes along by an entirely different developer.

I agree that it's sad, but as Stefano mentioned above, devs are not sitting around sipping coffee waiting for some random dude to suggest a feature they can finally work on. If your or anyone else's pet feature didn't make the cut, it probably has its very good reasons that was not decided by someone alone out of spite, and more often or not those very devs can be just as disappointed about it.