Quote from pajkul :

I'd just love if you could stop working on these relatively small things that distract the main development and focus on that instead.

Part of my job is to understand what is important and work on it. You haven't been following this thread or the test patch properly, or you wouldn't say that.

If I take 1 minute out of my several years of development, to enable road tyres on formula cars, it probably isn't going to be a really big deal. But to start enabling rallycross hotlap tables for formula cars would be kind of stupid. It's not up for discussion at all. Anyone else is welcome to create their own hotlap tables for formula cars doing rallycross on road tyres if they want to. Maybe it'll catch on, who knows? But LFS developers aren't going to do that.

If you actually look what has been going on, you would see that I've been working on a lot of important things to improve the online racing experience, that happens every day, right now. It's a few weeks of work, to make important improvements for everyone to use while they wait for the other graphical and physical updates. The drift lock and new tyre allowances are a couple of minutes each. Very little to do with what I have actually been working on.

What some people don't seem to realise is all these changes also go into the new development version. I spend almost no time at all working on things that don't improve all future versions of LFS.

Quote from nexttime :

So it's not 12pps at all times?

No, that would cause an enormous increase in server bandwidth and intolerable CPU usage from the extrapolation (prediction) of the position of remote cars. In the case where the remote player has a high ping, the CPU usage can become quite bad because, every time a packet is received, LFS must run the full physics from when the packet was sent, up to the current time. That could be 100ms, so 10 full physics updates and if that was 12 times per second that would be 120 physics updates per second and this would exceed even the normal physics calculations.

I ask people to consider turn one situations when a lot of cars are close together and there is a lot of physics usage and the cars are drawn at high resolution and the frame rate drops. I am fully aware of this problem and I am always trying to avoid it.

Along with this huge cost, there would also be only tiny benefits, from sending more packets when the previous packet already provides a good prediction.

There's no point in using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

This is why the code tries to send new position packets when the previous packet can no longer be considered to provide a good prediction of the car's location. This happens faster when there have been changes to the input provided by the user.

Quote from nexttime :

Shouldn't this be the other way round? At lower speeds people use quicker/wackier steering inputs & higher angles. And at higher speeds we all keep it smooth. (If by higher speeds you meant the vehicle speed and not steering wheel rotation)

When you are at higher speeds, you move the steering much smaller amounts. Before today's version, that would be interpreted as very little change to the input. But actually at high speeds your car moves across the road much more for a smaller steering input, that is why the steering-related packet frequency is now increased with speed.


EDIT: I don't claim this is the end of the job. I had some changes today that made sense and are moderate but noticeable enough, in my opinion, to be put out there for testing. It's safe and I want to play safe for now. This is a minor update for the existing public version and I need to be on this for as little time as possible.

Last edited by Scawen, Mon 11 Jan 2021, 20:32.

Thanks for the testing.

To my mind it is still possible that the bad collisions were related to lag and prediction causing excessive intersections rather than being related to VOB at all. As we know bad collisions can happen at any time between unmodified cars. It's true I could do a better job with that.

I understand you asked some people when you saw the collisions and often found out they were using VOB mods. But maybe these mods are just commonly used by people who go to cruise servers?

Quote from Vulgar :

It is obvious that the the current dev team has no desire to either do what others are doing, and or have to deal with the headache of the typical corporate bs.
...

Hi Vulgar, thank you for your long and well written post which I enjoyed reading.

I was happy to see your support for our work and was interested in the other things you said.

I read it when you first wrote it and came back for another read today.

Quote from Vulgar :

Clearly the devs do not need income. A great position to be in.

I agree with most things you said but would like to correct this point.

In fact we do need income but less than a lot of people do. As we want to eat good quality food, keep the kids in clothes as they grow and keep our houses running and it's almost 'necessary' to keep a car on the road (though less so these days, with food delivery services). In recent years LFS income has indeed been a bit too low but the great thing is that people do keep discovering it, so there is always income. It would eventually reduce too much but I'm sure the new update will get it up a bit for a few more years.

Still, without debts to service and if you don't need to go on expensive holidays or keep buying the latest telephone then it's possible to have a very good life even while earning less than most people would expect. Though I am fully aware that my family and I are very lucky, living in a rural part of England, we can go on walks and bike rides on wooded trails and field edges so we don't need to spend a lot of money for entertainment. Though that's not really pure luck - we chose to move away from London 12 years ago because this job allowed it and we knew we would have more space, less pollution and so on.

Through my life I've never cared about wearing clothes with a fashionable name or having a big watch or owning the latest gadgets in order to impress other people. Actually I would find that kind of thing embarrassing. I've always wanted to pay off any debts as soon as possible and only buy what I can afford. So I've not ended up enslaved by the system, having to earn loads of money to be sucked out of my bank account all the time. When I worked as a motorbike courier in London, I was happy any time to work less and earn less. I've always thought that time and peace are more important than money.

I hope that might be interesting, I suppose our way of running our lives is also related to how we have kept LFS going even if it is a slow burn.

Off topic but seemingly somehow related: I hope that when world economies get going again after the social distancing, we may rebuild and run our countries in a slower and less polluting way. What is really the point of traffic jams, crowded trains and long journeys to work in polluted cities?

Yes, I think it looks outdated too. It's like an old Windows desktop. I think maybe Victor could move each of the functions from that site over to the main LFS page, perhaps one by one. The trouble is he has another full time job so he doesn't always have much time for such things which aren't that high a priority.

Quote from cargame.nl :

Hmm no, a computer regulates this with help of a speed pulse from the CAN bus system.

I said the car radio going up when there is more ambient noise is 'conceptually similar' to a dashboard getting brighter when there is more light around. That's why I put that word 'conceptually' in there. It's a similar concept. Obviously not technically related but my point is that designers who thought one thing was worth doing might also consider the other.

Quote from cargame.nl :

An optical light sensor is that old that I was playing with that thirty years ago already (Kosmos X2000 anyone?), I am surprised there is so much fuss about such a simple electronic scheme.

No-one is saying that a light sensor being used to control dashboard brightness is a highly innovative and incredible idea. The question is about how commonly the system has been implemented. You would be most helpful if you would give us some information about just how many cars have a self-regulating dash brightness and how many don't. When I code something like this into LFS, it's preferable to have some real world examples and general understanding.

Also in reality for the car designers it's probably not the two minute job you seem to imagine. The designers need to make sure the sensor is in just the right place to receive ambient light but not be affected by direct sunlight. Also they probably need to be careful so the sensor is not affected by its own resulting lighting, which could result in a feedback loop situation. The whole idea of the self-adjustment is to avoid glare and improve visibility. A poorly implemented system could end up providing the wrong light levels or suffer from flickering which would be a distraction.

Thanks for the replies.

Quote from lfsrm :

...but people think in our modern society happiness and success in life is getting a full time job and consuming as much as your money can afford, which is simply wrong.

But I do understand that some competencies are not compatible with self-employment environment, as many people are forced to find a full time just to survive, sometimes you don't have the luxury of choices.

The normal thing in England seems to be to get the highest paid job possible, even if it means travelling a very long way to work, then buying the most expensive house possible on your salary, at which point you are enslaved to your boss and cannot speak out or defend youself for fear of losing your job.

I believe people should get a job nearer home and allow themselves more time to spend doing the things they really like to do (I don't mean getting drunk). And try to get a home that is within their means, so there is some spare capacity and they can tell their boss to shove it if they are out of order.

I do realise that many people are just trying to survive. But I find it crazy when I see fairly well off people voluntarily enslaving themselves and working stupidly long hours, while other people can't even get a job.

Quote from Aleksandr_124rus :

Looks like Left-Green coming out, and I have nothing to say about the green movement, although there are a lot of their problems and frankly stupid things of individual activists, but I sincerely hope that socialism communism is not considered the best idea for society as the opposite of capitalism, but capitalism also has many problems,it is capitalist societies that offer the best economic growth, a better standard of living and a better level of happiness among the population of all societies in practice, and I live in Russia and believe me, I heard a lot of arguments from the left discourse, 99% of these people are idiots.
Please be prudent, almost all modern left-wing discourse is contradicted by Marx himself, Marx quote: Practice Is the Sole Criterion of Truth.

Yeah it's a tough one. I really care about the environment and feel it is a great tragedy to cut down every forest and eliminate the amazing animals and plants that live there. So terrible but this is the result of growth.

I really hate economic growth and believe we need 'stability' rather than growth. Growth is based on the idea that everyone's income needs to increase every year for them to be happy. But my income has decreased every year for the last decade and I've found out that is fine, because my happiness is not based on buying things. I do realise that I have been lucky and things would be a big problem if income decreased to the point where I could not pay the bills.

I'm sure that if we globally aimed for stability instead of growth, then we wouldn't deplete resources and increase pollution at an ever increasing rate. We also need to make sure everyone can control their own family sizes because our population is still rapidly increasing, which is crazy on an overpopulated planet.

I'm not entirely sure where I stand in the sense of socialism and so on but I think there is a serious problem with rampant capitalism where people are encouraged to be selfish and keep buying products to fuel the ever increasing economy. There must be regulation, but we need real freedom too, so there can be innovation and the ability to set up interesting businesses, like Live for Speed.

Dear Racers,

Thank you for your patience as it's been a long time since the July progress report.

We aren't ready for a full progress report but thought we could say a few words and show you a few things. Eric has been continuing with South City. It's a long job and he has worked more on the roads than the buildings so far. At this point he would rather wait until more buildings are done before showing screen shots.

I've been working on the sky darkness, automatic exposure and white balance that became necessary with the use of the realtime generated skies. The lighting is now separated into lights that are always on and others that only come on at night. I increased the possible intensity of lighting to allow floodlights to work.

I worked on a system to allow us to use realistic camera exposure settings to allow comparisons with photographs from digital cameras. In a manual exposure mode I can now set the ISO, f-stop and shutter speed. It is interesting to see the massive variation in the brightness and therefore the exposure required for a night shot and a day shot. For example a shot taken in street lighting may require around 4000 times the exposure compared with a day shot. A more extreme example is the difference between moonlight and sunlight. The sun is 400 thousand times brighter than a full moon, yet our eyes can adapt to see quite well at those extremes.

I haven't had to make LFS adapt so much but it does have to deal with bright sunlight down to typical street lighting scenes. There is more to be done and the lighting is far from perfect. Anyway I hope you like the attached screenshots and the youtube videos.

Day to night transition at Blackwood:


Day to night transition at Kyoto Ring:

I asked Eric but he doesn't want to show South City screenshots yet.

He's been working on it, changing all the road surfaces and building some ways through that were blocked off before. It's not just the roads but barriers, fences, walls, etc. And many buildings will be updated.

It's a big job but will be worth the wait.

I tried to describe why things take a long time, for Eric and me. I wouldn't be able to go into much more detail without listing every detail of our personal lives.

Some people do understand and some will not. There is also life outside of LFS, we have families and so on. Things happen, it's not just a constant uninterrupted 50 hours per week on LFS.

But just to clear up one myth: Eric and I do not have any other jobs. I'm not sure why people sometimes get that idea. As you can see, we are working hard on Live for Speed and there has been a lot of progress these last few years. But it's not always plain sailing. There is life outside LFS, and within LFS there is experimentation, research, trying and testing, following unexpected avenues, backtracking, trying again, and so on.

I do say occasionally, if our aim was to make the most money possible, we should have chosen another job or way of working. But that's not the aim here. The aim is to develop something we like, working in the way we like, get paid for it and enjoy life as well. It's a great thing to be able to have some time to spend with the people you love. Some people do miss out on that part of life through working too hard, and I'm really happy that we have avoided that mistake. You don't have a second life to come back and do all the things you forgot to do in your first life. So you need to make sure you have time to do the things you like to do.

I don't suppose it does any harm to let you know where we are with the tracks, as I think you can work it out anyway. The South City and Fern Bay are not yet done. Kyoto has taken longer than expected because Eric is working to a high level of detail, and the track covers a vast area. He wanted to create interesting buildings as part of the job because as an artist he wants to create good looking work.

It's similar on my side, things have taken longer than expected and one thing leads to another, so I end up working on things that were not planned in the first place. Maybe if we had a project manager they could keep us to timescales and limit our work accordingly. But I think it's a good thing that we can experiment by going down unexpected paths of development, although it does take longer, the end result can be more interesting.

I know people may say "if you don't release it quickly it will become irrelevant and obsolete" and so on but I don't really mind about those kind of opinions. We're trying to create a nice game that we are happy with, and I know a lot of people will be happy to have a go when it's ready.

Quote from AndyG :

I'm not convinced it's the case here. In 2D mode if I turn VSYNC on (which is 60fps for my screen), it runs perfectly smoothly. Similarly, 300fps with VSYNC off is smooth.

I still think it may be the same issue. It just depends what you call severe. The 100Hz physics displayed at 90Hz issue can be quite bad when you look sideways. A definite problem.

You can see the same effect with 60Hz VSync on a monitor, it just doesn't look as bad as it does in VR. To try it, select a low FOV then drive along beside something big and nearby, e.g. pit garages, looking sideways. You can see the edges seem to be jittering along.

Trouble is it's a major graphics and physics engine redesign to avoid this, there's no quick solution and for sure it's not something I can do in the current public version, I would only do it in the new development version. It's too big a job to code up twice in the two separate diverged code bases.

We get a lot of unpleasant posters, scammers, spammers and trolls. More than you probably realise! And we've had to deal with racism, sexism, homophobia and so on. It's a pity that we have to deal with that, when all we are doing is working on a form of entertainment for people to have fun.

Anyway, our job as moderators is to keep this forum a place where you can have civilised discussions. Somewhere that people can come to talk about Live for Speed (and other things, a bit). The unmoderated places on the internet are not really a good place to be.

We try to be consistent, obviously it's not always possible. But the guy who got banned yesterday and couldn't make a post without insulting someone, has 11 accounts. You can probably understand what this means. It's a troll. So we remove that account. Simple as that. Like The-Great who posted above, with one of his 5 accounts. He used to be a good guy but gradually over the years has become nothing more than a troll.

If you want to know if you are a troll or not, try asking yourself this question: "Do I have multiple user accounts on a single site?". If the answer is yes, then most probably you are a troll.

Quote from Flotch :

Comparisons screenshots

Good job, thanks!

I like the final one best.

By the way, you have 17 but we only released 16. 1 and 7 are the same.

I'll close this thread now.

Costa, I would really like to ban you from the master server. But in that case you would be forced to stay on the cracked version. That's not what we want. It would be good if you could put your efforts into making sure people leave the cracked version and get onto the proper version, so we can continue to develop Live for Speed.

Or maybe you don't want it to be developed any more, and you just want us to go and get another job?

If I see another report of you advertising on our genuine servers, I'll remove your access to LFS services.

Quote from Chunkiegg :

Scawen, you mentioned that Eric has been doing some rebuilding parts of the tracks due to changing how the worlds are lit/shaders, when Eric's work load lightens up (if it ever does), would it be possible to get a run down of what and why the new bits have been rebuilt?

When we load an old track into the new lighting system, it does an auto adjustment for the light colour to try and look as close as possible to how it did before, though it does look a bit different because of the gamma corrected lighting. In most cases that is a better look, even without any manual adjustments.

But the new lighting system cannot be released with tracks in that condition, mainly because the shadows don't work properly with all the buildings. Some of them were built long ago when there was no free view mode and they would only be seen from track level. In those days we saved polygons and a bit of work by not always bothering with a roof. Now it turns out that doesn't work with the shadow system. The shadows are only cast from surfaces that are seen from the sun's direction. So every object needs a top surface. For example South City looks good with the shadows, but there are many places where the shadow is missing or there are various shards of shadows around.

So that means every track must be visited to do some fixes. The next thing is that we have shine on roads on some tracks now, and it would be quite inconsistent if there isn't any shine effect on road surfaces at another track, so it always makes sense for Eric to go and sort that out. But he is not comfortable with just updating a few textures here and there on an old track. He wants to do a better job, updating barriers and walls to have the right shine effect too. Then he sees old construction methods and things he wants to do a better way. Also he sees corners that need some adjustment, maybe they were too wide or there isn't enough detail or it's a corner that has caused problems while racing over the years. Sometimes things can be improved a bit for the open configuration support as most tracks were built before we had that system. All these things add up so he ends up doing at least several weeks on each track.

Nice job with the comparisons.

Yes, Aston has been raised to fix the area that was below sea level. I think it is 2 metres, so to make accurate comparison shots you can subtract 131072 from the Z coordinate (3rd number) in the /cp line.

I mentioned in the first post of this thread that we planned to release images of the graphical updates this month. Since then we have been brushing up the existing updates to be ready to make some screenshots.

It has been a useful process as Eric visited the already updated tracks to fix remaining issues, while I got back into looking around the tracks and noticing things I could fix.

As we looked around with our thoughts on the screenshots, we noticed there are things I should work on to improve the screenshots. I will do some of those. So as it turns out our plan has changed a bit to release screenshots in August rather than July.

I wanted to tell you about that change of plan. Also I can say a a few more words about what we are doing and why.

The new shadow system requires an update of every track before we can release it. Some scenery objects were not built in a way that works properly with the shadow maps. For example, every building must have a roof so that shadows are cast correctly. Some of the tracks were built so long ago that they were never designed to be viewed from above. At that time there was no real Free View mode, so things like that were invisible. It's an opportunity to visit every track and bring them up to date, also making the roads and a lot of other scenery make use of the specular reflections, 3D kerbs, better scaled scenery, improvements on some corners and so on. There will not be a "full Westhill" job done on every track. Some tracks will change more than others. We need to remain focussed on getting the updates done, not letting the job expand out of hand, although it is fun doing so many updates. We look forward to showing you some screenshots in August.

Quote from Sobis :

Though it is interesting that the problem was noticed only after the new patch!

In 0.6R I did have my own code in there that did the job. But I just came across that CopyFile Windows function one day and thought it would be good to use it. I guess for no real reason than to save a few lines of code.

Just for interest:

For comparison, here's the old function:


And here's the new one which is very compact but causes that issue:

Quote from ardalan5090 :

Hi
Scawen , please add arabic and farsi translate in this version , our team can translate this ... you should do our font and utf-8 compatable in your software ....

Thanks alot

Hi,

I'd really like to do Arabic at some time. It's just the sort of thing I like to do because I like LFS to be accessible to everyone and I'd be interested in learning how the Arabic alphabet works. But it is much more difficult than you imagine. We are talking weeks of work for me before you guys can start to translate it. Of course languages like Arabic and Hebrew have the difficulty of being right-to-left text (but with occasional left to right Latin text within that) and this means a lot of rewriting of many functions in Live for Speed.

There will be a lot of studying for me to do and a lot of problems to solve. I can't just click my fingers and magically all the code is done.

Now, I hope you will understand, I am in the middle of some extremely important graphical work and need to get the tyre physics finished. This must be done or Live for Speed sales will dry up completely and we will have to go and get another job. There is no doubt at all, this is a higher priority than adding a couple of tricky languages.

Unfortunately I was interrupted by someone taking our servers down two weeks ago, so I had to stop all the work I was doing and make a new patch in this old version of LFS which can resist the attacks. So that attack has slowed my development by maybe three weeks so everything that I will do in future will come a little later than it would have been

Hi, thanks for the support in this thread and your patience.

I confirm this is a full time job for Eric and me. There were some quiet years due to life changes but I can tell you we are really on the case now.

In the past year I have made a lot of updates to the graphical systems and there is much better support for different types of specular reflection including the shine on the road. The shaders are completely rewritten and structured better now as over the past few years I have got to grips with shaders (that was first stimulated by the VR support).

The lighting system is now done in a "gamma correct" way, i.e. processed linearly within the graphics system and only converted to sRGB at the output. Gamma correct rendering is an interesting subject if you are interested in that kind of thing and want to read up about it.

The specular reflections don't just appear automatically. Eric must visit each track and do an update to take full advantage of the new shaders. He is working hard updating the existing tracks and the results are very nice.

I've also recently been working on a new shadow system based on cascaded shadow maps.

So you should see a much better looking Live for Speed within a reasonable time frame. I won't speculate on how long it will be but Eric and I still have quite a few things to do, so don't hold your breath!

Hi, I'm not really being aggressive. I noticed you have been taking an interest in the cracked community things, and I've been a bit disturbed by it today. It's harsh when you are working hard then someone comes and takes away some of your pay.

Anyway, being serious, we don't have any possibility of hiring people or giving people a job. We are happy going on as usual, developing Live for Speed at our own pace. We have no interest in running a company, or working with employees.

OK, here is a job for you:

Please go to the new Brazilian crack site and ask them to close down the operation. We think we should earn money for the work we do. We work hard to make a game that many people love. If we don't get paid for it, we'll have to stop developing Live for Speed and get another job.

I can't pay you for this job, we are a small team and we don't hire employees. But I'd be grateful if you would pass on the message. Thanks.

Eric is interested in doing those areas in a future update but he doesn't want to just enable physics, because it is not a proper job and has not been built as driveable areas. So it would be quite a lot of work and it is more important to continue with S3 tracks at this time.

Don't think we need to resurrect 4 year old threads with depressing titles.

In fact there is a gradual increase in online activity going on at the moment, with the closure of pereulok and the new pricing system.
http://www.lfsworld.net/?win=hosts&whichTab=licensed_history&t=30

The developers' job is to work on new content and features. We are doing that.

The customers' job is to get online and have fun racing. Please join in!