@Tristan, there's basically nothing they can add or improve so much to get me into paying what they're currently asking (w/o discounts), unless it's free beer Plus, for the classes I race in the tyre model is already more than satisfactory to me.
For those waiting for re-subscribe promo codes, there may be good news: I got one, it's a 50% off voucher for the "Season Pass", and expires at the end of the month.
I know there are people running dual and triple monitor setups (e.g. Jaap) so it is possible, but I have no clue as to what technology they are using to do that.
Don't tell me BTW I was talking about the minimap, which offers no visual cue to tell whether a car's in the pitlane or the track. If the pit crew can't tell that IRL then they're blind
If you can see what's happening then you don't need a minimap. You're only interested in figuring things out in advance when you can't see and then from the minimap you won't be able to tell the cars are outside or in the very middle of the track.
Not much you can do about that either, except fetch some daisies on yyour way out, and that's not something that can be reliably done at full speed on many tracks (South City makes for a great example here)
To say it's a valid observation is an overstatement per se, but anyway it's pretty much obvious he's comparing the two. If you still have doubts that's where he said:
You never know who's in the pitlane and who's not anyway, and running into a yellow flag the most effective strategy is to keep eyes on the track and slow down.
I can't honestly say I have more problems or accidents in sims without a minimap. Most likely the opposite; and it's different to have someone tell you what's happening and having to figure out something from a map, that's why these days most people rely GPS receivers instead
In fact this information is provided through the pitboard in nKP.
I find a bit surprising that you're clinging on to those old statements, especially when Scawen's been refraining as much as possible from making any more new ones.
When detachable parts were announced (2007 IIRC), Scawen expected them to be introduced relatively soon and that clearly hasn't happened. For all we know the necessary changes in the game plan may have relegated an improved damage model to the bottom of the list.
In reality, we are stuck with what has been released.
That was not the point: it's under everybody's eyes that in spite of version numbers and tags, LFS is overall far more polished than nKP. The damage model for the time being is not subpar in nKP, while it is in LFS: it's plain unfair and completely pointless to compare LFS and nKP and criticize the latter for it (which is what cargame did and what I replied to)
Plus the current damage model in LFS has promoted bad driving habits for years on end, and this won't disappear overnight with just a tag change on the LFS executable.
What's the use of knowing the exact position of the car on the track, squinting eyes at a minimap when we should be busy driving?
Deltas are enough for me, both in nKP and iRacing, and I try to ignore them as much as possible (in iR) as it's way too easy to end up paying more attention to the numbers rather than the race.
That "LFS is incomplete" is one of those moot points/community mantras that have been used to justify mostly anything, as such it has been satirized in the LFSforum bingo game. (Much like the classic line "write your own sim then" which could have been easily spent in this discussion. But I prefer constructive discussion for the most part whenever feasible.)
Arguably, every sim is only partially complete in most of its parts. For the issue at stake, rFactor has more comprehensive damage modeling than nKp or iRacing, and all of them are better than LFS.
So it's OK to discuss how nKP could learn from rFactor, whereas complaining about nKP damage model while lauding LFS is the pot calling the kettle black.
It follows that if nKP was called 0.5 ALPHA you wouldn't argue about its (relatively superior) damage model, but if LFS was called 1.1 you wouldn't defend what you called a "placeholder" system.
As I see it, they can call whatever they want, the current products are what they are, and I fail to see the significance of a label that's only meant for revision tracking
Can you please explain to me why the minimap is _absolutely_ _necessary_ for you to admin a race?
The minimap is not one of those. For the rest, nKP has the pitboard, AIM on the single seaters and that little status bar on the 500 (I would have preferred something AIM-like but it's inobtrusive enough)
Hey that's not fair. I could have used the LFSforum bingo arguments too
No idea do you have specific issues with the current damage model?
Because of: how it drives, the FFB; tracks are on average more interesting than LFS, not as flat, no LFS's chicanes everywhere syndrome, free track editor. Limited sets. Open diff and FWD cars are drivable.
There are no minimaps because guess what? there are no HUDs IRL. iRacing doesn't a minimap either. LFS can do that too using Shift-F.
The graphics IMO are not bad at all. Yes, they could be better, but the same can be said about LFS (and I did it just a couple days ago). Models are better than LFS's more often than not.
Damage system sucks you say? in LFS you can stamp a car into a wall at 150 kph and then drive away with nary a scratch. That's arcade-ish.
Installing from scratch only takes a few minutes here, and I'm certainly not running current gen hardware.
It's understood the thing has more than its fair share of rough edges, but it seems you were too busy whining to notice the important things.
Hell not even I think it's as bad as I may think :icon23:
Does an extremely drunk something relly need a reason to do that? Not in my book and if it's as massive as an elephant you shouldn't question its motives either
I see where you're coming from, but TBH I wouldn't think it's safe to assume the non-posting part of the community is completely the opposite of LFSforum.
Anyway I'm just trying to sniff the wind, if there is some truth to what I've said it might be interesting to see how it turns out. In the meanwhile let's go back to waiting for the test patch forum to be opened once again.
The graphics, regardless of some rough edges, are pretty much decent. Yes they could be made better, but ATM LFS is lagging behind on those things that matters the most to simracers: tracks (quality of), force feedback and physics (tyre and suspension modeling, collisions etc)
There seems to be some kind of divergence between the evolution of this community and the direction of development.
The dev team is apparently more concerned about and working on the simracing part of LFS. The community however has been turning more and more into a bunch of gamers, while the simracers have been progressively putting LFS on hold to focus on other sims.
This post looks quite in line with this trend to me. I do wonder what will happen when the new patch comes out if it turns out to be what I expect it to be.
I wouldn't have expected anything different but thanks for keeping us posted.
Unless there's some subtle aspect that I'm overlooking, it shouldn't be too hard to avoid two cars from spawning/being towed in/to the same place. It's more difficult to prevent a car from pitting in the spot where another one's going to spawn (which is a problem in LFS, it doesn't even check if there's a car already parked).
But it is a rather minor problem, especially when there are many pit stalls and little cars in the field - and it is a bit disconcerting to see cars pass through you in the pit lane
I wonder why they don't just handle the cars normally when in the pits. If drivers will try their best to avoid accidents on the track, why not in the pit lane/stalls?
Non collidable state?! This sounds so much like a border line situation. Why so worried about this when lapped cars are allowed to interfere with the race of cars on the leading lap?
I was on for a bit yesterday, just wanted to point out that forced cockpit view has some minor side effects. For some reason in LFS the eye position can't be moved backwards more than a lot, so the choice is between settling on a wider angle, or relinquishing some of your peripheral vision (on some cars this may also affect the ability to see the wing mirrors). When FCV is off I just get around this problem by switching to Custom view, click on eye position and finally setting Y to a negative value.
I got used to this driving position from iRacing and I find it to be a good compromise to avoid too much distortion and still retain decent peripheral vision.
BTW I know this is a limitation with LFS (or it might even be an unrealistic option in iR) not a server problem, and it's pretty clear why you would choose to turn it on, so do not take this as a request or a complaint, just a FYI.
From what I remember from older discussions, there's some sort of consensus about load sensitivity being botched in LFS and the reason why differentials don't behave quite the way you would expect them to do, i.e. locked diffs + ultrastiff suspensions work wonders, because the outer tyres can be overloaded like there's no tomorrow, and even with the inner suspended in the air, it can still exert more force than the two tyres both making contact with the ground and more realistic loads on them.
Even if they had 1 mm scans of the whole track, you probably won't be able to play that. So in the end what matters the most is the conversion process that makes the map usable in the sim.
And anyway, I do wonder how much accuracy we can really feel through our run-of-the-mill, gaming-class steering wheels.
I happened to be without a credit card exactly when I was subscribing to iRacing (the old card was expired and I didn't request a new one :doh
So I put some money on my paypal account with a bank transfer. An added bonus of using paypal is the greedy boys cannot renew automagically your sub in case you forget to explicitly disable that <cough> feature.