Page 1 of 1
Posted: 21 Aug 2008, 11:56
Aeon
I've been trying to decide how to handle some things with real-life based cars for a while. Since standard cars use gears, and re-volt cars don't, its really hard to imitate the real life cars properly.

For example, the Dodge Viper is geared with really high gears in 1st, 2nd and 3rd which gives it explosive acceleration, but it has very low gears in 5th and 6th which give it a very high top speed as well. In real life, the car would blast out in the first three gears and then the acceleration would drop dramatically as the car starts climbing to its top speed.

Can't do that in Re-Volt. Since Re-Volt cars only have one gear, I could realistically either make the Dodge Viper have explosive acceleration, or a very high top speed. Not both. Which is annoying.

But the only reason that's the case is because I calculate all of my stats based on things which include gear ratios. The reason I do this is so that I can customize the cars with different stats and the performance results will be adjusted accordingly when I recalculate everything.

I could, instead, skip this whole problem and just calculate the car's stats based on the recorded numbers for the real life cars: top speed and 0-60 times. But it wouldn't be possible to create cars with custom stats that are based on calculated numbers. So boosting an Integra's horsepower from 250 to 405 could only be done by arbitrarily increasing the car's 0-60 time.

(This would actually make it more unrealistic because, realistically, cars which accelerate the fastest from stopped would also take the longest to reach their top speed. Not so with Re-Volt.)

So I'm trying to decide which approach would be better, as I am at the moment feeling a bit awkward with my Dodge Vipers being the slowest accelerators in the game - which would be totally realistic assuming you always drove the Viper in 6th gear.