I started autocrossing my new car with a local club recently and I've been testing a GPS-based data acquisition unit to get friction-circles & lat & long G plots & stuff. So, I thought it might be cool to try to walk one of the courses with the GPS unit and hack up some code that would take the lat/long feed & build a layout automatically in LFS.

First attempts are written up in this Cayman club forum post. I was actually pretty impressed at how close the LFS version was to the feeling of driving the real course, though I'd like to have been able to add my own car as none of the built-ins are particularly close.

The post contains screen shots & video of both real & simulated driving (though I'd sure have liked the simulated camera angles in the real video!). It also has the .lyt file for the layout I generated. It's not particularly exciting or complex, but it's cool that it came from a real course.

I'll keep hacking on the track-builder program and may post it at some point.

Cheers,
John.

Last edited by johnw3d, Thu, 1 Jun 2006 03:57.

Thanks for all the responses chaps. I'm new to LFS and the support on this forum seems amazing.

I have to agree with the opinion that FZ50 is a thinly-disguised 911, the flat-6 3.6 with 360HP, the 38F/62R weight distribution. The 911 was an oversteering nightmare with that engine hanging way out the back, but recently is much more controlled. Anyway, I'll try the setups posted and will analyse a run or two to make sure I'm not being fooled by lack of butt-feedback.

I've just got a Cayman S, hoping that one or other of the existing cars could be made to simulate a sharp, mid-engined coupe, but the FZ50 is to heavy and tail-weighted and the RAC certainly doesn't feel right.

Anyway, thanks again to all, very much enjoying my learning experience here.
John.

Hi, I'm experimenting with different cars on several autocross layouts and it seems to me that some of them are just unrealistically-temperamental. The FZ50, for example, clearly modelled on a 911, will throw the back out at 20 mph on a mild turn with very little throttle!! I've driven a 911 on an autocross course and it doesn't go into oversteer anything like the FZ50. What gives, are the default setups that bad, or am I just hopeless?

Haha, thanks!!

As a matter of interest, I found LFS when Googling around for some way to practice autocross. I recently bought a Porsche Cayman S and I've been autocrossing it at the local Porsche club meets. I have a GPS-based data-acquisition system and I plan to write some software that will build an LYT file replica of the meet layouts from the GPS track maps. I'll post any luck I have in the AX layouts section.

This is the first sim I've spent much time with for a long while - I spent many, many nights some years ago on Sports Car GT and have never found a racing sim that felt so right until LFS.

Quote from tristancliffe :

It's on the news page on liveforspeed.net. All you do is scroll down. How hard is it?

Thanks Tristan, I guess it's not hard when you know where to look. I tried the download pages and the download archives - too busy driving to scour the entire site.

Hello all. Just discovered and licensed LFS this weekend and I am very impressed and having a great time. One thing that's bugging me is all the replay files available here and on the other boards are coming up as "obsolete" on the version available for download on the LFS site (S2U). How can I watch them? I can't find archives of any of the older patches anywhere.

It seems bogus to me to render all this potentially very helpful archive material obsolete. As a programmer myself, I know that backwards compatibility is just about rule number one in any serious application. What gives?

Thanks,
John.