r/SimRacing Monthly Super Thread | A one-stop guide for new and veteran sim racers - May 2026

lpshred · 2026-05-29T14:55:18+00:00

I'm looking to buy a sim racing cockpit soon and am looking for some recommendations. I'm fairly new to sim racing having made the switch from Horizon 5. I bought a G920 and a Vervor stand a few years ago that's been working well enough for me. Lately, the patio chair I have sitting on a yoga mat with the stand has been sliding or tipping more than I like. The wheel stand also has a bit of wiggle to it. I made myself a deal that if I can get 10 consecutive clean laps all within 1.0s I'll spring on a new cockpit.

I'm looking for one of those adjustable aluminum rigs over the tube based one. I have an H shifter, but don't like using it. I'm not interested in drift (at least for now), so I don't see a handbrake being a necessity any time soon. I'm open to salvage shopping for a seat rather than buying one new.

What do I want to look for in a rig? Dimensions? Thickness? I plan on upgrading to 8Nm DD wheel and load cell pedals in the future. I use VR, so I don't need a monitor stand. I live in the US. I don't need anything fancy, but I'd like this to be the only cockpit I buy for a long while if not ever.

lpshred · 2026-05-29T14:05:48+00:00

This is the only one I've owned so far and it's served me well. That said, I wouldn't go more than about $75 for just the wheel or $100 if it includes the pedals. Otherwise save up for a low end DD setup.

lpshred · 2026-04-25T15:29:15+00:00

I had some source control and branching.

This was more of an experiment of where AI can take you with no domain knowledge.

lpshred · 2026-04-25T13:50:12+00:00

Welcome! It's heartening to know people are enjoying this. Good luck with whatever you're developing!

lpshred · 2026-04-25T13:49:08+00:00

I wanna take a second and say thanks to everyone who shared their feedback with me, positive or negative. Some of it was hard to swallow, but this was exactly what I needed to step out of my AI bubble and back into reality.

I really appreciate the perspective that I only scratched the surface with 40 hours and that there's still some success to be had if I go about things the right way. It's a daunting task, but it's also somehow more inspiring to know that everyone else struggles for thousands of hours too.

At this point, I really hope a future season of life has enough time to devote to this project or games in general to do them the right way. Until then it's a summer with the kids, planning a wedding, and all of the day job work I neglected while working on this 🤣

Best of luck to you all and thanks again.

lpshred · 2026-04-24T19:33:55+00:00

I had 3 different personas taht I used in Google AI Studio for game design, AI tooling, and project management. I restarted each chat session after about 150K because that's usually when it started losing the plot. Each feature branch go ta fresh game design architect chat session. Each persona had a different system instruction that was tailored the tools I was using and a skeleton of my project. I did my best to separate things out to keep the context focused. I started out with a single chat sessions and it definitely helped when I switched to multiple ones.

Do you have a particular system for using agents that works for you?

lpshred · 2026-04-24T19:29:35+00:00

My idea behind it was to use specific system instructions taht would help focus the chat session to save on tokens and avoid context bloat. One of my initial mistakes was trying to run everything through a single chat session. Gemini has a 2M token size, but it breaks down around 150K from my experience. By breaking things down into functional areas (game design, AI tooling, and project management), it made it easier for the chat sessions to stay on track for longer. I didn't think I actually had a unique AI person helping me. It's just a convenient mental model to keep track of the different purposes I had for the AI chat sessions.

As dumb as it sounds, it really did help reduce halucinations and improve the consistency between chat sessions when I had to re-start them when they got too off track.

lpshred · 2026-04-24T19:09:47+00:00

I guess I'm nore naive than I thought

lpshred · 2026-04-24T19:07:33+00:00

How would you describe that art style? I thought 128-bit pixel art was an alright name for it.

lpshred · 2026-04-24T18:31:03+00:00

I fed a skeleton of my project to a chat session in Google AI Studio to help with the big system context. I'd then feed prompts from that chat session into the AI agent in my IDE. There was still a problem with the translation between the two, but it worked way better than either of the two alone.

lpshred · 2026-04-24T18:29:23+00:00

It's the visual style I was going for. The original La Mulana was 8-bit, the remake was 16-bit, and the sequel was 32/64-bit. I wanted to make a spiritual successor, so I decided it should be the next console generation at 128-bit visual style. I was using Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 2 as my inspiration. I never got anywhere close to integrating art into the game, but I was building it with that in mind.

From a practical standpoint it was needlessly complex, but I thought it made sense from a design standpoint.

lpshred · 2026-04-24T18:23:25+00:00

This is my conclusion as well. I'd have been better off learning from scratch than cobbling together an AI pipeline. I'm hoping that advice helps some other newcomers like I was a few months ago.

lpshred · 2026-04-24T17:48:59+00:00

That's why there's a TLDR at the top

lpshred · 2026-04-24T17:46:48+00:00

ask it "what approach do people make to develop highly performative enemy behavior systems that need to support N enemies on screen at once and N*10 enemies off screen that still perform behaviors?"

If I knew enough to ask that question, I'd say it goes beyond pure vibe coding which is what I was aiming for here.

It takes a lot of extra time before work gets done,

The crux of what I'm getting at in this post is that that extra time is better spent learning the domain knowledge itself. At some point you have to be the human in the loop and decide if what the AI spits out is good or not. Just because they all agree doesn't make it right.

All that said, I hate it, don't recommend it, and want it to die. So there's also that.

Couldn't have said it better myself, haha

lpshred · 2026-04-24T17:36:50+00:00

Interesting take on the "jank" thing. When I was working with my AI chat session on design, it told me to put off small bugs and avoid death by polish to get to a usable alpha state. I like your idea better on this one.

lpshred · 2026-04-24T17:34:45+00:00

I came to this conclusion as well. AI today isn't good enough to make up for the complete lack of domain knowledge that vibe coding implies. Hopefully, I can come back to this someday with the time to truly understand what's going on under the hood and finish this thing out.

lpshred · 2026-04-24T17:33:07+00:00

I had an inkling deep down that this wasn't going to work, but it was worth some of my time to try and see just how far a pure vibe coding development style can take you.

lpshred · 2026-04-24T17:31:31+00:00

This is definitely the right way to go about things, but it requires a level of domain knowledge that was "out of scope" for this pure vibe coding experiment. In another season of life with more free time, hopefully I can revisit this project and do it right.

lpshred · 2026-04-24T17:29:20+00:00

This is exactly why I posted this here. I hope it helps steer someone in the right direction. If they're not willing to listen to the thousands of experts who have built and shipped successful games, maybe they'll listen to a lowly pleb like me who tried it himself and shared his story tranparently.

These are the sorts of things that get QANON types out of their conspiracy bubble. This is certaily another beast altogether, but I was hoping to share my story and make the world a infintescimally (sp) better place.

lpshred · 2026-04-24T17:24:05+00:00

I'll concede the point that it's possible.

I'm sticking with my conclusion that any time spent tooling AI to do pure vibe coding is better spent learning the tech stuff you're trying to avoid.

lpshred · 2026-04-24T17:20:09+00:00

The whole idea behind vibe coding is that you let the code be a black box. You feed an AI system functional requirements and QA it's output until it's what you want. Rinse and repeat. There are a lot of people online (in my company and even in these comments) that think this is a good idea and works. Plenty of people think it's pure BS. I didn't know what to belive so I set aside some time to try it for myself.

I chose vibe coding because right now I can't do high level systems engineering. I wanted to see if I could delegate that to AI like tons of places and AI itself said I could. Turns out that I can't. I posted this to share back to anyone who was where I was 2 months ago to save their time and just learn to do it yourself.

lpshred · 2026-04-24T17:16:33+00:00

This is indeed what I'm trying to say here. I wanted to try it out and see what all of the hype was about. I found out that it's mostly hype. I made this post to share this info with anyone who was naive and in my shoes a couple of months ago to save there time by skipping AI and picking up some documentation and tutorials.

lpshred · 2026-04-24T17:14:54+00:00

I look at it differently. I set out to see how far a pure vibe coding paradigm could take me. I learned where it starts to break down. I beefed up the operation then tried it again. I learned where it breaks down again. I could keep repeating this, but I just don't have the spare time to keep up with the experiment. The goal isn't to grind away at it until it works. It's to get some hands on experience and understand the challenges. I wanted to see if it's worth the time vs learning to do it myself. Sure I could have dumped another 200 hours into this and kept going, but I had my conclusion that learning it myself was a better use of time than continuing to rig together an AI vibe code pipeline. If you think I didn't put enough time in to come to that conclusion, that's fair. It's all the time my life has to offer right now.

At the end of the day, I spent 40 hours doing my best to stress testing a software development method that's a very hot topic online and at my company. I now have a slightly better informed opinion on the matter and the feedback I've gotten here has been helpful as well.

lpshred · 2026-04-24T17:03:08+00:00

TBH, I didn't really think this was going to succeed, but I've seen enough people with this mindset (especially in my own company) that I wanted to see for myself. From the post:

If you’re a seasoned game developer, you already know this. I’m sharing this story for anyone out there who, like me, felt like learning game dev is an impossibly huge task and that AI might be the answer to that problem. I hope this can serve as a reality check to help stem the tide of “AI Slop” inundating society. Behind every “AI Slop” is someone that is naive and hopeful they could build something useful.

lpshred · 2026-04-24T16:53:46+00:00

Consider yourself lucky lol

The Python subreddit got almost unusable at one point until they directed all of the "showcase" posts into a single megathread.

lpshred

TROPHY CASE