A boring wall of text. (Now hidden because of cringe and also too much text lol)
Spoiler: BBCODE_SP_AN
So recently I stumbled upon a weird offset in gp2.exe which gave me some hope on beating my old foe: the fact that the ccs accelerate so slowly out of low speeds when you use a low powered carset (and it is worse as you lower the car power).
The offset is 601003 (or 0x92BAB in hex) and its usual value is 33161 (0x8189, you will see 89 81 in the hex editor). By increasing it 50000 I managed to get the ccs accelerating correctly at 400bhp, by going to the usual maximum possible value of 65535 (FF FF) I could have enjoyable races with 270bhp carsets. I noticed it was a 4 bytes number in the exe so I could go even higher. Going higher gave a little bit of boost to the ccs but it was hard to notice any changes and going too high started to cause bugs (like some ccs in the pitlane spinning in the air lol).
So I settled with 65536 and 270bhp as good enough for me. My first thought was using it with my 2009 F2 carset which has 400bhp and I started with that. I messed with the Physics Editor until I got correct corner speeds and top speed and I noticed it became extremely boring because the way it simulated low downforce wasn't great. I raised downforce again to 22000 and the cars became responsive enough. After watching some youtube videos it seemed to me that those F2 cars were actually worse than F3 cars in some tracks so I decided to work with F3 cars instead.
The physics are still a problem so, for now, I'm leaving realism behind. My F3 cars have 270bhp and 22000 of downforce. Their top speed is lower than real F3 cars but their corner speed is much higher. I raised the "Acceleration" value in Track Editor so their top speeds would increase but it is still lower than what I'd like (for a medium wing setting). They are actually fun to drive so I kept them that way.
Next, I started setting up the tracks to run with this. Formula 3 cars usually run 2-3 races on each track so I can use that to "cheat" and have a full gp2 season with only 8 tracks. I tested many tracks and so far I have 6 tracks almost ready: Donington Park National, Welkom, Pau, Zandvoort, Goiania and Sentul. Next up is probably Mount Tremblant and then Macau. After that, I plan to add many more tracks and full calendars. As many as I can. I'm doing 80km races without pitstops and I think it is a great format.
The gear ratios are lower than usual GP2 but I can't go very low for the 1st gear or it will negate the effect of the hack on offset 601003 so I'm using 30-33 for me, 27-31 for the ccs. I tried to fix them in the Physics Editor but it also negated the effect of the hack (I still need to test what happens if I fix the gears and use a very large value for the hack. Maybe it will fix the bug?).
I looked into existing carsets and I didn't like any of them. There are some good ones but they don't look good with the carshapes. I assembled a carset very quickly and tried to fix André Santos' carshape but the results weren't any better. Still, it is now too late to go back so I hope it will be useful as a base for future improvements. Here are some pictures:
I'm attaching the carshape and carset here so you can have a look (EDIT: check post 2) and I will share the .dat and magic data files soon when everything is double checked.
I just tried to follow the color schemes more or less how they are in real life. Both cars and helmets are not detailed at all, or accurate. The teams come from many F3 championships, but mainly the now defunct European Championship. Also, I couldn't find any wheel jams that fit the F3 car (they are all too big).
All of this also gave me some motivation to restart an old project: a season installer that would install all tracks, patches and magic data in a few clicks. Progress has been great but I don't know when I'm gonna finish it.
If someone wants to help me with the carset, or the carshape, or anything else, I would be very happy.
EDIT: Updates on post 2
The offset is 601003 (or 0x92BAB in hex) and its usual value is 33161 (0x8189, you will see 89 81 in the hex editor). By increasing it 50000 I managed to get the ccs accelerating correctly at 400bhp, by going to the usual maximum possible value of 65535 (FF FF) I could have enjoyable races with 270bhp carsets. I noticed it was a 4 bytes number in the exe so I could go even higher. Going higher gave a little bit of boost to the ccs but it was hard to notice any changes and going too high started to cause bugs (like some ccs in the pitlane spinning in the air lol).
So I settled with 65536 and 270bhp as good enough for me. My first thought was using it with my 2009 F2 carset which has 400bhp and I started with that. I messed with the Physics Editor until I got correct corner speeds and top speed and I noticed it became extremely boring because the way it simulated low downforce wasn't great. I raised downforce again to 22000 and the cars became responsive enough. After watching some youtube videos it seemed to me that those F2 cars were actually worse than F3 cars in some tracks so I decided to work with F3 cars instead.
The physics are still a problem so, for now, I'm leaving realism behind. My F3 cars have 270bhp and 22000 of downforce. Their top speed is lower than real F3 cars but their corner speed is much higher. I raised the "Acceleration" value in Track Editor so their top speeds would increase but it is still lower than what I'd like (for a medium wing setting). They are actually fun to drive so I kept them that way.
Next, I started setting up the tracks to run with this. Formula 3 cars usually run 2-3 races on each track so I can use that to "cheat" and have a full gp2 season with only 8 tracks. I tested many tracks and so far I have 6 tracks almost ready: Donington Park National, Welkom, Pau, Zandvoort, Goiania and Sentul. Next up is probably Mount Tremblant and then Macau. After that, I plan to add many more tracks and full calendars. As many as I can. I'm doing 80km races without pitstops and I think it is a great format.
The gear ratios are lower than usual GP2 but I can't go very low for the 1st gear or it will negate the effect of the hack on offset 601003 so I'm using 30-33 for me, 27-31 for the ccs. I tried to fix them in the Physics Editor but it also negated the effect of the hack (I still need to test what happens if I fix the gears and use a very large value for the hack. Maybe it will fix the bug?).
I looked into existing carsets and I didn't like any of them. There are some good ones but they don't look good with the carshapes. I assembled a carset very quickly and tried to fix André Santos' carshape but the results weren't any better. Still, it is now too late to go back so I hope it will be useful as a base for future improvements. Here are some pictures:
I just tried to follow the color schemes more or less how they are in real life. Both cars and helmets are not detailed at all, or accurate. The teams come from many F3 championships, but mainly the now defunct European Championship. Also, I couldn't find any wheel jams that fit the F3 car (they are all too big).
All of this also gave me some motivation to restart an old project: a season installer that would install all tracks, patches and magic data in a few clicks. Progress has been great but I don't know when I'm gonna finish it.
- seasonpatcher.png (12.69 KiB) Viewed 30940 times
EDIT: Updates on post 2
