Well just to be clear : houses in London cost a LOT and the tax man likes to take a big share of our earnings.
So... no, although S2 sales have been good, Eric did not buy a house outright, that would be impossible around here. He did what nearly everyone must do and he put down his deposit and got a mortgage to buy the house. So what does that mean for you? We need to get some good releases out there to keep paying for the rest of it.
LFS Progress, 2006
Hello to all.
This is just a really quick note as I am starting to see more questions and frustration, from people who want an update. I hope this post will help to explain how things are going.
I first want to remind you how we work here. We don't work to a specified schedule or an exact feature list. We have our lists of things to do and we get on with them. We do allow ourselves to get sidetracked onto related tasks as we go, or even do completely unrelated things which we feel like doing, along the way. It's a good way to work, because we can follow our inspiration and interest, and so get a lot done. This is one reason why Eric and I left the company we used to work for, and set about working on our own. The only disadvantage is that sometimes, a planned thing takes longer to complete, while we finish something that wasn't planned. But that doesn't worry us at all - it just makes some people get impatient, sometimes.
Although progress is good, this year has been the slowest one yet. There are a lot of reasons for that, but none of them are really permanent.
On my side... as you know my first child was born this year, so there have been a lot of home improvements being done, and a lot of old rubbish to clear away, after years of letting things pile up when I only had a motorbike. Another issue has been the neighbours building. We are attached to a house which has had a loft conversion and a large rear extension. I won't describe what a building site is like, if you don't already know, you won't believe my description of the amount of dust and noise!
Anyway, that has been on the go for 7 months now and they are really in the final stages, so most days are peaceful now. Of course Leo himself is quite a distraction and something to get used to. But you don't want to miss out on the first months of your first baby's life. He won't be small for long!
On Eric's side... he was finally able to buy his own house, something that was impossible in the earlier years of LFS and he was forced to waste a lot of money renting a house. Now with S2 sales, he got the chance to get his own house again, so of course he took that opportunity. That kept him off his work for a little while. As anyone knows, who buys a second hand house, there is a certain amount of work to be done before you move in.
So, I hope you can now understand the reasons for our slower progress in 2006. This is by no means an apology! We never give estimates of when things will be done - we are very careful about that because we don't want to be in the position of failing to deliver on our promises. We are very happy with the improvements to our homes and our lives, and I am happy to report that our improved environments are helping us to continue working on this project we love so much! You can look forward to many improvements to LFS - graphical, physical and audible. We won't give any estimates though, of when any particular patch or version will be out. But we are progressing towards it day by day.
This is just a really quick note as I am starting to see more questions and frustration, from people who want an update. I hope this post will help to explain how things are going.
I first want to remind you how we work here. We don't work to a specified schedule or an exact feature list. We have our lists of things to do and we get on with them. We do allow ourselves to get sidetracked onto related tasks as we go, or even do completely unrelated things which we feel like doing, along the way. It's a good way to work, because we can follow our inspiration and interest, and so get a lot done. This is one reason why Eric and I left the company we used to work for, and set about working on our own. The only disadvantage is that sometimes, a planned thing takes longer to complete, while we finish something that wasn't planned. But that doesn't worry us at all - it just makes some people get impatient, sometimes.
Although progress is good, this year has been the slowest one yet. There are a lot of reasons for that, but none of them are really permanent.
On my side... as you know my first child was born this year, so there have been a lot of home improvements being done, and a lot of old rubbish to clear away, after years of letting things pile up when I only had a motorbike. Another issue has been the neighbours building. We are attached to a house which has had a loft conversion and a large rear extension. I won't describe what a building site is like, if you don't already know, you won't believe my description of the amount of dust and noise!
Anyway, that has been on the go for 7 months now and they are really in the final stages, so most days are peaceful now. Of course Leo himself is quite a distraction and something to get used to. But you don't want to miss out on the first months of your first baby's life. He won't be small for long! On Eric's side... he was finally able to buy his own house, something that was impossible in the earlier years of LFS and he was forced to waste a lot of money renting a house. Now with S2 sales, he got the chance to get his own house again, so of course he took that opportunity. That kept him off his work for a little while. As anyone knows, who buys a second hand house, there is a certain amount of work to be done before you move in.
So, I hope you can now understand the reasons for our slower progress in 2006. This is by no means an apology! We never give estimates of when things will be done - we are very careful about that because we don't want to be in the position of failing to deliver on our promises. We are very happy with the improvements to our homes and our lives, and I am happy to report that our improved environments are helping us to continue working on this project we love so much!
You can look forward to many improvements to LFS - graphical, physical and audible. We won't give any estimates though, of when any particular patch or version will be out. But we are progressing towards it day by day.
Last edited by Scawen, .
Yes, Geraldine is doing most of the technical support (help desk) now. She isn't going back to an office job since leaving her old job to have our baby. She wants to be able to look after him full time, and we are lucky enough with my job, that she can do that.
And of course Leo sleeps a few times in the day, so Geraldine gets some chances to do the technical support - which takes less than an hour most days. I only have to help her with one or two mails at the moment (she's already been doing it for a week). It's quite a reasonable job for her to add to her LFS duties - as she always did our accounts anyway ever since we became a business.
So LFS development won't suffer in any way. There is just a lot more for me and Eric to do, to finish S2, and not enough to fill Victor's time. So it's natural that he wants to be able to do something else with his time.
I just want to say thanks to Victor for all that he has set up here. LFS couldn't run as an actual business if it wasn't for what he has done with the websites. And it's great that he is still around and ready to do server administration and maintenance whenever necessary. We aren't losing all that knowledge he has that we can't do without. He is really not leaving us, he's just stopping the help desk and active website development.
And of course Leo sleeps a few times in the day, so Geraldine gets some chances to do the technical support - which takes less than an hour most days. I only have to help her with one or two mails at the moment (she's already been doing it for a week). It's quite a reasonable job for her to add to her LFS duties - as she always did our accounts anyway ever since we became a business.
So LFS development won't suffer in any way. There is just a lot more for me and Eric to do, to finish S2, and not enough to fill Victor's time. So it's natural that he wants to be able to do something else with his time.
I just want to say thanks to Victor for all that he has set up here. LFS couldn't run as an actual business if it wasn't for what he has done with the websites. And it's great that he is still around and ready to do server administration and maintenance whenever necessary. We aren't losing all that knowledge he has that we can't do without. He is really not leaving us, he's just stopping the help desk and active website development.
Or maybe him not posting would be fine as well? I don't think he signed a contract with you that says he has to be active writing on the forums.
Obviously I'm not saying he shouldn't post, I'm just saying, it's up to Eric how often he posts. I'm certain that if he felt there was something important to say then he'd make a post.
I don't think he would appreciate people saying how bizarre it is that he doesn't post. But then again he won't respond to that kind of comment because he doesn't think it warrants a reply. My point is, threads like this really don't make Eric more likely to become active on the forums.
The sub-objects don't yet have the shine in game. Although Eric has set them to be shiny and that's why you can see it in the CMX Viewer.
But I haven't yet coded the thing which can use the hardware meshes for subobjects. So they are using a different (very old) draw system. Simply put, they haven't yet been updated to the "new" method of drawing cars (although new is really not the right word for something that was added several years ago). It only became viable in the S2 stage in fact, now that we have transparent windows.
It's just a little complicated because I need to store special instances of these hardware meshes, for each of the subobjects, and I haven't thought it through fully yet, because there are some different things I can do with the subojects that don't move (bonnet clips), and those that do (steering wheel). So I need to make a few decisions and some programming. It will probably be a couple of days work at some point.
But I haven't yet coded the thing which can use the hardware meshes for subobjects. So they are using a different (very old) draw system. Simply put, they haven't yet been updated to the "new" method of drawing cars (although new is really not the right word for something that was added several years ago). It only became viable in the S2 stage in fact, now that we have transparent windows.
It's just a little complicated because I need to store special instances of these hardware meshes, for each of the subobjects, and I haven't thought it through fully yet, because there are some different things I can do with the subojects that don't move (bonnet clips), and those that do (steering wheel). So I need to make a few decisions and some programming. It will probably be a couple of days work at some point.
XCNuse - that's because Eric made the Formula XR long before the FXO GTR and we came up with the three letter prefixes even later. He didn't forget, that's like saying "I've forgotten what I did tomorrow".
EDIT : OOPS, looks like I'm wrong, it seems to be only on the recent texture update, so yes you are right, it does seem that Eric didn't think about the FXO GTR's skin prefix / abbreviated name when he was working on that new interior texture for the Formula XR.
P.S. There was a time when some things on LFSW did say "f xr" for "formula xr" and that was confusing but apparently that has gone now.
EDIT : OOPS, looks like I'm wrong, it seems to be only on the recent texture update, so yes you are right, it does seem that Eric didn't think about the FXO GTR's skin prefix / abbreviated name when he was working on that new interior texture for the Formula XR.
P.S. There was a time when some things on LFSW did say "f xr" for "formula xr" and that was confusing but apparently that has gone now.
Last edited by Scawen, .
As seen on http://www.liveforspeed.net/?page=CMX
Important Copyright Notice :
(c) 2004 Scawen Roberts, Eric Bailey, Victor Van Vlaardingen
The car meshes in .CMX files may be freely read, converted, saved
in other formats and used for non-commercial purposes only.
When converted files are distributed, Live for Speed must be mentioned
in a README file supplied with the files, along with an explanation
that the files were created from original Live for Speed files, and
our website address www.liveforspeed.net must be provided.
The CMX files may not be used for commercial purposes without written
permission from the Live for Speed developers.
Important Copyright Notice :
(c) 2004 Scawen Roberts, Eric Bailey, Victor Van Vlaardingen
The car meshes in .CMX files may be freely read, converted, saved
in other formats and used for non-commercial purposes only.
When converted files are distributed, Live for Speed must be mentioned
in a README file supplied with the files, along with an explanation
that the files were created from original Live for Speed files, and
our website address www.liveforspeed.net must be provided.
The CMX files may not be used for commercial purposes without written
permission from the Live for Speed developers.
Well, I don't think there will be an answer "soon" - depending on what you mean by "soon" - because I'm not going to interrupt him just for this. Eric and I are both on holiday at the moment, and I know Eric is very busy right now with non-LFS things. I just said I would ask him at some time.
But I am almost certain that he won't have, or won't want to make, high res versions of several textures. Maybe he'd have a few around but it won't be what you want. Anyway this is extremely low priority. Our priority is to finish S2 so we can get onto the meaty work for the S3 graphical improvements. I doubt very much that Eric will want to spend time updating loads of textures, which he has already tried to set to the appropriate balance between resolution and memory usage, and has done quite well in most cases. I don't deny there might be a camera view here and there which sees a texture a bit too low res, or a sign from an older version which could do with a step up in res, or whatever - and that's what I meant by reporting a really too low res texture as a bug, if you want to.
Drivers and cockpit improvements have already been mentioned by Eric so no worries there. It's not just texture resolutions. In fact he's waiting for some better mapping functions from me for the drivers as we plan do do nice driver and helmet skins. Please don't ask me which patch or version they will be in, because I can't see into the future.
But I am almost certain that he won't have, or won't want to make, high res versions of several textures. Maybe he'd have a few around but it won't be what you want. Anyway this is extremely low priority. Our priority is to finish S2 so we can get onto the meaty work for the S3 graphical improvements. I doubt very much that Eric will want to spend time updating loads of textures, which he has already tried to set to the appropriate balance between resolution and memory usage, and has done quite well in most cases. I don't deny there might be a camera view here and there which sees a texture a bit too low res, or a sign from an older version which could do with a step up in res, or whatever - and that's what I meant by reporting a really too low res texture as a bug, if you want to.
Drivers and cockpit improvements have already been mentioned by Eric so no worries there. It's not just texture resolutions. In fact he's waiting for some better mapping functions from me for the drivers as we plan do do nice driver and helmet skins. Please don't ask me which patch or version they will be in, because I can't see into the future.
Becky, all I can say is that at some time, the tyre tread appearance will change with tyre wear. It's on my notes, but I don't know when or in which version it will be, as it just depends on what happens. I've noticed that a lot of things come up unexpected while working on LFS.
Devil 007, when I talk to Eric I can ask him if he would sometimes like to provide a high-res optional download, for example in cases where there was a borderline decision and he went for the memory saving option, maybe he'd like to set aside a high res version. Though that kind of thing does lead to more complication trying to keep track of things when there are multiple versions. Don't worry, Eric does like to use higher res textures but as a game developer, he always keeps a check on himself to avoid the temptation of using unnecessarily high res textures all over the place - remembering that doubling a textures resolution uses four times as much memory, so can easily cause glitching and memory swapping hesitations. Also each track has it's own "age" because Eric does focus on one track at a time. Next one to be updated is Kyoto.
We can't just pretend everyone has the newest graphics card, while a lot of people are still concerned about low frame rates at the start line, glitches and hesitations when driving and that kind of thing. It's about trying to get a balance and make this sim work on a wide range of computers, and gradually increasing the specification over time.
Devil 007, when I talk to Eric I can ask him if he would sometimes like to provide a high-res optional download, for example in cases where there was a borderline decision and he went for the memory saving option, maybe he'd like to set aside a high res version. Though that kind of thing does lead to more complication trying to keep track of things when there are multiple versions. Don't worry, Eric does like to use higher res textures but as a game developer, he always keeps a check on himself to avoid the temptation of using unnecessarily high res textures all over the place - remembering that doubling a textures resolution uses four times as much memory, so can easily cause glitching and memory swapping hesitations. Also each track has it's own "age" because Eric does focus on one track at a time. Next one to be updated is Kyoto.
We can't just pretend everyone has the newest graphics card, while a lot of people are still concerned about low frame rates at the start line, glitches and hesitations when driving and that kind of thing. It's about trying to get a balance and make this sim work on a wide range of computers, and gradually increasing the specification over time.
I am sure that Eric increases a texture's size here and there as time goes on, when he is working over a track. For example I know various textures at Aston were increased recently. When he sees one that looks too low res he increases it, I am sure of that.
It would be a bad idea to spend several months doubling the resolution of every texture where it's not needed. We would just eliminate all the people who are running on slightly older hardware, and reduce the frame rate across the board (even if that's only slightly in many cases).
There are more important things lacking in the graphics, than texture resolutions. Some of the DX9 effects available on modern cards would have a far greater effect. Look at the grand prix on your TV, it's low res but looks better than LFS. Each pixel is rendered better in "reality" than it is in a game. We currently expect to be doing things like that for the S3 stage. For now, we use a DX8.1 engine and that's great because it runs on the older hardware, while people across the world gradually upgrade to DX9 cards. One problem is that every pixel of the track looks just the same colour no matter which angle you look at it, when in reality there is a specular effect on everything. You would then say, well, older card users can have the option for low res. And then that brings up more problems, larger download size, the need foir users to select the appropriate setting, a bug forum full of new bugs about how LFS doesn't work properly, etc.
Video card memory is taken up by the screen and objects as well, which people seem to forget when they look at "texture memory usage". The objects in the world, the screen itself, the backbuffer, the z buffer, take up several more MB. Every car which joins takes up more memory for the car skin. All in all you are better off and LFS runs well and stable by not overusing the memory. It MUST be optimised as a racing simulator, not a screen shot generator.
If you see a texture which is unreasonably low res, why not point it out in the track bugs forum? But don't just say "all textures are too low res" because that will be quite unhelpful for all the reasons I've just tried to explain.
I haven't asked Eric but as far as I know, there are no higher res version of the textures. There are of course the non-dds versions of them (24 bit raw files).
By the way, your LFS can convert raw files into dds files. I don't think many people know this technique. If you delete the dds file and you put a raw file of the same name (but .raw instead of .dds) in the pic folder, then LFS will create the dds file for you.
That may be confusing so I'll describe it a different way :
you want a new version of a texture named xxx.dds
save xxx.raw in the pic folder
delete xxx.dds
run LFS - it will create a new file xxx.dds from xxx.raw
But that doesn't help you get any higher res textures. And I guess that giving you a pack of uncompressed raw files won't help either...
Eric does already use higher res textures than early versions of LFS. What do you want them for anyway, are you taking close-up screen shots of the road? Or is it for some adverts? Do you think there are just a few things that are too low res or are you talking about everything?
By the way, your LFS can convert raw files into dds files. I don't think many people know this technique. If you delete the dds file and you put a raw file of the same name (but .raw instead of .dds) in the pic folder, then LFS will create the dds file for you.
That may be confusing so I'll describe it a different way :
you want a new version of a texture named xxx.dds
save xxx.raw in the pic folder
delete xxx.dds
run LFS - it will create a new file xxx.dds from xxx.raw
But that doesn't help you get any higher res textures. And I guess that giving you a pack of uncompressed raw files won't help either...
Eric does already use higher res textures than early versions of LFS. What do you want them for anyway, are you taking close-up screen shots of the road? Or is it for some adverts? Do you think there are just a few things that are too low res or are you talking about everything?
Yes, sorry about that. I didn't add any protection to the object list, and Eric must have deleted an object, so some objects moved in the list. I need to correct that so that doesn't happen in the future.
I can't really fix that now so I will have to ask you to repair your Aston autocross layouts. Sorry about the inconvenience, I hope that's ok.
I can't think of any way that Vic making a SMS system, could have delayed the patch that Eric and I are working on.
No... it has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Eric and I are working full time on the patch and we're still not finished. Victor has more time on his hands at this time, or at least he is a bit more free to work on what he is inspired to work on.The SMS thing is a new feature of LFS World that you may choose to use, or not to use, as you wish. It's not something to complain about.
Thanks. It's simple enough, LFS exists because we chose a way of working, to take our time and make the program we want. The design decisions and direction are led by interest, our ideas and experiments and also influenced a lot by requests and ideas from the community.
The money that we can make, although an important consideration, is simply not the primary driving force. If it was, then we should do something completely different, something mainstream. There are a lot of easier ways to make money. We're doing this because we like what we do. We don't want to change our partnership, form a limited company, start hiring programmers, artists, receptionists and accountants. That's not what we're here for and it's not why LFS exists. We've specifically left that kind of job.
Making a racing sim takes a long time. It's taken so much time for so many years, that we have allowed the rest of our lives and houses to decay a bit around us. So, it's sometimes a bit hard to take, when we see the amount of attacks that we receive when we take a bit of time to sort things out. I just can't understand what's the rush! We're working on a sim, which gets updated every few months. Sometimes progress is faster than at other times. You get things in the end. Most people understand that, they are happy to have the sim in its current state. But a few people are so impatient, it's amazing, and they have to come up with all these ideas about how we should do things differently, change our lives, even give up our whole lives and anything we want to do, in order to grow LFS as fast as possible. But from our point of view that's just quite strange really.
I shouldn't really need to explain this again, but i can see that the impatience level is rising again. Just relax, there will be new physics at some point when i've had time to work on the aero and the tyres, involving plenty of experimentation and testing. There will be updates from Eric as well. How long it will take, i don't know. If LFS bores you for now, just do something else for a while. You'll get a news letter from us when there's a patch.
Thanks to those who do explain this to people. It's a strange effect, this impatience thing, it seems to be seen often in gaming communities, a few angry guys putting huge pressure on developers for release dates, immense anger when the dates slip or features are cut, then it's even worse when things are rushed out before they are really finished. Gamers need to understand that it just takes a long time to write computer games and simulations. And always longer, year after year, as the complexity increases.
The money that we can make, although an important consideration, is simply not the primary driving force. If it was, then we should do something completely different, something mainstream. There are a lot of easier ways to make money. We're doing this because we like what we do. We don't want to change our partnership, form a limited company, start hiring programmers, artists, receptionists and accountants. That's not what we're here for and it's not why LFS exists. We've specifically left that kind of job.
Making a racing sim takes a long time. It's taken so much time for so many years, that we have allowed the rest of our lives and houses to decay a bit around us. So, it's sometimes a bit hard to take, when we see the amount of attacks that we receive when we take a bit of time to sort things out. I just can't understand what's the rush! We're working on a sim, which gets updated every few months. Sometimes progress is faster than at other times. You get things in the end. Most people understand that, they are happy to have the sim in its current state. But a few people are so impatient, it's amazing, and they have to come up with all these ideas about how we should do things differently, change our lives, even give up our whole lives and anything we want to do, in order to grow LFS as fast as possible. But from our point of view that's just quite strange really.
I shouldn't really need to explain this again, but i can see that the impatience level is rising again. Just relax, there will be new physics at some point when i've had time to work on the aero and the tyres, involving plenty of experimentation and testing. There will be updates from Eric as well. How long it will take, i don't know. If LFS bores you for now, just do something else for a while. You'll get a news letter from us when there's a patch.
Thanks to those who do explain this to people. It's a strange effect, this impatience thing, it seems to be seen often in gaming communities, a few angry guys putting huge pressure on developers for release dates, immense anger when the dates slip or features are cut, then it's even worse when things are rushed out before they are really finished. Gamers need to understand that it just takes a long time to write computer games and simulations. And always longer, year after year, as the complexity increases.
The dds files were saved without mipmaps to save download size. The mipmaps are automatically generated when the files are loaded. So that wouldn't make any difference.
As for texture resizing, i wouldn't recommend making them all bigger, as Eric has tried to aim for a good compromise - also because LFS is designed to run well on slightly older hardware. I'm sure you can benefit from higher res ones in some cases, but better just to upgrade those that you need to, instead of all of them - which would use a lot more texture memory!
As for texture resizing, i wouldn't recommend making them all bigger, as Eric has tried to aim for a good compromise - also because LFS is designed to run well on slightly older hardware. I'm sure you can benefit from higher res ones in some cases, but better just to upgrade those that you need to, instead of all of them - which would use a lot more texture memory!
This is the T-shirt I've always wanted to see.
It was designed by Eric. Ignore the dE logos etc, that was just the thing he was given to draw on.
High res versions of the hollow logo are available...
http://www.liveforspeed.co.uk/lfs_tshirt_eric_1.jpg
It was designed by Eric. Ignore the dE logos etc, that was just the thing he was given to draw on.
High res versions of the hollow logo are available...
http://www.liveforspeed.co.uk/lfs_tshirt_eric_1.jpg
In fact, this is our only job.
But we've needed a long break. July was to just relax after that hard Alpha push, August started with the little work for test patch P2 then an holiday for me. Right now I'm still on general life things, washed bike yesterday ready for its MOT on Saturday. Built a shed recently and bought a worktop and sink to build a new lower part of my kitchen. How exciting - I'm not sure you really wanted to know that!
Well loads of things really, but i'm not going to bore you with them as it's nothing to do with LFS... but just imagine for yourself if you had a house and did *nothing* on it for four years or so, and neglected all parts of your life that didn't need urgent attention, then there would be some jobs to do and things to sort out!
Same with Eric - he has had things to sort out as well. We are both *slowly* starting to do some work again. And whwn i say slowly, i mean slowly and gradually. So there won't be any significant progress to mention any time soon. It's more research and testing for some features and well known parts of LFS that need to be improved for S2 final.
FGED GREDG RDFGDR GSFDG