Track Flow
Back to XTG Holme Page


My Version of Track Flow
(by the way irl means in real life i.e. the actual time)

To get a idea of how fast, slow, hard, or easy a track is you need to know how it compares to and ideal fast track that is
very easy and another track that is hard and the slowest possible to drive a car round a track. Now when I quote the
slowest time you can drive around a track I mean the fastest around a very hard track. This may confuse you but try not to be.

I made 2 tracks in the lego editor:-

The first is very "easy" to drive round i.e. no obstacles and the longest corners.  Picture of track
This is a square track with 4 max size corners with the track double size.
Lets call this track "A".

The second track I made was a track that had a lot of square corners with only 2 straight parts, one of which was the start
 finish part and the second straight part was a harsh dip.                                  Picture of track
This track has most of the track as square corners.
Lets call this track "Z".

I will dig out the 2 tracks and will have pictures of them soon.

Re-Volt (in game) will now tell me how long each track is in metres.

So now I just need to do a good/fast time on the easy track with no errors and a time on the hard track with no crashes etc.
Now you may think why do I need the fastest lap time on track Z ? Well this will provide me with a time you could go round
a track whilst not hitting any obstacles etc. That is, if track A and Z were the same length then you could say that track A has
a much better or easier lay out than Z. But the first problem we have is they are different sizes. This requires a speed
rating in metres per second.

For track A the length is 564 metres whit a lap time of 30.4 seconds.

Now you may say why don't you do 20 laps and divide the time by the number of laps, well if you watch your time when you
start a race the race time starts after the GO but the lap time starts when you pass the start of the lap.

So for track A we get 18.55 m/s (metres per second) ( 18.552631 irl )

And for track Z we have 123 metres and a lap time of 19 seconds. ( it was 18.985 irl )

So for track Z we get 6.474 m/s (metres per second) ( 6.4736842 irl )
So now we need to know the range of speeds we could get while racing on a normal track rather than the ideal easy and
hard tracks.

so speed range (TRS) is 18.55 - 6.474 = 12.076

If you know about electronics as I do you would of seen on volt metres etc a term called FSD. This is full scale deflection,
and is the range to which the display will go from 0 to 100% of deflection on the scale of the display.

So now I can say that track A is 100% easy or as I will say from now on has a Flow of 100%.
Track Z has now a Flow of 0% meaning that it is very hard. Hopefully all the track will have a percentage between the
0 and 100%. So now here is one exception (so far), The Circle Track by Petack. I did a lap time of 14.879 seconds with a
track length of 277 metres. This so produces a Flow of 100.52%. If you area a track designer you may know for sure
why this is so but I that RV works out the track length but I think it does it buy the center line of the area set by the track
designer. If the track is wide like The Circle Track is then you will or should be driving closest as possible to the far left
of the track. This so shortens the track length a little and so giving a higher than 100% rating for Flow.


For Grayscale Road you should expect a high Flow for it, and it does.

the m/s is 803 / 49.376 = 16.262961m/s (the spreadsheet I use, uses this many decimal places)
now we need to do the math.
(16.262961 - 6.474) divided by 12.076 then multiply by 100 gives a %
= 81.06 % Flow

For Another Generic Raceway we get 92.22 % Flow
For Mansion Of Madness we get 57.20 % Flow.

Cheers
Any comments, queries etc email me

Last_Cuban Webmaster XTG