a few minutes ago :snowman:

As if playing Pipemania over and over and over again wasn't boring enough, now you get to watch someone else do it as well.

I'm glad that vista taskbar is gone

Hey, it's a "who can make the largest screenshot" competition!

Here's a few entries:
http://junk.kegetys.net/bigshot1.jpg
http://junk.kegetys.net/bigshot2.jpg

Quote from AndroidXP :

But the wheel is already at the minimum resistance, no?

I dont think it should be if there's 20t of weight on the wheels :drunk:

Quote from AndroidXP :

How can an effect create less resistance than minimum?

You get the rotation velocity of the wheel and then use the FFB motor to "help" it keep going. When a proper effect is used to do this the wheel hardware can do it fast enough that it works quite well, unlike if you try to "emulate" the effect with a constant force the lag/rate/etc. of the USB bus alone will be a problem.

edit: Also I think the Momo Racing applies such an effect by "default" already, as it comes lighter to turn when you power it on, and if you turn it very fast it suddenly becomes very stiff as the internal FFB cannot keep up anymore.

Last edited by Kegetys, Fri, 2 May 2008 13:22.

Quote from AndroidXP :

Since it's not LFS generating the wheel resistance, but the wheel itself...

Which was exactly my point all along, force feedback provides plenty of effects that can change the resistance of the wheel but LFS uses none of it and only uses the constant force to apply the aligning torque.

Quote from Shotglass :

do i understand you correctly that you mean lfs deosnt try to compensate the high friction in ffb wheels?

What I mean is, that the stiffness of the wheel should depend on how much weight is on the front wheels. By how much, I dont know. But if you consider the extreme example I gave, between a car that has no load on the front wheels and a car that has <insert big number here> of weight on the front wheels you ought to feel a difference between how much effort is required to turn the wheel. This should be felt wether the car is moving or not (maybe to a lesser extent when the car is moving?), and it is not a force that has a certain direction like the aligning torque which you can simulate with a constant force. You could see the steering wheel doing nothing when going from zero to <big number> of loading on the front wheels, but if you were trying to turn it at the same time you propably could feel it coming stiffer, regardless of which way you were turning it.

Phew, long text to explain such a simple thing

Quote from AndroidXP :

When the wheels don't touch the ground or when the car gets light (SO Chicane Route after long straight, anyone? ), the resistance is weaker or goes away completely.

Are you sure it is the actual wheel turning resistance changing, and not just the aligning torque (or whatever it is called, that the front wheels cause when they are turning and have a slip angle) effect fading away? Having the resistance go away completely is in fact very difficult with FFB altogether, and that is something I am certain is not possible at all with the constant force effects. A finely tuned negative friction value can give a feeling close to it but it will cause the wheel to start accelerating if you let go a bit

Quote from xaotik :

For further extreme examples: I seem to recall it happening in the rallycross tracks and when jumping off ramps, etc.

Note that when you go airborne, the aligning torque (or whatever) goes away which you of course can feel already, but it is not the same effect and not what I mean.

Quote from AndroidXP :

Which already happens anyway?

If it does it does not seem to work as it should, I can put a 20 ton engine on the GTI and between it standing still and being upside down I dont feel any difference in the "stiffness" of the wheel. But if it is true that LFS only uses the constant force effects then I doubt the effect is even there as it propably would be pretty difficult to implement using only it.

Shouldn't the steering 'stiffness' also depend on how much weight is on the front wheels? Extreme example being the car going weightless(or even airborne) when driving over a crest.

Quote from anttt69 :

nice what monitors do you have in your setup?

3x HP p1230 (Rebranded NEC/Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 2070SB)

Quote from SamH :

FTR, "pull it" can easily refer to a team or a crew of firefighters...

Which is exactly what the person in question has said he meant: (source)

Quote :

As noted above, when Mr. Silverstein was recounting these events for a television documentary he stated, “I said, you know, we've had such terrible loss of life. Maybe the smartest thing to do is to pull it.” Mr. McQuillan has stated that by “it,” Mr. Silverstein meant the contingent of firefighters remaining in the building.

Of course, this is all part of the conspiracy though :hide:

Overall, I dont see anything "suspicious" with the main wtc collapses or the pentagon plane, so even if the WTC 7 collapse would seem odd any kind of conspiracy as the cause of it doesn't make much sense. Just because something like it has not happened before doesn't mean there is a conspiracy behind it. Unique, "mysterious" events still occur simply because there are too many variables in the real world to take everything possible into account when designing something or when trying to find out why it failed afterwards.

Quote from duke_toaster :

There's still on or two hanging around.

Scawen himself is one of them:

Quote from Scawen :

...but using my S1 license I can see 120 hosts...

Quote from Napalm Candy :

Can you to release it?

It will most likely be included in the next SoftTH version (Whenever that may be released). As said though it looks a bit bad due to the lost detail, plus it distorts the menus etc. too while the mouse coordinates are not distorted so it needs toggling on/off all the time...

Lens correction is something I implemented to SoftTH a while ago (not publicly released yet). It just needs to be done as a "postprocess" effect so it reduces the image quality quite a bit as pixels get enlarged on the middle.

LFS only seems to use the constant force effect to apply forces, which does not (properly) allow adjusting the "stiffness" of the wheel... Its not that bad with the G25 since it is rather light to turn by default and the constant forces make it harder to turn if you're fighting against the constant steering column force. In contrast RBR felt really good with the Momo Racing, it seemed to properly take use of the capabilities of the FF effects.

Quote from fragile_dog :

kegetys: how?

Help -> Photoshop Help -> Automating Tasks -> Actions
(You should have figured this one out by yourself :P)

You can just record an action that saves the jpg automatically, and assign that to a shortcut key.

Put the radiator outside the case, that way it will actually make sense as the water will move the heat from the processor outside the case, where it can be cooled with ambient air and with the heat not staying inside the case. Keeping it inside the case would only make sense if you have a really big radiator.

Quote from tristancliffe :

What details Kegetys?

- The plane is said to be "moving" but it is not specified what moves it
- What kind of plane is it? (Does it have wheels? Frictionless wheels?)
- "Plane's speed" is what speed? Relative to ground, air, or the belt? Or the wheel rotation speed?

It is not possible to give a definite answer without more details about the setup. If made with some assumptions then it would take off.

Quote from Stang70Fastback :

Well, then what about simply increasing the update rate for all cars? They do jump around a bit. I'd love to see them running a bit smoother.

For some reason you can use a higher rate in a LAN game which indeed is much better to race with, especially with the faster cars. With a simple VPN setup it works fine over the internet too, just no master server etc.

I have suggested this before, but I would like an additional 'block messages' mode that would block messages from everyone except those who are actively racing - ie. spectators, finished racers, etc. would be blocked, but someone saying 'sorry' after accidentally pushing you would be visible.

After you finish or stop racing it could also automatically show all messages again (maybe even have some old messages visible in the message history with H key)

Doing such distortion on vertex level would most likely cause quite bad "artifacts" whenever there is a large polygon visible near the screen edges. It might look ok in a static screenshot but in motion I would imagine that the polygon edges jittering back and forth as the vertexes move would not look very good. Though of course a "solution" would be to add detail to all models, split all flat surfaces to multiple smaller surfaces, etc. but even then it would not eliminate the problem entirely and performance would surely take a hit.