You can look as cool as you like; the taste of a smokers kiss to a non smoker is very nearly the most rancid thing I've ever tasted.
Remember that next time you come on to someone who doesn't smoke.

Quite a few of you have said we do more dangerous things every day than smoke, but how many of them are addictive and how many will slowly kill you or your girlfriend / wife & children?

As for dying in a diaper, if you are unforunate enough to get lung cancer, how about dying laid up in bed being too weak to even breathe, let alone eat or get up to go to the toilet because your body is slowly suffocating? Even worse, how about contributing to one of your loved ones having to die like that?
Hmmm, yeah, not my idea of cool or fun.

I saw that first hand 2 years ago as lung cancer took hold of my grandad, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone, but to actively take a risk of not only killing yourself, but others as well in such a horrific way is beyond stupid to me.

Sorry for having a rant, but having had this touch me personally, it is something I feel pretty strongly about.

*edit*

Oh, a small comment on the weed... lots of people start on weed but eventually want a bigger buzz so advance on to pills. Then the pills arent enough so they get on to the coke or smack. I'm not saying everyone works out that way, but quite a few of the people I've known to smoke weed get bored of it eventually and move on to harder stuff. Just something to think about.

Last edited by Anarchi-H, Tue 25 Apr 2006, 05:05.

http://www.barryboys.co.uk/mx/
Shed Of The Week section is highly recommended for giggles.

Here are a couple of highlights
http://www.barryboys.co.uk/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=21311
http://www.barryboys.co.uk/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=21172

If you don't want to spend anything, need more than just a 30 day trial and don't mind putting in some severe effort, there is always POV ray.

Using the tool from here and POV (available here) you may be able to cook something up.

I've never tried though so it's no use asking me how and I'm not even 100% sure they'll work nicely with the LFS exported meshes.

Worth a try if you don't mind some effort though.

IMO notepad is a bit of a sad choice. The trivial things like syntax highlighting and indentation get to be a bit of a chore after a few thousand lines.
It's best to go for something with at least these two features.

There have already been a few decent ones mentioned, although my weapon of choice is VIM. Insanely powerful for a text editor, but really hard to get your neck around at first.

I never have got on with WYSIWYG editors much. The code they produce in most cases is... well naff IMO. Dreamweaver is probably the best, but still not perfect. The standards I play by are pretty high though.

1. What is your gender?
Male

2. What is your age (in years)?
20

3. What if any is your political affiliation?
Dunno

4. What, if any, is your religious affiliation?
I meditate & prescribe to a few buddhist beliefs, but I'm not a buddhist.
So none.

5. On a scale of 1 to 10, how religious do you think you are?
1

6. What is your level of education?
High School

7. Do you believe the theory of intelligent design correct?
No

8. Do you believe Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selection correct?
Yes, as long as it is presented without bias.

9. Should both intelligent design and evolution should be taught in schools?
Yes, as long as it is presented without bias.

In response to the above two questions, I'd like to add that although I may not agree with ID as a science, I also believe that people should make their own minds up.

10. Do you think that only intelligent design should be taught in schools?
No

11. Do you think that only evolution should be taught in schools?
No

10. Intelligent Design is creationism presented as science.
Strongly Agree

11. Evolution is flawed, and cannot be used to explain the varied life forms on our planet.
Disagree

12. Evolution only explains what happened after intelligent design took place, and as such the two can be taught together.
Not sure what to make of that one. I don't agree with the initial statement, but I do believe that they can be taught together... but as alternatives.

13. What is your opinion on the scientific basis of intelligent design?
Flawed. "Signs of intelligence" can easily be misinterpretted, and at the end of it all, without hard physical proof it still requires faith, and faith is at the heart of religion. Behind true science is cold hard fact. At best, I'd call ID a theoretical science, but from what I'm aware, unlike most theoretical sciences, it doesn't have any research data or theorem other than "this looks like intelligence had a hand in it".

14. What is your opinion on the scientific basis of evolution?
Less flawed than ID, but It does leave a few questions unanswered and possibilities open.

Last edited by Anarchi-H, Wed 8 Mar 2006, 16:28.

I really can't be arsed to read it all, but from what I did read, I think it goes something like this...

Game data is infused with some extra data that is only useful to spectators, and then sent to a broadcast program.

This program would then redistribute the data in such a way that anyone connecting to the server the broadcast program is running on could watch the game from various virtual cameras (just like you can spectating normally, except you can't interact with the actual game).

I should imagine you'd need the game content for this, otherwise this would probably fall under any one of numerous mass distribution visual media patents.

They aren't just talking about spectating in a game. They are talking about an entire system dedicated to spectating that uses a centralized broadcast server / network. i.e.

1. LFS Server packs up game data and attaches some extra misc data.
   
2. LFS Server sends this data to a broadcast server.
   
3. Broadcast server then sends data out to any number of connected clients.
   
4. Broadcast server may inform LFS server of number of conected 'spectators', or other spectator related data. (this was something else it mentioned)

In addtion, the patent covers similar systems that cover multiple games. (think gamespy where you could spectate)
Well... thats what I made of it anyway.

Scawen did mention, once upon a blue moon ago that he may implement a dummy client solely for spectating, but didn't mention anything about a dedicated broadcast server, so I don't think there is much to worry about, except for the fact that microsoft has yet another patent.

Quite frequently I've been stuck for a project to do, only to end up going off brainstorming and coming up with some daft idea that is probably of no use to anyone.
So a friend of mine in sales suggested that I 'survey the market' for unofficial addons.
This, (assuming anyone answers) should be of use to any potential developers looking to develop a project geared towards LFS.

So, it doesn't matter how unfeasible or stupid you think your idea might be, what do you want to see as an unofficial addon for LFS?

Requests for tracks / cars / any other content or physics related stuff should go in the improvement suggestions subforum if it hasn't already been mentioned.

Your post should clearly state...

1. What your idea is.
   
2. Why you need / want this feature.

Try to keep technical or implemetation issues out of this thread.
Additions to suggestions are welcome though.

If you think you can do it, by all means give it a go. If I can help I will, but as I've said before, I don't think that this a practical application of AJAX.

Here is a summary of the pitfalls I see. I think that if you can overcome these with suitable solutions that will work together, you should be able to pull it off.

• How will you interact with InSim?
  
• If applicable, how will you store the data between the insim client recieving it, and the AJAX enabled page requesting it?
  
• How often will it update? Will the mehods above work well enough with this interval?

Those probably aren't all of them, but I think that those are the major ones.

The solutions I see to point 1 is either a convoluted PHP script, an indefinitely running PHP script or, as afore mentioned by myself and TAA, some kind of client that can run indefinitely. If you can do that in a threaded language, and can cope with the complexities of sharing data between threads, you should be able to use this to overcome point 2 by also listening for requests from the AJAX client, thus eliminating the need for a temp storage media.

If the update interval isn't too high, a DB might work, or possibly some kind of complex cache system, but I think with the level of frequency you might want these aren't practical solutions. This, IMO is the biggest issue.

Last edited by Anarchi-H, Sun 5 Mar 2006, 12:29.

Quote from Dygear :

The class will do all of the rendering work. Set the update time to 1/6, 1/3, 1/2, 2/3, 5/6, or 1 time a second and the for loop will execute and render out as needed.

I think you need to do a bit more research in to both AJAX and PHP here because what you've said there is simply not possible.

An AJAXified request goes something like...

• Client sends initial HTTP request for page
  
• Webserver acknowledges with a 200 and sends back data required
  
• JS is loaded by client browser (JS was sent by the server)
  
• JS AJAX framework initialised, requests any intial data from the server by HTTP
  
• As the user interacts / a timer triggers events, the JS framework makes additional HTTP requests from the server.

PHP comes in to when the HTTP requests are made from the server. For example, a ficticious mailbox request might go like

• User clicks "Trash"
  
• AJAX framework requests "gettrash.php"
  
• Webserver starts up PHP, processes gettrash.php & returns the result to the requesting client (the AJAX framework) in the form of an HTTP response.
  
• AJAX framework converts this in to renderable output & it is displayed
  
• User then searchs for "moo"
  
• AJAX framework requests "search.php?q=moo"
  
• Webserver starts up PHP, processes search.php & returns the result to the requesting client (the AJAX framework) in the form of an HTTP response.
  
• AJAX framework converts this in to renderable output & it is displayed

and so on...

As you can see, PHP is invoked "on demand", and not in one big ass loop like you envision. As such, PHP has finished processing and is no longer able to do anything by the time any rendering has to be done.

Also, you seem to be misunderstanding the way you are going to be able to interact with insim. Each PHP request is delt with in a separate thread / process, depending on how it is setup. Either way, PHP can't communicate between scripts without an interim data format (one script stores it so another can access it, like a cache or database).

And finally, a server CANNOT push data through HTTP. It has to be pulled. What I mean by this is that a client must first request the data from the webserver before the client can recieve it. As such, it will be JS & the AJAX framework setting the update interval, and not PHP.

Hmmmm... hate to be the voice of doom and gloom but I'm not so convinced PHP & AJAX is going to pull this off.

What will you use as the insim listening daemon? You can send data on-demand thanks to UDP, but you still need to listen for it on a socket, in a loop. Unless you have some special raport with your hosting provider, an indefinitely running script isn't going to please them. If you have a VPS / dedicated server to act as listener then you could use a rather convoluted PHP script, or use a process to listen (i.e, java, .net or c) though.

Secondly, how live will it be? Updates every 1 second? 2 seconds? 5seconds? AJAX applications usually aren't this lively and to be so is an amazingly inefficient way of going about a dynamic interface. 5 seconds isn't really enough time for a decent overview, and on some slower connections or during peak times, 1 - 2 seconds may not be enough time for the client to recieve and process the async data before the next set of data arrives, thus resulting in an inconsistent behaviour.

In addtion, the added server load will most certainly be unwelcome if you are on shared hosting and get even a few concurrent viewers to the "live" page, not really because of bandwidth, but more because concurrent server hits coupled with PHP being invoked every hit is going to cause a performace drain.

On top of that, what will be your interim data format, between listening server and AJAX request scripts? If you were thinking about a database, you should probably think again because the data will be just coming & going too quick to be effective & the query overhead will be huge when you add it up. Flat file could work, but that means you have to contend with locking, filesystem overheads & all the other niceties of concurrent file access with such rapid updates of data.

Over all, neither PHP or AJAX are the right tools for this job, but please feel free to prove me wrong.

Quote from traxxion :

What's the use of creating two or more Ident-keys? You still can't make two requests within 5 seconds from the same host? (using 2 different ident-keys per request)

You don't have any credit, hence you aren't eligble for the premium untarpitted requests.

The purpose of the ident keys is to do exactly what their name suggests. IDENTify you, for purposes of deducting credit from you premium account and statistics tracking.

You may need more than one because, for instance, you may want an unteathered key for development (not tied to an IP), and you may run one or two sites on different servers that you would like to be teathered to the server because they could be accidentally exposed to the public. This creates the need for 2 or 3 keys.

Quote from Barroso :

http://img499.imageshack.us/my.php?image=screenshot19zp.jpg

Xgl & Compiz rock

Quote from (SaM) :

Anarchi, there has been an S1 age for so many time already I say. It has lasted long enough for the mere 12 pounds.
Now though, it's time to move on to S2 if they wish. LFS is progressing.

*Edit* Fair enough... I just checked the site and they are no longer selling S1 licenses.

Last edited by Anarchi-H, Fri 24 Feb 2006, 15:32.

Quote from Victor :

i'm not giving any answer to this thread here, but i just wanted to note that all of the people who posted in this thread are S2 licensed, except for 1 guy, Gabkicks.

no-one has mentioned yet that _it actually is a problem_. So, is it? So far I'm not convinced it is. Why are the S1 hosts empty? Maybe because there are barely any active S1 racers in the first place. So why should we go through the trouble of rewriting the whole unlocking code, to provide a non-existing usergroup with an additional feature?

Just shining light from a different perspective here.

Missed this thread the first time around, but here goes...

Perhaps the reason this userbase doesn't exist is exactly because the S1 hosts are empty. Catch22 if you like. No one plays on the S1 servers because no one else plays on the S1 servers, and as for all of this "s1 server", "s2 server" distinction, it's all arse biscuits.

The users that should be allowed to join a race should be based purely on the content they have paid for (I think someone mentioned this earlier).
As such, if a server is running BLGP with the XRT & XFG then S1 & S2 patrons should be able to play.
If a server is running BLGP with XRT & FXR then only S2 patrons should be able to play because only they have unlocked the content.

The S2 content is NOT encrypted as some have seemed to point out so that is a non issue. Access to S2 content is placed purely on authentication with the master server.

Demo users are fine as they are, but any S1 customers are stuck with something they can't use as intended for either an oversight or a simple discrimination based on how much they've paid.

Why still sell S1 licenses when you know that the customer can't use the game as intended? I know I'd be pissed if it were me.

http://www.shinybinary.com/play.php

Third one down.

He does some damn awesome stuff, most of which you'll find on that page

Better than my last; background by ShinyBinary.

Porting would be a massive job unless the code is abstracted. Windows specific network calls, and directx calls alone must go in to the thousands, not to mention the amount of stuctures / objects that the platform dependant stuffs rely on for i/o.

It's not really about the architecture, cos at the end of the day if the underlying libs aren't there to support an app, it isn't going to run without switching to one which exists on all target platforms, or suitably abstracting the interfaces such that you can create your own platform specifics.... unless you use an emulator / api translation lib.

Quote from danowat :

And whatever you do, don't use free AV programs, you might aswell not bother having one, anyone who has one of these, I would SERIOUSLY recommend doing an online scan with one of the "biggies", you may be shocked.

All I can say is if you've included Avast in that, you are misinformed at best.

Quote from Hyperactive :

I really don't want any piece of software installing any patches by them selves. Updating the firewall an virusguard doesn't take that much time if I do it myself. And windows updates just tells me when they are ready for downloading.

Fair enough; IIRC Avast has a notify option that will just tell you that an update is available, or you can just switch it off altogether.

Avast rocks (www.avast.com) & it has a free home edition. The only messages I've ever got are "Virus database has been updated" and "Avast has installed an update and needs to restart your machine".

On top of that it is cross platform, and I've not had any false positives or stuff sneak past yet.

This kind of thing makes me wonder if the first people to adopt sarcasm encountered the same problems. Surely sarcasm hasn't been around since the dawn of time, and if you don't know what sarcasm is then you can't interpret the meaning of what has been said / grunted with accuracy.

Maybe in a few hundred / thousand years our brains will have adapted more to communicating by text alone and we will be able to tell without cues?

Eheh, yet one more question.....

How are you going to handle running out of credit?
Falling back to tarpitted stats? Giving an error?

In addition, here is a feature request before you've even launched the main feature

An email telling you you've run out of credit. (presuming you weren't going to do that already)

Fair enough. Mixing and matching free & premium requests on the same cache is going to present some fun, but it's good to know you've covered the bases

It was without compression; I wanted to see how a relatively large output (although I suspect that chart is the largest) scales up in price.

I'll make sure I add idk and username / pass support to PPF when I get my lazy arse around to releasing it. Sorry to anyone who expected it when I said 'shortly'. I have an assload of lame excuses, but I'm sure no one cares

I have just had a thought that poses a problem to the current logisitcs of how this will work though....

ATM, the idea is that the tarpitted stats are free, and the untarpitted stats get charged for...

However, most of the stats will be cached anyway... the main use of untarpitted stats would be to make it easier to get pb, pst, hl data etc.
It is still possible to get that data untarpitted with a little extra code AND the premium members may be getting charged for data that everyone else is getting free just cos they have credit. (I.e. If Mr A requests a host list every 2 minutes, and has credit he may get charged. Mr B requests a host list every 60 seconds, doesn't have any credit & gets it free.)

Just wondering if you've accounted for this in your usage scheme, or if the tarpitted stats are going to have further sanctions imposed?

Need For Speed: Most Wanted... the red text :doh:

Although you gotta give em credit, that is some neat ass vandalism