I've been driving the Formula E cars since they were released. Today, for the first time ever, I'm seeing the engine heat warning icon pop up on the screen while hauling down the straights at London. Is this right? Is this the result of today's patch which made some changes to oil and water being heated up by the engine?
This has gotten even worse. I cannot drive the FEs any more. Since the last patch, the cars, even with the default setups, the car overheats and dies on the first practice lap. I tried both London and New York, just in case it was something to do with the new track.
What's your ambient temp set to? On 40°C I get temp warnings at times through the first timed lap (FE 2022 or 2018). Default ambients look like low-mid 20s, and temps seem fine.
Someone else on the Steam RF2 discussions mentioned the exact same trouble. I wrote a python script to generate the weather wet file using data from openweather.com. So the weather would be drawn from one of the last five days. Yesterday it was around 11C at the London track. Initial water and oil temps are around 40C. I have to run with mechanical failures turned off.
Initial water and oil will be the same as air temperature, so if you're seeing 40, then that's the ambient temperature, and that's pretty hot. I just did some running, and my temps were stable. When it was 26c out, I hit ~43c on the oil, and it stayed there pretty much.
I was wrong. The initial water, oil and brake temps match the air temp, 11C. But I can watch it gradually rise to 80C and then engine failure occurs. If I turn off mechanical failures, I can watch it get to 111C. I'm running the latest release candidate with the latest patches that included the engine temp fixes. I'm not sure if shortening the race length has any impact. I'll check that tonight.
I didn't realize release candidate was out of date. I have more information. I set up to run a 45 minute race this evening, and I never got a heat warning at all. I think the top oil/water temp was about 46. I then set up a 20 minute race and I started to get the heat warnings and temps ran around 54-56. Track temp was 15C on both, by the way, and I adjusted fuel usage based on the time I was running...I think it's 2.5 for a 20 minute race--I don't remember offhand. . I think when the heat issue was really bad was when I was running a 10-minute race. I believe that with mech fails turned off on that 10 minute race, I saw 111C oil temps. So I suspect the issue here is that the shorter the race you run and possibly using time-scaled mechanical failures could get you a car that is simply impossible to drive. That's my best guess, at least.
Works fine here on 10x time scale, time-scaled mechanicals, and 5x fuel use, practice or race. The only thing I didn't test was the RC, so see what the normal build does for you. For future reference, the RC is only for the RC period. As soon as the RC gets pushed to the normal build, you should always select None.
Ah, ok, didn't know they were always updated, makes sense though. Seems the engine scale upgrade is the issue.
I ran the MAS2 editor tonight to change the names of the AI drivers and I see there's a parameter in FE_2022_Upgrades.ini called HDV=CombustionHeat*=0.xxxxxxx. The xxxxx changes from .777777777778 for a 35-minute race to .222222222222 for a 10-minute race setup. For each step down from the 35-minute race, the cumbustionheat drops in a pattern. A 35-min is .777777777778, 30 is 666666666667, 25 is 55555555556, etc. Assuming this parameter has something to do with the heat "thing," then you may be able to manually change the levels higher for the race lengths that suffer from this affliction.
@J0E presumably the latest hotfix has cured this issue? I obviously wasn't changing the car upgrade, hence wasn't reproducing it.
Yes. I ran some practice with a 10-minute race setup with the fuel modifier for the shortened race and did not experience any heat issues. Thank you for fixing this.
