Quote from Jakg :

Vista - The os that makes me run Ubuntu

everyday i hear more and more people that do this

Quote from Electrik Kar :

Imagine if cars started looking like this ingame... (see attachment)

(sorry, I posted a while back saying how I thought graphics weren't important; I actually get so caught up in the graphics side of things that it's healthy for me to play devils advocate once in a while to balance myself out. Anyways..

+1 for graphical enhancements in LFS! :headbang:

PS,



So true. I was playing Oblivion the other night and the visuals were stunning. They really are that good. And it's Dx9. Not even shader model 3.0 (which everyone assumed it would be)..

http://www.lfsforum.net/attach ... id=15270&d=1156264938

vista and directx10 have nothing to do (amost) with graphic improvement they are only a way to force you into drm...

stunning graphics is possible with dx9, but i say OpenGL is and always will be as good as directx...at least! it's not that dx10 are the only choice...

actually we have little choice for other reasons: microsoft with his bully partners forces companies to buy ms os by making deals with hardware resellers so that if a company buy a workstation with preinstalled ms os it will cost less that the same workstation without any os preinstallation, this is of course absurd...this is the vicious circle on which ms lives...

Quote from Electrik Kar :

It's not just texturing which makes or breaks good looks. There are other details; grass for instance, not simply flat textured ground, but actual grass. I'm thinking of TM Nations, there are probably other rally type games out there which do similar or better things with grass. If done well- the tracks would look more lively (alive). Less like play models. There is some grass in LFS at the moment but it's at the periphery of the tracks.

having that type of grass, means a lot of alpha blending and a big impact on performance, i'd rather would like a smarter texture mapping and simulate 3d depth on textures...think about the 3d border of tarmac like i used on my textures as an example of what i mean.
imo texturing is always underestimated on games, a smart and good texturing can do a lot with very very little performance impact, while usually any special effect has a big impact on performance. if the goal of lfs is to be good even on old pc, then texturing should have more attention...

so...let's make a summary of the possibilities for hotlapping mode and hotlapping only (i think we can ignore qulify for now), so to vote them:

(1) start with prewarmed fixed tyre temperature (as it is now)

(2) start with prewarmed user defined tyre temperature

(3) start with cold tyres

(4) start from pits

(5) start from last sector from zero kmh

(6) start from last sector with flying start (i.e. AI drive car before last sector for 5 seconds, then control is passed to user)

my vote goes for (2)+(6) and (4) as an option for hardcore gamers.
(2) is realistic because in real life exist tyre covers that prewarm tyres at desired temperature, (6) is realistic, because it assumes you started from pits, but saves you the time of actually doing it AND it gives no unfair advantage!

Quote from Aquilifer :

I've seen this only once and it was with 99% certainty a 'regular' server. Was some months ago, so cannot remember which one. I thought it was lag, so didn't pay so much attension (but it didn't print lag texts so it wasn't).

thanks for confirmation

Quote :

Hmm.. maybe. I've tested my insim app on dedicated and non-dedicated host long and haven't seen there. Nobody complained me about this, but cannot be sure if nobody else wouldn't have experienced this. It's been running on dedicated now for few months and admin hasn't told me any problems. But, of course this doesn't prove anything.

it is a very subtle bug, i started to be aware of this only because in the old days someone tried to spectate me, couldn't see me and told me exactly how it was, he didn't make it simple by saying just:"you are lagging" in fact it is not lagging

Quote :

To be specific, if the InSim app sends much messages it is bad, not that if server sends them to app? Or is both bad?

i think it is bad when on server is enabled insim, on client is irrilevant (actually i don't use insim apps)

Quote :

About the last point("...never go to spectate, the problem seem to never arise"): Interesting, but how to prove that, unless you know what causes it and you can track the logic out of the code? Otherwise you can only prove it wrong (by finding a situation where it does not hold). Could be true but hard to prove.

the reason underneth this could be of any kind, some examples that come to my mind right now:
1-i connect and join->lfs adds an element to the vector/array of clients connected and in race, let's assume lfs handle this array in its way and not with stl containers or whatever, IF removing elements from this array is not "thread safe", it may happen that two thread may modified it asynchronously and thus having unpredictable results i.e. adding an element (rejoin race) could fail.

another possibility is if lfs uses timer threads to handle/poll/check some things related to joined racers or semaphores/mutexes are used some events may be lost timers will timeout or thread synchronization is lost by an unupdated semaphore by a timer timeout.

let's not mention compiler bug...here possibilitoes are endless, scawen uses VC which is pretty not standard and is not rare to build perfectly correct code to crash...i have somewhere a sample app (less than 20 lines) that crashes if compiled with VC 2005 because for no reason allocated pointers are freed , not to mention that it is perfect if compiled with mingw-gcc and borland compiler 5.5

Quote :

Sounds a good candidate for the cause. But doesn't server ACK these packets (im not sure)? Of course that's not 100% sure way (if all resends get lost too, but the client should disconnect then IMHO). Maybe it could be tested by building a 'box'(relay) which looses some of the packets to LFS (like those where player joins a race).

i don't really think this could be the cause because join/spectate are handled by tcp connections and car position by udp packets...lfs has (i guess) some timerthread to check the lag of each client and if it is too high it disconnect you, thus according to this and to lfs-network-debug udp position packets are received by lfs and "recognised" it is just that the server ignore them, maybe because of one of the guesse i made above

Quote :

If they wouldn't how could you even join the server? Or do you mean that you were able to reproduce it and netstat showed that correct packets arrive even when the car goes into 'invisible mode'? Yes, that would prove it's a server side issue (like a queue overfow).

as i said before lfs-network-debug is enough for this, because it proves upd position packets arrive and is of course a section of code called just very soon as the serversocket callback function is called, the handling of the packets is logically after the network debug code, so the problem have to be in the middle

Quote :

When you enter a server you are in a spectate mode and then you just click "join race" to join it. So isn't this what everybody needs to do? I guess you mean that after joining i go back to spectate and then joining again and maybe repeating this multiple times, right? But basicly this could happen even if you don't jump constantlty between spectate and race states (the first 'join' packet gets lost).

it never happened to me that the first join didn't work, except on the autox compo test, again a leak in the handling of the array of joined people is a good candidate to be the cause

Quote :

I'm as eager as anybody else to find the cause. Especially if InSim app coders need to do something to less burden the servers.

i don't have anything against insim apps, i find some server apps quite useful, i just guess that having insim enable on the server may "stress" more some parts of the code and make some sort of avalanche effect

Quote from biggie :

I'd much rather see effort spent in the right way... which is more actual HOT laps!
I can't see how wasting time on warmup laps makes the following lap more worthy... would you hotlap more because you will be forced to do warmup laps?

i'm totally with you especially for prewarmed tyres at desired temperature...also there is an escamotage to make this solution totally realistic: it's the way used by the old toca race driver for the "hotlaps" where you needed to prove you are worth a chanche to get in the team...the solution is:

make the hotlap start with car in movement, just before the last split (where hotlaps starts now) handled by AI and leave the control to you in 5 seconds...this way is realistic because it assumes that the car was not teleported, but it was drove from the pits...it's just that such useless time is "warped" and you don't have to do this time waste...what do you think?

to everyone: please report if the server has any insim application, i think it will be important to know if it is:
- a discriminant,
- a contributing factor,
- or it is irrilevant

...to what i experienced til now the second point seem to be true.


spectate/join actions trigger this, disconnect/reconnect fixes it.

Quote from BurnOut69 :

You might as well consider its [texturing time]x2

this is wrong, texturing will be only once and then downsampled for lower resolution, so no time waste

Quote from Thorvertonian :

I will try to get a screen grab for you when I can!

would be nice,thanks.

Quote from george_tsiros :

um... the thread has gone haywire, but since i am the thread starter and i do not mind changing the subject, i might as well continue. It is inevitable that a discussion will go off tangent at some point.

the fiat panda, because of its simplicity is a very very reliable car and in the cases where it will need service it is so simple that it is cheap and simple.

you do not buy this car to go fast or feel the road. you buy this car because it is undying. Something like old ladas (which were fiat copies or something).

aquaplanning at 50kph is because of the tyre and nothing else.

pandas own. they just won't go fast, but that is not their purpose. (i wonder... if someone started tweaking it... with better suspension and chassis reinforcements...?)

to the guy who insists that fiats are death machines... dude... no...

i already said that the old panda has its reason to exist and is low maintenance (a very bad project for "fiat company", you know car companies live with maintenance parts...).
acquaplaning at 50kmh with new tyres for fiat punto is because of crappy suspensions just as on not plain asphalt on new punto, suspensions get in resonance rolling left and right...this is a new "feature"...old punto didnt have it...

Quote from tristancliffe :

Fiats ARE death machines in Italy. Have you seen the way people drive? It's not the cars fault, its the fault of the fact that about 25 people in Italy know how to drive, the rest just pretend. And go as fast as possible EVERYWHERE.

fiat cant go any fast...you acn barely touch 120kmh and at that speed everything seem to fall in pieces...i had to drive a new punto last month and it was SCARY!
i wish you were right about italians, unfortunately the 99% is an idiot who stop at green light and he put himself at the exact middle of the cross when is red, the same idiots who go 30kmh at the passing lane at exact synch with people on regular lane, making traffic 10 times worse...

Quote from herki :

FIATs are driven so fast, because most of the people who own one, think becuase fiat owns ferrari, fiat have to be ferraris too. and they have be driven like a ferrari

like i said, fiat cannot go any fast...

to all people that experienced this bug (epsecially almost everyone that tryied the Autox compo test server experienced this at least once...), please report it because scawen need a statistical proof that this is an lfs bug.

i'm glad that more people is getting aware of this bug, it is very subtle and hard to realise it is happening, this is imo the reason why this is still there.
btw i noticed that insim enabled on server is making it much more reproduceable, i don't know about if insim enabled on the client can cause it too but i guess not.

@shotglass
at the end of september i will have a Z4 for a couple of days, but i'm sure blind spots will not be a problem...with roof open!!!

jokes aside, don't take bmw for comparison it wouldn't be fair, but take a simple volkswagen, even a polo and compare it to a punto or a stilo, those car are supposed to be of the same class and price (polo is much cheaper than stilo and new punto btw...), the point is polo is cheaper and far of another galaxy! just personal experience with polo with intense heavy rain aquaplaning start at 140kmh, with punto at 50kmh even with low rain, on dry conditions either, punto just goes straight on corners, while polo have precise and safe handling at any speed and any kind of corner i could a lot of personal stories about that...and i'm only talking about serious danger, let's not mention all the other things...


@herki
dont' forget the old toyota samurai...i'd call it a "war machine"!

about abs i have two experience from my friends and having abs preventing you from braking isn't a good thing...one of the two guys destroyed the nose of his almost brand new fiat coupé... do you wanna know the worst thing about that? ...i was the passenger!


the two of you should know how are italian car spots: they don't talk about advantages or tech features (hard to find)...there was a spot that judged our italians guilty of gifting money to gernam car manufactures, the spot said almost the following:"don't be stupid to give money to those germans, you are the sole responsible for our italian economy to go down and you force us to fire many fathers with many child to maintain, moreover german cars are crap, buy our beautiful fiat!!!" those things make me feel ashamed...a car manufacturer that base his marketing on that amon all other things have clearly no argument in favour of his cars...

Quote from Shotglass :

so what exactly makes them all that dangerous ? crash test ratings ?

poor grip. it gives you false sense of grip then you loose all of sudden, when is wet they are too dangerous, aquaplaning start at 50kmh.
above 70kmh on any not perfecly plain tarmac (in other words everywhere...), suspensions get into resonance making you roll left/right. below 50kmh steer is too light and as speed increase it becomes too strong all of sudden. 1st, 3rd and 5th gears are always out of synch, it's not rare that you cannot put the 1st to start and you have to start in 2nd (it happened me once in a uphill... ). at the minimum crash they bend innerwise too much and too easily putting always life at serious risk...
brakes are too crisp as clutch is (the later is not dangerous, but it's ridiculous).
on high end models, abs will fail when you will need it the most...
they have blind spots where you need the most, you join a road from a ramp always blindly, as when getting into a cross, parking is much harder too...

basically the worst thing is how they loose grip, you cannot feel or predict where the limit is and the limit is very low and after you loose it, hardly you will control the car, on wet everything is at n-th power

Last edited by Honey, Sun, 27 Aug 2006 23:39.

Quote from Shotglass :

magnificent ? i wouldnt go _that_ far but fiats are better than their reputation

absolutely NOT! i agree that old panda was low maintenance, long duration car [blasfemy start]like the good old 500[blasphemy off] but that was for its extreme simplicity (engineringly speaking, it was ridiculous by technical point of view), said that, all car after panda are: (1) instrument of death, (2) extremely high maintenance, (3) extremely uncomfortable, (4) ridiculous performance, and many other bad things...

i am italian, i am proud to be italian and i love my country for many reasons, but fiat is one thing that as an italian i am ashamed of...

i drove some fiat and i know by my friends' experience, i know quite well fiat and i will never buy one.

i hate fiat...and basically for one reason: they are instrument of death and should be banned from streets, fiat are the most dangerous cars and besides from any other flaw, this is one i cannot accept!

just na idea...if scawen could add events like "race start" and race end (i don't remember if they already are in latest pacth) then people could just bind two scripts to those events to disable ffb after race and enable at start, so people will automatically protected by after race rammers ...i know it would be better to don't have rammers, but this could be a prevention anyway

Quote from antman2006 :

Looks nice (Pic attachd)

i'm glad you appreciate them makes feel good to see the time i used to work on them, was useful for so many people...

Quote from Tweaker :

Looking at all the other texture mods for the tarmac, I was surprised that I hadn't really payed any attention to this thread, because I really think the tarmac texture you made Honey is fantastic!!!!

It can be a bit smooth looking at times, but I think it has that proper amount of saturation and texture to it. Maybe could use a "bit" more of cracking and/or dark spots here and there.... (like give the bumps and cracks a bit more definition) but so far I like how this looks :up:

yes especially blackwood is quite simple (i didn't use the cracks effect), but after the "success" of aston i thought i had an obligation to release quickly the most loved track (blackwood) at least, aston has some cracks on textures where there actually bumbs on track even if they are not placed in the middle of track as they probably should, but with a compromise to avoid some aliasing.
btw many people gave me precious feedback (as you too) to improve textures for next releases, so i hope to improve them with time...

Quote from Thorvertonian :

I have upgraded my PC (Now running 64 X2 4200 and Geforce 7600GT) and no problems at all with these textures, everything looks so damn good!!!!!! Very impressed with you work, and SimFIA love the Aston textures (Although I have used another texture pack before yours whch changes the curbing from green to grey).......

But great work, have you started work on any other tracks, or even pan to?

yes, "surprisingly" such high resolutions don't affect pfs even on very low-end graphic cards...only enough PC ram is required (512 MB is enough )

i haven't started yet to work on another track, i think i'll do after september, but i won't release anything more unless i will succesfully be able to add more effects to bring more realism...my preference is to work on fern bay next, but don't take it as a promise: fern bay deserves the best textures i can

Quote from BigDave2967 :

Shes a tough bird to overtake.

who, EVO? yes she is really fast...too fast for me..., btw tag was talking about other girl not yet addicted to lfs...

Quote from TagForce :

Who? EVO? Now that I know she's a human of the female persuasion the chance of that is about 500% higher. I have mental issues when overtaking women, and mostly end up with metal issues from the armco shortly thereafter.

Honey... Yes, but if all goes well I can't flirt and have fun with all the LFS women, because you'll all tell on me to her.

oh, don't worry...i have only good things to say about you...for now!!!!

Quote from finlay :

As said I will move on its best that way.....

if you made your decision, then let me suggest you fern bay black with fox... the only problem is that it is a too rare combo...

Quote from TagForce :

I want a female member in my frikkin team (I don't wanna be sexist, so we need one )

lol what an excuse!!!

if she is a motorsport passionate, just let her try lfs...she will go crazy for it...at least so i did...

Quote from BigDave2967 :

Evo is a SHE mate, just to clarify.

lol everyday i discover that we (girls) are more than i thought...

back on topic:
it's not a new rule, i remember a month ago some admin warned about after race crashes because of ffb safety, if i was you i would take it easy: you were kicked and not banned and btw after the firs kick, imo you should have stopped, it's their home with their rules and not so strange rules imo, besides it seems true (and i believe it) that ffb may get broken by too violent crash...

honestly i don't understand why you are so upset, if that rule is a discrimination for you to race again on that server, i think you are to extreme.

i hope you go back trhough this decision, i remember having good races with you, just think about it

i meant athlon 64 2500...but my memory was incorrect: i checked the bills and it was an athlon 64 3000.
btw as i said i was not making scientific comparisons, but i just want to remark that the difference from aa a64 3000 and an a64 4400 x2 is very noticeable for almost anything, even not-x2-optimized at the time i bought the two systems the 4400 had the higest-end available core architecture, while the 3000 the lowest.
my feeling is that any recent cpu is more than enough for lfs, whilst even a geforce 6600 is still limiting, but as i said i may be plain wrong.

what is clear for me is that devs can optimize lfs still a lot both graphics and phisics and this even only by a common sense consideration: scawen cannot be a geek of everything (math computing, net developer, graphic developer, etc.) especially for math computing there are plenty of numerical algorithms and theorems that can be used to speed up calculations by thousands or million times, i personally experimented that at university time when i was developing some projects...i still remember how was surprised when (in matlab) i reimplemented the computing of LPC coefficients with the levinson-durbin algorithm instead of the "classic" formula.
well my point is: lfs is made by a small team and this mean a much faster and optimized developing time (or at least usually this is the rule), but paid with specialization...honestly i feel that asking scawen to optimize more the phisic engine, rather than graphics is asking something too far from his core knowledge and thus will require a lot of study (time) by him and with the cpu going faster and being quite cheap maybe is less urgent than graphics, which for S3 must be almost rewritten to be ported to dx9 and add effects to simulate wheather...if graphics will not well optimized, then lfs will be a performance killer! btw phisics for S3 don't need to be updated with more effects to compute, so...

i had opposite experiences, specifically:
- with two exact systems (same nvidia 6600) but different cpus (one athlon 64 2500, the other a64 4400 x2) i had almost same performance

- with another system with pentium 4 @ 2.8 GHz with crappy unbranded card i had very poor fps (from 20 to maximum 30) as the same with an old athlon 1.6 with geforce 5200 (varying from 30 to 40)

in those cases i used lfs to witness a speed boost with the better cpu...but i did not, so i guessed that maybe cpu is not so relevant.

of course i may be wrong, because i did not scientifically and except the first case, many other factors could intervene, but that was my experience.

maybe the truth is in the middle and for lfs cpu and gpu are equally important...

i have tried lfs on so many pc combinations that i clearly concluded that even if lfs uses more cpu than other games, the graphic card is still the limiting factor, i believe that even if lfs graphics is very "simple" (low poly, no effects, etc.), it has a lot to be optimized.

Quote from Jakg :

How about whenever a user requests the server list (especially demo!), it automatically sends off the name of license holder and their license status, then it checks if that license has the license it says it has, before returning the server list to them, if it finds out that the user xxx has no license, yet LFS thinks its S2, then you know that something fishy is afoot, for a start LFS could lock itself, or something more aggressive

i would send this to the devs, but i thought id check if it would work with the community, and i have my concerns about it with 3rd party server lists

it already does! both things! whenever you try to have the server list, lfs connects before to master server and check the license before replying with server list, also when starting or joining a lan game lfs checks the license before.
regarding the ip, whenever a pc send any type of ip packet the receiving pc/server (the lfs master server in this case) knows already the sender ip, by the ip protocol itself, i don't know if lfs master server logs the clients ip (i guess not), but it knows them by means of the ip protocol itself.

so lfs master server may be aware of any cracked lfs trying to go online, but it cannot do any malevolus action (not even rebooting the pc) because in almost every country it is a very severe crime...you may argue that any of sony employees got busted and jailed for the rootkit crime, but big companies are above laws and lfs is not a big company so it must follow laws...

very nice idea, it will be a lot of fun to watch the replay then!
btw i think it will require much organization as already pointed out...good luck!

PS i think you will need a way to select the best teams, because there are plenty of teams out there (maybe a tournament will solve this giving the opportunity to every team to partecipate), also would be nice if there will be a way for teamless users to partecipate.