Can't speak for anyone else but the reason I don't use it is that I'm no good at driving it. It requires far more skill than I possess to drive it well and driving it poorly is just an exercise in frustration.

Honest difference of opinion is enough to explain away the disparity in scores. Witness, for example, the enormous differences of opinion that exist about LFS and, say, rFactor. That's why I usually pay little heed to any single review of any product, unless it's from a particularly trusted source whose opinion I know I can rely upon, and instead prefer to either try a product myself or, if that's not possible, look for a general concensus of opinion e.g. www.rottentomatoes.com, www.metacritic.com.

That said, the rumour that EA possibly bribed the reviewer to write a poor review of a competitors product is worrying and reminds me of the recent influence peddling scandals that have broken over the last year e.g. nVidia surreptitiously giving free product to influential posters on gaming hardware forums and the various stealth marketing campaigns in which marketing 'sleepers' are planted in gaming forums, build up a history as a regular poster and after a time start to praise whatever products they're marketing and denigrate the competition. All that just lends even more weight to the 'trust no single-source' approach.

I think the LFS rank stats would be a lot more useful if they would automatically consider your best laps during a race also instead of the current scheme which only considers hotlaps which you upload.

In LFS World, click on the S2 Hotlaps icon and then the Ranks tab. This does more or less what you're looking for though I don't find it particularly user friendly and it would have to be tweaked a bit to provide the same sort of utility as GPLRank.

Names off. I don't like clutter on the screen so I turn off the mini-map, results list etc off too. The license plate and paintjobs are usually sufficient to get to know particular people. I will sometimes turn on names while watching the replay if something happened that I want to examine more closely.

Big thumbs up for the STCC from me too. It has revitalized my interest in playing LFS online. I've been racing combos I wouldn't normally try and have found the racing to be clean for the most part and, more importantly, a lot of fun. My only gripe is that there aren't many users online when I usually play (GMT-8) so I'm trying to do my part to encourage more people in the US and Canada to give it a go. The faux-TV coverage of the main events is very well done too.

[edit:]That video came up in a discussion about drifting in rFactor over at RSC. Here's a link to the thread: http://forum.rscnet.org/showthread.php?t=280457 It contains a lot of good information though there is quite a bit of noise in the discussion which can get annoying.

I still check up on what's happening with rFactor every few weeks. The last time I checked the latest and greatest mod which everyone was raving about was Grand Prix 1979 which contains the cars and several of the tracks for the 1979 F1 season. It's not my favourite F1 era (that would be the late 60s and early 70s), but I've always had a soft spot for Gilles Villeneuve and fat slicks so I installed it hoping to take some of those roaring 79 F1 beasts for a blast around some classic race tracks. Colour me completely unimpressed. The mod is certainly ambitious in scope but the execution is terrible (a part of me wants to cut the mod makers some slack since they're not charging for their work and they clearly put a lot of time and effort into the mod but another part of me thinks that that would just be partially excusing poor quality).

If that is among the best of the mods being released, I shudder to think what the others that aren't as highly-acclaimed among the rFactor afficianados are like.

And thus ended my most recent foray into the world of rFactor. I don't want to come across as an LFS fanboy here nor be seen to be critical of the game just because it's not LFS; I really do want to see other games raise the standard of simulation as far as they can - the more quality titles there are out there, the better it is for us all as consumers. I just don't see even the potential for excellence in rFactor at all.

Last edited by BuddhaBing, Sat 3 Mar 2007, 10:20.

I find that the force feedback feels better if the Overall Effects Strength is set to slightly more than 100% in the Wingman Profiler, Global Device Settings. I use 102% with my DFP, for instance.

Apparently, this is because at 100% the profiler still applies some filtering to the feedback while for settings above 100% no filters are applied.

For what it's worth, I haven't been able to replicate XCNuse's bug.

Is there any way to specify the resolution (vertical and/or horizontal) or the field of view of the mirrors or are those parameters hard-coded?

I was rushing to the hospital this afternoon in my Audi A6 to be with my wife who had gone into labour with our first child. There were some road works along the way and the traffic was down to one lane in both directions. The drivers at the end of the traffic queue graciously waved me through when they saw me gesturing that it was an emergency and I was almost at the head of the queue when some dick in a Clio 1.2L decided to block me. I tried to edge in ahead of him but he was oblivious to my frantic gesturing and I eventually had to slip in behind him. As we made our way slowly through the road works, I called the hospital on my mobile to let them know I was on the way. In the end, I was just a couple of minutes too late to be there for the birth of our first child. If only that bugger in the Clio hadn't blocked me ... aah, I could strangle him!

Quote from N I K I :

In what time do you play (GMT +1)?

GMT-8, which means that I usually play LFS when everyone in Europe is either asleep or at work/school. Those of us in North America and Australia sometimes have a hard time finding online races; it's not unusual for there to be fewer than 20 licensed users online when I check the servers.

I've been discovering new car / track combos on the STCC servers lately. I just wish there were more players online at night in the North American timezones as the STCC scoring system makes it difficult score points and progress when the fields you're racing against are small.

Bearing in mind that this is a project for a drivers ed course, I don't think it's a good idea to say that you should ever exceed posted speeds, even if they're only advisory. While the yellow suggested speed signs you see on the approach to corners etc are just advisory and are therefore not directly enforceable, you should bear in mind that (a) posted advisory speeds are based on ideal driving conditions and (b) most jurisdictions have a statute which says something like "regardless of the posted speed limit, it is illegal to drive faster than is safe for current conditions"; so, driving faster than the indicated advisory speed could be viewed as driving recklessly. Again, for the purposes of the drivers ed course.

That error is discussed here: http://www.lfsforum.net/archive/index.php/t-7443.html

Quote from nikimere :

that doesn't appeal to me in the slightest...
i mean driving for days 99% of the time in a straight line! i need corners!
very "cliche" but a ferrari on those hairpin country roads in Monaco would be really cool!!

I've driven across the US twice and across Canada once. Parts are fun with some nice driving roads and beautiful scenery but it's mostly a boring chore. I can understand the appeal - I get pretty excited at the start of a trip too - but the reality is that it can be a grind. The drive from Vancouver down the west coast of the US along the Pacific Coast Highway, on the other hand, is a great road-trip; not long enough to get boring, the roads are fun to drive, the scenery is absolutely gorgeous and there's always something interesting around the next bend. I also wouldn't mind doing a road-trip around Europe one day.

2. Build my own car, either from scratch or from kit.

Quote from GHOSTRACER1 :

No stupid comments from the usual RF detractors,i can understand why........

Yes, congratulations are in order; when this mod is eventually released, rFactor may finally have a car that actually behaves like a car. I can see why you must be almost giddy with excitement!

Quote from GHOSTRACER1 :

http://ak47rulez.extra.hu/rf_subaru_final.wmv

Nice. That's the first time I've seen a car in rFactor that looks and behaves convincingly like a real car. It's even got suspension that seems to work! Shame about the tracks though.

If I'm not mistaken, that mod is by the same mod team that has created some of the best mods for Richard Burns Rally.

It's clearly being marketed to women. Marketers think that draping a scantily-clad woman over a car makes it more appealing to men and they've clearly tried to use the same gimmick in reverse in an attempt to appeal to their female target audience. Does it work? Well, my wife thinks it's a silly ad and thinks the dancing cowboy is annoying; then again, she also hates the car and doesn't fall into the frilly Euro-urbanite demographic they're probably targeting.

That's the UFR Brokeback edition.

Quote from EeekiE :

Collision detection when hitting a barrier is different to calculating the cars dynamics when driving it.

It will currently pong the car into oblivion because that's the only way it can use the energy it's been given. The mesh that makes up the car has no spring/torsion/tensile properties at the moment so the whole thing acts like a rigid body, so it's like dropping a pool ball on a tiled floor. It will bounce.

If collision elasticity is the problem, it's a relatively straightforward fix and shouldn't involve any special case coding. All that would be required is to set the coefficient of restitution (CoR) to a lower value. A CoR of 1.0 results in a perfectly elastic collision while 0.0 results in a perfectly inelastic collision. Given that cars are highly deformable and have crumple zones and a lot of empty space, I imagine the CoR would be relatively low.

However, I'm not convinced that the root cause of the problem is as simple as the elasticity of the colliding objects, since the energy state of the car and barrier post-collision often seems to be higher than it was pre-collision.

Quote from scoobyrbac :

I dint know but what does the 4 front wheels help?

The tyres of an open-wheel car account for a significant part of its total aerodynamic drag (something like 50% depending on the car and tyres). Reducing the frontal area of a tyre means that it creates less aerodynamic drag. Unfortunately, decreasing the size of a tyre also reduces the size of its contact patch which means that it produces less grip. So, to produce the same amount of grip as a larger tyre, more small tyres have to be used.

Last edited by BuddhaBing, Tue 13 Feb 2007, 08:39.

Martin Brundle's Supercars
http://video.google.co.uk/vide ... 916073474&q=supercars

Note: you can use KeepVid (http://keepvid.com/) to save a reasonably high quality AVI of this to your local system.

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