Quote from Scawen :

I guess, not so commonly used as normal textures and other D3D features.

Another side note is a bit on the subjective side (and I don't have enough linux know how to test in more detail) the overall quality of graphics appeared sharper and clearer in wine 1.1.25
I suspect they are still in the stage were each update see big strides in progress in many areas. I get this impression with open office and ubuntu overall for example. I attempted to convert over to ubunto and open office on previous earlier versions and found it too difficult for what I expected out of such a work system, were with the most recent versions I have found the process far easier and almost a pleasure

Quote from tristancliffe :

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So I have a weired brain I take that as a compliment even though many others have tried to use that as slander against me as well

What you say does make sense and I am constantly amazed at our brains capacity to do things super computers will still most likely take life times to perfect the down side of the human brain though is as strong as it is that strength often becomes a weakness...

Quote from Scawen :

Thanks. It looks like a lot of people using Wine 1.1.25 do get good shadows.

It seems to me there is an issue with some people's Wine installations, no bug in LFS regarding shadows.

I have Ubuntu 9.04 running on my second machine which I use for work puposes (my old LFS rig when I had XP on it) anyway with wine 1.0.1 the shadows don't draw properly and mirrors didn't render. Updated to wine 1.1.25 and the shadows are good along with the mirrors rendering properly dash displays correctly etc all is good!

The install of Ubuntu is pretty much the default install allowing the synoptic package manager to detect and upgrade what it deemed necessary. I only had to tell it to get the wine update manually via directing the synoptic package manager as by default it lists 1.0.1 as the latest stable version that Ubuntu supports.

Machine is Intel 3.2ghz early dual core 2gb mem and nvidia 6600gt.

Quote from tristancliffe :

I have a bit (some of it not entirely on purpose )... But I still don't get feedback from the brakes - you can't feel when they lock or when they bite from the pedal; that sense comes from the accelerations acting on your body.

Unless I've missed the joke

The joke was/is I believe in the dim dark past I have made such claims as feeling certain feedback through the brake pedeal but that most probably stems from the fact that the vast amount of driving experience I've had is in old bombs which inevetably don't have discs in what I'd call good condition so as you rightly point out my experience of feedback through the brake pedal is very likely an exception rather than a rule having said that though I would have thought sloted or drilled discs might give similar feedback to those badly abused discs of mine The reference to gravel is simply were I feel that sensation the most - I've grown up on gravel roads though so maybe it's just some wiered wiring going on in my brain that is not normal and is extrapolating the overall sensory input I have on gravel roads leading me to believe I have feeling in the brake pedal

Quote from tristancliffe :

You're not one of these people that think you can feel anything through the brake pedal are you Nuse (not counting warped discs or ABS pulsing obviously)?

You haven't driven much on gravel have you?

I really don't think you have anything to worry about XC, there is no way in hell that there is enough people in LFS land with a preference for axis clutch and/or H pattern shifter to ever see an option like forced clutch use ever being remotely abused in LFS If any admins tried to do it there servers would die a natural death in a few weeks max Bit like when there was a move to get people to drive the LX cars in the last year or so, no matter how supportive some of us forumers might be for the LX's the reality is that the vast majority of LFS drivers vote with their wheels, mice or keyboards and stay away in preference for other cars... the same would be true for forced clutch use.

I personally like the option to be able to race on a clutch, H-pattern server. Doesn't mean I'll spend all my time on them if there was more of them, it just means I'd spend some of my time on them if there were some about. As referenced to earlier OverBoardProductions had such a server up already that could force these options, I did race on there sometimes and thoroughly enjoyed racing against other clutch, H-Pattern users. Infact it was that server that spured me onto getting off my butt and making a sim racing cockpit, which has brought back enjoyment for many games, sims long forgotten and is even perking interest in new sims (for me) such as xplane, iracing, rfactor, etc again.

I'm often bemused that there is such strong views oposing some proposed options in LFS while elsewhere the mases cry that LFS is dying because of the lack of options.
Should we all just return to LFS S1H? I know a few that would mount an argument that it was more of a pure race simulator at that point in development, but for me if LFS was still like S1H I'd have moved on permently not because S1H wasn't fun but because I would have been long since bored of the sterilness of it.

My hope for LFS is that as it continues to mature it will be less and less of a sterile environment. At the moment it is still far too easy to do near perfect laps, lap after lap after lap after lap. For example this weekend in V8Supercars the qualifying sessions was able to produce much different qualifying lap times in the first half to the last half. Forcing clutch, H-Pattern allows an extra element of variability to be introduced which then adds to the immersion, tension and excitment of racing. We have other means to do this already in LFS mainly being wind which is used very rarely online, so I'd seriously doubt that forced clutch would ever be used any more than wind currently is.

FTR - I spent the first 2 years in LFS with an xbox controller, the second 2 years with a momo and the last year an a half with G25.

Quote from ndiw :

is this you wheelchair man? the car seat is just like mine

yeah m8 that's what old racers get as a wheel chair now do you want to get old too?

Quote from UncleBenny :

I like it Glen, looks nice and stable and that seat looks pretty comfy haha. Shifter seems a little low though?

Yeah I made sure it is solid as haha, comfy seat cost $20 bucks and yes the shifter is too low. I am going to remake the whole side console alot higher and add a keyboard moveable swing panel in the next week or so, then I'll be pretty happy with it

Haven't finished it yet, still plan to build a swing platform for my keyboard and also re-hash the side console, but here is my rig at the moment:

Computer build is:
CSE: - Antec 900
PSU: - Corsair Hx520W
M/B: - Asus P5Q Pro
CPU: - Intel E8500
MEM: - Corsair 4GB Kit Twin2x PC8500
HDD: - WD 640GB Black Ed
VGA: - EVGA GTX260+ 896MB
MSC: - Matrox TH2G
MON: - ViewSonic Vx2240W (x3)
WHL: - G25
OS: - Win XP Pro SP3

And yes I love it

Quote from Clm :

Maybe its false sense of speed, but then it needs some improvement. The sounds should be louder and more detailed yes.
But still, driving trough only slight bends in 150km/h, cars still want to slide off. There is no feeling of grip or speed. Maybe the best way to understand this is to turn all sounds off. And then compare some other game. In some games you can feel, how car has grip and starts losing it. I don't mean totally arcade style grip, but normal, like it should be, when you drive actual car.

Does anyone know, where I can download U,P,R and S versions of LFS ?

Where do I start

Tyre sounds did get reduced to bring them back closer to realism - although I do agree that we need some small aids to replace some of the feel missing in real life, the sound feedback is still higher currently than you would likely get if you were driving in an enclosed car with a helmet on.
I can clearly hear the difference between tyre scrub, light skid and major skid which gives me ample sound feedback (I have tyre sounds boosted to max and wind, etc very low)

Controller set up is very important to get the most out of LFS, since having LFS early 2004 I've used several controllers (xbox controller, momo wheel and G25) with all of them I was able to get increased "feel" by getting the profile settings just right. So spending time getting them right is well worth it.
With the G25 I have disassembled the pedals and spaced them apart more realistically, also have added spongy material to the brake pedal so as to give it more feel. That's a couple of simple mods that make a good improvement.
I'd like to mod the brake pedal further with a load cell to get it to operate more via pressure rather than travel, with the clutch I'd like to and stronger spring "zones" to better simulate clutch bite. The G25 itself has far superior force feed back over the momo.
I've also recently built a cockpit which has realistic posture, line of sight and most importantly ensures everything doesn't move around when your trying to drive.
All these things add significantly to my perception of driving a sim vs real life.

FOV and display set up - has a very big impact on how we drive. I've used a single screen most of the time I've had LFS and did find lower more natural FOV allowed greater precision and perception of depth allowing me to get better lines through a corner than higher FOV settings which tend to distort the view and your sense of depth somewhat, making it more difficult to be precise. The major downside of using a low FOV setting is the lack of sense of speed.
In real life visual sense of speed comes from your peripheral vision, it is your peripheral vision that is the most sensitive to movement while your central vision is not (hence why they say in drag racing you shouldn't look at the christmas tree directly, have your focus such that it is more in your peripheral vission and you will have a faster reaction time)
The way I used to compromise is that I'd have a low FOV started out using 58deg and being overly reliant on the speedo for speed indication, which is less than ideal but did work to some degree, over the years I gradually increased FOV settings up to 90deg. (80-90 deg is a good compromise for a wide screen monitor giving you some sense of speed while not distorting your sense of depth to badly) At these setting I would still need to look at the speedo a little but was able to concentrate much more on my lines.
Recently I've upgraded to a triple screen set up and now have FOV set to 135deg and the screens placed about 650mm from my eye position. With these settings I get a very good sense of speed in addition to retaining an excellent depth of perception.
This has greatly added to the "feel" I receive from LFS and with this setup I virtually feel no need to look at the speedo at all and can judge my speed quite accurately by visual and sound ques alone.
Still in real life it is easier to judge because you can also feel every vibration and force acting on a car. With a Force Dynamics motion platform I am 100% certain the feel you would get from LFS verses real life would be pretty good, it still wouldn't be the same as real life feel though.

What's my point? Well some of the limitations of any sim is the input and output devices with which we interact with the sim. The better those input and output devices are the better the experience we are going to have. What I am saying is that sometimes we blame a sim for lacking realism or not working correctly in this or that fashion, but actually what you are asking maybe is that the sim be made less realistic so that it behaves how we think it should with the limited hardware set up we might have, making assumptions here I know which can always be dangerous

Having said that I do agree that the tyre physics could be improved, but then so could my lap times it's all relative. As I've said in another thread recently I don't have the experience of feeling like the cars drive on ice in LFS, far from it! In fact I feel incredible levels of detail of grip in LFS and find you can correct slides (both understeer and oversteer) easily and imo realisticly. The BIG difference though from LFS and real life in this regard is that to get to that level of feel from an LFS car requires a greater familiarity with the car than you would need from a real life counter part, but once you are tuned into a cars handling and limits I find them very similar to real life.

As to your statement about going arround bends at 150km/hr in real life without sliding, well that is all very subjective. I've been in an e-type jaguar doing approx 135mph arround a 'gentle' bend with a Ford GTO following - the Jag was like it was on rails the GTO was loosing it and struggling to stay on the road. In addition I've know dozens of incidents were cars have come off 'gentle' bends because people were trying to go around them just that little bit too fast - often the same people have driven the same bend hundreds of times before at similar speeds and get a false sense that they have more grip than they really have (many incidents like this have ended in fatalities) To make a comparison to a bend and car behaviour between LFS and real life is far too subjective to determine anything useful. The other major problem with comparing LFS to real life is the way we approach driving in the two realms, even if it is only on a subconscious level you will be more cautious in real life, in reality the vast majority of drivers in real life don't ever approach the limit of grip (when their intentions is speed not talking drift or wheel spin ), in LFS I believe a lot get this impression of wrong tyre physics because they approach the limit of grip too quickly and not in a smooth manner, if they were to drive in a similar fashion on a track in real life they would end up facing backwards more often than forward .

LFS is far from perfect, but with the right approach and time taken to set up everything well it can give a very realistic racing environment, but there will always be limitations. And yes I'd like to see improvements such as car barrier crash physics fixed, improved tyre and racing environment physics. In my mind though the tyre physics are just down to fine tuning the differences between how road tyre behave vs slicks, how different compounds behave, how tyres heat and cool, etc. I think the broad functioning of the tyres is very good as it is, it's just added levels of detail from this point forward. Don't get me wrong though, levels of detail can have dramatic impacts on how things feel. If you were around and remember when flywheel inertia was introduced, it had a dramatic effect on car handling in corner transients for me. So each improvement in the finer details can change the whole way the sim feels.

Edit: - Just to add after re-reading your first post, you have correctly identified a current limitation in LFS tyre physics that I agree with and that Scawen has acknowledged in the past - that of low speed grip levels verses high speed especially in the area of loosing and regaining traction. LFS behaves pretty realisticly at speed but is not 100% at slower speeds - it's better than it used to be . This for me though doesn't destroy my experience of the sim and I can easily adjust to it, but it is one of the small areas which I look forward to seeing improvement in the future and that Scawen has stated he will revisit at some stage. It's a difficult balance to achieve I guess as many suggest LFS may have too much grip when it comes to wheel spin and perhaps too much when talking about sustained lateral g mid corner but at lower speeds it does seem to take too long to regain grip laterally when recovering from a slide. These things though in my mind are minor (still would take a lot of research, testing and thus time to achieve good results) and I'm certain will be improved upon over time.

Last edited by Glenn67, Tue 7 Jul 2009, 02:48.

Quote from XCNuse :

It's not so much that I've dropped off from enjoying LFS, it's that.. I can't get my damn wheel to fit to any of these new desks with a quarter inch lip! BAH!!

It sounds like it time to make yourself a racing cockpit I've nearly completed one for myself and I can say it definitely adds life!

Also there are other factors that make it even more difficult to compare to real life, in a sim there is too much consistency in the road surface and tyre integrity, there is a lack of chassis flex and suspensions types in LFS aren't fully supported or modeled (i.e. the trailing arm types don't effect dynamic camber how they should, not 100% sure on that but remember descusions about it)

So with those in mind I'd be suprised if LFS didn't actually achieve higher latteral G than real life for a comparable car and suspension. That's without even considering that hybrids and road supers are stickier compounds than you would likely find an a real life road car

I find any car in LFS to feel not realistic and be like driving on soap if I haven't driven it much and I'm pushing too hard, but paradoxically I find any car that I do a significant amount of seat time in to be very grippy and realistic in most aspects.

As most state it comes down to the difficulty in getting and correctly interpreting feed back from a sim verses feedback being very obvious in real life. In real life I don't believe you need to do as much seat time in a car to get to a level of being able to do consistent laps without spinning out often or crashing where as in LFS it takes longer as the feedback you receive as to what the car is doing is not as obvious as in real life.

After having done many many laps on a combo it feels very close to real life to me in how grip behaves, I think you just become much more aware of the grip.

Yes it has some part hence why I said "primary motivator", if your ambition though is to be the best at something the money will come of itself, where as if money is the primary motivator it will lead to decisions based purely on short term money needs which will more than likely lessen the quality and longevity of any enterprise.

If money is your primary motivator you will not likely achieve greatness, those that do extraordinary projects, enterprises or endeavours in life do it because they want to be the best at whatever they choose...

I've bought stuff from this mob before with no problems, have a lot of useful bits an pieces.

http://www.oceancontrols.com.a ... pplies/power_supplies.htm

Quote from Shotglass :

so youre saying they would never take off from a conveyor belt?

Are you so bored you are trying to bring this topic back

http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?t=41164

It could turn some away, I know a few that felt the fun of racing in S1 was lost when S2 was released. The same will happen every time more variables are added to the driving. For some this will be a turn off for others like myself it is the very thing that would keep me here another ten years!

Imagine the uproar if track conditions (temperature variations, marbles, rubbered racing line, sand on track, etc) more complex tyre modeling (graining, tread failure, blistering, rubber flex and adhesion degradation, etc) better engine modeling, etc, etc

Some complexities actually make it easier though like flywheel inertia and clutch pack pre-load.

Last edited by Glenn67, Fri 12 Jun 2009, 00:10.

Yeah watched it last night 1am local time, thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it! Great racing some of the moves those guys pull are insane The nerve they must have makes for riveting racing

I've driven manuals most of my life 20+ driving years, only have had auto's though in the last few years. The only negatives with auto's imo are that they don't drop down quickly enough and you can't engine brake with them. The newer auto's are getting much better though, I currently have a '08 commodore which has a sport setting on the auto and I must say that it is even too aggressive in down shifting! It's practically instant as soon as you press the accelerator pedal. So the only remaining negative on a modern auto is lack of engine braking There is also an advantage to having a auto over a manual and that is left foot braking not to mention all the other afore mention positives when driving in the city...

Install one of these in your car: http://www.oceancontrols.com.a ... rs/gsm_control_system.htm

Then if your car gets stolen call your car first! Let your imagination run wild

I just had time to look at the youtube footage, good stuff! Looks like you were having some good battles and making good friends on and off the track. Even old buggers in real life too eh but in real life they are faster meh I'm sure you will go on and see some good success this year! That is a great start to the year already for you, look forward to hearing and seeing more

Nice report m8, look forward to hearing and seeing more in the future

Quote from Hallen :

Yes, but the chemical structure change is 99% due to heat. I think that it the degree that the chemical structure changes is going to be related to just how much heat was applied.

Mechanical should not go off over a 20 minute session, at least not enough to notice. The only way mechanical is going to go off over that short of a session is if you have really bad quality tires, are outrageously abusing them (eg catching the inside of curbs, off roading, under pressured, etc), or you are over heating them.

I do agree that the chemical change is likely to be the most significant part, but at the same time I can't definately say that the mechanical condition of the tyre desn't have significant impact. I've read that approximately 70% of the grip of a tyre comes from mechanical keying at a microscopic level with the remaining being provided by adhesive properties. That would indicate to me that changes in the adhesive qualities will have a larger effect on lap times but changes in the ability of the tyre to grip mechanically will also have impact although perhaps not as significantly.

Quote from mrodgers :

Perhaps it wasn't world record. May have been on server racing times seeing the aliens doing 1:25/1:29.

Around 2006 I think, in fact, after the big April 06 update. I was running mostly on CRC's demo server because I was sick of seeing GTRs at Aston National. It was the only places you could race, Aston or demo. All else would be lapping by yourself no matter how long you sat on a server hoping someone will join.

Wasn't on a slickmod server was it? I recall they were around abit in that time frame and were abit of fun

As for being alien fast - I don't think it's all it's cracked up to be I have seen many strive to get that fast only to become very bored once they get there because public pickup racing becomes too easy Think about it, if you are within 0.5% of WR pace you have far less people of similar ability to race against than if you are a mid pack racer. So having times that are between 2-3% away from WR pace are more than sufficient for public pickup racing making you sufficiently competitive and also giving you the broadest amount of fellow racers that are at a similar level to you.