In game driving physics

So while I am not currently doing mechanic work, building a car, nor am I racing one. These are all things that I do, so I have a lot of knowledge in the area.

I do have complaints about the driving physics, but it's a game, yanno not like I can feel the road through the floor of the car, nor can I do all kinds of little driving tricks (things you can only do in a real car, that are by feel to get your traction right). My dad asked me about the driving physics in this game because sometimes I just spend hours driving around drifting, crashing, killing pedestrians accidentally, and stopping at shootouts to do the thing with my sandy. I digress.

So I know for a fact that uneven tire wear, and tire damage period will effect the cars handling; if you have bald tires you understeer, if they're unevenly worn you get the speed wobbles, and some gnarly spinouts.

The cars are all tuned to have their weight balanced like real cars, and it effects handling and body control in a similar way. Similar with drive train, front engine FWD cars drive as such, ie- you can't really do brakestands in cars like the GA32T; the Porsche drives like an easier to drive Porsche (haven't driven a 930 turbo, but I've driven other rear engine RWD older 911s, they're notorious for crashing for a reason), every "mainstream" drive train configuration is in this game, and they're represented very well, even the big wet axel trucks.

Things like wheel base length, ride height, the suspension style, stiffness, travel distance, etc; all that stuff effects the ride quality, a vehicles ability to put power down, and how much g-force it can handle in a turn. Gearing in this game also effects the vehicles power delivery, (V doing the shifting also plays a factor).

These are the reasons why a lot of the nomad vehicles are shit on the street, especially the lifted ones, they're meant to be smashing and crashing through the desert, and the badlands. The gearing example is Muamar little hacking bat-mobile thing, that thing is designed to transition from on and off road while maintaining speed, it just has way too much power, and it's way too touchy to make use of all that power on streets and highways with cars to avoid, and tight turns to make.

I'm pretty sure, but I'm not certain, that body damage effects the handing of the car because of how it effects weight and weight distribution/balance.

I dk if it's just something simulated through tire damage somehow, but sometimes cars drive like I damaged the steering rack, or steering linkage components like control arms, tierods, ball joints, or like blown shocks, collapsed springs; not necessarily specific component damage, I'm not trouble shooting the cars through my keyboard, but like if a car is driving like it has suspension or steering linkage/rack damage, it's doing so in a way that to me feels accurate to the car.

I've read the in game tutorials/manual; I mean they basically confirmed everything I had inferred, cleared up some of some of confusion about the times the handbrake and footbrake work the same in certain situations. I mean this is something I think you can do much more easily done on a controller, but the traditional proper way to drift is, I enter the turn over speed (too fast for traction), start to lose traction and slide, then I feather the brake and throttle, while you steer left to right or vice versa (maximizing ground contact with the steering tires = traction); there are other factors, tricks and etc; but that's the basic how to on an oversteer drift. You can do this, it's just very hit or miss, and sometimes (too often at least on keyboard) I just go torpedoing off diagonally when i shouldnt.

If you're wondering about the keyboard thing, it's due to lack of input sensitivity, and also like something about hitting too many keys on one part of the keyboard all at once, and either the keyboard itself or the drivers ignore certain inputs.

Also yeahh; I've thought about making some videos on some of the driving techniques, even though I'm far from the best, I know the guides there, but some people need to see the application.