First of all, thanks to everyone who participated in our largest championship so far, and congratulations to Spec Racer Z, Raider, and -randy- on first second and third. As always, this conversation helps keep hosting events that you and others will want to participate in. Tentative Forth Championship Start Date: Since the Monday due date and the 4 events / 1 dropped format seem to work pretty well, I see no reason to change unless other people do. If we start 4 weeks from now on July 24th, 4 events will have the championship ends on August 21st. If there's no major objection to those dates, I imagine that's what we'll go with. Other championship details: How did everyone feel the selection of stages this time around? Should we continue to include a lapped circuit in championships? Were the stages a good range of lengths? Was the 4th stage too difficult? Personally, I think stage 4 was probably about the upper bound on difficulty as long as we're doing these time trial type submissions. I certainly don't think there should be more than one stage that are that difficult in a single championship. I believe the lengths are just about optimal, unless you still want some longer stages. Starting with a shorter stage and then moving into the 3-4 minute range feels pretty comfortable to me. I also think the range of stages was pretty satisfying this time, including several mixed stages and one all-asphalt stage. Thoughts on this? This championship I aimed to have stages ready by the Saturday before the championship and they ended up ready just in time for the championship. So if I aim to have them ready a week before the championship, maybe they'll be ready the weekend before the championship. Does anyone else want to try designing a course? Even if you have a course in mind and you don't want to fiddle with the checkpoints, draw it on a map and I'll make it if it looks like it'll work. Thanks again to @Spec Racer Z and @MattKowalski for their work on getting us all the cars we have balanced for this championship. I imagine we'll be using the same set of cars in the next championship. Do you think you'll be balancing anymore cars? Also it seems like @CreasingCurve might be able to help tune suspensions, maybe? Also I was disappointed that the gears aren't adjustable on some cars, one of them being the SBR4. I could probably make an adjustable transmission mod for cars that need it, does that sound like something we want? Other thoughts on this championship? Potential Side Events: Any ideas for alternative formats that we could run as a side championship? Someone mentioned teams. I'm not sure how we would pick teams though. Maybe have a qualifying round and pair best and last, second best and second last etc. or give first place first pick for a teammate or something like that... Sound interesting? I was thinking it might be fun to do a RWD vs. FWD type thing, although we may have to artificially turn cars into RWD/FWD versions to have a good selection of cars. Not sure how car performance balancing would work for that one. Any interest? If enough people want to try out one of these side championships we could just reuse stages from previous championships to keep things simple. Thanks again for participating and for your feedback.
This championship was great, we finally got some more people that are about as good as each other making it much more competitive and a couple more that are incredibly fast (Raider). I'll keep it shortish, here is my feedback Stages were great, 4th was alright but way too bumpy especially with the covet as its much lighter. Stage lengths were close to perfect. If there were to be any longer stages they would have to be on more open stages as it quickly becomes frustrating whizzing through bumpy forest road with rocks on either side with a slowish computer. Would be nice to have a smaller break between championships but i understand what needs to be done so take as much time as needed. Regarding the suspension tuning. Yes i can tune suspensions (to an extent) but i'm not sure how this would apply to anything. Tuning is for those that know what they are doing in order to gain a couple more seconds. I don't like the idea of making tune setups just so those who don't know what they are doing can get that same edge. Just seems like a free pass to me. I might be able to help with making some custom/altered jbeam parts in order to allow for more cars to enter the championship, such as making more parameters adjustable like the gears in the SBR4 that you mentioned. I think it would also be a good idea to have a championship with stricter regulations such as FWD or RWD only. This was a great championship, congrats to Spec Racer Z, Raider and Randy for their positions, SouthernPotato for organizing the championship, Spec Racer Z and MattKowalski for balancing the cars and all other competitors for, well, competing.
@CreasingCurve is perfectly right with all he concluded. Especially the suspensiontuning should remain in everybodies own hands. The stages were great, really challenging. But I have to say: please no longer stages or as mentioned wider tracks outside of forests. Those countless slight touches with the back if the car resulting in a totaled wreck in ditches or on the next tree, that was frustrating Well, thank you all very much for this 3 rd championship and I'm really looking forward for the 4th
Because of "cheatable content", we cant use our own configs, right? It would be awesome, if we could create our own. But I can imaging, that does not work. But It´s great we can use own liverys.
The suspension tuning isn't focused on making the cars faster, it's to make them able to survive in the first place. The SBR4, LeGran and 200BX are as if you tried to take the slammed version of the modern Pessima rallying. They aren't setup to take impacts and they destroy their shocks on harsh terrain. Tuning the suspension has never been part of the default rally car balancing because they're already tuned to an acceptable base level, but all of the street vehicle conversions have needed adjustments so they aren't launching off of small bumps or breaking themselves. I was able to get the Modern Pessima and Grand Marshall to this base level since they were already built close enough to comfort/street use primarily. I couldn't figure out how to get the SBR4, LeGran or 200BX to that base level of absorption because they use stiffer settings for track use and dampening settings are like a foreign language to me. There's also the fact that a great starting tune will never match individual tuning setups for each track if someone really wants to push for a setup advantage. But TL;DR, we need someone experienced with suspension tuning to help keep the shocks from breaking over harsher rally terrain on the SBR4, LeGran, 200BX or anything else you think can be reasonably rally modified, or verify that it's a mechanical fault of the car itself and not just a setup issue. I'd say that's a good start to aim for, but wouldn't mind moving the date earlier if we're able to get everything prepared over a full week before that date. I thought this was definitely a good selection of track lengths and types. I would agree that Stage 4 was a little bit harsher than we probably want, but still not as frustrating as the tar bushes menace of BRC1. I would say more difficult tracks should be on the shorter side if we have them, as multiple retries of a 1 minute course is much less time consuming than constant restarts on a nearly 4 minute course. Depends on what changes we make to the car list. If we try and have rally and asphalt tire options on all of the cars, that'd take a bit of balancing to ensure it didn't create any performance imbalances. It also takes a little work each season to make sure the track list supports a fair competitive balance for our large variety of cars, as we have a mixture of speed focused and handling focused builds. Plus you never know what a mid-season BeamNG.drive update might do. As for side events, I think we might want to try something that'd suit some kind of one-off event which lasts two-four weeks first. I'm slightly worried we might otherwise spread ourselves too thin as many people already seem to be struggling to find enough time for the primary championship as it is. PS, it was nice not to have any track cutting crises this time around due to more thorough track designing. Some behind the scenes fun facts, the first version of the mixed surface town course had more brutal K-rail placements that made race ending crashes likelier, and we still missed blocking a couple shortcuts that fortunately no one seemed to notice. Thanks for participating everyone, and thank you @MattKowalski for the additional help with the car roster. Spoiler: Behind the Scenes
Alrighty thanks for the clarification. I was thinking you guys wanted me to make rally tunes for each of the cars. I will do a bit of investigating into how i can make the cars survive the torturous terrain. Will probably just be a case of raising ride height, softening up the springs and then copying or replicating the dampening settings from one of the other cars.
Thats why I asked for config our own. If we cant use our own, I would prefer using the standard rally versions of cars, because each user has a different handling because of depending which hardware each user uses etc) - if you know what I mean. So I thinks its 'dangerous' to config cars for other people.
Heyo guys, just want to clear some things. Firstly, I was gone for holiday to Japan, and therefore, no access to my PC at all. Second of all, I actually posted the third run for the Championship, I'll link it down below. And thrid as a rookie (third championship was the first time I join something like this) I enjoyed this championship very much, in my opinion, I think nothing should be changed, It's already incredibly good, but I am not a guy full of ideas and therefore not able to come up with something, I guess I'll let everyone else express their ideas.
Teams for the main championship sound strange to me as I can't imagine most people have teammates in mind. It is an interesting idea that might be fun to experiment with in a side championship thing, if we ever set one up. The etk 800 doesn't strike me as much of a rally car, I suspect the suspension isn't set up (or easily adjusted) for that sort of thing. Thoughts of others? East coast does have some good asphalt sections, I was thinking about trying to put together a course there. Maybe once we have everything mostly in order we should just declare that the championship will start in a week, I guess there isn't a reason to put everything off for almost a month. Though this part of why I think side championships would be good in between main championships (if they don't take too much to set up). Maybe we should plan to do a side championship like FWD v RWD or experimental teams right after this upcoming championship, and then the fifth championship right after that. Does that sound reasonable? Edit: And about the suspensions, tuning was the wrong word. As Spec Racer Z has said, I was hoping you could work with the weaker suspensions to make them viable for rally. The reason I made the rules so that you have to use exactly the premade configs is because the parts are balanced for performance. While it should be fine to change things that don't effect performance, it's difficult to say what does and doesn't effect performance, and how things do effect performance, so I just didn't want to worry about defining rules for it. Do you think you're up to doing the multi tire balancing? Should I get the stages together quickly for you? Thanks for joining, I look forward to seeing you in our future championships Edit: When I announced the last championship and told people to go to the participation thread, I did so once on discord and I also messaged everyone in the group who I couldn't find on discord. Next time should I just message everyone in the group, even if they're already on discord? It makes things a little easier, and some people may have muted the discord
Try suggesting how you think a team championship would work. And cars are ultimately up to the car people, unless you want to put the work in to make the etk 800 rally ready. Please try to keep posts productive.
Right now I'm thinking we could do the JRI Delivery Course as a three to four minutes course, and the JRI Super Car rally as a ~2 minute course. I also put together a mostly asphalt course on East Coast USA that's around three minutes that we might use. That leaves a circuit course, which I don't have any ideas about yet.
I had a bit of time to mess around and tried coming up with a circuit course. Tell me if you like it, maybe it could be adapted into the circuit race? I don't know how to make it into a race, but I'd imagine it's pretty simple. Right now with the two slow, non-rally cars I had sub-2-minute laps, so you could do 2 or 3 laps for the race. It could be shortened by removing the little technical loop if you think that'd be better.
I love the idea of a stage with a jump over that canyon! But I think there should be some thoughts about how to prevent racers to cut corners a lot on that open terrain. Well, maybe video judging will do...
We've been busy with life stuff, perhaps month-on-month-off championships were a little ambitious. I hope to be able to start either next week or the week after that
I did a small bit of testing with the legran a while ago. I can make a config that is rally capable (simply by using race springs and shocks and adding the dried rallypro tyres) but the car will still need to be balanced. It is quite strong and will hold up to whatever the other cars can do. SBR4 though, i didn't bother with. Its not a rally car and i doubt anybody would use it.
