I think that iRacing is going to be the new "king" of sim racing, but that doesn't mean that there's no room left for LFS. While I want the most lifelike and realistic sim experience, iRacing has some shortcomings for my particular situation that will cause me to stick with LFS. iRacing is not designed to let you hop on your computer for a quick race and there are no AI players. Given my location and the rare times that I am free to race, that's a big drawback. Also, while I love sim racing I don't have enough free time to feel like I would be getting my moneys worth from a pay-per-month title. So, LFS is a better value to me in this regard.

Other people won't care about these things, and many people will gladly part with the $15-20 per month to play iRacing. These people will probably abandon whatever they are currently playing and will choose iRacing instead. The most unfortunate part of it is that most of the people who will likely leave LFS/rFactor/GTR for iRacing are people in North America. Those are the people that are already in short supply in LFS as it is.

Quote from Jazzka :

And now im missing my original LFS.exe helppp

You have obviously done something very wrong. Download the Y to Y24 patch (not the Y19 to Y24 version) and reinstall it. If that doesn't work, re-extract a fresh copy of version Y and then apply the Y24 patch, or just go back to using Y and wait for Patch Z to come out.

If you're using Vista you need to make sure that you are an Administrator and that you have write permissions in whatever directory you are installing LFS to.

I think the XRG would make a much closer Spec Miata (or even Spec E30) car. Front engine, rear wheel drive, relatively light, and modestly powered. Even though it's a convertible, the RAC doesn't seem like a very good match because it's a mid-engine layout.

Does anyone know if setups could be checked using an InSim app? I know that the CTRA used something for some of their races, but I'm not sure exactly what they were able to monitor.

Quote from AndroidXP :

^ That's not entirely right, and your first instruction was misleading. You have to set the wheel turn compensation to 0.01 - 1.0 for it to make what you describe. If you set it to 0.0 however, then the current car's steering rotation will be stretched to fit your 720°, so you'd have to steer ALL cars with 720°.

Describing how the wheel, game, profiler software, etc. all work together can be difficult.

Bottom line: Set Wingman software and LFS to 720*. Set wheel compensation to 1. Drive.

Easy peasy.

Quote from bbman :

Set it to 1, otherwise it will be somewhere between the lock of the car and the one you've set in the profiler...

If the wheel's degrees of steering are equal to or greater than the car's degrees of steering then compensation doesn't matter. For instance, if you are driving a road car (720* steering) and you have your G25 set for 720* steering, setting the compensation to 0, 1, or anything in between will have no effect. No compensation can happen when the wheel and in-game car match up perfectly. Even if you have your wheel set for 720* and you drive a car with less lock-to-lock (say, 540*), compensation has no effect because your wheel still moves 1 degree for each degree that the in-game wheel moves.

The only time compensation has any effect is when your actual wheel has fewer degrees of rotation than the in-game car does. For instance, using a 360* lock-to-lock Wingman Force with a 720* road car in LFS.

I might suggest having a CRC generated for the patches to prevent this sort of thing, but given how much trouble some people have installing the patches I can just imagine how much trouble they would have with running a CRC check.

Quote from Gills4life :

ah i see, using the wheel turn compensation

No. No wheel turn compensation is needed. If you set the G25 wheel to 720* it will be precisely in synch with the in-game wheel for every single car. The only thing you don't get is "hard stops", as pointed out by 510N3D. I personally find the force feedback stops to be plenty, since I rarely get to lock in any of the cars. But, to each their own.

However, the point stands. Setting the G25 to 720* allows you to run each of the cars as intended without ever changing the settings again.

If you set your wheel to 720* it should be setup correct for all the cars, even the very tight lock-to-lock ratios in the formula cars. Surely you guys aren't changing your degrees of rotation for every car, are you?

Quote from _--NZ--_[HUN] :

Yes, and that means it will be possible to break off wings in a future incompatible patch, probably before S2 full.

While that is quite possible, it's purely speculation. I certainly wouldn't count on getting parts that break off in S2. If we do, GREAT! But don't count those chickens before they hatch.

Other than the "flying into space" bug when hitting objects and the GTR interiors that we know, I don't really see any unfulfilled promised features.

There are a ton of things I would like to see added to LFS: more cars, more tracks, engine damage, better suspension damage, track surface temp, etc. But hoping to get something and expecting it to be delivered are two different things. Hell, I keep hoping that SimBin will come out with something that feels even remotely like driving a car, but I certainly don't expect it.

Quote from Homeless_Drunk :

I guess my use of the word 'promised' was more of a 'this has been talked about a lot by the devs and they said it would be part of SX'...when you say stuff like that you kind of raise the bar and expectations of the community and when you see no result it is frustrating....

Can you give some examples? The only thing I can think of which we've been promised (or even hinted at getting) is the GTR interiors. I don't recall seeing any screenshots with breakable cars and I certainly don't recall Scawen ever making any indication that we would see anything like that in S2. I would love to be proven wrong.

What needs to be fixed for S2 to be "complete" to you?

Quote from Homeless_Drunk :

I'm almost torn between 2 views...I understand why LFS development is slow and respect the dev team but at the same time I paid for a product that I thought would of been complete some time ago...

While I can see your point, what does "complete" mean? If the devs released Y23 tomorrow and called it "complete", would you be happy? Were you promised anything other than what you have right now?

Yeah, I've been wondering what they have been up to lately as well. I mean, we've only had TWENTY TWO test patches since Y came out. Scawen must just be lounging around sipping pina coladas on a beach somewhere, only coding during his copious amounts of free time.

Simpler setups is something that I've wanted to see for a long time as well. I'm a decent racer, but I don't have a lot of free time. That makes working on setups, testing different track combos, etc. difficult. It's just too time consuming.

I would really like to organize a "super stock" type of race where everyone has essentially the same car. Something akin to the Spec Miata or Spec Solstice series (Spec XRG, anyone?). I think that some of the most fun races (both as a participant and as a spectator) are the ones where the cars are virtually identical and have little leeway in modifications.

Personally, I think that if the cars were given only realistic setup options this wouldn't be as big of a deal. There wouldn't be millions of different setup combinations for each car, so getting a decent setup would be more of a compromise (and therefore, much quicker and simpler). Imagine how much less setup time would be required if the road cars had standarized transmission ratios and maybe a half dozen rear end gear ratios to choose from. The same could be said for suspension. The average track day car and even most "spec series" cars have a pretty limited range of suspension adjustment. You might have 5 or 6 rebound and damping settings and two or three ARB choices.

Bottom line: Limit the road car setups to realistic levels and server side or "locked" setups probably won't be necessary at all, racing will be much closer, and drivers can spend more time driving and less time messing with sliders.

Quote from neRu :

Just a thought. What about a multiplayer setup-lock option, so everybody only can use the standard setup, or make it partially lockable, for instance lockable suspension, gearbox/diff, tires and such

That feature has been requested many times in the suggestions sub-forum. This thread and sub-forum are specifically to report about issues with test patches. This is not the right venue for requests.

As someone who lives not to far from PR, and who attends tons of races there, I would kill to have this track in the game. Ever since that laser scanned track for rFactor came out the wheels in my head have been spinning.

Quote from ajp71 :

There's a common belief amongst sim racers that all real racing cars suddenly loose all grip at a point and then regain it resulting in the typical GTR nonsense about 40% lateral force drop off and ridiculously high slip angles. What a lot of people don't realise is that a lower slip angle creates the effect they're looking for (you reach the peak slip quicker and you get doubly punished due to adverse aero effects) but with sensible ISI or LFS tires you don't just surrender all control until the tire stops slipping.

I wasn't insinuating that GTR is necessarily better or worse than LFS in this respect. I'm just saying that LFS in not a panacea of perfect physics (say that three times fast). LFS might feel good and be fun to drive, but a lot of the reason that people come to grips with it and are able to get away with the things they are is because of LFS's downfalls. Let's also not forget that above and beyond the tire model, LFS is missing a lot of other very basic features like engine damage, realistic suspension damage, dirt on the windshield, etc.

I love LFS and think it's the best thing out there, but nobody can say with a straight face that it's even remotely close to perfect or that there aren't other sims that surpass it in many areas.

Quote from 5haz :

LFS definately has the physics edge though, in ISI sims you have to really have to snap the wheel about just to catch slides in time, in LFS the car gets away from you more gradually, so you can apply opposite lock smoothly and because you can actually feel what the front tires are doing, you knwo how much opposite lock to put on

I think that behavior is actually one of LFS's pitfalls. In general, tires don't gradually slide away and then slowly and predictably regain their grip. In real life, if a car gets a bit sideways and you let off the throttle the tires will suddenly grip and snap the car back into line. That sort of thing doesn't happen in LFS. And that's with road tires. With sticky tires and slicks it's even more "snappy" and violent. There are also the problems with longitudinal grip. Very little time is lost when you spin the tires off the line. locking the front brakes and spinning the rears causes the car to move (spinning tires given more friction than static ones...that's a big problem).

I'm a huge fan of LFS and think it blows away the other sims out there (not in all areas, but in driving feel and all-around fun/ease of use), but there are still some major flaws in the physics.

When trying to run AI drivers in Practice mode I'm getting the following error: "AI can't drive on this configuration".

Running Patch Y22. Wind is off, Pit required is off, car reset is off. Time of day seems to have no effect. Level of AI seems to have no effect (I'm running Pro). I've tried this on all of the tracks. Both Blackwood layouts work fine (normal and reverse) but all other tracks fail with this error.

I can run the AI successfully on any track if it's set to race X laps, but not if the game is set to Practice mode.

Edit: I did a clean install of LFS Patch Y, then installed Y-to-Y22. Now it works fine. I'm not sure what the problem was with my original setup, but a clean install seems to work.

Last edited by Cue-Ball, Thu, 12 Jun 2008 21:34.

Quote from Jakg :

It's enabled automagically when the GFX card supports it.

I don't think you can turn it off...

If the card is atrocious then the FPS will get worse, but you'd need a card almost as old as me to cause that....

I guess I should have stated my question as "does your card support HVS".

And no, you don't need an old card or computer to not have HVS support. My work machine is a ~1 year old Dell desktop that uses an on-board graphics chip. HVS is not supported. Most any machine that does not have a dedicated graphics card is not going to have HVS support and will see a slow-down in frame rate from this patch.

Quote from Methyl Ethyl :

I actually LOST about 6 FPS going from 0.5Y to Y22. :-(

Do you have HVS enabled? If not, that would explain it.

Quote from Fischfix :

not sure if this is related to Y22 or the hires-skin pack as i've installed both of them but,

when i race offline i get "shadow error" and all the shadows under the cars are gone

You should install a fresh copy of LFS to rule out texture packs and such as the cause.

Quote from Scawen :

Does your graphics card support hardware vertex shading? If not then that is what you need - and HVS has been around so long, such a "modern" graphics card would cost nothing (if you can find one second hand). People are probably now throwing away as scrap, graphics cards that are fine for LFS.

I've been able to verify this on a machine that does not have HVS support. In Y21 at the back of a large grid on Westhill I got 32 fps (game paused, in-car view). In Y22 I only get 16 fps. This machine has an on-board Intel 82945G chipset (utter crap).

If your computer doesn't have a graphics card that supports hardware vertex shading, it's time to upgrade. Virtually every decent card has had this for years now, so anyone who's even remotely serious about gaming or sims should have no problems getting their hands on an HVS supported card.

Quote from sgt.flippy :

And another problem I saw on the last page: my reflections on the car are gone. It looks like a toy car now. I get shadows on it, and a little bit of reflection, but the color stays pretty flat.

Make sure you're not running any third party textures. The high resolution textures pack changes the reflections and requires a change to the shinyness of the cars. You might want to try a fresh install of LFS in a separate directory, just to rule out this possible cause.

Thanks for the link! I didn't even see that.

@Soeren: Is there any chance of adding these to the download in the first post? I re-downloaded the newest version yesterday and it would be helpful if it came with these cam files right out of the box so that users didn't have to hunt them down separately.

Last edited by Cue-Ball, Tue, 3 Jun 2008 19:45.

Has anyone created new cameras for the tracks that don't have support already in the program? For instance, FE Green or any of the Rallycross tracks?

If anyone has created cameras, could they please post the files here. Not only would it give everyone else access to them, but perhaps they could be included in the next release as well.