or just going back to umm, mouse?

Well, that's a bit of a relief! I was worried you guys just got sick of it all and pulled the plug

And yeah, the twitter account eventually occurred to me (not updated for some weeks tho), but I had no idea there was a Google+ account (last updated in Sep '14 ).

Quote from Scawen :

Thanks! Now if the registered users could go and buy an S2 license so they can try out the new Westhill that would be an excellent idea!

OMFG Scawen I cannot believe you just did that to us all :-O
Like kicking a puppy!

Quote from Litro :

Im still missing CTRA servers..

LOL! Me too

Quote from Scawen :

That's a pity if it's true. Sad timing as I'm sure the new Westhill update is going to provide a lot of fun. I'm adding a lot more good support for the custom configs system and Cargame.nl was one server that made some good use of open configs, which recently became practical.

Well I'm hoping that if Dave isn't too hacked off, he'll share the pretty cool infrastructure (scripts/PRISM/Airio etc.) that he had built up to help others pick up where he left off.

It's certainly a shame that CG is gone - was almost the only server I used for the last couple of years.

Yeah I agree random is best, especially if a way can be found to tune the track length to the number of drivers. I think you said online that this might come with the new insim? (CG did it somehow, but I can't remember how.)

It's an interesting idea though (updating the mini-map, I mean).
I wonder...

Sigh. It was looking for a while as though I was gonna be able to make it after all - my son was going to head back to uni a bit early. But then the plan changed back again, argh.

So - enjoy yourselves, you lot!

d'oh! /me fails!
for some reason I thought maybe you were doing a one-day version of the meet (but then Saturday woulda made more sense ;P). <cough>

aaaanyway - on an unhappy note, am gonna need to check, but i suddenly have a sinking feeling that that's the w/e my son goes back to uni so my absence might not go down well... :|

Hey, is that a typo or do you really mean to do it on a Friday Jason? :o
Hope you are enjoying the Rift btw!

Quote from Scawen :

No Timewarp yet and I'm not sure about it yet. The need to actually wait for the the Timewarp point (just before the vertical sync) is hard to deal with.
[snip]
It sounds more suited to a multithreaded system where physics and graphics are on different threads.

Is there any kind of plan to go multithreaded with LFS? I reckon that would be a big win.

Quote from Scawen :

I'm not convinced of the need for Timewarp in LFS at the moment. The predicted head position is so accurate, the image always seems to be in the right place.

Maybe you've already tried this, but perhaps you could fetch the timewarp point and not use it for the graphics - just log the difference between it and the point that was used for the rendering. That way you could quantify whether it's worth the work to implement it properly.

I'm very keen (My availability will depend on the final choice of date tho.)
I've never yet made it to a karting meet at your place Jason (sob) but I seem to recall reading that you have quite a bit of space - so maybe more than one Rift setup could be obtained (to reduce the queueing ). Not sure how many ppl who are likely to make it actually have Rifts, of course.

Timewarp sounds seriously cool!
I can't wait until they get this product to the point of retailing it. I may succumb in the meantime and buy a dev kit of course.

I'm chuckling at the ridiculousness of people spending lots on a PC, lots on a FFB wheel, lots on a DK2, and then, umm, 24 quid on an LFS licence
The wheel and DK2 alone would be ~10-20 times the cost of LFS. If Scavier were (are? ) a little more mercenary they would (will?) be selling VR-enabled LFS versions at a premium.

Quote from Scawen :

I think when you store info about someone's computer system, you really need their consent before you do it. So that's just an added complication that puts me off doing it in a hurry.

Yeah, I think you're probably right (despite the temptation to just do it). Thanks for clarifying.
NB: I'm not keen to distract you from the main thing

Quote from Scawen :

At the moment it appears that "some" people do have SM2 cards but we don't really know how many.

Scawen - are you actively against the idea of LFS sending PC information back to base (e.g. CPU id and speed, OS, RAM, GPU)?
Or perhaps it's just not a priority?

(The subject keeps coming up but I don't remember ever noticing you comment on it one way or another - apologies if I've missed it.)

Quote from cargame.nl :

So influencing colors is not a problem but gamma is? Hmm OK, well.. I have zero experience with that. All I know is that gamma has influence on the 3D picture quality/experience. The issue I have is that I can change gamma for the RGB channels but its for both images at the same time. Now I wonder what happens if gamma of separate images can be influenced.

Maybe nothing

It's more or less a poor mans 3D mode anyway but, still nice to convince others (and myself :facepalm that 3D in a racing sim actually is better.

Haven't found my 3D glasses yet so I've yet to experience how good/bad it is
As for the gamma thing, what I meant was that it's likely to be computationally expensive - instead of just a few multiply and add operations, you need to create a non-linear mapping between the input and output values (using x^y for example). Doing that on a per-pixel basis seems hugely sub-optimal. However, since I haven't tried it, I can't be sure it would be slow enough to be a problem so wth, why not give it a shot

Quote from cargame.nl :

( https://www.flickr.com/photos/ ... 230654930/in/photostream/ )

I don't know if LFS is doing this but can Gamma correction be controlled by adding something to anaglyph.psh ?

I just checked, and yes, you can do all manner of non-linear stuff using functions available to the pixel shaders. But doing it one pixel at a time seems likely to be very slow.
You are specifically thinking of the 3D mode though? (Different gamma for each side, thus can't use a global gamma in the card settings.) If so, I guess you could just try it in the shader file, and if that sucks for performance then LFS would need to do the rendering with a different gamma on each side...

Quote from smove :

It's great that you put the optional anaglyph mode in LFS!

Can anybody explain how to edit "Anaglyph.psh" to make it work with magenta-green glasses as well? I don't quite understand how to work with this file ...

Well, a simple and probably nasty version might go like this...

The most basic red-cyan code at the top of the psh file (NB: "bad retinal rivalry (brightness conflicts)" - hence it's not the version in use) looks like this:
// Out.Colour.r = L.r; // r = red from left eye
// Out.Colour.g = R.g; // g = green from right eye
// Out.Colour.b = R.b; // b = blue from right eye
// Out.Colour.a = 1.0f;

I imagine you could simply uncomment that and tweak it to read:
// want green from left, magenta (i.e. red + blue) from right:
Out.Colour.r = R.r; // r = red from right eye
Out.Colour.g = L.g; // g = green from left eye
Out.Colour.b = R.b; // b = blue from right eye
Out.Colour.a = 1.0f;
return Out;

That might be good enough to try. Fine-tuning it to mix the colours a bit more (like the Dubois versions at the bottom of the file) would require more head-scratching but should cause fewer headaches

Um, I shuda checked Dubois' website before posting
See https://www.flickr.com/photos/e_dubois/5132528166/

Last edited by Neilser, Fri 25 Jul 2014, 20:26. Reason : Dubois already generated a matrix for green-magenta!

Quote from Trekkerfahrer :

Yeah, i already use this, but its hard to find the Optimum, when Sound is not live... and this mini slider is not accurate enough

When I'm adjusting balance, I just keep hitting the slider (it goes ping each time) until I get it right. Possibly the Win7 improvements broke the ping too?

Quote from Trekkerfahrer :

Just a small request for handicapped people: I have a Problem with my ears too... i can just hear 20% on the left and 80% on the right... is it possible to get a slider to adjust the Sound Balance?

Your sound card doesn't let you do it via the mixer??
(Oh hang on - I seem to recall they hid the balance options stupidly deeply starting on Win7, but it's still there... Somewhere under advanced properties or something insane.)

My oar:

I have an old PC - 7 years old + change. My GPU wasn't high-end even when I bought it, and the PC as a whole can only sort-of cope with open layouts right now. But the GPU is an SM3 model (Radeon X1650 XT). So I personally look forward to trying an SM3 test version

Yes, there are bound to be people running LFS on SM2 cards. We don't know how many but it'll be non-zero (and I agree with the often-made suggestion that LFS should phone home so you know how many OS/CPU/GPU combos are out there, Scawen).
How many is too many to move LFS on to SM3? (I have no particular view on this.) Supporting both is great if it doesn't suck much dev time...

It might help if someone with an SM2 card could pipe up and say "hey my PC is still usable for LFS", cos it would convince me that such a person exists. At present I doubt it.
Edit: on reflection, I realise this bit is just wrong. My bad. Bound to be a handful of people with quicker CPUs than me and yet with SM2 cards...

Last edited by Neilser, Thu 24 Jul 2014, 18:24.

Quote from cargame.nl :

Still amazing to see that the GPU load doesn't increase in my case.

That is a bit freakish since I'd (like you?) have assumed that the FPS drop would be basically entirely due to the GPU. Perhaps the load reporting is bogus.

Haven't tested yet but I guess it's too much to expect an FPS improvement on open layouts? (Since I seem to recall that LFS is CPU-bound in that case.)

But FPS improvements are always good, and am looking to trying the cross-eyed 3D

Quote from Meanie :

Well thanks... but I just made a test and hosted from the game itself (not the DEDI .exe), asked for a friend to login into the server and he gets the same error I do: "Connect timed out".

It's a while since I last ran my own host, but you aren't exactly inundated with answers so here goes with a couple of suggestions

I suspect (rather than know) that the symptoms you mention in your post a few up the thread are telling us that one of the two protocols is working (e.g. TCP?) and the other isn't. (Or it could be that one or more of the four combinations of protocol/direction is bust, e.g. UDP/outbound.) If I were debugging it myself I'd try two things - firstly install Wireshark and catch the relevant packets & conversations, and secondly to try to connect from a second PC on the same router in case that makes the symptoms any easier to understand/debug.
Good luck!

Quote from Pablo Donoso :

It's a good idea to use different unique passwords for all of these:

- your lfs.net / lfsforum.net password
- your S2 user license game password
- your registered email password
- all other sites you're registered to

Never re-use your lfs.net password or game password for other stuff and it won't be at risk or compromised.

Huh?? Unless I've misunderstood you, you are completely missing the point.
As the post (which I linked above) from Victor says, LFS credentials can (and in fact must) be used at four and only four websites:
www.lfs.net (previously www.liveforspeed.net)
www.lfsworld.net
www.lfsforum.net
www.lfsmanual.net

Note the massively unhelpful fact that these four sites are on FOUR different domains... The phishing risk arises precisely because of this fact. Do you see the problem now?
If some thief invents a new website like lfsshop.net, lfsreplays.net, or similar, people should be forgiven for it not exactly jumping out at them that this is not a legit website, given the (IMHO bizarre) decision to have separate domains for every LFS website that is legit...

Well, had one last attempt to find old threads about this.
I keep finding this thread, but nothing else

If anyone knows why the idea was abandoned/rejected in the past I'd be keen to hear the reason...