Quote from Crazy Harry :

I got a P90 years ago. I payed 4.800 DM (€2.300) for it and the processor had a (well known) malfunction.

Can you mention one at least semi-new CPU that doesn't have any faults?

Couldn't fit any more into the pic :drunk:

A (decent quality) 400W power supply should be enough for that system, unless you happen to have 10 hard drives or something... Buying a much too "powerful" PSU is generally not a good idea since the power supplies have their maximum efficiency at a specific range somewhere between half and full load. So if you buy a 600W PSU and only ever use some 300W from it the efficiency will be less than optimal.

Most important thing is to get a good quality one, not some "600W" Q-Tec :P

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(In alphabetical order)

Archimedean Dynasty
Bioforge
Block Out
Boulder Dash
Carmageddon 2
Civilization
Colonization
Command & Conquer
Commandos
Dark Forces
Death Knights of Krynn
Descent Freespace
Doom 1/2
Dune
Elvira 1 & 2
Fallout 2
Hexen
Interstate '76
Jones in the Fast Lane
Kalliolinnan Aarre
Krakout
Little Big Adventure 1/2
Lotus 3
Magic Carpet 2
Mega lo Mania
Midwinter
Need for Speed
Nethack
Nitro
Operation Flashpoint
Paradroid
Pirates
Settlers/Serf City
Stunt Island
Super Karts
System Shock
The Incredible Machine 1/2/3
The Secret of Monkey Island
Thief 1/2
TIE Fighter
Transport Tycoon Deluxe
Turrican 2
Wings
Wizball

+ The ones I forgot to mention

With that price I'd expect you to be able to buy some real ads instead of using public discussion boards as free advertising space... :bewarespa

Or if this was approved by the devs/moderators then sorry

Quote from wheel4hummer :

But how did you figure out what the pointers to the car parameters were?

A pointer is just a pointer, it points to a memory location (beginning of the car parameters in this case.)

Quote from wheel4hummer :

How else are you going to find the values to edit? How do you think kegetys found the values to edit?

I wrote a piece of code that searches for the function LFS uses to retrieve the pointer to the car parameters. This function seems to stay the same from LFS version to another (Unless some larger changes are made of course like a new car is added) so my "tweak" works with different versions automatically. Or, at least so far it has worked well as I made it almost an year ago, haven't touched it since and it keeps working...

Then there is of course the actual format of the parameters, but that wasn't too hard to figure out.

Quote from Bob Smith :

"Or, would it be allowed to do a "copy" of a licensed car over a demo car so that the encrypted values would not be edited but only copied to demo car which then could be edited?"

I don't see what that would achieve, if you're only copying the properties, which would potentially all editible anyway? Or did you mean copy the model too? I'd need to talk to the other mods on that.

The car properties include a property which tells the game which model is used, so if, say, all RA properties are copied to the XRT then the "XRT" both behaves and looks exactly like the RA since it will then use the RA model too...

Quote from Bob Smith :

* Any stat editing should be fine, if you're playing with variables that have never been editible before you might want to run it by me (or another mod)

By 'stat' do you mean all values LFS has defined for a car outside the model? That includes:
- Flags like diff limits, passenger presence, etc.
- Car type and engine specs
- Default setups and colors
- weight center, fuel tank & driver position, configurations (open roof and such), etc. values.
- the car "skeleton" (not model) where suspension parts are attached and (I think) the weight is defined
- wheel and axle settings, suspension geometry and rims
- aerodynamics

Many of those do visual changes too like tire size obviously, but without modifying the model...

Quote :

No encrypted values are being edited, as that would seem to be circumventing part of the unlocking mechanism

Would this be allowed without circumventing it? Or, would it be allowed to do a "copy" of a licensed car over a demo car so that the encrypted values would not be edited but only copied to demo car which then could be edited?

Quote :

...checks that the registered username is licensed, too

This would need some form of online check I think from LFS website? That would be alot of hassle to do and would be very easy to circumvent anyway.

Since it is a moderator asking, I'll ask what is "allowed" from such an app? Ie. if someone would release a "tweak" that can edit all properties of all cars, would that be OK here?

Would be maybe better if it would just say "XX users thank Y for this post" on a much smaller area, and clicking on it would expand it to show the names.

Quote from geeman1 :

I meant lack of support on the programming side. Like not all APIs support PNG for example.

Huh? There are multiple free, open source libraries for reading (and writing) PNGs and it is an open and well documented standard with no patent problems either. Even d3dx comes with PNG support.

With TrackIR, I cannot move my head sideways when using a custom view. Also, when I move my head outside the TrackIR tracking area the view immediately snaps back into the center position. It would be better if it would stay where it was last (When I move my head just a bit too much the sudden view jumping is a bit annoying)

In my 5DOF mod I used a divider of 50000, so the motion is about 33cm each way and it worked quite ok.

Photoshop CS3 Extended comes with ability to load 3D models, you can edit the textures directly and see the result on the 3D model. If someone exports the cmx models in a format compatible with photoshop I guess you could use that. The lighting would not be correct though.

Quote from deggis :

Exactly how much easier for the system are DDS skins then compared to JPG? How significant the difference is?

DDS contains DXTC compressed surfaces. DXTC (or S3TC) is a form of compression your video card can handle with hardware, if you have a JPG/PNG/whatever texture it needs to be either recompressed to DXTC or sent to the card without compression. DXT1 without alpha channel gives you a compression ratio of 8:1, meaning the texture will take 1/8 of video memory than what an uncompressed texture would. While it is lossy compression, the saved memory is very well worth the image quality loss in most cases.

For example if you have 32 cars each with 2048x2048 32b textures, without compression those would require 512MB of video memory. With DXTC they only take 64MB. You could double the resolution with DXTC and it would still be half the size of the uncompressed ones.

DDS can also contain pregenerated mipmaps, for other formats they need to be generated every time the texture is loaded.

Quote from Scawen :

Are there any other IP addresses than 127.0.0.1 (as you said 127.*) ?

The whole 127.0.0.0 - 127.255.255.255 range is reserved for local loopback (~16 million addresses just for that, and now they complain about running out of free addresses :tilt. 127.0.0.1 is the most commonly used though and that alone would propably be enough.

Could the insim password also be separated from the server password? Many insim app users now seem to be confused what it means when the connection is rejected due to some old password they used for a server.

Maybe the password setting could be in the options, or maybe insim connections coming from localhost (127.*) could always be allowed without providing a password (An application running on the same machine could read the password from the config file or memory anyway so security wise it would not be much different).

Number 6 is a bit stupid, PC and especially older computers have great platform games (Gish was one of the best 2004 games imo). I still wouldn't want to play platform games on a console :P They should rather have rather put a point about being able to mod games.

Quote from geeman1 :

Shadows in LFS could be improved, but not by faking things.

Good idea, Scawen should update the render engine to use photon tracing... Of course a nasty side effect of that would be that the game would run maybe one frame per week on the top end supercomputers :drunk:

In practice, pretty much everything you see in games are "faked" entirely. Only thing that matters is wether the result looks realistic enough or not and with this method I believe it could look better than with any other 'high performance' approach.

Quote from Soeren Scharf :

Even if the wrapper dll approach is very easy to understand and to implement, it has one significant drawback. As every addon developer will write his own D3D8.dll for his purpose and copy it into the LFS folder, it may lead in overwriting the D3D8.dll of other addons.

You should be able to 'stack' the dll's, by instead of loading the real d3d8.dll you just load the dll of another 'proxy' until the dll at the end loads the real one. I dont know if it works with that gpp proxy dll though since I dont use that myself.

That's not to say some common interface would be a bad idea, it just might be difficult to design it in such a way it isn't too restrictive.

Quote from wien :

Anyway, I know OSX has this feature, but I'm pretty sure XP doesn't.

XP does have it, so does 2k, NT4 and even windows 95. I'm not sure about Windows 3.x but that might use whatever DOS has (Smartdrv works as a disk cache in DOS).

What Vista does differently as far as I understand is that it tries to preload things it thinks applications might use in the future based on what they did in the past. This might or might not be advantageous, I would suspect for games it would have mixed results since their behaviour is not that predictable (Like in LFS, you might once load Blackwood but next time you run it you might want to drive on South City instead)

Quote from wien :

Do you know why Vista "eats memory"? Because it caches DLLs, executables and other files you use frequently in left over memory so that they're right there should you ever need them again.

Pretty much every OS out there has been doing this for years (Including windows). The memory used as such cache is generally not included in the "used memory" calculation, it would not make much sense to do that as the amount of memory free would be almost always close to zero and thus would tell you nothing useful.

Quote from Gunn :

Thanks for that useful information about the D3D, can you tell me how it affects OpenGL? I use 3DSMax 6 which works best with OpenGL. Do those parameters effect OGL the same way as D3D?

I would guess the cards that support it in D3D also do so in OpenGL.

Quote :

Those "3D textures" appear to not be 3D, they are several flat 2D textures. The name is misleading.

That is just a method of storing it, you might as well say a 2D texture is not really 2D, it's just several 1D textures split by rows. And, procedural 3D textures are not stored in any way other than as a formula (which gives infinite resolution too).