I'm wondering what resources or communities would be best when I need help figuring out how I (or a collective effort) could improve mediocre-yet-salvageable mods.
Probably the csp discord, tho there is a pretty high level of elitism present
visually it's mainly learning a 3d software of choice. Blender is a nice one because it has lots of addons that can automate a lot of processes, and is also pretty good at generating things like emissive textures and normals for headlight refraction.
There's also ext_config, which is mainly reading the available options (on github) and trial an error until it works the way you want it. Good references are users who are known to make good mods visually (like trawa, azuane, togue etc.)
If I post a few examples or requests, would anybody with some knowledge and experience be able to steer me in the right direction as to what problems to look for and how to fix them, or even tweak some of those problems themselves (if it's not too much trouble)?
Noticing problems in physics really requires an understanding of how the physics in ac works (and also vehicle dynamics as a whole), and recognizing values that are unlikely to be accurate. for instance in tyres.ini if there was a COMBINED_FACTOR = 10, it's probably not a very accurate model ( i think some of legion's physics have some incredibly high values)
Noticing problems visually depends on how nitpicky you want to be. On the base level it's looking for things like too low/high poly, mesh density (like gtsupreme cars tend to have the rims be like 4x the poly of the entire rest of car) and also looking for unnecessary object counts/materials like some cars that have each single body panel their own object/material. Also things like baked ambient occlusion in the txDiffuse slot
The whole ACTK controversy has me kind of nervous because people seem sensitive about their work being hijacked and messed with.
which is funny because 99% of actk "fixes" are basic things the moder was too lazy to do. At the end of the day as long as you're not putting out statements like "realistic physics" or "adding realistic visuals" when you're making these edits (which is what a lot of people seem to do) who cares really.
Are there any good resources for car mod reviews anywhere?
Not really, because "good" is a highly subjective term. If you look for accurate physics, you could probably count the number of "good" cars on a single hand (especially for racecars, there are only like 3). At the end of the day if the car is enjoyable for your use case whether it be grid filler or cruising on srp, who gives a crap
I used to think AC was the standard, and now people are talking about how much more realistic ACC and AMS2 are
It depends which version of AC you look at, because ac has regular phys and extended phys with csp (cphys). ACC is basically ac 2.0 (i think they even use the same data structure) so maybe slightly better than base AC. AMS2 is pretty comparable to ac on a lot of fronts, though kunos does use pretty inaccurate suspension geometries for practically all their cars
but AC with extended physics is able to provide a more realistic experience than both. Issue being however, is more data being needed to implement correctly (and there's a difference, some people use cphys but use it poorly so it doesn't really help) which can be difficult to find for a lot of cars especially racecars can be really difficult.
I have the suspicion I might be missing some of the more detailed nuances.
Which is something you shouldn't chase. Even the likes of vrc/urd/rss have flaws in their physics accuracies (but rss being better than the others, hell some of VRC's cars are outright inaccurate) so there's no use trying to chase utmost realism, because like I mentioned for racecars there are only like 3-4 public racecars out there and most modern racecars like gt3,lmp,f1 and so on have very classified data that is not readily available. If you're enjoying driving a car that should be that
