Re: How Realistic is F122? (According to an F1 Engineer)

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@Wollcott wrote:

After driving F1 cars in actual simulators I can say the F1 cars int he game, (especially wheel support) are horrible in the feeling and feedback. F1 2020 is closer to real life 2022 cars than F1 22. 

I know people might use medium traction but imo those guys cannot take part in this discussion as real life has no TC as well. the traction is completely different and you can feel this straight away as in an F1 car you could go flat in 2nd gear while ingame here its not possible. Also higher gears the traction of an F1 car is one of the easiest in any race car out there. Why they decided to make it so unrealistic, i dunno. (again, 2020 had fairly realistic handling)  Same with the reaction of the car. Yes, this generation produces understeer but the amount of understeer IRL is significantly less. the car still turns in straight away unlike F1 22. 

Also the gear sync is completely wrong in F1 22. 

But the biggest difference compared to an Arcade or simcade game and an actual sim is the feedback. Yes, its no secret that wheels in F1 games havent been supported well at all for pretty much ever and the game is made for a controller (yes, 22 being first game where controller isnt the better device, and pretty much equal to wheel)

Still, the support for a wheel should be MUCH MUCH better in this game as practially you get zero indication what the car is doing in the device via FFB. 

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Regarding 2nd gear, you are absolutely right about that. Watching many onboards just proves it to be so. F1 cars always had huge traction.  

@Wollcott did you get to drive a sim in a factory or in the team's entourage? This is off topic, but if that's the case I'd love to hear more about it and I'm most definitely not alone in that! Though there are a bunch of users who casually play the game, there's a good number of legit petrol heads here that will always perk their ears up to hear such stories 👌

However if you got into a sim in an exhibition, museum or the sort, please bear in mind that those sims are tuned for the general public. I'm referring to sims like those in the Ferrari museums or in the various exhibitions the teams promote around the world.

It is still a great experience, but the sims are tuned down with TC, lower FFB strength etc.

Regarding going flat on 2nd gear, I'll properly attach a telemetry screenshot when I get back to my desktop but you'll notice how their throttle application is not so binary. And race start incidents are there to demonstrate that it is not as simple as go full throttle from 2nd onwards. Healthy dose of upshifting or throttle modulation.

To those not entirely sure what this is about, think of the engine speed (RPM) as the source of power of the car, not the throttle. The throttle is a valve that allows you to increase or decrease the engine speed at different rates - so 50% throttle will increase engine RPM at a certain rate from idle to 12.000 or whatever, while going full throttle will do so much faster. It is not instantaneous though. You can be at full throttle in lower gears no problem, as long as you upshift earlier (shortshifting) when the wheels get close to breaking traction as the power increases as a result of higher engine speeds.

That said, the game has a lot to improve to get to a more realistic state. David Greco himself has mentioned many aspects he wasn't content about in F1 22 and even shared a long list of handling features and updates he'd like to work on, so that (not being in a good state) is not a secret.

Same goes for the FFB.

Comparing it to iRacing as a game "released In 2008" is misleading too. iRacing gets huge updates from time to time and the last one was pushed just a few months ago. Literally everything from AI to crash models to FFB gets reworked in these big updates. If you were to play the game in an earlier state it would not feel the same.

And I imagine you know this already, but for those reading iRacing's W13 was not designed and programmed by Mercedes. They did a great collab, with constant feedback from the team and even a Discord server just for Mercedes engineers and iRacing devs to hang out and discuss progress with the car. 

It was still made by the iRacing guys over data provided by Mercedes. 

You can take a peek at how it happened on the iRacing Downshift podcast with James Vowles, episode 40. Yes, that Vowles that has just jumped ships and is now the boss at Williams haha! In the show he speaks at length on how the car was developed, what sort of data they disclosed for the iRacing team, what the iRacing devs got right and what they got wrong. Keyword here being "they", as in iRacing devs - Mercedes didn't code or program anything, just gave feedback on how it was shaping up and tested it in a simracing rig with Anthony Davidson and Mercedes eSports drivers Jarno and I think Moreno.

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@mariohomoh wrote:

@Wollcott did you get to drive a sim in a factory or in the team's entourage? This is off topic, but if that's the case I'd love to hear more about it and I'm most definitely not alone in that! Though there are a bunch of users who casually play the game, there's a good number of legit petrol heads here that will always perk their ears up to hear such stories 👌

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I'd love to hear that too.

And guys, don't get me wrong - the discussion is great - but it sounds like you are expecting something that was never intended for this F1 game series - as far as I think of the game in those years playing it. It's like judging a fish by its abiity of climbing trees. To implement this in such level of finesse the game could never be released yearly.

And to say that TC medium players have no part in the discussion sounds arrogant to me. Firstly 'cause splits the players into categories where some are relevant and some aren't. Second because those are the guys who feel the most this misbalance in traction - though they don't necessarily know what's going on and why. So, if it's hard for us, for them it's almost impossible - to the point where they could lose interest in learning and turning assists off and ultimately dropping the game.

@dancrodriguesVast majority play the game using a pad. So game should be optimised for pad as well as wheel. Without those on pad. The game wouldn’t be financially viable

afterall it’s advertised and sold as a game.  

@Wollcott 

And can you attest that you were driving a sim in a non-exhibition context specced to realistic settings? Bear in mind that in a exhibition or museum, the guy in the simracing booth is not a race or simulator engineer, that parameters for tyre grip are made on an software engine level, and simulators on booth, however fancy, are not decommissioned real F1 sims but rigs built in partnership with consumer grade brands like Fanatec and Thrustmaster. Ferrari for instance has a long, long time partnership with Thrustmaster and those booths are built by them with the general public in mind.

Sorry for going over this point again. It’s just that from your reply it wasn’t clear if you got into a real F1 sim, or on an exhibition “F1 sim”.

Back to iRacing, I’m not talking about PC specs to run the game. I’m referring to game engine and software parameters for handling and physics. On this one we’re going to have a hard disagreement, mate, as even FFB ultimately changes as a result of new tyre models or category updates (GT3, LMP, etc), and these get reworked frequently. Even 2023 Season 1 introduced significant BoP changes for the GT3 cars and they veritably change how a car handles.

Again, I don’t see how alluding to iRacing being released in 2008 has any bearing on this debate.

Now back to the torque and gear ratio, sorry for the crude paint intervention:

If anyone here have any trouble reading the chart, I’ll be happy to break it down. But hopefully anyone can see the shortshifting and the frequent throttle modulation in gears as high as 5th?

Anyway there was a dedicated section in Ultra’s video all about how off the mark the gear ratios are. Isn’t that exactly their addressing of torque and traction issues of F1 22? Gear ratios are precisely that, all about torque delivery.

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@Wollcott wrote:
But about the first part:
What bugs me the most is that F1 cars in actual simulators are MUCH easier to drive than the F1 game. I dont get the intention behind this. Why is it easier to dirve an F1 car on iRacing than the offical F1 game? if anything that makes people lose interest even more or compensate it by turning on assists.
Thats why 2020 was so good. and as far as i know it was the only F1 game where developers had actual discussions and meetings with real life F1 drivers.

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There's no intention, mate. I think it's due to having to release yearly and, at the same time, bring something new and engagin to a wide range of players, from casuals to petrol heads every single year.

They surely don't have enough time to code from scratch every year so they may add something here, another thing there and anyone who has some experince in coding knows that is terrible. Imagine small regs changes every year, plus adding story mode, then supercars to grow the player base and make more money... I have my reservations too on their work and in some bugs but I think they do great with their timescale - here in Brasil we say that the "blanket is too small" meaning one can't cover it all.

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@Wollcott wrote:
@Blackbird90
Yea and after watdching the video i think theres one massive flaw in their comparison. And that is the traction part.

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Alex and the other guy probably forgot that dimension when making this video 

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We'd have to ask Alex to be certain but personally I'd be astonished he he did 'forget'. Rather I suspect it's so obvious that the gears used to drive optimally aren't the same that there was no point trying to do an equivalent comparison in this regard. Instead they focused on how the end result of driving the fastest lap possible compared, which doesn't seem unreasonable.

@mariohomohsomewhat off-topic and regarding the telemetry you've posted.

I don't like the guy but VER is a beast. Keeping the gear low to deliver more power out of corners putting 0.7s onto Sainz which isn't a poor driver at all.
(I wouldn't like to be his gearbox tho but this isn't my problem haha)

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@Wollcott wrote:
@Ultrasonic_77Yeah or that. Don't think it's unreasonable but then they also could've said that the result here is not gonna be representative as it's different gears and different levels of traction.

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It depends what you mean by 'representative'. I'd argue what they did was far more representative than Alex trying to mirror real F1 gear changes would have been, since it mirrored what (good) players of the game will be doing.

Don't misunderstand me, I do think the current unrealistic high-gear meta is something I'd love to see fixed. In a recent post somewhere I actually put this second only to wanting to seeing BIG improvements in the online experience as my wishes for F1 23.

@Wollcott That's still very nice, you getting to hop on a rig there in Milton Keynes! And experiencing it all on their bespoke wheel and pedals, must have been quite the day. Assuming you were not using consumer grade equipment in the rig?

FFB is definitely subpar on a wheel in F1 games. They do have what I'd say is the best pad experience in the industry, for whatever it's worth. And since they do cater to a way broader audience than that of iRacing or even ACC, I'd say that's quite the feat.

Does that imply that they're acquitted from the supbar wheel FFB? Most definitely not. I want better FFB on my wheel, and while F1 doesn't deliver that I'll probably spend relatively more time playing ACC in the foreseeable future. I do agree that buying a 1k+ rig to play only Codemasters' F1 games if would be a waste of money.

You see, if we had not been so hyperbolic on the precious posts this thread would he way slimmer. Like the "in an F1 car you could go flat in 2nd gear". I selected 2022 quali fastest laps on Spa, but the Twitter bot I got the chart from is freely accessible and anyone can pull telemetry data from any lap in recent official sessions. Not a betting man, but I feel confident in saying that exiting a corner in 2nd gear full throttle is quite the exception, and saying otherwise is not representative of the sport at all.

F1 22 still does not deliver a satisfactory experience in torque delivery or even throttle response, but I honestly think we'd be better off making fairer comparison here.

Back to the video, I'm still a bit confused about what you believe was left out? They even plotted the engine speed and gears chart. That's a visual representation of how off the torque curves and consequently the traction are in the game.