Please don't send us all the information. We can't just take your info and start banning accounts.

I know you are trying to help but we cannot spend every minute of our lives investigating Turkish LFS racers, poring over the evidence and trying to be judge and jury too. I am a software developer trying to find a bit of time to do some actual development. I am not a underpaid policeman and I'm start to get fed up looking into all this rubbish. Even though you are trying to help, it just takes more of my time, not less.

Quote from Bruhmomento :

They sell the TC money for real life money

This is the part I can't understand.

You can't just say something that makes no sense at all, and expect me to take that as a reason for something.

Well I can't understand Turkish, but the obvious suggestion is to not remove bans for reason "I am illegally renting a license" or "I bought a used, banned license as disallowed by the LFS regulations".

If rented accounts are useless then maybe the trade in them can stop. I am astonished that anyone can profit from renting out LFS licenses. It must be so cheap for the driver, to be worth renting instead of buying.

So the amount of effort involved for the illegal renter (who is basically a software pirate) can't be worth the income received. It's very strange.

Though I heard something about TC cruise money being used to make real money, which I don't even begin to understand.

Quote from Rubbel_31 :

I think after typing /rtex, the texture of the Indicator Glass and headlight glass of some vehicles is not visible. But it comes back after typing /rtex. I know it can be fixed after writing this command, but I still wanted to report the error.

Although it doesn't seem to be a serious issue, I've tried to see why it goes wrong but I can't make it happen so far. I've tried in single player and multiplayer.

I'm not really worried about this as texture loading is handled differently in the new graphics version but if anyone can explain a simple method to make the FZ dash and headlight textures disappear (maybe after typing /rtex or by some other means) then I would look again.

I don't think it is related to VR support, but there is multi monitor support that goes some way to support a curved screen, in an imperfect way.

I don't know how good the final effect is in reality but you can specify up to 5 "left screens" and up to 5 "right screens". This can represent a cylinder as several planes. I don't know how bad it is at the seams between the planes.

I did /window 1800 600 on my LFS and set 5 left and 5 right screens, the result is attached. You can set the FOV of the centre screen and the angle between screens, and LFS works out the total FOV. If the angle between screens isn't too high then the seams aren't very noticeable.

But the seams are visible and it look pretty heavy to draw the main view using 11 renders. It might be best done using a post processing shader to produce the correct distortion, conceptually similar to what we do in VR.

We've had an illegal LFS community in Russia, later an illegal LFS community in Brazil. The Turkish LFS community suffers from frequent DDoS attacks from its own members.

These were big problems related to certain countries but this does not mean that all Russians, Brazilians or Turkish people are troublemakers!

I know your intentions are good but I'm not taking off topic suggestions on this thread.

Please use the suggestions forum section.

No, I can't join either, your host needs restarting. The symptom I see (Queue Position : 1 endlessly) does happen after 49.7 days (aka 32 bits worth of milliseconds) and I believe I have fixed it in my own version, recently. But the fix isn't yet available. I'm wondering about moving soon to a minor update full version with various fixes and improvements seen in the test patch.

Yeah that's what I'm thinking. There is no suggestion that our servers have been hacked, no security breach on our side.

So in effect we are simply giving advice that there are hackers around and a few licenses have been stolen (around 20 as far as we know, as I've already said).

For example, some people actually entered their LFS game password into the systems run by people who formerly ran pirate master servers. It may sound crazy, to willingly hand over your password to a hacker, but that's what they did. We don't know if this is a source of some of the leaked passwords. But I am aware of failed attempts to use other licenses, by the same person that successfully used multiple licenses.

Anyway, I repeat the general advice, even if it's painfully obvious. Don't use the same password on different sites, do make sure your GAME password is not similar to your web password, don't give your password to hackers, or use it on other websites. Don't install exes given to you by "some guy on Discord" or whatever.

EDIT: We are still looking into this. LFS development has not resumed!

Last edited by Scawen, Mon, 19 Feb 2024 12:01.

I should explain that there are actually two separate issues here. They may be linked or partially linked, I don't know yet.

The first thing is a small number, around 20 that we know of, accounts in which the GAME password has been discovered by some means, that we don't know. We haven't heard this is widespread but we have seen repeated related attempts to use other licenses. At least some of these licenses are LFS users who have given no permission for anyone else to use their license.

The second thing is an illegal LFS license rental service based in Turkey. A certain group of users has actually purchased licenses and rents them out to other users. We don't know if they have also been using stolen licenses, but that is a possibility.

These two scenarios, that are definitely happening, have come to our attention in the last few days. Maybe they are entirely unrelated but people should make sure their WEB password and their GAME password are entirely unique and not used on other sites.

Dear LFS Racers,

We have seen evidence of people obtaining the GAME passwords of LFS racers.

[EDIT: We know of around 20 passwords obtained by one person - there is no evidence of a widespread problem]

We don't know where they get the data, but there is no evidence of a breach of security on our servers. Passwords have not been obtained by brute force attack either. We suspect there are multiple sources, possibly including data from pirate master servers that no longer exist. Possibly some password guessing and possibly passwords could have been obtained by software supplied by unscrupulous LFS community members.


EDIT: Unfortunately, I started this one thread about two separate subjects which are probably not related. For the password subject, I have now started a new thread: https://www.lfs.net/forum/thread/107278


We have also received a report of a rental system in Turkey, run by some users that have obtained at least the GAME password of several LFS accounts and are renting them out for money (although some of these accounts may have been purchased legitimately rather than stolen).

If you have not changed your GAME password recently, please change it now, and make sure it is not related to any other passwords you use on the internet.

I'll have to take some more days off actual Live for Speed development in order to try to detect accounts that are being passed around.

If you have seen any account being used illegally, please try to contact the true owner of the account if you can. We will not be able to handle large numbers of reports to our technical support email. Such reports usually contain very minimal proof and it's hard for us to simply take such accounts offline. But if the true owner could change their passwords then the problem is solved without our intervention.

Live for Speed licenses are not for rental or loan to other users, so if we find accounts being used in this way we will remove their access to the online system.

EDIT: More information below: https://www.lfs.net/forum/post/2080549#post2080549

Last edited by Scawen, Fri, 23 Feb 2024 09:58.

Hello Mod Creators!

Here is a new video about rim profiles, different types of wheel and how to recreate realistic wheel rims in the LFS Editor.

Narrated by me, photos taken by Leo at Haynes Motor Museum.

This has nothing to do with textures. You are looking at an unfinished mod without a proper LOD2 model.

Test Patch E6 has more optimisations and a fix for the icon (I copied the old one by mistake when testing for E5).

As a rough guide, on my computer, the paused frame rate in a heavy external view (zoomed in on a full start grid) is up by around 10%.

EDIT: (I mean compared with version E). Considered another way, if you set an achievable limit to the frame rate, then the CPU usage for the Draw is around 10% less. Why I say "heavy external view" and e.g. start grid: Most of the optimisations are related to vehicles within LOD1/LOD2 distance. They will also help in driving views with a lot of cars around.

Some of the updates are applicable to the new graphical version in development too. So with these updates and the improved checks on mod limits, we should hopefully be running smoothly now and in future.

Optimisations:

Combine rim and spoke object into a single subobject
- saves 4 extra subobject switches for most cars
- update also applies to development version
An optimisation specially for external views
- avoid begin/end scene when drawing env maps/shadows
Tiny opt when drawing driver (avoid some integer maths)
Tiny opt (set projection matrix only once per frame)

Icon:

Fixed icon (old one was copied by mistake in E5 patch)

Translations:

More translation updates, thanks to translators!

Download:

https://www.lfs.net/forum/thread/106967

Last edited by Scawen, Thu, 15 Feb 2024 19:38.

Quote from kipieslim :

While trying 7E5, I've noticed that a mod that is out of limits is being reported in chat once, but subsequent pit leaves won't show the message again, I'm wondering if that's correct.

See the note for E4:

"Prevents frequent excess reports for the same mod"

It soon becomes annoying and there is no reason to see the same message every time the same mod leaves the pits.

Quote from kipieslim :

I've also noticed some mods that are published this week, that have both LOD2 and wheel warnings.

Maybe they were first submitted before Editor E5 was compulsory. Anyway, their creators (or should I say hackers) will soon receive a message that their mod (or should I say BMW) needs to be updated.

Thanks, well spotted. That's my mistake as I reverted to a previous version to compare frame rates but apparently I got the old icon by mistake. It'll be fixed in the next version.

By the way, calculating normals on the CPU for flexible object is also the reason why the LFS driver objects (the human in the car) use a lot of CPU time and mod creators should switch on "Concealed driver" for any normal car, where you can't see the driver's body from far away. The helmet is drawn anyway (it's not flexible) and this setting is really important for CPU saving. Just don't set it for bikes and karts or FSAE (when you can see the driver's body even as you move away from the car).


EDIT: Talking about polygon people, and going way OT, but as I mentioned Hind, you can see a few pictures of the polygon people that I coded for the Hind simulator: (I didn't make the objects, but did the code and editor to animate them. EDIT2: and I did the animations too )
https://www.mobygames.com/game/620/hind/screenshots/dos/272951/

Last edited by Scawen, Mon, 12 Feb 2024 17:46.

OK, I'll describe that but first I will mention that saving is only in the graphical render code, not the physics.

The thing about tyres is as they are flexible objects, their vertices cannot simply reside on the graphics card memory. They must be calculated every frame and the vertices are sent from the CPU to the GPU each time. I had thought before the main cost was actually transferring the vertices to the graphics card, and calculating the normals of each vertex. But what I found was the worst part was calculating the colour of each vertex (according to its lighting condition and the sun highlight). This used a lot of integer maths and I found the CPU use was way less when I bypassed this function, returning a simple grey colour. So I set about converting it to floating point maths.

The general idea is that integer maths is good for adding and subtracting, but floating point is better when there is a lot of multiplying involved. There's some leftover integer maths in LFS left over from earlier times. Considering some of its code goes back around 30 years, when we had 486 processors, I worked at Digital Integration on the Hind Helicopter Simulator, Pentium was the latest super CPU and there were no 3D cards.

By converting to floating point I found it was instantly faster, so I changed the code some more so that the normals were calculated in floating point, actually borrowing some code from the development version, where this was done already.

In the development version, the tyre lighting is actually done on the GPU, based on material properties, but the vertex normals are still sent to the graphics card each frame. You can see it in the LFS Editor.

The older code (before Friday) had a lot of complicated stuff to avoid sending vertices if they were not needed. This was done by checking if a triangle faced the user's view before drawing it, then calculating vertices as needed. But that is way complicated. It's better, if possible to just calculate all the vertices then send them all, without jumping around between triangle and vertex code. But for quite a while the "avoid sending unnecessary vertices" was still winning. But eventually I got the vertex normal and lighting calculations fast enough that it was better to do it the simpler way and I saw best results in the profiler that way.

Unfortunately that work, that took most of a day, doesn't benefit the development version because it was already done in that version. In the D3D11 version with shadow maps, all triangles must be sent every time as they may be seen in a shadow map (drawn from sun direction viewpoint). So it was impossible in that version to avoid drawing the away-facing triangles. But in the development version there is code to only send one object's triangles to the GPU once each frame, even if it will be used in multiple shadow maps, main view, mirrors and stereoscopic images in that single frame.

But although it doesn't help the development version, we still have the current public version for some months ongoing, so I'm happy if it helps people racing on full grids and the helps the quality of broadcasts by saving a few percent of CPU each frame.

Last edited by Scawen, Sun, 11 Feb 2024 21:05.

Changes in E5:

Mods screen:

New button to show your own mods
Ability to switch on multiple vehicle type filters
New filters for drive type (none/RWD/FWD/AWD)
New sort options power/mass/power-weight ratio
X button beside text filters stops text entry
Updated translations - thanks to translators

Optimisations:

Decreased CPU used when drawing tyres
- reduces CPU used by official GTR cars by around 7%
- smaller optimisation for suspension parts

Download:

https://www.lfs.net/forum/thread/106967

To be clear to others reading:

You submitted a street car (because of course, there aren't enough bimmers and bimmys and bavarias on the system already). Then from what I can see you changed it to a racing car, then later back to a street car, and then later back to a racing car.

Maybe if you were paying a monthly subscription for mod usage, we could hire a team of people whose sole job is to manage the mods system. But we are running a system that is free to use and it is supported by a few volunteers who are trying to make it good for everyone.

We don't have the manpower to constantly monitor your tricks and buy ever more servers to keep hundreds of versions of mods on.

Mods saved our business from total collapse, but now it's becoming a massive drain on my development time. I've spent nearly the whole of January dealing with mods (not to mention most of 2021 and 2023 as well).

Yes, this was detected by our system and I removed it.

The idea of mod versions are, for the mod creator to make improvements to the mod, as it is refined and improved.

The idea of mod versions isn't to keep changing the mod according to however you think it should be on any particular day.

The way you are using it is simply abuse of the system, causing people to keep downloading new versions and wasting space on our servers and everyone's hard drives (or SSD for those who don't understand the use of "hard drive" as a general term for your storage device).

We won't be able to host mods if people keep thinking of ever crazier ways to abuse the system. I find it a bit sad that my development time is reduced so much because I have to spend so much time trying to keep our systems up and running. I'd really appreciate it if mod creators could try to understand the spirit of the mods system and use it properly.

You know, the best mod creators are like artists and engineers. There are some really fantastic mod creators who make great mods. They might upload a very small number of version updates over the years. It's not about daily updates.

I remembered a couple of suggestions I have for Steam VR:

[ In Steam VR Settings... Video... ]

Switch OFF: Motion Smoothing (causes a bad image warping effect if frame rate drops)
Set "Render Resolution" to Custom instead of Auto (set to 100% then use the in-game setting)

Not so sure about this one but I switched it off as a saving:

Switch OFF: Advanced Supersample Filtering (couldn't see visible difference)

I had a first look and couldn't spot any obvious problems, except that the setting for "Concealed driver" is wrong (currently NO, should be YES). This wrong setting can increase CPU usage by around 4% for no benefit at all (when a lot of cars are on the grid).

The main LOD1 triangle count is high, but it has a good LOD2.

Can you remember which situations caused performance issues? For example was it when a lot of cars were on screen, in main view or mirror view, or was it when there were crashes, people leaving pits, or some other event? And the type of performance problem, was it glitches or low frame rates?

Get the latest version.

https://www.lfs.net/forum/thread/95664

EDIT: Sorry for the short answer. Patch E5 is now required because it does the mod checks for the LOD2 and wheel triangle limits which are now enforced when the mod is uploaded, to ensure higher quality mods and better frame rate.

More info: https://www.lfs.net/forum/thread/106757

Last edited by Scawen, Wed, 7 Feb 2024 08:59.

[I'm not talking to myself, just making a better suggestion than my earlier post]

Quote from Scawen :

I think normally you should use swap side?

In fact the intended flip function for this is "with driver - move with driver / no flip"
So the rotation point doesn't need to be in the centre of the steering column.

What an amazing progress thread!