[Skybird]

Here is what the chief physicist of the AC said about the different methods of shifting, it is quite useful to know this stuff:

"Hi, indeed you can't have autoblip and autoclutch with an H-Shifter enabled. You need to either learn to change gear properly, or use the clutch, or use the paddles

There are multiple reasons behind this but I'll state just the most obvious. While driving with paddles the program depending on what button is pressed, can understand perfectly what next gear to put and can calculate accordingly how much clutch to press and if a blip or cut is required. When driving with a H-Shifter there is no way the program can predict what gear you're going to put once you've got out of a gear. For example, you could do a 4th-3rd, a 4th-2nd, a 4th-1st, a 4th-5th, or a 4th-6th... all very valid choices. To make the assist work, it would be needed to wait until you've selected your final gear, and then start all the gearchange operation, so press clutch, blip or cut the necessary amount of time, insert gear, release clutch.

We did some try outs and the driving experience was terrible, not to mention the complexity and bugs it created, so we simply abandoned it, because in the end it is also a bad habbit. Don't like H-Shifters? You can use assists and paddles (being a bit slower). Like H-Shifters? Learn to drive them

Sorry, no way around it.

(...)

"If you use paddles on an H-shift manual car, the gearchange is slower than what you could achieved with a totally manual H-Shifter.

If you use autoclutch and blip on a car with a sequential box like the Z4 GT3, the clutch engages just a tiny bit slower than without the assists. "

(...)

"We have explained this before, but I'll explain it again as probably it is somewhere hidden in the older posts.

If you want to be real fast with gearchange, you need to touch the clutch to make a successful change. You can do without, but it is a tiny bit slower gearchange. Also, the faster you try to change, the more you risk to hear the grinding noise of gears. You might even make it but you hear the noise.

Now, when mechanical damage will be enabled, the more grinding noises you hear, the more the "accepted rpm range for gear change" will get narrower. Let me make an example to make this easier to understand.

Right now a specific car might be able to accept a gear in a 1000rpm range. So say that the gear should enter at 4500rpm. You will be succesful if you rev match at 4000 to 5000rpm.

Now, everytime you revmatch badly and hear the noise, this range will get narrower. So 800,700,500 and so on until you will arrive at a point that you will need to press the clutch totally to change a gear and even at that point it might get risky and the gearbox might not accept a different gear. So you might need to let a single gear in and finish a race with that.

So why didn't we opted right away for a more severe simulation? Simply put, there is no specific hardware that simulates an actual gear lever connected to a gearbox (force feedback shifter), nor a properly clutch in consumer pedal sets, and most importantly gearchanging has a lot to do with feel and g forces too. All of those features are heavily lacking in sims. So a very severe simulation would be simply frustrating. We think our system works very good, and "teaches" the player to properly use a clutch in order to be safer and faster. The more risks you get, the more it punishes you, until it breaks down. "