Quote from deggis :

When I'm driving GTRs I definately don't feel like sitting in a GTR car.

Yep, the FZR's wood veneer and LCD climate control panel don't really give the feeling of "being there".

I also was hoping that we'd be getting updated interiors for the cars, especially the GTRs. But the fact that we didn't isn't really that bad, because of course purely graphical things such as interiors can be introduced with a physics-compatible patch whenever they're ready.

I can live without swinging key chains or driver animation to change gear, but some touches of effects and flashy bits would always be welcome. Things like sparks, glowing brake discs, etc, have all been mentioned before. They'd be nice, but I'd sooner have fully working undertrays, engine & brake heat, radiator & engine damage, and a more comprehensive damage system.

Quote from bo-kristiansen :

:throwrose meee teh win

That was very exciting race, very tense towards the end because Strobe was getting closer.. ..and closer...

- a shame Jamie got disconnectet though.

Congrats on the win. Shame about Jamie's disconnect as he was an almost dead cert to win. Those last few laps were pretty tense though as the time gap gradually fell and fell. If only it had been a 42 lap race.

Thanks Scavier. Excellent service to have these loose ends tied up so quickly after such a large patch. Enjoy your break.

Quote from Merc68k :

It would be cool if we could have an option to have that function on or off, in case anyone prefers the new behaviour... what do you guys think?

I understand the reasons why Scawen took it out (which he detailed in another topic, and make sense in light of the BF1), but I do miss it. I'm guessing most racers don't have a clutch pedal, and there's certainly times when I've wanted to dip the clutch to build the revs or boost and control a spin; but hitting a button on the wheel in the middle of a small crisis is a whole lot less likely than holding a paddle down. It's not a big issue, the moral of the story is not to spin. But it'd be nice to see it as an option.

Quote from Woz :

At the moment the XF and UF GTR are in a group (GTR no downforce) without a RWD car. If the LX8 GTR were added along with another car based on the RB4 or XR would make this a great group.

But the LX8 GTR would be way too fast for the XFR and UFR. And aren't the LX cars kinda in a class of their own anyway? Imho, any new rivals to the UFR and XFR would need to be similarly bodied cars rather than a tiny little LX. I don't know what the ideal car is to add to the "GT2" class (if the XRT has become the XRR, perhaps the XRG could be turned into a rival for the XFR/UFR?), but I can't see it being an LX.

Quote from SamH :

Oh.. and don't EVEN claim the British heritage tale.. bwallax. Like British Range Rovers were well made? Or Rover 6 series? Or even Jags? They sucked, FFS. The lot of them. Shall we talk about the chronological history of the British car industry? Please!

I think you'll find the miserable state of the British car industry is chiefly down to appalling management despite some superb engineering (not saying we didn't make any duffers, every country has some appalling creations they'd rather forget. ). When you consider that British engineers are at the heart of so many road cars from multinational car companies and that British engineers almost have a monopoly on international motorsport, I'd say we aint done too badly when you take into account the cack-handed management of our industry in general. ;)

I'll give it a shot, count me in.

Thanks, I'd give that a shot too tomorrow, but there is no reset button.

It would be nice to see such a system in place, but I'm not sure of how ultimately effective it would be.

For starters, tracks aren't exactly popping out at a huge rate (not necessarily a complaint, it's not like I've driven all the combos we currently have) and so a system for community choosing tracks might be a bit futile. After all in ten months since LFS S2 Alpha was released, we've seen two new Aston configurations and a lorryload of lamposts and billboards. On that basis, I'd assume that any totally new environments are either a long way off, or being kept very quiet.

Secondly, 2d maps would give some idea of the type of corners, but that's it. We wouldn't have any idea of elevation, camber, scenery, kerbs, etc, all of which go into defining a track. For example I prefer certain tracks over others, but I'd never have been able to make that choice simply based on an overhead map layout.

If all that sounds overly negative, it's not supposed to, as I'm all for anything that helps us have more race environments in LFS. For me to make more judgement on a track, I'd need to see something more akin to concept art - such as a simple line/b&w sketch from an elevated viewpoint at selected points of proposed circuits, showing how two or three intended curves go together.

Thanks for all the responses.

Firstly, to the best of my knowledge the buzzer/case speaker is working fine. It always used to, and apparently the first reboot after the freeze, it did give a beep pattern. Unfortunately my mate can't remember what the pattern of beeps was, just that it was different to the usual single-beep of a successful POST. However it didn't boot successfully, and all subsequent boots have been met with silence.

I have the manual for the motherboard, tried resetting the cmos but nothing changed. Of course the troubleshooting section is as useful as ever: "Symptom: computer fails to turn on correctly. Check: the power cable is plugged in correctly."

Regarding the power to the optical drives, I've tried switching molex connectors round between components and they all seem fine. The optical drives are healthy and behave normally when disconnected from their IDE channel. It's only when they're connected to the mobo that they just become dead.

Should there be any other symptoms of a dead PSU? It appears healthy in every way - any connected devices have power, and the ATI gfx card doesn't use a molex connector from the PSU for any extra juice - so all it's power comes from the mobo, and the gfx card does have power (well, the fan spins on it, anyway). Therefore it appears that power is going through the mobo correctly too (at least as far as the PCI-E slot is concerned).

@ dumbass, ta for the idea of taking out all the ram, hadn't thought of that. Will give it a shot when I nab a spare power cable from work tomorrow!

Thanks everyone for the help so far.

Be warned, this has nothing to do with LFS.

A while ago a friends' pc just froze (just during internet use, nothing strenuous or suchlike), and hasn't successfully booted since. The box is now in my custody as I attempt to repair it.

It's an Athlon64 (3400, I think), with an MSI 7903 motherboard, a pair of SATA drives, pair of optical drives, a gig of ram (I think), and some extra toys like tv card, etc.

As it's switched on, you can hear the hard disks spinning up, all the fans start and so on. However there's no POST beep, the IDE/SATA activity light on the front of the case stays on solidly, and there's no output to the monitor.

After disconnecting various components to try and isolate the cause of the problem, I noticed that disconnecting the optical drives had an interesting effect. With the hard disks being on SATA, only the secondary IDE channel is in use by the two dvd/dvdrw drives. When connected to the motherboard, the (optical) drives are dead. Can't even eject the tray. Disconnect one of them, and the tray will open and close as you'd expect, and the activity light on the case is only half as bright and flickers. Disconnect both and the activity light doesn't jam on anymore, but the computer still won't boot.

At no point is there any video output.

Anyone got any clues or ideas what to try next? I'm assuming there's something serious fubar with the motherboard, but overall I'm baffled.

Yep I noticed that too the other day, and I run at 1280x1024. Please don't lose the skin download notification though, when joining a busy server I like to wait until all skins have downloaded before joining, rather than me lagging too much on the track while the skins download.

Quote from colcob :

The amazing thing about this effect is that it is affecting by the actual amount of rubber being used up. The last few F1 races I've been amazed by how dark the line gets, much much darker than I've ever seen it before.

Same here - with the road cars it would take a long, long time for the darker racing line to build up to a noticeable level, and I noticed all the tracks get cleaned when the patch is installed. But with the size of the BF1's tyres and the sheer energy being created and dissipated, the rubber is being laid down much faster.

2560 is your friend.

1024 skins can be stretched to 1024x1280 to help get the proportions correct, so 2048 skins can stretch to 2048x2560. But be warned that the proportions of the distortion vary between cars, and tbh I find it easier just to squash the width of stuff when I put it on a perfectly square skin.

I may be mistaken, but I'm sure I recall Scawen once saying that having to have your damage fixed when you pit is deliberate, and intended as punishment/deterrent from crashing until the damage model produces more sophisticated and accurate car damage.

Quote from mrodgers :

Someone made a dds file that contains the Michelin tire and replacements for the other 3. You just select them in the tyre section of the setup to what manufacture you want. Evostar is Bridgestone, Cromo is BFGoodrich, and Torro is Pirelli's. It's nice and if everyone used it, then you could see different manufacturers online, else, everyone will just use Michelins.

It'd be great if LFS could, in the future, support extra tyre sidewall dds files. Then one could keep the original, fictitious, LFS Universe tyre brands, and add the third-party created real-life brands. Perhaps if LFS just looked for all the tyre dds files in a specific subfolder and gave you a choice of everything it found, then we could have the best of both worlds.

Was it just my imagination, or is the turbo lag noticeably reduced on the XRR? It's still sluggish at low rpms, as you'd expect, but the boost guage feels as though it flicks round much more eagerly when you come on and off the throttle at higher revs.

@ Tweak: I've no doubt that one of the principal barriers to not having 1024 LFSW downloads is the bandwidth and server requirements. However bandwidth and storage space is constantly getting cheaper which is why one day I'd expect to see this included. 512 textures are noticeably blurry and although they're fine for racing in a 5 lap GTR/BF1 blast at Aston National, they're not up to scratch for slower races, viewing replays, taking screenshots, or comparing to other modern games/sims (be it driving, flying, shooting, or whatever).

512 textures might be fine for some people, either those with limited bandwidth (there are still plenty dialup/256/512k connections in the world), limited hd space, or limited gfx memory. But many people aren't limited in such ways and would prefer crisper, clearer skins. If the sacrifices are so great, as you suggest, then many would switch back to 512 skins anyway (assuming it was included as an option to choose between 512 and 1024 downloads).

Without wanting to state the obvious, erm, close your web browser while playing LFS?

Haven't got much mileage in yet with the new physics but they seem much better. Finally I can take a GTR with fat, warm, soft, wide slicks and whip the wheel round at 30mph and not have it understeer madly. And the BF1 is mad. In a good way.

But there is one minor thing I don't like:

Quote from Scawen :

Gear shift levers no longer hold the clutch

This is a good feature. Although I'm still holding out for in-game downloadable 1024 skins from LFSW one day.

Not sure if it's been mentioned before but...

All those worrying about oval racing deteriorating even further need not worry about the Michelin-shod BF1 causing more crashes and noobs. Just think back to Indianapolis.

Quote from DeadWolfBones :

What's with people saying "Scavier"?

ScawenVictorEric - it appears as a sponsor in the LFS universe.

(Bah. )

Last edited by STROBE, Tue 18 Apr 2006, 23:22. Reason : Beaten by the spam-meister!

Quote from afastest :

We've been over all this in the other threads many times. Nordschleife is not such a great race track, it is narrow and very long.

Agreed - whilst the publicity would do wonders for LFS, the track itself is just too unfriendly to have any kind of quality race on it. After all, a five lap GTR race at Aston National often gets repeatedly restarted because people can't negotiate turn one. I shudder to think what kind of races would occur on the Ring. And although a 'Ring might be popular with experts for hotlapping and whatnot, LFS is an online simulator and any track not aimed at online/public participation would be somewhat missing the point, imo.

However if one were to suddenly appear (equally strange things have happened, not mentioning any 2006 BMW Sauber F1 cars) I certainly wouldn't be complaining, but at the same time I couldn't help but feel that Eric's talents would be better served recreating other, more accessible real life tracks or some more fantasy circuits.

So in theory if, say, one were able to get twelve individual car licences and eighteen individual track licences, you could tell Bernie where to shove it...