07-17-2018, 12:13 PM
(This post was last modified: 07-17-2018, 12:21 PM by Jaroslav Černý.)
The system needs an overhaul on how it awards contacts so that it cannot be abused as it can be right now.
Some simple rule would go a long way to solve some of the issues:
1 contact per 3-5 seconds max.
race time in minutes divided by 2 = number of contacts before severe punishment, such as 20min race = 10 contacts, 60min race = 30 contacts, though it's probably better made as a curve such as 20=10, 60=20 or 25 as the spaces between drivers get bigger on most longer races the longer they are making the need for contacts limit lower. The curve is not hard to do as an equation or even predefine as a look up table with discrete steps and interpolation.
The getting rammed and then getting contacts should definitely be fixed but I doubt that will happen anytime soon as the incident system would need a major overhaul probably and be able to decide very well who's fault what collision is, be able to track back in time etc. so that if someone gets rammed into T1 from back it's not necessarily their fault that they then wreck someone else or even multiple in front of them.
The system should be able to know where the racing line and side by side lines are to know who's pushing who, desired speeds and braking points to be able to tell gross deviations in both directions, what parts of vehicle made contact with what force and what the drivers did several seconds before that, ... and do this for all cars individually to see who's deviating from their line etc. not necessarily from the average or fastest line, sure driving weird slow lines is undesirable but it should not immediately blame you for that unless the difference is big and causing issues, same the other way driving a better faster line that is different than the average line should not immediately blame all incidents on you because of it.
KMR for example has some of these features: xbox/joystick blocking or other app can do it, latency limit to avoid having these messy 150ms+ drivers on servers so they learn to join servers near their location, damage costs in virtual money as in you gain money for finishing and you have to pay for repairs (automatic) you can go negative and then get kicked all these limits IMHO can be fine tuned to provide a decent realism and additional protection from wreckers though as seen online so far it's set pretty lenient. There is also an active option in KMR of limiting number of collisions in first lap to a certain amount and restarting the race many many times until people learn to make a clean first lap. As well as first contact of a race having high monetary penalty, as such if someone rams into T1 on lap 1 and makes the first contact by rear ending someone they get a sizeable penalty for it.
This is something that would be easy to implement on SRS to penalize first contact of a race especially in lap 1 severely as in it would have higher safety rating/virtual-monetary/incidents-count penalty.
Other option as mentioned in other thread would be AI and train it to be a race/track official but that's probably the most time and resources consuming one while it would still need all the inputs as mentioned above for a "rules based" system.
A car management/garage with virtual monetary function would be a nice addition but more of a fun one for website, where you could repair your car after races and not be able to join races with that car until it's repaired, different cars having different repair costs, buying licenses to be able to drive different car classes, and you would gain virtual money by finishing well without incidents = no damage to repair. And if you run too low then you would be stuck on an entry level series with a "borrowed/rented/insured" car so that you can try and earn some money again by clean racing to be able to drive the higher series again. There can of course be other limits and custom damage detection to for example limit the amount of new engines, gearboxes, etc. you can buy to repair your car in a series. This is more of a fun feature for web but it does have it's safety impact as well. And if the collision detection is overhauled and done very well then the offender would have to pay a part or full cost of repairs for the car they crashed into. This feature has been wanted a long time in sim racing but often only arcades implement it for single player, sort of a "career" mode for online multiplayer sim racing.
Right now KMR (see racedepartment for the server app) has some of this "costs of racing" implemented and automated as a way of additional safety and clean racing promotion.
Some simple rule would go a long way to solve some of the issues:
1 contact per 3-5 seconds max.
race time in minutes divided by 2 = number of contacts before severe punishment, such as 20min race = 10 contacts, 60min race = 30 contacts, though it's probably better made as a curve such as 20=10, 60=20 or 25 as the spaces between drivers get bigger on most longer races the longer they are making the need for contacts limit lower. The curve is not hard to do as an equation or even predefine as a look up table with discrete steps and interpolation.
The getting rammed and then getting contacts should definitely be fixed but I doubt that will happen anytime soon as the incident system would need a major overhaul probably and be able to decide very well who's fault what collision is, be able to track back in time etc. so that if someone gets rammed into T1 from back it's not necessarily their fault that they then wreck someone else or even multiple in front of them.
The system should be able to know where the racing line and side by side lines are to know who's pushing who, desired speeds and braking points to be able to tell gross deviations in both directions, what parts of vehicle made contact with what force and what the drivers did several seconds before that, ... and do this for all cars individually to see who's deviating from their line etc. not necessarily from the average or fastest line, sure driving weird slow lines is undesirable but it should not immediately blame you for that unless the difference is big and causing issues, same the other way driving a better faster line that is different than the average line should not immediately blame all incidents on you because of it.
KMR for example has some of these features: xbox/joystick blocking or other app can do it, latency limit to avoid having these messy 150ms+ drivers on servers so they learn to join servers near their location, damage costs in virtual money as in you gain money for finishing and you have to pay for repairs (automatic) you can go negative and then get kicked all these limits IMHO can be fine tuned to provide a decent realism and additional protection from wreckers though as seen online so far it's set pretty lenient. There is also an active option in KMR of limiting number of collisions in first lap to a certain amount and restarting the race many many times until people learn to make a clean first lap. As well as first contact of a race having high monetary penalty, as such if someone rams into T1 on lap 1 and makes the first contact by rear ending someone they get a sizeable penalty for it.
This is something that would be easy to implement on SRS to penalize first contact of a race especially in lap 1 severely as in it would have higher safety rating/virtual-monetary/incidents-count penalty.
Other option as mentioned in other thread would be AI and train it to be a race/track official but that's probably the most time and resources consuming one while it would still need all the inputs as mentioned above for a "rules based" system.
A car management/garage with virtual monetary function would be a nice addition but more of a fun one for website, where you could repair your car after races and not be able to join races with that car until it's repaired, different cars having different repair costs, buying licenses to be able to drive different car classes, and you would gain virtual money by finishing well without incidents = no damage to repair. And if you run too low then you would be stuck on an entry level series with a "borrowed/rented/insured" car so that you can try and earn some money again by clean racing to be able to drive the higher series again. There can of course be other limits and custom damage detection to for example limit the amount of new engines, gearboxes, etc. you can buy to repair your car in a series. This is more of a fun feature for web but it does have it's safety impact as well. And if the collision detection is overhauled and done very well then the offender would have to pay a part or full cost of repairs for the car they crashed into. This feature has been wanted a long time in sim racing but often only arcades implement it for single player, sort of a "career" mode for online multiplayer sim racing.
Right now KMR (see racedepartment for the server app) has some of this "costs of racing" implemented and automated as a way of additional safety and clean racing promotion.