[HN Gopher] Ditch the sim rig and use your car instead (2019)
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Ditch the sim rig and use your car instead (2019)
Author : alavry
Score : 96 points
Date : 2024-08-17 02:09 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (outlandnish.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (outlandnish.com)
| danielbarla wrote:
| This looks like a fun project, but that's about where I'd draw
| the line. A few issues right off the bat:
|
| - In all such comparisons, people conveniently leave out build
| and research time/costs. I suspect that at least a few hundred
| hours went into this project, which would significantly increase
| the cost, if we account for hourly rates. Whenever I've run the
| numbers on similar custom hardware projects, I've come to the
| conclusion that if I'd simply worked the hours as overtime, I
| would be getting a much better product even if I bought high-end
| equipment, and quite a bit cheaper. So, these are strictly for
| people who enjoy the journey, and as such I find such comparisons
| insanely misleading.
|
| - What exactly are the wheels doing, when you're turning the
| steering wheel? Is the car stationary in the garage, or is it
| lifted? I probably wouldn't want to spend dozens of hours turning
| my car's wheels in a stationary position, it puts strain on
| things.
|
| - While on face value it seems like this should be about as real
| as you can get with sim equipment, I'd argue that it's actually
| fairly low- to mid-tier. Neither the steering nor the brake pedal
| will have any adaptive feedback, which is fairly easily
| obtainable with direct drive wheels and in some high-end pedals.
|
| So all in all, quite a cool project, but not particularly useful
| or reasonable, IMHO.
| 000ooo000 wrote:
| >I probably wouldn't want to spend dozens of hours turning my
| car's wheels in a stationary position, it puts strain on
| things.
|
| He blew his engine, at a raceway. Something tells me that
| gently steering back and forth on his garage's polished
| concrete floor isn't something he is concerned about.
| AnthonBerg wrote:
| Learning and building are very rewarding which tips the cost-
| benefit balance here into profit - for me personally!
|
| Re. driving feedback from the controls, near the end of the
| post:
|
| > Next Steps:
|
| > Force feedback support using the electric power steering and
| the ABS module.
| eertami wrote:
| > Neither the steering nor the brake pedal will have any
| adaptive feedback
|
| I think this is probably the biggest disadvantage compared to
| using an actual sim wheel. In the linked video demo it looks
| like the driver is struggling to apply the right amount of
| steering and correcting after the corners. At times the game
| footage looks more like someone playing with a gamepad than a
| wheel.
| tcmb wrote:
| There's been a recent article [1] about a very similar students'
| project at Darmstadt University. Interesting to see that the post
| referenced here precedes this by about five years.
|
| [1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Car-hacking-real-cars-turned-
| in...
| a2tech wrote:
| I've been told that a local wealthy fellow turned his preferred
| racing car into a sim rig when he got too old/rich to risk racing
| it for real. It's in his garage and is up off the ground. The car
| has been completely redone to make it a realistic sim machine--
| screens in the windshields, vibration motors, pedal sensors, the
| works. The person that told me that didn't know how much they'd
| spent but it was in the six figures.
| jrmg wrote:
| I don't like that the Xbox adaptive controller is necessary for
| this. Microsoft gets praise for how it enables alternate
| controllers - and it's great for DIY - but that is only necessary
| because they use a cryptographic protocol to disallow allow
| unlicensed controllers in the first place. There's no reason home
| brew or third party USB game pads should not work on the Xbox in
| the first place. Sony is the same. Nintendo at least, while they
| don't 'support' third party pads, don't use cryptography to
| disallow them.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| I don't own a console, but I always imagined the motivation was
| partially to level the playing field for competitive
| multiplayer games.
|
| I recall playing COD4 online (on PC) and someone had hooked up
| a controller with rapid-fire and was pwning the noobs, quite
| literally.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| I strongly suspect that the reason is more to do with
| producing artificial scarcity of hardware so that they can
| continue their loss-leader pricing strategy. Typical Xbox
| controllers go for PS50 new; that's a quarter of the price of
| the Xbox itself, yet all one gets is a piece of moulded
| plastic with a few buttons on it!
|
| PS. COD4 is apparently set in 2011 - do players not have
| automatic weapons anyway?
| magicalhippo wrote:
| > that's a quarter of the price of the Xbox itself, yet all
| one gets is a piece of moulded plastic with a few buttons
| on it
|
| While I agree that they probably are having a decent profit
| on accessories like controllers, electro-mechanical parts
| are surprisingly expensive in my experience. A good
| potentiometer or joystick can cost way more than the rest
| of the circuit that uses them.
|
| > COD4 is apparently set in 2011 - do players not have
| automatic weapons anyway?
|
| Sure, but with games being games, to make single-shot
| weapons interesting game designers usually make single-shot
| weapons more accurate and do more damage as a trade-off for
| their lack of automated fire. Of course with a rapid-fire
| controller you can get best of both worlds in that regard.
| klyrs wrote:
| I think it's a design mistake to allow single-shot
| weapons to fire as quickly as your input device allows.
| falcolas wrote:
| That is actually how Cassidy works in Overwatch - the
| tradeoff is the exceptionally small hit radius of the
| projectiles. But there are other games where your ability
| to hit buttons quickly matters. Fighting games, for
| example. The recent kerfuffle around Razer's snaptap
| keyboard (and the software version with "Null binds")
| have well demonstrated that technological advantages in
| the controllers bring advantages into the games as well.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| On the flip side, I've played games which ignored the
| "fire" input for N milliseconds after triggering. Works
| well to prevent the issues mentioned, but was highly
| annoying as I would frequently click just a millisecond
| or so too early, and miss the shot.
| batch12 wrote:
| That's one way to get a workout. Without the engine, there's no
| power steering, right?
| spaceywilly wrote:
| BRZ has electric power steering assist. If he puts the wheels
| on alignment pads he should be able to move the wheel easily.
| I'd still be worried about wear and tear on the components (you
| really don't want your tie rods to give out at speed) but it's
| a fun weekend project.
| outlandnish wrote:
| Blog post author here - Didn't expect a hack I did 5 years ago to
| show up here!
|
| This project was a weekend project that I took on. I used to
| professionally reverse engineer cars for building self-driving
| research vehicles for companies.
|
| Here's a demo of it using a VR headset that I made shortly after
| the blog post: https://youtu.be/jfWcgWdSK28
|
| To answer the other questions, I made it work directly with PCs
| as a USB accessory. It doesn't require the Xbox gamepad in that
| variant.
|
| I never bothered building out the FFB for the steering wheel -
| but it would be a nice addition. That said, slightly jacking the
| nose of the car up gave enough resistance on the wheels but it
| was still easy enough to turn.
|
| It's still been a great tool for me to get seat time. Recently, I
| just taught at Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium and the Nurburgring
| in Germany. I used this sim rig setup to get properly acquainted
| with the tracks before teaching in person.
|
| Last, along with a production company in NY, we used the same
| technology in a big rig truck to make it into a super realistic
| truck simulator for Pilot Logistics. I think there's media on it
| floating around the internet somewhere.
|
| Cheers and happy to answer any questions!
| starkparker wrote:
| Reminded me of the Ridge Racer Full Scale recovery/restoration
| story: https://arcadeblogger.com/2022/11/20/the-last-ridge-racer/
|
| In which a very limited edition version of Ridge Racer in arcades
| used a full-size Mazda MX-5 (technically the Eunos Roadster)
| shell and panoramic projection.
| djmips wrote:
| What about the simulated acceleration on the body by tipping the
| sim rig? That's going to be a tall ask in a real car sitting
| still.
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