Please find below the official chat transcript of the questions dealt with by Dave Kaemmer in the iRacing Insider event:
“Q: So first question: V8 Supercars
A: I’m afraid I can’t comment on upcoming/unannounced/unknown content, but I can say that our friends down under should be happy about some new developments coming soon. And I have to leave it at that…
Q: Next question I see: what will be the league structure and how will it affect the service?
A: The idea is currently that anyone will be able to administer a league, and the admin will be charged a nominal fee, to keep the numbers reasonable.
The membership will be limited to 30 or so drivers, so sessions can run for the most part without splits. Also, the track schedule will have to follow one of the Official Series schedules, but any car can be chosen by the admin.
And one more thing, no iRating, or SR effects during league races.
Drivers will only be able to participate in one league race a week, although in any league that they have been invited to.
Q: I’ll give an answer on the netcode issues…
A: For the next season, we’ve improved the prediction code, and made some changes to the information transmitted that I think significantly improves the remote cars’ behavior. (more)
We looked at Akamai’s IP acceleration capability, and spent some time and effort getting it to work, but we were disappointed with the results, I’m afraid. But we continue to look at other ways to reduce latency for everyone, and improve the netcode…
It’s a very complex thing to deal with.
Q: I’ll talk about the tire model, brakes, damage, etc. — physics upgrades.
A: My next big project is to improve the tire model. We have so many different vehicles on so many different tires, that we need a model that is more physically based, and less empirical.
The big unknown with tires is really how they behave on the scary side of the slip curve–the “it’s got me” part. It is very temperature and speed dependant, and that behavior is modeled pretty well now, but it could be better.
The brakes also need upgrading–we plan at some point to model the heat buildup, so the braking has some more real-life transient behavior, as well as potentially fade.
For damage modeling, we’ll focus first on the physical effects, and there are several areas here that need work. Obviously we need more aero effect from damage, but we’ve also got ideas about how to better model drivetrain damage.
On the tire data question–we have a lot of great data for several of the cars, but most of what is measured in the real world is the front half of the slip curve (the “I’ve got it” part), and there isn’t much empirical data for the region of sliding.
That affects the transient handling a lot.
Q: What’s going on with the throttle/braking is that it allows you to control the brake bias on the fly.
A: I think it’s probably a legitimate technique, although in the real world, drivers wouldn’t probably want to run enough rearward brake bias in case they got in trouble.
Shane, the burning brakes issue with throttle/braking is not necessarily relevant. The energy from the slowing car would be a lot more than the energy put in from the engine. It’d be interesting to see if this worked in RL.
Q: Telemetry…
A: We’ve got a system in place to export telemetry, but it’s lacking data from several of the components that make up the cars at the moment. We do want to enable that at some point; it will probably dump a .csv file at first. Then pretty interfaces later.
Q: Andre asked about simracers being given opportunities in real cars…
A: We have some programs we’re thinking of that will do just that. Unfortunately, can’t say a lot about them, lol.
Q: Multi-groove?
A: Alright… Currently we don’t have the ability to map different grip levels at a very high resolution, although we can and do do it for several different surface types.
I have been thinking about a way to store a map of additional information at a higher resolution on track, and would like to do this at some point. As the tire model gets better, the roads will need to get better.
Q/A: Short COT no yellows not happening soon, but maybe for fun races. The COT races will be a bit shorter next season, however. I think about 10% or so.
Q: Did iRacing open too soon?
A: I think definitely not. If we waited until everything were perfect, you guys wouldn’t be racing yet. And we might never finish.
We’ve learned a lot from having the service live, and we continue to learn.
- -
I’m sorry I can’t answer all the questions; I do see them in the forums and believe me, we are working on a lot of the things you guys are asking about–or at least it’s on our list to do.
Now we’ve gotta run for the Skippy race–if my SR is high enough…
Thanks to all for coming–I’ll have to do this again.”
- -
Meanwhile, while Dave was busy answering questions, co-founder John Henry was in an overflow chat room, answering some of his own. Among the gems of information given were:
“Australian Server Coming Next Month” – What could John be talking about? Well, we’ll leave you to debate that one for a little while…
“There will be an oval series.” – No, John is not referring to the Star Mazda series…
“COT will be A; Nationwide B” The plan is for the existing Chevy Impala SS “COT” will become a Class B 4.0+ car, and the Chevy Impala SS “Nationwide” car will be slotted in as the Class C 4.0+ car.
“Paypal very soon.” – John confirmed what had already been mentioned in the forum. Paypal will be available from May 1st.
“Nationwide and Spec Racer next season.” – the SCCA Spec Racer is planned to join the Chevy Impala SS “Nationwide” car for 2009 Season 2.
“Needs to be more than monthly.” – Yes, that’s right. We are planning to hold special events and feature specific series where staff – or celebrity race-drivers – will be joining you on-track and maybe taking questions prior to that.
