Me, Forza, and Excel

[Blooze]

Maybe whittled the target audience down just a bit with that last word.  Excel.  A spreadsheet.  It calculates, it stores data.  It makes it easier to examine the data and display it.  I love spreadsheets.  I got into computers back in 1988 because of Lotus-123 2.0.  My mind boggled.

I've seen a couple things that caused me to reflect a bit on spreadsheets and Forza.  One is a thread on the other site that is something along the lines of Self Tuners no more exists or something like that.

And then the other day I saw something where Big Moo referred to me and FDawg as guys who used Tuning Calculators and I thunk to myself.  "Whoa.  I don't have no Tuning Calculator."  And I got to wondering how folks would get that impression.

It is most likely because I talk about this or that calculation that I have on my car sheet.  I calculate this, I calculate that.  Some of you have seen it.  (Note: your vesions is now 4 releases old... it is quite dynamic)  Hardly what one would consider "Plug and Play."

So, I thought I'd start a little Thread here devoted to some of the little calculations that I make when I am setting up a car.  I think a bunch of you make the same calcs already.  Some in your head... some on a notebook that is always frustrating you because you can't find this one page.  Others have spreadsheets of their own.  Anyway - we'll discuss the calcs, where the data comes from - what the results mean... yada yada yada.

And perhaps, just maybe, some of you will think, "by gum, I need to start keeping track of this stuff - and chase down an old lap top, some silly old thing with an Win 98 and an old copy of Works will get a lot more done than you think.  It will make it whole 'nother game for you.

One of the first things I will offer up.  I will ask you a few questions...

• How Many Cars are in your garage?
• How Many are built out for D?
• Which one's your best D car?
• Which one is better on long tracks?
• What parts went into its configuartion?
• Why aren't you running the Talon anymore?
• Why do you have 3 D class Acura Integras?

There's nine other classes.  I could ask variants of those same questions for each one.  And as Moose pointed out once, the number just gets bigger the higher and higher you go in class.  I have 27 muscle cars.  Some are Minc cars, some are ALS, some are Freddy Barry cars.  Which ones are which.  etc., etc.   I have a 189 cars in my garage right now.  Some of it is pretty simple.  I mean, what do you do with 6 P1 cars?  Get rid of a few when you know which ones you want to use.

At any rate.  The spread sheet can help you keep track of what the hell all is in your garage.  And what parts are in it.  And what the settings were, in case you have to reproduce the car and have forgotten whether you went with slicks or WR...

So anyway, I invite your participation in this.  Do you have Excel, how are you handling a particular part that we will discuss.  Thinking of getting Excel?  Just got it?  Why do you have this if(x=0, 0, y/x) all over the place.

Stuff like that.

[Blooze]

Here's a new little ditty that I added just the other day - just to make buying engine parts easier...

In the section of my spreadsheet where I keep track of parts... off to the side there, I entered this function....

=IF(L68=0,0,M68/L68)

Where M68 is the Torque of something, and L68 is the Hp of the something.

There's 10 rows of this function.   The first row usually gets the current Hp and Tq of the car.

The rest will have whatever ends up causing me a quandry while I am sorting out the engine parts.

we've all been there... flipping back and forth, from installed to uninstalled, how much torque... is it more than the exhaust, forgot what the exhaust was, go back - write it down this time dummy, now check the air filter again...  what is the torque again... damn.

What a grind.

So now I can type Air, plug in the resulting Hp and Tq values that they show in green - and I immediately see a ratio...  do the same for the exhaust...  there's both sets of numbers right in front of me, with a Tq/Hp ratio for each.  I now know exactly which part will give me the best torque increase for my build.

It is nothing more than a handy little scratch pad with the function already typed in, and with the required divide by zero trap.

Later on, when you return to this sheet and you are wondering why this engine part and why that, if you did it right and notated it well, you will have a record of what you checked to make the decision that you made.

Handy, huh?

$

[TheTechnobear]

i have the odd sheet knocking around
...and always have my macbook next to me when playing forza

a quick list of sheets, ive picked up, that are useful (if your coming afresh to excel, can get from fm2 website):
- transmission calc from blooze!
- feuredog calc
- fm2_cars.xls, has all the cars with initial ratings etc (interesting what you can do when playing with these, avg stats etc)
- forza_2_kitchen_sink.xls, not really my cup of tea, but has everything in it tuning calcs, cars list and lots of other into collected in one place
- fm2_tracker_v2.xls, has all cars, and allows you to 'tick' the ones you have, tells you how many credits to buy the rest.

and of course, ive created a myriad of sheets to analysis numbers, and come up with other numbers...

excel or not excel - i have excel, but im actually using Numbers (part of iWork08)
if you dont have excel, most spreadsheets will import them, and its usually pretty easy to adjust if required - and you learn about how the sheet works which is not a bad thing... only thing that causes problems is when people starting including VB code

anyway, so now a question for fun!
the carlist.xls, lists all the cars, including there stats, so ive got a formulae which calculates Perf/PI
this is Sum(Speed:Handling)/PI
obviously the idea is to determine, which cars are 'good' value in terms of points for their pi rating and to find some 'under-used' cars.

however, this works ok'ish, once you moved up the classes, but since both PI and ratings dont start from zero its 'skewed' a bit.
variants ive tried include:(Sum(Speed:Handling)-12)/(PI-100), and reversing the idea (PI-100)/(Sum(Speed:Handling)-12)

thoughts?

[Blooze]

I have taken a run at something like that.  I forget specifics of it - it used weighted versions of the stats to create a fudge factor number.  I could never get it to find stuff like the CRX and Elise.  So I went to values that figured weight and power.  I am currently monitoring torque by weight to see if there is any corellation there.

The only place I have had any luck producing a list of cars that was accurate was to sort...
( order by G_@_120 DESC, 0_TO_100 )

This produces a list that is almost identical to a list of cars sorted by QR.

Instead of 0_TO_100 now, I am using the Estimated ET.

Basically all its saying is the car with the most grip and accelleration will be your best car. 

Doh!!  No Kidding... 

But now if you were to look into the pre build numbers...  is there a corellation between braking, handling, weight, and torque?  Those are the ingredients of my post build query.  You might look into that.

When it is all over and done, I think a personal afinity for the car is very big in the choice of what is a good car and that can't be measured.  Liking the car means you will go the extra mile with it, and that sometimes is the most important thing, time.

Also, with the new drivetrains and such, no scheme would ever find what has turned out to be my favorite and best A Class car.  An Awd VIS Integra that starts out as a C Class FF car...  go figure.

But it's fun to search for the combination that will reveal hidden beauty.

Good luck with it...

$

[Moosejaw]

Personally, I have spreadsheets named as garages, B Class garage, A Class garage, Muscle Cars garage etc and in them I keep all the specific information I want as to the cars I've built out for each class.

I think this game is far to big for you to keep track of what's going on with anything other than Excel (or any type of spreadsheet). So far, I have built 17 muscle cars, and have more than 15 builds in all the other classes, some of which I have yet to develop. If I tried to keep track of that on paper I have notes all over the place.

As Blooze touched upon, from D to S class there are 280 different cars so if you are into building, testing and developing the possibilties are endless. I have built one car into D, C & B class just to see if it could make the grade at the higher level. So, 1 car, 3 builds. Multiply that by 280 and you've get a lot of cars in your garage!

Which leads me on to a question (Blooze, TB). How do you decide which car you are going to try and build/develop? Do you look for high handling stats knowing you can add more power or vice versa? Do you look for lighter cars over heavy? Those are just a couple of examples, but really I'm just curious to see your approach. What makes you think that a particular car in a large list of cars might be THE CAR?

[Blooze]

I look at weight pretty fast.  I am pretty well prejudiced against heavy cars.  For one reason, they demand that you look immediately into WR to be competitive.  A lighter car can let the weight go, or just sport or street WR and the rest can go to tires.

For comparable cars, I will look at the top speed Stat.  This could be a break in the aero-dynamic drag for that car.  That will always be something that is good to have on your side.

Then I will look at the torque to Hp ratio... I like to see it close to 1.  That means the car already has a good dose of torque, and I can look immediately at Cams, and higher RPM.  It also means I have a car that can lug a little...  I put up a top 500 time on Atlanta Short this morning with the Vette GS.  Beat my Integra, which is pretty damned strong.  The place where I was able to pick off the Integra was the sweeper on the hill...  The Vette could accellerate in 5th gear on that hill, it took me a while to get the angle right, (kept sliding off the top because of the speed) but when I finally held on to it. The VIS was toast in the rear view mirror.

Then I will check to see if it has an ashtray... 

That's pretty much it.  I don't really go shopping for a car much.  I know which one I want already.  That may be an interesting challenge sometime.

hmmm...

Anyway, that is all I have to say about that...

$

[Tonka Crash]

- forza_2_kitchen_sink.xls, not really my cup of tea, but has everything in it tuning calcs, cars list and lots of other into collected in one place

I put that one together.  I started with a babyblu077's car list and started adding pages for things I found interesting or merging info like feuerdog's calcs. Alot of it was grabbing other people's spreadsheets and reformatting them to my liking.  My personal version keeps mutating. I now have a page that does calcs based on the Blooze's WB theory.  But I've only spent a limited amount of time trying it out on a Trueno.

I track things like my best times on each track in C and D class, where I race mostly, and have a quick reference sheets things like relative weight reductions for each rim, tire stats, payouts for each career race, # of laps per track for 5, 10, 15 or 20 minute races, etc.

One thing I've been tracking is where Forza 2 ranks in Xbox live activity.  Major Nelson's blog usually posts a top ten games for each week, but hasn't had an update for the last two weeks.  Forza's been in the top ten since the demo launched, and as high as #2 in activity, but has steadily been declining since the end of June.  It was #8 in his last posting.

Now for Blooze's original questions:

• How Many Cars are in your garage?  I had all cars at one time, still have 250 or so. 42 have at least a 1st pass at tuning
• How Many are built out for D? 19
• Which one's your best D car? VW Golf Mk2, but I also have some top 500 times with the Hyundai, Civic VTi, and Chevelle
• Which one is better on long tracks? VW mostly but the Hyundai has been better for me on a couple others
• What parts went into its configuartion?  Generally in D I leave the motor stock and go for WR and Tires.  Chevelle is all power on pizza cutters for NY and Speedway only.
• Why aren't you running the Talon anymore?  It's up in B class, but needs work
• Why do you have 3 D class Acura Integras?  Don't have one in D class.  I have an AWD VIS intergra in B class

[Blooze]

See there, the guy that's running Excel knows the condition of his garage.  How would you like to keep track of that mess with out your spreadsheets?

You couldn't do it, and the game becomes frustrating.

$

[Placard Rat]

I've only just started using Excel to assist me in Forza and already I wonder how I ever coped before using it.

At the moment I use Mandricks Car tracker to assist me when I assault the AH and a spreadsheet I've built to help me tune suspension settings. I can enter in the current settings for ARB, Springs and Dampers and it will show the bias (more out of curiosity than anything) and the percentage used for each of those sliders (probably useless but slightly interesting). I then added a simple calculator just to make changing settings a bit quicker.

In addition to this I've started to use a Logbook in Word. If I'm tuning a car for a certain track/class I now document every change I make to the suspension (I ought to expand it encompass every value really) with a note on why I made the change. I find it allows me to backtrack through the stages I've taken in a tune better than wading through loads of save files.

This thread has given me some good ideas of what I can try to add next, looks like I'll be a busy boy working on these new sheets 

[Ske]

For some reason I've never even opened a spreadsheet... the only thing I like to keep track of is my current "über numbers", which are conveniently stored on a post-it note. I try to keep the amount of tuned cars to a minimum, but I have a pretty good memory

I've been meaning to teach myself excel/openoffice equivalent, this may actually be a good learning project for me.

I can answer (Most of) the first round of questions fine off the top of my head, though


How Many Cars are in your garage? Around 100, 15 or so useful ones.
How Many are built out for D? 3 - a Trueno, an MR-S and a Solstice. Might try a Focus or some other FWD soon.
Which one's your best D car? The MR-S is slightly better than the Trueno at just about everything.
Which one is better on long tracks? The Solstice has a bit more top end, so it should be better for faster tracks
What parts went into its configuartion? Always weight, handling and grip - and put the leftover PI into power.
Why aren't you running the Talon anymore? I never did 
Why do you have 3 D class Acura Integras? Only tried two Integras. The VIS is untuned in C class, and I have a B class Mugen that I don't really want to use.

[Hoplee]

• How Many Cars are in your garage?

derrr...

• How Many are built out for D?

2

• Which one's your best D car?

Dino

• Which one is better on long tracks?

Charger

• What parts went into its configuartion?

love AND tenderness

• Why aren't you running the Talon anymore?

same reason I'm not running the Stealth.

• Why do you have 3 D class Acura Integras?

Still do not own even one FWD car. I bought a CRX once, converted it to RWD, ran it once and sold it.
[/list]

[Blooze]

LOL - Anyhow... I think I made my point...

$

[Spiny Anteater]

Right, Blooze has banished me down here like a naughty school boy for attempting to hijack the other thread 

So, first off

• How Many Cars are in your garage?

About 85

• How Many are built out for D?

10 ish

• Which one's your best D car?

MR-S

• Which one is better on long tracks?

CRX - it's just like old times 

• What parts went into its configuartion?

The one's which are still on it

• Why aren't you running the Talon anymore?

Because I haven't bought one yet

• Why do you have 3 D class Acura Integras?

Only got one, bought it for the trans-axle challenge
[/list]

All done without recourse to Excel 

Now the real reason for coming down here. Although I don't have a tuning spreadsheet, I do have one to keep track of my times. And when I say keep track of the times, I mean that it is capable of tracking the times for all cars, in all classes making it an 11 sheet, 2.2 Mb monster. The final sheet draws all the data from the other sheets to give a table of all the tracks with all the cars in all their 1103 variations. So far I have about 8 times in there  It took long enough to create the spreadsheet without having to fill the thing in 

I did a similar thing for Forza 1 but by the end had quite a few more times in there. Now I was used the formulae to see what the fastest, slowest and average times were for each track, as well as the QR's for any cars run. Now I also got it to calculate the Standard Deviation (as a percentage of the average time), which, depsite taking me back to A-Level Statistics appeared to show that the car you ran made a bigger difference on some tracks (such as Speedway) than on other tracks (such as TT Infield, now King Cobra). So, 2 questions:

1) Does this seem like a reasonable hypothesis to you guys or was I imagining things?
2) Does the fact that tracks like TT Infield had a smaller Standard Deviation than Speedway also imply that on these tracks the driver is more important than the car?
3) Do I need to get out more?

[Blooze]

LOL - Banished - Drama Queen...

I'm curious as to how that worked?  The formulas and what have you and how the data pointed to one car over another.

$

[Spiny Anteater]

Drama King please! I don't frequent that sort of club 

As for the spreadsheet, most of the times I put down in that (or rather the drivatar put down in that) seemed to suggest that the ranking was not far off. There were the odd cars such as the F355, Spec C Impreza and '92 NSX which were faster than they should have been and others such as the Skyline Nur, Dodge Challenger and especially the Ferrari F40 and Evo FQ-330 which were slower than expected but generally all seemd in order. When FM2 came out I was in the middle of testing out and tuning a Civic Si to D Class which was showing as being faster than any of my other tunes (no CRX). But, I only got about 50 down on there (all tracks though which is why I felt I could better compare tracks than cars) so there would have been other surprises.
 I also had it calculating the QR so I could see how accurate the sample proved. Although it wasn't an exact match to the overall times, the running order was close enough that I feel I will be able to use it to rank cars this time around. Oddly enough though, the QR ranking was closer to the class structure than the overall times. makes me wonder if they used a similar system when they did the ranks first time around.

As for this time, it's a similar idea... only bigger. So far the only times in are those from the challenges - I've just updated the 911 time but there's only 4 cars on the final sheet so far, and only one with a full QR. Generally I use the sort data function to order the cars, using the QR column first, then the total, then class. You have to put them slowest at the top though or all your times head off down the bottom of the sheet 

Finally, some typical formulae from the final sheet:
Fastest times: "=MIN(AY2:AY1104)" (this doesn't work on the roll-up sheet as everything on there goes to nothing - maybe I need to convert all the blanks to 1800 or something like that)
Slowest times: "=MAX(AY2:AY1104)"
Average time: "=AVERAGE(AY2:AY1104)" (again this doesn't work on the roll-up sheet, but does everywhere else)
Standard Deviation: "=(STDEVP(AY2:AY1104))/AY1106" (At the moment I only have this on the roll-up sheet so I've had to do it as a percentage of the slowest time - the main advantage of this is that it shows which tracks are most car dependant but to really make it work you have to run every track. With the size of this sheet, I think this one is going to be a dead duck as there is no way I will have time to set a time for every car).

Hope that gives you some idea of the monster sitting over here - maybe not a lot of use but it should at least show which are good and which are bad cars in my hands (and I do know that it's easier to look at the scoreboards but this shows how MY tunes perform