Oh, I read this back when I was doing the upper echelons of GT4 licenses/missions.. ugh... bad memories. Great guide though.

So who is going to be the new star? Kimi? He's such a fuddy duddy ^.^

I think Michael's new job at Ferrari is going to be some kind of coach, mainly to teach Kimi how to interact with other humans or something. I'll miss seeing him race.

Quote from duke_toaster :

This sounds like my totally panned WreckBot idea ........

Wreckbot ftw!

Pole Position, Atari 2600. Played that for quite a while before I realized the "pieces of a picket fence" that I was dodging around the track were actually other cars? I still have it, but both of my Atari's have a different problem with them. I wish I had the ability to put the two together and have one working one

Spy Hunter, NES. Not exactly a racing game, but definitely one of my favorite driving a car fast games. Top down view, blow up the "spies," drive into the back of a semi truck to upgrade your weapons/oil slicks/smoke screens. Great game, played the hell out of it.

Grand Turismo 2, PSX. My first racing "sim." Loved it, especially after I got a cheapo Mad Catz wheel. I loved how it was so... difficult. I could tell people, "it's not a game, it's a sim." I played that game so much, it's ridiculous. I had a lot of fun with GT4 too, but that was short lived as I then found LFS.

Mario Kart also gets an honorable mention. Not only was it a mega-fun racing game, it was probably the best multiplayer console game I've ever played. That kept me up many many nights at friends' houses and stuff back in the day. *sigh*

I watched the qualification session and also have to agree that the "blocking" penalty is ridiculous. Alonso was well ahead of Massa, which was obvious from the on-board shots, and he was certainly not lagging and forcing Massa to slow because he was rushing to the start/finish so he could do his last hot lap. Renault's telemetry shows that Massa never got within 93 meters of him. illepall I don't know about conspiracy theories, but it's certainly a very poor ruling on the officials' part. After Massa's pole/win at Turkey he said he wanted to do anything he could to help M. Schumaker get his (final) championship -- What a shame if the team is resorting to "tactics" like this to get the win. Do they think Michael's driving can't do it? I don't; he's a fantastic driver and I'm going to be sorry to see him leave the car. I think it would be awesome if he does win the championship in his last year, but not if the team is doing silly crap like whining about "blocking" and such.

Stupid me forgot to rewind the tape for my recording of the GP2/F1/GT this morning, so I missed it all! :slap: From what I've seen of the highlights though looks like I missed an interesting race. Too bad for Alonso's motor I would have liked to see him claw his way to the front despite starting way back there; though I guess it was probably a combination between running the new spec and presumably not tested as thoroughly engine and pushing it as hard as he must have been to get up to... what was it, 3rd?

Congratulations to Mr. Kubica; maybe Scawen's already gotten the Patch V BF1 to him or something?

Fabulous work Yamakawa. Looking forward to seeing this expanded.

I think it sounds great with the two sounds mixed; maybe not how a car with only one measly engine would really sound, but it does sound pretty cool!

Just to confirm: Yamakawa's work is unrelated to the videos posted early in this thread, other than inspired by them, right? I wonder what happened to the original project o.O

Nope, sorry.

I would be much more inclined to use the hotlap mode if a rolling start (top of 3rd gear or something) at the beginning of the last sector with warm tires (optimum minus a few degrees) was implemented. Maybe it could even include camber angles into calculating the tire temperature, i.e. if you use extreme cambers your outside edges will be a bit cooler. The next best choice I think would be a standing start at the last sector with warm tires.

By "best" I don't mean "closest to how this hotlapping might occur in reality," I mean, "most efficient means to make an attempt at driving the fastest clean lap that you can." There is a point where you should draw the line between realism and fun; tire-warming "acrobatics" are not fun. If I'm pushing for a few more hundredths and go over my limit and spin out, I think a just punishment would be to have to start my lap over -- not to waste another few minutes trying to warm my tires up and start over.

Quote from SparkyDave :

I have to agree with Sinbad on the added worth and (simulated) realism of starting HL from the pits.
I just dont see any dissadvantage to anyone, we would all be using the same system right? except it will take longer to complete an outlap then run a HL (time enough to heat tyres in a realistic way),so a few added minuites to the hours needed to HL all the combos anyway shouldnt upset anyone should it.

Suppose you're working on your nutter rank. You want to drive as fast as you can on as many different combos as you can. If you wanted to beat robnewman out of the top slot, you'd have to drive all 858 combos at a moderate speed. At the very least you'd have to drive this many outlaps, however more than likely you'd end up driving many times this number. All of the world records in the... um... in the world add up to 1384:49.89. If you drove only one outlap for every single combo at the world record time (which is not going to happen unless you're from outer space) you'd have just over 23 hours of completely wasted time. Imagine an entire week from sunup to sunup piddled away warming up tires. Unfortunately I can't think of a way to word this to sound as dramatic as I wanted (I guess that's why I'm not in advertising), but that seems pretty inefficient to me.

The way I understand it, hotlapping is a test of setting up your car and driving a clean lap as fast as you can, and I believe that a rolling start with warm tires would provide the best conditions and the most efficient means for a driver to do so.

Last edited by Dumpy, Sun, 10 Sep 2006 03:24. Reason : quote credits

Chuck Norris' tears cure cancer.


Too bad he has never cried.

I've used Dumpy for a few years for online FPS games and now for LFS. When I've played fantasy style games I almost always use names from Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. I use my real name Howie Stephens for "official" email stuff, but I wouldn't have a problem using it in-game if it were asked of me. I've used a fake but real sounding name Richard Stark a few times over the years too. I also have a pretty old made-up word nickname that I registered an original hotmail (pre-microsoft) account with and still use for that and other "junk mail" email accounts and forum accounts and such.

As for other people using nicknames, I don't really care. Like Funnybear said, computerland is just a nickname kind of place. It's just annoying when I can't figure out a way to say/think it out loud, or when it's completely made of "cool looking" arabic characters or whatever.

As an aside, I do enjoy googling myself every now and then (It's not what it sounds like!) to see what other people are doing with my name.

very nice!

I voted no because I haven't used my setup in a few weeks, but I had ok results with a freeware program called Freelook, an ordinary cheap-o webcam, and a miniature flashlight stuck to my hat. It took a good deal of time tweaking the deadzones and detection thresholds until I got it working well, but it was wonderful for being able to look where I wanted when I wanted. When I LFS I can't help but tilt my head a bit leaning into turns, and with the right sensitivity and center reduction I got the head tilt looking great. Also it was setup so that turning my head to the point just before it became uncomfortable and leaning to the side a bit let me look over my shoulder. It was great! It didn't take very long to get used to turning your head but still looking at the screen - it's just like having another controller or something.

So why am I talking entirely in the past tense? -- Because I LFS at work as well as at home, and it's just more crap I have to lug around with me (cpu tower, keyboard, mouse, DFP, pedals...), a pain to setup, and I look retarded

As for VR glasses, look up the eMagin Z800. From what I've read it's about the best bang you can get for your buck atm. For about $550 you get 800x600 OLED, head tracking, and stereo earphones. More details once I've paid off a credit card or find a cheap one on ebay. (There are assloads of cheapo HMDs on ebay for $150ish, but as far as I can tell they're just pieces of junk.)

Last edited by Dumpy, Tue, 29 Aug 2006 01:06. Reason : clarification

Doh I guess "Spoiler" should have clued me in ^.^ Taped a bunch of stuff this morning but didn't get the chance to watch it. Just caught the last bit of the Rolex series at Infineon.

And in the process I found out that Infineon Raceway is about 5-10 minutes away from the town I'm moving to in a couple months!! That made my day; I can't wait to be able to catch races IRL again, plus they do karting and race school all the time it seems! Haven't lived near a track for 12 or 13 years =-/

Anyway congrats to Mr. Alonso, I'm sure it was well won. Especially looking forward to watching that now.

I think a profanity filter is a much better idea than an auto-kick. The way it's implemented in several online games that I've played is that by default any word that matches the filter just shows up as gibberish, as if the person had typed, "You kaodwim goat-kissing son of a laothesjkclr!" whereas if you prefer, you can turn the censorship off and see the beautiful blasphemy in all its glory.

Quote from Wuzzie :

Swearing, in general, is a show of lack in vocabulary.

Quote from Theafro :

You don't know as many swearwords as I do

I heard of really good results using a force feedback joystick, a custom H-gate, and a little utility called FFShifter. While looking for that link over at RSC I found another for something similar called Virtual H-Shifter which doesn't use force feedback I think. Good luck.

In order of how recently I last played them:
Live For Speed, Day of Defeat:Source, CounterStrike:Source, Dawn of War, World of Warcraft, Half-Life 2eathmatch, Anarchy Online, Everquest

Anything after DoD:S I haven't played for months at least; haven't played EQ for years. I play Oblivion every now and then too, but that's singleplayer. I also have an NES and about 30 games that still gets regular use; I'm about halfway through Legend of Zelda at the moment. My PS2 and N64 mostly just gather dust nowadays.

Good stuff!

Thank you AtomAnt for inventing time.

And also for devising a way to bring threads back from the distant past.

Last edited by Dumpy, Sat, 26 Aug 2006 06:02.

Awesome man, have fun!

<-- me green with envy!

Definitely on my "list of things to do before I die." I think I should get the other things out of the way first though if you know what I mean

I was sort of hoping they would promote Pluto's moon Charon to dwarf planet status as well, creating a binary planet system - that would have been pretty cool. It does make sense to reclassify Pluto and the other objects like it though as they are not only so small, but also completely different in composition compared to the four terrestrial planets or the four gas giants. It's good that it's settled now since there was actually no official scientific definition of "planet" before.

Don't sweat the jerks trying to blame you for their crash. Even if they are faster, "faster" is not equal to "better racer."

My first pathetic attempt at skinning... Tried screwing around with it before but never had an actual idea so they just fizzled. Here's my RaceDeck RB4

Quote from MAGGOT :

appauling spelling

Did you mean: appalling

I'm sorry, I really couldn't resist

Last edited by Dumpy, Tue, 22 Aug 2006 03:34. Reason : italics

Mine's always enabled.
RE:Bad websites... Don't visit them?

I'm pretty sure I've messed around with all of the cars at some point or another, but my current project is to practice with every car on every track/config. I didn't realize how long it was going to take at first

I do most of my LFS at work (I work a night shift answering phones, and there's a lot of free time in the last half of my evening) hotlapping online on a hidden server. I don't have broadband here and I have to afk often enough to make actual racing pretty hopeless. I only get to do that for a small window of time after work before sleep and even then I'm not quite confident enough with many of the combos that seem to be popular online.

I made a list of the cars sorted by hp/ton and I'm slowly working my way up from the bottom of the bin. Basically I just drive each combo in quali mode with Kegetys fantastic ghost mod until I feel that I'm driving a smooth consistent lap - some of them take a lot longer to "master" (hehe, something like that ) than others. I made up a pretty slick Excel app that downloads all the WRs and my PBs and charts them against each other and shows the % difference so I can see which combos I'm doing relatively well on and which ones need a lot more practice.

So far I've done the UF1, XFG, and XRG, and I'm up to Fern Bay in the RB4. Each car has been my favorite car for the week or so while I was practicing with it - they're all a blast in their own respective ways. The UF1 and XFG were a good intro to LFS and helped me learn the tracks at low speeds. The XRG though... wow that was a surprise. It took me sooo long to get that ass under control. In retrospect, I think a big part of my problem was that I was trying to learn the RWD with really twitchy setups from teaminferno. When I finally dove into making my own setups with the help of Bob's guide and Colcob's analyser I ended up with a much looser and easier to control vehicle. It's much more fun actually being able to go a lap without doing 360s on every turn . The RB4 is a ton of fun too; I love chucking it around SO Long.

Anyway, to make a long story short, the notion of removing unpopular cars is ridiculous. They're all fun (to someone): slow, fast, RWD, FWD, 4WD, whatever! LFS FTW!

Last edited by Dumpy, Tue, 22 Aug 2006 00:53. Reason : a typo =-(