Quote from Crommi :

It could be all the PR stuff that is reflecting to his performance on the track.

Or it could just be that he's not as good as all the hype is making him out to be. Reminds me of something my drum tutor once told me (He was a well regarded pro session musician):

"You're only as good as the worst you play. Anyone can pull it together and excell for that one song, gig or session, but being truely good is about consistantly excelling".

Apply that to F1 drivers and it puts Hamilton in to perspective IMHO.

Quote from (-Mark-) :

looks like spa stuck on :P

It does? Pure coincidence if it does, I've no idea what spa layout looks like.

It wasn't a serious design really, I just extended the track adding stuff I thought would be interesting to drive as I went. Looking back it does look rather long, Donnington's not that short a track to begin with.

CEO of Donnington just announced on the F1 coverage that the updated track will be entirely within the current infield.

Not all the files are duplicated, and I haven't done anything with any of the folders under LFS except install the new update. I haven't even looked in any of them until today, which I only did to look at some of the new interior dds files.

Why should i need to have hdd disc space issues to care about good housekeeping??

Also, I really don't understand the negative reaction to using an installer. It gives the advantage of being able to do file management whilst implementing updates to software. I don't see anything but advantages personally.

Quote from DevilDare :

that might be nice, but there is absolutely no way they could get it done by 2010

Depends on who they contract. Certainly wouldn't be on the cards if they asked the local council to do it !

Quote from aoun :

What happened to Massa?

Spare car. He totalled his race car in practice. They've obviously had some issues getting the new one up to scratch. That or the crash knocked his confidence (not that likely, it's not like he's never had an off before) or maybe he's just fuelled heavy? Who knows, he set some very competitive times in practice.

As for Hamilton, personally I think he's over extending himself off the track too much. He's all over the media, going sailing, in adverts all over the place etc . If I were a complete newbie to F1, (as he is - despite what he or anyone else might think), I'd be focusing ALL my attention on achieving. Not acting like he's already a multiple world champion. It's only going to rebound on him IMO.

How about this?

Quote from tristancliffe :

Both are great circuits (though I've not driven on Donington ), but I think the access and facilites will be a problem at Donington due to a lack of space - it's not got a huge infield, it's not got a huge paddock (because the Melbourne loop goes behind the pits)...

I don't think it'll last long on the calender unless it's massively changed. And that would almost certainly be a bad thing - like the ruining of Hockenheim for example.

I agree, it might be a good thing for British F1 as in it's the only reason there will be a British GP according to Bernie, but it'll be terrible for Donnington IMHO. Donnington is a great motorcycle track and it'll be ruined by widening etc required for it to be able to host F1.

I've noticed after upgrading to patch Z that there is another folder named "dds" under the existing "dds" folder. There appears to be quite a few files in both folders with the same name.

I'm assuming one folder is actually the patch Y dds files and the other is the patch Z files. Is that correct? if so which is which and which files can safely be deleted?

which brings me to the question. Is it ever the intention to make LFS a full windows installation package, (ie use an installer and register files in the registry etc), rather than a simple unzip ? Would be good if "updates" could remove redundant files in future versions .

Quote from only.one.RydeR :

I don't like how some of the steering wheels are different from one another. ....... Why didn't you just make the same for all cars?

Do real cars all have the same steering wheel?

IMHO the more different the interiors of each of the cars is the better. I'd really like to see each car have it's own unique character in every respect, including interiors, before it's released as a finished product.

Quote from wien :

I'd say they are that way to make programming more accessible. Higher level languages, just like assembly and FORTRAN try to abstract away the details of how a computer works so you can write code quickly and easily without having to worry about the down and dirty details.

You use file abstractions to access the disk instead of keeping track of file systems, platters, cylinders, sectors etc. and writing the data manually. You use graphics APIs instead of writing a command buffer native to the GPU and send that across the PCIe bus. You write machine assembly instead of having to write binary opcodes using 1s and 0s. It's just easier, and the more complex applications get (because of user expectations), the more layers of abstraction are needed to keep thing at a manageable complexity level. We usually only have to worry about the top level though, Meaning it's easier for out pathetic human brains to cope. These languages simply let you describe what you want done, not how you want the computer to do it (which, let's face it, you don't really care about).

I know what you mean about the "write code in English" bit though, and there are languages that will let you do something close to that. BASIC has been around forever but some popular incarnations are getting quite long in the tooth these days. Ruby is one of the newer languages that try to stay fairly intuitive, so there's alternatives that are FAR better than C++ in this respect.

They're still not anything like real English though, and that's simply because English is a spectacularly bad language for instructing a computer. It's just too vague and ambiguous and requires extraordinary amounts of logic and intelligence to make head and tails of. It's better/easier to teach a human how to communicate in a way a computer can understand (we're good at that sort of stuff) than it is to teach a computer how to understand a human.

EDIT: Just wanted to add one of my favourite quotes on the subject which pretty much sum up high level languages to me: "Being abstract is something profoundly different from being vague... The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise." - E. Dijkstra

Thinking about it that way I suppose it's true, even relatively low level languages are actually abstractions of what is really going on in the hardware as far as bits of data etc are concerned.

I just remember that when I first heard of the use of libraries as a way of calling specific functions I thought "at last" simple programming. Coding will just be a case of stringing together the calls in the order you wanted to execute them without needing or caring to know how the computer actually achieves it. Take an imaginary file handling call for example:

write.file(file.name)

would take car of all the opening and writing too and then releasing of the file with no worries about needing any bits of code to come around later and close it etc. How wrong I was !

Though I guess if you open/write/close a file for every bit of data and you know you're going to be writing more data to that file it's maybe a bit of an overhead to have to keep opening and closing it, (from the file system access speeds on the hard drive point of view i mean).

btw - do people still use subroutines any more, or are they a thing of the past?

Quote from DanneDA :

Another question:

How do you structure the code?

Like this:


function foo()
{
for(int i = 0; i < 25; i++)
{
do_something(i);
}
}


or this:


function foo() {
for(int i = 0; i < 25; i++) {
do_something(i);
}
}


Or some other way? I myself use the first of the two as I find it easier to read the code at a later point.

I'd do it the first way too. Like you say just seems easier to read, (though I've no idea if it makes any difference to the way they run). Just be thankful it doesn't care how many spaces there are between the start of the line and the code !! Fortran was a real pig for that

Quote from wien :

Well, not quite. But to take the file handle example, let's say you want to write into a file. To do that you need to ask the OS to please open *that* file for writing for me. The OS will then lock that file so no other program can access it while you're changing it, and return a handle to the file you can use for any operations you want to do on that file (reading, writing etc.). In C this is done through a call like "FILE *handle = fopen(<filename>, "w+");".

Now, when you're done with this file you need to tell the OS so it can release the lock on the file, once again allowing other programs (or your own program at a later time) to open the file again. In C this is done through a call like "fclose(handle);". This is of course when things can go wrong. If for some reason you don't call fclose you've leaked that file handle and the file lock won't be released. Exact same concept as a memory leak.

In GC languages like C# and Java the GC will take care of this for you, but if can't guarantee when the handle will be released unless you explicitly tell it to release the handle yourself (much like in C). For memory that's usually not a problem since you have lots and lots of it and a few tenths of delay on deallocation here and there won't matter in the long run.

With file handles though (and a lot of other resources), it's extremely important. You could very well end up in a situation where your own program tries to fetch a handle to a file that the GC has not yet gotten around to releasing (from some previous access). That could mean you won't be able to fetch a handle at all, or worse your program will lock up until the GC has released the handle.

So you need to explicitly tell the OS "I'm done with the file now", and you're back to square one (C) even though you have a fancy GC to help you.

C++ and RAII does not have that problem as the mere action of fetching a resource (memory, handles) also dictates the lifetime of that resource. You can't fetch a resource without also stating when the resource should be released. The two actions are one and the same. Once the resource handle goes out of scope (at the end of a function call for instance), the handle's destructor will automatically tell the OS "I'm done with it". There's no need to do this explicitly.

Ahh ok, I'm familiar with opening and closing files and understand the concept of calls, I get it now. I've haven't done any programming for over 20 years, (and I was never much good at it anyway), so I'm completely unfamiliar with the terminology of "modern" languages. One thing I've never really understood about a lot of languages is why they need to be so "abstract". I've often thought that they're purposely designed to be obtuse just to keep programming "elite". Whatever happened to the goal of a high level language that could just be programmed in plain language? Back in the days I remember talk of programming eventually getting to the level where you could almost write in plain english what you wanted to do and the computer would translate that in to it's own internal machine code and do it. Seems to be going the other way to me. The fact that developers are forever trying to reinvent the wheel doesn't help either IMHO. A multitude of languages each with their own syntax and terminology to achieve exactly the same thing.

Quote from wien :

...... file handles, window handles, mutex locks, graphics contexts etc. etc.

Like you said gone a bit over my head. I've never got on with abstractions used in high level languages. Do these things essentially boil down to variable registers? As far as languages are concerned I'm far more comfortable at a lower level talking about registers, flags etc. But even then I don't really have the will to get in to it in any depth.

I see what you're saying though. Automatic memory management makes you pick up lazy programming habits, which then work against you when it comes to managing other resources, (eg graphics memory, i/o ports etc), right?

Quote from mrfell :

There are lots of words strung together to make sentences, but i still have no idea what they are telling me!!
Its another language that i'm not getting at all. Hats off to all you guys and galls that understand it and make money from it!!

It's not a very complicated concept. Basically it boils down to keeping track of changes made so that you have an audit trail to find what was changed, when it was changed, and by whom. It also covers keeping back up versions of any document, software created along the way so that changes can be (relatively) quickly and easily reverted back to the way they were if new versions turn out not to be any good for what ever reason. It's also used extensively in project and programme management, (as well as SLA and Contract management etc).

I have to admit I know little about programming. It never interested me so I took no interest in class - (you try staying awake trying to learn programming in Fortran77 !! :razz - but isn't C++ a language that requires manual memory management? Just makes me wonder how many of those 6 million characters are taken up dealing with allocating and freeing memory. I thought people were moving away from such languages to ones that do automatic memory managment, as they are more code "efficient". But like I said, I'm no programmer.

Quote from Scawen :

And are we obligated legally and morally to add free cars and additional content, as we do?

I know you have worded your post not to be attacking us, but it is quite hilarious how many people (although I am aware it is a small minority and ther are plenty of patient people out there who respect our methods, even if things take a long time) have appeared and are attacking us (only with words of course) on the actual thread announcing many new developments, and a few days after a clear statement from me about what we consider most important for development in the near future.

Nothing more could we do than that, other than work twice as hard but as I've pointed out before, sleep is required in order to remain alive. No way am I morally obligated to work more than the 270 hours I did last month, and no way am I morally or legally obligated to hire additional staff when the only thing we have promised, is development to S2 stage, with clearly stated goals, that we are gradually getting nearer to achieving. Working the way we want to do, which we are happy doing, and is the reason for LFS's existence.

The standard keeps getting higher, many new unplanned features are added, and that is why things take longer than planned. You've got most of what I have done but there are some things on Eric's hard drive awaiting completion, and you'll get them when they are done. It's easier to release a half-baked code feature that works, but you can't release a track with some hills you can see under and cars with holes in them.

Anyone who thinks we should do better in a shorter time should present to us all their work that proves their point. Anyone who says we should change our way of working and turn LFS into a company with employees, I have a very short phrase for them but can't say it on a public forum.

Scawen,

With the utmost respect, I am purely pointing out the care that needs to be taken by someone in your position so as not to find yourself in sticky situations. As I stated there are several ways in which one can inadvertently enter themselves in to binding contracts. Concepts of "free" in one persons mind may well not be considered so under certain circumstances by a judge for example.

On a personal level I am happy with what I paid for, but I know enough about contract law to know it's never as black and white as it would appear and urge caution with regards to things said on public forums etc.

Quote from danowat :

It's not a bad point actually, because the Baby-R is all about keeping momentum up, something you can use to good results in alot of the other cars

A point Tiff Needel once made in Top Gear, (I think! ). Racing is all about keeping momentum up, even at F1 power to weight ratios.

Quote from danowat :

It's a tough one really, they don't "owe" us anything, we paid a very small amount for a continually developing product.

....

Huh? Just a response, (in general not specifically to scawen et al), to that statment.

You pay someone for something. They owe you. Simple. The payments made by all the license holders of LFS are keeping the devs in a living, (at least in part). You really honestly believe that if someone is funding your house, food, childrens schools etc you owe them nothing in return??

As individuals, all the license holders may have paid a relatively small amount of money, (not small for everyone though), and the game may well be "in development" but statments of "as is" just don't cut it as a get out when there is clearly a promise of development. In life, and in business especially, if you make a promise to people, (especially those that have paid money to help you meet that promise), those people have a right to expect a reasonable effort on your part to meet that promise. In fact on a legal basis they can very well demand it. A contract can be established in many ways and a promise to develop a product with the money that is paid for that reason is just as contractually binding should it be made on a forum as it would be if it were on paper with signatories and witnesses etc.

Legally speaking to take money off people on the promise (read contractual obligation) of product development and then not to develop said product is tantamount to fraud. Which in case anyone isn't clear about it is a criminal offense.

Now, I am no way implying that the LFS devs are doing any such thing, but let's just put this naieve argument that because we've paid peanuts and LFS is "in development" and sold "as is" that the devs don't owe their paying customers anything. In fact it is exactly because it's "in development" and not a finished product that they do ! They've taken the money to develop LFS so now they are obligated (legaly and moraly) to develop it.

Quote from gezmoor :

I'm not able to use any buttons on my wheel. For some reason LFS is not picking up the mappings used in the wheel profiler. I've had this issue since Y19. Patch Y worked just fine. Z doesn't.

hmm ok... I've just retested it.. seems ok now. I must have been doing something wrong initially.


The new interiors look much better (for the ones I've seen so far). The XFG and XRG look much more like road cars now, which is what they are. XFG seem to handle more like a road car too, (though that could be my imagination). I must admit though that the "air bag" on the new wheels does look a little odd. But I'm guessing its' not supposed to be an air bag?? given the era of the car.

I'm not able to use any buttons on my wheel. For some reason LFS is not picking up the mappings used in the wheel profiler. I've had this issue since Y19. Patch Y worked just fine. Z doesn't.

Quote from tisy0 :

I, don't think it will change either,
But there needs to be a 'Cut Down' on the "Ricer" attitude.

Why? LFS is a race simulator .. hence the use of the term "speed" in the game name. It's intended to replicate driving cars fast. Ricing is purely a visual thing. Nothing to do with performance in any way, so why should a performance biased audience not have a negative attitude towards things that are irrelevant to performance. Coming here and asking for visual mods capability in a game which is modelled 100% to replicate performance issues is like going on a forum for the game "guitar hero's" and asking for a mod to be able to play a recorder in the game.

Quote from unseen :

Yeah, that`s what I thought. I`ve always hated that effect, since it always feels as if it`s doing some damage to the wheel, and not actually vibrating/moving normally. Makes a horrendous noise too which doesn`t help late at night.

First thing I did was remove that effect from GTR2 when I started playing it.

Problem with that affect is that the quality of FFB available in current wheels just isn't good enough to accurately reproduce the "tingle" you get through the wheel in real life in some cars. Otherwise a frequency related minor vibration through the wheel would certainly add something to the realism of racing sims. What's actually required is not vibration through the FFB motor(s) but a separate motor causing vibration up through the wheel stem.

Quote from wien :

I would assume a wing that has fallen off would stop producing downforce.

So would I, it would be very odd otherwise... just as odd as having deformed wings but no affect on down force as is currently the case !

What I meant was, given that the modelling of the wings actually falling off is some way a way. I would much rather the devs just updated the physics modelling to approximately match the graphics aero damage that currently already exsits in the game on single seaters. I would much rather see that now, than wait for it to be implemented with what I believe is essentially a graphical improvement, (ie the wing actually detatching). It doesn't have to be accurate aero modelling just a rough approximation of loss relative to the kind of damage incurred. eg half bent front wing = 50% loss of down force etc. Just that in itself would be a huge step forward in realism for the single seaters IMHO.

Good news..


Just a note about wings falling off. I would much prefer to see partial to full loss of aero downforce due to damage to wings before the ability of the wing to actually fall off, (unless this would be part of the physics changes needed to allow wings falling off to be modelled).

I just remembered an article I read of a motor journalist getting the opportunity to ride what was then the new Cagiva 500cc race bike. He had about 5 laps on it and after taking the first lap very slowly he gradually built up the pace over the next 3 laps and actually stated that the bike was incredibly easy to ride, (at speeds that were way above what any production 1000cc bike would have managed), but when on the last lap he then actually tried to keeping the throttle open full past 3/4 revs to the red line the bike came up so quick it nearly headbutted him off the back, he rolled off the throttle got the front down by which time he was already past his previous brake marker going much faster than he had till then. Hitting the brakes in near panic nearly threw him over the front but killed his speed so that he made the corner doing 20mph more than he had previously. It was at that point that he realised just how talented 500cc racers were at the time.