Quote from Ball Bearing Turbo :

Fast drivers are not necessarily good racers though.

Very true, but at least you know you're dealing with somebody who can keep it between the white lines at the speed you're used to.

So while you've not culled every bad driver, you've at least reduced the amount of bad drivers you're likely to face.

Passing is an art, not learned easily and I'd hazard a guess that the majority of the people out there racing on servers don't know how to do it properly. But if you can keep the rolling chicances, first corner foul ups and mobile missles out of your race, your chances of having a better race over all just went up.

Like I said, thinking out loud. But I like the licensing, to get a LFS <Super, Class A, B or C> license you have to complete x number of online races, no DQs, no bans, laps within nnn% of the best lap of the race.

Lots of infrastructure to implement, but could be a useful system. You're not blocked from running any car, you don't have to unlock anything, but you can't race on every server out there.

I'll shuddup now.

only if you play it w/o gloves on.

zOMFG!! LFS-BF1-flu!!!

Well I used to just take a pull off the beer or relax the hands, but now I'm going to have to spend it trying to block out the possiblity that somebody I'm passing, or being passed BY, could be doing this...

Quote from KiD-OtA :

I masturbate

*shudder*

Just going to throw out some ideas (some have already been touched on);

Allowing server to require n of complete hot laps in a car offline before you can race that car it online?

What about a 110% rule for HotLap times? A matching system where servers can stipulate where only people within 110% of a preset lap time can race on that server?

How about a class / points licensing system? Allow servers to lock races for that license (or above and below if you want) only. Each license is obtained after x number of races online w/ no DQs or send offs AND best lap times are within nnn% of best lap time of that race.

/just thinking out loud.

Thanks guys, but see the problem here is, I don't want to have to go through a key combo to set my brake bias F<> R.

F11, KEY || SHFT + key takes too long and I know there will be a race that I scrub it because I had to look off to the keybaord.

Does anybody have a script or add on that can map the F<>R brake bias to a HID on my wheel then?

Or am I going to have to write it?

I STFAs and didn't see anybody suggesting this previously but;

Now that we have the Sauber BMW F1, I'd like to be able map a control to adjust the brake bias in race on at least the F1.

Quote from sdether :

Although I still use 2 spaces for indent when everyone else uses 4

^ YEAH!!!!

*grumbles* Can't STAND the 4 space indenters...

I much prefer

IMO, just makes it SO much easier to visualize the blocks that way.

Okay, my turn for a rant, I've always, ALWAYS hated the "traidional" blocking.

May not seem like a big deal, but it's annoying when you're blocking huge nested statements..I think it just "looks" horrible.


Just a nit pick...

Even though nobody asked me and it's OT, I'll jump in here

What is your programming languages of choice?
Just about antying but C++. I actually love to work in ASM / C.

What programming languages do you know?
"Know" is a subjective term; C, x86 / x64 Assembly, oCaml, Perl, VB, C#, C++, etc, etc. I can work in just about anything save the "web based" languages. Don't have a need for web based stuff in driver land. *g*

What do you use the most as your text editor for programming?
Laugh as you will, I'm really starting to like VS 2005.

What IDE do you use, if any, and if you don't do you have problems with them?
See above.

What is your compiler of choice, for your primary programming language?
At home, See above above. At work we have a somewhat custom compiler tied to our source code manager.

What libarys do you recomend for your primary programming language?
What ever is needed honestly. Stupid as it sounds, you should always look for ways to streamline your binaries / code.

Programming is 10% typing and 90% researching APIs anyways.

Quote from L(Oo)ney :

While that may be boring, atleast we dont create a "world series" that only one country takes part in.

Then how did a team from Toronto Canada win the title, twice?


< Can't stand baseball, just picking on ya.

The outside front tire is more heavily loaded under braking in this situation, so it will always pull you out. When you are able to turn in and get to the entry of the corner you're going to have an outside front tire that is; trying to steer, and put power down equal to its inside and much lighter brother and in doing so, voila, added understeer. You compound that with the natural tendencies of FWD cars to understeer and fun times ensue! It shifts the whole balance of the car to push out even more.

It's inherent nature on a locked front diff which is why people tend to stay away from locking front diffs on anything but off road vehicles.

You can offset it to a degree with car setup, but it's still prominent.

You can run a locked front diff on FW cars, it just handles like total sh**e.

It will cause a sizeable change in steering; damn near impossible to turn in under braking and it produces higher understeer because of it, but does allow all the power to be put down on exit better.

Well he is a homeless drunk (or so his name implied) so it's possible the internet cafe kicked him out before he could post again.

/threadLockTolerance--;

Quote from bavor :

Where do people get these strange ideas? Have they not driven FWD cars before or do they read somethign that someone wrote 30 years ago based on false assumptions and assume it to be true today?

There are plenty of production FWD cars that have been available over the past 15 years with 250-300 HP. There are a lot of daily driven, modified FWD cars that have more than that. Even back in the 1960's Oldsmobile had a 425 cubic inch displacement(7.0 liter) FWD V8 car with 385 bhp (287 kW) and 475 ft·lbf (644 N·m) of torque.

God forbid you ever tried to turn that thing at speed....wow what a nightmare. But then again it is / was a 60's-90's American car. Not meant for the twisty bits back then.

And those numbers are kind of skewed, the Nm was to the crank, I believe it actually lost a considerable amount by the time it got to the wheels.

Quote from bavor :

One of the high horsepower FWD cars I helped build won 1st place in Car & Driver's superfour challenge and about the same lap times as a forced induction lotus elise.
http://www.caranddriver.com/ar ... d=10165&page_number=8

It took first in the FW class, they never did an overall winner between FW & AWD/RW IIRC.

The ridiculously overpriced HKS EVO took first in the AWD /RW segment.

http://www.caranddriver.com/ar ... =10165&page_number=16

Preface:

Sure some of the times on the road course can come down to the driver (IIRC they weren't driven by the same person around the track, each one was driven by somebody from that company / team), but surely that car should have been able to make up some of the difference by sheer brute force. It wasn't even .50 a second within reach of the best time of the Audi, and > 1 second off the times of the Hondata Lotus.

The SRT-4 had blistering straight line speeds, but pretty slow on the road course considering the weight, power and torque numbers IMO.

Power (mfr's claim): 452 bhp @ 5500 rpm
Torque (mfr's claim): 476 lb-ft @ 4000 rpm
Curb weight: 2934 lb

Road-course time, sec
60.25
54.60
DNF
51.95
52.45

Best in class FW road course was the Mini;

Power (mfr's claim): 265 bhp @ 7200 rpm
Torque (mfr's claim): 225 lb-ft @ 6600 rpm
Curb weight: 2634 lb

Road-course time, sec
52.60
51.80
51.15
51.70
51.55

Nearly 1/2 the HP and well under 1/2 the torque and at its best still ~.80" faster than the SRT-4. Sure it's 300lbs lighter, but again, 1/2 the total grunt numbers of the Dodge.

For comparison from the other classes:

The Hondata Lotus (RW);

Power (mfr's claim): 320 bhp @ 8500 rpm
Torque (mfr's claim): 220 lb-ft @ 7200 rpm
Curb weight: 1935 lb

Road-course time, sec
49.95
50.65
48.65
50.20
50.75

And the thoroughly disappointing, heavier and last place in class, A4 (AWD);

Power (mfr's claim): 340 bhp @ 6100 rpm
Torque (mfr's claim): 332 lb-ft @ 4100 rpm
Curb weight: 3581 lb

Road-course time, sec
52.60
52.25
51.80
51.50
51.25

I would have liked to see them get an independent driver for all the road course times because after all is said and done, those values really only serve to show AWD / RWD cars are easier at being driven around a track.

But still at the end of the day, you can put as much power in a FW car as you can any AWD or RW car, problem is using that power on, in or around corners is lost. FW tuners are getting better at curing that, but there's only so far it can go before ol' Mr. Physics rears his head again and shows that fundamental flaw w/ FW cars.

Quote from JogDive :

i think not backslash zero, zero
\0 terminates a string

@der_jackal: This is not the error, just an enhancement

?

Quote from JogDive :

EDIT:Hey guy, you used the ' ' char brackets. Zero terminated means terminating with a zero and not with the char code !!!

please try that:


[3] => 0


does it work ?

Since it's 0 terminated;

But 0 and '\0' are the same thing in this sense.

Last edited by der_jackal, Fri 17 Mar 2006, 17:37.

You'll need to put in error handling for the size of the strings, and strncpy isn't the safest to use, but this is quick and dirty for ya.

Quote from sireric :

That I agree with. However, it's difficult to get everything tested, in every mode.

Trust me, I know.

See what happens when you hold a SpinLock for too long? (just taking a stab at the problem, never got it hooked up to a debugger..hehehe)

Quote from sireric :

Yes, we usually are around 3 releases or so. About 6~8 weeks for a specific bug fix to show up. I believe 6.2 will have this fix. We'll see if we can do a hotfix earlier.

As for lucky to not use an ATI for home/game, I think that's backwards. No other company is as consistent in updating drivers and fixing things; I believe we give the best game experience out there, both for the newest and for older HW. Certainly give the best visual experience.

I'm lucky I use an x1800xl at home.

I'm just a little miffed this issue slipped through the QA / regression testing because I'm pretty sure it's causing my slow down in GTR as well. Oh well, I'm going to roll back to 5.11 and wait for the package update.

If the system isn't even POSTing at times, try moving the sound card to a different slot.

Long story short, some motherboards don't like having sound cards in certain slots. Asus and Abit were nototrious for this.

It's a low level hardware problem for sure. Drivers won't cause your system to fail to POST as they aren't loaded until AFTER POST during the loading of the Windows kernel.

And there are VERY, VERY few viruses that will attack your BIOS (which is software btw. )

More info about your system would also be helpful.

Quote from Scawen :

One more question :

For those who experience the massive drop in frame rate, i guess the frame rate is still very low, even if you press the pause key? Is that true?

I'm asking that just to be sure that the updated drivers aren't somehow causing LFS physics to run slowly, and so the slowdown is almost certainly in the drivers themselves. If that's quite well established then the ATI guys will really need to run LFS over a debug version of their drivers on a HT system and they may be able to see instantly where it's tripping up.

Sometimes there is a huge slowdown due to exception handling. The scenario for that could be that somehow there is an error (or many errors) each frame due to a certain DirectX function called by LFS, and these could be causing the slowdown.

Last night playing multiplayer, I was geting ~25fps when I first dropped into the pits during the session, after the world "spooled" up and everybody else was drawn around me, I dropped to ~10-15fps.

If I changed to spectator mode I would get back up to the ~25fps range, but the minute I dropped the camera view to "forces" or "in car" I crashed back down to the ~10fps range.

And it's been pretty well covered, but yes, my proc is a dual phyiscal core 64bit processor running in 32bit mode. I was going to bring the machine in to work and throw it on a debugger but don't have time this week.

Single player empty track, no other cars, I was getting ~40fps, but I did not try to pause the game. I'll try that tonight if I get the chance.

Holy Jumpin'

AMD64x2 4800+
ATI x1800xl

5.11 was fine, 5.13 is MISERABLE, I'm getting >20+ fps drops even w/ AA-AF off. It's making online racing unplayable.

I turned off HVS in game and got about 10 fps back, but the graphics engine was dropping plot points all over the place.