Quote from Chupacabras84 :

When it comes to steering I connected my PS2 controller and it does pretty good job when it comes to applying throttle or braking.
You can try still cheaper than wheel.

That's also in England... Hehe

Mouse it'll be, I used to do it, I'm sure I can again...

Quote from Chupacabras84 :

As for me the game is just boring visually and there is not enough tracks.
If you look at it almost every track is green its just grass and trees and nothing more Kyoto, westhil and aston looks just like different layout of blackwood.

I know LFS is online racing simulator but I am more into offline racing my fav times with gran turismo were taking some slow car like citroen 2cv/golf GT/daiahtsu etc etc on the nurburgring and drive it for pure pleasure of dirving.
Now in lfs the track looks so boring that after driving blackwood with lx6 or raceabout and turning to aston I dont see any difference.

The same boring look just killing the fun after 20 of laps even if you switch to kyoto it still look like layout of aston in some way.
Even abandoned vilages in stalker have more live in them than tracks in LFS
And I am not talking bout graphics cuz with new textures its look pretty nice and with lynx reflection my FZ5 looksl beautiful with custom 2048^ skin but I am talking bout placing more objects or making tracks surrounding looks more interesting.
The making of new custom object its usually a couple of hours mesh and texture.
I would do it my self but it would be moding which is a forbidden, bannable etc etc .
I personally prefer to drive poorly made port of Silverstone or laguna seca than aston for 100th time.

As for now in LFS physics is the only thing worth mentioning but without anything else its just getting boring.

Hmm, being a big fan of South City, I tend to get plenty of scenery, and being so close to the barriers, lots of action too...

Reading through this thread makes me sad, for two reasons.

The first reason is that I am in Ireland, Dublin to be precise, but my gaming rig, 21" CRT and DFP Wheel are all still in England. If I want to take it up again I'm gonna have to re-learn to drive with the mouse...

The second more comes from being an "old timer" as you may put it and having given the game a bit of break (I've not really done serious online races since CTRA stopped... but I never said that ) and really want to get back into some serious racing... Pick-up or otherwise.

Quote from codehound :

snip

This is true, but I don't think you have to resort to just playing against AI... Pick Up Racing has always had this risk... Really the only way to avoid it is to only race with friends... or in a league... occasionally (I'm afraid) you must brave the stupid/inexperienced, perhaps purposely join after the grid has formed so you sit at the back and hang back until T1 (and indeed T2 and T3 in some cases) are clear and you can get the hammer down...

With more realistic damage (in the future) people should hopefully take fewer shunts to realise it's not the best way to get around the track...

Meh... my join date show's how long I've had my license....

I'm still a newbie... there are still things I need to ask occasionally...

Quote from J03130 :

Sorry Scawen but this is really bugging me i only asking since this is general discussion forum. I just watched your video of you driving the Formula BMW and when you say your name is it said Scorn? cos I've been saying it how it's spelt. Lol i'm so stoooopid.

Skay When?

Lol... one of my colleagues at EA got VERY angry when pronounced her name wrong... hehe, as does my girlfriend... Mind you they are both Irish names and Fionnuala is not 'Vanilla' and Aiobh is not 'Abbi'...

I love names, and my first born is to be called Æðelbert... How cool will that be???

I am of course joking... being the Dad I probably won't have the choice...

Quote from JasonJ :

If you read that thread though, I doubt you will feel more because LFS seems to remove (dampen out) most of the FFB effects it has available to it. Some slight changes to the tyres physics won't fix that. It might feel somewhat better, but only marginly. I don't think the full potential is realised.

Just with that mod you can tap the throttle repeatively and really feal some amazing weight shift in the front. You feel the curbs stronger and you feel most things that are just lost.

I haven't tried that mod yet... but if it improves the feel of the rather dull FFB I will give it a bash... hehe

I agree, the FXO does feel a touch too light (wind the FFB up, and find I can hardly move the wheel for the XRT).

Phew... that took some effort...

I'm not quite sure why I just spent the best part of a day trawling through these heavy posts...

However, I am glad I did, it's VERY good to see that the devs read posts so late into a thread, even when they appear to be quite negative.

I seriously doubt Scawen will be reading this anymore, however I want to say it looks seriously good and I'm excited.

I would like to hear Tristan's (and anyone else who's been on the track) opinion when it goes live as how real it feels (I've had the joy of driving around Thruxton, and as much as I would love to see it put in the game, I am more excited about the content we're getting, Thruxton is very quick, but there is only one layout).

Quote from Becky Rose :

Trying to find yourself in a place eh?

Nah, not quite.. the new Girlfriend is Irish, and offers more security, and a sexy accent too...

Being surrounded by people who constantly speak with Received Pronunciation can rather boring at times... and I have also found the perfect mix of physicist, gamer and explorer to match my own personality, hehe, and while she's not actually a racer, she does seem to adore me, which I have to say is a new experience for this spotty, speccy geek...

Lol, this has gone a little OT for sure...

Quote from JasonJ :

I doubt that very much....
FFB flavour enhancer (experiment)

Meh? You doubt I feel more or doubt it'll get better?

With both the Goodyear Tourers and the cheap as chips Arrowspeed tyres on there I could feel so much under the wheel. (I know it's criminal to put cheap tyres on a car like the CR-X which is why I had them all replaced with the Tourers)

Quote from jaykay3000 :

Plug a controller in without force feedback then that's pretty much what driving a real car can be like in certain conditions, you can still 'feel' the car but your slightly more detached. I.e going from my mini to a golf, it's all basically the same but slightly different.

Plus in a real car you get a lot of feeling of the car through your butt/spine which your less likley to get with a wheel and pedals playing lfs.

But your right though, lfs is good for showing the fundamentals.

Power steering is just added weight, and should be kept to Forklifts, HGVs and the odd luxury limosine... I personally dislike power steering on anything that weighs less than 1400kgs it's a waste of weight and power...

If I've got problems parking I go a touch faster... and that's the only reason I can see for putting Power Steering in a car...

Just one reason I love my CR-X

EDIT: For comparison, I think I get more information from my wheel in the CR-X then I do in any of the FWDs in LFS... but that should change with the tyre update I would think...

Quote from Becky Rose :

Ultimately I am sure I would have to conclude that the string has no colour, or is polychromatic, as neither red nor blue are likely to exist in all dimensional states within an observable spectrum. Possibly even bringing us to the ultmate question of quantum mechanics: What string?

How philosophical...

Quote :

Mine too, but I just accepted a new one - keep trying, you'll get there

Meh... I'm skipping the country... Heading to Dublin to settle and maybe one day get married/have kids/turn them into racing fanatics...

Once I get there I have to say, I would love to say I'll be making a serious attempt at creating a replacement... but I doubt between the Swinger parties and building my Millions that I'll have the time... <--- Wishful thinking.

Quote from Michael Denham :

I wish it were as simple as using the 'correct' amount of lock. With my DFP, the force feedback is just too slow when you're trying to correct oversteer in an LX6 with full steering lock. I think the G25 is fast enough, but with the DFP when you're trying to force the wheel faster than the FF motors want to go, it's not a lot of fun.

So very true... I now look at the motors in DFP as a case of "If it breaks, it's time to upgrade" to a G27 if I can afford it... hehe.

The motor squeal as I throw the wheel back round to counter a skid is nevertheless unnerving... but it hasn't snapped yet...

Quote from kaynd :

The point here was not to explain what settings favor drifting.
Yes generally low or no Ackerman geometry will be better when going always with opposite lock.
But I, AndRad and xaotic responded to some frivolous points cupraman tried to state using the “stfu” attitude.
A user who actualy prooved to me his quality by senting several PM's swearing at me.

mooving on

This is a simplistic approach that applies only in low speed rolling speeds.

While cornering in speed, none of the tires actually faces the direction it is going. Tires produce maximum grip at a certain slip percentage.
When cornering, this slip percentage is covered by the slip angle and the speed in which the tire is traveling.
The effective slip percentage of any tire depends in many aspects like the tire’s design, the compound it’s made, the temperature it’s operating, the air pressure that it keeps it inflated and the vertical load it pushes it to the ground.

Keeping it simple. The greater vertically loaded tire produces its maximum grip at a higher slip percentage (or angle if we are talking about a turn) comparing to a less loaded tire.
It’s a known fact that in a turn, while creating some lateral forces, the outside tires get loaded a lot more than the inside tires. That makes the outside tires produce their maximum grip at a higher slip angle than what the inside tires need to be effective. Here is where the anti-Ackerman geometry comes into play, (the more you steer the more toe in is applied) especially in situations when track conditions and the car's setup tend to stress the front outside tire way more than the inside.
Situation like these are met in fast tracks with wide corners using a car that has grater roll resistance at the front, and doesn't produce much downforce.

In slower tracks with tight corners where weight transfer transitions last longer and you are forced to enter corners while braking (that makes both front wheels more equally loaded), some percentage of Ackermann geometry (the more you steer the more toe out is applied) is beneficial in making the car to turn.

100% ackerman implementation would be efficient only in parking speed turning. This is the only case where a road car keeps both front wheels equaly loaded when turning. So no manufacturer realy uses it. Thats why you hear thiese tire sqealing noises while turning in parking spaces covered in that smooth surface.

Ackerman, anti-Ackerman at nearly any sensible percent or fully paralell steering, isn’t nesseserily going to make the car spin happy on its own. So no it’s not all about Ackermann, it’s a combination of several factors around suspension geometry and stiffness that play a far grater role than this.

Too true... hehe, I was just pointing out the fact that it does play a part, and will decrease the stability of car when you do remove the ackerman completely (which was where Cupraman was originally coming from, even if he did overstress it). The slip-angles of the tyres should always be considered when laying down Ackerman, I was simply using the purest most simple way of looking at it...

Here's a question the drift followers might be able to answer me... are the tyres they use standard radial tyres?

On a bit of a side notice, Xaotik... I am rather interested in the list of books refered in that .doc you linked and how they come up with different results... I might have to have a look at a couple of them... hehe

Quote from Becky Rose :

If there one thing I've learned from my bank, customer services via computer decision isn't the way to go, even if you employ cheap Indian labour to give a human touch to read the decision out.

Bah, we don't mention the I word (it's where my job went).

Again, SamH has put exactly what I was trying to say without the waffle...

Cheers

Quote from xaotik :

I have no idea where the notion that an unstable car is better than a stable car to do controllable-ass-swinging-through-turns with comes from. I'd imagine that a drift car is set-up to be highly controllable at extreme situations which are not useful for normal driving or racing but not that it's an instantly spinning monster.



I wouldn't know about un-natural, but Ackerman steering geometry will have similar effects to a setup with negative toe at high steering angles - most commonly used in slow turns. So I guess Ackerman reduces un-natural toe with further un-natural means the more one turns.

However a much better and in-depth explanation, citing various sources, is available here:

http://www.racing-car-technolo ... /Steering%20Ackerman4.doc

It also features a nice section regarding race cars and why some engineers opt for no ackerman, others for negative ackerman and others for >100% ackerman geometry. All of them for the sake of stability and speed.

So, based on the fact that race engineers seem to find pros for all these extremes and all of them seem to benefit stability, I'd say that Ackerman geometry is probably a minor factor by which to determine the overall stability or instability of a vehicle.

As you have said the Ackerman is there to decrease the toe in corners... and as the perfect racing line includes all four wheels having as much grip as they can and the by the nature of using two wheels next to each other will force one of them to take a longer (and looser) line when turning the Ackerman allows each to move 'forward' in relativity to the line that tyre is taking. When you remove the Ackerman (or increase it beyond 100%) your tyres are no longer working with each other but are working against each other (either trying to push together in the case of < 100% ackerman, or they are pulling away from each other in the case of > 100% ackerman) thus making the car less stable when trying to drive it normally (IE not drifting)

It does make sense to remove Ackerman (almost) completely for drift reasons, as two wheels pointing in EXACTLY the same direction will have more effect on a car that has lost control (IE is no longer gripping the road), just like taking corners on loose terrain it is often quicker to get the car pointing in the right direction and the hammer down then to mess around with this whole avoiding loosing grip in the first place...

Quote from NigelY :

% races started to finished
% yellow flags

It's possible to track these, yes, the CTRA system did that, and yes it would be possible to consider this when making decisions.

Quote :

% time spent on racing line (can InSim use the green line)

Well... this would be harder to do, but more importantly I think this would be pointless... watch a race replay with the green line on and see how many "real" racers follow this line... I agree that the line is great for people starting out, but different driving styles use different lines (especially RallyCross).

EDIT: Also how would the system know about overtaking zones or straights where some people favour the left or right side of the road...

Quote :

% lap time

This one is again possible there are several examples of this already... things to keep in mind are in/out laps from the pits, midrace joins yellow flags etc...

Quote :

% time spent pressing "restart" after race is under way (after spectating)
% time spent chatting during race (after spectating)
% time spent off tarmac

These later three I wouldn't actually recommend trying to enforce/monitor as it could produce a HUGE amount of reporting that will need to be dealt with at sometime, and particularly with the chatting could end up producing false-positives over normal racing banter.

I would first, before trying to implement weighting systems such as above, try and define what a 'wrecker' acts like... i.e. what do you notice when they come on track... just penalising someone for missing the racing line is at risk of taking out people with unusual car setups that sacrifice on corner entry for exit speed or vice-versa... and as the car would do that for every corner he's at risk of showing up as a consistantly bad driver...

Once you can actively define the behaviour of a 'bad driver' then you can start to think about implementing the core auto-system... but like I say, the differences can be so subtle that I wouldn't want to make the call... as SamH said you don't want to punish people because someone drove into them... or even if it was just a racing incident (not really the fault of either party and certainly not malicious)

I had my chair collapse while trying to organise setups... the funniest reason for me crashing, just a shame I was offline and no one got to hear about it (straight lined it into a sand-trap around Kyoto)

But my favourite excuse is quite simply

"I'm incompetant... sue me!"

Dammit... I can make the test race... but as I am soon to be starting a new life in Ireland on the 10th Nov... I won't have a wheel until long after christmas... in fact I won't even have a rig capable of playing LFS...

Sounds like a result... nice job guys

Just a shame I missed it

Open Diffs... then you'll get Oversteer under braking and Understeer under acceleration... job done... hehe

Seriously I find the default setup is too fierce in the Clutchpack LSD... change it to some lower lock or even the open/viscous option. I find Viscous LSDs easier to predict too... Clucthpacks seem to behave badly whenever I drive them especially in the FWD...

If you've got a locked Diff... you won't get any brake-oversteer...

Quote from xaotik :

Why?

What Cupraman is refering to (I believe) is the unatural toe created by removing the Ackerman for drifting purposes...

Ackerman is there to keep the car stable in the turns, as both wheels are pointing in the same direction relative to the direction they want to go... this affect is the opposite of what you want to happen in a drift vehicle... so they get rid of it, which makes the car unstable again... it would result in positive toe (IE the tyres will try to get closer together when driving normally through corners, reducing their grip quite a bit)

Quote from SamH :

Automatic - as in InSim-based - incident moderation simply doesn't work. I find nothing more odious than iRacing's incident system, and anything that punishes both the wrecker and the wreckee is worse than no moderation at all. As far as I can tell, there's simply not enough information in the InSim packet data to give better than a poorly educated guess. It's not an option, unless you provide for a manually handled appeals procedure and if you're going to go for one of those, you might as well go for a manual reporting system. At least with manual moderation you maintain the concept of "due process", innocent until proven guilty etc. - fundamental to anything purporting to be judicial.

The only way I can see this happening is by using a Semi-intelligent approach that "learns" what is good driving and what it is bad driving without being given any rules straight off... Similar to how a few email filters work at the moment... however, anyone with the money to invest in such a solution should put it to a better use...

Having seen the approach used in filtering emails it's entirely possible to take reports and score them on selected sections (I have been working this out in the last few hours) but the amount of power they throw at just decyphering a bit of text to work out whether it's good or bad is immense... to do that on a 3d representation of several cars as they collide, it would take one hell of a bit of code and would need to be worked out on a frame by frame basis... to do this (what I currently have in my mind) in real time would take an awful lot of kit...

That's the only way I can see this sort of system working... and I don't see it running on anything any of the LFS community can afford to run, and in my mind anything "simpler" would produce too many false-positives (People being banned when it wasn't their fault) to be practical... in fact the system in my minds eye would still be far from perfect

Quote from dawesdust_12 :

Kamrock: The only reeason I'm using Visual Studio and not something like Dev-C++ is because I NEED the Windows DDK (Driver Dev Kit), and in Microsofs typical way, it's only compatible with Visual Studio. Although VS isn't as horrible as one might think, I just hate the way it resolves dependencies, becuase it ends up I'm compiling my program with say the Windows 7 version of SetupAPI.lib (stuff to do with DDK), but the built in VS version of hidsdi.lib which incurs (as one would expect) a shit-tonne of compiler errors. I've started to rectify this by making the include files I need totally local by copying them into my project but it's such a wasteful effort.

Lol, no I understand your problem... just saying I agree with you.

Although I have been using VS 2008 recently and it seems much better than it used to be... I still use Redhat core for most of my programming so GCC works the best... however with the success of Windows 7 and the new VS I might be tempted back from the command-prompt compiling...

Fantastic idea guys...

I'll be taking part