Nah, the trolls would start using that themselves, the forum would end up like a demo crash server :/
This member has, for the first time ever on any forum, inspired me to make use of vbulletins 'ignore member' feature. This change has considerably improved the quality of forum posts and I fully expect further improvements as more use is made of it, highly recommended.
TBH, I've had a lot of 70's strokers and never had any trouble from oil pumps, premix is generally the safest route though. Beware that some 2 strokes will suffer if run premix, for instance early suzuki twins need the pumped feed to the crankshaft main bearings.
Talking of tanks, check the fuel tank for rust and maybe pull the tap off and check the filters (you might need to get a new tap mounting seal if you do that though). Partially blocked fuel systems cause a lot of trouble, it usually shows up at full throttle for long periods, mixture leans out, things heat up..... pull the fuel pipe off and make sure there is a good flow there.
Talking of tanks, check the fuel tank for rust and maybe pull the tap off and check the filters (you might need to get a new tap mounting seal if you do that though). Partially blocked fuel systems cause a lot of trouble, it usually shows up at full throttle for long periods, mixture leans out, things heat up..... pull the fuel pipe off and make sure there is a good flow there.
http://www.mez.co.uk/lucas.html
....ok, its a page but it has pictures
....ok, its a page but it has pictures
If the bikes been looked after and run regularly it shouldn't need attention yet, 12k isn't much. If yours has been treated properly its a 1 in 1000 find though, almost every 2 stroke gets the nuts thrashed off it, most take that no problem if looked after, but it's also 40 years old so has almost certainly stood for a long time and that's the real killer. Rust on the crankshaft is your biggest worry and not so cheap to fix, unless you know the crank is good it would be a worth stripping the engine and sending the crank to a specialist. While its stripped it would be worth putting new pistons in, wiseco are expensive but worth the price, at the very least hone the bores and fit fresh rings. Put it together with new gaskets and oil seals and its as good as new (clutch and gearbox should be ok at 12k).
2 strokes have a bad name for reliability, mostly that's due to bad repairs. Fresh rings get put in when a rebore is needed, excess piston clearence really screws up cooling so they seize, then fresh pistons are fitted after the crank has been using bits of piston for lubrication so that either locks up or lets go..... not saying the damned things are super reliable (except GT500's) but they are at least trustworthy
Also, get a haynes manual, fit new reeds and clean out the exhausts with caustic soda.
2 strokes have a bad name for reliability, mostly that's due to bad repairs. Fresh rings get put in when a rebore is needed, excess piston clearence really screws up cooling so they seize, then fresh pistons are fitted after the crank has been using bits of piston for lubrication so that either locks up or lets go..... not saying the damned things are super reliable (except GT500's) but they are at least trustworthy
Also, get a haynes manual, fit new reeds and clean out the exhausts with caustic soda.
Would check that site for a quote, if you just get a flat disc cut it could work out cheap. Failing that could try a printers for the same kind of thing, the heaviest self adhesive print of the wheel they can do and stick it to a transparent sheet. Was going to say a CNC aluminium one would be overkill but if you can supply a toolpath file it would cut down a lot of the cost. Not sure what you did the render with, some 3d modellers can output toolpaths, usually in gcode and usually needing a lot of manual tweaking to match different machines though :/
+1 to replace wheel or get another for parts. You can make that kind of disk by printing the pattern on transparent plastic but its tricky and you would probably need to make other parts to mount it. More here near bottom of page.
Did you run memtest? Most likely its just that 1 stick of RAM faulty, would suggest changing both if they are the same.
The torque units aren't specified in the spec and I don't where they are required to be linear, I'm fairly sure linearity is part of the spec though, the docs are here: http://www.usb.org/developers/hidpage/ under ' Usage Tables for Physical Interface Devices'.
The wheels own inertia more or less cancels out as a real race wheel would be a similar weight, many road cars have a heavy wheel to increase inertia and so give a smoother feel. As to drivers, it's been a few years since I dug into what effects are implemented and it wasn't great, maybe manufacturers are implementing signals more advanced than basic force and rumble type effects but most of what I have seen is the equivalent of 640x480 graphics.
The wheels own inertia is very difficult to cancel out completely, it could be done with sensors in gloves but it really isn't needed as the same type of inertia exists in a real car wheel. On paper a torque sensor would only give a minutely better response that a perfect system using the position sensor, all it really does is make things simpler with less room for error. I was surprised by the part of the article about inertia implementation too, its in the force feedback spec and the maths to simulate inertia are very simple with a PC and far from impossible with an 8 bit microcontroller as found in most wheels. Don't know whats going on there, maybe there is a vicious circle of wheels not implementing it so games don't use so no need to implement it... etc.
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That article makes a lot of valid points but IMHO the real issue of what he describes isn't in the way force feedback is done, as far as I can see its in the way tires are modelled. In a real car you do judge your cornering by the force exerted and not the angle (this was a real pain with power steering systems until relatively recently) but this is because of the tires. The tread doesn't immediately respond to our wishes, first the sidewall has to load up then there will be a slight rebound as the cars rotational inertia is taken up etc. and if the tire breaks traction it becomes a real mess as balances have to re-establish, dampers have to catch up, body inertias balance out.... all this is fed back to us through the wheel in a real car, no reason why a sim cant do the same, the more accurately the tires responses are simulated the more accurate the feedback will be.
The force feedback specs cover reading force from the wheel and using it as an input, it also covers forces like spring, inertia, ramping and many more but implementing them correctly is up to the wheel manufacturer. He has a very good point in moving the servo type operation into the wheel's controller, wheels are effectively a servo but the PC is acting as controller which makes things very slow, orders of magnitude slower than even the cheapest industrial servo controller. I'd looked at device memory to do the same thing, ie. have the torque value for a few degrees in either direction stored so the values can change immediately the wheel is turned instead of waiting for the PC to respond to the new input but the force feedback protocols don't allow for this (at least, if they do I haven't figured it out yet). Latency is a big issue with controls, if there is any lag noticeable then the feedback signals will likely be lagging even more, noticed this to the point where it makes a game all but undrivable with feedback.
The force feedback specs cover reading force from the wheel and using it as an input, it also covers forces like spring, inertia, ramping and many more but implementing them correctly is up to the wheel manufacturer. He has a very good point in moving the servo type operation into the wheel's controller, wheels are effectively a servo but the PC is acting as controller which makes things very slow, orders of magnitude slower than even the cheapest industrial servo controller. I'd looked at device memory to do the same thing, ie. have the torque value for a few degrees in either direction stored so the values can change immediately the wheel is turned instead of waiting for the PC to respond to the new input but the force feedback protocols don't allow for this (at least, if they do I haven't figured it out yet). Latency is a big issue with controls, if there is any lag noticeable then the feedback signals will likely be lagging even more, noticed this to the point where it makes a game all but undrivable with feedback.
The signals used for force feedback specify output as an amount of torque, if all the virtual forces are correctly calculated then the actual forces at the wheel should also be correct.
Most wheels use calculated PWM values to vary torque output which would be accurate to within a few percent and a few high quality wheels use torque sensing for motor control so torque output should be near perfect with these.
Inertia is a problem, torque sensing effectively cancels it but only within the limits of the feedback drive train (motor, gears etc), without torque sensing it has to be cancelled by the position sensor and clever firmware with the same kind of drivetrain limitations.
Drivetrain limitations are usually due to speed and acceleration, usually the motors are simply to small so there is lag while they get up to speed. Direct drive should be the solution as it cuts drivetrain inertia to the minimum but I've not heard of a direct drive wheel that feels good (please CMIIW), the simply solution is more power but that probably means lots of injury claims too :/
Saying that, I've tried a few wheels that where simply wrong, the force feedback protocols allow manufacturers to send any kind of signals they like and many chose to do things their way instead of using the simple actual values provided by the protocol. Also, many games do screwed up things with force output, don't know if this is something to do with physics clock rates as the linkage forces are simple to get and a very few calculations give the output at the steering column with everything accounted for.
Most wheels use calculated PWM values to vary torque output which would be accurate to within a few percent and a few high quality wheels use torque sensing for motor control so torque output should be near perfect with these.
Inertia is a problem, torque sensing effectively cancels it but only within the limits of the feedback drive train (motor, gears etc), without torque sensing it has to be cancelled by the position sensor and clever firmware with the same kind of drivetrain limitations.
Drivetrain limitations are usually due to speed and acceleration, usually the motors are simply to small so there is lag while they get up to speed. Direct drive should be the solution as it cuts drivetrain inertia to the minimum but I've not heard of a direct drive wheel that feels good (please CMIIW), the simply solution is more power but that probably means lots of injury claims too :/
Saying that, I've tried a few wheels that where simply wrong, the force feedback protocols allow manufacturers to send any kind of signals they like and many chose to do things their way instead of using the simple actual values provided by the protocol. Also, many games do screwed up things with force output, don't know if this is something to do with physics clock rates as the linkage forces are simple to get and a very few calculations give the output at the steering column with everything accounted for.
Last edited by stan.distortion, .
Loads of cars would like to see in S3, every car ever made if possible. That's not going to happen but configurable weight distribution with class constraints would be almost as good and if track and wheelbase could also be configured it would pretty much allow any cars basic characteristics to be simulated without breaking class balance.
True, my bad. Seems like a troll plague on forums I visit atm but rant over.
Will have a look for favourite setups in GTR2, don't play it much and only got started with setups after playing LFS.
offthread, lot of carnage in the demo servers but some good ones, S1 and S2 servers are much better.
Lots of other stuff in LFS that's not in the menus and shedloads of keyboard shortcuts so the manual's kind of essential, config options are almost endless too.
The guy says what sort of gaming background he's coming from and gives his first impressions of LFS (that kind of feedback is pure gold to dev's btw). Does he get a 'welcome to LFS, you get used to its quirks', no, he gets an 'RTFM dumbass kid' in response to questions he didn't even ask. Watched a few games get popular just because of a friendly community and watched the same games die a death when the trolls follow the herd, maybe there is some truth in the 'LFS is dying' posts after all.
1st step for any guy when seeing a manual: Throw away manual.
2nd step: Find out where not as smart as we think we are and check manual when no ones looking.
Love posts like these, genuine and unbiased first impressions are a great insight and surprisingly hard to find for any software.
The interface looks like crap and feels clunky at first, when your used to it try a big name title and see how it compares. Was playing GTR2 a few days ago, options buried in tiers of menus, no shortcuts, a dozen clicks to do anything, have to load setups every race, have to find menu to load setup, setups for every car listed so have to dig out the right one...... give up in frustration and load up Richard Burns Rally, down, down, return, up, return, down, down, return, 'are you sure?', up, return, 'are you really sure?', ctrl+alt+del..... Thank god for indi games, LFS has its faults with configs and menus but it doesn't sacrifice function for the sake of appearance.
Different name and pass for game and forum might seem clunky but sharing them is a really bad move, the chance of hacked accounts is much greater as it adds all the hackers trying to crack the forum software to all the hackers trying to crack the game and the same forum software could be used for hundreds of games.
Hope the trolls don't put you off the forum, there are plenty of friendly and helpful folks here too. Have a good one.
NFS Porsche is completely different to other NFS titles, dated but well worth trying. Same for Grand Prix Legends, looks old even with the community mods but the physics are comparable to anything released since.
OMG, dont see how grip levels due to tire loads can be even close to working in that clip
Don't see anything wrong with cut scene's, there have been many games that focus on telling a story, kind of like a film or book but the direction the story takes is decided by the player. No reason a game involving skill can't also do this but the story needs to be a good one and it adds to the art work which is by far the biggest expense in any up to date game.
Much has been said about grinding and leveling, biggest problem I have here is when it isn't restricted. This creates an unlimited difference between players, a more subtle issue is this also hides imbalance between classes. DAoC was ruined by this, Regnum is styled on DAoC and it took years to get balance close to evenly matched while keeping level restrictions. Something worth checking out is Little Wars by H G Wells, it was written 99 years ago and is about grown men (and women) playing with toy soldiers. It got a lot of interest which evolved into Dungeons and Dragons and continued through to the MMORPG genre we have now. Funny thing is the 2nd chapter describes trying to balance out the game and many of the issues from it are still issues in MMORPG's today
Much has been said about grinding and leveling, biggest problem I have here is when it isn't restricted. This creates an unlimited difference between players, a more subtle issue is this also hides imbalance between classes. DAoC was ruined by this, Regnum is styled on DAoC and it took years to get balance close to evenly matched while keeping level restrictions. Something worth checking out is Little Wars by H G Wells, it was written 99 years ago and is about grown men (and women) playing with toy soldiers. It got a lot of interest which evolved into Dungeons and Dragons and continued through to the MMORPG genre we have now. Funny thing is the 2nd chapter describes trying to balance out the game and many of the issues from it are still issues in MMORPG's today
Lol, thought the work was far to detailed for DIY, but then thought maybe that's the way Germans do DIY, an Englishman would have used lumps of cast iron and a bakelite on/off switch for a sensor :P
Very nice work Pivot point are nice and close to your heel so should feel good, would second Thunderhead though, reverse mounting just feels more natural for some reason.
Cant see how you have done your travel stops, worth spending time making good solid stops as calibration will wander if there is any inconsistency, also worth using a large area and nylon on 1 side to keep them quiet as metal to metal stops are annoyingly noisy.
For the hall effect sensors, you can pick them up on ebay for about 1.5 euro each, you have used steel though which may cause issues with magnetism reaching the sensor and with getting a linear signal. Your axis pivots on the pedal, if it had pivoted in the mounting you could have attached a magnet to the end or a linkage for a potentiometer. I had the same issue with potentiometer rotation before, used cables to get around it. You could run a cable from somewhere near the pedal side spring mounting, fit a pulley to the pot shaft and mount it behind the spring. With a double row pulley you can use the second row for another cable with a return spring. That gives good, accurate movement but will bend the pot shaft so it needs to be bearing mounted both ends, 6mm ball bearings are on ebay for about 1 euro each.
Simply mounting the pot on the pedal axis would work if you can get 10bit or higher resolution, mjoy or many of the arduino projects would give you this and give plenty of scope for expanding with handbrake, balance valve etc. They are AVR based, worth checking out PIC based projects too, if you need to get into the code they might suit you better (I dont like PIC's, ymmv) but you wont need to code to get things working, mjoy give 8 analogue inputs, a shedload of digitals (think its 64) and costs less than 10 euro to put together.
Sorry if it sounds like I'm preaching, just suggestions based on past experience and IMHO. Really nice job so far, you know what your doing
Pivot point are nice and close to your heel so should feel good, would second Thunderhead though, reverse mounting just feels more natural for some reason.Cant see how you have done your travel stops, worth spending time making good solid stops as calibration will wander if there is any inconsistency, also worth using a large area and nylon on 1 side to keep them quiet as metal to metal stops are annoyingly noisy.
For the hall effect sensors, you can pick them up on ebay for about 1.5 euro each, you have used steel though which may cause issues with magnetism reaching the sensor and with getting a linear signal. Your axis pivots on the pedal, if it had pivoted in the mounting you could have attached a magnet to the end or a linkage for a potentiometer. I had the same issue with potentiometer rotation before, used cables to get around it. You could run a cable from somewhere near the pedal side spring mounting, fit a pulley to the pot shaft and mount it behind the spring. With a double row pulley you can use the second row for another cable with a return spring. That gives good, accurate movement but will bend the pot shaft so it needs to be bearing mounted both ends, 6mm ball bearings are on ebay for about 1 euro each.
Simply mounting the pot on the pedal axis would work if you can get 10bit or higher resolution, mjoy or many of the arduino projects would give you this and give plenty of scope for expanding with handbrake, balance valve etc. They are AVR based, worth checking out PIC based projects too, if you need to get into the code they might suit you better (I dont like PIC's, ymmv) but you wont need to code to get things working, mjoy give 8 analogue inputs, a shedload of digitals (think its 64) and costs less than 10 euro to put together.
Sorry if it sounds like I'm preaching, just suggestions based on past experience and IMHO. Really nice job so far, you know what your doing
OMG, this is still going!? I'm the tinfoil hat kind that would suspect this guy of being a troll, regardless of whether he is or not he's powned every troll here for prolonging a stupid argument.
Regnum Online would be my ideal for gameplay, lot of grinding and not much to do other than battles and pvp though. Often hundreds in battles, runs smooth, where a lot of network issues to handle all that but more or less fixed now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCHAzESsqfM
Horus, Alsius BTW
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCHAzESsqfM
Horus, Alsius BTW
Should be a reset jumper on the board, usually marked fairly clearly. If you cant find it pull the cmos battery out, a few min should do but a couple of hours to be sure if you have time.
Watch out for that! Often its the calm before the storm, hope not this time.
Wear whatever looks smart and your comfortable in. Put me in a suit and its obvious I'm not comfortable, not good for an interview.
FGED GREDG RDFGDR GSFDG