Hey everyone!

With me aiming for some ambitious project around GP4 game, I've got into some extensive testing of this brilliant game. Right now I'm focused on exploring Magic Data values, and meanwhile I'm taking an overview for every GP4 track to see how good they are at producing exitement AI racing. So, one of the various testings I'm doing is formed like that - I have all the cars with the best bhp/grip values starting at the back of the field, while the cars with the worst bhp/grip starting at the lead. With the grid formed like that I can see how many overtakes can be seen on a certain track, what places are good for that and what causes the cars being tangled up/spinning after the contact. So, with the Long Beach'81 track by Pedro aka Ripping Corpse I've got into real trouble seeing just any succesful overtaking maneuver. Look at this for example:
[youtu.be]
This is what racing at Long Beach'81 is about. The fastest car with 850 bhp (ferrari) cant do nothing against the slowest car 790 bhp (minardi). The only way they seem to overtake each other is bumping in like that:
[youtu.be]
I've spend hours of tweaking this, adjusting MD track grip, drag/downforce, cc-agressiveness/braking range and even tried various slipstream.ini values (only to find out that it was disabled at gp4tweak.ini , so I will continue on testing these later) - but I had 0 success in getting the cars overtaking each other. Which seems pretty amazing for such a long main straight. So I had no other option, but to adjust bhp values exclusevily for this track as a quick workaround, while I can't find a better solution. So, this is how the tool was born. With it you can just make your bhp-range wider across the grid in like two clicks.
DOWNLOAD FROM HERE
Right now it has only 1 function - bhp value tweaking. You can set percentage of how wide do you need your values to be, and also select a maximum bhp value. Note that with the percentage below 100 you'll get your bhp values to be tighter to each other. With the percentage set to 0 you'll get all your bhp values equal to "maximum bhp" value you'll set. And with the negative percentage (below 0) you'll get your former fastest cat to be the slowest, and vice versa. So, use it you feel like your field is getting too fight and the fast cars can hardly overtake the slower ones even on the main straight.

With this tool I was able to get cars into overtaking finally, though, as I said it is a quick workaround. I have plans to get this tool working with individual car-specific values and also to make grip values adjustable as well in the same way as the bhp currently is. Also to make the qualy/race values to be calculated separately. Dont expect the new version to come out earlier than in a month. Maybe you wont find it useful, but anyway, since I've made it - why can't I share it?
Cheers

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For a list of EVERY download for GP4, look here:[docs.google.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/05/2019 09:55AM by Soutsen.

One small bug was noticed and fixed. Now the bhp calculations should work as intended.

___________________________________________________________________________
For a list of EVERY download for GP4, look here:[docs.google.com]

Just out of interest can you post your full performance file? Have you been modding the min/max braking ranges as well?

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Intel NUC 8i3, 8GB RAM, MS Sidewinder Wheel

I tried most of the stuff.

With the rather low CC aggresiveness/braking range (60000) the cars seem to have lower speed at the corners (I had to increase downforce value to make them go a little faster with such low braking value). They seem to have brake earlier and have more bumping into each other at the hairpins, and it leads to make overtaking even harder on this track. Also with this low braking range value there is a higher chance for a T1 pile-up at the Lap 1, and cars staring from the back always have to stop to get into that first corner.

With the values higher than 72000 car seem to miss the apexes due to late braking and crashing at the corners. Btw the dry wing ratios at the MD has like 0 effect on slip-streaming, maybe because it's same for every CC car, though I might be wrong about that. And at the same time I have impression that Downforce/Drag value makes a bigger impact on slip-streaming, with the lower values producing more slip-stream, but again that's just my impression.

At first my perf file was like this:
And it works good often, producing the good ammount of overtaking even at the tracks such as Kyalami'93 and Zandvoort'05. Though as you could see at the videos from above, I couldn't get the cars into overtaking on Long Beach. So I switched to the following later:
Most of the testings with the I did with braking range set to 67500 and rather low Downforce (below 12 or even 10, sometimes having it set to 2). Now I have switched to 69400 braking and 5 downforce, but I still feel lack of overtaking. Though I have some faster cars overtaking the much slower ones now occasionaly, which is fine.

I haven't tested the car-specific braking values just yet, if you're pointing me on that, cos from looking at how the AI works I have a strong feeling that making braking range to be different from one another will lead to the pile-ups, bump-ins and tangle-ups due to difference in braking range. I might be wrong about that - as I said, I just haven't tested it out yet, tbh.

Here you can have my .dat for Long Beach and .md file for it, and my perf files just in case if something is not working:
[www.mediafire.com]

And above all this is a CC-line trouble I think:
Video
This is why you can't see overtaking at the back straight.

___________________________________________________________________________
For a list of EVERY download for GP4, look here:[docs.google.com]



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 09/05/2019 06:15PM by Soutsen.