Quote from Chris_Kerry :

IMO Teachers in schools promote this mentality by telling kids that its the taking part that matters, breeding the mentality I was speaking of.

No, actually, after industrial action in the 80s, (when i was in school), most schools dramatically reduced there involvement with competitive sport (and other extra curicular activities). For the last 10 - 15 years, the generation that should have been producing sports stars has not - the same generation that was affected by this political battle.

For the vast majority of children you HAVE to encourage them to play sport even though they know they cannot and will not be winners - there are only a very tiny minority who will win at sport. this goes for every country not just UK - teachers will tell all 'average' kids that they have to try and enjoy sport without having to be the winner

also - you stated that "The guys who are fast, deserve rewarding."
this attitude in itself is part of the reason that top level sport in the UK is suffering !
Its too easy for the fast/strongest/most tallented to gain big rewards in this country - without delivering results !
I hope what you meant was "The guys who WIN deserve rewarding."

Quote from Chris_Kerry :

The guys who are fast, deserve rewarding.

It's this type of mentality, the type of taking part and creating an even playing field despite differences in ability, that means UK sport (in a lot of areas) are making up the numbers compared to other countries.

IMO the reasons for the lack of success in UK sport have nothing to do with 'this type of mentality' as you put it - but that's a whole different issue.

There is a huge difference between top level professional sport and amature recreational sport.

If you want to do a top level professional racing league, of course you don't have a handycapping system. But, you would also need a very large marketing campeign, big sponsors, and big prizes for the winners - maybe enough so that they can train full time. You have to try and attract all the top racers, and you don't want anyone else - only the elite - or your sponsors may not be so happy

Alternatively, you can have a low level, small stake, small prizes setup for lots of 'evening/Sunday racers' - racers of all skill levels. If you do this without Handycapping, the 'pros' will mop up all the winnings, and the whole thing fails !

My gut feeling is that the OP is thinking more on the scale of amature competition rather than the big bucks pro game.

so, who is it for ?

Quote from sinbad :

A fair suggestion certainly, but with that sort of system implemented I don't think it would be a competition that stays popular for very long. Contests that "reward failure" are off-putting to anyone other than those lowest on the ladder of ability. They're ok for a bit of fun, but when money is involved it's a different story altogether.

IMO, there is nothing more off-putting than having a competition where 2 or 3 guys win everything - unless entry is free.
Handycapping, if done well can even up the balance without making it impossible for the fast guys to win. And if it was set up depending on race finishing position rather than 'ability', it helps with other stuff like bad luck

it needn't 'reward failure'

Quote from danowat :

Exactly, which is why the idea is floated here first

Dan,

I would guess, if you can get some sponsorship to provide extra prizes in addition to sharing the entry money, people would be interested

doesn't have to be big stuff like cars or big money (would be nice )
could just be a new wheel, computer hardware, go-carting session at your nearest track etc. That would be enough to get me interested

and of course a winners cup + champaign hehe

I think for this to be popular, you would need to wait for the devs to implement some sort of weight penalty handycapping system.
that way drivers of different abilities could expect some chance of winning.
So you need a reasonable accurate rating/handycapping system - which should be easier to do for a pay per race deal than for free servers.

you could cope with unfair car/class issues by having something like the 'elite athletes with a disability' events in the commonwealth games - where the winner is the one who gets closest to the world record for their class (not the fastest lap, but fastest for that race length). Or just by adding more weight to the faster cars. Or best of all, by having single car type races.

you would probably need to require folks to book a minimum number (say 10) of races in order for handycapping to even out. this would also help to prevent cheating - anyone who is obviously wrecking or working as a team would be barred from any other races they have left, and lose their entry money.

sounds like a lot of organising, especially if no one is interested

Last edited by col, Tue, 16 May 2006 14:02.

Quote from macready :

maybe a cheaper upgrade if you're just purchased the game in the last x months? 12 to upgrade as usual but only £6 if you've purchsed the game in the last 6 months or so?

I cannot belive how many people have made this suggestion ! illepall

cost of S1 = £12
cost of S2 = £24 OR £12 for folks with S1 licence.

I will translate these confusing figures for the more intellectually challenged out there:
If you already have S1, you get the FULL COST of S1 DISCOUNTED from the price of S2 !
Just to make absolutely sure you got that: If you have already purchased and S1 licence and you chose to buy an S2 licence, you get a TOTAL REFUND of 100% of the money you payed for S1

How the hell can you expect a better deal than that ?
How can you not be embarrassed asking for more ?

col.

Quote from Shotglass :

...
yes it is ... but the imput you feed into the collision detection (namely the road surface) is not band limited causing severe aliasing when you sample it

right I understand what you mean, so, rather than bandlimiting all the track data (ouch), and the fractal texture generator, build a collision algorithm that uses some sort of bandlimited interpolation filter. Sounds like mucho cpu though.

Last edited by col, Mon, 15 May 2006 00:09.

Quote from Shotglass :

no you see any discrete time algorithm is strictly bandlimited

my understanding is that any discreet time algorithm will generate aliasing noise unless it is bandlimited (except when the signal it is generating has a frequency of 'sample_rate/n' where n is a positive integer)

Quote from Shotglass :

its a very real effect ... for example the whole collision problem can be described by a not band limited excitation (like say a steep curb) aliasing up to infinity (at least if the phase happens to be ill conditioned which it is most of the time) and then feeding into the cars model ... boom

seems to me that you just contradicted yourself - the collision detection is a discreet time process, which you have just stated must be strictly bandlimited by definition ?!

btw, don't take these comments the wrong way . I think that you are on the right track. And also believe that you know considerably more than i do on the subject.

col

Quote from Shotglass :

unrelated ... this is about aliasing

Are you suggesting that for the simulation to be less noisy, the tyre compound should be modelled using a bandlimited algorithm ?

Do you think that aliasing noise would have a noticable effect on the handling of a car in a game/sim, or are we just talking theoretically here?

well... they never really explain how to find them... maybe if face man takes a break from the sunbed and BA gets his finger out of his ass, they might find you.. I love it when a plan comes together..

Quote from danowat :

And you know why this is?, because the sidewall isn't working quite as it should.

Dan,

Or, maybe, because of limitations in the (excellent) LFS tyre model, there isn't enough of a traction penalty for running high camber on the drive wheels?
has anyone looked at this in detail ?

col

Quote from Pablo.CZ :

Easy solution imho is divide server list to demo/licensed, not demo/s1/s2.
S2 player will see S1+S2 servers in one list, S1 player will see only S1 servers. There will be more players on S1 servers, because S2 player could connect to FE/LX4 race directly, no S1/S2 list changing.
S1/S2 status of server wont be set thru config, but automatically depending what track/cars allowed.

As has already been explained, this would cause a not insignificant problem.
If as S2 server is running an S1 track/car combo, and there were say 10 S2 players and 3 S1 players on it, what happens if all the S2 players decide they want to change to an S2 only combo ?
Do they kick the S1 guys? do they have to stay on a track they are bored with or go and find another server ?

There is no simple answer to this, which ever way it was resolved, some people would get annoyed, so why bother, certainly the current situation doesn't cause enough traffic on the forum to be a real concern

The best solution seems to be to show S1 servers in the S2 list, leaving the decision to the latest time for S2 players - this way there might be a little more competition for any remaining S1 players. Though I doubt there are many (I know for a fact the Robbson is S2 now

col.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Routemaster

http://www.utahlotusmuseum.com/id70.htm

http://www.ddavid.com/formula1/merc125.htm

http://www.geocities.com/xing6666/carnut/oddball/scooter.jpg domin8r would appreciate this!

http://www.h2.dion.ne.jp/~f-detail/50cat797b.htm look at the size of that thing!

I really would like to see the first three

col

Quote from Robbson :

... I paid the same price and be only allowed to play it some month before S2 Alpha release... and that's it... Hey, I bought it for online playing and not for offline content!...

Having a little look at LFS World, the only person the OP has a right to be angry with is himself.
According to LFSW, he bought his S1 licence on or before 4th April 2005. He played S1 on a grand total of 7 days in that month, he then played on only one day in May, then one day in June, since then he hasn't played in a licenced server once.
Maybe Robbson, if you had actually played the licenced content online for those few months before S2 was released as you intended and claim to have done, you may not be so angry (with yourself) now !

kind regards

Col

AFAIR, AI have no 'understanding' of fuel loads or tyre temps. The effect of this is that if you train them up from scratch on a long race, they do well by the end... unfortunately, when you start another session, they crash out all over the place, because they are trying to drive lines and braking points for warm tyres and low fuel weight!

Maybe, if you did multiple training sessions of 2 - 4 laps each, it might work out better? I'm certainly not waste my time doing that though

col

Quote from spyshagg :

i had 0% since i can remember... how stressfull is it? never tried with other value

how stressful depends on your wheel
The LWFF only has 180º lock to lock, so with the setting at 0%, the BF1 gets really twitchy, the tinyest of movements of the wheel have a major effect, and the FF oscillation issues can be more obvious as well.

col.

FWIW, The wheel turn compensation slider in Options->controls seems to have a large impact on perceived FF realism (at least for my wheel, its a LWFF 'old red').
In the BF1, try it at 100% then at 0% to see - also beware of the obvious difference in controller sensitivity.
I have gone for a compromise of 45% for the time being (0% is awesome, but just too stressfull

col.

Quote from BWX232 :

...

It is funny to me to hear people here bash rFactor and call it arcade and whatnot, when some aspects of rF are actually more accurate than LFS.. rF's implementation of the physics engine is not as good, and the FF you get is no where near is good.. but in some ways it is still more accurate. Strange....

A clock that loses 1 second per day only shows the correct time every 236 years - a clock that has stopped completely shows the correct time every day.

col.

I think the reason some people have a problem with the deformation in LFS is because visually it 'doesn't look quite right'.

I think that this is because under severe deformation, the tyres in LFS don't move laterally on the rim (at least visually they don't), whereas in real life they would, this means that they look more 'stretched' than in real life.

I couldn't care less about this - it's not noticable when racing, and I doubt that it has any impact on the accuracy of the algorithm in terms of feel. Just be aware that it makes things look a little odd in close-up stills of the effect.

cheers

col.

Quote from Fordman :

Our Scavier, who Sim is heaven,
Hallowed be thy Name.
Thy kYoto come.
Thy will be done,
In Aston as it is in Westhill.
Give us this day our daily Patch.
And forgive us our Turn 1 Accidents,
As we forgive those who hit against us.
And lead us in the BF1,
But deliver us from the pitlane.
For LFS is the kingdom,
and the power,
and the glory,
for ever and ever.
Amen.

Hallelujah, praise the Ford...man

Quote from Woz :

Dont believe a word of it. Debug/crack tools now allow huge control over execution. Also machine code is not that bad if you know what you are looking for/at. All code has to call the various windows API's to do anything and these API calls leave signatures that are simple to spot. This makes it easy to find where sound, gfx etc are done. You can even get debug tools that allow you to break an app when it calls different API calls to make it easier. Its more a case now that people coming into development now have not had to work in machine code/assembler, like us oldies , so are not used to reading it.

If the code is encrypted and then decrypted on load then breaking on API calls means the code is in memory decrypted so can be dumped so it can be pulled apart. The war becomes trying to spot debug tools before you decrypt code so you can halt execution if you want to protect against debugging but that is hard if you rootkit the debug tools so you hide them from task list and directory structure, Sony know all about this one lol.

Also compilers translate similar code in similar ways so as long as you know the compiler used you can find out how it structures that code when converted from source to MC.

Just make a search on Warez to see how much cracked/hacked apps there are out there. Most of these would have involved someone pulling apart machine code to see what is going on so they can patch the code.

So if someone wanted to see how it worked they could find out. And with the budgets for games today the cost of adding a dev resource to pull apart another product for a year is cheap in comparision.

As for general hacking of LFS to allow warez version you will find reason that LFS is not hacked like other games is that it has an online part of the code. LFS World is very tightly coupled with LFS so unless the hacker can hack LFS World people can't play online which is what LFS is about. The same happened with Q3, hacks that allowed offline were available but nobody hacked master server so could not use online until iD disabled master server checking later in the product life.

The real problem for someone who tried to reverse engineer LFS wouldn't be getting past encryption, or tracing windows api calls.

I would have thought that the big difficulty is that the one thing that you really want - the physics engine - is also by far the most difficult to translate from machine code back to a human readable form.
The problem is that the maths involved are extremely challenging even with fully annotated source code, reams of documents and reference literature
The original source code will be structured in such a way as to clarify which parts of the calculations apply to which attributes of the physics - tyres, aero, temps, wear, forces.. etc. Taking optimized machine code and analysing it to the point where you could seperate these math based components in a way that would allow you to maintain or update them seperately seems like a huge task to me ?

Basically, its not 'machine code --> c++' thats the biggest difficulty, its 'machine code --> math'. Thats a much higher level of abstraction, and there won't be 'WAREZ TOOLZ' to help you with it either

col

Live for Speed - Race for Life

"wanna race ?" Live for speed

LFS S2 - Bigger Faster Stronger


LFS - 9 out of 10 owners say their wheels prefer it

LFS: Vorsprung durch Technic - as they say in Twickenham

LFS: refreshes the parts other sims cannot reach

LFS: "Hand-built by robots"

Last edited by col, Fri, 28 Oct 2005 17:49.

Fantastic job. Seriously impressive!

I particularly like the picture on the final page

vrooom!

Col