When I came back to mxs after a 2 year hiatus, I quickly learnt that many setting combinations that were possible to use before, were no longer possible. You may be familiar with the term "chatter" when talking about erode in this game. From my understanding, chatter is basically the physical resolution of the ground being too low for the torus wheel model to make consistent contact with the ground, causing a feeling of "chatter" or riding on marbles. To my knowledge, the lowered pixel count for the ground is because the game would lag too much using higher res terrain.
Here's the big problem with chatter; it triggers the landing damping settings. Many people have come to me for help with their advanced stabilities, and one of the most common problems I hear goes something like "my bike just locks up in the rut and I have no control". This is because when your landing damping settings are applied, you get your roll damping multiplied by your landing damping factor. So if your roll damping is at 55, and your landing damping factor is at 2, you will be getting 110 roll damping for the duration of your landing damping falloff. Its great for landing jumps, going through whoops, etc, but try navigating through a bumpy rut while your bike is locked up.. Not fun. Until now, i've just been finding ways to smooth out the chatter using alternative settings but the more I think about it the more I start to consider this problem a game glitch. Now, if all my assumptions are correct, this problem happens because the front wheel is technically lifting off the ground and retouching as it hovers over the pixel gaps in the eroded terrain, triggering the the settings.
Example below:
The player was turning up out of the rut, but the landing damping settings kicked in locking his bike up, causing him to stay leaned over longer than intended. I have personally seen unintentional contact being made in rF races, solely because of this bike lockup that sometimes happens in chatter. You're trying to turn, but there's just too much roll damping, too many forces fighting against each other.
Now, the logical solution would be to optimize the game in a way to be able to handle higher res ground, so the chatter issue doesn't happen, but I think I may have come up with a viable solution until then. Introduce a new setting into the advanced stability, you can call it "Landing Damping Liftoff". This setting would control what the minimum distance between the front tire and ground would be to trigger the landing damping factor. So an example would be, if you have your landing damping liftoff set to a height of 4 inches, then any missing contact between the front tire and the ground under 4 inches in height wont trigger the landing damping factor, giving you the ability to ride through chatter with much more control without sacrificing the benefits of landing damping in other areas. If there's no way to code in a measurement system like that, another possible solution would be to use amount of time between front tire making contact. In chatter, the front tire very rapidly makes contact and then loses contact to the ground, so maybe if the tire is off the ground for under a certain amount of milliseconds the landing damping settings wont kick in. Whatever's easier to code in, I would imagine height would work better, but duration of time sounds like it would be easier to add in.
Tell me what you guys think, like any idea i'm sure it could be improved on, but if the game allows micro measurements to be thrown in like that somehow, I think this is an extremely viable solution to a big problem.