I have a really strange thing happening. I'm running the Formula E Gen 2 2022 at Berlin, 30 min practice, 30 qualifying and 45 minute race. I start practice and run a bunch of laps and go back to the garage and Accelerate Time so the practice session finishes. I watch Live Timing and see that all of the cars run about 20 laps or so. Then I go to Next Session for Qualifying. The first thing I notice is that the timer does not start until I pull out of the garage. If I don't leave the garage, the timer never starts. I go out and run a few laps and go back to the garage and watch the Live Timing again. The first strange thing is that I see AI with S1 times of 11 minutes, 7 minutes, etc. Their S2 and S3 times are fine (20 seconds or so) and so are their fastest laps. None of them run the allowed nine laps--they all stop at four or so. Some of cars show that they have run three or four laps but have no fastest time listed even though they have S1 and S2 times (S3 times are blank). If I skip practice and go right to Qualifying, everything is normal. If you look at the image below, you can see an example from LogAnalyzer where Richard Boone has a fastest lap of 1:16.835 but also has laps where no S3 is recorded. Gabby Hayes and Richard Widmark ran several laps but had no fastest laps or S3 times at all. The column with the % symbol is fuel, so I'm suspecting that because of the 20 laps they ran in practice, they don't have enough fuel and go into the pits, never completing S3. Richard Widmark, for example, starts Qualifying with 7.5% fuel and he starts so low that he has to pit and spends 4 minutes in the pits getting refueled but not enough to finish the next lap. People here suggest you always run a full Practice (even if accelerated) so the AI can better judge how to use the fuel the have. Is there any way to fix this?
I think if I reduce the practice time to something like 10 minutes, it will solve the qualifying fuel issue for the AI. I can't test until tomorrow, though.
Hello, at some point there was a bug, solved by the "Fuel multiplier" in a json file. But this was normally solved on very last version of AIs. Looks like there is still a bug ... Fuel tank can be different size on AIs i think, that causes some issues. Multiplier solve that making IAs think they have a bigger/smaller tank, imo. Setup is not forced on IA so they see different specs on their setup i think.
I thought that running a 10-minute practice would be the answer here. The AI would have more fuel available for qualifying and that would solve that problem. But that didn't happen. I witnessed the same thing with the shorter practice as I did with the longer practice. The AI do not have the fuel to (in some cases) even post one lap. I looked a bit further. I looked at the practice session and discovered that the AI aren't starting there with a full charge either. One started practice with only 45%. Note this from LogAnalyzer--Arness starts practice with 54.9% and somebody didn't make Eastwood's day with a 46.3% charge. When they get to Qualifying, most of them start with less than 10%. As a result a bunch of them don't even have qualifying times. When looking at the Qualifying stats, I see that Arness and Eastwood started with 8.6% charge. I don't know what I can do to make this work. I guess I could skip Practice altogether and see if that works. That, I guess, will be the next report. By the way, they all start the race with full charges (well, not full, 96%). By the way, devs, I find it irritating that the qualifying clock refuses to start until my car physically leaves the garage. So if I saw it was raining and wanted to wait a while, I still have to drive out of the garage to start the clock countdown. This, of course, costs me a qualifying lap because I have to drive out (now an out lap) and then quit back to the garage.
The clock thing doesn't sound normal. Also, going out in practice with less than a full tank is fine, and they don't keep their same fuel for qualifying. They should learn fuel use in practice sessions and completing long sessions is therefore usually a good thing. Something isn't working right in this case perhaps.
More experimentation. I turned off Practice and started a new session from Qualifying. All of the cars finished the allowed nine qualifying laps. I then looked at the stats generated from that. All of the cars started with about 38% charge. There were no cars starting with a charge less than 10%. I don't like skipping practice. This is not a good solution. I'm not sure what to try next. A CORRECTION however. I was wrong on the Qualifying clock not starting unless I pulled out of the garage. There is about a 20 second delay from when you start the qualifying session to when the clock starts. I was too impatient.
I ran some more tests and have come to this conclusion: If you run Practice, the AI will start Qualifying with less than 10% charge. Some will be unable to post a time. If you skip Practice, the AI will start with about 38% charge and everyone will complete Qualifying. There appears to be no correlation between how much energy a car finishes practice with vs how much energy a car starts qualifying with, however. I have only looked at the Gen 2 2022 cars.
I ran some more laps to learn more. I ran a 45-minute practice followed by a 30-minute (9 lap max) qualifying. I used the log info generated by RF2 and LogAnalyzer to look at it in an orderly fashion. I tried all of the Formula E cars from 2019 through 2022. In each case there was insufficient fuel for the AI to complete more than three laps after they completed the 45-minute practice (it doesn't matter how much time is allotted to practice, by the way; the qualifying aberration remains). According to LogAnalyzer, they start their first timed qualifying lap with less than 10% charge. I noticed while looking at the player.json file that there is a comment that says the minimum number of qualifying laps is 3. This gave me two possibilities. The first is that no matter how many laps are set, the AI plan their fuel thinking they only have to run 3 laps. This could make sense for gas powered cars because that would give them an out lap, a timed lap and an in lap with the least amount of fuel and weight. They could just do this repeatedly. This, however, doesn't work for the FEs because they aren't built to refuel. My second thought revolved around the parcferme setting in player.json. That is set to 3, which is supposedly "RFM default." I don't know what the default is. I changed parcferme to 0 (off) thinking it is preventing the AI from adding fuel between practice and qualifying, but it made no difference. At this point, I am at a total loss. It would be helpful if someone else would run a practice and qualifying (at least 5 laps) with the FE cars. If I am the only one seeing this, I guess my next step would be to reinstall RF2. I don't want to do that if I don't absolutely have to. For now, I guess I just skip practice because if I skip the practice session, all of the AI can complete the 9 laps of qualifying without running out of fuel and having to pit.
replied to you in part on discord but for the benefit of others following along, the rfm defaults for parc ferme are as follows; Code: ParcFerme = 0 // Control over what changes can be made between qualifying and race; default=0, possible values are 0=no restrictions, 1=restrictions apply, 2=restrictions apply as long as it doesn't rain in qualifying or afterwards // Whether fuel level remains the same (only if parc ferme is applicable). In general, this value specifies what fraction of the qualifying session is reached before fuel usage becomes "free"; default=0.0, possible // values are 0.0-1.0, where 0.0 indicates fuel level is always free, 0.5 would mean fuel level at the halfway point of qualifying will be used to start the race, and 1.0 means fuel level at the end of qualifying will // be used to start the race (and no refueling allowed during qualifying). ParcFermeFuel = 0.0 ParcFermeTires = 10 // How many of the top qualifiers have to keep their used tires on for the race (only if parc ferme is applicable); default=0, possible values are 0 and up (300 recommended if everybody has to keep their used tires). ParcFermeSetup = 1 // Whether setup used during qualifying must be used during the race (only if parc ferme is applicable), except for the RFM/season/GDB or PLR file "FreeSettings"; default=1, possible values 0 or 1. // Settings that are free to be changed regardless of parc ferme. You must add the values of each setting that drivers are free to change: // 1 = steering lock, 2 = brake pressure, 4 = starting fuel, 8 = fuel strategy, 16 = tire compound, 32 = brake bias, 64 = front wing, 128 = engine settings (rev limit, boost, and engine braking) // Possible values are -1 (use default value) up to 255 (which equals 1+2+4+8+16+32+64+128). FreeSettings = -1 The player.json choices re parc ferme are as follows; Code: ParcFerme#":"0=off, 1=no setup changes allowed between qual and race except for 'Free Settings'), 2=same unless rain, 3=use RFM default 'ParcFerme=<0-2>'", The default rfm file can be found in C:\Users\<NAME>\AppData\Roaming\~MASTEMP. folder (obviously change the <NAME> bit to your computer name). If it's not showing there fire up the mas2 tool and select the create mod component option, while it's open then check the mastemp folder and you should see a few rfm files there.
This shows that parcferme is playing no part in the fuel problem I have with FEs. It's just so strange that the problem only crops up when I run practice first. I've spent more time investigating than driving in the last week, and that's just not healthy.
