To anyone who stops to think about what the new Westhill update will be it's obviously a bit daft to keep the old one around. The new track is a graphical revamp of the old track, with a few refinements and a new course option.
But the fact that people are already asking not to loose the old track is indicative of a bigger issue, and that is the shortage of tracks in LFS.
It's very difficult to do a league on certain track types when the selection for any given track type is limited.
I believe if you drill right down in to it, the real unrest is an appetite for more tracks.
This is a good thing, because the purpose of S3 is to deliver more content.
So don't panic :P
But the fact that people are already asking not to loose the old track is indicative of a bigger issue, and that is the shortage of tracks in LFS.
It's very difficult to do a league on certain track types when the selection for any given track type is limited.
I believe if you drill right down in to it, the real unrest is an appetite for more tracks.
This is a good thing, because the purpose of S3 is to deliver more content.
So don't panic :P
Physics and playstyle can't be too arcade - it's about immersion more than anything else. If I can believe I am racing, if my imagination can fill in the blanks, that's enough. I've said a million times on this forum that environmental simulations are typically compromised in race simulators and that's a real shame.
I don't like games where I have to unlock content, that straight away gets the game filed under arcade.
You should learn about the skinner box and how to use it as part of the gameplay mechanic.
It's the same as any other sales channel, if people think they are getting a bargain or something exclusive then they're more likely to bite.
The number of car skins in LFS is testament to how people like to individualise their player avatar. But that's different to contributing a skin to a game and then having AI or other players drive it. It might work on kickstarter, but it's not satiating the desire people have to customise their virtual presence with their own personality.
I'm a marketeer by profession (actually a sort of hybrid programmer-marketeer-leader - I was recently called a Cheif Development Officer - which made me laugh because the initials are OCD alphabetically sorted)... My advise is always: Be honest; be open; be kind. The rest is just details.
And that's a good starting point for marketing :P
Exciting times. I'm holding off getting a new wheel and back on the track until some of these new tracks are out but its really nice to be seeing progress again.
Especially as its been such excellent mountain biking weather over the summer
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How've your experiments with shaders coming along? I still get a real kick from coding shaders - I don't know why, but something about writing .fx touches my inner nerd.
Especially as its been such excellent mountain biking weather over the summer
.How've your experiments with shaders coming along? I still get a real kick from coding shaders - I don't know why, but something about writing .fx touches my inner nerd.
Dual carriageways are fairly simple, but junctions are a mind bender until you get used to it.
It's in Wales, your best bet would be a plane from Schipol to Bristol and then get one of the other attendees to pick you up en route (not sure if regional Dutch airlines fly there but KLM, EasyJet and Lufthansa apparently do according to Google). You could also drive via the Chunnel which would take about 10 hours or so.
I'm down with that, you even get a proper bed this year so you've somewhere comfortable to crash out after a night out at the gay bar.
Birmingham (59min)
East Midlands Airport [Castle Donington] (1h01min)
Luton (1h01min)
Stansted (1h21min)
I'll be there.
I'm slightly disappointed that I wont be adding to my trophy haul though.
I'm slightly disappointed that I wont be adding to my trophy haul though.
Funny even the third time
With a vertex shader it would not take much (really, not long at all!) the problem is that LFS tyres are already quite polygonal in appearance so I'm not sure what would be added by changing it's shape to show a flatspot - certainly I expect that now Scawen is playing with pixel shaders that the visualisation of the tyre is going to get pretty good, perhaps with some scuffing around flat spots - and hopefully a few more polys :P
Just a heads up on this but the very nature of a bloom effect will by it's very nature kill the AA unless Scawen also switches over to a deferred rendering system, which will probably mean a few months downtime for LFS, so don't go putting ideas in his head yet mkay :P
I'm actually quite keen to play around with a few artistic styles too, I enjoy playing with shaders and I'm hopeful that a "shader mod scene" might spring up around LFS.
Glad I'm not the only programmer that goes all gooey over writing pixel shaders 
Racing is for rich bastards.
If you are not a rich bastard, there is karting. Unless you want to win at karting which is reserved for rich bastards.
Otherwise, sim.
If you are not a rich bastard, there is karting. Unless you want to win at karting which is reserved for rich bastards.
Otherwise, sim.
Yeah, even the Greeks could not find Eric: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Who_is_Eric_in_greek_mythology
I'm curious now what the plan is with Rockingham?
If he's anything like the artists I know he probably can't even spell it :P
DirectX 9 has a limitation in multi-threaded mode in that only a single thread can safely access the DX device context at any one time. (DX11 provides an alternative thread-safe mechanism).
To counter this MS recommends using some form of synchronisation, but personally I prefer to take a more model/controller/view approach to my internal architecture, although I know LFS isn't OO internally and I get the impression the internal workings are quite highly coupled - so I think it's going to be a fairly heavy job isolate component parts and put them to threads.
What cover up? You are linking to the Daily Mail. That doesn't sound very covered up.
I refuse to read that comic so cannot comment on other aspects of the case without a link to an actual news site.
In any case it's my view that rape is the most dispicable crime and that traditionally men get away with it far too easily. Would you believe the provocative clothes defence still gets used? If my government is protecting a rapist I think that's just unacceptable - but I already regard my government as unacceptable and don't need sex scandals to tip my voting.
You want me to talk to my MP? Hahahahahahaha.... Oh so young. So much faith in politics.... I e written to my MP twice in my life, and each time I got a standard reply stating that they would follow the party whip.
Sorry but Britain is not a democracy, there is nothing I can do for you.
I refuse to read that comic so cannot comment on other aspects of the case without a link to an actual news site.
In any case it's my view that rape is the most dispicable crime and that traditionally men get away with it far too easily. Would you believe the provocative clothes defence still gets used? If my government is protecting a rapist I think that's just unacceptable - but I already regard my government as unacceptable and don't need sex scandals to tip my voting.
You want me to talk to my MP? Hahahahahahaha.... Oh so young. So much faith in politics.... I e written to my MP twice in my life, and each time I got a standard reply stating that they would follow the party whip.
Sorry but Britain is not a democracy, there is nothing I can do for you.
Right lets just stop one misquote: if you go back to page one and read my post its not about me or anyone wanting a mandatory setup share: it was an idea proposed as a solution to the problem of setup theft as a catalyst for changing the culture toward a more open and giving community.
It has been considered and loudly rejected - (by a few people posting very passionately about how amazing their sets are).
What is needed is not more discussion of that idea, but more ideas.
Short of changing what is sent to a calculated affect rather than the source numbers I don't know what to suggest to protect both of your works.
It's a shame, it's much easier to steal some of this in RL than it is in LFS, and being a driver simulation all this talk of team development of sets is a bit depressing - furthering the idea that LFS should be stale and repeatable.
Perhaps the only real fix is something I've desired since I first played this sim: dynamic environments - adjust your set as each session unfolds to match changing conditions. Then we can be done with this whole rinse repeat perfet lap syndrome and all the epic sets won't work anymore.
Or: what if - this is just a suggestion - but when the new physics come out alleges will be worthless - maybe that's the time to introduce always on sharing? Would the guys who objected last time be won over by having nothing to loose.
It'll make you a deal - reject these ideas by all means, but if you do reject them, and if you propose no alternative workable solution, then never moan about set stealing again.
Ps: written in bed, on an iPhone, slightly grumpy after being awoken. (Seems to be the trend in this thread. - glad to have kept the tradition going)
It has been considered and loudly rejected - (by a few people posting very passionately about how amazing their sets are).
What is needed is not more discussion of that idea, but more ideas.
Short of changing what is sent to a calculated affect rather than the source numbers I don't know what to suggest to protect both of your works.
It's a shame, it's much easier to steal some of this in RL than it is in LFS, and being a driver simulation all this talk of team development of sets is a bit depressing - furthering the idea that LFS should be stale and repeatable.
Perhaps the only real fix is something I've desired since I first played this sim: dynamic environments - adjust your set as each session unfolds to match changing conditions. Then we can be done with this whole rinse repeat perfet lap syndrome and all the epic sets won't work anymore.
Or: what if - this is just a suggestion - but when the new physics come out alleges will be worthless - maybe that's the time to introduce always on sharing? Would the guys who objected last time be won over by having nothing to loose.
It'll make you a deal - reject these ideas by all means, but if you do reject them, and if you propose no alternative workable solution, then never moan about set stealing again.
Ps: written in bed, on an iPhone, slightly grumpy after being awoken. (Seems to be the trend in this thread. - glad to have kept the tradition going)
Not being currently active is not necessarily an affirmed statement of not coming back.
I have not played LFS in quite a while (actually I did knock up a skin and do some AI racing today, not very well on account of using keyboard...).
But that does not mean I have quit LFS. I'll be quite happy to race again when there's some fresh content and new challenges.
Does that mean my opinion should carry no weight?
If I still had all my setups I would zip them up and post them just to prove a point!
When I started in LFS I put a lot of effort in to my FOX setups, I tried to make cars that handled well and usually were neutrally balanced and very drivable. Back in those days I competed in the OWRL and I recall one event at Fern Bay where I was doing very well in practice and placing in the top few spots. I gave my set up out to a lot of people who in turn shared it, and by race day I was top of the mid-field.
Was I beaten by my own set up?
In part yes I was and I was even thanked for making it (a reward in it's own right), but I was also beaten by the fact that I was at that point in time, at my best, the top of the midfield - and no neutrally balanced drivable setup was going to change that.
Later on in my participation in LFS I got more interested in other cars, and not in the least interested in flaffing around with their setups, I started asking for them.
But almost every setup I ever got was tweaked to suite my driving style, more oversteer on some cars/tracks - less needed on others...
The reality is:
Different drivers drive differently.
And that means in a league race the only way to perform at the best that you personally can achieve is to tweak the setup to YOUR requirements. The fine detail is ALWAYS personal. The course detail is always down to car/track combination - so when you ask for and receive / or steal a setup, what you get is the course detail, the fine tuning you still have to do yourself.
So going back to my Fern Bay race, if I had downloaded someone elses set, and not fine tuned it to the near-neutral slightly on the side of understeer driving style I had at that time in the FOX would I have finished top of the midfield?
Probably not. I'd likely have spun, and at best would have made the mid ranks.
Why?
Because that was my level of skill at the time.
When I started in LFS I put a lot of effort in to my FOX setups, I tried to make cars that handled well and usually were neutrally balanced and very drivable. Back in those days I competed in the OWRL and I recall one event at Fern Bay where I was doing very well in practice and placing in the top few spots. I gave my set up out to a lot of people who in turn shared it, and by race day I was top of the mid-field.
Was I beaten by my own set up?
In part yes I was and I was even thanked for making it (a reward in it's own right), but I was also beaten by the fact that I was at that point in time, at my best, the top of the midfield - and no neutrally balanced drivable setup was going to change that.
Later on in my participation in LFS I got more interested in other cars, and not in the least interested in flaffing around with their setups, I started asking for them.
But almost every setup I ever got was tweaked to suite my driving style, more oversteer on some cars/tracks - less needed on others...
The reality is:
Different drivers drive differently.
And that means in a league race the only way to perform at the best that you personally can achieve is to tweak the setup to YOUR requirements. The fine detail is ALWAYS personal. The course detail is always down to car/track combination - so when you ask for and receive / or steal a setup, what you get is the course detail, the fine tuning you still have to do yourself.
So going back to my Fern Bay race, if I had downloaded someone elses set, and not fine tuned it to the near-neutral slightly on the side of understeer driving style I had at that time in the FOX would I have finished top of the midfield?
Probably not. I'd likely have spun, and at best would have made the mid ranks.
Why?
Because that was my level of skill at the time.
If you can't fight it, make it available to everyone.
So either tougher encryption, or change the culture by allowing everyone to use anyone's set (there might be some resistance initially, but it would get accepted soon enough).
In real racing you can walk about the paddock, talk to drivers, look at their cars, and gain a lot of information. At international level you can use photography and analysis tools to garner toe and camber data - sound analysis for gearing and so on - heck, F1 teams steal and buy each others secret data routinely...
Apart from a league race long enough for fuel stops even that is simply "enough for the race".
It's not exactly rocket science to work out tyre choice or pressure.
So what's the big secret? Only because hackers have something others don't... So lets change the landscape and just open up setups for everyone.
So either tougher encryption, or change the culture by allowing everyone to use anyone's set (there might be some resistance initially, but it would get accepted soon enough).
In real racing you can walk about the paddock, talk to drivers, look at their cars, and gain a lot of information. At international level you can use photography and analysis tools to garner toe and camber data - sound analysis for gearing and so on - heck, F1 teams steal and buy each others secret data routinely...
Apart from a league race long enough for fuel stops even that is simply "enough for the race".
It's not exactly rocket science to work out tyre choice or pressure.
So what's the big secret? Only because hackers have something others don't... So lets change the landscape and just open up setups for everyone.
I have never managed to see 3D from anaglyph personally, but at least you will now begin to get an appreciation of how awesome LFS is in true 3D, Scawen ...
...But thats a static light position, which admittedly leaves 3 input channels with global uv mapping, sweet... Surface water could go on one ;p. but it must be possible to use those channels to pre bake lighting at different times of day - but that would result in shadow artefacts of the shadows... (That is t going to read well is it!).
It's why I was thinking of storing an angle on each channel rather than a light level, this could then be transposed through time and applied against the normal map as the light direction - I admit I thought of it whilst typing and haven't proved that I'm talking rubbish - but in my head it seems to work*
*its 1am.
It's why I was thinking of storing an angle on each channel rather than a light level, this could then be transposed through time and applied against the normal map as the light direction - I admit I thought of it whilst typing and haven't proved that I'm talking rubbish - but in my head it seems to work*
*its 1am.
At least we know LFS development would continue if he goes blind in his old age, it's not like he could see what he was doing in 3D for the last few months...
I don't think it's likely Scawen would attempt a major overhaul before the physics are finished, I'm actually kind of surprised about the move to dx9 but I think that's because he got excited over 3D. Although it still amazes me that he did it without a 3D monitor or headset of any kind...
As others have mentioned, LFS' shadows are vertex based and that's really a hand me down from DX8. Pre-baked Lightmaps are complicated in the LFS arrangement, although are possible... but they would curtail any hope of a day/night cycle.
Pixel based lighting has some possibilities now that LFS is in DX9 - but there are some issues which Scawen will need to take a view on.
I doubt he will do deferred rendering because I get the impression that if Scawen attempted that from his current position he'll probably have to disappear for a few more years and that won't pay his mortgage.
That leaves us with a couple of options... Firstly stencil shadows, they are a bit old school now but they work quite well if the geometry has no holes in it... As odd as that statement might sound, you'd be surprised how hard it is not to end up with this disaster from my own experiments [pictured below] with this technique - caused in this case by my games swappable mesh pieces on the main character. This technique is slow in high geometry environments and is not normally used on scenery - it would blow any chance of South City running on an entry level system.
One approach is to do it as a post-processing effect, from what I can tell this was the method used in Assassins Creed 3. You render the view from the light and compare the depth of each point in 3d space to your camera - it works really well until you render the world on a 3D screen... Whereupon the shadow overlay simply doesn't work because it is drawn after the scene at a depth of 0. LFS' new 3D mode would be broken by this approach.
By raising the system requirements to shader model 3 (perhaps leaving the old vertex lighting as a fall back) it becomes possible to use some alternative techniques. I have no direct experience with these and don't know which if any would be good with LFS' 3D support, PSSM looks promising at a quick glance.
The thing about shadows in modern games is that you usually design your game levels around the lighting architecture of the game. LFS pre-dates all of the modern techniques so the shadows are being added in afterwards to a 3D world architecture that will not necessarily be optimised for the technique that we end up with - updating the lighting is therefore going to cause some headaches!
My advise to Scawen would be to decide between one of two options: A full structural 3D overhaul with a switch to deferred rendering - which should yield the best results but might have an impact on the current entry level systems, or more likely a keep it simple approach with hacks for given entity types or areas to fake a good shadow system (and you would not believe how many of todays cutting edge games are FAKING their effects - it's probably not the right word to use when talking to end users, but essentially games programming is itself the art of how to fake reality).
For example he could add some worldwide light level map textures, maybe with flexible u/v scaling based upon common view positions/angles with 1 being under full sunlight and 0 being in shadow at all times of day with 0.25 being in shadow in the morning and 0.5 at midday etc, maybe using RGBA channels for sunlight arc movement. Whilst this global texture would render at a fairly low resolution (although should be higher than vertex density) it would allow to fake the sunlight across the level and could be filtered back out when under a headlight by the pixel shader. How well it works would be down to the size of the texture / divided by the scale of the map (or map area covered) multiplied by any efficiencies regained by uv scale warping... This is just a thought based upon a pre-rendered approach to try and keep the low system requirement and 3D support. Scawen knows his architecture better so will have better ideas I'm sure.
Shadows are a very complex issue, but if Scawen is anything like me with programming (and he is an oldschool nerd too) - then I believe he'll really enjoy solving it
- I first discovered HLSL at the tail end of last year and it has rapidly become my favourite programming language, and is by far the most fun I've had at the keyboard since I first discovered I could make pixel perfect vertical scrolling sprites on the Spectrum computer by poking the font rendering to use my own area of memory... Oh them were the days...EDIT: Oh my, I just remembered the memory address I used to poke: 23606 and 23607 :P I'm so happy right now...
Last edited by Becky Rose, .
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