Its a great start and proves its possible. Only tried the FZR and from in cockpit, it sounds good but is not there yet. The gear whine is perfict not too annoying, its nice.

Quote from Becky Rose :

Mazda shaved 7grams off the weight of a rear view mirror for Tristan's hair dresser, so should relative weight of the cars be an issue based on drive train alone? I'd rather weight was set to make the gameplay better than left as is in persuit of a pseudo-ideal of perfection.

And to add to this, most racing classes put a restriction on Power, Weight and tire sizes to ensure a close and competitive class.

I still think putting the three on the same size tires and adjusting the weights or power slightly will go a long way to ballancing the class.

Removing 50lbs from the GTT and 100lbs from the RB4 has proven to make the three much closer in performance when drivin by the AI in my tests. So I think that a little power or weight tweaking in addition to a uniform tire size and shape would yeald very good results.

I performed my weight/performance tests with differing fuel loads between either car and the GTT to arrive at the 50lbs figure. With the AI driving and all havng the same ammount of training in their respective cars the average time difference dropped from about 1 sec per minute to .1 - .2 sec per minute on a variaty of tracks.

Lets look at the facts.

FXO:
Lightest Weight
Widest Width, Lowest Profile Tires
Best Power/Weight Ratio

GTT:
Meduim Weight
Medium Width, Medium Profile Tires
Average Power/Weight Ratio

RB4:
Heaviest Weight
Medium Width, Medium Profile Tires
Worst Power/Weight Ratio

So the lightest car has the best power/weight ratio and the most rubber. The other two are more competitive, but are heavier, have lower power/weight ratio and less rubber to put the power down. Its no wonder the FXO just runs away.

The differece is too small to use a passenger as a ballancing tool, and too large to use fuel. So a change will need to be made in the core game to ballance this class. I also agree that we should not hamstring the FXO to rein it in, just boost the performance envelop of the other cars to allow then to keep pace. Right now the FXO just has all the advantages and no disadvantages other then tire abuse but with smooth driving that is not an issue. Its easy to drive, its fast, light and has the rubber to carry more speed through corners. As it is now it will out accelerate, out corner and out brake the others hands down.

Last edited by Gimpster, Mon, 18 Sep 2006 01:26.

Quote from thisnameistaken :

By turn one on my first lap in the demo I was laughing out loud because it felt so nice, and already thinking about buying it, and I did buy S1 the same night. I'd actually gone looking for a game just like LFS, thinking that it didn't exist, so when I found it I was hooked straight away.

God that brings back memories. I still remember the day I downloded the 0.1 version of the simulation at work on to my relitivly slow laptop. The first unsteady slide in to the hairpin at BLackwood in the XF GTi felt so close to the way ever little FWD car I have ever owned handeled I was instantly hooked and have been a LFS fanatic as my friends put it ever since. Very few, ok only one other sim, has felt as good or better since that time, but it has its own shortcomings.

The only thing that has tempored my fanaticsm of LFS has been nKPro and getting an R-spec miata. Now the shortcomings of LFS are starting to appear as I have a more performance oriented car in reality and have driven another sim that is also close to reality, though excells in different areas then LFS.

I prefer servers that are running 10 or more laps for several reasons. One, there is more time to make up for small mistakes. Two, there is more time the the other racers to make mistakes. The quality of racing also seems to be higher when the race is longer, there seem to be less people willing to try some crazy stunt to gain a position.

Quote from xaotik :

And yes, using post-processing is definetely a way to achieve it, but knowing this and accurately doing it in real-time (without ending up with nausea-inducing harmonics in the process) are two different things.

You know harmonics are there in real life too, just the other day I noticed this when driving my car. There was even a rythimic base pulsing in my exhaust/intake note that suprised me. A very low slow rythmic pulsing. Almost hypnotic.

Quote from xaotik :

Outgauge wouldn't provide the resolution required sadly, there would be lag. The best method, imho, is the audio equivelant of what Kegetys did with the ghostcar app. Hijack directX and find a way to divert the engine's audio layer through an external app which would apply the effects, render and return to output.

Then I have to say:
Kegetys, we need your magic, Please.

Last edited by Gimpster, Wed, 13 Sep 2006 17:40.

So the question remains was this done in real time or was it done in Post-Preduction? If was was done in real time then it coudl very well be a comunity mod project begging to be done. Becky added in backfires and a pit radio, I do not see why this coudl not also be accomplished.

To be honest it sounds like the nKPro sound system but with more work applied to the final sound. Deffinatly an improvment over the current state.

How diffacult woudl it be to to read engine RPM and Throtle position to generate a sound like the one in the video and then feed it back inplace of the original to the sound system?

Quote from BlackEye :

LFS or any other sim didn't change my RL driving.
What I'm little afraid of threads like this is that some kid will read this and think "hell, I can drive pretty good that FZR so I can drive at least some 300 hp beast in RL" and end up dead around some tree beside the road.
Maybe it's just my crazy way of thinking

Its true that for less experanced drives simulations like LFS can and often do provide them with a false sence of security in thinking they know more then they really do. I do feel that LFS is not as bad as the more commonly played racing games by new drives which have drasticly less realistic physics.

Even LFS is now replacement for real seat time. I can use LFS as a tool for improving my driving only because I have nearly 20 years of real driving experance. So for me, yes it did change the way I drive. It helped me learn to react to situations in am approate way which I had never encountered in real life previously. Like others have also said, my time in LFS allows me to pickup things faster in real life as wel that are new but similar to things I have done in LFS.

When I finaly bought a car worth taking to a track, I took my new to me miata to an autocross school. This was the first sporty car I have owned and the first time I have been on a track other then a gokart track. My first run was sedate, the second run the instructor showed me what the car could do, the thrid run I was hanging the ass out around the cormers, and by the 6th run I felt in complete control of the car.

Without the time I have spent in LFS I very much dought I would have become so comfortable in so short a time with that car. So LFS has changed the way I drive, but not in a negitive way, I am not a lead foot, I know when its approate and not approate to drive in a more aggressive mannor, and I only take away from LFS what is applicable to the real world.

Perhaps you could get the grey to match the grey in the rest of the light area, that woudl be an improvment over the original.

3 1/2 years of LFS has definatly had a positive impact on my real life driving. I have better control of my car, I am more aware of the traffic around me and can better anticipate the stupid ass moves the average american driver makes on a daily basis. More then once I have been able to identify and avoid a bad situation because of the time I have spent in LFS. Although I do some times drive a little more agressivly then I need to its not the norm and find that I often drive at a more sedate pace now then before I started playing. Racing is for the track, not the street, at least for me.

Simple fix to prevent a wrecker jumping to the garage is to not allow anyone to join mid race from the garage or spectating. About the only series where you can move your car bahind the wall to the garage and repair and then back out on the track is endurance racing. In every other form of motor sports going behind the wall to the garage is a retirment from the race.

Just this morning I took a freeway interchange at a fast enough speed to make the tires growl through all 270 degreed of the uphill positive camber interchange. The back end steped out at about 5 degrees and the rear tires in their optimal slip angle. When i got to work i took a good look at the tires. The new wear was half way between the edge of the tread where is rolls down toward the sidewall and the point where the tread blends in to the side wall, so still squarly on the tread of the tire.

I am running 205/50R15 Yokohama tires rated to 150mph, inflated to 35psi and about -2 degrees of camber. If i set the GTT or GT up this way I would roll the tires right over on the sidewalls and loose grip, have slugish handeling and be slow around the track. Somthing is just not right there.

Dam Becky this looks interesting, can't wait to see how this develops in the future.

It is already included in LFS. Most race cars use some setting between full ackerman and full parallel. LFS allow you to set the steering at any point between the two settings.

It has been my experance that my time in LFS has allowed me to learn and practice skills and behaviours that have translated very well in to my normal driving on a day to day basis. I have avoided several accidents and close calls because of the experance i have gained in LFS, watching the other drives, learning to predict what they will do, knowing what I need to do and how the car will react.

When I finaly got a sporty car and went to the autocross school, I found I could easily catch, hold and correct slides. This is somthing I had never done in a real car, yet there I was on the autocross course drifting with a passable effort. Not only did my times increase over the day but in the end I beat my instructors time by over 3 seconds. In a car I had owned for little over a month.

So yes I feel its time well spent, my daughter when older will learn in LFS or its follow up and she will be much better prepaired for the road then I was. Everything you learn in LFS, if you use a setup that is close to a real car will be directly translatable to a real car with similar handeling propperties. Some things though you just have to learn in the real world.

I do not think that speed alone does a good driver make and as such would be a poor indicator of a drivers skill. But to each their own.

In my opinion, the best way to get a new or younger driver to advance or even and old hat for that matter is to put them in a very loose and hard to control car. Turn off all the aids and allow them to learn the car. Once they figgure out how to control that beast, its become much easier to drive the more incontrol cars.

But the key as others have mentioned is being smooth. The exit of a corner is the most important part of a corner so entering slower and getting a better line for the exit is often times then fastest line through a corner. I still struggle with this myself.

There is no good way to identify a wrecker. Yes is is posible to identify who likely was the casue of an impact but there is not way to be certin that they intentialy caused that wreck. About the only tool you have to to compair direction of travel relitive to car facing at the time of imapact and compair relitive speeds. But even with all that info a human woudl be hard pressed to determin who was at fault.

Simple you have to pit between races if you want to fix or change tires, add fuel etc. Basicly the normal state of the system would just keep the persistant state of your cars. Damage would take time to repair nothing crazy but long enough to make you not want to crash, much longer then repairs take now in the pits. But you would have an unlimited pool of parts to use. Leagues could impliment a limited pool of parts to help encourge racers to save their cars for the long haul.

Time to repair could be somthing like this:
Time per corner:

Tires - 15 Sec
Light Damage - 30 Sec
Heavy Damage - 60 Sec

When we get more detailed damage then each componant could have a time to repair.

Last edited by Gimpster, Wed, 6 Sep 2006 19:56.

This was one thing in nKPro that was very interesting. The state of your car was saved from session to session. So unrepaired damage and the wear of your tires would be the same when you log on or start a race as they were when you left your last session. This made things interesting as tires started out a little slippery as new, gained traction as they started to wear in, and then would loose traction as they started to wear out. So tires ovten would last several races and often be best in the races after the first few laps. used on them.

This could alos later be applied to other wear parts like brakes, engines and the like, or even adding a league feature limiting the number of each part that can be used during a season.

I would rather see the RAC GTR fit in to the XFR/UFR class and the XRR/FXR get a larger non-turbo engine to be more even with the FZR.

For awile i was racing under their flag, but I and and always will be parts of GURU first and formost. Hell I am the head of the N/A division not that there is really one at this point.

You can adjust the understeer out of a meduim to hich pressure tire though. It takes a completely different approach to setup though and a different driving style i need to go back and build a set around this approach to prove the point and test my theory but will not have a chance until tomarrow.

To a point yes. But is a tire rolled over on its sidewall more grippy then a tire still frimly on its contact patch. One thing that stood out to me when learning to autocross was that they told us all to increese the pressure in our tires before coming to the event. They made a point of emphisizing that preventing tire rollover was the most important thing to achieve in tire setup. Optimaly you want to run just enough pressure to prevent the tires from rolling on to the sidewall under max cornering force. I don't see that as being the case in LFS. Tire manufactures allso would not design a tire that would require a pressure so low as to make the tire dangerous to achieve the optimal running temp, yet this seems to be the way it works in LFS currently.

When I was testing the FZ50 using a low camber, medium pressure setup I found that the inner tire temps on the back of the car and the tires surface temps were performing like i imagin they should. The right side of the tires got warm on left hand turns, the left sides got warm on right hand turns, the centers heated more and the sides cooled on the straights and under acceleration and braking and the overal effect was very dynamic over the course of a lap. But to achieve this effect the tires end up running at about 5-10C below optimal and sidewall fles was still a little bit of an issue.

The car also responded to smaller inputs and was over all much more responsive. I think though that the benifts of using a more realistic setup like this is still not being rewarded enough in the way the physics work, as it is plainly clear from the WR sets that the fastest sets are nothing like would be used on a real car.

When I look that the way the tire loading on the contact patch affects heat generation i see a problem and it may be a contibuting factor. With the pressure set right to develop optimal head at the center of the contact patch and camber set to allow the bst grip in cornering the inside of the tires run very warm 10 ro 20 above optimal and the outer edged loose heat. The entire contact patch is still touching the road, and is generating friction yet the outer edges don't generate any heat and thus never generate thier optimal grip. I think that the there is a decmel misplaced in the calculation that in effect looks somthing like this. Heat = Load % * Friction, when maybe it should be Heat = (Load % + 1)*Friction. Even a tire running at -5 degrees camber should be building heat in the outer portion of the contact patch, though friction, heat exchange from the inside air temp and throguh the media of the tire as well. There should be a blead effect to some degree by which the less used portion of the tire helps cool the warmer portion and vice versa. I only see this happeing when a much less sever camber and higher pressure is use. This tells me that only when the relitive differences are small does the system work, so somthing is getting multiplied to the wrong power in my opinion. I need to explain that better but I am not sure how to yet.

Last edited by Gimpster, Sun, 3 Sep 2006 20:51.

Is there a reason som many people are still posting in this thread? We are not going to get any real world cars in LFS unless the devs strike it rich. The licencing costs are just not worth the trouble. If we are lucky we migth find some small manufacture or rac eteam that wants to use LFS as a showcase for their car or for testign of their cars, but those are more likely to happen of we as a comunoty approach these teams and manufactures to get them interested. In the end though any such deals also slow down work on planed features.