Quote from TheBandit_92 :

I Agree with you on everything exept for the Uf1 thing. The original Daihatsu Trevis has a rev limiter. I do not own one but i have driven one. Its easy to go wrong on this, the UF1 looks so old but its actually a pretty new car.

I didn't say the UF1 shouldn't have a rev limiter, I said that it might not be able to reach its limiter

Sam

Quote from Not Sure :

so its like this then:

if the clutch slips a little all the time because of minor overheating -> more friction -> heat -> more slip

so when clutch heats beyond a certain %, it is doomed pretty much

If you drive everywhere flat-out, yes. But if you moderate the throttle so that you don't overload the clutch (or use it less often, if you don't have variable throttle control), the clutch will cool back down again.
Having experienced a few knackered clutches in my time, it seems to model what happens with an overheating or worn-out clutch pretty well.

Quote from atledreier :

I don't think that's the case. I haven't been in a car that doesn't have a rev limiter. You rarely hit it because most cars run out of breath way before you rach redline.

True: very, very few modern cars don't have rev limiters. In fact, I can't think of a road car you can buy in the UK today that doesn't have a rev limiter. You can almost always reach it in at least the first three gears, though - rev limiters are mostly set quite low these days, to avoid damage from excessive thrashing. The exceptions, I guess, are smaller-engined cars such as the Ford Ka - which didn't want to get too near its rev limiter when I tried

Plenty of older, cheaper cars don't have limiters, with an early Nineties Ford Fiesta coming to mind. Certainly all of the cars in LFS now should have rev limiters, though, and all of them... With the possible exception of the UF1... should be able to reach them.

Sam

Last edited by Dark Elite, Sun 16 Dec 2007, 11:26.

Quote :

I really hoped that the new clutch thing would provide an advantage to people with a clutch pedal, but as the clutch gets too hot after a few laps (no matter how fast you jump off the clutch or bury it), it turns out to be a hinderance, especially as you only need to come off the gas a little using the auto method in order to flip the next gear in, and the clutch heat never changes.
Not at all sure why the bar for the clutch heat is so long, once it's a 10th of the way filled, the clutch is already hot enough that gears engage slugglishly, and much more than that and the clutch is apparently completely fried.
I've not tested it with all the cars, just the new one, which I would expect to have a racing clutch anyway, and therefore be pretty resistant to heat, and capable of taking much abuse. It's not like I ride the clutch at all, although after a few laps, it feels like I've been sat at traffic lights on a steep incline, riding the clutch for 5 minutes because I didn't want to use the handbrake.

You have, then, tested the clutch heating simulation solely in a car which you had never driven without it, and a car that also happens to have a very weak clutch. Not to mention a sequential gearbox, so what you're using the clutch pedal all the time for is beyond me... That doesn't seem a very fair test, and, having driven all of the cars with the clutch heating simulation, I don't think it's as inaccurate as everyone seems to be saying.

The reason the clutch temperature bar is 'long' - actually, I think it's quite short, but it needs to fit in the F9/10 menus - is that the clutch isn't simply 'working' or 'not working'. Once the bar has filled enough to be coloured red, the clutch starts slipping, and then proceeds to slip more and more easily until the bar is completely filled, at which point the clutch is completely incapable of engaging. It's a dynamic system, which runs from very little effect at the point at which the bar goes red, right up to an immobilising effect when the bar is full. If anything, the bar should be a bit bigger, so we have more idea how much heat the clutch can deal with before it starts to let go.

Sam

Quote from PaulC2K :

Personally i find some of the enforced changes in the name of realism pathetic while its considered acceptable for people to play the game using a mouse or keyboard... thats realistic. You cant have a H shifter in your XRR, but you can drive around using Q,A < & > no problem. Some things you just wonder what the harm is in leaving them in there.

The big thing you're missing here (although I do support the view, in principle, that keyboard/mouse drivers are undermining the realism of the game, as are non-FFB wheel users) is cost. It doesn't cost anything to us for the developers to make the game as realistic as they can, but it does cost money for racers to have 'wheels. The developers can't force us to pay for realistic controllers, but they can make the game as close to true racing as possible for those who do want to pay for 'wheels.
Making the game unusable without a 'wheel would remove a huge amount of people coming into S2. I for one bought my DFP purely because of LFS, but there's not a chance I would have done so if I couldn't have tried the game out first, and nor would I have bought it without being able to try S2 first. The 'issue' of keyboard/mouse drivers does seem, I'm afraid, unsolveable.

Quote from MaximUK :

If you look at AS National public races you will find 70%+ of the field (and usually more) will be FXR's. Even though the FZR, when driven well, is clearly faster. In league races I am sure the mix is very different where the drivers tend to be more interested in outright speed compared to ease of driving.

I am not sure you can ever address this so if you balance, or at least close their lap times towards each other, public races will probably become 90%+ FXR. If you give the RWD an advantage enough to see them used more in public races, league races will become all FZR.

Before we can really balance them we would need to agree on what type of races we were trying to achieve the balance in. I don't think we could ever get agreement on this. Won't it will come down to making the imbalances within tolerable margins more than any real balance. In my mind the goal is to make sure you never see one car dominate the grid.

I'm in agreement with this. Over a longer race (in X10), the FZR seems to be used very little, because it punishes mistakes more than an FXR or, to an extent, XRR would. I think it being rear-engined, and thus inherently more dangerous to drive than the other GTRs, does make up for its extra speed. Yes, it can be used in a hotlap scenario, by a mediocre driver, to get better laps than a fast FXR driver - but that's not to say the average FZR driver could get that laptime over and over again.

As I see it, the FXR (in X10) is slower because it is easier and more forgiving, and the XRR is slower than the FZR because it is more manageable. Both of the latter are quicker than the FXR because both are a lot harder to drive consistently. This sort of setup seemed to reward those who took the time to learn the FZR fully, while allowing less experienced drivers to run alongside them in FXRs. Now, with the FZR's handicaps, there's the possibility of those FXR drivers being able to beat more practiced FZR drivers, which doesn't seem to be the way it should work.

Actually, if any class balancing is to be done in GTR from X10, I reckon it should be making the XRR slightly faster. It's a lot harder to drive than the FXR, but doesn't seem to be sufficiently quicker to make up for it.

And now I wait to be contradicted

Sam

Quote :

To be honest I'd rather drive an overweight (or less powerful engine) FZR with sequential gearbox (with ignition cut) than the H-gate with no extra weight. The FZR is now much trickier to drive than the other 2 GTR:s, and the reward as I see it is too low.

For endurance racing the FZR is going to be a bitch, as the other two are nearly fool-proof, when you drive normally.

I agree entirely... I have to say having the FZR running a different gearbox to keep a class balanced seems to defeat the point somewhat - as it's clearly not in the same class any more. It would be interesting to have a poll and see how the numbers of people preferring weight balancing to gearbox crippling, but I'm pretty sure most people prefer the weight option.

Having an H-pattern gearbox in the FZR feels so unrealistic that I will probably resort to setting it to automatically clutch itself, which is a pity. A car like that would be extremely unlikely to use an H-pattern, and in the same class as sequential dogboxes? Much as I don't like to criticise, one must in the pursuit of perfection, and this just feels wrong.

The odds just seem stacked against the FZR now - lower rev limiter, slower gearbox, and to top it off the turbo lag in the other two is vastly reduced too.

Sam

Last edited by Dark Elite, Mon 10 Dec 2007, 21:27.

Quote from SFL :

I highly doubt that any race car uses a key and not a switch to turn ignition on/off. Maybe its realistic in uf1 but not in fbm

True, in a race car you would most likely have a separate ignition switch - which may use a key - and then a starter button. However, this would mean having different configurations for different cars, which may get confusing. Seeing as the road car system is that with which most people are familiar, that's what we get.
There is also the point that when a race car has been stalled, you would usually have to turn the ignition off and back on again - or perhaps override some switch or another - to be able to use the starter motor again, and this would be two actions, so we might as well keep those two on the same button to simplify things (not to mention removing the need for two configurations for different cars).

Quote from SFM :

If you turn the ignition off when the car is moving the clutch is still engaged for a while. If the ignition is turned back on while the engine is still turning it should start again, no?

Yes, it should. But I doubt you can turn the ignition of a Formula One car back on again after it has been turned off, for safety reasons, and so LFS currently doesn't allow us to turn the ignition back on either, never mind try and use a non-existent starter motor.


It's certainly worth noting that the clutch pedal (I've tested it on my DFP using the brake axis as a clutch) has no free movement whatsoever, and full clutch pedal depression is right on the biting point of the clutch. This means that anything but full pedal depression is resulting in the clutch being partially engaged, and so it feels somewhat different to real driving. This, EeekiE, might be where you're finding difficulty adapting to the clutch control needed, in that there's no free play in the clutch whatsoever.

However, I do think that the clutch engages rather too quickly, and as this doesn't seem to be different between cars (the only difference is how well the engine copes with it), we have a clutch in a hot hatch that is just as twitchy as one in a stripped-out 500bhp race car. Which strikes me as odd.

Smell-o-speed is something to be considered for S3

EDIT - Actually, something that's just occured to me - to engage a gear from neutral in the BMW Sauber, you now have to depress the clutch... Is this intentional, or a quirk of the new clutch system? This wasn't the case in X10, so I'm just wondering.

Sam

Last edited by Dark Elite, Mon 10 Dec 2007, 21:16.

Quote from SFL :

FIX (for scawen): Put ignition switch and starter engine on seperate keys

No, because you don't use one key for turning the ignition on, and then another for starting the engine

In every car I've ever driven, you must turn the ignition key back at least one stage - usually all of the stages, right back to Full Off, so the car can reinitialise any electronic systems - for it to be possible to use the starter motor again. This makes two actions for for turning the engine back on after a stall, and so we must press I twice. Personally, I think it's a nice little touch of realism.

Quote from SFL {regarding BF1 jumpstarting} :

Sounds like a bug to me! Might be related to ignition and starter motor being on the same key.

No, it's more to do with the automatic clutching system in the BMW Sauber - I've realised exactly why this happens now - it seems the car's electronics will not engage the clutch (and you can't force it to do so, seeing as it's fully automatic and all we can do is disengage the clutch with a button/pedal) after the engine has stalled until it's manually restarted: hence jump starts can't be done.

Quote :

Also, just when it's about to stall (when rpm is around 500) you can see the gas pedal rising even though you're not pressing it. Is this a "driving assist"? Is it so the engine is harder to stall? I think it should be looked at again.

This looks to be modelling the ECU intervening. Having realised that you're an eejit and have left the car to stall, the ECU (on most cars) will start to open the throttle to save the car. However, it usually can't catch anywhere near as big a mistake as we can get away with at the moment so the modelling is still quite inaccurate.

But hey, we're criticising a brand-new feature pretty heavily here. It's not too shabby for saying it's only just arrived on the scene

Sam

^ This one has already been covered in the main patch release thread, you need to rename your setting files from the full car name as a prefix to only the three-character car code as a prefix.

So, in 'settings', your setup named "BMW SAUBER_Development.set" would be moved to 'setups' and renamed to "BF1_Development.set".

This is more to do with Interface than Physics, I think
And I got beaten to it.

Sam

Let's keep it on topic, guys, rather than taking the piss out of other people's pedal-stomping
Personally, I think the clutch modelling is pretty well done, as is the engine inertia.

My suggestion, though, is that the engines are far, far too difficult to stall - something like the LX4 will never be able to pull itself away at 400rpm with the clutch fully out, but it does at the moment

Also, the new rev limits are set a little too low for my liking - I still believe making them customiseable is the way to go here - and the sound of the engine against the rev limiter is now, how shall I put this, somewhat horrible. It also seems that the volume of the air intake is drowning everything else out against the rev limiter. Not a bug, at least not that I can see, but hopefully something that can be ironed out before the final release.

EDIT to Blackout - Seeing as, as far as I know, it takes compressed air to get a Formula One car going in the first place, you're lucky you can restart it at all
This may be woefully outdated or inaccurate information, by the way

Sam

Last edited by Dark Elite, Mon 10 Dec 2007, 19:48. Reason : Labelled comment

Absolutely not.

Anything which takes the emphasis of LFS away from racing against humans is losing the intent of the game. Cruise servers themselves use this idea in a different way, and this too is against the original purpose of the game. I really can't see development time being invested in something like this, to be honest.

But you could always try and find a way to do it yourself

Sam

Quote from dcToro :

There is no way to have it absolut correct anyway.

Yes, there is. Set your wheel's rotation to match the ingame wheel's rotation. This results in absolutely perfect matching between the physical wheel and the onscreen one. If it isn't too much of a technical issue, maybe this could be implemented, but I can't see a whole new option sprouting up just because one person doesn't like the way things are done now.

I think it's more likely that we will be able to customise the replacement LCD screen that we already get when the wheel is removed in a single-seater.

Sam

Excellent, I've been waiting and waiting - well, haven't we all?

This list of updates looks simply fantastic, a lot of little things that have been annoying me have been fixed - even though I'd never have thought of ways around them. Great work, guys. Downloading now

Sam

Quote from OP :

moonclaw: ty for your reply i've been playing lfs for 2 years never knew about f12 i will definetly be using it now lol.

Perhaps, then, clearly not having read the LFS Manual, you should acquaint yourself with as much knowledge of the game as you possibly can before criticising it.

Quite apart from that, almost all of your suggestions have been seen before, and as has been said already, you should have thoroughly read the Suggested Improvements Log before posting this - if at all.

Much as I don't mean to sound hostile, I'd like to point out why you've received what you might call a negative response to this thread.

Sam

This is by far the most valid improvement suggestion that's been through here.

Sam

Quote from TVE :

Isn`t it just easy as forcing drivers to not use TC?
It doesn`t need to be that complicated, or to update the current BF1 car

Quote from JET46 :

the cars will be designed without TC being incorporated so they will be quite different, and as of now we do not have enough control over the differential to make it the same situation with the BF1. 06

Hmm.

Sam

Quote from dropin_biking :

As for a Supra being rice? DOUBT THAT BROTHERN. 2.5litre twin turbo doesn't mean rice. Look at the third generations. BPU they would spank quite a few cars, all while staying street.

Quote from (Questionable) GodOfDrift :

I would Like to see a tuned up supra, not a stock one.

Hmm.

Sam

Quote :

Switzerland banned circuit racing in the '50s after a crash that killed a driver and dozens of spectators (it was at Le Mans iirc)

Yes, they did, it was after a Mercedes ran off the track in the 24 Heures du Mans and hit a large group of spectators. The rest of the world mourned, Switzerland banned racing outright, and subjected everywhere to its blanket speed limits. I think this is still in action today, and the Swiss Touring Cars used to have to run in Germany and Belgium - not sure about now.

As for the topic at hand, the only argument against adding something like this is that people with lower-spec machines don't need to give their systems anything more to process at once - but you can answer this by attaching it to the LoD setting, so that those with powerful machines can get the immersion, without hindering those without. Why not? +1

Sam

dpcars is taking words out of my mouth here. Probably the biggest point I'd like to highlight is exactly what type of controller you're going to use for a bike. You need a clutch handle, a brake handle, a brake pedal, a gear 'pedal' that moves up and down, handlebars that rotate, a throttle that rotates, and the ability to lean without falling over. I just can't see it being viable - maybe there's a very good reason nobody markets home bike-simulator controllers?

Sam

That's what Need for Speed is for. This is somewhat different.

Sam

Why would it be like a Spyker GT car in particular?

Anything else aside, a GTR version of the RaceAbout would only serve to detract from the original car's appeal - as there's something better to go on to, but with the same sort of theme. At least, that's my Mystic Meg prediction for the day.

Sam

Nor do you need to start 'threatening' him publicly. Save it for PMs, gentlemen, so we don't have to read it.

Sam

Well, it's called the Live Settings menu...

Sam

Quote from mrodgers :

56k here for slightly more than 2 years. I connected to servers all over the world on that 56k connection. No, it wasn't sufficient enough to download. It took me 5 or 6 days running overnight to download, but was able to race nightly just fine with very few disconnects. As long as it was less than 18 racers, which is easy to do in the US, all was fine.

That reinforces my point somewhat, if a connection that takes fifty-ish hours to download 120MB is capable of racing against a large field, I really can't think of any reason why anybody with a connection who has the game can't play online. If your connection is down for some reason, go practice until it comes back up again... Without AI in your way.

To be honest, I just don't think that this is a meaningful addition to LFS. It is centred on being a real racing simulator, and you cannot simulate real racing with computer-controlled opponents. Simple.

Sam

One of the wonderful things about LFS is that it requires very little in the way of connection speed to play online - in fact, it is the most tolerant online game I've ever seen as far as slow connections are concerned. If your connection was sufficient to download it, your connection should be sufficient to play online - but if it isn't, for whatever reason, LFS just isn't for you...

You have to consider the impact that taking emphasis away from online racing would have on the community, too.

Sam

Quote :

afaik the brake bias you'd need would make you loose all of that advantage at T1 as you tried not to lock the fronts :P

What d'you think F11 is for

It's occured to me that as the speedometer works from the drive wheels, even if you can stay perfectly still (which I doubt), you're probably still going to get done for it

EDIT - Actually, I've just tested a Formula V8, and you can do it. It was moving forwards a little, but it could go about a foot before I got the penalty. Cool.

Sam

Last edited by Dark Elite, Sun 23 Sep 2007, 16:42.