Originally posted by Cool Matty
Psh, Cruisin' USA was much more realistic. A school bus can beat anything any time of the day.

Originally posted by jEDIkIRBY
It's a racing SIMULATION. You obviously suck at the SIMULATION aspect of the game, not the game itself. Arcade mode is simplified, and equalized. My father can beat me at GT3 with just about any car in the same category as my own, simply because he's got driving skills. This game is about practice, and learning the dynamics of the car you own, NOT about flying down the straight aways and owning everyone immediatly.

JediKirby

Ok, explain to me why when I race my favorite car, the Pontiac GTO, I usually get first or second place? But when I race a POS Honda Civic or those minivan/suv/unsafe for American road foreign POS cars, I lose left and right? Oh wait, it's cause it's a crappy car.

Originally posted by THRAWN
I suck at the straight aways. If my car isn't fast, I get my butt kicked. When I drove the Civic, I could pass alot of cars on the curves, but once the road got straight, they'd whoop me. Even now in the Toyota Supra, I'd tear them up on the curves and then tear them up on the straight away.

This post will not cover basics, we all know that weight is bad, power is good, and stickier tires are heaven. This will not tell you how to tune your car, what settings to use or what to upgrade, but it will tell you what everything does, so you can look at your car and make changes according to what you want it to be doing.

That being said, the next section is

Weight(advanced):

There are three different types of mass in a car, sprung mass, unsprung mass, and rotating mass. GT3 only lets us look at two of them(and its not like you can really mess around much with your unsprung weight anyway, at least the kind that also isnt rotating).

As a general rule, rotating wieght is about four times as hard to move as sprung weight. Weight reduction reduces sprung weight. Rotating weight reductions are found in the flywheel and the driveshaft. These, along with a new clutch, are the first upgrades you should put in a car(if they can go in). They make your car easier to turn, increase acceleration, and decrease shifting time. They are almost always a win win situation.

A new clutch must also be added when you upgrade the flywheel. The flywheel is what keeps the engine from stopping when you let off the gas, it slows the acceleration of the engine, but gains momentum, so that when the gas is gone, the engine still turns. A heavier flywheel keeps your engine from going down in revs too slow. This is nice in a driving car becuase it allows nice, leisurely shifting. **** them bones, we want to shift fast, and that means we want revs to drop as fast as possible to the next shift point, and that means we want the lightest flywheel we can find. When you arent gassing, you are losing speed faster. Which is also, in my book, a good thing. The clutch comes in because it is the thing that connects the rest of the car to the engine, the better clutches have higher C(f), which means they can handle more power without slipping. Which means they will engage right away and stay there, keeping our flywheel from reving too low when shifting and slowing us down or slipping when engaging if its too high.


Things to not do when adding power advances.

1. Put a large turbo on a small engine, the power loss will be so great in the low range due to having to wind up the fans that you may never get to the high RPM's. Similarly, keep the stock small exaust to increase back pressure.

2. Put anything larger than a stage 1 exaust on a stock turbo system. Turbo systems rely on exaust gasses to power the fans, this means they rely on that backpressure. It may get you a few extra HP, but it will drop your torque in the low range to the floor, because you cant move the fans of your turbo fast enough. Back pressure is essential to turbocharged engines, and unless its tuned well you will have a net decrease in power over your range by adding the larger exaust. Which can be killer without a tuned transmission.

3. Never supercharge a high reving engine

4. The more expensive/less power increases are worth the money, they are generally low end power loss free, if you have the cash, these are much more rewarding in the "fun with the game" sense.

5. Never tune your cars to stupid amounts, its lame, learn to drive


Suspension work:

Its hard to mess up when adding power to a car, not so when tweaking a suspension.

The different aspects of the suspension are

Shocks/Struts, springs, ride height, toe, camber, anti-roll bars.

Springs first, they are up top: Springs are what hold your car off the ground, and return your car to its original seat. Spring rate does a number of different things in a number of different situations. The first and foremost is to keep your car from bottoming out. The second is to return your wheel to its original position after a bump or dip. And the third is to adjust the amount of weight transfer when braking and accelerating. This last one means that FF, AWD, and FF cars will have different spring settings.

The first thing to note is that weight transfer is good to a point. When you brake, you want the weight to go to your front wheels, this is because your front wheels are the wheels that steer the car. If your springs are too stiff in the front, this is reduced, which will make the car harder to turn. If the springs in the front are to soft then you are going to nose dive and lose too much traction in the rear of the car, increasing the chance of spining out if you brake and turn at the same time.

FF: FF cars are the anomaly, as they drive off the front wheels, when accelerating, if the back springs are too soft the car will lose traction in the front. FF cars are generally best tuned with stronger rear springs and softer front springs, this keeps wieght as forward as possible, so that the car does not lose traction as easily when accelerating or turning.

FR: FR cars will usualy have stronger front springs than rear. This is because all the weight is in the front(so its easy to get the weight up front for turning) and the drive wheels are in the rear. If your rear springs are too strong you will not be able to transfer weight to the rear of the car and your acceleration and traction will suffer.

MR: MR are generally even sprung, they have a difficult time getting weight forward as the engine is not in the front, so if you are having trouble moving wieght forward you may want to reudce the front spring rate.

AWD: AWD cars are also generally even sprung, becuase they can easily get weight forward(more are not mid-engine, though some are), and drive on both the front and rears. They however can suffer from both the problems of the FF and the FR, if they dont have Limited slip differentials, letting the weight shift in straight line acceleartion in one way or the other too much will result in slower acceleration. VCD's alieviate this somewhat.

Ride Hieght: Ride Hieght is simple, you want it as low as possible without bottoming out or letting your tires hit the wheel wells. The bumpier a course, the higher your ride height should be, with similarly softer springs.

Shocks(simple): Shocks work in conjunction with springs to alieviate bumps. If you hit a bump with just springs your car will bounce... and bounce... and bounce some more. You have surely experienced this with an older car with worn out shocks or a newer car meant for old people, like a Buick. Shocks are the force that stop this. Stronger shocks will resist the force of the spring more. If your car is "boingy" increase the shocks, if your car bounces when it hits bumps, it might be the shocks resisting too much.

Shocks(advanced): With the nice suspension, you get to mess with each individual aspect of the shock, meaning the bound and rebound.

Bound is the amount your shock resists the compressive force. So if its too low, your wheels may hit the wheel well or the stops. If its too high your car will bounce when you hit a bump

Rebound is the amount your shock resists expanding force. This should be 2-4 times the bound value. If this is too high, your wheel will not go down into a dip like it should, if its too low, your car will be subject to your springs much too much.

Yea, shocks are easy, shocking!

Next comes camber. Camber is best displayed as "tire splay". Increasing the camber will tilt the top of the tire in towards the car and the bottom of the tire out away from the car. This has the effect of lowering the profile of the tire on the road, meaning that there is less tire contact with the road. This reduces traction in a a straight line, and makes the car more stable in a straight line. This is because there is less tire to get pushed around on the road and slightly more centerfugial force from the wheel. Now then, if camber decreases traction, why would we ever want it? Well, remember that the amount of rubber on the road changes as the weight shifts. So an increase in caber will generally increase traction in a corner, until you get to the point where the weight shift is not enough to put the rubber on the road. This means that softer spring rates and heavier cars will require more camber. So if you are losing traction in the back or front when braking and turning into a corner, then you may want to increase camber. Also note, that camber is increased on the front wheels when they are turning. This can be seen by stopping your car and looking at the front wheels then turning them side to side. They will splay a bit, increasing camber increases this effect. This is a reason that camber is generally larger on the front tires. Becuase this effect is very important to turning when weight is shifting. Camber works basically the same way for all drive types and is also one of the hardest things to get right. The most important part of dealing with camber is try and try again. Camber should have little to no effect on the turning radius, oversteer or understeer, only traction on the wheels when turning. Now, as will be explained later, this is a factor in those effects, however camber wont have much of an effect unless you are losing traction.

Toe: Toe is probably the easiest and largest modification to your suspension you can make. It works very simply, toe in, points the front of the tires in to the car, and toe out points the front of the tires away from the car. Again, in a straight line, this doesnt have much of an effect, though it will make it easier or harder to recover from turns.Toe in, when turning, will reduce understeer and increase oversteer. while making the car less stable in a the straights(easier to turn). Similarly will a toe out increase understeer and decrease oversteer while making the car more stable in the straights(harder to turn). If your car revovers too easily from movement or wont recover from movement you want to mess with the front toe settings. The back wheels have the most effect(because you arent steering with them). Rear toe out will make the back end easier to bring around a corner, this is very good on front wheel drive cars, as it will counter some of the understeer, and toe in will reduce oversteer, while making the car more stable in the straights(pretty much the opposite of front toe settings). This is easy to see by imaging how a car will turn with the toe settings by only using one side of the car, positioning the wheels straight and then pushing forward(do this in your mind). Left side of the car for a right turn and right side for a left turn.


Stabilizers: Stabilizers are similar to springs, they keep the car even from side to side, they do this by pushing the opposite wheel closer to the chassy when one wheel is pressed heavily. If you are experiencing too much body roll, it is generally better to increase strength to the stabilizers rather than the springs, this is because the springs are nessesarily soft or hard to facilitate weight shift when braking, and stiff stabalizers wont change that. While they will reduce weight transfer side to side under heavy cornering, allowing the car to use all four wheels to turn. Similar to shocks, strong stabilizer settings will most likely reduce the camber you want to run, and are only suggested if you are having problems with body roll.

Brake Balance: Brakes are a simple thing until you start turning. As a general rule, tuning your brake balance up is good, and tuning it to even levels is good. However, modifying your brake balance will change the handling of a car when braking and turning. If you have heavier balance in the front, your front wheels will slow down faster than your rear wheels, turning the car in toward the turn more, and if you have stronger rear brakes this will keep the car going straighter when you brake. Beware adding too much to the rear over the front, if you add too much you can lock the rear wheels and lose traction, which will do the opposite of anything you have ever wanted.

Downforce: Downforce is another realativly easy tune, it should be as low as possible while still holding the car to the pavement. This is becuase the application of downforce slows your car in two ways. The first way is by adding extra wind resistance (the 2j doesnt have this problem), and the second way is by reducing the deformation that your tire can achieve. Tire deformation happens when you are traveling very fast, and is basically the centerfugial force of the tire forcing the rubber into an ovoid shape. This can easily be seen by looking at stills of high speed drag racers. The tires deform to roughly twice their resting size! Softer tires deform more than harder tires, which is why softer tires will yield higher top speeds than softer tires. Downforce, also increases the wear on your tires, as there is more force being applied to them (extra "normal force" from the traction information), which heats them up faster, which makes them go away faster. Downforce however, does hold your car to the road, so is great for long sweeping turns connected by short straights. But still, the trick is finding what is nessesary and not going over.

Tires: As above, softer tires allow for a greater top speed because they deform more from centerfugial force. They wear out faster though.

Specific info on tires is pretty simple many cars tires will wear out in un-even distributions, a FF car is almost 100% likly to lose the front tires before the back tires, the solution to this is to put softer tires on the rear so that they wear out at the same time, this also goes the opposite for many FR cars, though in heavy braking situtations, or tight courses, this can cause problems as the softer tires on the front become useless too early.

Driving Aids: Driving aids are generally a bad thing, the driving aids work by applying brakes to areas of the car that are having problems. For instance, if you are understeering out of a left hand turn the driving aid will brake on the front right tire and left rear tire. This is bad because it slows you down. It is however good, because it reduces the chance you will understeer off the corner. Driving aids induce uneven tire wear, which is another negative. And once you get to the point where you are tuning your car heavily and tweaking it to be just right in different situations (you have three set up tabs to use after all) i suggest not using them, except maybe for traction controll(which will reduce power to the rear wheels when they slip). All in all, they are very self explanitory, and they always slow you down.

VCD: This handy controller will allow you to make an AWD car handle more like an FR car. (or MR car) the less front distribution the more like an FR car. Adjust appropriatly

AYC: I have never had any personal experience with automatic yaw control, though it is supposed to control torque between the left and right wheels(sort of like an intelligent LSD), which is a good thing. If anyone has anything else to add, let me know, cause i have never messed with them. However, they should increase power to wheels that are moving slower, and that can have problems and benefits.

LSD: this is the reason this "guide" has taken so long to write, yes, taht is me not wanting to write this section. That is becasue limited slip differentials are very complicated and it takes some explaining to get the idea through.

First, some basics of turning. Take two of your fingers and set them an inch apart, now draw a circle with an inner radius of once inch. When looking at what you have just drawn you should notice that the outside circle is much larger than the inside(duh) and that the circumferance is larger(also duh). However, what many people fail to grasp, is that a car traveling along that circle, cannot simply turn the wheels and have it work, the tires have to be rotating at different speeds, in our case, the outside tire has to be traveling twice as fast as the inside to complete the turn. This applies to the front and rear wheels. What limited slip differentials do is counteract this. So why would we ever want to counteract that ability?

Well, first we need to look at how a normal differential works. "Normal" differentials are called "open" differentials(as opposed to a closed differential). This is a decent depiction of what is happening. The short way around it is to say that an open differential will put different amounts of power to each wheel, alowing them to spin at different speeds. This is essential to the ability of an FF car turning, as well as other cars(differentials only go on the drive wheels). However, an open differential has the tendency to put more power to the wheel that already has more power or is spinning faster. This is the problem, for when you turn, the wheel that loses traction will most likly start to spin faster. This is almost always the inside wheel. Now, going back to our circle diagram, we can understand what happens if the inside wheel starts to travel faster than the outside wheel, or even faster than half the speed of the outside wheel. Now i mentioned a closed differential a bit ago. A closed differential is one that is locked at a 50/50 power distribution, meaning that the wheels always spin the same speed, no matter how much traction one has. This is a great thing in a straight line, and a terrible thing in a corner(remember the circle?). So what we need is something somewhere in between, and the LSD is just that, it allows the wheels to spin at different speeds, but limits the amount of power one wheel can attain.

Now, there are three aspecs of the LSD's in GT4.

Now, a higher number means that the LSD will be applying closer to 50/50 distribution at that differential.

Initial torque: This is the strength of the LSD that is always applied, cornering, braking, whatever, doesnt matter. Lower numbers are usualy better on pavement. However tweaking it can be usefull. This means that when not applying power of braking(ie, revs are staying the same) is the amount of slip that can be applied. Lower numbers mean that the differential is closer to an "open" differential, and higher numbers mean that the differential is closer to a "closed" differential. Low numbers are good, because it allows you do power off while still maintaining speed in a corner to reduce understeer or increase oversteer. Higher numbers will prevent that

Acell: This is the strength of the LSD when accelerating, The same was with the Initial torque, a higher number means that the differential is closer to 50/50, and a lower number closer to an open differential. This is the most critical aspect of the LSD. As turning while accelerating is such a crucial aspect of race driving. As with all the other types, increasing the strength will make the car understeer more.

Decell: The strength while decelerating, the least critical aspect of the LSD. It works just the same as the others, increasing it will cause the car to understeer more while braking, and decreasing it will add more understeer.

The most important part about making changes to your car however, is to do one thing at a time, this way you can know exactly what change caused what deviation from your previous driiving charactersitics.

I hope this has increased your knowledge of how the systems in GT4 work togother, and a little bit better understanding of cars and racing. If you wish to add anything or change anything or call me an idiot and tell me why i am wrong, go right ahead.

Originally posted by Master Tonberry
How does it compare to GT3?

Originally posted by Spork
It hasnt been released here yet, Tonberry, but every opinion seems to be it is just more of the same. A lot more.

If you liked GT3, you'll like GT4. If you didnt, it wont convert you. If you want the best marketed racing game of all time, go get it. Now. If you dont like racing games, save your money for something else.