Race Starts

Why is that every race starts like the beginning of a snail race?

Do not understand . What do you mean exactly?

every race I start the cars pull away as if the start grid is coated in a layer of treacle, there are no fast get aways and darting around as you would expect at a race start.

I'm guessing PO issues at start affecting the frame rate?

Nahh he's talking about the hard-coded AI :/ Basically, this is the hardest part of the ai's actions to program, and considering this game was 11 years ago, they did a pretty good job at it..! Just don't let yourself overtake anyone for the first few corners and it'll be more realistic

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"Anything can happen in Grand Prix racing, and it usually does."
"The lead car is unique, except for the one behind it which is identical."

Depends on the mod as well. Some mods it's hard to beat them off the line, other mods it's easy. Not sure why, although I have found it depends on AI power vs player power.

its something I have noticed from the very first time I played GP4 at launch right the way through to now, using a variety of PC's with the game vanilla or modded. I find that even my car is slow off the line, its not just the ai.

As I said in the other topic, you can adjust desc73 in each track's magic data to make it more realistic.

This value regulates for how long the AI cars will keep a straight line following a start (in segments, not sectors). It varies from track to track, generally from 50 to 180. Giving it a much lower value, like 5 or 10 has a dramatic effect. Cars begin to make moves much earlier following the lights out. Be aware though that decreasing it too much could make them crash into each other before even reaching the S/F line.

To adjust this value, open CMagic, find the .dat of the track you want to adjust (in the first line), click Edit, then Get magic data from track file. Save it, then open it with Notepad, find desc73, edit, save. Open CMagic again, locate the same .dat file in the first line, the newly-created magic data file in the second line, finally click Insert. From here on, you can either use CSM or just GPxPatch alone.

Don't forget also that launch control starts were never that spectacular, everyone will get away at a similar sort of pace until horsepower will dictate the outcome, and that is only after the wheelspin phase is out the way. Watch all starts from that era and most of them are pretty much everyone getting away together.

I did wonder why I used to blast away from 10th/11th on the grid to 1st in the 1983 mod using Mansell's Lotus, and then fall back to 3rd/4th in his Williams in the 1991 mod.