Simracer = One Man Army

[DND]

I just assumed VR would have a better view, thanks @Andy-R that's good to know. I'm loving the triple monitor besides the seat pillars getting in the way sometimes the mirrors are pretty good.

 

[Andy-R]

I just assumed VR would have a better view, thanks @Andy-R that's good to know. I'm loving the triple monitor besides the seat pillars getting in the way sometimes the mirrors are pretty good.

I may well have assumed the same as yourself before using VR for a while. It came to mind a few times recently when racing with a steam friend and I was struggling quite a bit to know if he was still behind me. IIRC one of the 70's F1 cars is particularly difficult, the mirrors are out of your line of sight and there is a lot of car behind you so someone has to be pretty far out to one side of your car for you to see them.

 

[Nick Hill]

I am more of an immersion guy, so I try to get by with as little as possible. A couple exclusions I usually make are laptime and tire temp/pressure.

VR has helped in the sense that's it's (for me) gotten rid of any necessity for virtual mirrors, helicorsa, etc.

 

[Jempy]

I'm personally navigating between different huds:

For example AC ( the easiest one to easily have 4 different huds available according to different needs and aims ):
- one with more apps when preparing a setup or a future race
- one with just SideKick ( with enough infos in race ) + Crew Chief + a part of Helicorsa ( only the coloured rays ) + Pitlane Penalty ( Stracker not shown but activated ) when driving in race.
- one with only ( invisible ) PLP + Crew Chief ( for offline pleasures )
- one with .......... nothing at all ... for immersion and ... replays.

If I could, always no hud at all + Crew Chief should be the best... but really not enough when driving in leagues or Online.
Driving clean ( quick if possible ... for the back marker I am ) needs attention .... so rather look at the track and other drivers than be distracted by too many hud instruments.

NB: always the Clock App so I can know when sleep time has come !

 

[Durge Driven]

Get rid of that virtual mirror for a start unless you driving road cars !
Oh I just upset 90% of drivers here, only jest, do what floats your boat


My idea/wish a decade ago was that developers could make 2 versions of the same sim
One would be exactly what you have now

the other a Pro version would be as real as you could make it
there would be no virtual mirror, no look back or anything else
All aids or any other help would be totally removed from sim
No shortcut buttons no ESC every lap you would need to drive back to pits properly

You would be free to buy both versions at a reduced cost for the 2nd one and they would have separate servers

In Pro huds would be limited
one button would activate, another button to scroll and select 1 hud
and you would only have a set time to view, never opened all lap

So you would only get the 1 hud info, not all, so you would need to scroll all over again for a 2nd hud just like real racers do and they should disappear after 10 seconds or so

 

[Troy Barman]

If im racing single player by myself I like to know the bare essentials. However if I'm racing competitively online, I am racing for a win and since I'm my own crew chief I need to know that information so it has to be on. If your racing online with no HUD or virtual mirrors you are probably slower and you are handicapping yourself for no reason.

Only time I'd race with no HUD is with VR because thats when it would make sense but I dont own VR yet or will for a very long time.

 

[Grape-Juice]

I was just thinking about this last night while trying to work out how to do good setups for 2 hours

 

[Steve Worrell]

I always race as minimal as possible. That's the way I like it.

 

[Ghoults]

It is also very series specific. At lower level series and in vintage racing you don't really have other people or tech to rely on. You don't have any info about tire pressures and what you have is rpm, temperature gauges and your feel of the car. In these cars sims can offer too much information in much easier accessible fashion. You can check your tire temps and pressures at any point on the track. Not just on pits after a cooldown lap. All your instruments are 100% reliable and give absolute accurate readings of your fuel levels and whatever else you want.

But the main thing is you don't even have car radios. In other words you have extremely limited knowledge about the race itself. You may have a pitboard telling you your position and laps left and the flag men around the track and that's all you get. Imagine doing this in sim. You'd literally need to turn off everything in the hud.

Then there is the middle level. You can run as much telemetry as you can afford and put into the car but you are mainly limited by how much mileage you get and your skills to use all that info in and outside the car. This is probably the closest level to sim racing. You don't have engineers looking at real time data coming from your car but you have lots of information available to you. Granted it is not quite the same as in real racing but somewhat close. In real life you are limited by track time. In sim racing you are just limited by time. A race team can go to someone like chassissim and pay them to set up and understand the car but in sim racing all you have is your team mates if you have any and any setup sites where to download setups. And your own work.

But in real life you still have someone in the pits you can talk to while driving. You get info about the race. Is it going green on this lap, they can tell you the green flag is waved before you can see it in the car and you have very good idea about the race and what is going on. In sims we don't need to talk to anybody but we still have all that as well.

Then there is the top level. Before you even get to the track your engineers have spent weeks driving the car in simulations figuring out the best maps for electric power deployment and harvesting zones, aero and suspension setup and your whole schedule for the weekend. Every time you go out you have 50 engineers watching your data and even if you knew nothing about race cars and your technical feedback quality was at the level of homer simpson they can set up the car very nicely for you. You get nice concise telemetry sheets where you can see where you are losing or gaining time. You have as much information as you could ever want. Only somewhat limited by the fact that team radios are public and anyone can and will listen.

In sims we get somewhat close but somewhat not. It is our own responsibility to figure this out. If our shifting points are off we don't have engineer tell it to us. If our line through a corner is totally wrong all you hear is tire squeel. If you want telemetry you need to learn to use the telemetry software and become your own race engineer. If you want to do strategy simulations all you can do is drive yourself and do all kinds of stints and then compare. If your setup is wrong you'll have no idea. Again you need to figure it out on your own. All those electric energy deployment maps and aerodynamics are just lots of hard work for the driver. A real team has pretty good idea what kind of ride heights they want because they have information from wind tunnels and cfd models for example to get the maximum out of the ground effects but in sim you don't have any technical info. If you want it you can just do laps and compare telemetry and figure out which way is better.

 

[RobertGracie]

For me I like the information flow but when I require full focus I can disable the HUD in game so either way works and I do a lot of driving IRL so I have to rely on what my instruments say in the car and stuff

 

[Serge.M]

Really good write up there.
I try to keep it minimal but there are still things you need such as fuel/lap info and distance to cars in front/behind and lap times. Things like track map and gear/speed info are certainly a no though

Crew chief is excellent at a lot of things, especially the spotter function telling you about cars either side of you, I’ve configured it to only give me the info I want so works really well now. Would love to try the voice commands some time to see how that works.

As far as the divide between real and virtual, I believe that gap is shrinking more and more with the advances in sim gear and computer hardware. The introduction of VR has helped shrink that gap a lot I think and it will only keep getting better. Virtual can keep getting closer to the real but the real side is a constant, it can’t ever be any more real

 

[Boby Kim]

I use dashmeterpro on an old Samsung S2 with only two things: gear and remaining fuel.
On screen a virtual mirror and that is it.

 

[Mr Deap]

Racing sim is a tool for making setup & analyze placebo inputs. Removing the HUD contradict the use of a racing simulator.

Example:
Like you see guys wondering how come X person is 4 sec faster & to realize that the X person is braking at 100% mid entry on a high speed corner.

HUD is god send.

 

[Hal Burns]

I find that the tyre temp/wear indicator is very handy for me, a casual racer. On some cars ( SuperV8, GT4 etc.) I tend to cook the tyres by over driving, so it keeps me on track. Not realistic perhaps, but very useful for training. Otherwise, not too much clutter.

 

[Dirk Steffen]

If competition is your first priority you absolutely MUST use elaborate HUD information to stay on top of many factors during a race.
You deal with tires, fuel load and consumption, pit strategy, your opponents on track and their strategy, stay informed who on track is in which position and have they or have they not pitted yet, …

Disregarding all that strategic information and racing without an elaborate HUD that provides that info to you is missing the competitive edge.

Now having written that, I completely HATE HUDs in sim racing.
To me simracing is trying to make the simulator look as close to real life to pretend as much as I can that I am actually racing.
That means I race without a HUD at all times and exclusively use the information Crew Chief and my actual cockpit provides to me.
I also have disabled Kunos proximity indicators and all sorts of popup messages, car status, etc…

For online racing I make two small further concessions:

1) I use CarRadar (and have optimized it so it does actually look like a small LED projection into the windscreen of modern cars rather than the seizure inducing, flickering disco light show that is Helicorsa).
CarRadar aids both for SAFETY (we lack the surround vision in sim racing we have in real life) and information about blue flags (it can be difficult to know which of the cars in the pack behind are racing you on the same lap and which are lapping you).

2) Sidekick
This is the solution for not having an actual race engineer in the pits.
I get info about position, laps, remaining time, fuel load, consumption, tires, lap times, gaps to front and rear, indicated speed, gear, energy levels (hybrid cars) and more.
All of this is packed into a beautifully designed small app that can be integrated visually into the car's cockpit so not to be "stuck in my face" and can be controlled with just three buttons on my steering wheel (apps show/hide + move to next section + flip section).

I wish more effort would be made in future racing sims to actually replicate a racing engineer through the radio rather than plastering the screen with computer game HUDs - they are sooooooo 90's ;-)

Did I mention how amazing the Crew Chief app is? Everyone should use it!

 

[Fernando Zart]

Only TrackIR + CrewChief. Nothing more. Old skool.

 

[Durge Driven]

Another point being you can't force drivers not to use virtual mirrors or huds so requires a
sim version where they don't exist to begin with

Just tried to count all the settings in rF2 are not applicable to real life and lost count

I am bias as I like Historics and back then the only concession they had was a pit-board and dash gauges, I think it is nice to do the same

Mistake to use rF2 Historic hud anyways, the tacho is 1,000 rpm out and has never been fixed p

 

[Slowdive]

Now that I read about it, I realize we deal with a lot of info on screen and we do it without any difficulty. I guess we're pretty impressive.Give yourself a tap on the shoulder if you're a simracer.

Actually I don't. I run with all HUD data completely turned off. I run in VR with my only data sources being Crew Chief in my ear and whatever the display in the car tells me. And I get by just fine be it offline in RF2 or AC or online in iRacing. I highly recommend this method as it's the most immersive and really doesn't degrade your performance at all.

I always chuckle when I see videos on YT and it looks like someone is getting ready to launch the space shuttle. It's especially funny because most sim racers are obsessed about having assists turned off and then they get every cheesy cheaty data display put up on their screen.

 

[Metla]

After all, nowadays simracing has become mostly a matter of online competition, which means that the other drivers around are not robotic minds any more, but people just like you trying to have a clean, fair race. Taking necessary precautions is more than justifiable.

I don't believe that is the case at all, have you got any data that shows this to be a factual statement?

Certainly the figures I have seen indicate that the online component is very much in the minority, which may correlate with the majority of replies in this thread stating they turn off as much of the HUD as they can get away with.

 

[Cohen]

racing online HUD = Highly Unfocused Driver
but setting lap times I find its okay to help find that extra second