It's worth it in my opinion. I've pretty much stopped racing altogether but I don't regret buying it one bit.

However I'd go either all or nothing. I don't see the point in buying a different lower priced wheel if your FFEX isn't breaking apart anyway. You'll just end up with a half baked jury rigged solution that cost quite a bit of money too, without reaching anywhere near the quality of the G25.

You don't.

Just tested it and it seems to be true that it's limited to 200something characters. Though, could it maybe make sense to simply use multiple columns then? It's not like you have to display the properties as comma separated list

Ah right, but isn't the listview able to perform the same tasks (and more) than the listbox? IIRC you can make it look pretty much the same. Of course I don't know if it's capable of handling thousands of items, though. In general I have the impression that .NET win form controls can be pretty shit in regards to performance.

I bet he's talking about the Formula Force EX

Have a look here for attempts to make a flickerfree listview:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/list/listviewff.aspx
http://geekswithblogs.net/CPou ... ive/2006/02/27/70834.aspx

Not tested if they work, but Google has a lot of results regarding this issue, so it seems to be a relatively common problem.

Quote from The Very End :

I agree with you, I just don't see why it (07 word) needed to as standard save files as something to compatible with backwards Word versions.

I think the reason for that is if you don't put it as default format then nobody is ever going to use it. That would've been quite a lot of wasted effort and time and surely open standard advocators would've cried foul at this (then it would've been "Microsoft grudgingly implemented this open format but now tries to minimise its spread by not making it default").

Why? I like quoting you

If your workplace refuses to roll out that update then you really can't blame Microsoft for introducing the new format, but only the bureaucracy and inflexibility of your IT department. I understand changes are always a risk and need to be carefully planned in bigger corporations, but if you're not even forced to upgrade to the next version and pay for it, but instead can just install a free update...

Patents last 20 years minimum as far as I know, which is what I was referring to.

Quote from danthebangerboy :

In what way android, because if i4i did indeed patent it first, hence it being theirs, then MS deserve everything they get for trying to steal someone elses ideas TBH.

Software patents are a very slippery slope and pretty dodgy in general. I think the concept of patents is simply too outdated and unfitting for software, considering how it's easily possible that hundreds of programmers solve the same problem the same way completely independently. Then someone goes ahead and patents that way of solving the problem and suddenly nobody may use that technique freely anymore? What a complete crock of shit. Or on the contrary, maybe 100 programmers solve the same problem in completely different ways, then someone patents "solving the problem" which means everybody else has a patent infringement even though the technology and methods used to solve the problem are completely different.

The US patent office seems to be rather prone to giving out trivial patents, like in this case IIRC a patent for software that can automatically read/generate XML documents (which is an open standard, btw) with no direct XML code editing required from the user. Hell I can write program that violates this patent within a few minutes. That's like patenting "boiling an egg". Yeah screw you cooks all over the US, you're going to pay ME now for using such advanced and novel techniques! Also that patent is from 1998 if I remember correctly, which is a time span that might be OK for mechanical devices but 20 years validity for a software patent is ridiculous. That's many many generations of software.

Quote from Electric Eye :

I thought it was only the problem of saving something in certain format?

Yeah I think so, but ironically enough they only implemented this open format (docx) because other people cried for a open document standard. Though my knowledge of the details in that regard is hazy.

Quote from The Very End :

I mean, jeez, I just wan to write, not making big-ass diagrams and analyzis in a word writing program Also, 2007 version that makes documents that canot be opened by earlier versions = SUPERFAIL!

.docx documents can be opened in 2003 if you install a compatibility update. They even managed to anticipate this and leave open a backdoor that makes the 2003 Office tell you you need to install this update to be able to open 2007 documents.

The ruling is absolutely ridiculous, as is the US patent office.

There is no ReplaceAll() in C#, instead the standard Replace() already replaces all occurrences

Quote from carey :

Isn't that recalibrating?

I probably used the wrong word when saying "I never need to recalibrate." With that I meant I never have to change anything in LFS or in the Logitech Profiler or anywhere else. I just have to physically get the wheel hardware to recognise its full motion again (mostly it's just the pedals actually).

If that is actually the problem you're unhappy about then you can't be helped I guess, since it takes less than five seconds to do this recalibration. Also it has nothing to do with LFS.

Regarding your price-quality comparison, the pricing model of racing sims is generally not comparable to normal mass market games, simply because they're often a niche product and independently developed. In the case of LFS, the devs don't even have "making lots of money" anywhere near their top priorities, hence there being no price-gauging but also no official advertisement anywhere ever. From their standpoint the price model seems to work reasonably well in supporting them and their families sufficiently, so there's no need for special offers or changes to it in general.

Heh, I guess you should be all over iRacing then, since according to its price it's of unbeatable quality in every aspect

But yeah, you seem to be the unlucky one with controller issues. Are you sure none of the files in your LFS folder are write protected? What controller are you using and are you plugging it in before starting LFS? Seriously, my G25 never needs a recalibration, the only thing that's sometimes necessary is turning the wheel lock to lock and pressing all pedals to get the full motion range back (but that has more to do with the G25 firmware than LFS).

Ouch :ouch:

:munching_

Quote from carey :

There are many, many replays.

I think you're referring to the common red-barrier / crash-launch-to-space syndrome, but this has nothing to do with gravity. It's a faulty collision response code that cannot deal with certain parts of the car intersecting objects correctly, creating huge get-unstuck forces that launch the cars into the air. However, even subjected to these silly forces the cars behave perfectly well in respect to gravity. There's nothing wrong with gravity in LFS.

Quote from Nathan D. :

Wine is a work around, not a solution.

There is no problem, hence no "solution" needed.

But really, what amp88 said is true. Having a dedicated Linux build would just be extra effort for no gain whatsoever.

Have you checked your spam folder?

Also great job on not making the contestants send in the answers via PM :rolleyes:

But these are things you do once, not often enough to constantly run out during the week.

Think of it as your unlock-account. The maximum value this account can hold is 2. Every Friday you get +1 spare unlock (or is it +2 already? I'm not sure), filling up your account up to its maximum value. Should you, for whatever reason, use all these unlocks during the week, you'll have to wait for Friday to get new ones. In "emergency" cases you can also write an email to the devs to re-up your unlocks.

In practice you don't really need those unlocks anyway, though. Once you unlock your account there's never a reason to lock it again.

Quote from The Very End :

Also, you should be carefull giving too much restriction

You're just whining because you're a weirdo who races with chase cam

Guys this debate is entirely superfluous. Scawen knows that the tyre heating, wear and compound selection/behaviour are not finalised.

It's spelled license. And you're just going to get drunk again and give it to some random person anyway

I'm really not sure what you're pursuing here as a whole? Seems to be a whole lot of effort for nothing really

I think it's pretty clear that the tyre wear itself has no direct physical influence on the car's performance (in LFS). All the factors you're speculating about here are far to small to have any serious impact on laptimes, compared to the uncertainty factor that is human control, or other actually big factors like tyre temperature or fuel weight. If there was an artefact, a physics oddity, then somehow it would have to be big enough that untalented drivers (relatively speaking) benefit from it, too, for it to be "noticed" so widely. And if it were that big, you'd see all world record laps taking 60+ laps beforehand to wear down the tyres to get this then very tangible advantage of having worn tyres, and I'm pretty sure hotlappers do anything to set a WR

Honestly, I think it's more to do with ones mind than having an actual physical reason. You want to believe... no, you know that a worn tyre makes you faster so in the end you are faster. Suddenly in your mind the worn tyre actually made you faster, whereas it was probably just you believing in yourself resulting in better driving. And with that you have the self-reinforcing "evidence" of worn tyres making someone faster, where there can hardly be found any measurable effect of tyre wear itself.

Comparisons of LFS to real life are also somewhat useless. While LFS is quite good and complex in general, if you start going into the details you just notice more and more areas that very much matter for racing are only very roughly approximated if simulated at all. Tyre heat and wear is (officially) a very WIP part of the simulation, with most behaviour being barely more than educated guesses. I could now list all the obvious deficiencies of LFS' tyre model, but really there's no point. Making a fully abstract model of a tyre where in the end the correct behaviour just falls into place is, while noble, not really realistic in terms of being a reachable goal either.

Right now, I think LFS in terms of realism is so close, yet so far.