Best way to reduce tire degradation ?

Discussion in 'Modding' started by JohnW63, Dec 15, 2014.

  1. JohnW63

    JohnW63 Registered

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    My goal is to reduce the tire degradation of a tire in a mod we have been using. After reading the Tyre Tool Quickstart, it appears there are 4 lines in the RealTime section of the tire file that could be want I want, but I suspect they are interrelated. The tutorial doesn't go into much detail on what the data in each line, so I am hesitant to just throw wild edits at it. If someone could give me a little info on each line, and how it reacts to small or large changes, that would certainly help.

    AbrasionCurveWLFStartStep

    I think this is a starting point and defines how large each step in abrasion checks are.

    DegradationPerWearFraction

    I think this is a curve that shows a degradation in grip level based on the wear level. I graphed it and it looks like the two pairs follow eachother closely until the last pair, where the second one drops a lot more. Is this where the grip hits "the plateau " ?

    DegradationCurveParameters

    I think this defines how to handle the history of heat put into the tires. I don't know where those values are used. Is the second one a Kelvin temp where the heat history does bad things to the grip ?


    DegradationPerUnitHistory

    I think this is the degradation by heat curve. I graphed this one too, but I am not sure which line is the heat history and which is degradation. I suspect this curve is one I might experiment with to reduce the tire wear caused by heat build up, but, again, I am not clear on this.
     
  2. Lazza

    Lazza Registered

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    Are you reading V3 of the tyretool quickstart? It doesn't exactly spell everything out but it should provide enough info to have some idea what you want to do.

    First, you need to be clear what you're aiming to do: the tyres degrade through wear (abrade) and this affects their grip. Degradation other than that is a change in the physical properties of the rubber, so for example running at very high temperatures will lead to the rubber producing less grip - separate to any grip loss from abrasion.

    So if you just want the tyres to lose less grip as they wear (abrasion), or change the shape of that grip loss, you only need the DegradationPerWearFraction line. This line has up to 32 values that define the amount of grip at each step of wear. These aren't value pairs. So for example if you had 8 values, they would represent the grip available at wear levels between 0% wear and 100% wear, not inclusive. So the first value would be the grip (1.0 for full grip) at 10% wear, the second value would be at 20%, etc. Obviously the 'normal' and maximum 32 values means you're defining the grip at each of 32 steps between 0% wear and 100% wear. Adjusting these figures may be enough for your needs, but if the tyres are wearing too quickly (moving to 100% wear) you'll need to adjust this:

    AbrasionVolumePerUnitEnergy - This is the volume of abrasion per unit energy at each value of WLF (as defined by AbrasionCurveWLFStartStep). You can spend hours reading about tyre models and theories and try to get your head around WLF and the rest of it, but chances are if you have a half decent base tyre you just need to adjust the existing figures. Larger figures increase the abrasion, smaller values reduce it. Again I'd just scale the existing figures by a single number in order to adjust the wear rather than trying to reshape the graph, unless you really want to get into it. Up to you.

    AbrasionCurveWLFStartStep - chances are you don't need to change this. If you get an understanding of WLF you'll know what to do with it. I don't :p

    DegradationCurveParameters - the first one is the starting temperature (K) rubber degradation will occur. So below those temps the rubber won't degrade (again, that just means its properties aren't being altered... it will still physically wear and lose grip because of the earlier parameters). To be honest I'm not sure what the second figure is, but again you may not need to adjust it anyway. I'm sure someone on this forum has explained it previously, but it's probably a fair guess that it represents the step size of the curve, meaning that higher values will lead to a slower progression along the degradation curve. So if you just want to slow the degradation effect try increasing that.

    DegradationPerUnitHistory - like the PerWearFraction curve, this isn't value pairs but a set of values forming one curve whose steps (x-axis, if you like) are defined by the parameters above. In concept at least that should equate to the first value here representing the grip (1.0 = full) after a heat history equal to the second value in the previous line. Each value then represents the grip after multiples of the heat history have been put into the rubber.


    This is probably all a bit easier to understand if you're familiar with rF1 tyres (or the .tbc file it used). What's important for graphing is that the x-axis is the index of each of the values (so the first value is 1, second value is 2, etc. while 0, which is full grip (1.0) is implied), and the values are the y-axis.

    * The final value in the curves may represent the final step, rather than one value before it. I'm a bit fuzzy on it ;)
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Dec 15, 2014
  3. JohnW63

    JohnW63 Registered

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    I have read the ver 3 of the tutorial file, a few times, but the short one sentence descriptions doesn't often tell what the numbers mean, just what the line of code does. No details about what each does and what changing them does or how touchy the changes are.
     
  4. Lazza

    Lazza Registered

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    Ok, I guess so. It doesn't explain much about the modelling but that's probably because it's not a simple subject; the short description on WLFParameters is fair proof of that :)

    Has my explanation helped at all?
     
  5. Leonardo1962

    Leonardo1962 Registered

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    Great explanation, Lazza. Exaktly what i am looking for, to improove my suspension editor.
    I noticed a non realistic tire behaviour in Game, by loosing tire grip too early.

    Thanks for that infos, i will check and test these parameters.

    Leonardo :)
     
  6. Mee

    Mee Registered

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    Shameless plug:

    You can check those degradation curves with CarStat btw. Hover over the values/graphs to get some more explanation (it's more or less like Lazza's).
     
  7. JohnW63

    JohnW63 Registered

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    Lazza,

    That explanation should help a lot. I need to start trying things. What would be nice is knowing how big a change in how the tire works a given data value creates.

    Mee,

    Nice shameless plug ! :) I downloaded your utility, I'll let you know how it works for me.


    Now, I have a dumb question....If I make edits to the tire files, do I need to make a new VMOD with a new name and assigned signature to put this on a server for testing ? I found that swaping out the MAS file in my computer worked fine. Doing the same thing on the server made it unjoinable. So, I would like to be able to just hand out a new file without all the vehicles and tracks so the download is quick and the change to the edited tire file is easy. I'm going to look up the basics of this stuff again, but, if you feel pity on me... give me a 1 sentence Reader's Digest answer.
     

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