NKP and RF2 - why is NKP superior in terms of raw car handling ?

I just reinstalled NKP after having not playing for a good 13 months

I stopped playing due to the game not having very active multilayer , which I assume was caused by the awful net-code.

What strikes me though is that NKP to me has more realistic and stable cars than RF2 and RF1 in terms of physics FFB and how the cars move and handle.

I appreciate RF2 is still in beta so I'm not writing RF2 off , but what playing NKP again has done is give a good product to compare RF2 with.

Now I know rf-pro is used by F1 teams and many professional drivers so logically you would think RF1-2 must be realistic for teams to use them , or maybe its just that its a very good as a tool for learning tracks and component testing as the RF back end is far more open and adaptable than any other simulator?

But both RF 1 and 2 have issues with cars when they are sliding or lose grip or are at the exstreems , granted both RF1 and 2 make you a smoother and better driver but that comes from the lack of stability / twitchy nature to the cars and the lack of grip , not the depth of the physics or realism.

I believe RF2 at the moment has the potential to be better than NKP and I can see that the fundamentals of the FFB should make it better than NKP , obvously RF2 beats NKP and other sims hands down when it comes to car setup , mods and customisation.

I'm just wondering is it just the case that RF2 still has a long way to go with its tire model ?

Maybe RF2 only works well with Top end FFB devices ? ( CSR E t500 frex ,minimum )

Would be interesting if people at ISI think NKP at this piont in time feels better than where RF2 is ( don't expect an answer on that lol

Would be interesting what the RF2 community thinks of NKP and FVA compared to RF2

In my opinion the cars in NKP handle and move far more like real cars than those in RF1 and RF2 It would be interesting to hear from other people that have had real world sports / track car experience what they think ?


I love RF1 and 2 so to be clear I'm not slagging it off or undermine the excellent work ISI have done.

Cheers !

 

Cars in real life a very twitchy on the limit, and in my oppinion rfactor is much better than nkpro physics wise. I've raced Formula 1600s and Formula 2000s and I tried loving netkar pro because I love small companies like them and isi who stick to true hardcore (plus iitalian, netkar is too so I really wanted to support him), but I'm sorry netkar pro is very good but at the same time very overrated. The ffb is very direct in terms of the steering itself and the cars are nice and grippy and that leads people to believe that its a god in the actual physics/vehicle dynamics/car behaviour. Its not.

 

why do you say that?
heres me driving in real life. im on the limit and over driving at points - and the car is hugely manageable and very easy to control on the limit. The car is twitchy but easily controlled.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=his6nXTkBYA

 

+100000000000000000000000 with Jameswesty jejeje

 

People always say this on the iRacing forums too. What I don't understand is why people don't play it if it is that good?

 

Correct my if I'm wrong please someone, but rF1 and rF-Pro share very little in terms of physics. I am under the impression that rF-Pro provides the means to which teams can plugin their own physics models into the rF-Pro engine. So to assume that real team use rF-Pro and then that should translate to rF1 is not true. Again, this is only my impression (maybe I had read it somewhere?) so correct me if I'm wrong.

I think the mods produced by Reiza in Game Stockcar are by far and away the best physics feel in rF and most closely resemble nKP. The way the tyres heat up and the slip angles that you can feel the car go through and react to are fantastic, both the Formula 3 Dallara F309 and Formula Classic (Armaroli in rF although GSC version has been updated).

 

Lol i know Like i said the only reason I can think of is due to the net-code in NKP being **** for so long and by the time they fixed it people were playing other games.

so maybe when osseta corsa arives it will have player base. ( forget how to spell it) lol

 

Mainly because it is a very boring game. No people online and no AI. I was a fan of his great physical and force feedback.

 

Nice driving, but I can show people tons of videos of F1s doing awesome slides and say look they are easy to control, then I can go show another ton of videos of F1s loosing it quickly, snapping, spiining out with no warning, etc etc and then say look ppl they are sdo hard to control.

Well both groups of videos are real life and therefore perfect physics so which one is right?

Hope you know where I'm getting at.

 

Thats the thing and is of massive interest to me.

To me it seems like ISI are the best and absolute genius when it comes to the raw math , underlying system and engine side of car simulation , but are totally underwhelming when it comes to the delivery of cars that handle in a believable way with consumer hardware. ( less so with slow cars and the old cars , ISI have done a superb job with the 1960s cars but then these types of cars don't test the grip simulation as much or in the same way as F1 or Radical type cars)

And what happened is with RF1 and presumably what will happen with RF2 is we will get modders that use a bit of artistic license to fudge the physics so that we benefit from the underlying engine isi have made but also have something that is intuitive , smooth and handles like a real car but with consumer hardware.

I strongly doubt NKP is anywhere as good a engin underneth it all as RF1 or 2 but the guys that make it know how a car feels and moves and have produced something that more accurately portrays that to the end user.

NKP is obviously then going to be fairly useless when it comes to component testing or getting realistic tire temperatures or car set-ups and applying things found in the simulation to the real world, but what NKP does do is offer a more realistic driving experience from a drivers perspective.

Again so people don't go mental I realise RF2 is in beta and maybe things will change but that's partly why I ask and its all just very interesting to me.

 

That is him driving that car so its not just a case of him going look at the video , Its him driving and saying he feels RF2 cars are not as forgiving or as consistent as real cars based of his experience with a video showing it.

Personally I think you can clearly see from videos the amount of give and stability real cars have when compared to simulated cars outside of the fact you obviously feel more in real life.

The biggest thing with real cars is they let you mess up in a very linear and gradual way , and penalise you with a bad lap time . Simulated cars on the other hand penalise you by spinning around or throwing you off the track with far less granularity to how they let you mess up.

NKP to me gives far more granularity to car behaviour , stability , grip than RF1 or RF2 beta.

 

I def agree with most if not all you said here especially the part where you say along the lines of at times a tiny less accurate physics model may have the potential to actually give us a more realistic driving experience. I believe the main reason for that is how much less AND later we feel the cars in sims, people tend to use less of the cars total amount of grip and at less of the time in real life than in sims, input lag from physocs calculations game sending it out to your controller controller receiving the the info, then sending it out to its hardware then it has to start moving.

If you were on the absolute edge of grip before gettin the oversteer in that palmer the slide would have been twitchier. Power oversteer slides when the rear isn't already using very close to its maximum grip potential are the easiest forms of oversteer to correct. If you were carrying much more speed and you were really really leaning on the tyre and its grip limits and THEN you decided to give it a nice bootfull of throttle when you were already heavily leaning on its max grip limit then the slide wouldn't be so nice, not saying you can't correct but it wouldn't be so nice as the ones in your video.

On top of all of that, the lower the overall grip the more you can slide and the less sudden it happens, gravel, rain, ice, lower grip tyres etc etc up to a certain point of course where it can snap.

 

@Jameswesty

I think as a general rule the underlying ISI engine is quite good as it surely would form part of the rF-Pro basis (maybe?!). Otherwise I don't see why they would tack on the rFactor tag to it!

But the concern is that if you put 'real' numbers in and the car reacts strangely then there must be something wrong with the fundamental algorithm - or perhaps it's just a limitation due to mathematical complexity. Still, if putting 'real' numbers in to an algorithm and you get weird results then it undermines the algorithm completely. I appreciate there are a number of fudge factors required given the minimal computing power but it is partly-concerning because it then simply becomes guess work as to what actually works. And ultimately, if fudge factors are required then the 'right fudge factors' will be completely subjective dependant on that person (modder)'s interpretation of what is realistic so it basically opens up a whole can of worms.

One day, if every possible in any simulation, when we can input real world numbers and the car reacts in a reasonable (preferably realistic!) manner then that will be the day when we approach an excellent simulation! Hopefully rF2 is well on that path.

 

I agree to disagree, you know how many times I saw hot shot guys who think they know what they are doing because they can impress their friends in a road car and drive fast just understeer straight off the track in completely straight line? Or people spinning off. Its pretty similiar to real life, if you overcooking it your done, the thing is in real life you can feel everything happening so much better AND sooner, so u go wowww the back ends getting light on this super fast right hander, so you just breathe the throttle a touch like from 100% to like 90% for half a second or a second or so and then you feel ok so u put it back down to 100%, from an onboard cam this would have looked like the drover stayed on the gas flat and the car looking nice and stable, when inside the car it was a totally different story. That same situation in a sim might have ended up in the driver not feeling this back end SLIGHTLY lightening up and therefore would have stayed flat and then boom get into a tank slapper or atleast a nice slide in the middle or exit of a super fast right hander and would then blame the sim for being too instant and not gradual enough on grip loss.

1ell your never going to feel the grip loss as good and more importantly as early as you can in real life, and maybe the answer to this problem is what you suggested pehaps certain sims take this into account and compensate a tiny bit for it so that underneath it all its just a tiny bit off in pure physics/math terms but to how we drive its more real because its more natural and gives more of a feel we would get in real life??? That could be true.

 

There may be another reason.
In real life you we are driving much under limit and we know very early that limit is coming closer.
In sim we don't feel accelerations so can't feel how far limit is.

We did a few cars with stock physics, which is quite slow comparing to most popular racing series. People tried to approach corners with the same speed as in GT cars :-o. But hey.. stock cars didn't break, and also didn't wanted to turn. "hello, what the f** is goin on! it must be due to screwed physics!"

Do you know what I mean?

 

Do you not agree NKP feels and from the perspective of what the drive ris doing and what the cars do is more reolistic than RF2 ?

regardless of the underlying simulation at this point in time NKP acts more like a real car you apply more of the real world skills to drive it.

You can feel the back end in NKP and the car is more stable and more analogous to a real car on consumer hard ware , seeing as 98% of people playing RF2 are playing it on consumer hardware on a pc at there home surely its more important from a end users perspective for it to feel or be as realistic for them with what they access it with ?

If you think NKP to you is less realistic from a drivers perspective than RF2 then I can see where your argument is coming from but if you believe NKP is more realistic then I don't understand the grounds of your argument.

As a counter piont to you argument about reality alowing premptive feel for the driver hence making the cars look more grippy in a video , I firmely belive you could drive a real car remotely using a camara dna g25 hooked into the stearing colem and it would be more stable predictable and gripy than what we find in simulators.

as a separate analogy to depth and predictablity and the nature of simulations , RC helicopter simulators tend to be far less forgiving than reality and offer a far less granular model of flight characteristics than are found in real life. Obvously if you crash your RC chopper in real life you lose allot of cash but its far harder to crash a RC chopper in real life than it is in a sim ( on a calm day annyway)

In the same way red bull air racing typ events are incradably hard in a simulator compared to real life , obvously in real life you have the difficulty of g,s but in real life the planes are for more prodictable granaualar and smooth than any simulation .

It seems that all simulators simply lack the depth of reality , which is not a huge suprize given how abstract a simulator is and that we are only 20 years or so away from 2d graphics with a couple of colours and simple linear velocity calculations.

 

It may seem less raw in your opinion of course due to NetKar being a finished/final sim and rF2 is WIP. Really there is no miracle here, just the simple matter of a finished title in comparison to a title that is clearly well still in WIP. Pretty simple really. I disagree toally btw, still do use NKP, put some vids out a few weeks back but rF2 feels better for me.

Only reason i still have it installed is purely for when i fancy a blast round nords

I think you are gonna find that AC will feel very similar to rF2 and not like NKP either. What you gonna do then?

 

I've tried to get used to and get a feel for nk pro many times, spending hours days etc getting a feel. I can't drive it like I can drive rfactor 1, rfactor 2, live for speed, iracing, or the original netkar.

The steering feels awesome in terms of what a real steering wheel feels like, but I can't drive the cars, I can't attack the corners, I can't get in a groove for consistent laps and lines, I can't feel the car beaneth me, the grip situation of the car corners, the steering has this realistic feel in terms of actual steering and correcting a slide but - can't feel the car, the grip, brake threshold from locking up, etc etc etc, I don't get the fine minute details from nkpro tellin me the little tiny changes and reactions that the 4 corners of the car are doing, but the actual steering itself is good

 

I like both games for different reasons , I would describe RF2 is more RAW than NKP and in some ways NKP can feal slugish but on the other side NKP's cars are far more stable and behave outside of ffb more like real cars , the NKP cars simply dont do crazy tank slappers or weard twitches that RF1 and RF2 cars do.

I agree RF2 is still in beta and that's why I asked in my first post if the tire model is going to change much it will be really interesting to see how RF2 develops over time , that's also why I used RF1 as an example as that is no longer in beta for what it is and suffers from similar issues that rf2 does though granted RF1 has far worse FFB and even less stable cars than both rf2 nkp and i racing.

In some ways I like how the simulators are all different Its like how a Picasso is different from a monnet but both are artistic interpretations of reality. ( a better comparison would probably be with realist painters but I don't know any of the names lol )

Even though ISI might be trying to describe the world mathematically and its more of a Methodical process I'd argue what these simulators do and try to achieve is the pinnacle of realist art.