Quote from 510N3D :

Yeah, i think those people are still in the minority and therefore a "optional pack" like devil suggested would be a good idea. Or just a option to switch in game. Dont get me wrong, i really appreciate your effort and the qualify of your work and i can understand that you could save alot of time if you would know which part of the content of lfs will be updated with the next patches. Just in case there is an official statement once about these kind of things in this forum, please PM me or something, i dont want to read it

cheers

I don't think that people who can handle better textures are in the minority. LFS doesn't use that much video memory, and textures that are 16X as big as the in-box versions cause no slowdown on modern machines.

I think LFS really needs to double the dimensions of all the default textures. The default ones look pretty bad, IMO. Anyone who experiences slowdown can always use the "half size texture" option to regain any speed loss.

Quote from Speed Soro :

Dear Scawen,

When will you stop lingering and do something substantial?

Like physics improvement... :banghead:

The things he's doing now ARE substantial. And he's already said many, many, many times that after patch X is out he'll begin work on physics stuff for a later, incompatible patch.

I do have one question about the high-res skin payments. How will we know when we've reached our limit? Once we download 2000 skins, will we get some sort of message, or will the system just throttle down to low-res again? I'm guessing this will be handled the same way as the SMS messages that were implemented, but I honestly don't know how that's currently handled either.

Quote from mr_x :

is this a bug in the new skins 'feature'?

see the 2 screenshots, the FE track is W the AS track is W20. the conversion in W20 seems to downgrade the skin quality quite alot. Especially if you compare around the bonnet.

That is very odd, and quite noticeable. I'm going to take a guess that the W screenshot is using a high-res skin that you put in the skins_x directory manually, and that the W20 is a lower-res version, following conversion to the new compressed format. Is this correct? If so, you're comparing apples and oranges. You need to compare the same skin downloaded from LFSworld in both patches.

Quote from Termi :

I have read the first post, but i dont understand why the devs go to pay-dl-hires-skins, thats to commercial for me... just my

High resolution skins require FOUR TIMES as much bandwidth as the current skins. Server bandwidth isn't free, so they need some way to cover the cost. If you don't want to pay, you aren't forced. This isn't like World of Warcraft where you have to pay $10/month just to play. If you don't pay the fee, everything is exactly as it was before. You've lost nothing.

Quote from JamesF1 :

Well, show me any conflict in the Bible that can't be resolved by context and perhaps I'll have to rethink my beliefs

http://www.submission.org/chri ... bible-contradictions.html

Knock yourself out. That's just one quick link I googled up. You should read "From Preacher to Atheist" by Dan Barker for a better source. Of course, every Christian always claims "context" when shown black and white contradictions.

Quote :

As for the ten commandments... they're not called that by God or Moses, no. But guess what... they're commandments, and there's ten of them. Can you make the mental link? If you want to be pedantic, there are hundreds of commandments in the Old Testament and the New Testament... so maybe it's time to stop being picky for the sake of it?

I'm not being picky. I'm pointing out a glaring contradiction between what the bible says and what supposedly religious people teach. The ten commandments are exactly where I listed them, in Exodus 34:11. In Exodus 34:1 it reads "And the LORD said unto Moses, Hew thee two tables of stone like unto the first: and I will write upon
[these] tables the words that were in the first tables, which thou brakest." Moses gets two tables (stone tablets) and goes up the mountain. God then says, "Observe thou that which I command thee this day," then goes on to list ten things (which include never boiling a kid in its mother's milk, keeping a feast of unleavened bread, etc). "And he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the ten commandments." (Exodus 34:28). The oft quoted "ten commandments" (thou shalt not kill, etc.) listed in Exodus 20 are never called commandments in the bible, and were never engraved on stone tablets.

Quote from wien :

Determining visibility is an extremely complex problem, and there is no (good) algorithm that will cull each and every invisible polygon. That's just way too inefficient since you'd spend more time checking for visibility, than it would take you to render those same polygons.

I think you are probably right. But it would seem to be logical that you can't see the wheels in dash view (in the tin tops, at least). Making such a change could be good for a 20fps increase, judging by the difference between in-car and wheels view, and wouldn't require any intensive culling.

Quote from wheel4hummer :

The actual Ten Commandments do NOT say that you are not allowed to kill. You can kill all you want, but you cannot murder.

Actually, the ten commandments don't mention murder, killing, adultery, or any of the other stuff that most people think (unless you work on the sabbath. In that case, you are to be put to death. Gee, thanks, God). The actual "Ten Commandments" are listed only once in the bible, starting with Exodus 34.11: "Observe thou that which I command thee this day." My personal favorite is the tenth commandment: "Don't boil a kid in its mother's milk."

The ten commandments that preachers refer to, and that everyone thinks they know, are never referred to as the ten commandments by Moses or by "God". God simply says that he will re-write on the stone tablets what he had written before Moses smashed the first tablets. But, the two writings do not match, and they do not match the ten commandments given in Exodus 34.11.

The bottom line is that the bible is a hodge-podge of conflicting stories, and that anyone who is looking for morality in that book is condemned to failure.

Quote from Burnzoire :

I'd say you'd be guessing wrong there (I am a programmer tho this isn't my area)

My guess is that tracks are designed in a linear fashion, instead of one big area. Therefore, view distance denotes which bits of the track are rendered in terms of distance ahead of and behind the player's car.

The tracks are linear (at least, that's what we believe based on what Scawen has said), but that does not explain why two views, looking down the same track, from the same exact spot, have such wildly different frame rates. And it certainly doesn't explain why the view that has fewer visible polygons, and no moving polygons, has a lower frame rate than a higher poly view.

There are some pics in the screenshots subforum that show a wireframe outline of the cars. You can see through the cars and look at the polygons of the cars and objects that would be blocked from view if it weren't transparent. That would seem to indicate that things are rendered, even if they are not in view (blocked by another object). I'm not positive this is the case, but it seems logical.

Here's a good example of what I mean: http://www.lfsforum.net/attach ... id=27341&d=1175121846

One thing to note, that nobody else seems to have mentioned, is that LFS could probably be optimized quite a bit more, once Scawen gets the chance. Take, for instance, the difference in fps between in-car view and wheels view. Even though there are fewer polygons being shown in in-car view (just the dashboard, no wheel, no arms), the frame rate is much lower than wheels view, where you can see both tires and wheels, the brakes, etc.

I'm not a programmer, but my guess is that LFS is calculating polygons that are not visible. If this is true, and if it can be fixed, we could likely see a HUGE increase in frame rates at the start, or whenever lots of objects (cars) are visible. Hopefully this is the case.

Quote from 5th Earth :

Or you could just make 1st gear higher. This is LFS, we've got continuously-variable gear ratios for free. It's not the physics, it's your setup.

It IS a physics issue. Longitudinal grip is not correct in LFS and Scawen has said as much. Rather than working around the issue and using a band aid on the symptom, we need to address the cause.

Not to mention that we shouldn't have such variable gears in the first place.

Use the replay analyzer to compare your best lap with the world record lap. You should be able to tell right away where you're losing time (my bet is the chicane, and the two big braking zones).

Quote from dev :

Sometimes when there are a lot of racers, you can bump the car infront... but thats due to lag...

Do you have a replay showing this? So far, nobody else I've talked to has been able to hit another car because they are spectated before they can touch.

Quote from wien :

I'm not sure if this is even a valid way of testing this, since the stutter may be recorded into the MPR somehow, but it might provide some insight into the problem.

I agree, which is why it would be nice to have people who see this often try to reproduce it on a live server under controlled conditions.

Quote from wien :

If I play the replay back again without shutting down LFS, the stutter is gone, presumably because the RB4 model is already in memory.

This adds ammo to the theory that loading a model that is not already in use causes the stutter. We really need to do some tests to confirm that this is actually the problem.

Perhaps a few of you who are seeing this a lot could try a test to confirm that this really is the problem. Join or host a server where only one car is in use, but multiple cars are available for use. Drive a few laps, then have a friend join the same server, but using a different car. If the theory is correct, you should get a stutter. If the person in the new car pits and rejoins again, there should be no stutter. Rinse and repeat for several cars and this should be easy to pin down.

Once we know for certain that the loading of the car models is causing the problem, then we can either try to narrow down why some people have a problem and others don't (or maybe we just don't notice it), or we can see if Scawen can fix the problem.

Edit: I just viewed the replay and also can see the stutter. I don't think I've ever seen this before, but I usually join TBO servers that are fairly full (and all three available cars are already in use), or single-car servers (ie: FOX on South City).

Last edited by Cue-Ball, Thu 3 May 2007, 17:57.