I think there are a lot of topics getting confused in this thread. I have now seen references to engine braking, scavenging (Only happens in N/A engines) and some other oddly related topics.

As others have said until we get a more complex engine physics model some of these thiong are just not possible to add in to the simulation yet and things like scavenging, electromicly controled engne braking reduction, and the like are just not likely to happen as the physics they need to work are not in the physics model yet or are just placeholder pieces.

Some how I do not see LFS becoming so compled as to accualy model the physics of how an engine works, how the transmission, shifting and clutch work and some of the other rather complex componantes of the cars. Even though we would love to see such complecity.

Personaly I would love to see LFS become a truely complex vehicle simulation which works as closely to how reality does as can be done on a modern PC. But then it may detract for what makes LFS as great as it is, which is being a very fun, accesable and fairly realistic racing simulation.

There are other projects that are striving for more extreme accutacy of vehicle physics. They are targeting a different crowd then LFS is though. If LFS can get the vehicles behaving a little more like real cars, get the tire feel closer and build the damage system in to a nice complex componant then I think LFS will have achieved its intended and correct level of realisim and retain it fun factor.

nKPro, i-Racing and Drivers Republic are all trying to more accurate vehicle simulations, but none will be as accessable or easy to use and the racing will not be as fun for the casual racers like LFS is. LFS will always be the sim of choice for me when I just want to have fun and a good race. I will look elseware when I want a real experance.

I think the point Cue-Bal is trying to make is that as it is right now the level of adjustability is so high that the driver is not forced to make as many choices in the setup. This leads to a situation where everyone runs bases their sets of the WR sets. And setups can be so fine tuned that they drive exactly like the driver wants.

This has a net result of allowing those people with very good setup skills to create a car that is perfict for them while those that don't have such finely honed skills are left with having to addapt to a not ideal setup. The end result is races that are not very close and competitive which is the point of a sim like this. To have close and fun races.

By limiting setup options to more realistic values and number of choices drivers now will all have to make compromises and adapt to the limitatios of the setup options, this also brings the racing closer togeather and makes the racing more about your racing abilities and less about your setup. This is a good thing.

I do not see a problem with very granular setup option for the suspension, wheels, brakes and tires. I do think that the transmissions and diffs need to be modeled and their setup options adjucted to be in line with what is really posible in a real car. I just spent some looking and most of the gear boxes under 10k come with a choice of a few ratio sets and rear diffs come in with 5-10 ratio choices from most of the racing gearbox vendors I could find.

The only car in LFS that woudl use a box where indifidual gears can be altered indipendantly is the BF1 and even then you might have no more then 10 choices for ratios of any 1 gear. We do not need transmission and final drive ratio adjustability down to the 1/10000th. Model a real transmission with real teeth and let us adjust within real limitations.

I have on many occasions slid the rear tires of the XRT on approach to T1 on Blackwood due to the engine braking being more then the tires have grip to handle. Its there, its noticable but with out the seat of your pants g-forces you just can not sence it well.

I don't even want to get in to the mistakes and assumptions you make reguarding how engine braking works and how you think its adjustable.

Last edited by Gimpster, Fri, 23 Mar 2007 19:46.

Ok what I wrote before did not make any useful addition to this thread so I am re-writing my thoughs.

As far as the level aof adjustability and the costs infolved for a street car here is what I know. My car, a miata, from the factory has the ability to adjust the camber and toe. on the wheels. There are 2-3 final drive ratios that were avalable and depending on the year of transmission used there maybe three differnt ratios that were used on the 5 speed boxes. The only differences were in the first two gears and the difference were very minor.

For few thousand dollars I can get a fully adjustble suspension system which 20+ levels of damping adjustment + preload, several ARB choices and a few sets of springs. There are also a few choiced for aftermarket gearsets for the transmission that are more optimised for the power curve of the engine but each is over 3k.

Thats a lot of adjustment but is no where near what is abalable in LFS, Caster, Ackeman, Brake Bias & Pressure are not adjustable. Final drive is limited to 3 choices, an gear box ratios might as well be limited to 2 predefigned sets. The number of spring rates is also very limited as are the ARB choices. And thats all I have to work with. Everything become a ballancing act and the driver becomes more of the determining factor.

LFS allows adjustment in gear ratios down to 0.0001, and do do that you need like 10,000 teeth on the gear, you might be lucky if you have 100 in a real transmission. The number of teeth & there pitch determin the number of choices that exist. In LFS it is as if instead of gears we have friction wheels which we can very in very very small imcrements to optimise ratios and this is not in any way close to reality.

Patch W will be a multiplayer update as Scawen mentioned, avter that will be the incompatable. So the earliest I can see a fix to these issues is Patch X. As S2 has been said to be about the Cars this is the right time to take this step. Its time to recode the vehicle setup process and options, it time to move from infinate adjustbility to realistic values and number of choices. Its time to make it realistic.

Last edited by Gimpster, Fri, 23 Mar 2007 17:05.

But it would still require additional logic to be programed in to the existing replay function to allow for the posibility of the "Ballast" paramater not being there and to then assign a value of zero for that missing paramter. Seems like a lot of extra work to me just to slip in a new feature that could just as easily wait until the next physics/feature update, so as to not have to add extra code that would be made un-nessasary once the next non-compatable version is released.

Thats my point, why do it at all if the work is only going to be needed until the following patch?

Quote from AndroidXP :

Where do you have this knowledge from? Did Scawen tell you? Did you have a look at the code? Or is it just an assumption?

If deciding in a replay that "value not there" = "value is 0" is so hard (it is not), how come that replays were still compatible after Scawen strengthened the suspension of the BF1, which was actually really a physics change? I can even recall him saying, that upon loading the replay he was checking if he should let the physics engine run with strong or weak suspension, to stay compatible with replays.

Sorry, but I think you're pulling this out of your butt.

I dare you to find me two versions where there is a feature difference that affects the cars where an older client can connect to the more updated host which has the new feature.

You will not find one.

Regurading the change to the BF1's suspension. That was not the case of a missing paramiter. The value of a paramiter changed. The replay only tracks user input and then then recreats the replay from those inputs and the current game physics and vehicle paramiters. Altering the threshold of when damage occures and how much damage occures if the threshold is passed would not invalidate the replay but whould display slightly different as the physics applied to the repay would differ. It was not deamed in-compatable as it affected a single car, was done right after the car was introduced and was a relitivly small change to two paramiters.

Thats a far cry from adding a new paramiter.

Thats the point AndroidXP, LFS doen not have the code to assume a missing paramiter means that the parameter should return 0. The base engne is not written that way. That would be even more new code needed just to allow the newer client to reconize this state and not error out when it does not find an expected paramiter.

LFS has not been desined to allow for clients of differing versions to interact. Part of that is cheat pertection, part is code efficiency. For the engine to allow for clients of differing versions to play togeather it would need to be have a check and logic function for each possible feature/paramiter differece and then automaticly default to the feature set of the lowest common dinominator(only allow features/paramitors which all clients have in comon).

While very doable the cost in terms of code complexity is extreamly high and its not very often done as the need for such adaptability is often not worth the cost and its far easier to control by forcing client version compatability.

This is one of the sortcomings of the LFS engine. It does now allow for alterations of the program to remain backward compatable. I can see reasons why they did this and I can se reasons why this is a bad thing but its not my sim.

Adding ballast would break the compatability as the OOS check would not find a paramiter for the ballast option from a client without the current version and would reject the client. It would break Hotlapping as well. LFS does not have the ability to ignore missing but expected paramiters.

Its the same reason why a Demo client can not conect to a S2 host running Blackwood with only the XRT enabled. Or why and S1 client can't connect to an S2 host running Fernbay. The engine does not allow cross connection unless you have the rights to all of the content of the host. So just the same a client what does not have a version with a feature can not connect to a host that does have the feature. It would be come a validation nightmere and allow for cheating.

Until there are built in systems to control who or what can enter a race on a much more granular level such as displacement, weight/power ratios, etc which let us define our own race classes LFS will never be able to support altering vehicle performance or allowing clients with veriyng features to connect to hosts which have features not supported by its clients but it does allow an client with a newer client to connect to an older hosts with less features such as and S2 client connecting to an S1 or Demo host.

Last edited by Gimpster, Tue, 20 Mar 2007 22:31.

If you have played nKPro you woudl know what I mean by road grain. And yet I can feel the subtle veriations in the road surface through the steering wheel in my real car. Just as easily as every little vibration from the car and road through every part of my body that is in contect with the car.

Right now in LFS it feels like I am driving on buttery smooth concrete like a garage floor. There is not character to the road, it like driving on glass.

iRacing has alot of potential. nKPro has some potential but I think its gona take a long time to reatch it, if it ever does.

Drivers Republic is the one that has me the most excited, but I do not see it getting close for a few years yet. Personaly I like that the designer was first an engineer and second a sim designer. Its also going to be less of a racing sim and more of an engineering tool to design and test cars and tracks. I do not think it will ever reatch the level of accessability and fun that LFS has though.

Ok since some of you do not seem to understand geometry let me paint a picture for you in terms you may understand.

When you add negitive camber to you wheels to aid in cornering grip what part of your wheel is closest to the wall when you are near one. The lower part. So if you hit the wall sideways the lower part of the wheel take the hit transfering the energy in to the lower suspension arm and damaging it. This is represented as the arm becoming shorter when reduces the negetive camber on the wheel.

Now if you have the wheel turned in to out when this contact occures then you also risk damage to the steering arm and thus can affect the two angle of that wheel. Most of the cars in LFS with zero camber have a small margine of crush space before the wheel and suspension is affected. This goes away very quickly as you add negitive camber or steering input.

Welcome to a usefull application to the physics and geometry you are learning in school.

When something comes along that exceeds the level of imersion, reality and ease of accessability I will continue to call LFS my home for racing simulation. There are a few titles that seem poised to take its place but that are no where near along their development cycle as LFS. I do not see somthing taking LFS's place for quite some time.

I have been here nearly since the begining and will be here to see the end.

There is no grainiess feeling to the road surfaces in LFS. Go drive nKPro so see what I mean or a real car. I do not feel any feedback through the wheel in LFS that maks me feel the car is connected to the road other then curbs. The road grain vibration is missing completely.

Quote from Bob Smith :

About the ride height, it's essentially just mis-labeled in LFS, it's the spring length you're actually adjusting, but due to the way LFS works internally, you don't set the spring length directly, rather some weird figure. The trouble is changing it to raw spring length (which would be logical) means braking compatability with all existing setup files, unless extra measures are taken.

I think Ride Height should be changed to spring pre-load. I think that is what we are really adjusting.

Quote from dpcars :

my goal is to still keep it relevant to rl. based on what i've seen so far the sim has very accurate car behavior so what i'm trying to do is figure out which clues i should use so that it helps my rl driving rather than just learning to drive the sim. at this point i think that's very doable. i believe the sim could be a useful training tool for drivers in the off-season or just between track days, especially as far as predicting what the car will do goes. we'll see.

tried rallycross a bit, it's quite entertaining

LFS has taught me quite a lot about vehicle dynamics over the years. It made the transision to a light RWD miata from a pickup a non issue. I was throttle steering the little thing on the first autox practice I attended like I had been doing it all my life.

The FXR and the old FXO are styled after a race verson of the Opel (Vaxhall) Astra.

The basic idea is to take the street cars and have each one avalable in 4 versions.

A Basic Trim
A Sport Trim
A Race Prepped Trim
A Factory Built Race Car

As it is now there are 5 Street classes:
UF1 - XFG/XRG - XRT/FXO/RB4 - LX4 - LX6/RAC/FZ5
And two Race classes:
XFR/UFR - XRR/FXR/FZR

My model also has 5 street classes and two race classes. The only differences is we would get more cars in each class as we would have more variants of each car. It also then paves the way to limit setup complexity based on the class of the car. Imagine having a no downforce version of the XR, FZ and RAC in the same class and equal to the XFR and UFR.

Ok I surrender, I have derailed this topic far too much when I did not really care one way or the other about the OPs idea.

I am really bored at work today. Sorry.

Hotlapping does help you:
Hone Car Control Skills
Improve Track Knowlage
Build Consistancy
Learn the Fast Lines

Personaly I have improved more while racing with good racers (who may also be good hotlappers) then on my own hotlaping.

Last edited by Gimpster, Sat, 10 Mar 2007 01:13.

Biohazard,

I am fully aware of the driving skill to hotlap, its a different type of skill though and mostly applies to preparing ones self for qualifying laps. There are alot of people who hotlap an are great at it while at the same time struggle in traffic. I use T1 as an example because in this corner on the first lap everyone is racing as hard as they can to get position. This means everyone and especialy the hotlap experts are trying to put their car in the same space. They often are so conditioned to their practiced line and braking points then they are unable to adjust for traffic and thus a T1 incidient ensues.

I personaly do not hotlap because I do not care where on the grid I start from so being able to pull out a perfect lap is not important to me. But in racers where there are a lot of people in fast cars there are always a few that fail to leave room, or smack the car in front because they are so focused on their perfect line. I have lost track of the number of times I have been hit in the first turn because someone tried to find that perfect line and found it unavalable and did not know how to react.

That is the biggest deficency in LFS drives. Everyone tries to drive at 110%, few know how to drive well off the ideal line. The Hotlap feature feeds that deficency. Its not a global stereotype but its becoming a common trend.

I do really care for the way the cars and car classes are currently represented in LFS or in the number and granularity of the setup options each car has available to it. I would love to see this part of LFS change and present a different feel for this racing simulator.

Cars & Classes

S2 introduced a new concept in LFS which allow the different cars of the same type to share a common base model with different additional parts and performance specs based on the specific model of any given type. For example the XRG, XRT & XRR are all just XRs with different body panels, wheels, wings and other bits. It’s the same for the LX4 & LX6, the UF1 & UFR, the XFG & XFR, the FXO & FXR as well as the FZ5 and FZR. Now only one street one car comes in three variations and two only have a single variation while the majority of them have just two. I would love to see each of these cars come in three or four variations. It would be nice to have each of the street cars available in a Base trim, Performance trim, Race Prepped trim and Competition trim.

This would change the car groupings a little but not too much and I see it looking something like this:

Showroom Stock:
Group A: UF-B
Group B: XF-B, XR-B, FX-B, RB-B (Non-Turbo versions of the FXO and RB4)
Group C: RA-B, FZ-B, LX-B (LX4)

Improved Touring:
Group A: UF-P, XF-P, XR-P, FX-P, RB-P (Turbo versions of All)
Group B: RA-P, FZ-P, LX-P (LX6)

Grand Touring:
Group A: UF-R, XF-R, XR-R, FX-R, RB-R, RA-R, FZ-R, LX-R

Super Touring:
Group A: UF-C, XF-C, XR-C, FX-C, RB-C, RA-C, FZ-C, LX-C

This allows for more choice in a given class and for more levels of competition.

Class Based Setup Options:

Now in addition to the restructuring of the cars and their classes I would like to see the setup options on the cars also be restructured to reflect more realistic levels. The basic idea is to allow more adjustability as the classes advance. This them makes the slower cars less complex to setup and more accessible to newer players when also allowing more flexibility to more experienced players.

Quote from DeadWolfBones :

Definitely needs to be added soon, though. Would be great for spec racing series.

Even spec racing classes still let you adjust things like tire pressure, camber and suspension settings. Spec racing just ensures that all teams have the same basic car and ability to adjust. Even Showroom Stock classes allow setup changes within what is avalable in stock trim.

Enforcing a single setup is more like the Driver Challange type series of events where all the cars are setup identicle and by the same orginization.

What I would like to see is the setup options bebecome less granular in nature and more realistic steps be offered based on car class. Then we could enforce server side things like which options are changable and their range.

For example the street cars should have a fixed gear set, with only the final drive able to be altered and there should only be a few options for that. The faster street cars might have the option to run a short, normal and long gearset in the gearbox.

But in the end I have an idea I like even more and will repost it again in its own thread.

Warming trend leads to cooling trend, ergo Global Warming leads to Ice Age. We know the change can happen fast, mumified Mamoth's still standing with food in their mouth is a testoment to how fast things can change. The Dark ages were a mini Ice Age, and we know so little about how the earths climate changes that trying to predict what and when change will happen is not likely to end in a correct assumption.

There are lots of pointers that the earth is changing. Weather patterns have become stronger, storms are getting worse every year, the oceans have warmed to a point they they are now blue and not green with planckton like they once were and in recient years there has been a masive coral die off. Earth quakes are on the rise, another potentialy earth intersecting asteroid has been discovered and the "End of Days" is approaching.

Do what ever you feel is right for you and enjoy your time here for no-one knows when your time will be up.

Oh and the single largest source of polution on the panet is COWS, be we are the one breading and increasing their numbers far beyond what they would be if they wer not a food source for us. Either way I like steak and hamburger.

Ok but what is the point of hotlapping? It serves no real purpose other then to practice for qualifying. I see no reason why we need hotlap charts at all. Having the charts encourges people to hotlap, hotlaping premotes driving the ideal line and comiting it to memory. I find that people that liek to hotlap are poor racers when forced to drive a non-ideal line in a race. They are the one that cause T1 pile-ups and racing incidents.

I do not thing any real world hotlapping is even recorded, only official laps qualify for WR and Fast Lap recognition, why shoudl it be different here?

I do not even understand the whole concept of hotlapping. WR should only be valid from online race and qual laps. Offline driving and online practice should be just that, practice. They should have no impact on the online comunity of LFS.

Quote from the_angry_angel :

Common misconception. You're correct oil is not needed for locomotion, but mineral oil is the most effective lubricant discovered, something which isn't easily replicated in man made lubricants - which are still largely oil derivatives. I'm more concerned about this tbh. Less lube means more parts will need to be replaced. Bumclouds.

Lets not forget that fresh water is actually pretty scarce as well.

Well if we stop burning oil then we will have more for lubricants. There are also things like zero friction bearings where there is not contact and therefore no wear, which do not need lubication. Fresh water is easy to come by, the ocean is full of it, the polar caps are full of it the earth is full of it but most of it needs to be treated in some way before we can use it. Even urine is paletable with filtering. You think they stock large supplies of water on the space station and shuttle? They recycle what little thsy have and yes they includes urine.