Our ReVolt Pub

I've been pretty annoyed with the parameter.txt's CoM value for some time, since it appears they programmed it to work the opposite of the way it SHOULD work.

As it is, if you shift the last value of CoM (front to rear) forward, to moves all the weight to the back of the car. So if you want a car that in real-life is rear heavy, that's what you'd do. However, when the CoM is set to put the weight on the rear of the car, this tends to cause the car to UNDERSTEER. Realistically it should be causing the car to OVERSTEER, since the weight on the back is harder to stop when the car turns, and it wants to keep going in the same direction while the front turns. But it doesn't do that. Instead, the added weight seems to give the rear more grip and make it less inclined to slide.

The inverse is also true, a front heavy car is now more inclined to oversteer due to less grip in the back, so the back of the car slides around. Realistically a front-heavy car should be inclined to understeer.

So, yeah. I'm annoyed with it and I've been trying to come up with some good ways to counter this without messing things up too much. I don't like messing with tire friction values to try and achieve this effect either. I've started messing with axle friction and things like that to see if I can come up with a better way to handle it, but so far, nothing.

I'd really like to have the weight distributed accurately on the car, since this effects the suspension which I already have based on realistic spring rates and such. But the suspensions will never be quite right if the weight of the car isn't distributed to the proper side.

Just wondering if anyone has any novel solutions for fixing this.

Have you tried to change the mass of the wheels?

Actually I'm thinking maybe I'm just wrong and front-heavy cars ARE supposed to oversteer more than rear heavy ones. Reading up on car performance and asking other people I know seems to contradict what I've thought all along, that rear-heavy cars would oversteer more. Maybe I've just told myself that for so long I started to believe it.

But I guess reading up on it, WRX STI is inclined to understeer (but you can torque-steer through turns), while the Lancer Evo is the one that has the awesome maneuvering abilities and the possibility of oversteer. I've had it the other way around.

Either way, Nissan 240SX is darn fun to drive with my new settings.


Incidentally, tire mass seems to only effect how fast that tire will fall - of course, that pulls the car down with it. But aside from that it doesn't effect much else.