(Before I start, apologies for long post, but I think you might find it interesting).
Generally I only race 17% races Tom. I know that skews things a bit, but I have to sleep etc and I'm hoping that when (if) I can pin the mathematics down it's easy to extend the principles out to 100% races.
I did make some progress yesterday. On the basis of the 520/140000 midpoint giving a nice balanced start line dash in my '78 mod I put that info back into my spreadsheet and created a new set of PFs based on the real world F1 results but anchored around that 520/14000 midpoint which informs what I call the four 'range anchors' in my spreadsheet, ie max power, min power, max grip, min grip. Then I ran a race.
Several incidents occurred in the second half of the race (because by now I had re-injected failures and variabilities back in the PFs - actually I forgot to take them out), but until the midpoint things ran exactly according plan. Indeed for more than one lap my four cars were in exactly the positions that I had predicted they would be and they looked set to stay there. Andretti's car felt nice but not ridiculously solid to drive and Jabouille felt OK, ie it was noticeably harder to drive than Andretti without being impossible. Overall, so far, I'm quite pleased.
TBH I'm a bit tired now and there's a large backlog of non-GP4 things I should be doing before tomorrow but what I'm planning to do next is to load up the '98 mod and repeat what I did above until I find the appropriate grip midpoint for the start in that mod. It should be easier this time. Then, once that's done, it'll be a simple task to compare the '78 & '98 outcomes and give my spreadsheet a set of rules to automatically assign the appropriate grip midpoint to all the mods in between.
Remember that I am working on the basis of gradually increasing the power by a factor of somewhere around 1.5% each year to give a linear progression, with a similar in concept but different multiplier being applied to the grip (which currently has a progression of about 0.7%/yr). Maybe one day I'll be able to build in quirks like rules changes etc to account for the years when the progression wasn't so linear, but certainly for now I just want each mod to drive and feel like it's part of a coherent set of mods that offer a strong sense of progression through the years - and most of all I want to resolve the 'too fast at the start line' flaw that affects so many mods.
The figures above and ever changing, but in 78 (so far), Mr Average will be getting default power of 520 and a grip of 14000 or thereabouts (it actually ends up being a bit less in the final PF), whereas in the 98 mod I'm expecting Mr Average to end up with something like, say, 700/16300, which would put 2004 (the newest year I've ever looked at) at about 770/17000. I pretty much have all this done at this point and it definitely generates some very refined results, but obviously there's a lot more work to really pin it down and the spreadsheet remains (and probably always will remain), a horribly complicated beast that only I could understand. Seriously! Even if I leave it alone for a couple of days I have to spend an hour or more re-learning how it works, as values are influenced by one set of modifiers before being changed by others etc etc. It's like a bowl of spaghetti and probably massively over-engineered TBH, but it's become an addiction (and I've always been a spreadsheet fetishist in any case!).
There is one big problem which I have uncovered however and I'm wondering if you can shed some light. In each race I did yesterday when the AI took control of one of my (effectively de-tuned) cars (520/137xx), it drove it quicker than me AND quicker than it was able to perform in the 520/14000 CC default ones. I just don't understand that, do you? It's not a showstopper but it's certainly an issue I hadn't really noticed before and a big mystery to me at this point - and currently I have no idea how to resolve it - although there will certainly be a way to compensate or hide it in my spreadsheet in time. Ideally though, I'd like to know how that particular behaviour is governed. Why does the AI do better when it's standing in for me than it does in it's own cars? It's like I'm missing an unknown variable somewhere. I'll continue to work around it for now but it would be nice to root it out. I'm thinking it might be something in the MD file but I'm trying not to bring them into my focus at this point.
I'm not sure if I've mentioned this on the board (because it's a bit controversial) but my current thinking is that
PFs and MDs should be considered to have two distinct and NON-overlapping functions:
1.
PFs govern the performance of cars and drivers relative to each other. They have nothing to do with re-creating real world lap times. They are simply there to create a range of power/grip values to regulate the spread of laptimes through the field. (And regulate failures and other stuff, but that's not relevant here). The main point here is that RANGE that they create.
2.
MDs are entirely circuit oriented and have nothing to do with driver/car/team performance (relative to other driver/car/teams). The MDs are there to fit the RANGES created by the PF
into the track behaviour as defined by the MD (ie using the track grip and grip factor values, predominantly) ,
ie this is how and where actual real-world laptimes should be simulated.Anything else and we're stuck with the start line acceleration issue. That's my thinking.
Now, as I see it Tom, you have a really good feel for MDs and I know you must have laid out a ton of effort creating the ones you have. However, I'm hoping that
if I can make PF creation a more or less standardized procedure it might then be possible to simplify the creation of MDs too. Eventually, as a result of what I'm trying to do, we might end up with a working model whereby when you create an MD for one particular track year, you will be able to generate modified MDs for all other track years automatically and simultaneously. I'm not sure how yet, but that's the idea. You'll still need to make adjustments for year specific anomalies, such as rain chance or the track being resurfaced in such and such a year etc, but the core factors of track grip, CC grip and default gearing could be informed by the power/grip ratio to be found in the PF - then voila, the start line acceleration issue can be put to bed and we can all get back to some great racing!
That's ultimately where I'd like us to arrive. It may well be (in fact it probably is to some extent) an unrealistic goal, but for me personally, I do get tired of editing and re-editing MDs (especially the CC grip factor values) over and over as I refine my performance calculator and change the PF values.
Just for context, let me remind you that currently my PF calculator automatically generates a PF based on real world historical F1 results for each race* (along with an incidental generic year average PF like a lot of the older mods have). Once I enter the historical results set for a given season it takes about ten minutes to arrive at a full set of PFs, which is the time takes to copy and paste the PFs into the 17 or however many PF files. Unlike most calculators it takes into account Q times and FL times but ALSO position achieved, as well as failures and variability. There are other things too (the secret sauce), but that's the core of it. When I look at my database of results (which increases rapidly owing to my tendency to do short races) it's very accurate. (It easily expands accurately to 100% races by the way). It's not that accurate PFs haven't been made before, there are plenty out there, (especially after '94), but it's the idea that we can maintain a consistency of feel, (esp. at the start line), between each mod year which I think might be unique.
Maybe at some point in the future we might work together on this Tom? How about we identify a couple of older mods around the same period with defaults we don't care for - and create something to really bring them forward as a 'matched pair', you might say. It's not like we'd need to bother with permissions as it would just be a few PFs and MDs.
Maybe most won't care or even notice the difference, I don't know. But I'm sure there are plenty of others out there who would appreciate it.
Finally, I guess I should add, what I'm doing is in no way intended to overrule or over-ride anyone else's efforts in this arena and I'm not trying to cast myself as some kind of expert either. I'm not. I'm just an obsessive tinkerer doing what I can to improve the GP4 experience for myself, primarily - and ultimately if anything good can be passed on into the community it's just a bonus and freely given.
* To be precise, the real world results are modified slightly, in that extremely bad Q and FL results are modified fit within a range I call "max Q and Max FL". This is because if you let a 5 min FL time through when everyone else managed to get round in 1 min it completely ruins the whole PF range spread. In other words if the real world FL was 1:02.00s and the 21st FL was 1:03.00s, the driver who recorded a FL of 5 minutes (because he, say, got a puncture on the second lap and retired shortly after) is modified to read 1:04.00s. All rough figures obviously, but indicative. Apart from eliminating anomalies like that, it's all based on historical real world results. Make sense?