You may want to have a look at the CPU usage as well, to see if there are any correlations between freezing and how much load there is on the CPU. But still, I'm almost sure this is due to a hard drive (SSD) type of problem, or the way OS or bios controls it.
At this point, given the update progress with car mods, lighting, multithreading, and tire physics, I think it's best that Scawen only thinks about updating the inSim core in an optimal way that would allow us to create external apps.
Then, we could in a very similar way to creating mods, be able to create a plethora of different apps and offer features that Lazy had, or even more. For a long time now, I've been desperately expecting a real-time FFB graph monitor, but now I see that this can also be a feature of such apps. An example of how they made available those Python apps in Assetto Corsa, that would be awesome for LFS, a new playground for us So my suggestion for Scawen is also to think along the lines of updating inSim with the simple 2D graphical capability of drawing points, lines, circles, squares, and similar on the screen.
As mentioned by Bass-Driver, we would need a new inSim packet that contains nodes, which is automatically sent whenever any car comes into contact with it (within some predefined sphere radius). Therefore, a node packet should also contain its spacial x,y,z coordinates as well as its radius, optionally maybe even a direction (heading) vector. Each node should be a physical sphere rather than a circle, this will make our life with math calculations easier.
Bear in mind that we should not distract Scawen way too much at this moment, there are many more important things he's working on, that are highly expected from all of us.
A little bit of math. Say you have 2 points A(x0, y0) and B(x1, y1) and you want to get a line that is defined by them. The equation of the line is: y(x)=(y1-y0)/(x1-x0)*x+y0. If you need to find a direction that is perpendicular to this line, its coefficient of direction is kp=-(y1-y0)/(x1-x0). Using the same equation for a straight line you can get another line: yp(x)=kp*x.
In 3D space, you can get the distance d between 2 points A(x0, y0, z0) and B(x1, y1, z1) as:
d=sqrt((x1-x0)^2+(y1-y0)^2+(z1-z0)^2)
Yeah, this feature will be good enough if it has at least 0.1s precision, which I think will suffice if we have at least some approximate path coordinates available or other players' data - you may add a new packet for it.
One thing that comes to my mind is to enable access to race line coordinates via inSim, if there is one available, it may be useful for calculations of time delta. Or access to other players' x,y,z car coordinates and vx, vy, vz velocities.
Unfortunately, there is no parental control in LFS whatsoever. The best thing you can do is just to block the chat completely, with a "-" button on the keyboard.
Second, join our AirAttack GTi server. It's quite child-safe and we have admins online most of the time. We have an inSim system that autokicks anyone using bad words. We try to prevent bad language and insults by moderation using punishments like kicks or bans. We also try our best to create fun and competitive casual racing for everyone, from beginners to pros. Many of our admins are patient enough to give driving lessons and share car sets. If you see anything inappropriate just contact our admins online, or use our discord.
The trick is that while driving an imaginary race car, there is no real-life counterpart to compare the handling to, so in principle, we have no idea if the car behaves as it should or not. At least for me, I only care for the car to be challenging and fun to drive. Is it real or not, I don't care much After all, it's only a PC game (sim) and no matter how hard the devs try, it will only be an approximation of a real race car physics.
If we dream, consider this. Let's say you have an awesome simulator of a real car at a real track. Even after driving many laps in the simulator, after getting in a real car, there will again be quite a big learning curve, but there will be left a race craft or knowledge about how to learn to adapt to the car and how to find an optimal race line. And that's all that matters, LFS can provide that. For example, 1st time I sat in a rental karting on an unknown-to-me track, I was better than everyone that day after only 10 laps. I knew very quickly how to find the limits of the little thing and this I owe to many hours of driving various combos in LFS.
He explained it already in a very detailed manner, but I'll give it a shot in layman's terms.
When you make your button, somewhere in the code you have to specify which value you want this button to display. So, instead of that value put Round(value, 0). The round function does exactly what you need, it takes the Var you input and rounds it up to the nearest integer, and returns the value.
A variable is a term in programming that is used for some quantities that are changing in real-time through various parts of the code, for short we just say Var and it can have many different types like integer, float and so on
Yes, I see. Well, I think it is a nice feature, most racing sims have some form of it.
Let's see what Scawen has to say. I'm sure he will find some way to implement it quickly. However, it is far from a trivial programing task which may introduce further delays with other updates
Should this delta be displayed in real-time, or is it enough if it is only shown per sector, like 3 times per lap, depending on how many sectors a particular track have?
If you want it in real-time this is in my opinion much bigger programming challenge then to just implement delta calculations for each sector, because LFS already has that and it needs only a small feature upgrade.
Our Airio can also show you the time for each sector and the delta is just the difference between that value and some reference value. If you want the simple version, then I propose that Scawen make some way of selecting what will be the reference value and display the delta somewhere. One can choose the ref between his PBs or else's or WR or current fastest player's sectors.
Actually, that is very well said What I think his point is to make us all sad that he is leaving or maybe push devs to update more frequently, which is ofc not going to happen, not because of him or anyone else.
Farewell dude, and thank you for playing LFS for 15 years, I wish you joy and many good races in RaceRoom or where ever
As far as I am aware, a new thing about tire physics will be to develop a numerical model that will simulate as close as possible the tire slip curves, where at the moment those curves are input into the game engine as some parametrized functions with rough steps, taken from somewhere else. Also, it may be that the tire model will have more than 24 radial and 3 axial zones as it has now, we'll have to wait and see. Obviously, the simulation will be more accurate if you have a smaller (more high-resolution) grid to define the tire model. This about temperatures is more about fine-tuning the model or making it with enough free parameters that will allow fine adjustments. So rather than trying to manually optimize a tire slip curve such that the end result is something realistic, Scawen wants to try to simulate the curve realistically in the first place with a more detailed tire model and avoid having to rely on external input curves.
About multithreading, Scawen is working on two threads that can run on a CPU in parallel, while sharing the same resources. Even if the CPU has only 1 core, it can still happen that it has more than 1 thread - multithread. Depending on the CPU architecture and operating system, it will always try to run the code as efficiently as possible. That may be such that both threads are run on core0 on separate threads, while other cores are remaining unused.
To sum up, one needs at least a CPU with 2 cores and 1 thread per core, or a single-core CPU with 2 threads to take advantage of this new update. Will it run better on a more capable CPU? is unlikely, but we also have to wait and see, as Scawen said he is testing it on his particular dual-core CPU where he already saw significant benefits with respect to a single thread LFS code run on the same CPU.
Normally, anything with 8-10Nm max holding torque is more than enough. This is not to say that you will max it out, you will probably use 20-30% of that torque in real racing conditions, but it is good to leave some headroom for high torque spikes that will not be clipped. Don't worry about setting it up, you will manage as there are plenty of resources for any DD online.
It's a good idea, demo servers could very much benefit from this. If it ever gets realized, I just ask to leave the wiggle room for adjusting the steer lock and brake pressure, as this has to be user optimized for every controller type - keyboard, mouse, gamepad, joystick, or wheel.
One curiosity though. How do we agree on which setup to choose as a "fixed one"? Could be fun to have a poll or a voting system for it some day.
It's good that you were able to narrow down under what conditions the freezing occurs. Yeah, really hard to say why it happens, I can't say if this is a software or a hardware problem.
I experienced a similar problem on a very very expensive HP laptop workstation that my wife uses for her work. It just kept randomly freezing, even up to 20 times per day in the middle of normal work. It did help for a while to disable all run-time power-saving options for SSD in bios, but it again started occasionally freezing which is a real bummer. She had to return it because it was unusable for anything, HP support was useless and this is a serious flaw in the low-level hardware-software design. I hope, it's not the case with your laptop.
Yeah, 7% ffb in LFS is normal for fast cars like GTs and open wheelers. For GTi cars I use max of 26% for XFG and about 20% for XRG. You should set what ever feels good for you such that you can still know what the car is doing and not to have to fight against the wheel.
If you are thinking of buying a DD wheel, consider the following.
They are all very good and very much good value for the money. Think about how much you will be using it and if you actually have that much free time to spend on it. Also, due to increased available torque, you may want to upgrade to a better desk or even a cockpit with a seat, and at that point, things can go sky-high with the price if one gets too carried away. It's an addiction, so big caution there it can easily seriously endanger friendships, relationships, or marriages.
You are correct about clipping, in LFS ffb strength should be set to give a max signal with little to no clipping, independent of a wheel. This depends very much on your driving style car and track. Then the desired ffb strength you can set with wheel settings in driver. Think of LFS ffb strength setting as a volume slider for an audio card in Windows. You always want this to max available but without any clipping or distortion, it just so happens that for most sound cards in Windows this is at 100%, while it LFS Scawen chose that this is around 20% or so. It's just about scaling, maybe he will make this number different when we have new tire physics, but for now, the sweet spot is 10-20%. After that, you adjust the volume of your music to your liking in the settings of your audio amplifier - the wheel itself.
Yes, any direct drive wheel will work fine in LFS. There aren't many options to configure in LFS, except for overall ffb strength of about 20% (depending on the car and track), ffb rate which should be set at 100Hz and ffb resolution set to 10k. The rest you can play with in the driver settings of a particular wheel if you need to fine-tune the final torque and other stuff to your liking.
Yes, direct-drive (DD) wheels are very good. Comparison between G29 and DD is like comparing small plastic PC speakers with a high-end Hi-Fi speaker with 3 drivers. The AC servo motor of 1kW can reproduce pretty much everything from an ffb signal, down to the tiniest detail, so you can feel everything LFS has to offer. Because ffb signal is not really a true replica of forces that come through a steering wheel of a race car, there is a big freedom in what needs to be felt there and every sim developer has implemented their idea of, call it an ffb flavor. In my opinion, LFS has the best ffb in that sense, it gives you exactly what you need in order to understand how the car behaves and it also gives some sense of G-forces, that would normally come through the car seat in real life, but without too much high-frequency road noise and other unnecessary and distracting vibrations.