My Diaries

A Lurid Tale of Obsession, Depravity, Wits and Attempted Wit

Wed Jun 9, 1999

Thoughts about tuning, when I was asked about NSX bouncing problems

Ahem. I play a lot, but don't have a lot of talent and have little theoretical knowledge behind my tuning. That's why I qualify a lot of the following with "I think".

You should refer to:

http://home.att.net/~chmilnir/gt/

which features a tuning guide.

The only NSX I have bought is the special model. I hated it[*] and did badly with it. Yes, lowering the damping usually prevents the bouncing you describe. Increasing damping doesn't usually seem to work properly; I think the game simulation is not so accurate wrt to dampers, especially with excessively light cars. This "bouncing" is not a realistic phenomenon (although it arises because of a need to visually exagerrate car responses, in order to provide sufficient feedback). And, strangely, the bounce seems to occur when the dampers are *higher*. And it seems the game does not provide enough resolution for damper settings; if they had reduced your available gear settings by a factor of 10, they might have freed up a lot of bits for use in such things.

So, in short, I don't know.

[*]Actually, I sort of like it in the "International" Series; it seemed very good at SSR11, with near-stock settings. Although it would bounce horribly if you did hit the kerbs, the steering was so precise you could avoid doing so.

I used to use a lot of stabilizer (e.g. 5of5 hard). The consensus is that the numbers in all three stabilizers types are the same; soft is just cheaper, while hard gives you the same choice, and more. Now I use less; this generally seems to give cars more grip, making them slide less soon and thereby increases cornering speed, even though more body roll on the suspension is visible, especially in replays. (In constrast, a car with high stabilizers is like a go-kart, seeming to slide early, but when learning I found this gave extra feedback).

From what I read other places, (e.g. above) it seems that stabilizers make suspension "less independent". But on the other hand, I think minor problems with the algorithms for depicting the car motion can make the motions caused by too much stabilizer look like those for too little. E.g. with too little stabilizer, you might, in real life, get an inside wheel lifting without causing roll of the entire car, (although the body may roll a lot on the suspension) but with too much stabilizer, an inside wheel lifting will want to make the entire car roll (I think). But I think the game's depiction of both situations is pretty similar, making diagnosis difficult.

So my main hint (in addition to the above URL) is that you, counter-intuitively, might want to try reducing dampers but leaving the springs high. High spring values do not seem to cause as much oscillation as you would in real-life expect.

I now have one last race-series prize car to win. The yellow '91 Skyline in the Tuned Series (which I like to refer to as the "Abnormal" series).

After that I may investigate NSX's more. Though the first project would probably be trying a TypeSZero in the Normal Series.

(I don't suppose I'll ever seriously pursue all gold license tests; that could be very frustrating experience, I think).