Car Difficulty

[alanrotoi]

Is it possible to make a standard appretiation of the car driving difficulty?
Some of the parameters to take in mind are:
GRIP: it would split in 5 (intrinsic, asphalt, dirt, ice and grass) and airborne but only few cars used it.
Power Gear: makes the car a bit harder for exploiting the bug.
Also we have breaks, power, top speed, number of gears, air drag and in a minor scale of difficulty height, size.

Also there are special details of the cars like Speedgate's 1st supergear, Pontiac Firebird's Pursuit mode or Ford Crown Victoria's speed boost.

There are more details and parameters for sure, let's complete the list but now let's focus on the difficulty scale. In Short terms:

Difficulty increses when:
- high speed
- low grip
- low height (also it starts to be harder at very high height)
- big car size
- higher number of gears

About gears we could say that 6 gears is the hardest, 5 gears is a normal difficulty and 4 or less is easy.

As for power gear difficulty maybe Anti-PG is the hardest, then Rigid and Flexible is the easiest.
A digital speedometer would make the car experience easier and also other dashboard details (top dashboard, roof, etc).


For example, LM002 probably is the easiest original car because the low top speed (125mph), very high height, high grip over ice and grass, no power gear and 5 gears.

Ferrari GTO maybe is a hard car because of the normal street car grip and normal breaks wich makes very hard to handle in a power gear. Also the power gear is "rigid" so it's hard to reach it. 5 gears, low height (almost as racing cars). Anyway it has the fastest acceleration of the original street cars and a low air drag.

I think a score where 1 is the easiest and 10 is the hardest, divided by five colors easy to identify (green, light green, yellow, orange and red).

[CTG]

First rule (for me, at least ):

Don't touch the Countach!

[Overdrijf]

I think a big factor in difficulty is style of cornering.

The fast car group, the IMSA's and their brethern, tend to be easy to pick up. Basically, when you slide, you went to fast. (Sort of kinda after some simplification). Something like the Carrera, that can slide around the corners, and it's faster than driving it around the corner "IMSA style".

It might just be where you're coming from too. Maybe there are people who learned with the slow cars and have difficulty driving the fast ones, but for most people I think it's the other way around.

So for me I guess the general broad strokes order from easiest to hardest is sort of:

Fast Cars
Indy
Slow Cars
Other Powergear Cars (I was tempted to put these before slow cars, but there is a lot of extra investment in learning the powergear tricks).

The medium cars are a mixed bag, but most have at least one thing that makes them tricky, and a lot more speed than the slow cars. I guess the F40 is one of the easier ones to drive, and even that one feels not as easy as the IMSA's. So a bunch of them might end up at the hardest end. The Superkart as one example of how mixed bag this group is is reasonably hard unless you use automatic gears, then it's basically a fast car. The LM002 and the Ranger and monster truck and such are probably exceptions among the slow cars, they have too much grip for their speed to be very tricky, making them the only group perhaps easier than the fast cars.

So...

Terrain cars
Fast cars
Indy
Some medium cars
Other slow cars
Probably about half of all medium cars, maybe less
Other powergear cars
The rest of the medium cars

?

How to classify that? I think it's a hard thing to put a calculation on. I think for the car cards at the time I was planning to just spitball them into easy, average and expert or some terms like that. Where I guess in the list above average would run roughly from the Indy to somewhere in the "about half of the medium cars" group.

Oh, maybe we could use competition data. If the winner is typically X% faster than the average or the average amateur time, clearly the car is hard to master.

[Daniel3D]

The balance between grip, speed, acceleration and breaking (alongside the other parameters mentioned in the first post) are factual. So we could put them in a formula of sorts and generate an indicator.

PG and Driving in PG is a separate class of difficulty, I think that should be separate from the base difficulty.

[Cas]

This is a very good idea. Each attribute should have a weigh and also, some might be lineal, while others might be more logarithmic or square-root like and others more quadratic or exponential. But... to make it all simpler, I would say start in the other direction: first think of which original cars are harder and which are easier and in which order and with how much "distance" you'd place them and then go and calibrate the attributes so that the cars get sorted that way. You can tune this better by asking several people to list the original cars in this fashion and set up an "average ordered list" before calibrating.

In my case, and thinking quickly from my experience, I find the Acura and the Countach two of the hardest cars to drive, while I feel especially comfortable with the IMSAs... the Jaguar being slightly easier than the 962. The easiest non-fast car to me is the Lancia. I feel that speed only has a negative impact if very, very high and because it's more or less the same for slower speeds, it's easier to pick a faster car, because I feel slow and not-so-slow cars are equally easy to handle, so I prefer then one that's faster from them, but yes, once they get very fast, it's harder to get a good RH replay. Now, very slow cars can also be negative because some stunts are hard to perform with them.

[Overdrijf]

The balance between grip, speed, acceleration and breaking (alongside the other parameters mentioned in the first post) are factual. So we could put them in a formula of sorts and generate an indicator.

But even just the grip is more complicated than the value. The cornering behavior follows in a non-obvious way from a combination of mostly the main grip modifier, the asphalt modifier and the car length, plus some minor factors, probably. And a higher number isn't always better.

I tried this out for the DTM's at the time, and I could swear I found a "sour spot". If you went up in grip value from there you got more grip, but if you went down in grip value you got more warning before spinning out, while on the sour spot itself you had very little warning.

In a more extreme case you get the sliding behavior of a car like the Carrera, you get so much warning that it pays to push deep into the warning and slide around the corner. This is a difficulty (or perhaps more accurately: a skill ceiling) of its own, and its tied to the values in some weird not too closely understood (at least not by me) fashion.

[Daniel3D]

That is a mechanism thing to explore. There is little documented about this. There must be a system to it just like PG.

[Overdrijf]

We might be able to do it the other way around. We rate 100+ cars on their easyness, a thing possible thanks to Ryoma. Then we give a computer program like Mathematica those ratings and a list of things like grip values, numbers of gears etc and task it to finding the best fit for a formula.

Even if we just rate from 1 to 3 stars, the model might actually result in more shades of... easyness. Shades of easyness.

[alanrotoi]

I don't think leaving it to a math is a good idea. I think the human experience must decide. There are only less than 150 cars anyway so it won't be a very hard job. It don't have to be as accurate as god would do, that's why we could use a 1-10 scale where it has 5 different areas or colors of difficulty. It's better and fun this way. Areas, not specific "5.82" points of difficulty... just give the car a 5 or a 6 or a yellow color it will be enough accurate.

Based on what we think what's harder and what's easier we deside.

[alanrotoi]

Thinking about difficulty at firts sight Melange would be a bit easier than IMSA cars (same category and same general difficulty but I'll go in depth just to make a point) because the digital speedometer. But it has also "a remarkable potential for magic carpets." that would make it more difficult. It has an enhansed grip only over ice (and I guess over grass too) that wents to the easier spot again.

I think besides the system we use to rate the difficulty, we should show the easy result (a color, a number, a star) and deploy a detailed list if the user wants to know more. I think it applied into the wiki design, inside the table or in a table below or both.

If you went up in grip value from there you got more grip, but if you went down in grip value you got more warning before spinning out, while on the sour spot itself you had very little warning.

This is a very interesting concept. Is it possible to get and study this part of the code?

[dreadnaut]

Warning, statistical rabbit hole below! Duplode, don't read!

We could generate a series of events, where we ask people to drive two cars, and at the end to vote which was easier or more fun or interesting to drive. ELO ranking for cars, along different dimensions!

[Duplode]

@dreadnaut Ooh, heaven knows I've already been nerd sniped enough times to cover the rest of year 😅

@CTG The Countach surely would score high in quite a few categories  The big question, I think, is: is it harder or easier than the GTO?

[CTG]

@dreadnaut Ooh, heaven knows I've already been nerd sniped enough times to cover the rest of year 😅

@CTG The Countach surely would score high in quite a few categories  The big question, I think, is: is it harder or easier than the GTO?

It depends on the track, whether GTO's steering or the anti-PG effect of the Countach is more annoying.

And don't forget about the psychological aspect: people who annoy me love Countach.   (kidding)

[Daniel3D]

Of all the original cars only the countach icks me. All cars have their subjective strengths and weaknesses. But I don't feel like the countach excels in any way. But it has definitely weaknesses.

The big question, I think, is: is it harder or easier than the GTO?

I don't understand what you mean. The GTO is a good car and a lot easier to learn. It only becomes difficult when you are a way better driver than me.

[Overdrijf]

With the GTO you have a much clearer win condition (after a fashion) than with the Countach. Get to powergear as soon as possible and survive from there.

Now that I think about it, powergear driving is in some ways easier than regular driving. If you get around the corner without dropping out of PG you know you got the best possible exit speed. Your line may not be perfect, but the exit speed is the most important thing. It's more binary than without PG, and especially more than the Countach, with all of its anti-PGness and such. With a car like the Countach you can lose so much time compared to the top drivers in just one corner combination, even if it felt reasonably good.

The Countach is more like real racing, and less like a mobile game with auto-accelerate.