I had the usual calibration problems with my Momo Racing pedals, I tried asking the Logitech tech support if it would be possible to disable the autocalibration, but instead of providing such they promised to send me new pedals However those never arrived, so I asked again and they sent me an all new wheel for no cost, without even asking any kind of proof of purchase other than the serial number of the wheel. So I'd recommend contacting them if you have any kind of problems...

Also, the manual of the new wheel was labeled "Rev.B", I have heard the B revision DFP's with the metal pots are marked the same way, so I suspect they might have done the same thing for the Momo Racing, although I haven't opened the pedals to verify this.

Wouldn't a peltier cooling on today's processors require massive cooling, and a huge power supply? The efficiency of those things is extremely poor, so to cool down a processor that puts out over 100W of heat on its own you're going to have to pump in a massive amount of energy to the peltier and then somehow move that away from the hot side of the peltier.

The whole purpose of them, as far as I know, is the capability to cool down the cold side to sub-zero temperatures which allows you to overclock the processor (or video card) more. If you're not getting sub-zero (or at least less than ambient) temperatures then there's only harm done as you only get more heat from the peltier to get rid of.

In my opinion the time it would take to improve the unlocking system would be much better spent on improving the game, as that would give more 'value' to the product and encourage more people to buy it. There's nothing you can do about people unlocking it illegally as long as there is some way to play the game offline. And there's always the danger that too annoying copy protection mechanisms discourage people from buying the game (Starforce has done this to me for example), the current unlock system already causes some hesitation as its not a "hard copy" that you're paying for.

The best way to fight piracy is to make the product worth buying for. It wont make everyone buy it, but even a protection that would be impossible to crack wouldn't make everyone buy it, people would simply play something else.

Quote from Bob Smith :

I'd like a mode where the tyres had infinite grip... how fast do you dare drive while trying to stop the car from rolling over in the corners? Or flipping end-over-end when braking? Just for fun.

You can already do that with UF1000 + slickmod :P

I'd rather like an option for servers to select what setup options they want to lock. So, for example you could force everyone to use road normal tyres and certain suspension settings but allow adjusting everything else. Or force everyone to drive the UF1000 with the roof on, or force everyone to use a certain fuel load (So you could more easily have a "economy" race of who gets the farthest with a certain fuel load ) etc.

Spelunker
This propably was the first computer game I ever played. I was 4 back then and the C64 came with Spelunker, Stealth, Raid on Bungeling Bay and some other game that didn't work, and I believe Spelunker was the first game we tried. Not that special game, though it has great music.

System Shock
This is simply the best game I have played. (And some people at GameSpy seem to agree with me ) In fact I have just started playing it again, since someone made a "patch" that allows using 1024x768 resolution with it. And it doesn't even look that bad despite the fact that its as old as Doom 2, it has 3D objects, real time lighting, leaning, jumping, great storyline, great voice acting... even 'bullet time' A game thats only fault was that it was 5 years ahead of its time.

Doom
I got to try Doom once when I still had an Amiga, and after that I just had to get a PC no matter what. Doom had great atmosphere and great gameplay, and very impressive "3D" graphics. I still play it sometimes using the various source ports like Doom Legacy and jDoom that add things like 3D acceleration.

Operation Flashpoint
OFP changed my view on 3D shooters. After it everything else just seems so boring and restricted, if I hadn't ever played OFP I propably would have thought games like HL2, BF2, etc. are great but now I find them as interesting as NFSU would be after playing LFS. I guess I also have had influence on OFP as I have made quite alot of mods for it...

Related to this I'd also like an addition to the message blocking function that would only block messages from people who are currently not racing. It happens sometimes that when people are spectating or otherwise out of the race they begin to talk about all kinds of things which can be distracting, and I wouldn't want to ignore the people still in the race since they dont usually say anything unless its important.

Quote from Kegetys :

There doesn't even seem to be any way to transfer surfaces from one device to another even if the devices are on the same card, so you cannot render everything on one device and just move the finished frame to the other device to be displayed

Being bored, I tried this again today using a method I thought would be extremely slow. And it is slow, but I still managed to get 30fps on my 3GHz P4 + AGP GF6600GT in 3456x864 resolution, quite low details though. The way it works is that it creates one big surface on the primary video card to which the game renders things normally, and this big surface is then clipped to three parts to be displayed on the other monitors. It's slow since it needs to copy quite a lot of stuff from the video card to the system memory and then back again, it might be much faster with PCI Express card(s).

The thing I need now is a PCI video card so I could actually try it out myself :doh: It works now on two monitors, with both side views drawn onto the seconday monitor (So only one of them is visible but the performance should be quite the same as with a real third monitor). Looks like this.

Its too much work to update it for test patches as their "lifetime" doesn't tend to be very long.

Quote from Cue-Ball :

How do you cycle different keys using one button?

With the Logitech Profiler cycle assignments

I'd prefer TCP connections not used at all (I dont know if they are), since even a very short network problem could cause the TCP connection to be cut and thus you would get disconnected from the server. I have got dropped from a server during long races and that is always quite frustrating, I dont know the cause of those disconnects but if LFS uses a TCP connection to the server then that would explain them...

Its a preview release, you should report that in the Opera beta testing forum.

With my Momo Racing I have the following:

Unshifted:
Paddles = gears
Stick shifter forward = Horn
Stick shifter backward = Handbrake
Button 3 = look left
Button 4 = look right
Button 5 = Flash lights
Button 6 = Zoom in/out cycle
Button 7 = SHIFT
Button 8 = F9,F10,F11,F12 cycle

Shifted:
Paddles = Arrow left/right
Stick shifter forward = Up arrow
Stick shifter backward = Down arrow
Button 3 = Pit limiter
Button 4 = HUD on/off
Button 5 = Reset car
Button 6 = Vote restart
Button 7 = shift
Button 8 = Change camera

It would seem to me that the factors that come in to play with mechanical problems (Ones not caused by accidents etc.) are mostly influenced by things happening outside the track, ie. how much time and money the team spends on testing and hiring engineers, and how they balance reliability vs. performance. To simulate this properly you would propably need some sort of race team manager game integrated into LFS where you can make the decisions on who to hire and what to aim for

Because of that I propably wouldn't like a "random" failure system that I cannot influence in any way (Although in most real teams the drivers propably cannot influence it that much either but still), but maybe something like a slider in the setup menu that allows me to choose between max reliability and max performance, that could give me a few extra HP's but with the risk of a mechanical failure...

Quote from mkinnov8 :

How nice of "Kegetys" to Share his creation with the community, must be one of those no setup sharing types...

How nice of the "community" to pay no respect whatsoever for my work and use it on things forbidden in the license even before the whole thing is even released.

And I dont think anyone would want my setups even though I have no problem sharing them.

Quote from Vain :

I've got no clue wether you'd have to sacrifice a virgin to MS to get DirectX to draw across multiple GFX-boards.

Direct3D implementation of multimonitor support sucks, since you have to create all textures, vertex buffers, etc. to each device separately which is a real mess, not to mention how much it wastes memory from the card. And you have to do it all in one single application, you cannot have multiple applications running at the same time that would use a fullscreen device (So for example running two instances of LFS would not work, except windowed). There doesn't even seem to be any way to transfer surfaces from one device to another even if the devices are on the same card, so you cannot render everything on one device and just move the finished frame to the other device to be displayed (An attempt to do this caused a BSOD in the nvidia driver for me :smash3d: ).

I havent personally tried using multiple monitors with OpenGL, but I would assume all you need to do is change the render target to the other full screen window? Does it work right even if you have two video cards installed, with OpenGL handling all the texture transfers etc. transparently?

1440x1080 and 1024x768 on my Windows "gaming" system
1152x864 on my Linux desktop
1024x768 on my laptop
176x208 on my mobile phone (I rarely surf web pages with it though :P)

On the Windows system I do not run the browser full screen though, somewhere around 900 pixels wide usually.

I'd rather have better upstream speeds, 24Mbps download with 1Mbps upload is quite ridiculous...

Quote :

so there is no difference between 2 MegaByte and 2 MegaBit??

One byte (B) is eight bits (b).

The following come to my mind:

- Donnie Darko
- The Andromeda Strain
- Threads
- Dawn of the Dead
- Day of the Dead
- Das Boot
- Hunt for Red October
- Ravenous
- Mad Max 2
- The Matrix
- Terminator 2

Though I usually have hard time judging how good a movie is, usually I just think its either really crappy or good, with nothing in between

It depends on from which bank you have the card from, as far as I know the only Finnish bank that allows using Visa Electron as a "normal" visa card online is Sampo.

Put the paths of both the spotter and LFS executables into the executable path in your LFS profile in the Logitech profiler (separated with a semicolon) and it should work. Or disable the spotter autorun and run LFS some other way.

I wouldn't personally mind passing some driving tests to get access to the fastest cars, as long as the tests would be made well (For example I'd propably hate a test of some kind where you would be forced to drive with the current AI drivers) as this would mean everyone I drive with online would have at least some basic knowledge on how those cars handle. It might also be helpful if there would be some means of seeing how much experience people have, like maybe display the amount of online credits a person has when he/she joins a server, or display the amount of laps he/she has driven on the current car/track combo in the name list. This would make it much easier for admins to concentrate on new people to watch how they drive and instruct or kick them if necessary, and the other drivers could also see that the person might not be so experienced and could be more careful when dealing with him/her on the track.

I would also support much more strict policies against wreckers from the devs, in clear cases of someone doing wrecking even once should get their license removed immediately.

Operation Flashpoint, Dangerous Waters, Richard Burns Rally, OpenTTD, Doom Legacy, Alpha Centauri, Heroes of Might & Magic 3, some C64 and Amiga games with emulators... Good games are quite rare nowdays

Quote from SlamDunk :

You can dowload the full SDK for free: http://www.ageia.com/novodex_downloads.html

And a snip of the license from that package:

Quote :

1. Use of the Software.
a. You may:
(i) use and display the Software, including the Third Party Materials, for internal demonstration purposes only;
(ii) use, display and reproduce the SDK and Rocket, excluding the Third Party Materials, internally solely to develop Your non-commercial physics simulation applications, including without limitation game demo, educational and training applications; and
(iii) distribute the Software, excluding the Third Party Materials, solely as part of a non-commercial project for non-commercial academic and research purposes only.

...

c. No Commercial Distribution Right. This license grants no rights to distribute the Software for any commercial purposes. Any and all individuals, companies, non-academic government agencies or other organizations wishing to redistribute the Software for any purpose other than that specifically set forth in Section 1(a)(iii) above must enter into written contract with NovodeX. Please contact [email protected] for further information.

Free to download does not mean free to use.

Also the Novodex SDK is said to be quite expensive; the commercial license price for a single title on one platform is 50 000 dollars. Or, thats what it used to be some time ago, it could have changed up or down but whatever it is now I doubt it would be worth it for LFS. Especially considering the time it would take to pretty much re-write most of the physics code already there, and the amount it would "alienate" the whole game (It would not work well or at all without the PPU card).