Quote from s911 :

One questions is it possible to make the LED's flash once at a redline? That would be nice...maybe?

Unfortunately not without some additional trickery.

You're missing Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable libraries, these can be downloaded from MS. Port 0 is an illegal port, anything between 1025 and 65535 should work, default is 30000. If you still can't get it working, please enable debugging and post g27dbg.txt file.

http://thenewboston.org/list.php?cat=15

This guy has uploaded 200 videos with C# programming tutorials. I didn't watch those vids so I have no idea if they are any good, but seeing someone writing the code in front of you and explaining what it does is a great way to learn...

Wow... I really don't mean to be insulting or disrespectful towards the author(s) of this program, putting it together must have indeed required some tremendous effort, but... this code is one hell of a mess! When a class in C# has over 19800 lines of code, something is really, really wrong. No wonder this code is full of bugs, it's totally unreadable and nobody is going to spend a weekend trying to understand it, let alone fix it for you, sorry. If you really want to learn how to code, then

- Throw this away
- Learn some basic C# and familiarize with it
- Learn some more advanced C# and familiarize with it
- Grab InSim.NET and try the simple things first
- Profit

HDD partitioning and process affinity shouldn't have any effect on this. ATM there are two things I can think of. HW manufacturers can be quite sloppy, perhaps the Win XP drivers for your MB are a bit dodgy. If you have a Win 7 install disk, it might be worth a shot. The other possibility is - obviously - a faulty MB.

It's interesting that I reproduced the clock slowdown under heavy load on another machine. I guess there are some things I don't know about how Windows gets the hardware time.

All you have to do is run the batch and wait for the results, the command prompt window should not close automatically. It takes 10 minutes to complete. The EXE itself is not meant to be run directly.

Anyway, this really looks like there is a serious timing issue. On the other hand, if it was just a faulty RTC clock, its pace shouldn't be affected by CPU load or running applications. Does any other CPU intensive app have the same effect on LFS as FRAPS? Could you post your full hardware specs?

It's not really apparent from the video, but the debug messages in LFS say "TCP ER : InitTime (-/+)= *", it looks like this problem. I believe that LFS is trying to tell you that the game runs "faster" on your computer than it does on the server. LFS updates physics at a fixed rate of 100 Hz (each 10 msecs). When your computer's clock run a bit faster, the physics gets updated at say 110 Hz. This is obviously a problem in multiplayer and if the clock variance is high enough, LFS can't compensate for that and you completely drop out of sync eventually. It's rather puzzling that FRAPS causes the delay to be positive. Anyway, here's what you can do.

- Check the RTC clock. Run the application with no other programs running, then with just LFS and with LFS+FRAPS. Each test takes 10 minutes to complete and it will fully load one CPU core. Another good test is to drive like 10-15 laps in SP, save the replay and then watch it with a stopwatch if your hand. If there is a timing problem, you should see the replay time in LFS deviate from the time on the stopwatch.
- Check your motherboard. If there is a BIOS or driver update available, make sure it's installed.

I'm almost certain that the problem you're having has nothing to do with your Internet connection. Your computer sends position updates to the server, not the other way around so you car can't suddenly jump to a different place on the track just because the server thinks that's where it's supposed to be. If you indeed were lagging, you wouldn't notice that yourself, only other players would see your car jerking around or disappearing altogether.

You would probably see the FPS dropping if this was the problem, but is there any heavy HDD activity when you get this jump?

Could this be a RTC issue? I imagine something like this would happen if your PC's clock ran at a different speed, there are some cases of this reported on the forum.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-HD-6320.54746.0.html

Unfortunately none of the games you menioned bar LFS will be playable, maybe at the lowest graphics settings. The GPU that notebook has is just not suitable for gaming.

Try to do a fresh install in a separate directory and see if that works. Also there is a "deb.log" file in the LFS directory which contains some debugging info. It might give you a clue what's going on.

If it's really just a rumble effect that your wheel can do, it won't work in LFS. Force feedback in LFS calculates the exact force acting on the front wheels and then models it as a constant force effect. If your wheel has just a set of rumble motors that make the wheel vibrate, it can't simulate such an effect and therefore it doesn't work...

The wheel probably needs drivers for the force feedback to work.

What kind of computers you guys have that you struggle with performance? LFS runs fine on any gaming rig less than 5 years old.

If by talent you mean the natural grasp of how to drive fast, then absolutely yes. A sim-racing champion might not become a top racing driver in the real world, but I bet he'd do quite well. OTOH, it only works with people who need only a few laps to kick ass in a sim, anything beyond this is called practice...

Quote from Chupacabras84 :

Where did you get that info? As I know its simply not true.

I was just extrapolating from my awareness of the current games market. Perhaps the number is a little off, but what games really worth playing are consoles or PC exclusive? All I can think of ATM is GT5, Heavy Rain and maybe Forza on the consoles.... and nothing on the PC (apart from hardcore sims and MMORPGs).

Quote from Chupacabras84 :

Again would disagree with you, GT5 giant patch and monster install, plus if something goes wrong during firmware update (Which are frequent) you cant fix it yourself like you would do with PC and sony service is not the quickest.

I don't have a first hand experience with it, but what are the odds that a FW update will break a console? I don't say it can't happen, but as far as statistic goes I reckon PC are more prone to occasional problems. Some people are comfortable fixing this stuff themselves, some would rather just hit the power button and play, it's a matter of choice.

Quote from Matrixi :

PC games are also often much cheaper to buy aswell, even at launch. So even if one buys a PC, the higher initial hardware cost tends to balance out because the games are cheaper. Not to mention, consoles are locked to a single digital distribution platform by the manufacturer, whereas PC has several = healthy competition, lower game prices!

I realize that the prices differ from region to region a lot, but at least here one would have to buy about 25 games to make up for the higher price of an average gaming PC.

@Boris:
I suppose this debate is not of much help If you use a PC extensively for work or other kind of stuff, a new gaming-grade PC will definitely pay off. If on the other hand your PC is a simple Internet terminal and multimedia center, a PS3 Slim might be a better choice as long as you've been comfortable with the Sony's ecosystem.

Since PCs and gaming consoles aren't exactly substitutes it's sorta difficult to reasonably compare them, but IMHO the main differences from the gamer's point of view are:

PCs:
+ Wider games selection, 95 % of console games come to PC eventually and there's a lot of games that don't have a console version.
+ Considerably higher flexibility, a gaming-grade PC is suitable for almost any kind of workload.
+ (rather controversial) It's much easier to pirate games on PC.

Consoles:
+ Great optimization of all titles. Devs cannot use the "get a faster machine" excuse plus the uniform hardware makes fine-tuning simpler.
+ (Almost) no hassle with security patches, drivers updates, viruses etc.
+ Cheaper to buy and run, you don't need to buy a new GPU for a console every year and throw it away after 3 years to be able to play the hottest titles.

Update to v2.2.0.0, fixes one embarrasing bug.

Each object on the track adds complexity. An extra car means LFS has to do an extra set of physics calculations, an extra cone means LFS has to do an extra set of collision detection for that cone. Everything can be optimized to some extent, but the rule of "more objects = lower FPS" will always apply.

@Racer X NZ
Wow... 95 % of your last post was pretty much unrelated to FB, what point did you try to make? Nobody forces people to post stuff on FB (or anywhere else for that matter). The idea of a Secret-Government-Organization giving people a system where they can post all the details about their personal lives is pretty laughable. First, you assume that people are going to deliberately rat themselves out and second, if a person posts something on the Interwebs for all the world to read it, why is it wrong that the cops read it as well? And the last but not least, if you're so concerned that someone reads your private info, then make sure that the info is ehm... private and don't publish it online - problem solved.

Quote from Racer X NZ :

...

You know, some of the stuff you post makes a bit of sense once in a while, but this is ridiculous. People who actually could be worried about getting into NSA/CIA crosshairs wouldn't post shit on Facebook and use encrypted communication channels (no, even NSA can't break those), so what would be the point of such a data mining? They don't even have the manpower to sort through an evaluate tens gigabytes of emails, FB statuses and text messages that circle the Internet every day.

You should make sure that you really need a faster HDD.
- Are you grabbing videos from games in real time?
- Are you working with some very high bitrate video files?
- Do you need to export the processed files on the fly?

Unless you answered yes to any of those questions, you probably don't need a faster HDD. To give you an example, I can record MPEG-2 DVB-T video streams in real time on my laptop and edit them afterwards with no problems. Note that laptop HDDs are all about power efficiency, not speed.

What's the rest of your PC's specs?

Well, RAID support in desktop versions of Windows is kinda poor and unless you have a motherboard with hardware RAID controller (which you probably don't), the benefit of a RAID array is a bit debatable.
Before you decide on anything, you should be sure what is really bottlenecking you. If you have a write performance problems, a RAID 0 setup could help, but RAID 0 has an increased risk of data loss. If one drive in a RAID 0 fails, all data in the array is gone.
If you indeed have disk throughput problems, you might be much better off with a SSD drive.

Does my jailed Windows setup count too?

Bump to v2.1.0.0, as of now FFBInspector needs .NET 4.0 and manually installed SlimDX libraries.