Real Road enhancements: Pickup rubber, persistent skidmarks and more

Hello everybody, I hope this was not mentioned before. I wish to have the following Real Road enhancements:

Pickup rubber
Visually the marbles are already simulated but you can't "pick them up" with your tires.
WHile a small amount of pickup rubber is not critical, more amount of pickup as after leaving the racing line can lead to grip loss. Also this grip loss is persistent until pick rubber wears off.

Persistent skidmarks
That would bring rFactor tracks really to life! Imagine how the tracks looks after some race weekends! I'm not sure with this, but I would assume that skidmarks provide a little bit more grip in dry conditions and less grip in wet conditions.
The skidmarks should wear off over time or get washed away from rain or something like that, so they are not there for ever.

Persistent dirt patches
If a car drives off the track and than returns, it should lay some dirt on the road. Depending on the amount of dirt these patches should reduce grip and and they should disappear after some cars driving over them.
I don't know if dirt patches reduce grip in the rain but they should get slowly washed away depending on the amount of dirt left.

Persistent Oil patches
If someone has a severe engine failure it would be glorious if the car blows out oil! Obviously oil patches would reduce grip and you can only get rid of them by starting from green. Or maybe with heavy rain?

Wet Racing Line
The racing line is more slippy in the wet, because the rubber is filling up all little wholes and cracks on the tarmac, where normally the water would run into. This results in more water standing on the surface an therefore less tire contant with this surface. See post #18 for details.
(Thanks to Justy for the idea and Tim for clarification how it works)


Technically, I can imagine that it will be really hard to blend this all together. For example, what happens if someone lays dirt over an oilpatch... and because it is so slippery the next one leaves a skidmark there! [emoji14]
Looking forward to the discussion...

 

+1

Would love to see this stuff implemented at some point in the future.

Also, to make the race groove more slippery when wet, so we actually have to start taking a wet racing line.

Judging by ISI's pursuit of realism, I guess this is probably a case of "all in good time".... I hope.

Cheers

 

Wonderful ideas, I completely agree with you on all the points.

 

Would be defenetly nice to have!

 

Added wet racing line to OP. Thank you Justy! [emoji106]

 

Those would be nice features, but I think unless they can be somehow investigated scientifically and reproduced in a simulative manner, based on facts and data more than "how I think they should work", ISI won't touch them with a pole 3m long.

 

Amazing OP, sadly though, I think Comante may be correct; it's so complex. I still think it's possible to do at at-least a fairly realistic level, but would be extremely complex and time/m & resource consuming.

This is definitely the type of stuff, though, that'll eventually start getting simulated more and more, and in more and more sims. ISI is currently a step or two ahead all others in this area, but as more and more big-budget, mainstream games get even more complex and realistic (even the non- or part-sims of today are much more realistic than the non-/part-sims of even 5 years ago) then it may only be a matter of time before another dev - wether arcade, "simcade", or sim - overtakes ISI in this area if the current RealRoad system doesn't progress in the medium to very long term.

 

I think most of this features don't need any scientific approach. Simulating them on a "fairly realistic level" would be totally enough. I rather think some of this features like making the already existing skidmarks persistent and the racing line more slippy in the wet can't be too hard. For pickup rubber I think it really depends on how "deep" you want to simulate it. For dirt and oil i have to admit this could be more time consuming since at the moment nothing in this regard exists in the sim.

 

It's not so easy, think of dirt on a turn, a car with a high load pass on it, and nothing happen, then a car with no aero pass on it, and goes straight into the wall. In the first istance the feature would have no impact, in the second istance all people would go mad about it. How would the programmer know what is the correct behaviour to expect from the car, without a scientific approach?

 

Completely understand you're point about complexity and a scientific approach, Comante, and I do agree to a certain extent. I was giving the wet racing line some thought and realised that it would be an insanely difficult thing to model at all. But if ISI had followed that same logic about only using scientific data, then there is a good chance we would have no real road at all. I don't suppose there's any scientific way of proving exactly how much rubber, one car will put down on the track surface, in one lap, at varying speeds, loads etc.

A simplified implementation, of some of the suggestions would be fine, if it's possible.

ISI did mention they would "like" to model dirt/gravel surfaces to an rF2 standard in the future. They did however, mention they would only do this, if they could find ways of testing things like; how each material is displaced when driven on, how it reacts when wet etc etc. This would perhaps lend itself to dirt patches being brought onto the track. So no promises from ISI, but lets hope they do find the time to look into this, one day.

 

I totally agree with you all in regard to dirt. But why would it be so insanely hard to implement a wet racing line? They have everthing there what they need. They know the amount of rubber on each square inch of the track. The same applies for the amount of water. Only thing left is to decrease grip as soon as rubber gets a little wet. In my imagination this is just another few lines of code in the realtime part oft calculating the current grip.

 

Well you have to program and what point does the rubbered-in part become more slippery than the dry part. How much rain is required? How do different amounts of rubber affect this? How do the track's dry non-rubber parts affect all this. There are a lot of variables. At what point in time does the wet, non-rubbered part actually start to be less grippy again relative to the rubbered-in parts? Then what about tyres? I'm pretty sure different tyres would make a difference to. I'm pretty sure there were times which were massively different for Bridgestone runners VS Michelin when any sort of track wetness was involved (from light sprinkles to massive downpours, to super wet but not raining, to wet but almost dry).

It's pretty complex.

 

What ISI should do first before this, is start by having the water actually flow and/or sit according to the track's physics. This way there will be parts of the track that hold more water than others, there will be small shallow puddles (or even big ones of the track physics warrants them), etc. etc.

It has to be done according to the track physics though rather than programmed spots in the track.

Then comes another problem though. Do track makers (including modders) even build their tracks with enough detail to even make this work?? Track surfaces usually seem pretty basic to me with mostly just large, flat areas combined with some bumps here and there (and obviously hills). I don't really notice any fine details in track physics when driving.

 

> Persistent skidmarks

Pretty certain you can set persistence in player.json? At least there is a setting for things like broken-off car parts and I suspect that it applies to skidmarks, but never tested. For the car parts, I've got it set to a couple of minutes so the breakdowns hang around for a lap or two.

 

If it was, do you not think it would be done?!

 

ISI has so much to do. I think everything regarding rain was never priority up until recent builds.

 

Thats why I sad a few lines of code, not one line of code.[emoji12] I have never sad it is done in 5 minutes but also with all your points you mentioned (which i will add to OP) I just don't think it's an insane amount of work to implement something better than we have now, which is more grip in the rubber. Maybe we have to define insane. [emoji6]

 

Just to correct or inform, this isn't quite right. They go wide in the turns in the wet because the racing line becomes smoother (the small cracks in asphalt disappear) due to continued traffic. The few remaining cracks are often filled with rubber. The water sits ontop of it, this then reduces the amount of rubber touching the surface and therefore grip on that racing line. This same surface is more grippy in the dry as well because there is maximum surface contact and rubber within the cracks as noted.

Off the racing line, cracks within the asphalt remain. Water may be pushed into these when a tire goes over them allowing the rubber of the tire to touch the track surface. Water is more easily displaced allowing contact off the racing line.

The surface details of this type are called aggregate. You can probably find quite a few references (including this forum) on this.

 

Do you mean "Debris Removal"? I don't think that skidmarks are affected by this setting but will try.

 

Thank you for the hint, really interesting! I have corrected the OP. Could you just simulate more amount of standing water on a rubbered surface in order to reach this effect?