Thanks for your message! You've obviously spent a lot of time and care with your Lancia D50 to get it towards accurate laptimes at several other tracks, and if your driving is of a good enough standard to get near real world times at those circuits then it would be wrong of me to suggest there's another 8-9 seconds for you to find. Asphalt is a mysterious thing. I remember from Martin Brundle's autobiography a section regarding testing at Magny Cours, teams didn't like to use the track because laptimes would be all over the place, sometimes getting worse as the session progressed, and not rubbering up as predictably as other tracks did, making setup work a very moving goalpost. Reading the following from the Motorsport review of the 1957 Naples GP suggests that it is a track that evolves in a very exaggerated way compared to others. Wth races crowding on top of each other, Naples suffered from the lack of factory support from Maserati, just as Pau had lacked Ferrari support the week before, but in spite of this there were sufficient private owners to fill the field. The circuit of Posillipo, on the heights overlooking the bay of Naples, remains unchanged each year, being a pure street race, with innumerable corners and continually-changing gradients; in fact no part of the 4.1-kilometre circuit is on level ground, even the start being on an uphill gradient. The Ferrari team was out in full force as soon as practice started, with Collins in a Lancia/Ferrari with swing-axle rear and Hawthorn in the one with Ferrari front suspension, and Musso in the 1½-litre Formula II car. It has been a bone of contention with drivers that the lap record for the Posillipo circuit remains to the credit of Ascari driving a 1953 Formula II Ferrari 2-litre, with a time of 2 min. 7.7 sec., and though many have tried to improve on this time, using current Formula 1 cars nobody had succeeded. The power/weight ratio and handling of the old 2-litre Ferrari, together with Ascari’s ability, plus the fact that he was trying hard to make up time after a pit stop, resulted in freak conditions that were absolutely right for the circuit, with the resultant record time. Since then cars have had a lot more power and it has been difficult to approach Ascari’s time on this twisty circuit, for the surplus of power over that required has been more than the drivers could cope with. It was Collins who set the pace, soon lapping around the 2 min. 10 sec. mark, the new independent rear suspension proving to be very good on the tight corners. Musso was lapping consistently with the Formula II car and getting down to 2 min. 14 sec., while poor Hawthorn was feeling very put out as he could not better 2 min. 17 sec. It appeared that the swing-axle car was far superior to the de Dion rear end, judging by the times, for Hawthorn has not lost any of his ability to drive, yet all was not well, for Lewis-Evans was lapping faster than Hawthorn, in spite of the Connaught not being right on carburation. No one was taking this first practice period very seriously, most of them finding the way round the twisty circuit first of all, and Gould, Halford and Volonterio were having a quiet look round. Unfortunately for Halford a half-shaft broke, so that he had to spend the Saturday practice period waiting for a new shaft to be collected from Modena. Before the Friday practice ended Hawthorn tried the swing-axle car, to see if it was really as good as Collins thought, but after only one lap he stopped, for his knees were firmly wedged under the rim of the steering wheel, making dicing impossible. TLDR: It took the 1957 F1 cars ages to beat a lap record set four years earlier by Ascari in a F2 car, but then during the race Hawthorn set a lap of 2:05.6 - some 12 seconds faster than he had managed in practice. I knew this information already, but when I made the track for AMS1 I had a very good 250F that I could compare laptimes with and I found that the grip in that sim is commensurate with the cars and other tracks, so I didn't have to make any changes. In AC I remember now that I did indeed have to revise the grip upwards because the AC 250F is an absolute dog, but it was the only yardstick that ran there for me to compare laptimes with. It appears that in rF2 that the track evolution, yielding accurate times for Monaco, Pescara etc is not enough for Naples, which appeared in real life to go from 'super low' grip to 'super high' grip, compared to Monaco perhaps going from 'super low' grip to 'regular' grip. So what's the solution? In AMS the .tdf has this line which would really help with this situation: Dry=0.9632 DryStep=0.000108 DryMax=1.0128 I can in AMS control how quickly the track evolves, and to what extent, up to a very high DryMax value if necessary. In rF2 sadly ( as well as having to package the whole thing again, rather than just giving you all a new .tdf to drop into the folder) the tdf looks like this... / Roads [FEEDBACK] Wear=1.00 Dry=1.00 Wet=0.84 Roughness=(0.5,0.25) Resistance=0 BumpAmp=RoadBumpAmp BumpWavelen=RoadBumpLen Legal=true Spring=0 Damper=0 CollFrict=0.4 Sparks=1 Scraping=1 Sound=dry In rF2 there isn't this functionality. I don't believe there's a way to control track evolution on a track by track basis, so all I can really do is crudely hack it upwards by let's say 10% grip, to Dry=1.1. Would that be a fair or desirable solution to achieve closer laptimes?
Thanks for your feedback Woodee, I think I left the normal maps out of the bark because of the different shaders used for the leaves (which have bits of branch in the texture and use DIFFUSENOSHADOW) and the rest of the tree. Matching the bark colour to the leaf twig colour was impossible under different lighting conditions with the bark normal map reacting to the light, and the leaf not doing so. Material editor doesn't like changes to transparent materials on the fly. I'll have a think.. Regarding the dirt patches I'm not sure whether I can make them get wet without them having to be part of the race surface objects, I could perhaps make them darker so as not to stick out as much in wet weather maybe?
@Italotracks I think it would be enough and rational to increase grip multiplier by 6-7%. Could perhaps get away with less if we would experiment with roughness parameters. Theoretically roughness parameters should also affect the way road gets rubbered in and grip improves. I don't know if rF2 works this way, I have tested roughness years ago with my goodwood track, and sadly the results were wrong - increased roughness should have made grip bit worse for dry "green" road till it gets rubbered, and it should have made grip in wet much better with "green" road. What happened was that grip just improved same way in dry and in wet. My findings were totally ignored by community and everyone, I guess people don't understand how important that is. Bascially if roughness worked the way it should for wet (in inverted way) then wet racing lines would be a thing in rF2 automatically. They probably won't even do that for LMU. This being said, roughness parameters definitely had massive influence to how tires gripped. I remember once I had set roughness very high, I rolled over skip barber car simply because resistance to lateral movement was so high. And yes indeed it is not very comfortable that in rF2 we have to mess with packaging, I would also like if there was an option to simply drop files such as in devmode. Quickfixes is not very comfortable. Although S397 was able to do quick patches with small packages.
I guess the only way to do it is integrate it onto the tarmac texture at certain points. I don't think realroad racesurface textures support alpha transparency?
I think you can somewhat balance out shading to make these patches looking better. I remember doing that with Goodwood. I should come back to my goodwood someday.
Only con slightly bothers me is my car rolls backwards in pits. No biggie, even some Le Mans Ultimate garages do that.
I've been thinking about the lap time discrepancy at Napoli with the D50. Knowing nothing about modding, could it be the several long left hand corners and how the tires react to heat? I suspect in your thorough approach, you've tested at other tracks with long corners without seeing this issue. Just a thought.
It's not just the D50, other cars should be a bit faster than they are. I believe I have the grip set too low for what was an abrasive and grippy track, I will remedy that with a small update.
In practice, some AI slam the brakes on as they cross the start-finish line. Can this be fixed? I don't know if it happens in a race.
It's normally caused by an Offset in the Fastest and/or another Path at the Position where the XFinish Object is, that has to be smoothed by editing the AIW File.
The AI sometimes get a little spooked by the presence of other cars parked there at the side of the road, especially if there is a car moving in the 'pitlane' either entering the pits or joining the 'track'. I did select waypoints at either side of the start/finish line and smooth them in the AIW editor before release. I just did a test with only 7 AI cars in practice and they all crossed the start/finish line without lifting, but with higher AI numbers the more likely the traffic/perceived danger will be.
I wanted to offer to check it, but then i noticed that the Track is Payware and one of my Principles is it, to not to work at Payware Components. But we have some very talented Modders here, that probably will offer the same Help.
Thanks for your message, that's perfectly fair. Like I said, it's a stationary AI car proximity problem, and not a kink in the fast line over the start finish that can be fixed in two seconds in the AIW editor. Short of parking the cars elsewhere there's nothing to be done.
I will give you a Hint, that can be one possible Reason for the Problem. Did you check for overlapping Corridors between Pit Lane and main Track in the Area between the PitIn and PitOut X-Object? I've made a short Tutorial about it, that you can find here: https://meetme.bplaced.net/rF2_onli...ile=Solving_corridor_caused_trackproblems.pdf
Thanks for your post. In this case I opted to have the corridors overlapping because narrowing the track corridors to not include the pitlane means that the cars on the right hand of the grid dive immediately left to come out of the pitlane and as such the cars used only half of the road width at the start of the race - which like the AI sometimes slowing down over the line in practice also looks a bit weird, as well as resulting in accidents.
Unfortunately rF2 has some Limitations, so that you sometimes have to make your Choice, because you can not have everything.
Oh well, I guess we'll have to live with it. Thank you both for looking into this, and thank you for the explanation!
