Just trying to be objective about racer numbers, Looking at the LFSworld graphs, over the last six months LFS has had a pretty consistent peak number of about 350-400 licensed drivers online and also 350-400 demo racers online. Licensed users have been falling off very slowly over that time but demo numbers have remained consistent.
I cant access history graphs for racecast but the graph they show for the last 24 hours indicates a peak number of just over 200 racers. Obviously they have no demo racers, and it's also possible that they count racers differently, or even that its possible to race rFactor online without appearing on RaceCast, I dont know.
But certainly there is nothing to indicate that rFactor is ahead of LFS just yet. Although to be fair, rFactor is fairly new to the market and may take a while to grow.

Dunno, Scawen said he'd be starting in earnest on the Physics re-vamp in January, so definitely dont expect a big patch. I guess there might be a little suprise but dont bank on it.

Hey, nice work. I did the same thing manually using excel a while back but really have enough data points to make it work well.
This basically gives us a convenient way to work out things like tyre load sensitivity.

Well, its an interesting review. And while I agree with some of the points, if you are going to go to the trouble of writing a proper review and getting it published, it might be an idea to get someone to check the spelling and grammar before you hit the upload button.

Quote from Scawen :

No league should use online PBs as a qualification system. It's absolutely impossible to stop people being able to cheat the online PB system.

A reliable way to prove a PB is with a SPR, preferably a HLVC legal replay. If it plays on your computer then it is not hacked, simple as that.

I must admit, that when I was witing the php for the unoffficial hotlap charts, I assumed that LFSWorld used your knowledge of the encypted file format to do some checks on the actual SPR data, rather than just relying on the header data.

I found with my charts that it was obviously possible to hexedit the data in the header to change the time, or mark a non HLVC lap as HLVC. Again, it wouldnt play if you tried to play it, but thats not really a robust solution.

Just out of interest, would a SPR with hex-edited time upload to LFSWorld?

In my experience, 'Move View WIth Animation' on also gives you quite a bit more view vibration over bumps for that Genuine Rfactor Feeling. Which is nice.

God, sometime soon I hope. I dont think anybody imagined that some language support was going to take such a long time.

The only problem with doing everything yourself is that that includes all the tedious scutwork like painstainingly debugging multi character support for weeks on end.

The default sets and setup value limits are mostly procedurally generated from the car parameters. Which is why they automatically change when LFSTweak changes the cars. It's also why there are no .set files for the default sets.

It's also why they suck.

I did some analysis on them once, way back when, and came up with a set of values that the car mass is multiplied by to give you the default set. parameters.

Its a good idea when you are developing different cars as it means you have instant baseline setups, but its a bad idea for producing actual driveable setups for general use.

Personally, I think that if someone is considering a purchase of S2, then they probably want to drive race cars with slicks. At the moment, the LFS Devs are basically asking them to take it on trust that the physics and handling of the race cars and slick tyres meet there expectations.

This is not so much of a problem when trying to attract 'new' sim racers, but if they want to convert serious sim racers from other sims, then they need to give some kind of demo of the serious race cars.

It could easily be implemented as an offline only car (after the ai patch though), or if the actual demo cars themselves were to change, you would just make it an incompatible patch and have the master server refuse old patch connections after a while with a message to download the latest patch form liveforspeed.net.

Outsim gives you decent pecket resolution, ie 100 per second, but doesnt contain any info about the gearing or revs.
I guess in theory it shoud be possible to do some audio processing on the sound output to determine the dominant frequency. Then from that and the no. of cylinders and engine type, you could maybe work out what the revs are and then play out your own sounds.
But to be honest, I dont think it would be worth the bother.

Yeah, personally it gets on my nerves when people ram into me after the race. Its kind of childish and irritating and it ruins the atmosphere of a proper race. But that said I've never bothered complaining about it because most people just dont see it that way.

Good luck guys, you show those VMax boys what TSR was made of eh?

This is what you need. I've got one for the nippers and its ace. Its a genuine USB analogue controller, 2 axes 8 buttons, so you can use it to control anything.

It comes with some nice simple exploring software that lets the kids drive/fly around easily without having to worry about keeping it on the road.

Yeah, there seems to be anecdotal evidence that the FF is somehow 'better' when you set the rotations manually and have wheel turn compensation at 0, than when you have everything at 720 with WTC at 1.
Personally I couldnt really tell the difference.

I made my first foray into demo servers for ages recently, and I must say it wasnt what I expected.
I just randomly picked a server and found myself in what was apparently 'the Last All Fast Demo Server'. They had some kind of server side insim script that kept everybodies PB's, and if you couldnt do a 1.33.99, you got kicked.

Anyway, I hadnt raced GTI for months and only had race_1 setup to play with and could only manage a 1.35.00, but the nice fellows didnt kick me because my ill-gotten unofficial hotlap chart fame. Which was sweet.

It was like wandering into the wild west expecting lawless chaos and finding a little outpost of switzerland where the rule of law was ruthlessly enforced. Kind of cool really. I think it was a NOS team server.

Well, y'know, its not like I'm ever going to make or release a tool that automates the process, but I just like to point it out every now and again when people get het up about keeping setups secret.

Wake up and smell the raf file folks

If we make a MPH'05 skin, would it be fair to include the logos of the MPH'05 sponsors, ie. Shell Optimax, Sunday Times, Virgin Radio, Sony erricson etc. In fact anyone listed on this page http://www.mphshow.co.uk/meet-partners.html

I must have said this a million times, but getting a setup out of an SPR is a piece of piss and the information is public knowledge and in black and white on the LFS main site.
Go to programmer files - RAF format, and then try telling me that setups are secret.

Last night I had an 8 lap practice race around Aston GP in the UFR with Sparky Dave. We were both driving extremely consistenly and hard, and I got consistently faster each lap, it was about 0.8 difference between 40% fuel and empty, with about 0.1-0.2 secs a lap improvement. Although that was over a 187 second lap.

Basically the greater the fuelMass/CarMass ratio, the bigger the effect. Also, the better able you are to drive at the limit consistently, the more you will notice the effect.

Yeah, looking at it, they seem to just be individual R G and B bytes with values from 10-160 in decimal, with a zero byte to keep the file tidy.

I cant for the life of me think why he doesnt use the full 0-256 range of each byte, but I guess there must be a reason. For conversion purposes I guess you just need to scale your rgb value to be within that range.

Oh, and its not quite clear from the way you've written it, but the filename section is the filename of the skin, not of the col file. I'm sure you know that, but others might not realise.

Somebody I work with went the national final of the Schuco Challenge (construction industry thing) at Whilton Mill, and they raced the two-stroke racing karts on the outdoor circuit (jammy bastard, I missed the national final by one place).
Anyway, point being that the two-stroke karts can go 70mph, twin engine karts are a different thing, generally being hire karts with two 4 stroke engines on. Not sure exactly how fast they go, but 50mph sounds about right.

Nah, never wrecked a car. Bent the lower control arm on a 1.0L Nissan Micra once, but thats it.

It is a different magazine guys. PC Gamer, not PC Zone.

Here you go lads, a bit of public service touch typing. Any spelling mistakes are mine.

Quote from PCGamer UK :

We've already reviewed the first version of LFS. But S2 is more than just a patch, its the important second step for a game devised in three parts. The S3 build will be final, but thats not to say its lacking now. Far from it.

The main theme of S2 will, for many, be the addition of truly high speed driving. You had high top speeds in S1, but new locations such as Westhill and Aston introduce enormous laps ripe with near-terrifying fifth and sixth gear corners. These regularly flow into each other, lunging over blind brows and accross cambers to create real tests of nerve, knowledge and skill. There is even an oval now, if that's your bag. Happily, S2 also provides new unltra-fast cars amongst the newcomers.

The two DTM-ish (500bhp touring cars) are fantastic addittions, brutal but suprisingly friendly in their soft, fat, oversteer-friendly way. The single seaters are more of a handful, particularly the F1 style car: speed affected downforce effects are impressive, but it's hard to believe the rears should be quite this snappy. Still, it didnt seem to slow down many of those playing online..

And its the internet that drives LFS. While it has reasonable single player, the ease of setting online - and the friendliness of most of the other drivers - is a massive plus. LFS is very well designed - it even downloads new skins automatically. And while S2 caters for the hardcore who want petrol usse, pit strategy and tyre damage in multi-hour races, it also continues to deliver in 5-lap sprints, thanks to inspired track design, tough-love physics and an enthusiastic community. If you have S1, the upgrade is only £12 and if you dont, S2 offers hours and hours of fun. Buy it. Right n(eee)ow.

A bigger, cleverer and faster challenge than ever 89%

A couple of minor factual errors, but overall a very very positive review from someone who actually seems to understand what the game is about. And who actually played the full game .

Congrats Fordie. How does it feel to be 30 then? I've got 11 months to go till I hit that one.
Although I suspect if you're anything like me you've been feeling 30 since about 5 minutes after your first kid was born