So, I did my first ride today and really enjoyed the tool. Given that it is possible to draft other riders, it would be cool if you could make some more tweaking with the speed, and not estimate the speed entirely based on power and weight, but maybe also CdA for those who have it, and for others have some way to guesstimate how low the position is, etc.
On a side, note, I started the ride without plugging in my laptop and it drained the battery incredibly fast (from 85% to 25% in just an hour).
I think calculating CdA is going to be too hard for most Zwift riders. I find it difficult just to keep my FTP up to date. While it would be awesome to have the CdA for everyone, it would likely just turn into a guessing game and everyone would have inaccurate numbers. As for the laptop battery problem, same happens to me, just use a desktop or a charger.
I agree that inputting individual CDAs is unrealistic. The app already creates a speed advantage when drafting, I believe. How exactly that’s calculated, though, hasn’t been detailed as far as I know and for these purposes I’m not sure it’s necessary to go overboard. Still, I believe there are increasing advantages (in the real world) as you add more and more riders in front of you. It might be fun if Zwift simulated this to encourage large, rotating pacelines. I suppose an aero profile could be estimated with a calculation of height/weight, but again, probably overkill for this and just one more way to encourage users to cheat. I love Zwift, but I unfortunately see a future when this gets beyond the novelty phase and people start taking the competition too seriously. There will be cheaters and, as a consequence, there will be many online disputes and complaints.
There are several methods to get your CdA in the real world, just using a power meter. Chung’s method comes to mind and it’s pretty straight forward to do. In terms of implementation, it would add just a couple of lines of code. The software can deal with drafting etc. so it can easily be tweaked to take CdA into consideration.
Of course though, I agree that we will see some cheating (just like with strava).
I just want to add my voice to the battery issue. I noticed a seriously depleted battery after just 15 mins. I put it down to either Zwift being power hungry (it’s probably the most graphically challenging thing I have run through my mackbook to date) or the use of the ANT+ dongle. As my GPS watch is also an ANT+ receiver and the battery can last many hours I can now only conclude the Zwift program is sucking all the power. But as it is a program designed to be used indoors, I suppose hooking up the power lead isn’t too much of an inconvenience.
David, the reason Zwift uses so much battery life is because of the processing power required to draw all the graphics on screen. Most laptops will have a “power savings” mode that the graphics and processor chips can be put into that will limit the speed at which they perform operations, but also consumes much less power. However, Zwift needs to squeeze out all the power that (most) laptops can handle. I thought playing Zwift on my laptop was pretty nice until I tried on my desktop with a much more powerful graphics card.