if it's still allowed on vista, audio kernel streaming could do the trick, or maybe asio (it was menat for real time audio), but that would mean it would only work for users with expensive audio cards...

i think the real reason why ms won't fix this could rely on "trusted computing" features, maybe a sort like winx sp2 that won't let you see any dvd if you have a graphic card with tv out...

Quote from Xaid0n :

downloaded the ones here http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?p=176489#post176489

please can you try to download the full package from sourceforge and try it?
maybe the first download was corrupted, thanks.

Quote from Xaid0n :

downloaded, tested.... WOW :eye-poppi :faint2:

i don't know how it could be possible! can you just reinstall it? i know it's a simple file copy, but i remember someone having some weird problem: he just reinstalled and it worked...

i personally tested both, but just to know what did you download, the single file on lfs forum or the whole package from sourceforge?

i did the ftp upload on sourceforge.
for those who don't want to wait for the mirroring to complete (max half an hour) or just want to download the updated file only, here is the only file to update in the attachment (unrar it into lfs-folder\data\dds)
cheers

Quote from Thorvertonian :

Just one thing too add, stop apologising!!!! lol

ok!

Quote :

You've gone to effort of making some textures like many others, but unlike many others, yours are actually worth using

that was the initial purpose and i'm glad i achieved it.
After so many Aston downloads i felt quite obligated to release at least Blackwood

Quote :

I wasn't sure wether it was my PC or the Texture problem, as you've confirmed it I'm more than confident your skillz will provail!!!!

Look foward to the update, NO RUSH!

Brilliant work, hope you carry on to do all circuits

westhill and kyoto should be quite straightforward, maybe some attention for fern bay, while for south city...well i hope you don't like south city...it can take ages before i willingly decide to work on it !!! well i will sooner or later, but prolly later...

Quote from Xaid0n :

mmmmm lovely new tarmac like Aston on fernbay lovely I love the dark tarmac more than anything, looks nice for screenshots

fern bay is definately my favourite track and this is one more reason to give it the care it deserves...
maybe fern bay should be a bit brighter than aston or blackwood or maybe some dust/sand near borders as Boris Lozac and you suggested. My main goals are firstly to make tarmacs more realistic as possible and then give each track its own personality.
cheers

Quote from Thorvertonian :

It only happens on Blackwood! Aston workf fine, not quite sure what is going on, AA 16 and AF 8.......

i confirm it: it is my bug! it seems that when exporting from psd to raw i had mistakenly one of the subtlelayers, so the overlap created sorta of a grey line...the master psd is fine thou.

i already fixed it, but i cannot upload right now (dinner sorry ), whitin one hour i will upload it and half an hour more for sourceforge mirroring to complete by 22.00 of this night it should be available.

sorry for the inconvenience

Quote from Shotglass :

isnt it all about the edges of the textures ? if they are exactly the same you should get a seamless fit

i don't think it is the case, on the low-end pc i used for tests at work it is surely the crappy graphic card, for Thorvertonian in this case maybe could be the texture

Quote from Thorvertonian :

It only happens on Blackwood! Aston workf fine, not quite sure what is going on, AA 16 and AF 8.......

in this case maybe it is something to do with my texture, while on some sections blackwood also has more than one texture and thus this problem also arises, but since aston (wich is worse) is ok for you then it must be my textures, i'll look into it and i will fix it. Sorry if i didn't understand clearly before.
thanks for reporting it.

Quote from Thorvertonian :

Yes I do, and I hasn't struggled with any game yet at same settings (GT Legens DX9) Battlefeld 2 etc.....

Radeon X850 256mb --- Could be my gfx card, but only happens on these textures, all other texture packs I've tried have been fine....

do you mean that it happens only with my testures, or with any texture pack for aston?
as i said this problem is for aston only, with blackwood it is one bigger texture and this problem cannot appear

EDIT: with my home pc it is fine (asus nvidia 6600)

Quote from djdolber :

Thanx a lot and keep it up !
The look of the road is very important for any driving game. This does miracles really for the game, i like it much better. I like the feeling on going around on fresh tarmac instead of grey old tarmac. Looks good and feels fresh, a definate keeper.

thanks, i will!

Quote from Thorvertonian :

I get the stitching problem in the middle of the track (Used to happen to alot of people on Aston) with your blackwood textures, it's not too big a deal and may well be my GFX card not quite rendering things quick enough!

It's a small white line up the middle of the road, but not a constant line, just at various point (line for 5 metres, stop for 20, another line)

i think i understand what you mean, i experienced it on an old pc with very low-end graphic card (maybe intel, i dont know) and it occurs where textures joins, it happens with original textures too and it can be only masqueraded making textures much brigher and maybe with some trick...when i saw that on that pc, i worked a bit to smooth it but then i dropped caring about when i realised it was basically a graphic card issue.
btw, since this issue is really annoying, i will try to start again to work on some tricks to make it much less evident, but i make no promises about results

Quote from Rtsbasic :

Do you have anti aliasing enabled, if your card is powerful enough to use it?

good idea, maybe just a bit of AA could do the trick

Quote from Xaid0n :

may i suggest only putting the dirt bit near the edges of the grass would look silly in the middle of the track

yep! i was thinking that too also because it would be easier to avoid aliasing (repetition effect), but mainly for realism.

the funny thing is that in the last months when i go out i stare at tarmac trying to figure out new ideas , that texturing thing is driving me crazy...well crazier than before

scawen, i know you are gonna hate me ( ), but may i ask if it is possible to add an option to have a wider virtual mirror? that should compensate the lack of lateral visual when using realistic views like cockpit view

Quote from Boris Lozac :

I like this Blackwood texture very much.. I love this darker looking asphalt, it's more real then the original one, good work there
I got a suggestion for you.. what about making the asphalt look more dirtier, you know, when you look the real races, there is dirt on the asphalt and it looks like the track is being used, not like it is just fresh made. I don't know how hard is to do this, but it would look absolutely great, and it would really add to the immersion. Otherwise, really great looking asphalt Honey..

thank you! i'm happy you enjoy my work!
you are right about some dirt especially for blackwood, i think. when i was working on the base texture i made few tests with dirt, but at that time i was still fighting with eric's weirdo mappings (still fighting thou ), btw this is a perfect expamle of suggestion i am looking for the next version of textures with more realistic effects...i just noted "dirt" at top of my todo list fox next generation of asphalt textures...btw i think that probably i will work on an easier thing (tyre treads maybe) before next tarmac release just to alternate a bit...
cheers

for those who need, i have uploaded the blackwood *.psd source files

Quote from St4Lk3R :

Hi Victor,

Your script/server seems to need a restart again. PBs are not recorded any more, and you can join whenever you like, being invited or not. There also seems to be some "ghost player" on the server - a high-pinger that isnt visible for all the others.

yeah i noticed too and experimented too that problem occurredd to me occasinally also on regular servers, but in 1 year of S2 it happened less that 30 times i think, most people think it's our own isp bug, but i can boldly say it isn't, also victor yesterday was so kind to assist me whil i was doing some internet checks pings was always low with maximum of 160 ms and 0% loss all the time, ping is essentially icmp packets wich behaves like udp so the "ping test" let presume all packets arrive to destination, moreover today i tried some traceroutes too -> all succesful.
yesterday i also enabled the lfs network debug and accordingly to lfs my maximum lag was 0.06 just like other players also the network bars were very small (that's good), fortunately this server shows this problem sistematically, so imo it is possible to find the real cause.
i noticed that between !away and !back commands or connect/disconnect it triggers from invisible/visible and viceversa...i mean if i connect and i am invisible, i will be forever at any start, but if i connect/disconnect or away/back till i'm visible, then i will be visible forever.

i think that this new autocross feature is just stressing a subtle and latent bug of lfs and make it show frequently, also the feature of this autocross make this bug show itself, while on regular servers people just think that everyone is crashing at him...
i hope that everyone that experiment this bug, will report it here so that devs have enough user feedback to assume it is an lfs bug and investigate it.

so sweet! i absolutely agree with you: let's take it easy! :grouphug:

Quote from Becky Rose :

I wont, I am merely refering to Scawen's post where he explained how LFS did this. I believe he has mentioned it before also. And as Tristan says above (and if I recall without checking in this thread Scawen too said (or maybe it was another)) Scawen has also said that LFS could be made to do branching, but that it currently does not.

scawen also said that right now he could remove paths but that means no AI and no "wrong-way" -> but who really cares if we can have open tracks right now?

Quote :

You really don't understand what I said did you ! I understand what you are saying, but it's about as closely related to what I said as modern human is to a T-Rex.

you said "prerendering" and that is a nosensebecause "rendering" is the process where a 3D scene is drawn into a 2D picture/frame

Quote :

If you are leaving the "engine" (ie: OpenGL or Ogre or whatever you use) to decide what to render as you describe then you would indeed need to learn more before attempting a realtime 3D application such as a game unless you only want users with very powerful computers. One of the first things hobbyist game coders learn after producing their first few simple games is how to optimise the render list to increase performance of their games. It's one of the first skills starting indi coders learn, without it games have much lower poly counts or very low framerates. Even I do it and I dont confess to be good*.

*I leave that for others to judge in the smug knowledge that i'm flippin' brilliant.

obviously you didnt read my post i said 2 times that view frustum culling is a standard and common tecnique to speed up things i never said the contrary, but i have also said that bsp-trees are used by game devs for view frustum culling and not rendering, once you know what objects you have in you bounding box/sphere, then the rendering is a task for your graphic card + opengl/directx, otherwise what is the purpose to have 3d accelerated graphic cards if you do software rendering? only old games like quake and unreal had software renderers because at that time 3d acceleration was still young, but nowadays what's the purpose to reimplement opengl or directx like things?
again fot the n-th time: i don't say to pass all objects to directx/opengl!!!!! but that's a different thing from rendering (the visible scene) -> this is a task for directx/opengl!

btw i dont understand why you brought up those things into discussion, i only said that the myth "lfs can only render what's ahead and what's behind, so it cannot support open tracks" is a clearly false statement for a 3D application either for a graphic developer geek who knows all the underneath precesses involved, but either for a common sense guy despite of more indeep knowledge.

iagree that my first post was too concise and without any real tech explanation, but teh post before meine said

Quote :

no, the engine renders the stuff infront and behind you, thus multiple routes confuse it

directx/opengl can render anything despite of it is in front, behind or at your side! since scawen is not a mad to reimplement directx from scratch and we also know lfs uses the directx rendering engine, that quote is obviously false! guess what? autocross has no routes, but lfs still render autocross track....so how could it be possible? omg, omg, how could it be?

PS for the (n+1)-th time: i'm not claiming that lfs is not doing view frustum culling of the scene...having a path can speed up this task, but it's not that "if we don't have a single path, lfs cannot exist"

Quote from tristancliffe :

Actually Scawens words were 'It seems possible', and the rest is basically 'but we can't at the moment'.

The two together form, as far as I can tell: It seems possible, but we can't at the moment'. In other words LFS does not support multiple routes yet, although it might be a feature in the future (though I really hope it isn't, as this is a race sim, and in racing you don't tend to have route choices as you'll end up with cars going in opposite directions).

I'm sure there is a better post from Scawen, but RSC is so slow and requires a months wait between searches to save it's precious (read like Gollum) bandwidth which is rather annoying.

yes he said that paths are a problem, yes he said he could work on multiple paths but not urgent now, you forgot that he also said that as it is it can work by removing the path from track, just like in autocross, but that means no AI and no wrong-way detection, so we are saying the same thing except the autocross thing

we see lfs trhough the monitor wich is a small box while in real life we have a much wider field of view, thus "lfs is very unrealistic (not its fault btw ), because it gives us only a small view compared to RL", so to have lfs more realistic we need to compensate this, the best thing imo is to have virtual side mirrors, so we will have something closer to RL.
btw scawen mentioned int the test patch thread that it's his intention to implement a "not compatible way" for improved "smooth/partial left/right view", but it will be in a "not compatible patch", i'm sure it will be a huge improvement, btw i think virtual side mirrors will be the best

Quote from wheel4hummer :

If Scawen/Victor/Eric say it's impossible, then ITS IMPOSSIBLE!

I T___ I S___P O S S I B L E ! ! ! (<- Scawen's words)

http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?p=168201#post168201

The mith " lfs can only render what's ahead and what's behind, so it's impossible..." is purely false!!!

Quote from Becky Rose :

Without wishing to sound rude but you've not played with Bilinear Spatial Partitioning or any other similar method have you?

yes i have but since you are not a fool you will use BSP for view frustum culling, NOT for rendering because since the invention of graphic cards, this is a task performed by the hardware via graphic drivers + directx/opengl

Quote :

LFS is using a render tree of some description, most games do, specifically it is using the route of the track and a pre-rendered list of track segments visible along the route. If you leave it to the "engine" to decide what to draw (and bearing in mind here LFS' engine was written by Scawern specifically for LFS)

[sarcasm on]i'm glad to know you know for sure how lfs is implemented...you must be the fourth misterious dev of scavier, so it must be scavierbe then!!![sarcasm off] <- don't take this too seriously
please explain me how can you prerender a 3D scene and still being a 3D game the way you depict it seem like the old arcadish 2D race games simulating a 3D visual...

Quote :

then I pressume you are using a generic 3D engine that isn't optimised for a particular game, or you are just drawing everthing within camera occlusion - and consequently paying the performance hit for what I would describe as a sub-freeware quality 3D system - because yes, freeware programmers are doing stuff way more advanced than that to cram more pollies into their games.

i used opengl + my code (like scawen is using directx + his code), i didn't developed "games" but rather "demos" for special engineering purposes.
I'm also glad to see you know very well my code and so deeply that you can judge even its quality...

Quote :

Some form of visual occlusion is needed, whilst camera bearing position and range is ok for a quick mock up, most 3D games will go beyond this and optimise the render tree specificallly with the gameplay in mind - this can hugely boost performance, and is one reason why LFS' high polygon graphics can run on such low specification machines... If LFS did not do this our cars would look considerably more square and are tracks would be less detailed.

yes detecting objects into the viewport is a standard tecnique and yes it can be optimized for specific games (i.e. lfs and paths), but the latter point does not mean that lfs cannot run a "free run" mode infact that's my own quote:

Quote from Honey :

the problem of paths is for the "wrong way" detection, AIs and maybe something else, but it cannot be graphics and also scawen said that it is possible if it make it run like an "autocross mode" were paths are ignored and that means, no wrong way and no AI...thus lfs is ready for "free run mode"

as you and some others describe "autocross" is not possible in lfs and this is not true. Paths my help to speed up the view frustum culling but but they are not a must and this was true since S1 and more true with the latest test patch and i add that even multipath is not a problem since it only overload a bit the bsp-tree (or whatever) in the neighborhood of two or more paths joining...again why saying "it's not possible" while even now it's possible? why reading scawen's words with a so close mind? i cannot understand, really!

cheers

Quote from Jakg :

no, the engine renders the stuff infront and behind you, thus multiple routes confuse it, but of course, im only going by what Scawen said, and you must know much more about LFS than him!

i hope to don't feed the fire... ( ) but, i had developed 3D demos (OpneGL, not DirectX btw) and that thing of front and rear rendering seem quite bizarre because the rendering is a task of directx/opengl not a developer task...unless the developer implementes his own software renderer...but we know lfs uses directx, so...
moreover, i think scawen's words were misleading about that, if we actually read some scawen's quotes reported in this thread also, we can see that the problem of paths is for the "wrong way" detection, AIs and maybe something else, but it cannot be graphics and also scawen said that it is possible if it make it run like an "autocross mode" were paths are ignored and that means, no wrong way and no AI...thus lfs is ready for "free run mode" and imo it would add another dimension to lfs, because it will allow new possibilities with "shift+u" building and thus more variety

Quote from axus :

I highly doubt that will be network compatible or that it will solve your problems... if so many people run LFS and say it has the best net code and don't experience this you should look into it being a problem on your side/your ISP's side.

Or are you refering to cars becoming invisible and showing "LAG 3.85s" or something like that? That's most certainly not fixable because that is, oddly enough, because of lag. Try requesting TCP/IP packets for position updates (its shift+something - you'll find it down the right hand side in options -> controls).

lfs has a very good net code or "the best" as you prefer...but this does not mean it is flawless, i do not want to go again into this discussion, because i go very upset when people do not want to hear, if you prefer "it's my problem"...btw mine or not i simply asked a feature request that will solve this problem despite of where it resides...the feautere i requested will solve the problem since disconnecting from a server and reconnecting fixes it...for a smart guy this is quite enough to understand it is an lfs bug and not an isp bug, btw whether it's lfs or any isp, such feature will make lfs more robust and that will avoid childish people like me who have a crappy isp, to blame lfs for anything.
btw the shift + ??? didn't worked.
this bug is more common that you may think, it's only that people don't figure out, i found out that some chat fights about "you wrecker!!! etc." were actually because one guy was "invisible", till now i haven't succeed to convince people to report it as bug (only one did), but i know that one day it will be admitted as lfs bug, or it will be magically fixed...

sorry if i was too rude, you didn't deserved this, but i didn't expect/want to make a discussin in this thread, only a request...it's just that whenever i posted a problem (only 2 times i think), people came out saying "oh, it's only you...no problem here! it must be your pc!", you know...people that act as they know everything (especially about you) and you know nothing...that's why i do not want to start a discussion, i already said what i wanted in the past and for me once it's enough for people who do want to hear.
apologies for my attitude

scawen is it possible for next patch to add a command (for script clientside) to reset network connection (serverside and maybe even clientside) to get rid of the "invisible car" problem? on some servers this is too frequent...
thanks.

Quote from Scawen :

The LFS sounds are awaiting a major rewrite of the engine code at some point and better sound simulation. That is not new info, I've said the same thing for years.

Sound generation is very difficult. The sound is less than realistic but it's not because I am deaf or have bad speakers. It's because it requires months of development, devoted entirely to sounds.

1) fzr sound is very cute
2) do you consider worth exposing sound engine parameters into cfg file (or sound data to files)? i mean make it possible to mod car sounds? you see, there are a lot of technical people into lfs community and more than once someone had proved to do useful analysis (i.e. tire analysis by androidxp, etc.), so ithink that would bring useful feedback before you start to rework the sound engine...hopefully that would end in saving much time for development

Quote from MataGyula :

They are nice, but the BL GP asphalt is too similiar to the asphalt @ Aston ,imho P:
But otherwise, nice work !

honestly, it is actually the same base texture for now i'm making all tracks with the same base texture (as long as this is reasonable), what i'm really asking to all you guys is something like: what "effects" are missing, or speaking about making each track different: some ideas like "this track should be more dark that the other, because...", "this track should have more cracks, because...etc." etc. because til now it seems to me that all tracks except fern bay and south city, should have the same tarmac, if someone can give me some ideas about all of this, i would appreciate very much since i think i'm not very good at thinking about those differences...

btw thank you for appreciating my work