Infineon Long
Project Page
| Tracks List Page | Pending |
| Category | Real Road Course |
| Configuration | 12-Turns 2.47 Miles |
| NR2K3 Track Author | Maybe7 |
If only you knew. But you don't so I will tell you. I was corresponding with a friend who drives (real cars, real tracks). He mentioned that he wanted to use this for training but quickly found that it wouldn't work. First obstacle: a maximum field of 9 cars. Why 9 you ask? I started to post a forum shout about that 9-car limit then decided I'd play around with it a little myself to see if that would help me compose a semi-intelligent question. Ended up digging a lot more than I had planned. I can tell you why now. Because if you try to move the pit stalls from the short version to the long version the first ten stalls will be correct. All the stalls that are behind the start-finish line will end up somewhere in the dirt on the final straight before the pits. I always try to avoid those command line programs these days but it was time to give in and attempt to use Mkstalls. Which went surprisingly well but there were still some hoops to jump through. One thing that happened was I had pit stalls wrapping around a corner between pit road sections where none were supposed to be. Due to poor documentation on my part I'm not sure how I fixed this. It seems that I tried to create a file with extra pitstalls and then remove the incorrect entries and renumber those remaining. Which, if memory serves, gave an improper spread and did not use the entire length of pit road. I think I ended up making separate files for each section with 21 stalls in the first and 22 in the second which I then merged and renumbered. Anyway, at that point I had a working pitroad for a full field of cars.
The fun started when I went to race. Ran a test at 2X Pits, Damage:Moderate, Cautions:Off. Pretty good racing for awhile. Tony Stewart started 20th, climbed to first and then just checked out. But he had an accident with the tire barrier at the pits and then he and Kurt Busch ran out of gas almost simultaneously. Jeff Gordon took the lead and that's when a bunch of cars started running out of gas. Boris Said (in one of the slowest cars) took the lead finally and finished first, within 5-6 cars of lapping the entire field. Though pleased that Boris took the checkers it brought me to realize problem #2--cars would not pit under any circumstances. Just to keep this from getting much longer let's just say that I really had to work to figure that one out. I started checking coordinates and then moved to a direct comparison of the original Infineon INI with the one for Infineon Long. Once again it seems the problem involved numbers in the INI file. I believe it may have had something to do with a line that read merge_to_pit_line_length = 1.0 (which I changed to 150 for reasons that you can easily guess).
One more fix I made was with the track length--using the incorrect lap lengths in the INI was causing speeds that were registering much too slow. Laptimes of course were ok but if using the mph option setting the speeds were wrong. I used the Sandbox stated track length of 2.476 miles to replace the 2-mile length which obviously belongs to the short version. And that's where I am as I write this. I made a number of track changes but managed to do them all in the Track.ini file; nothing else changes in the game. So it will accommodate a full field and a race can begin without the pace car getting wedged sideways into the pit row entrance.
Which is not to say that this track should be regarded as a finished product. I don't know how much farther I will go with this but you're probably ready for a project right? ;-). I already had my lightning-rod week--I made my first LP files using reflap (another track) and used Mkstalls to make my first pits for a track. Went through alternating periods of frustration and elation and ended up with a rewarding feeling at the end (with some reservations). I'm thinking the AI lines probably need to be optimized since they seem to swing way wide on a few corners. Makes it easier to pass them though. And they seem to be able to slow down way late for the final hairpin but maybe it's just me slowing down too early. (And yes I know some INI "fixes" for that but I just look at the raceline and AI paths and think that perhaps some of the LP's could benefit from a rework.
Project Files
| Orig. Track DL (or Loc) | Original now available here |
| Supplemental Files | New Track INI (4 kb) |
| File Summary | Rename your track.ini in the track folder to track_ini.old or something (just in case something is horribly wrong) and extract this one to the folder to replace it. |
| Revised Track DL | None |
One caveat:
What my friend and I discovered was that if you are a stickler for accuracy you are not going to be satisfied with this track for current conditions. But that's another story and will be dealt with in the 'other' Infineon Long article.