Hello everyone. We decided to try out the development diary format, although we’re not sure if it’s going to be possible to follow a stable posting schedule. We don’t have a designated PR department to take care of content creation 🙂
Last couple of weeks apart from our normal polishing work we had to figure out the best way to handle some features of the engine and tyres.
We had to tackle two problems:
- Make the tyre parameters more simple to implement (trust us – getting dry tyres to realistically lose grip as the track gets wet or vice versa is quite the task, and it is even harder to set up an AI for the bots)
- Set up the effect for the orders we give to our drivers to be positive or negative.
As the driver orders are linked to kerb attacks and more aggressive engine mode, we decided to redesign the mechanics of actions and visualisation of the engine and tyres during the race.
Let’s just cut to the chase.
Here’s how the tyre selection looks now:
First we’ve got resource (as shown by numbers 30.0, 30.0, 61.2 on the screenshot). Every type of tyre has its own base resource, although you can get a certain bonus amount based on the wear resistance parameter of your tyre supplier. In our case, hard tyres gain +1.2 from the supplier’s wear resistance, and rain tyres gain +1.4. It might seem unusual, but the rate of hard and soft tyre wear is going to be the same. The divide between these types of tyres’ resistance to wear is achieved through differences in resource values.
Next in brackets it says how many more laps the tyres are going to last during the current state of the track.
The last parameter is efficiency. Just as the resource, this parameter applies to all types of tyres and shows the absolute efficiency at a given time. As you can see, the soft tyres are much more effective than the hard, and the intermediate and the wet are no good on a dry track. There is temperature indication in brackets, as the chassis have a tyre efficiency on a given asphalt temperature parameter value.
But here comes the rain, and it turns the situation around. The arrow indicator shows that you’ll have to change the tyres to intermediate soon.
The soft tyres are still more effective than the intermediate, but the hard tyres are now lacking. In a situation when there’s heavy rain and no signs of weather improving, a switch to the rain tyres as well could be effective. In two or three laps those would become the most preferable, considering their rain resource (on a dry track 71,4 would be gone in no time).
Now let’s look at how all of this appears in the info panel.
As already mentioned, the first parameter is resource. After that you can see consumption per lap and efficiency values. Fuel, of course, has no efficiency parameter. Every one of the parameters is influenced by several values. For more information on what those are you can hover over the parameter.
Apart from those there’s also the parameter of heat. Tyres can be underheated (efficiency lowered) as well as overheated (tyre wear increased). Engine can only be overheated.
All of the changes we’ve made will in the future allow modders to create custom tyre types. We had that in mind, as we decided to pursue the redesign at a late stage of development.
There’s one more addition we wanted to tell you about. It is the starting year selection screen.
Don’t mind the blue background; at the time of writing this post it is still in development. We made this screen to show players our plans for how the game will evolve in the future.