I got it to run now, well... run... no matter what I do I can't get more than 40fps.. That is 640x480 low detail for ya... its about 28 at 1024 high detail, when I'm about to leave my 'crib' (uhh).. But that still reminds me of my Geforce 2 as far as smudged gfx go..

It is really too slow. It would always be a big big pain to get 'points' or whatever that is to unlock the hardcore mode, but at these framerates its even worse. There is about 0.5 seconds input lag as well! LOL Press gas.. wait.. VROOM.. ah..

My sempron 64 at 2.5ghz (athlon64 with a bit less cache) scores at least equal to a 'normal' AMD64 3800+, often faster.. A 6800GT card isn't anything special but it should not have to struggle to get 35fps at 640x480 :O

I don't know.. What is the worse type of piracey. Try before buy or game companies releasing unoptimized crap?

A quick LFS comparison, I think I had my CPU at 900mhz and a half grid of AI before I got sub 20fps at 1600x1200 8xaf 8xaa.. I can barely reach 20fps in TDU at 1600x1200, no aa no af and 1600mhz more

Does the sound frequency seem low (when quick revving) or is that because of the capturing? Speaking about which, is it possible to capture at 30fps? Te slightly choppy framerate doesn't always do justice to whats really going on

Ok.. I don't really 'care' about the 'missions'.. I just want to pick a car and drive it all around the available roads, randomly!

Are you driving in that 'Hardcore' mode that Bosse mentions, JTbo?

Looks like my 3800+ / 6800GT will struggle though!

/Niels

PS: surely there must be some cheatcode so you can do the hardcore settings without spending hours gathering points? Google says there are no cheat codes..

this is hardcore mode http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaIAmD5-vM0 and disregarding the jump.. it does seem to show cars no longer pull 3Gs in turns. Perhaps its 'good enough' for the leisure drive thing that I somehow find a cool prospect of this game! Tunezz on the radio.. window rolled down.. just cruisin.. :P

Last edited by Niels Heusinkveld, Mon 5 Mar 2007, 12:44.

iRacing is by far the most promising sim for the true realism freaks. If this doesn't live up to my expectations I'll be a sad puppy for a good while! It really is 10 steps ahead as far as potential goes than anything we drive at the moment. Expectations have proven to be a bad thing in simracing though, but its hard not to get excited!

Yeah I would say even if it IS a very cheap brand, it should still easily deliver stable enough power. Very basic components there, they don't ask for much.

No problem at all, that system will never use more than ~80W of DC power. The graphics card will probably use less than 10W. You're fine!

Graham would say: "Its got some poke!"

Audiophiles vs 'non believers' is often more of a brawl arena than the average LFS vs rFactor debate..

Do you go by science or by feel? Putting expensive dampers under a CD player doesn't change anything. Unless you charge a hefty sum for the thing, then the buyer simply WILL hear a difference.. Afterall, he spent all that money, so the 'soundstage' (whatever that is) must expand! Its quite hilarious imo how many impossibly expensive useless gadgets there are. Cables for $1000 per meter are commonplace, yet you can't fault a piece of $1 piece of decent copper. Try those cables on your coffee machine and enjoy a new taste! Err.. Oh not to mention your washing machine; colors preserve a lot better with a 2000 quid cable.. But in audio, yes, every expense somehow changes.. no.. not that.. IMPROVES the sound!

I rate sound quality as an important thing but I approach it from the 'scientific' side. Mp3, if coded correctly (LAME for instance, and to be safe at a high rate like 160 or 192kbit) is not audibly different from WAV. Very very few people can hear that, and in some cases they preferred the MP3.. Often blind tests, wether it is simple things like CD players, cables or MP3s, show no difference between 'good standard stuff' and 'exotics costing 20x more'.

By far the most important things regarding sound reproduction, imho, are:
- the recording; often not ideal, often using too much compression (no dynamics) and poor use of stereo or tonal balance can really make a record sound 'bland'.
- The speakers; distortion, frequency response.. All much harder to get right in a speaker. Any normal CD player will be great, a reasonable (few hundred euro) amp will deliver.. but speakers are more variable.
- Acoustics (sp).. A stone room or Granny's living.. Huge huge differences in how sound bounces / decays..
- Setup: having a dedicated listening 'triangle' spaced well away from walls to avoid being subject to indirect sound..

and of course..

- Neighbours: poison them so you can actually listen at fairly loud levels for more than short periods without them coming after you with an axe..

Audio is just two streams of 2 dimensional low frequency (relatively) stuff thats really not that hard to get right. If we all optimized our (living) rooms for accoustics, poison our neighbours, and sack 80% of the recording studio personell.......

So you use the Logitech electronics for the pedals? I would say its well worth the cost to go for a better USB interface. ECCI has its own HD Ultra (etc etc) interface which is probably good, but better value (and quite possibly the same performance / accuracy) is to be had with Leo Bodnars boards:

http://www.lbodnar.dsl.pipex.com/joystick/index.html

If you go for the Plasma Lite from Beta Innovations

http://www.betainnovations.com/hardware/plasma_mm2.html

you can completely calibrate in 'hardware' and tweak a lot. Its recommended if you want the most control over your pedal range / calibration / deadzones etc.. With both boards, you calibration is 'fixed' (for Bodnar's board only if you tick the 'calibration lock' in LFS) so even if your pot bounces or whatever, calibration limits will not change. I belief logitech electronics do this by themselves, so the in game 'lock' doesn't have to work..

Mind you, the performance increase from shutting down a few of those is next to nothing probably.

There was this big thing on the net a while a go regarding Black Vipers popular winXP 'services settings', a similar thing. It made sense: running less background things makes things faster, but it appeared that it was actually marginally slowing things down in benchmarks!


It can be worth to Google the list, to make sure there is no 'dodgy' stuff in there but for performance increase, you're probably not going to notice anything.

Thanks for that AMp88.. I sort of reconsidered it myself as it should've been a boat with those conditions and no grooved tyres.

I should get that DVD; car pron is always better at high res

No speakers nearby? Or AC-DC converters?

My old speakers where magnetically shielded.. great.. but the little amplifier still managed to make the CRT image 'jitter'. :/

Its youtube day..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2bcPIXl8kc&NR

I like that a lot! Creative bunch!

/Niels

Oddly enough that last name is Dutch and means 'cemetary' .. (sp).. the place where people are buried I mean.. He could've been! :O

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU8WZnVJrMs

a true eye opener that

I quite agree with most that's been said.. Simracing could have evolved better / faster as George said.. LFS gives you decent content; everything works, works pretty well and looks pretty well. With rFactor you get very poor physics at the best of times, and tracks that seem to be Sports Car GT conversions. There is a LOT... but also a lot of very low quality / buggy stuff. I am finding out that the ISI physics engine can be reasonable though, but not with any of the mods I've tried. And releasing a sim as a 'mod' platform with just TXT files and 300 variables to edit should be considered a crime..

Until there is a breakthrough sim, perhaps iRacing, I get my fixes with a mix of LFS / GPL and even rFactor..

You could / should also listen to Selling England by the Pound by Genesis (1973 Gabriel on vocals / Phil on drums)

And once you like that, go for The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, a double whopper of amazing music! (the less accessible from the two..)

Hey guys,

I'm too 'young' to ever have been impressed by the poor old Fax machine. A friend of mine is starting a small business and faxing is still pretty common as a business communication tool.

I wonder if anyone has experience with things like www.efax.com which offer a software way for 11 euro per month + 9 cents per fax.

Are there any drawbacks to this method?

Hope to hear from some of your experiences!

Regards,
Niels

Often you can cure memtest errors by changing the RAM timings in the bios. They don't cause huge slowdown, but going from cas2 to cas3, or putting some other latencies from whatever they are to a few clicks higher can do wonders.

Most gfx cards have at least a 2 year warranty so there might still be warranty on your card.

So what is the truth about hardware changes? For a while there was talk about adding a graphics card or changing the mobo making your license invalid so you had no choice to buy Vista again?

I doubt it is that bad.. Lets hope sims will have their dx9 versions for a few years to come. I sort of get along with XP and it only cost me 18 euro for a legal xp pro UK upgrade, back when I was a student! That's cost effective OS

If it wasn't for Immer$ions FF patents, I'm sure we'd have a $599 FF wheel that would be pretty impressive. Now its ~1350 euro for the VPP which is expensive, and it only has 270 degs of lock.

Shotglass is right, of course; not having any 'feedback' is far from ideal. I have had a Logitech DFP and found it very poor. I want the FF wheel to do exactly what the sim tells it, and when you calculate that the DFP has a max speed that is some 8 times lower than you can see *real* wheels spinning at.. and you feel all that inertia of the 40:1 drive. Did you know that the DFP has a 'brake mechanism' that makes the motor positively resist fast turning of the wheel? This is done to limit the current going through the motor I think. Eero P (from Drivers Republic) told me that, and he has that straight from Logitech.. So the DFP doesn't come close enough. The G25 should be better but I haven't tried that yet.

Now the reason why I prefer to have no feedback at all is that my opinion is that there is only one thing worse than no feedback, and that is "often not correct" feedback, as you get with most FF wheels. I don't want to use a wheel that I learn to 'trust', and based on which I judge realism of sims, when I *know for sure* that the wheel is technically incapable of delivering what the sim tells it to. Sure there will be times when its not bad, but there will also be times when there is a big difference between wheel feedback and what the sim intended.

I realise this is also a compromise, a big one. I just see it as a 'risk' as explained above. Perhaps in 2144 when BRD releases their wheel things will change

With good sims I have never had a problem 'feeling' the car through my 'dead' wheel, going purely by graphics and sound. During my 'peak' days I was 3rd overall at the Nurburgring in GPL with a 7:53 lap.. This was 2001 or something.. I was also top 10 on some RBR stages, until everybody learned each and every bump and set insane times. I haven't done much LFS but managed a 1:24.9 at Blackwood in the GT Turbo within ~30 laps, which is not good but not horrible. Driving cars should be 'logical' and instinctal, even without FF imo.

Here is a pic of my wheel. It will get center springs eventually, using two big torsion springs I will get ~700 degrees of lock at ~3kg force. For now, I am the center spring . Its a cheap 30cm kart wheel with 4 wheel buttons, and a TSW sequential shifter. The big round thing is an optical encoder, giving a totally over the top 4096 steps per revolution precision. Any touch of the wheel registers! Over the top but pretty sexy I find! My wheel has registred about 22 steps of movement before the average DFP with slight 'cog wheel deadzone' even starts at ~2 degrees.

Don't get me wrong, no FF is a huge compromise but weighing the options I prefer it to having Logitech FF.

Most FF comes from cogwheels / motors in your average logitech wheel though

Since I don't use FF I haven't experienced how poorly it is done in ISI. It is bad that for years they've added brake fade, brake duct effect on drag and creating FF that 'feels' better.. While not touching the tyre data.

But now that I saw the light (still darkness here and there) I am happy to get the chance of driving some great cars and great tracks, even if most are sub par, at least I now have some idea how to make the handling good.

While I am totally against LFS being 'moddable' (the horror!) I also find it frustrating that I can't play with the tyre model / develop a better understanding for the pros and cons of LFS. This 'need' I can now look after in ISI. Though I already know I won't be doing much of that as long as Notepad is the 'car design lab'

It might be known to some of you that I despise(d) ISI physics. Since 1999 (F1 2000) not a single release or mod convinced me. Oversteer behaviour was so wrong, countersteering was.. counterproductive. And if, with a random combination of panic inputs, you thought you came out of a slide alive, you would be thrown off the track in the other direction. Driving a car needs confidence and I never had any with ISI games, even though I could 'learn' to be 'quick', doing top 50 or top 100 laptimes. It just never had anything to do with driving a race car.

LFS has always been a lot better at simulating a car 'over the limit'..

The last two days have been very strange. After reading the discussion on rFactor 'drifting' at RSC, I asked JTBo what his rFactor Volvo project was about and - Thanks! JTB! - I got access to the beta, which made my jaw drop. Normal car inputs work, car 'balance' (throttle / power) works.. A pretty good dream, except it was for real!

I liked the idea of the 79 mod for rFactor but also couldn't drive it. While they changed the lateral tyre curve, they also kept lots of 'bad' stuff in there. I simply turned off most non linear effects (load sensitivity / camber effect on grip / speed effects / heat / wear) to see what a 'pure' more realistic set of grip curves would do to the 1979 Ferrari. I also added 10..15% inertia (values seemed low) and put the COG 2 centimeters higher.

I know there are a few ISI .. dislikers here on the LFS forum, although I must've been up there in the top 3.. I made a short video of just some outtakes, showing proper car behaviour and control. I only spun a few times, and even that looks pretty good. I crashed only when really being very eager. I *never* disagreed! How is that..

I'm baffled / stunned / amazed.

It is still HORROR to actually build a car for rFactor, there are no proper physics tools to analyze suspensions, 'check' tyres etc. Its all very very bad in this respect. But guess what.. The physics engine works if you provide realistic, even though very basic, data!

I hope the video is very un-ISI like, as that sure is how it drives!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cevxP5GtD68

Edit, it is 5:44 at night. That hasn't happened since Grand Prix Legends!