Quote from frokki :

...I could imagine forcing some noobs, cleanly and by cornering rules, into grass to teach them a lesson, if they aren't willing to respect blue flags at all.

Any move that involves forcing someone onto the grass is by definition not clean, and is breaking at least one rule out of any set of reasonable cornering rules.
If you are overtaking, the simplest and most basic rule is that it is your responsibility as aggressor to ensure that both of you get through the corner safely.... If the other guy ends up on the grass because of your overtaking move, then it's your fault, and the move was dirty not clean.
The only way to fairly get him onto the grass is to pressure him until he screws up and slides wide - no contact required

Now, I'm not saying that the red mist doesn't descend even on the best of us occasionally, just don't kid yourself that this can ever be a 'clean' move.

cheers

Col

Just make it a switch in the ini file, so that the very few people who use it still can (it will replace external view for them), but it doesn't mess up/confuse the interface.
Assuming of course that this isn't a lot of extra work

Col

Quote from AndroidXP :

Adding focal blur + hot air disortion != "pretty much how the game looks"

Don't get me wrong here, it looks rather good on those screens, but displaying both these added effects in realtime and in that quality in the game itself would be a HUGE graphical step, so these effects are far from minor. If you want to compare game graphics, you either take undoctored screens, or you don't bother comparing at all.

Not to mention that before focal blur can be used ingame, the graphics card needs to somehow know where the player wants to focus. Maybe in a FPS, they could focus on the crosshair (might be acceptable), but in a driving sim it would somehow HAVE to look at your eyes (or your intentions)! (or else you would get severe eyestrain and a headache within minutes.

Col

I was browsing rec.autos.simulators back in 2002 for GPL news and came upon a discussion obout a new sim demo that had just been 'discovered'.... that was the last time I went looking for GPL news

Quote from BuddhaBing :

Ah, you're right, that's probably what it was!

edit: it happens even when the car is on its back with both sets of wheels free to spin and it happens to both front and rear wheels. Since in the UFR the rear wheels are non-driven and are not connected via a diff, perhaps friction is modeled in the running gear after all.

perhaps your brakes are always a tiny bit on !?
you really should check this as it could be slowing you down - I think you can use dxtweak or someting to fiz it if it the cause.

Quote from AndroidXP :

Interesting. This is a prime example of how we were told not to do it in driving school

How were you told to do it ?

Quote from george_tsiros :

So, you are arguing that left hand positioning, during a left turn, during daily driving (not formula racing), should be as fig.7 and not as fig.8 (you can try this in your own car)

No, whatever gave you that idea ?
I'm not sure about how they teach you to drive in Greece, but here in the UK, they teach you to 'feed' the wheel through your hands, so if you're driving 'correctly' you left hand would have been moved upwards to a more comfortable position long before it reached the one in your 'fig.7'.
i found a site with an animation of the 'correct' method (in the UK)
turn your volume down if you don't want the audio instructions blaring out.
http://www.2pass.co.uk/steering.htm

Quote from axus :

I see you have just read the topic and replied. I see you come from RSC too. illepall

My Apologies, I am currenly in alpha stage of development. As an Alpha version forum poster, Some features are missing or at an early stage of implementation. Particularly 'irony' functionality has not been updated since early demo days, also 'sarcasm' and general 'fooling around' are high on the priority list for a total re-write. If you believe that my attemts at humour may have been taken seriously, please PM me with a detailed 'oof' report.

Quote from george_tsiros :

Someone might misunderstand my previous post as boasting about being "uncrashable".

I did. (at least that you were less crashable than us)

Quote :

This is not the message i am trying to convey. I am constantly analysing the surrounding area and vehicles for any potential danger. Not a single moment i rest assured that "i will brake early and safely". I always drive having in mind "what if i brake and it starts skidding?" "What if there is something i haven't yet seen?", and i am alert constantly.

A most comendable attitude.

still doesn't make your theory about hand positioning less wrong

Quote from george_tsiros :

If you see "F1" anywhere in my post, please tell me, because i distinctively remember i tried to examine the daily routine driving.

you gave some pseudo scientific theory about hand positioning related to muscle control - the same muscles are used to turn the wheel in an F1 car as in a road car - so my point about F1 using 9 - 3 hand position is totally relevant to your post

Quote :

Thank you for your deconstructive and harsh critisism.

you are most welcome - fwiw, the reason i was harsh and critical is that you were expounding some obviously (to me) flawed theory that if taken as correct, could make someone a more dangerous driver - that is a serious issue, and not the place for niceties and good humour.

Quote :

You (or Moss) wouldn't last a minute in greek traffic without a crash. I've proven myself worthy countless times having avoided being smashed to bits(and having saved numerous ignorant lives that pop out "apparently" out of nowhere) by the general chaos and disorganization around me. The only time my car was in an accident was when it was parked. I've spent every single day since i learned driving to analyse everything that can be analysed, from the length of the car to the color of the car. I've gone karting with some guys who were all the time gloating about their mad skillz and pwned them the first time i raced round that track. I have avoided cars coming up from behind me, sliding with brakes locked, while i was waiting at the light. You can guess how, but in the time i had gone out of harm's way, you wouldn't even have geared in first. They (4 girls in a tiny car) just grazed the rear right of my bumper.

So you are a self proclaimed great driver - and none of us would have survived what you have - not ever, coz we are all rubish compared to you...
none of which makes your original post any less wrong, stupid irresponsible, dangerous etc.
When i was a kid, my dad used to drive his car with his hands on the top of the wheel like in your fig6. The thing is that he had arms like popeye, So for him the loss of muscular control between the different hand positions was less significant - maybe you also have arms like popeye... that still doesn't make your theory any less wrong, false, etc.

Quote :

shut up.

you shut up... fool :mr-t:

Quote from sgt.flippy :

Yes, I'm stupid, everyone here knows it by now.

But those cyclists have rules too, and if they would obey their own rules, the drivers wouldn't need to be so defensive. I don't know how it where you live, but over here, cyclists (on a roundabout for example), they just cross the street (while there is painted on the tarmac, and there is a sign that tells them they have to stop). Is that normal then??

hehe. here in Scotland, most cyclists seems to ride on the pavement because there are enough idiot driver to make the roads too damn dangerous - i gave up cycling years ago because i refuse to cycle on the pavement, My biggest fear was moms on 'the school run' who seemed to ignore anything smaller than a bus as 'not a threat to my kiddies'.
I havn't seen nearly as many cyclists missing stop signs and jumping red lights as cars - I guess cycling gives you a hightened sense of your own mortality

Quote :

About the children, I know you should be carefull, and keep to the speeds, but I'm talking about unsupervised children, wich can suddenly ran onto the streets from let's say two parked cars. You can't see it, you can do nothing about it, but guess who gets the blame huh?

Supervised children can also run into the road - somtimes because they've just been told not to !!!!. You can do something about it - you can do your utmost to minimise the severity of an accident if one should happen... if you see kids on the pavement ahead, prepare for a surprise attack - and don't forget to beep you horn and swear at the little B*****ds when they do stupid things

Quote from axus :

Come on guys,

This forum was always loosely moderated and the moderators were never stupidly strict like on RSC. But I now see one or two threads getting locked per day, and with good reason too. On the one hand, I blame it on people not thinking before they make a new thread... on the other hand I blame the people who actually post in these dull threads. If no-one posts in there, the thread starter will eventually get the message.

The flamewars that went on every few weeks seem to have disappeared, but now its stupidity left, right and center. As Scawen said a week-or-so-ago, this forum was never intended to be a kiddies' playground. I urge both forum members and moderators to take a stand against this. Have a sticky with a more comprehensive version of the forum rules in the general discussion. Don't post in stupid threads to tell people how stupid they are and for the love of god, the whole forum doesn't need to jump on a demo racer using a crack. Not helping him and reporting his post so the moderators can deal with it will do.

I'm really left speechless by some of the threads started. I know that this comes with the territory and LFS has grown a lot but the moderation and community needs to grow with it to keep this forum tidy and pleasurable to read as it used to be (barring the flamewars).

This is getting on my nerves - every day there seems to be a new thread about how many threads are getting locked :-t

Moderators please lock this useless thread!

Quote from sgt.flippy :

Am I the only one bothered with that? I wonder if I'll ever get a week off work for whiplash and instant death

i think you might get time off with an injury, but death would send you to the graveyard... of course you could end up strapped to a chair for decades, pooing into a bag and being spoon fed baby food.

Quote :

... And about the child... I know it's harsh, but I feel a lot of accidents with children happen not because of the drivers, but parents that don't pay attention to their children. Now everywhere in Belgium, around school areas, are limited to 30KM/H. That's just insane...

Its not harsh, it's ridiculous. Children have to be given freedom and some responsibility if they are to learn and develop into adults - would you have them chaparoned by an adult 100% of the time ?
Unfortunately children often cause accidents - they are children, they are sometimes irresponsible, they have less sophisticated awareness of danger etc.. Drivers on the other hand are adults and should know better. If a child runs into the road and dies in an accident in which a driver was being irresponsible, the accident may have been the childs fault, but the death could have been avoidable BY THE DRIVER!. If the driver could have avoided the child by driving at the correct speed or paying full attention or holding the wheel correctly, then it's them that will have to live the rest of their lives with that death on their conscience.

Quote :

The thing with pedestrians these days is, they seem to be the greatest, and drivers are the fault of everything. But if you look how those children on their bikes, drive on the streets, crossing streets where they should stop, but they just cross because they EXPECT the drivers stop anyway... That's just plain wrong.

I've seen as many cars doing stupid dangerous things as pedestrians and cyclists - it's human nature to take risks. The difference is that drivers are in charge of a very dangerous piece of machinery whereas pedestrians and cyclists are not. As a driver it is your responsibility to be 'defensive' and safe, and obey the rules - they are there for good reasons, even if you're not willing (or too stupid) to acknowledge those reasons...

Quote from Hyperactive :

...But going straight at 100kph doesn't take too much steering. Unless I get into an accident...

Well, thats the WHOLE point !!!
Thats the whole point of most rules of the road - it's not what happens in normal conditions - it's what happens in extraordinary conditions e.g. when a stray pedestrian turns a straight road into an instant high speed slalom...
or the guy coming the other way has a seizure and veers into your path at 70mph...
having both hands on the wheel in a 'correct' position could be the difference between a week off work with whiplash and instant death, or years of remorse and emotional pain after killing a child... !

Quote from george_tsiros :

How do you grip your wheel?

I will try to start a thread discussing about the optimal way to hold the steering wheel of a (real life) car. In the process i will demonstrate and try to give good reasons that some of the current trends are sub-optimal for safe relaxed daily driving.

I will start with an assumption, that the arm...snip...

Wow, what a bunch of ignorant misinformed DANGEROUS drivel !

Do you have any understanding of human anatomy ?
Where you are placing your hands in fig6 , it's mostly the muscles of the wrists and arms that control the wheel. When the hands are placed at 9-3 or 10-2, it's the much stronger muscles of the upper back, shoulders and chest that do the work.
Your hand placement also makes it more difficult to feed the wheel without crossing your arms - this also reduces the level of muscular strength you have to control the car.

You would think with all the millions thay have for research that the F1 guys would have their wheels designed for maximum control ? where do they put their hands ? yep at 9 - 3

Quote from MZWiZard :

Yes it was VCS indeed. You were logging on and off and the last time it said in red "JOOS -main", which means you run a modified version of some kind and we will NOT allow such things on our server!

It is not okay to go try out "mods" on public servers, unless specific told it is okay by welcome msg or other.

If you feel this is not correct, please go to www.vcs.dk and post in our "miscelleneous" and we will treat you with respect and take it from there.

Pretty funny, first you state publicly that the guy is a cheat, (an assumption based on ignorance), and then you tell him if he has a problem with this, that he should go to your forum - lol. Aside from the fact that the forum is run by folks who have demonstrated poor knowledge of LFS (or very low level of intelligence?), it's a foreign language forum. Telling him to take his problem there seems like a pretty daft suggestion !

Maybe you should just apologise to him here ?

Quote from keiran :

erm ...

Did you really take this sentence completely out of context, and then interpret is as meaning "The marbles are there because of Montoya". If so, maybe less time on track, more in the classroom would be a good plan

Quote from keiran :

Why should it be Montoya's fault for the marbles ? illepall

I dunno, you tell me? seems like an odd question though, and has no relevance to anything I have said

Quote from ayrton senna 87 :

u look at all the replies from the rosberg thing, the real racers say 'yea rosberb was stupid' and the simmers say 'monty was stupid'...

Which real racers are you talking about ?
LFS 'pros' lol, semi amature karting enthusiasts, or highly experienced and respected F1 drivers ?

In the itv highlights programme, there was an interview with Coulthard - they asked him if is was Rosbergs fault, he said (paraphrasing) that it was a difficult call, but that Montoya was being very optimistic with his attempted pass.
IIRC he also implied that it would have been difficult for Rosberg to yeild in that situation without crashing out due to the dreaded 'marbles'.

I guess you know better though - I mean, you're the guy who never shunts other drivers by accident, only on purpose right?

Personally, I thought that it was naive of Rosberg to try to hold his line for reasons of self preservation - let Monty past, he will crash out later anyway .
If what Coulthard said about the marbles is true, most of the blame lies with Montoya.

@becky

The thing that i found most enlightening was highlighted by figure3 in that article. I was doing some spring/mass stuff on gameboy, and it kept blowing up on me. So I instinctively started introducing more damping, and the sort of techniques you were suggesting. That approach doesn't work, even though is seems like it should !. Fig3 shows that for the given time steps, the curve with the least change can be the one that blows up (e.g. the most damped one can be worst !).

So the only way to fix things is either to have a faster 'sampling rate' or use a more complicated/accurate method of guessing where everything should be at the next time step e.g. Runge Kutta etc.. The more complicated 'integrator' uses up more resources, but allows you to use a much lower clock for the physics. I suppose the most efficient balance between fancy math and brute force depends on the specific application, and the likelyhood of it blowing up.

Quote from Becky Rose :

@col - what's an integrator in this context please? (not mocking, i'm a techy but not a scientist ).

read the article i linked to - it explains it better than I ever could
It starts off very easy to understand, showing you how even the limplest video games use a version of a Euler integrator. It then gets much trickier - so you would probably need to look at other references, but its a good introduction i think.
fwiw, I'm very much a techy/creative rather than a math/science person, so I find this stuff has a steep learning curve (steep like a cliff )

Quote from pricorde :

Hi there, I'm the Rigs of Rods developer.

Scawen got it right, I need a high rate of simulation steps to avoid instabilities. The trucks have a bit too much flex, but making them stronger would require even more steps. Keeping the trucks heavy helps also to keep stability.

Event the wheels are made with beams, so you have also tires flex!

The physics simulation is indeed at fixed rate per second. The advantage is that on high end machines this boosts fps because you do less physics pass par frame. On low end machine, the physics can not be simulated realtime, so I slow the time in the game (the game is in slow-mo) in order to avoid instabilities....

My (limited) understanding is that, as you have already noted, switching to a Runge Kutta (or even higher order) integrator will make a huge difference to instabilities. Euler integrators blow up all over the place.
It would be interesting to know what kind of integrator is used in LFS ? Scawen ?

Here is a good article on the issues of physics models 'blowing up'
(two versions of the same paper - one in pdf)
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20000215/lander_pfv.htm
http://www.darwin3d.com/gamedev/articles/col0499.pdf

Quote from P5YcHoM4N :

Or to put it basicly, we are paying for tech demos to show off a graphics card to sell it to people. So we're just paying to do what marketing do?

I have considered that, but I don't agree.
They are not tech demos - they have to be games, and the metrics by which the GEEK WAR is won/lost depend on them being 'games'.
The delusion that the whole process is based on is that "the fancy hardware makes the 'games' 'better'. " illepall

Some interesting stuff about the state of the games industry in this thread

Heres some of my thoughts...

[warning] LONG RANTING POST FOLLOWS [/warning]

I've been playing games since 1980, I've been programming since 1981, although only professionally (gamboy advance) since 2002.

I have strong opinions as to the reasons for the current situation in the mainstream games market.

There are lots of little reasons floating around, but there is one BIG FAT REASON that outweighs the others by a huge margin !!! It all comes down to that old favourite passtime 'keeping up with the Joneses' otherwise known as GEEK WAR

In the old days, is was Atary2600 vs coleco vision vs binatone etc, then it was C64 vs Atari800 vs Spectrum vx BBC micro... then AtariST vs AMIGA...
Each of these eras saw folks buy into one or other of the competing systems, then spend the next few years arguing with their friends about which was the better system. For this argument to have any weight, the combatants had to have something more substantial than subjective ideas of gamplay and style, so it has always been about software and more importantly hardware technology rather than content. Arguments like "Z80 is better than 6502 coz it has more instructions and runs at 4Mhz"... "C64 has hardware sprites and sound and Andrew Braybrooke"... "Spectrum has Ultimate play the Game", "AtariST has midi... so there... humph" etc. GEEK WAR had begun.

The big change has happened for a few of reasons - as the hardware has got better, it has become possible to produce much more complicated games with larger worlds and far more 'assets' - requiring more time and much more money to develop, this gradual development has made it more and more difficult for small teams and individuals to compete in the game market....
However, I think that the Main issue is the switch from static platforms like C64, ST, Amiga over to flexible component based PC hardware. Suddenly instead of a hardware hike every few years, its been every few months !! This accellerated flood of new hardware updates has been accompanied by Extremely aggressive marketing - and increasing prices.

The marketing convinces the Gamer that they have to have the latest card to really enjoy their games (i.e. WIN GEEK WAR).... they buy the card... their existing games don't improve... suddenly, they are in a sticky situation - they have made a (major) investment, they want to show off to their gaming buddies to WIN the next GEEK WAR BATTLE, and they also need to satisfy themselves that there is enough of an improvement overy their (5 month) old card that they haven't wasted their money... Sooo they need a new game that can use the new features of their fancy new card....
The game companies soon learned that the only way to ensure good sales it to fulfill this need - not for a good game, but for a game that will show off the latest graphics hardware !!!

You see it all the time even in the LFS forums - "great game, but.. oooh.. I wish they would improve the graphics." followed by a reqest for implementation of whatever fancy feature that plyers hardware supports. The sad thing is that as graphic tech has moved on over the last decade or so, each incremental improvement has made a smaller difference to the overall 'quality' of the graphics, while at the same time making a bigger difference in the resources required to develop a marketable game.

The only way things are going to change is if everyone stops buying into this process. I for one have !!! I've stopped buying pc games, the last game I bought was LFS, I don't play pc games other than LFS, freecell, minesweeper and the odd game of online othello or poker. The only time i buy a gfx card is when I Have to for a new system, and then its the minimum spec that will run LFS at a reasonable refresh rate and resolution.
Don't get me wrong, I still love games, just not the glossy crap thats out there now - the only company that is doing anything remotely interesting is Nintendo (but there are other issues with them - even more difficlt for small dev teams...)
....
enough for now

Quote from Blowtus :

this whole 'flex' business appears to have become a popular point to latch onto as the cause of all failings. I don't really see how myself, has anyone suggested why it would have such a great effect, or is it just something complicated sounding that hasn't been modeled at all?

IIRC bal00s post was about the much less popular 'drivetrain flex' as opposed to chasis flex (which seems to be a favourite cure-all ).

Play in the drivetrain causing a continuous variation in torque - which has the effect of blunting the 'knife edge' between not enough and too much.

seems like this could have an effect on the handling of the more powerful cars depending on diff settings?