Spilling beans
Don’t know how much I should spill the beans to be honest. But…
I started working on the Vehicle Dynamics Model (bar the Tyre Dynamics Model) on my break last Christmas for Track Evolution™ and since I don’t have any real data for race cars (apart what’s already been published in some of my vehicle dynamics engineering literature) I use Assetto Corsa to guide me as my ground truth until I can collect my own data. I basically take the parameters in the mod files and the output from the telemetry in AC and compare it to the same parameters and telemetry in TE. While not being linear systems it should work out according to control theory anyway and it’s essentially the same way teams do it in real world racing. Except that they have real cars for the ground truth. Exactly how we go about simulating the vehicles, taking the input parameters and producing the output, is different between my VDM and the one in AC. The same way a real car is different to a simulated one.
I have also started working on my track pipeline in Unreal Engine. I have been sourcing a lot of aerial LIDAR scans of tracks that are freely available. My two test tracks so far will be my local stomping ground Mantorp Park and not so local Zandvoort (of course I don’t hold any license for their likeness yet) because the Swedish and Dutch governments and surveying agencies are great in that regard. The Dutch especially. While the Flemish government data is freely available but just raw data it seems and not cleaned up tiles (for Zolder) and the Wallonian government data is (maybe) technically free but you have to fill a form and jump through a lot of hoops to get it (for Spa) so I haven’t been bothered. (Feels like my family leaving Wallonia for Sweden 400 years ago and not returning back as other did was the correct decision.) My plan is basically to use the same methodology with the tracks I use for developing the VDM/TDM for the proof of concept vertical slice. When I got funding and a business plan I might do terrestrial surveying as well. But looking at the loading screens of the Monza pointcloud in AC I think the resolution is already pretty good from the air.