Have Your Say - Damage in Sim Racing

[M D Gourley]

I suppose some of the many problems with wanting all the extra bells and whistles like a great damage model / visuals / Audio and Physics is ...as a Developer...
'How much is this going to cost in time / money and resources to complete'.
'Who is our Target Market, that will offer the best 'Long Term Profit Potential'...the list could go on.
...unfortunately, as a hardcore Sim Racer / Driver I am in the minority and there is possibly only a selected few like 'Reiza Studios',...'Studio 397'...'iRacing' ...and hopefully 'Sector 3 Studios' ...that will cater to my purist Sim Racing needs surpassing my customer expectation without loosing the essence of Simulated Racing for the future....hopefully.

 

[Icky427]

i absolutely agree. damage should be as realistic as possible, just like every other aspect of a racing sim. people can always turn damage off if they want to mess around. to me, the perfect car game would be assetto physics, pcars2 day night/weather, beam ng soft body damage, forza/nfs tuning and customization, the crew open world, and forza amount of cars and circuits. oh, and vr lol. *sigh* a man can dream, cant he?

 

[KoeleKoen]

the lack of damage in sims is because of the manufacturers refusing it,not lazy development,the only reason beamNG is there is because they don't use official brands,the same with all GTA games,they can't use real branded cars because they explode,catch on fire etc and brands,especially high end ones,want their car presented as clean perfection

 

[Steve Worrell]

the lack of damage in sims is because of the manufacturers refusing it,not lazy development,the only reason beamNG is there is because they don't use official brands,the same with all GTA games,they can't use real branded cars because they explode,catch on fire etc and brands,especially high end ones,want their car presented as clean perfection

I'm not saying you're wrong. Can you or anyone who says this is the reason provide a source for that answer? Whenever I have spoken to developers on twitter/forums this is not the reason they have given.

 

[Ghoults]

the lack of damage in sims is because of the manufacturers refusing it,not lazy development,the only reason beamNG is there is because they don't use official brands,the same with all GTA games,they can't use real branded cars because they explode,catch on fire etc and brands,especially high end ones,want their car presented as clean perfection

So why do all games except gran turismo have damage? Only requirement I've read online that makes sense is that car companies don't want their cars to burn. But lots of games have damage. It is 100% developer decision.

Only exceptions are games like carmageddon and GTA because car companies don't want to see their cars driving over people.

 

[KODIAK]

I agree with your reply.

With that Id like to see more detailed engine and body panel damage. Rubbins racing until your panels rub against your tires and puncture them. Or the guys that engine brake beyond what is normal IRL, kiss your valve springs goodnight

 

[GTRacer123]

There's an old racing game called F1 racing championship based on the 1999 F1 season, not sure if it's more arcade than simulator but somehow good in its time I guess.

A very slight contact could cause the car to have a 50% chance of being damaged.
A slight contact could cause the car to have somehow a 98% chance of being damaged.

The rate of damage sensitivity is way too complex.

 

[tpw]

While ultra realistic mechanical and visual damage modelling might be asking too much of the current generation of sims that are already struggling with the visual fidelity versus physics trade off, it’s not too much to ask that the damage handling as it exists is at least consistent, and applied equally to the AI. Not to name and shame, but there’s a current sim where a side swipe will destroy your engine, but AI can literally somersault end over end several times and drive on totally unaffected. At the very least there should be some kind of monitoring of position and/or deceleration - if a car is upside down at any point it is instantly retired. If a car decelerates from 250kmh to 0kmh in under a second it is instantly retired. No fancy damage modelling equiped, just an acknowledgement of some basic physics.

 

[ShredatorFIN]

the lack of damage in sims is because of the manufacturers refusing it,not lazy development

Guys from Kunos said it's not the case at all, manufacturers set them no limitations of any kind, into how much they can damage the cars in AC.

Maybe some developers have used this as an excuse to justify a lazy damage model

 

[Jez_Hammond]

I posted in this thread yesterday. You won't find it though.

 

[apex11]

So so true, we all scream for a "proper" "realistic" sim...imo if you go off in a race at high speed one of two things should happen, just as they do in real life, either you are able to limp back to the pits or you are out, full stop, one or the other...eh you took the chance and it failed, so now you have to pay the consequences of that move and not just loose a few spots either. This reversing and rejoining the race after hitting something head on at high speed is crazy, we are able to get "sim" on the race track, but the "sim" will switch to arcade ",mode" we come of .

I agree in sim land it should all be about options, but I go to races a lot as my family runs a small race team and also a kart team, now i see many times a chap roll up at track unload his race car, head out to practice and within a lap has either done weekend ending damage by crashing or car has busted engine....
So he puts car on trailer and thats it, money gone, 1 lap done, no qual no race, done....back he goes off home which could be 4 hours away to wait 2-3 weeks till he can try again....
Now never would i want the simulation value to be that high...

Its not really realistic to pick any car any track any time, its certainly ot realistic to race at Spa then 1 hour later have your car prepped and ready at Sepang either...

 

[Jayenn]

I think what is needed is a car damage api, like havok for general physics, that can be licensed by developers. As long as it isn't super hard to implement, i could see a lot of devs licensing that. Developing something like BeamNG crash physics for a mainstream sim from the ground up is just way too expensive and nobody is going to buy the game just because of that.

 

[James Cook]

It's 'sim' racing, so yes, I also want some level of 'sim' damage. I get the impression some developers hide behind the idea that manufacturers don't want their cars to suffer anything more than superficial damage in video games but the reality is probably different. Programming complex damage models is probably quite a resource-intensive task, something small developers don't have in abundance.

 

[apex11]

It's 'sim' racing, so yes, I also want some level of 'sim' damage. I get the impression some developers hide behind the idea that manufacturers don't want their cars to suffer anything more than superficial damage in video games but the reality is probably different. Programming complex damage models is probably quite a resource-intensive task, something small developers don't have in abundance.

I think that myth was dispelled as someone mentioned Kunos saying its a load of rubbish. Ian Bell has used that excuse and i think its straight out of the Dan Greenwalt text book of excuses, Dan basically created most excuses around driving games and lack of features, remember all that pants about open wheelers...

 

[WOKOWEN1]

Do you mean yes or no?? Of course yes!!! If you say racing simulator then there is no other answer because it is physically, visually and audiably part of what's going on in the race track in real life. Is it a priority?? That's another question?

 

[James Cook]

I think that myth was dispelled as someone mentioned Kunos saying its a load of rubbish. Ian Bell has used that excuse and i think its straight out of the Dan Greenwalt text book of excuses, Dan basically created most excuses around driving games and lack of features, remember all that pants about open wheelers...

Ian Bell and Dan "passionate about cars" Greenawalt are cut from the same cloth. Both are salesmen first-and-foremost, hype generators whose games never quite deliver.

 

[Steve Worrell]

I think that myth was dispelled as someone mentioned Kunos saying its a load of rubbish. Ian Bell has used that excuse and i think its straight out of the Dan Greenwalt text book of excuses, Dan basically created most excuses around driving games and lack of features, remember all that pants about open wheelers...

What pants about open wheelers? I'm intrigued.

 

[Captain Jhon]

I want the level of destruction in Beam.ng Drive on all future sims. At least on career mode. I know online is a lil harder

 

[Andy_J]

I want cars disintegrating into thousands of pieces. I want cars to blow up like in the A-team with marshalls running out with fire extinguishers etc. I want multiple car crashes and wheels flying off into the stands. I want realism. I want to see the emergency helicopter land and take off.
I want a damage model like we used to have in some of the older sims. In Indy 500 (old Papy sim) you could and would see a car smash into a thousand bits. In the Grid and Dirt games we get good damage too.

Yeah, you could say I wan't proper damage.

 

[Steve Worrell]

I want a damage model like we used to have in some of the older sims. In Indy 500 (old Papy sim)

I forgot all about the damage model in that game. What a game it was though in general.