F1 is ridiculously complicated, for fans.

Assetto Corsa is a sim I play, and yesterday they came with a update that allows you to drive the F138 and SF15-t. Both are made working very tightly together with Ferrari themselves (Kunos also made the Ferrari simulator thing). The F138 is easy and rather wonderful to drive. As you get in, do your outlap, and there's 2 buttons to worry about: DRS and KERS. Easy enough. Drive passed a DRS sign or see the blue light illuminate on your steering wheel, and you're good, and use KERS where you feel you get the biggest gain.

The SF15-t however. **** me. A NIGHTMARE! The manual, just for the MGU systems, is TEN PAGES THICK! (for a sim, remember, not even the real thing!) You can (and have to, to be fast) set the MGU recovery rate, the deployment function, the battery stuff, everything. The worst part is the MGU Regen, it affects braking so much it isn't even funny. The distances are longer, and the balance is completely off. Very odd to drive. One thing you do have to do is press the KERS button in the game to get it, in F1 it's done automatically via GPS position and whatever map it's in. The maps they have are unlimited.

For us fans though, we haven't a CLUE what bloody mode they're in, what it does to their car, what any of the letters mean or any number of other things. It's madness.

F1, please make yourself less complicated so we can have the slightest idea of what's going on.

 

Other cars are much simpler, with some cars such as the Lotus 98T you can adjust for full qualifying boost (also hurts the engine so you can't do many laps on it). Assetto Corsa is highly accurate and by far my favorite sim.

Don't have a moving rig as of yet, that combined with an oculus rift will be so cool though, see this video for the F138 with oculus etc on Spa:

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2MsQrz7uJs[/ame]

I've recently upgraded my computer to I5 6600K, DDR4 16gb, everything is upgraded except my graphics card (R9 280x, so a few years old). On my old system (amd 8320, ddr3 8gb and R9 280x) it ran just fine at full grids and max graphics though. It's very well optimized.

I love racing the GT3 and GT2 class cars. They just added the 488 GT3 as well.

 

Yep. Just did a bunch of long runs using different mappings and the difference between them (battery usage vs lap times) is noticeable. Enough to have something for the fans to see what mode the driver is in to explain lap time differences.

Oculus rift is 2160x1200, and Oled. Graphics are supposed to be fantastic according to friends who tried one.

I've found a video of the Oculus rift working on GTR2, but nothing for GT legends. Couldn't find it for Rfactor, only Rfactor2.

I used to play Rfactor a lot, easily my most hours are on that. Assetto Corsa absolutely destroys Rfactor. There's no comparrison. More and more mods coming out, too, and easily implemented as the developers specifically made the game mod friendly.

You have to buy it, but if you don't have a wheel + pedals I wouldn't bother. Forget keyboard, and a controller won't do it justice in any way, shape or form.

 

More regarding the car and driving it:

For the SF15T Assetto Corsa basically had to make new buttons (key combinations) in order to work all the systems in the car (CTRL + 1-2-3 or 4)

When you adjust the MGU-K regen (0 to 100%), there is a HUGE difference in your braking performance (distances and feel). Up to 70% is driveable, but after that you'll just find the car going backwards under hard braking (no abs or stability control, of course!). It really is a massive difference and I can easily see how a driver has a ''dumb'' (to our eyes) spin.

Driving with different deployment is quite interesting, too. Several settings, Charging, which does what it says on the tin, it deploys little to no KERS and charges very fast. Under a lap and it should be full (remember to have the regen on though, or you're charging nothing... ask me how I know). From then on you have low deployment, high, overtake, topspeed and HOTLAP mode. Each setting deploys more KERS at different percentages and in different gears, automatically. You can override this with the KERS button to deploy more in lower or higher gears, for instance. You can lap for some time driving with medium deployment and 60% regen, switching to low and 70% for a lap or 2 to get more KERS back.

Going for a HOTLAP is very tough. You have to make sure your tires are in good working range, regen off (or for longer tracks perhaps adjust it to some regen). You're under serious pressure too, you want everything done perfect. Mess up later in the lap and you know you have binned this lap, and the next, because you'll have to do a slow lap doing charging your battery. Don't have enough fuel? Back to the pit...

You can then also change the MGU-H to 2 settings, motor or battery. On motor, it gives you more power yet again, whilst on battery it'll regenerate exhaust gasses into electricity.

Finally we have engine braking (0-13). At the lowest setting it uses less engine braking, so your rear won't lock as easily. It also allows for more downforce because of exhaust flow to the diffuser and monkey seat. You do use more fuel. Go higher and the opposite is true.

All this, and you don't have an engineer yapping in your ears suggesting what modes to use! It's bloody difficult to figure out what will actually be the fastest modes to be in for a hot lap and long run, as it's not as easy to say ''put it on hotlap and just go''.
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These are my own findings, and I'm pleasantly surprised. I was sure the 488 GT3 and F138 would be my favourite cars of the new pack. Driving the 15-t is frustrating but oh so rewarding when you get it right, and all the settings add a whole new dimension to the game. It's my favourite car to drive now.

Currently my best is a 1.11.0 with the SF15-t on the laserscanned Red Bull Ring (accurate to 2mm), but I was on mediums.

 

Far from it

No reason it shouldn't work, right?

 

Driving these new cars is much harder than the pre-2014 cars, the challenge to them is huge. So much torque, and all these systems then adding ever more torque.

But yes, I agree, as a fan, you don't see any of this stuff happening and it's all to easy to say ''yeah, but he lost 6 tenths a lap there for 5 laps, he sucks!''. It's very cool to drive but for us fans it's taken a lot away, and there are so many systems it's really hard to a) comprehend and b) design something visually so that we know what's going on.

And the noise is rubbish .

 

I've gone for 2.5 years not understanding anything F1 ''power unit'' related as I couldn't be bothered to work out what all the system did as they are stupid (as I keep doing).

F1 needs to be simplified in order to succeed.

Noise, power, good looking cars, exciting racing, less PR speak (though the latter will be tough to achieve as it would depend on the multi billion dollar owner/sponsors to not give a toss...).

Winning formula.

 

Not sure if it's illegal now but the developers mentioned this when they where making the in car SF15t together with Ferrari that's how it's done. For the sim they haven't done the GPS mapping (yet, may come). Even if GPS isn't allowed, teams are still allowed to make their own KERS mappings so it would be easily implemented for them to design maps specifically to each track and then deployment % on each different map.

You can still override the KERS deployment whenever you want it. All teams have different ways of naming these or if it's a button or paddle. Some have the paddle on the back, or a button called override, overtake or boost.

I've been looking at the ''space ship'' steering wheels a little bit lately and there's actually a terrible amount of logic in them.

 

Just did a 1.08.956 with F138, 8th fastest overall with that .

 

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9svXXRlLdI[/ame]

Onboard lap of 1.08.771 with the F138. Here and there some mistakes, still working on a better setup

 

Big difference having half an hour or so in the car (at time of writing) to what must be well over 1000+ hours