Absolutely the biggest factor is the the crash repair bill. Even karting or locost racing will soon add up. This is why spending £10k plus on a simrig is really not a bad investment. If you ever get to do racing for real it will have taught you the "theory" of going quickly. Everything will be that bit more familiar than if you just decided to buy a car and go racing. Nobody is saying "its the same as reality" I think what they are saying is it is currently the best virtual help you (general public) can get. Ask yourself do the best drivers in the world use simulators? Why?
Cost of repairs is secondary only to your wife having to come get you. That scares me more than anything by far.
This reminds me of how many kids thought they could play guitar like a master because they excelled at Guitar Hero! (a game, not a simulator) Okay, this is not quite appropriate because the hardware there in no way resembles an actual guitar, but the point is how some people think. More relevant however is RC (Radio Control) flight simulators. I have flown RC planks and heli's for years. I have and still do use computer simulations to practice difficult maneuvers and to hone my skills. Again, this is a bit unrealistic as well, because we are simulating flying a toy plane and not a real aircraft but this is what the simulator is intended to replicate and does a pretty good job at that. There are a lot of things missing from the RC flight simulators that are hard to duplicate, such as, yes, fear factor, the ability to infinitely adjust your view perspective, depth perception and the such. However, when I train a newcomer to the sport I "ALWAYS" make them spend time on the simulator first. If they can take off, fly a designated pattern, and land the plane on the runway in the simulator the chance of success with the real deal is immensely improved. It teaches many of the fundamentals very well and does indeed improve skill at the field. Simulators are a tool to learn with but not a substitute for real world experience. They are valuable training aids IMO. Riff
I used to fly 3d helicopters to competition level. Could never have happened if I hadn't spent hours and hours on a sim, actually Riff they are that good now that I could learn a completely new manoeveur on the sim (phoenix) and go out and nail it first go for real as long as the wind conditions weren't too severe. Flying an RC sim on 3 screens gives you the proper perspective, fov, peripheral vision you need to fool your brain into making it real enough that you simply "repeat" when faced with reality. I should imagine with occulus it will be just like flying for real. But no cow poop, ramblers with a death wish, or freezing fingers. Nothing* can ever reproduce the g force of a car, even so, I think they are still a valuable training tool. * except a magnetized faraday cage type arrangement, and you in a tin-foil suit. (or something mental like that)
£10k on a simrig? That was about the price of my second-hand professionally built Group N Fiesta... still homologated for the WRC... with tyres and spares! Each to his own but there is a lot of relatively low-cost racing about. In the UK rallycross is a good place to start. You don't need to attend a raceschool to get a rallycross licence. Starter cars cost almost nothing (£2000). Entry fees are around £200 per meeting. Tyres will last several events. You get several (usually 4) short races so even the most unfit person can usually cope. Whatever people say good sims are useful practice - GPL helped me a lot. If you can cope with that you will probably find any RWD saloon car fairly instinctive, even on the loose. You won't be brilliant straight away but you'll have a sense of what is happening. I love sims but if you are a petrol head its really worth having a go at the real thing occasionally.
A developer buddy of mine let me borrow his Occulus Rift a few weeks ago. It is an impressive piece of hardware. BUT...It gave me a severe headache after a hour or so of use. I hated being blindfolded from my keyboard. I was going to pony up for the dev kit, but I have changed my mind after using it. EDIT: I never got to trying iRacing or AC with it because the headache persisted so long that I was completely turned off to giving it more time. I have used Phoenix and Real Flight (5.5). I have not upgraded to the current crop of simulators due to my getting out of the sport for the most part. I have 7 planes and 2 heli's that should just go to the auction block according to my wife!
Yes but Fezza even at the cheaper end of motorsport it will not take you long to do the same £10k. And then the real thing is hungry for more cash. I'd love to do rally-x as I live 20 mins from Lydden Hill. But I can't take days off work, £2000 is a ropey rally-x car for sure (not saying it wouldn't be fun!) Then you need a trailer and a vehicle to pull it. license, race-wear, Fuel, tyres, brakes, repairs, insurance, entry fees. You are limited to one type of racing. It wouldn't be hard to do the best part of £10K over a year, then you got it all to pay again if you want to continue, and I see most people do want to continue.... but rarely with the same car... I have friends who do grasstrack which is basically racing an oval on grass for nothing more than the fun of it, and they always want a different car, better, faster, more money. Simming is much cheaper with a better variety, but yeah nothing quite prepares you for that adrenaline first time on a track; there is no comparison and it's probably worth every penny if you can afford it. I have only done 1 trackday which I was really using as a testday for a car I had built before I took it for an IVA so I was taking it easy, there were a couple of tuscans and westfields out on track with me, again it meant nothing but the fear and adrenaline levels were something I had only experienced briefly for seconds as a kid doing stupid things on a bmx at a skatepark. At a track, driving something you own but can't afford to lose, it never really goes away!
Yes track days are certainly well worth it. I tend to set myself a budget for the year and try to stick to it. If something goes expensively bang I write the season off and come back next year when I've saved some cash. But I agree you can spend silly money if you aren't too careful. Its worth joining a motor club to get help and share costs where you can. You can often save money through drafting in mates for help and then returning the favour late. I've never bought a specialist vehicle for towing - just used my or a mate's road car. Until recently I shared a trailer with a guy from a local motor club and the first race suit I had I also borrowed! Another cheap option for newcomers is regularity rallying. You aren't racing but the driving tests against the clock are good fun and its a very social atmosphere. No need for race suits, trailers or much car preparation beyond the obvious checks. My first historic regularity car cost £1300 and a day's work in the shed at home. Even today regularity events rarely cost more than £100 for a full days competition.
And it costed me a warning. Sorry for that Jerry. I get quite hot sometimes ... enviado mediante tapatalk
Then you have the other people who have done real racing and sim racing and think they fall into some elite club and want to convince simracers that their beloved sim is 100% different from the real thing and therefore they will never be in the elite club. This is nonsense. Sims of today are actually very close to the real thing. Sure you lack fear (never going to run 9/10th on the outlap IRL), mental (although I disagree here to some extent) and g-Forces. The lack of g-Forces is the real problem. If you lack g-Force you tend to have a disconnect and feel like every aspect of the sim is flawed. I think if you stop focusing on the g-Forces you start to realize that sims of today are actually very realistic. But lets not share this with too many people. I would hate for simracers to get the impression that they could actually drive a race car in real life. No no... that is only for the elite. I used to played every car game I could get my hands on starting with TestDrive, GT (on PS1), all the NFS games, GP2/3/4 and on and on. I never said any of them were real.. at that time I didn't have any real experience to go off of. Later (1996) I started racing with my Dad which is what really got me interested in simracing. I wanted to find something more realistic that I could do at home. I got a wheel and went on a hunt for something more realistic. I found GPL which was the first sim I felt react to inputs the way one would expect. Then EAF1 with the SBDT GTR2003 mod, GTR1... and so on and so on. It wasn't until rF1 and RealFeel that I really started to see it approach the real thing. Still not 100%. But I am not going to sit around and bash sims so I can feel like a more superior human. One last thing. Sims technically are very close to the real thing. "Feel" is the part that will NEVER be the same because we will never be able to reproduce g-Forces (no, motion sims don't do this either). But the technical aspects of the sims can be taken to the track and back. Picking lines, learning how to induce or inhibit oversteer, learn how weight transfer impacts the car, ect ect. If you join a league and race with humans that can actually stay on the track and close together for a full race then you will learn some of the mental aspects of racing. You learn to be patient and setup passes. You learn to keep your cool and not make dumb mistakes.
Isn't the most encouraging thing about the original analysis the fact that the physics correlate so well? Let's be fair too, maybe it correlates elsewhere in other sims too, but nevertheless I think it is bloody fantastic that, for the first time that I can tell ever, such an assessment has been carried out. Sims are able to replicate the experience very well up to the points of their limitation - and they are significant ones (feel through your butt etc...). I remember my dad, a former commercial 747 pilot, telling me how he loathed the simulator because despite the multi-millions spent on the full motion rig system, it never felt the same to him. I also remember how I desperately wanted a go on it and it never happened.
First of all my words were direct to those who you can clearly see that put themselves at the same level of real drivers. Many people here wrote that professional drivers use simulators to practice and that's completely true. Said that, you have to consider two things, the first one is that you cannot even think to compare your rig to their (at least some of them). Second, they use simulators not because it reminds real life but because they have to practice tracks shape and keep warm their rhythm.
"you cannot even think to compare your rig to their" yes we can think to compare, some peoples rigs will compare better than others. "Second, they use simulators not because it reminds real life but because they have to practice tracks shape and keep warm their rhythm" well if it doesn't in some way remind of real life shape and rhythm why would they bother? If it was inaccurate it would be a disadvantage to use a sim. Most people on here probably are a real driver. Most probably own a car. That makes their opinions fairly valid. The comparison graph to Vettel was just a joke.
Can you say who is clearly putting hinself at the same level of real drivers? What I do see is that a lot of real drivers have a lot of money, which if they didn't have, they would not be there. To make an analogy. In yacht racing the world champion probably wouldn't be the same one if it was an accesible sport. IMO only soccer and a few cheap sports can guarantee that everybody has the same accesibility to demonstrate own skills so that we can say that the best is really the best. enviado mediante tapatalk
You could actually tell it really starting to approach the real thing in RF1 even before/without realfeel. Realfeel is mostly a personal "feel" thing, rather than something that effects pure in-game vehicle dynamics modelling. Unfortunately many people may hate certain mods and think the physics suck just because of pure FFB, rather than the physics themselves being bad, likewise I've seen many times people comment on how some FFB setting changes (in-game settings, wheel's control panel, game's controller file, realfeel, leos ffb, etc.) made someone go from hating a car's physics to loving them, or at least enjoying them. Even though the pure physics never changed, it was just the physical feel of the player's real-life steering wheel that changed, and now all of a suddenly the physics that he once said were so bad, "magically" improved. Sad to see some brilliant mods be so looked down upon by most of the community due to their FFB, when they actually drive very, very well. The only thing sader than that is the opposite, sims/mods that don't drive very well, and in some cases even "simcade-ey" yet people praise it/them because they don't notice these handling faults because all they go by when judging physics is FFB. Sad.
