Quote from EQ Worry :

Ah, Neil, you're completely right. And thanks for the league info!

Would love to see you online And are you still shunning your wheel in favour of your (spit!) mouse?

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 )

Quote from garph :

Did you actually read that thread?

Chill, man, chill.

Yes, I did read it (and am actually quite sorry I did )
Did you read what I posted? A guy early in that thread made the remark I'm referring to, and it piqued my curiosity. I was not using the thread as an example for anything I'm well aware that that incident had nothing at all to do with passing under yellows, and that's one of two reasons I didn't put my question in that thread. (The second being that the thread has descended into something much sadder than a flamefest and is now quite tragic, and most people have probably quite sensibly stopped reading it.) Sorry if my wording made it sound like I was using the thread as an example of passing under yellows

Back on topic though, I do think the flag system is often flaky/misleading/wrong.
But the tricky incidents are those where someone is posing a genuine hazard on the track, you have to pass them, probably off line, and you have to slow down to do it "safely", but then you run the real risk of getting passed by the guy behind. In fact, maybe slammed hard from behind by him cos you slowed down. Having said that, I mostly do slow down, and as a result I often do get passed. Stuff happens.

On balance, I'm glad CTRA doesn't have a rule about passing under yellows, because I think it would be a nightmare to enforce, and would lead to a lot of name-calling and pain and maybe not help very much...

In another thread ("CTRA and Yellow flag") someone complained about people passing under yellows.

I gulped, because I've done it, and actually just about everyone does - if you don't, then you end up at the back just after T1

So then I rechecked the rules. In fact, they say nothing about not passing under yellows, just basically advise caution and not going full steam.

(The actual text is: Yellow Flags: Drivers are expected to heed yellow flags and drive accordingly. Driving headlong into accidents when drivers have been issued yellow flags is not considered acceptable behaviour. Penalties may result if such instances compound existing race incidents.)

I have mixed feelings.
It is pretty annoying when you are in a tight battle, and you slow down for an incident and get passed by the guy you've kept ahead of for five laps and lose a win/podium/whatever. But if the rules say nothing about it, and passing under yellows is the done thing on CTRA servers, then I guess it's just one of those rolls of the dice - you win some, you lose some.

Does anyone out there avoid passing under yellows?

Firstly, I have to echo the fine words from others - Sam and the whole team behind CTRA (past and present) have done us all a great service, and I'm very grateful. Most of my last few hundred races have been on CTRA servers.
But burning out because of it is a Bad Thing, so put yourself first Sam.

On the report backlog issue - one suggestion which doesn't seem to have come up in this thread: Wipe The Slate Clean. How about an amnesty for all unprocessed reports?

Someone said in another thread that they would personally delete their old reports if they could, as they felt it was unfair for someone to get hit with a punishment months after the offence, perhaps even after they have become a reformed citizen... I have a lot of sympathy for that approach.

And wiping the slate clean would lift a very large weight off the shoulders of the admin(s)...

It's not a total solution of course, and the ongoing burden may still be too much to bear.

Whatever happens, many many thanks for CTRA, and good luck for the future.

Quote from Toddshooter :

Your right they are not on the Inferno site. I'll shoot a few too you when we see each other online.
On second thought here's a link to our site and you can download the sets.
http://www.rsradicals.com/webs ... loads.php?do=cat&id=4

Nice one, thanks

Quote from zeugnimod :

Ctrl + S and the screenshot gets saved to LFS/data/shots.

Ooo, that was embarrassingly easy! Thanks

Quote from zeugnimod :

No, they don't. You have to press Shift + U while the layout is loaded on the server, then you get an option to save the layout.

Cool! I had been planning to try Shift-U to try and get a screenshot (must learn how to take screenshots ) but didn't realise that would actually allow saving the layout too.