I decided I needed a skin for the FZ5. Just because

Quote from deggis :

LOL! It must be a conspiracy!! Prepare your foil hats!!!!

Pfeh. You don't honestly think that the government is going to let you buy REAL tinfoil, do you? It's all crap aluminium, which can actually INTENSIFY their mind control waves. A wet towel is your only hope.

And hotlapping. Lots of hotlapping.

Richard, one thing you may find if you invest more time in the game is that the standard setups aren't all that great. (pause for the howls of "but I use the 'race1' setup and it's fantastic"...it's not, but it's better than the other standard setup) I personally agree that the breakaway behaviour of the tyres is very soft and that a somewhat less forgiving traction/slip curve would make the car much more interesting. I'd certainly prefer it if they squirmed around a bit more. Having said that, my own setups can exhibit a degree of slip and grab so it's not all "driving on ice" as some would have it. Also, a lot of the standard setups can be extremely loose depending on how you drive. I usually back the camber, the rear compression damping and the rear sway bar off a fair bit and that generally results in a more neutral attitude for the car. In other words I generally get both understeer and oversteer from the car depending how I drive it. This is understandably a frustration for someone who's just starting out, but then fiddling with setups can be part of the fun. If it's not part of the fun for you, asking if anyone has a decent setup for a given car when you get into a server usually results in at least one person giving you their setup (they can be transferred online).

This underscores what makes LFS as good as it is, and you did touch on it somewhat. You looked at the basic netcode and LFS world and noted how well it works. To take that further, the degree to which people are prepared to help each other out within the LFS community is its real strength. Similarly, the developers are active within the forums and provide feedback and listen to what the community are saying to a degree that I've not seen in any other game. The driving feel and immersion levels are just one part of the game, albeit a very large and important part; but if you played the game offline or only in the demo servers and never frequented the forum you'd miss out on a vitally important part of what LFS is. Certainly, there are braindead T1 wreckers but the clean drivers, the teams and groups like CRC more than make up for that. While, as you said, the former can't really be attributed to any particular aspect of the game, the latter are part of the community that's grown around the game. Again, this isn't something that is apparent immediately, but which becomes more and more a part of the game the more you play it.

Most of your criticisms have some merit, although looking at your online stat demonstrates that there are a lot of tracks that you haven't yet seen, unless you've covered a lot of tarmac offline. Kyoto Ring National is one track that comes to mind, as do the longer iterations of Fern Bay. (I personally like FE Black, but then I'm a sucker for the longer tracks.) You did say that you would look at LFS again once the full release of S2 is in place. Do so, but realise that LFS is not something which can adequately be explored in a couple of days. This is probably true of other driving sims and it doesn't fit well into the environment of magazine reviews but that doesn't make it less relevant. We're honestly not as partisan as we seem; there's plenty of threads within this forum criticising one aspect of the game or another. There are some who won't hear a word spoken against the game, but the rest of us recognise the shortcomings, as do the developers.

See you online.

I just did a quick conversion and £36=AU$83.44. Most games here cost $80-100 already. I can't really see S3 being poor value for money

Quote from tristancliffe :

Actually, I think the TT was flipping from the front, so they added the spoiler at the back to ruin the airflow over the back, and reduce the rear downforce, and allowing balance back into the downforce.

But as any body who likes cars know, the TT is a pile of poo, apart from the clever gearbox. Just a shame it's flappy paddle.

I seem to recall that the TT suffered from high speed overspeer. I think they reduced the size of the rear sway bar as well as fitting the spoiler.

Actually, come to think of it, you just told us wtf is up with the devs to a fair extent so you were on topic

Szwei and RunRiot are the two I certainly would have suggested, especially Szwei.

Quote from Turbocharge :

we have your IP Address MmadmaxX...and we know what you look like.....watch your back....

Pfeh. One post and this was it? Fighting the enemies of freedom and justice this week, are we?

Quote from animosity :

If you redline a real road car, does it suddenly splutter and loose power?
Well if it did then my ex, a carburetted 1400 would've been 6 feet under by the time I'd driven it for 3 months.
I redlined that car broken (it had no torque so to get it to go anywhere, it needed to be ripped... and I was 18).

No rev limiter, and I took that car (stupidly) to well over 7000RPM.
Official "red-line" started at 6000RPM for that car.

Still to this day, its got all the power it ever had.

A real road car will sputter and lose power if it has a rev limiter. They either cut the fuel of retard the ignition which makes them run poorly enough that they can't rev any higher.

Quote from Lola Popeye :

LIve for speed......Plasterer..........................LFS ..... Plasterer.......gee Scawen, must of been a hard decision for you

You'll notice that he only pulled out the fuses for the kitchen. Probably got the important stuff on another circuit.

Well other sims are bound to register on the radar from time to time. I wandered back into Grand Prix Legends last night. I downloaded a few extra tracks and had a blat. I'm better at it than I used to be (all that time in LFS, I suspect) but the AI still disappears off into the distance (unlike LFS). Good solid fun. Mind you, it's a passing fancy. It still has a place on my hard drive and it's one of the best sims ever made, but I still prefer LFS.

Quote from ColeusRattus :

Tonite playin around with gradients again, so I have a nice base for custom skins. Because it's in black and white, you can colour it ingame too... enjoy

I did one very much like this for the LX cars in S1...nice one

I had some good racing on ASHistREV the other night. Some XFR and some FOX. A bit of F08 as well that was actually racing rather than noob wreckage. Most fun.

I can't get the game to assign an axis to the handbrake. It looks like it does in the controls settings screen, but then when you get out onto the track it doesn't work. button works ok, but sometimes I like to squeeze the handbrake a little while trail braking, just to shift the brake bias back a little. I can't do that with an on/off button. I'm using a Logitech Extreme 3D non-ffb joystick and trying to assign the handbrake to the throttle slider. It worked fine in S1.

I'd like a ghost car...it's a way of being able to watch a replay of your best lap while you drive that doesn't exist otherwise. A ghost car of somebodyelse's best lap would be dodgy though.

I think a lot of the engine sounds need more of the fundamental frequency in there. They seem to have a really high harmonic content which makes them buzzy and rattly. If you listen to something like an F1 or Champ car engine (from outside the car) it's quite a pure sound, which is what gives it that howling (or shrieking, once the revs get up) quality that raises the hairs on the back of the neck.

That's most pretty. Yay for pretty cars.

Quote from skiingman :

It'd be nice if there were some big conspiracy to that effect....but thats just not the case.

A given acceleration over a given period of time requires a given amount of work to be done. This work cannot be done without power. All the torque in the world is nice, but means absolutely squat if the torque can't be produced far enough to the right of the graph.

I can give a very realistic and very obvious example which proves this point.

" torque/weight is directly analogous to force/mass which equals acceleration."

So I've got this electric motor that produces 2000lb-ft of torque at 1 rpm. It produces 300lb-ft at 1000 rpms. This is not an unrealistic torque curve for an electric motor.

Although it will smoke the tires even in fourth gear from a stop, no amount of gear swapping in the world will make it accelerate faster over any reasonable time period or distance than a 160hp gasoline engine making about 150lb-ft of torque.

By stating this:
Torque/effective wheel radius = delivered linear Force at contact patch.

you are implying that you don't understand the function of a gearbox. Bob did a good job of explaining its torque multiplication duties.

If torque to weight were a better indicator of performance than power to weight (obviously false with a basic look at physics) the izzy Celica would be faster/quicker than the duzzy Celica. Its not. Same goes for ZO6 vettes, which really don't make more torque than stock vettes. They move the torque curve further right, increasing the PRODUCT of torque and RPM......horsepower.

Right on, and thats exactly why the figure given is hp/weight, not torque/weight. Given non-silly gearing you can get pretty much the same result of calculation from hp/weight as you can by plotting torque available at a given engine speed/gear combo over time. Its a lot less labor intensive too, unless you have something cool like the tool Bob is using.

Close, but not quite *grin*. Acceleration from a given speed to a given speed is a quotient of horsepower and weight; that is, acceleration over time. This is determined not by peak power of the engine, but the area that you'd get if you graphed the torque curve of the engine (torque x rpm equaling power, of course) over the used rev range. Acceleration as an instantaneous value, that is at any given moment you're accelerating at Xmetres/sec/sec, is a straightforward torque/mass (and drag) equation. In other words (torsional) force divided by mass equals acceleration at that moment.

So acceleration from point to point IS determined by horsepower, but that's NET hp (over distance) not PEAK hp (instantaneous) which is a fairly meaningless value in this application because you're only at peak hp for a moment and using a work over time derivation for an instantaneous value is just silly. At any given moment best acceleration will be at peak torque.

It's only when you hold a single point or very narrow section of the rev range over a period of time significant to the exercise that you're performing (in this case, pushing a vehicle) that peak power becomes the most significant value. Because you're not accelerating hard, torque over TIME becomes more significant that torque over DISTANCE. So at high power/low acceleration (at or close to top speed) horsepower is more significant. So saying that overall torque is more important or power is more important is a bit simplistic, the emphasis will shift dependant on specific factors.

Or as people who think less and do more would say, torque makes you accelerate, power gives you top speed.

Last edited by Resound, Sat, 8 Oct 2005 04:01.

I just found the video (googled for yellowbird and nurburgring) and he's not drifting in the showboating, maximum-opposite-lock-at-every-corner sense of the word. He certainly gets some lock on through a few corners, especially the ones where they bothered to use the external camera footage but he's not deliberately shredding the tyres. Even so, by the time he got past the karussel (about the 5min mark) the back tyres seemed awfully secondhand. It sounded like he wasn't leaning on the throttle anywhere nearly as hard as he was at the start of the lap and the transitions to sliding were a lot smoother so I'd say his tyres were getting distinctly greasy. Awesome driving though.

I found this here. It's the second highest rated movie there and there's a good reason for that. If anyone ever asks you why you play LFS, don't say a word. Just sit them down in front of your machine and show them this. I don't know who Steven "Kraniwani" Kranhold is, but I love his work

Excellent stuff. Def Leppard never rocked so well.

Excellent stuff. I love the fact that there were so many people involved...the traffic rocked

Quote from benmjt :

IF your looking for a drift skin for your cars there is only one person to look for his the best drift skinner out there u can hit him up and well do any design u want email him [email protected]
www.VTcommodoredesigns.tk thats his web site and these are some of the stuff hes done

Can't align across skin seams, overuses carbon textures (and, again, can't align it across seams) [edit]: A bit harsh. but take a look at skinners like andylec or crumbut if you want to see quality.

Last edited by Resound, Sat, 1 Oct 2005 08:10.

I finally got off my arse and did a skin for the XFR. Comments would be welcome.

"She might not look like much kid, but she's got it where it counts." Bit of rust, bit of primer, haven't quite got around to repainting that replacement second-hand right hand rear guard, needs a wash...goes well though. And it passed scrutineering...what more do you really need?

Last edited by Resound, Thu, 29 Sep 2005 05:51.