You can register yourself - you just have to hit the register button on the home page for the site (if not immediately obvious, try clicking around a bit, but I seem to recall it was fairly easy)...
See you there

Quote from Scawen :

Thanks... I've had a look at the replay in Z15 and Z - same thing happens, so at least that does not mean I broke something today. I guess that racer who wrongly appears to be in the lead (although he is last) just crossed the finish line when you joined the host, so your computer thought he was going onto his second lap. I don't know if it's easy to fix but I've made a note to have a look at it.

Hmm, I've spotted a weirdness that *could* be Z15 specific...
I've got WE1R replays (of me): an SPR from Z, and an MPR from Z15. I was comparing them the other day and noticed that the finish line (and all splits) are in different places. The finish line isn't where I expected it to be in either case, btw. If this is interesting I can dig up more detail. If it's a simple manifestation of the known bug, then I won't

It's a shame, but organising races is a decent amount of effort (and indeed I'm one of the people who enjoyed the racing but isn't able right now to commit to running them).

Note to Worry and others - the SR team are running a FOX league now. Race 4 (of 6) is on Sunday 19th, and I'm pretty sure fresh signups are still welcome. (I signed up in time for race 3.)
Race 4 will be on WE1R (and I'm glad I learned that track pretty well for a previous FBM race on AA :-)).

Quote from EQ Worry :

While I´m slowly giving up (but not quite yet) hope for having a FOX racing series, because it really does not generate sufficient interest among people around AirAttack servers, there´s certainly no reason for not having some races on a stable day/time, once a week. It may be FOX, it may be anything else, but say every Friday at 19:00 UTC we may probably gather and try some racing in a friendly atmosphere. (Dat/time change suggestions are welcome.)

Hope to see you there Not a particularly bad day/time combo for me really; there are better but it should be doable this week at least...
NB: Could be that the Easter hols affected other people too? (That's why I didn't make it to the last two races.) So maybe after this week we'll get a truer impression of interest level. (The schoolkids don't go back in the UK at least until next Monday...)

Bummer, I'll miss the race tomorrow as well (won't be back for another few days)... Oh well.

As for the crashing, must say I was a bit worried that would happen.
I had got "reasonably" reliable at taking T1 on FE2R, but my failure rate was probably still over 10% when taking it flat, and even when I was deliberately being careful (and lifting) I still messed it up now and then. So I have real doubts I'd have made it through a race without a T1 prang...
(Very rarely hit the sandtrap later on though, but wow, it's near-impossible to get out of, unlike most in the game!)
I hadn't really raced much on it (as opposed to qually) so I have no idea where the passing places are. (Note to self: must try to race a few times on a track before race night in future.)
But sorry to hear the racing was a bit of a let-down anyway.

Hoping that the series keeps going...
(I seem to recall that KY3 is quite a lot more forgiving, so that should help !)

Quote from EQ Worry :

So shortening the races might help again, because it means less frustration in case something goes very wrong for someone, having 2 or 3 more tries in the upcoming races (and less time to wait).

Mmm, mixed feelings about having lots of races. If it increases the total time window for the racing to 90 minutes plus some qualifying, it might rule some people out (maybe me). I think last time we used 30 qually + a notional 60 racing (which often ended up being 70+ for the racing, but of course you can turn up a bit late for qually and still get a laptime in and then race. 3 x (20 minutes+1lap), with 5 minutes gap will probably mean about 75 minutes overall, which is close to the highish end of what I personally could take.

Quote :

1) Require symmetric wheels setups

Sounds good. Simplifies life, rarely a big problem anyway (unless we go oval racing ).

Quote :

2) We could use some kind of dynamic handicaps

Yes, would make life much more interesting. Not sure whether intake restriction only, or some mix of power & weight restrictions would be better. Probably lots of experience out there with handicapping though?

Quote :

3) I think we should use layous (additional tyres) and try to make the tracks so that no extensive cutting is possible, so that the racing line is very close to what is required by HLVC.

Well, yes, probably a useful idea in general (maybe with some no-go zones (auto-spectate) thrown in for good measure for the really drastic cutting). But I had a look at my FE2R line, in my hotlap, and I use a bit more grass than is possible with the FE2R tyres layout I saved to disk from AA last night. I also checked the WR hotlap and it uses even more grass than I did - I've attached a screenshot (I think! my first attachment on this forum ). Maybe about a half a tyre-stack less would permit the WR line to be used (which of course satisfies the HLVC test).

Many many thanks again to Worry for having the motivation to hold another series. I was a bit lost after the last one ended, and fell into bad company (CTRA, lots of fun, but look how that ended ). Perhaps this forum should be renamed now?

Sounds good to me - been playing with the FOX lately and I like it (yup - controllable and well-behaved even for mediocre drivers like me ).
Friday's aren't generally so good for me (still a chance I'll make it tomorrow though).

Quote from NightShift :

It would be far more reliable and meaningful to only consider the top 20 licensed servers.

Agreed.
I've given up on demo servers - too many wreckers and idiots.

Quote from Amynue :

The second way to stop moans would be release of FZ and FX interiors. For some reason they are not finished when they actually should be.

Are you kidding? Apart from TVE's remark ("who uses cockpit view" ), I'm totally amazed anyone who does use it cares about how the cockpit looks....

Quote from S14 DRIFT :

Me thinks your sarcasm detector is brokended. :sadbanana

Or perhaps yours is? Same person posted this beauty
http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?p=1092846#post1092846

Last edited by Neilser, Fri 6 Mar 2009, 15:41.

Quote from S14 DRIFT :

You can't please everyone though. If you enforce "realistic setup" (who defines that?), then those who like to play about with the customization of LFS's tuning will feel left out.

I think the appeal is that if there is at least one car with basically only one setup, it will allow people to choose to have races where ONLY driver skill affects the results...

Quote from Becky Rose :

Ah but after T1 field spread ensures that at any given time most cars are on a straight. Watch a big race on LFS Remote, you'll see that after the start at any given time most cars are settled.

Am slightly worried that I've missed the point here, but...
Surely it's irrelevant how many cars are in the race, as the physics calculations for a car (e.g. see Becky's earlier post) are done locally on the player's own PC on a one-on-one basis? So the extra cars in the race don't add physics loading to the master server or the clients (though they clearly add graphics loading to the clients). A few milliseconds worth of kerb interaction would never be a sensible candidate to be sent down the wire...

[Oooh OK, just spotted something - the local game engine probably has to do physics updates on each remote car in between packets from the remote host... But still I feel that giving very many cycles to those calcs would be a waste of time because of the high probability of changing control inputs from the user in the meantime... I now remember seeing (laggy) cars hit barriers and spiral through the air at high speed for half a second before magically reappearing on track when the next packet arrived ]

As for reasons to run at a constant rate, it's certainly cleaner/nicer to be adaptive here, but I guess people writing for consoles might not care about wasting cycles (if it makes the program performance more deterministic) given that they probably don't have to care about any other demanding bits of code sharing the CPU(s).

Quote from Dj-Aeri :

Yeah... That's done in two weeks of work.

Umm, well the collision physics alone could be a seriously big deal, depending on how things are coded right now. (Has any dev commented on this previously?)

Quote from amp88 :

Sometimes things are entirely out of your control, though. Someone running out from behind a van at the side of the road, a dog/cat running across the road etc. It doesn't matter how aware or perceptive you are, if you drive for long enough something WILL happen that you could not have been prepared for. Not long ago I came round a blind corner at ~40mph (60mph limit) and found a queue of stationary cars. To make matters the road was damp and greasy. If it hadn't been for the ABS and good brakes I would have been in the back of something hard. The only way I could have been prepared for that would have been to drive round every blind corner at 10mph, but it would take me hours to get anywhere and I would probably get drilled by someone coming along behind at 60mph.

Hey, you bad bad boy, nobody called you out on this one
One of the most horrendously under-rated rules of engagement for driving any vehicle: "Drive at a speed that will allow you to stop well within the distance you can see to be clear." (See rule 126 in the Highway Code, which drivers in at least the UK "have to know" and I guess a lot of other countries too - Ireland I know for a fact has an identical rule.)

This means, for the benefit of the hard-of-thinking, that you don't drive around bends at a speed that means you don't leave the road, with the tyres gently squealing.

You instead drive around a bend at a speed that will allow you stop if a herd of cattle/bunch of boy scouts/line of traffic/broken-down car/brick wall turns out to be just around it.

If you don't, then you are guilty of Dangerous Driving, and in theory but probably not so much in practice you can get the whole damn book thrown at you if you have an accident. Perhaps you are still in your twenties and thus invincible?

I learned of the existence of this rule a long time after passing my test, and was gobsmacked because I had never had my attention drawn to the rule while learning to drive (and yet it's so obvious when you think about it.) How I survived my first 5 years behind the wheel, I will never know. (Yes, I was a tyres-gently-squealing kind of driver...)

Quote from bbman :

So unless you hear that prices will go up or you'll have to pay a monthly subscription from now on, you can sleep well assuming that the business is running ok...

And even if things *did* go tits-up, I think most of us here (myself included) have had a hell of a lot of hours of fun for our £24 investment, so the LFS devs don't owe me a penny

This is amazing, whiners fighting with people who whine about whiners. Anyone who thinks it's lame to whine about the Scirocco being late - fine, have that opinion. You might be right - maybe it is lame. (I don't feel strongly either way.) But if you don't want to read the whines, just don't bother.
(Hey, does this make me someone who whines about whiners who whine about whiners? )

Not being funny here, but why is it that some people seem to think it's a badge of honour to be banned from the RR servers? I've visited one or two of them once or twice and failed to see a major problem...
Is there something "uncool" about 'em? Full of lousy drivers?? (Not what I've seen so far...)

Quote from Becky Rose :

Linux - Pain in the smegging smeg recepticle, how can it be the future when it's based on a 1970's concept of an OS? Why do [other] techies like it? Why are there arguments over pronounciation when I speak like the Queen, dammit. Why does compiling an app on Linux involve acts of wild desperation, googling, and random guess work via trial and error and still result in inexplicable failure.

Hehe.
Yup, it has some issues. And despite some kernel hacking in the dark past, I've not used it so much lately. (Though having a bootable CD distro as a tool - e.g. Knoppix - for fixing busted/sick Windows installations or whatever is simply invaluable, and would have to be on my MUST-HAVE toolkit list.) Part of the reason for using it less is that management of updates got painful for me and I decided to have a life instead... So no home Linux for me right now (but plenty in work, where I don't have to be sysadmin ).

Why do techies like it? Well, perhaps partly cos you can get TOTALLY under the hood; because you can (with the appropriate level of knowledge) fix ANYTHING that goes wrong, without having to throw the towel in and reinstall the whole damn OS. Whereas with Windows, cruft just gradually builds up, and a bunch of binary config files accumulate slightly screwy settings over time, and next thing you know your PC is crippled, and you either bin it or reinstall
If an app misbehaves under Linux, I can track every library call or system call it makes, figure where it's getting stuck and work out if it's an app bug, a system misconfiguration, or a kernel bug. If that's possible under Windows, please tell me which tool to use. (I've been playing with Process Explorer recently, with limited success.) Not to mention, I've got access to the kernel source code, so if a kernel bug pisses me off enough, I can just fix it. Less easy with Windows, hmm?

Compiling apps? OK, there's a learning curve. But as someone else said, Windows is no walk in the park either. Just depends on whether you are the poor sod trying to port something from one to the other I guess.
But with Linux, my experience was mostly: download a tar.gz, run the config script, run the make, use the app. Easy.
(Compiling the kernel was slightly non-trivial for the first dozen times or so )

Hi Worry. Sorry to hear you have overindulged on LFS and have to take a break!
But many many thanks again for the time you put in organising the races and writing a superb Insim extension - Airio has lots of features I miss on other servers :clapclap:

Quote from EQ Worry :

Yes, my bad, sorry for the very short notice. I wasn't sure until the last moment if there should be a race or not. Just six people made it in time, but only 5 races because I lost connection and was offline for full 50 minutes. From what I heard it was one shortened race (15 minutes) and one very short (5 minutes). I'll make sure the next test race is announced much sooner, several days before the event, not several hours. Meanwhile suggestions for track to race on are welcome. Options: FE2R, KY2R, AS1, FE3, WE1, KY3R, AS2. :-)

Hehe. Yes indeed, a bit of a quiet evening. I think it was 5 of us that started the 15 minute race, but unfortunately we lost the leader (also to a connection problem I believe) about half-way in, and gained one more person mid-race :-)
The 5 lap race was quite close and more fun though! (Even though only four of us then...)

Quote from EQ Worry :

Doh, such pity, you must have missed it by just a minute or two - the server was opened until the 1st race start, that was around 21:03 UK time. What a pity... Next time try to use "end" as a password...

Yeah, figured that must be what happened.
Got stuck late in work and missed the boat... Ah well!
Will practise hard for the next one
...
Hmm, just checked the date for the next race, will be out of the country until the night before so might still be able to compete, but has the track been decided yet? (Would be nice to practise a bit and I've only got experience of about three tracks so far...)

Argh, can't connect - private host, needs password...?
Am I too late?

Hi...
Still finding my way around the forum ;-) and just came across this thread.

Is the race series still going?
Didn't see anything new on the team website (but maybe looking in wrong place).

Quote from wheel4hummer :

This is the car info format. Nothing about the torque curve, I don't think.
http://www.lfs.net/?page=CAR_INFO_BIN

Aha - thanks. Yes indeed, no hint of torque curves in there . Shame.

I have to presume somebody asked for the torque curves before engaging in heroics to extract the curves from the replay files... No?
Can't imagine why the devs wouldn't be happy to distribute them...

Thanks for the info, all!

I've now tried VHPA, and was wondering where it got the torque curves from, and then I read Bob's post. (Wow, dedication!) It's a seriously nice, and complex tool, for which I hope there's good documentation :-) (Only scratched the surface last night.)

However, given the info in Bob's post, it seems like the easiest thing to do would be simply to ask the devs to provide the torque curve though, no? Reverse-engineering it from the force data in the replay data seems a bit extreme, unless of course the devs have already declined to provide the data...

Unless of course, the BIN file contains the torque curve, as the other posts seem to hint.

(Btw, does the replay actually provide contact-patch force, or does it have to be inferred from the acceleration? In which case how does the acceleration get corrected for wind resistance...?)