I´ve posted a thread asking if its possible to find a way to make the player car have the same mechanical failure chance as the other cars in the grid, something really RANDOM that doesnt depend only on drivers own mistakes. I am looking foward to solve this becouse searching in the internet and reading a lot of forums I found out that lots of players have the same feeling as me, that when playing a season offline, the fun reduces a lot when you realise that all AI cars have "real chances" to face some mechanical problem, except the player car. (For me, this is the only important defect/bad point of rfactor). I say this because I´ve been playing rfactor (1 and 2) F1 mods for the last 3 years and never had any mechanical issues, while all other cars in the grid has. Is there anyway to create maybe a plugin to solve this?
By mechanical failures I assume you mean engine and brake failure, because those are the only ones present in rF2. For engine failure, there is both an expected lifetime and a random variance variable, which you can find inside each mod's engine.INI files. So for example you could have: LifetimeAvg=7200 // average lifetime in seconds LifetimeVar=720 // lifetime random variance so in this exampe engine lifetime would be 7200+-720 seconds. If you change the LifetimeVar number to same as LifetimeAvg (7200), then it means your engine could break on first lap as well with some probability. Many mods I think have LifetimeVar set to 0 to avoid any random failures in online competitions. Grand Prix 2/3/4 series from 20 years ago was the last sim I played that simulated random failures on everything, like clutch, transmission, etc.
It is fairly easy to increase the random chance of suffering engine damage simply by over-revving the motor. I suspect that the human driver was felt to have enough ways already to end a race, i.e. crashing, that the AI were given other random events to try and balance out the equation. good luck with your search.
As per your other thread, you can't turn on 'random' failures with game options or a plugin. You can pull a mod apart, change the wear parameters stonec has detailed (can do the same with brake disc failure point) and get more random breakages. You'll need to extract all the mod files, make your changes, then repackage them into a new custom mod.
@Lazza can you explain what the values represent? The engine setting seems logical enough, but this seems a tad more challenging. BrakeWearRate=1.5e-11 BrakeFailure=(0.02,2.9e-4)
Check the hdv of the DevMode Skip Barber, there you'll find the ISI "Explanations" for these Settings.
