I ran a test the other night in Forza 2. I have a Mazdaspeed 3 (09) and in the game they have a Mazda 3 and have a lot of Mazdaspeed upgrades. They even had basically the exact same rims on my car for sale. So I basically made my car, exact paint, wheels, wheel size, rims, tires and upgrades. I wanted to see how accurate it was, so I looked up my (real) car's final drive ratio and gear ratios for every gear from the manufacturer... went into the game and tuned my car, setting each setting where it is in real life. Knowing my car like I do, I know my (real) car's exact shift points in relationship to the speed and rpm's (you have to shift this car early as the power drops off dramatically before redline).
Anywhooo.... well, to say that the game was off would be a serious understatement. It was absolutely nowhere near it. My gears and shift points in the game were all screwed up and off. Bad. The only reason I bring this up is because I would think that this kind of thing could be worked out mathematically. If I have the same rim size, tire size, final drive ratio and each gear ratio, they should be able to get it somewhat close, no? Well, it isn't.
Not that it really matters, but I thought a sim of this caliber would have that sort of thing on lock-down.
I was able to manipulate the gearing and change it (not based on real life numbers) to get it to match my shift points in real life and the car came alive and it's awesome. But it would have been lovely to just plug in the real life numbers and have it bang on from the get go. It makes me wonder about their underlying system though.
I want to state that this is in no way a big deal to me, at all really. Just pointing it out and wondering if anyone with some knowledge about this kind of stuff could maybe elaborate on why it isn't.
Cheerio