I've always enjoyed the S397 cars although the early version of the Formula ISI seemed to be the black sheep of the herd. It was updated in January and just got around to trying it out. Stunningly better than ever. Ever since the BT44 & March vintage formula cars S397 products have been among my favorites. While GT cars tend to cater to a different style of drivers the S397 formula cars tend to be much more of a driver's car with very realistic tuning characteristics. The Formula ISI car is among the most realistic in terms of tuning responses I've felt, and that comes from a voice with 30 years of on-track experience including Formula Ford, Formula Atlantic, GTU. GTP, and F1 Vintage racing. Indeed there are many independent modders out there with some exceptional work, F1 86 being an example. Few seem to truly compare to the driving and tuning quality of S397 work and I suspect thats due to the state of the art with physics development. It's not so difficult to develop a spectacular looking car. It is a significant challenge to develop proper physics without an experienced driver to test and refine, and thats been obvious among the majority of independent mods. I'm not sure how long S397 has been reaching out to Rudy van Buren, but I know they've been reaching out to many other pros in their development and it sure has paid off. I am in debt to the S397 team and am thankful for your fine work!
The "problem" with formula car in RF2 is that they are very sensitive to setup changes, so, unless you know where to put your hands they can be difficult to setup properly. Truth is that often a touch on the wing balance and the brake bias can be enough, but many other aspect require a solid experience.
Good points you've made Comante. For the most part they tend to come with a pretty good default setup and being sensitive to changes is pretty realistic. It seems with some independent mods you have to use a sledgehammer get the setup just to baseline and even them some are so far off they'll never be quite right, despite being eye candy.
I didn't know S397 were updating the older ISI things. You're right, the FISI is much better than I remember. It used to be such a pain to drive because you had to use such small amounts of throttle to keep it from spinning up the rear tires, it seems to stay much more planted now. How did you know it was updated in January?
Interesting, I better try it out. I have thousands of laps and hundreds of hours of setup work on the in the original as it was the Formula Sim Racing car in my first season. I think I did 1000 laps at Albert Park including "audition" for the team and practice for round 1. It was hard to set up IMO but once you had a good base setup it responded well to slight tweaks for differing tracks. If memory serves me well the default was quite driveable but set for understeer to make it so. I was only when you started to look for speed over a long stint that you went down the rabbit hole looking for something. I spent entire afternoons just on diff. IMO being very sensitive to throttle inputs goes with the territory in a car with 900 hp that weighs this little. Most drivers in FSR adjusted their throttle sensitivity in the controller menu to make it more useable. We would search everywhere for something. I did find that harder tyre compounds like a tiny bit more pressure. Also that as you go harder in compound you need to take a click off the front wing to match the reduced rear grip. We would do it routinely when pitting. Other fun stuff was understanding tyre life in the various stints in the race. EG the medium might be so so in stint one but amazing on low fuel and a rubbered track in final stint making them bulletproof. Nice trip down memory lane. I am overdue to drive this car. Forgive my indulgence here...……. 2016 Pro Round Catalunya.
Looked at the dates on the MAS files. It has been a while for me since trying the FISI and IndyCar mods, as they used to have that "arcade style" handling characteristics, as did the FR 3.5 Formula Renault. IMO, there were a few 3rd party mods that felt much more like the open wheel cars I've driven on the track in my younger days. Some of the S397 open wheel cars like the BT44, March, and McLarens felt far more realistic. After seeing the later time stamp on the files I thought I would give the updated ISI cars a try, and was really impressed with the quality of handling. I have somewhat discriminating opinions on drivability & fidelity levels of cars and there are a handful of 3rd party mods that meet my approval. Formula Simracing is a great mod for example, although rFactor has some limits in how MGUK is implemented (or Push-To-Pass with Indycars). MGUK can be tamed with light traction control settings, but I am not find of using driver assists. Besides being "geezer larva" I'm more old school and tend to favor the high rev gas only powerbands. It's getting to the point with S397 cars that I feel like I owe them much more than a cup of coffee.....
Formula cars always felt like they had on/off grip to me, and that's in every sim not just rF2. It's definitely getting better, whether it's tire model updates, or overall physics stuff, they're becoming more dynamic, but always room for improvement. I think karts are a good way to see this because they're so simplistic and work at such a smaller scale compared to cars that any deviation from reality is more obvious. The new karts for example are better than the older ones, but they're still very simplistic and feel like the tires are covered in super glue. You can actually bring them to a stop faster than the brakes will stop them by getting them into a 90 degree slide; either the tires have insane grip or the mass of the kart isn't truly being accounted for or something, it obviously isn't 100% realistic, but much better than the older karts and better than any other kart I've driven in a sim. That said, I'm pretty sure most of the guys who were actually developing this sim are still the same people working on it now, they're just now working for S397 rather than ISI. So, this is probably where things were eventually headed regardless, at least in terms of physics stuff. There's probably more official content than ISI would have done since they never wanted to make paid DLC, but that's a different point. I'm still waiting for the day where I drive a car in a sim and completely forget it's a sim. Hopefully in my lifetime.
That’s interesting, IIRC Marcel said in RD interview that they can’t update physic for cars that were licensed to ISI. But I guess if F ISI 2012 is not officially licensed car, then they can do whatever they want. But why the update was so silent? If they really updated physics then it should be somewhere in changelog etc. Weird. Also, people sometimes have poor memory of how a car handled when enough time has passed since they tried it. For instance they feel/claim physics was were updated when in there wasn’t any update( but I know in this case in fact MAS file was updated). I recently went back to try C6R GT2 by ISI and didn’t like FFB, but I remember it felt good two years ago. I believe the car wasn’t updated, nor any physics engine updates changed its FFB, but just my feeling of what is good FFB changed. Edit: just checked that on Steam Workshop Formula ISI was last updated on Dec 2019, which was graphics update
Keep in mind most of the karts only have rear wheel brakes. I've got a mod with 125 & 250 shifters with front brakes and the brakes are pretty good. Short wheelbase and very low polar moment as most of the mass is in the center as the driver's torso makes a big difference. Simulators take baby steps towards the real thing but even full motion aircraft simulators still lack the real feeling, yet I'm told they respond very close to how a given airplane flies in terms of the reactions to inputs. Of the race sims I've tested rFactor2 comes the closest when the mods are done well, but there are still some significant gaps. The one in particular is the margin of reserve as the tires reach the limits of adhesion on racing slicks as the difference between slip and grip needs to be far more progressive the closer the limit is reached. Every open wheel car I've driven on the track
I have two instances of rFactor2 on two different PC's, one not connected to the internet with V1.95, the other has V2.0. Graphics files are kept in car.mas Physics files are car-encrypted.mas V1.95 cars-encrypted.mas is 24689 KB in size. V2.0 cars-encrypted.mas is 23750 KB in size. Fired up the old one and let the driver AI take laps at COTA an unchanged version I have on both. Did the same with the V2.0. V1.95 - 1:56 V2.0 - 1:49 Sure seems different. Not sure how FFB would change the old snap spin issue anyway, thats more of turn in. Moreover, the new FFB hasn't helped the other 3rd party mods that snap spin.
I honestly have little experience with karts of that pace in real life anyway, so maybe they do actually behave like that when on a really smooth road, which is what all the Kart Sim tracks feel like. In fact, if you compare footage of karts driving on the real life circuits, the road is much more bumpy and maybe this is most of the difference I'm feeling. Still, you can flip the kart over by just the grip of the tires overcoming the kart, which I don't think would be so easy in reality and looks a bit silly when it happens. I agree about the traction near the limit, it's better than years ago, but like with the karts it just seems like the tires want to roll much more than slide so that when it does slide it's a relatively large slide and any mix of the two is relatively difficult to achieve, when in reality the mix of the two is almost constant even for drivers who aren't super quick or consistent. I think with flight sims it's a bit more forgiving because there's mostly just the fluid dynamics of the atmosphere to deal with and maybe the flex of the wings and fuselage, whereas with cars you have that (especially with high downforce cars), but you also have pieces of rubber that are constantly changing their characteristics every millisecond, as well as the road surface itself changing along with the tires and these make a huge difference in the behavior and feel. So it's much less forgiving than flight sims for inaccuracies. About the FFB, I used to change the linearity of the FFB before it was updated, I did this to basically make it feel more like the way it does now by default, I only make a few minor adjustments for more realistic SAT now. So the FFB feels almost the same to me compared to before and yet I still feel a big difference with this car, so I think if it wasn't an update with this car in particular it was some overall change with the physics that's made it behave more reasonably.
Not sure, I just assumed the FFB was updated at some point. If it wasn't FFB particularly than it must have been something with the underlying physics. It's pretty obvious since with a DD wheel I don't get oscillations with any of the cars and only with the Karts does it oscillate but can be stopped by adding smoothing. Before it would oscillate in any car with the FFB strength set to 1.0 and that was with an Accuforce which only puts out about 14.5Nm. I'm now using a Simucube 2 Pro which puts out 25Nm and I get no oscillations except with the karts. In iRacing today, it feels like how rF2 used to feel like 4 years ago, and just like in old rF2, the cars with strong FFB in iRacing will oscillate like crazy unless you lower the strength or add a ton of damping and inertia, which messes with the actual feel of the car.
