Making setups more accessible

[Erlan88]

Hi guys,

I don't know where to write this but here it goes.

As a die hard sim racer, I like how you brought a wider audience to the genre. However I would love to see you democratized setups in consoles.

Some place in project cars 2 in the menus to have a pit lane area, where people can share setups and easily load them on cars. Moreover, in the leaderboards the ability for people to make their setups public if they want and for people to actually copy the setup they wish to try out.

A nice looking area where you would see your driver character, standing next to the pit crew looking at the selected car and where you could browse a bank of community generated setups for different races. Qualifying, short races, stability etc...

I think it would make the game even more engaging and bring on-board or make the game ever friendlier to people who don't like the default setups and find the going on the web and manually copying setups comber some.

Ultimately, it's about the driver and you could see people who enjoy sharing their setups take more notoriety in the community and help lenghten and broaden the game.

I would gladly share more of this idea should you ever want more feedback, all I want is this game to be legendary.

Setups are a huge part of the game and making it take a more approachable stance would be a winner in my opinion. I don't know about you but it's over 25% of my time in PCars

Moreover, once you copy the setup, have a skippable animation where you see the crew work on each part of the setup and their progress so that everyone can enjoy seeing a car being worked on but also how it is actually performed. Like how gearing changes are made, toe, camber and all of that so that people can actually understand what is being physically tweaked on the car.

Keep up the good work and long live !

[Roger Prynne]

Setups are very much improved in pCARS2.

[Erlan88]

I have to admit I am underwhelmed to say the least by this response. I was sent to post this here after flying it by a project cars official and was expecting a bit more of an open ear rather than a thank you but go away.

[Ryzza5]

Thanks for taking the time to share those ideas here. I'm not sure exactly how it will all be presented as far as animations etc go, but I have read posts saying how Setups will be shareable, an external sharing website won't be required, and ease of use targeting a more casual audience is all in the works for Project CARS 2. No doubt the team will be eager to see what players think of it.

[hkraft300]

Don't care for the animations but what Ryzza5 said about the setup sharing is the big step. It's been mentioned/revealed for pcars2 but any detailed gameplay/functionality footage is yet to be released by SMS.
Right now on console I'm sending screenshots of my pcars setups for my mates to copy them manually.

[bradleyland]

Sharable setups are going to be huge. I used to play a sim racer called Live for Speed, which had the ability to "send setup" to anyone in the game. Practice sessions take on a whole new dynamic when you're hanging out with some friends, tweaking & exchanging setups.

It's also a great way for newcomers to learn how setups affect the car. I've spent many a night in a PSN Party with someone new to setup tuning trying to verbally explain what settings to change. It's a bit... uh... cumbersome. It'd be really great to simply create a setup and send it to them so they can try it out immediately.

[hkraft300]

Used to do that! It's fantastic.
2 guys in a private lobby running test laps. We'd diverge on setups, one might find a tweak that works and the lap times drop so we share it and vice versa.
It's double the development time.
But yes the setup sharing will be fantastic. Guys running default setups won't be disadvantaged if they're struggling for test time but want to race competitive.
I enjoy shooting a base tune for guys who are struggling for a league race, just as much as finding someone 3+ seconds faster than me to do some laps in my setup and give me feedback to improve it.

[moustace]

Don't care for the animations mentioned in the opening post, but I'm really looking forward to the setup improvements in pCars2.

One thing I hope is better are the explanations for every setting available. Right now they are a bit difficult to understand, took me forever to figure out which way to drag the slider in some of them. For instance, the camber the description says 'Increasing the camber angle can have a positive effect on but may impair acceleration and braking', but if you drag the slider to the right (which sounds like increasing to me) the negative angle gets smaller.

And the description on limited slip acceleration lock says 'High settings here gives the car better traction coming out of corners, but limit your ability to turn. Lower settings reverse this making it easier to turn but with the possibility of wheelspin on exit of tight corners' which is the opposite of what it should say.

[hkraft300]

Yes and no.
Agree "increasing camber angle" can be misconstrued as "increase towards positive" for those not in the know. The use of the word "magnitude" may make it a touch more accurate. Getting a better understanding of alignment settings need diagrams and can get very in-depth with suspension and tyre kinematics.
Same as differentials. Just have a search for the diff talk in the garage section.
The explanations are probably too basic and therefore can easily give the wrong idea. If you're getting into tuning there's a fair bit of study involved: which will be more or less negated by setup sharing for most.

[bradleyland]

One thing I love about pCARS is that they use the actual units & measurements you'd find on a real car. I hate how certain competing sims *cough* AC *cough* use generic numbers. What the hell does "7" mean? I really hope pCARS 2 keeps the actual units, even if the learning curve is a little steep.

What's really required is that the player do some reading/watching about how actual suspension systems work. It might not be a bad idea for SMS to create a small learning resource, with video content that covers the very basics of each adjustment. Digging around on the internet, things can get deep pretty fast.