The more serious you take LFS, the more fun and realistic it is

Like others have said real racing costs alot of money. I'm looking to do my first real track day this summer and cheap tires and wheels for my car are around $2000. Not to mention the tires will only last a few months just doing this track day and a few autox's. Then the track itself is another $250-$450 for 1-2 hours of seat time. Or I can continue doing autocross which is pretty cheap but I waste a whole day, run after cones, pay $30 and only get about 4-6 minutes of seat time. Right now I'm going to one of those indoor karting places to satisfy my need for speed and even that's pretty damn expensive (~$60 a day for about 18-24 laps).

For about $300 for LFS and a G25, it's a bargain considering I've driven about 13,000 miles in this game

Quote from DeadWolfBones :

It's the admins' job to move someone back if they cut in line, and if they don't do that, you protest it post-race.

It must be insanely difficult to keep track of this with everyone spinning out all over the place..

haha that's cool. I'll be on another dang business trip until saturday evening. When I get back my CST pedals should be waiting for me! But they will probably have a negative impact on my times until I set them up properly and get used to them

Quote from kABLiuks :

i cant find a braking point after a first long straight on the bridge

I usually drive with driving line on I really wish they would get rid of that feature. It's very useful because you can use it as a marker for your braking lines (whereas usually you have to use objects on the side of the road) but it's unrealistic.

On the bridge I'm 100% brakes when it's yellow but my braking distances might be slightly longer because I'm pretty bad at heal-toe. It's easy to lock the brakes there which will increase your braking time and destroy your tires.

Quote :

than having dificulties with that dangerous chicane wich was T1 in FEGreen round

The chicane after the bridge section? That's actually one of the places where I have the least amount of trouble. I usually trail brake into the chicane, find a line where I can go straight through, keep the wheel straight and floor it... I think anyway. I haven't practiced here in a while. I have a feeling I can go MUCH faster through there. I'll have to analyze my time with the WR - the problem is there is no good WR for this track. The current WR runs very loose while I've seen drivers be very smooth and get equivalent times. The next WR lap is ~4 seconds slower.

Quote :

than those five or six last corners, wich seem to be made for drifting...

I'm awful at just about every turn after the first 2 splits Through the first 2 splits I'm on pace for a good lap. All hell breaks loose after that and I usually wind up running a ~2:56. Wish I had more time to practice...

mwuahah, I was lying to make everyone panic and practice hard.. With RAC, if you don't push the car at all and just drive the safest line possible you should be able to get 2:58 easily with default set.

It's very accurate. It even accounts for lag, disconnects, penalties for chatting, wrecks during SC, everything It says you will finish dead last. Sorry!

haha thanks. great driving at the end there.

That looked like a ton of fun. "FFS Blackbird is on his roof" lol

Can't believe how many people were wrecking during the SC... but it was pretty amusing. The SC did a good job of staying right at 70mph... not sure what the problem was.

I'm not a big fan of oval racing but I think I'd still have fun out there. I may join the next 250 or 500.

Haven't practiced much but I'm running around 2:50.9x to 2:51.2x in RAC. According to my most recent simulation, I will qualify 2nd and then spin in front of Taylor in the chicane causing him to hit the tires flipping over and getting a DQ.

I'll never buy another fresnel lens again. I still have nightmares of being scammed on ebay.

"120 INCH PROJECTOR BIG SCREEN L@@K !!11"

Yeah I'm one of those idiots who bought plans to build a homemade projector by turning your TV upside down and putting a fresnel lens in front of it.

Still, I've seen some vids of people using fresnel lenses to remove the borders and it just looks a bit odd to me.

Can you elaborate a little more android? I've only tried rFactor once. The only thing that I thought added to the immersion was the damage model.

What's wrong with drifting on grass? This isn't footage from a real drifting event so who cares. One of the craziest things I've seen was Tsuchiya passing an entire field by drifting through the grass in turn one in a best motoring race

Interesting. Thanks for the review. You should post it over at thewayiplay.com - they have a nice site over there for hardware reviews.

I'd be interested in hearing from a TrackIR user that already has a 3 monitor setup.

I liked it... the vid he is referring to is this:

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/32013.html?type=wmv

haha that video was hilarious.. ooh there's a part 2... *watches*

Here's a screenshot I took from LFSBC round 2 practice.

Quote from wtf im nameless :

My goal is to do this same setup with projectors

Check out the PDF in this post for "improving wide angle viewing for web conferences". They use a 5 camera hardware array (with each camera having varying FOV's) to capture the video, stitch the separate images together into one, and then apply warping.

The technique in the article used for generating a single, non-distorted flat image. But if LFS could do something similar then you could use a curved screen or dome and a single projector, with a lens that can evenly distribute the light across the entire curved surface, then you wouldn't need 3 projectors. Of course I think these lenses cost ~$20k!

Anyway, I'm talking out of my butt. I don't really know much about this stuff. But, I too am looking to build the ultimate sim setup

Quote from jarmenia :

Thanks for the link but I'm trying to refrain from getting other peoples setups as it just extends my ignorance as to how to tweak a setup to be exactly how I want it. I will however use them as general guides to see how other people approach a certain track.

Check out this thread over at RSC

Quote from wtf im nameless :

No, you can do it with 3, if I have triple 120 inch projectors in a U shape (but squared 90 degree corners) I can sit my cockpit which is a lot smaller in the middle of it in a way that the side projectors actually go behind me.

hmmm... well I guess I can't comment since I've never sat in a 3 projector setup with 3 camera angles! But I would think that the angles between the 3 projectors might be too much.

Quote from wtf im nameless :

couple of things, #1, that pic is using three "4x3" LCD monitors. The proper way to do it would be using three 16x10 widescreen monitors which is what I am doing myself. The only issue is you cannot use TripleHead2Go unless you want to run a non-native resolution. Using SoftTH I am running at 5040x1050 and with my new tweaked settings I am running at 30-40FPS online racing 10-12 people now. That being said, I have a much wider center screen than what you showed in your pics and the anyone who has raced in my setup has agreed so far, once your sitting and racing you actually cannot see the bezels (unless you stop and look for them) because you are so into the race.

My only issue with the way its being done right now is my rear view mirrors and edges of the screen are all distored. The way the other thread you are talking about is going to distort the picture even worse. If you run multiple camera's, especially with projectors you can have over 180 degrees of vision with almost no distortion and no border at all.

For 180 degrees I think you would need atleast 5 monitors or 5 projectors. But yeah I used 4:3 monitors because that's what I have in front of me so it was easy to take screenshots Edit: Actually since I used 45 degrees FOV in these screenshots, I guess you would only need 4 - but then you would not have a center screen.

I believe Juls' suggestion in the other thread was for single display setups - which is what the majority of LFS users have.

Last edited by Technique, Tue 18 Mar 2008, 20:25.

Thats because your center view is not 45 degrees like in the picture above. The picture above is 3 view ports (45 degrees FOV each) with their own camera angle as mentioned here and in the FOV thread. This isn't possible in LFS. Unless you're using 135 degree FOV - but I'm guessing no since it looks pretty awful!

edit.. hmmm... I missed that look steer part. I've never used that before so perhaps that would work. I don't have 3 monitors either so I can't test it. It seems like it would be unnatural though.

One thing that may be annoying is that with a 3 monitor setup you have to use the left and right monitors in order to see the apex of the turn. You have to turn your head a good amount in real life too so in that respect it's more realistic. But in real life you don't have large plastic monitor bezels blocking your vision!

In the image below, the yellow lines represent where the monitor borders would be.

Until borderless triple monitor displays become more common place I think Juls suggestion in the FOV thread is a better approach. Since it works with single displays a single projector could give a decently realistic image..

Quote from JO53PHS :

Just wondering.... Is it possible to set up a custom camera for each monitor... or will it display the same thing on all monitors?

I know this is basically what the thread is suggesting... but is there any way to do it?

Nope, that's really the point of this thread is to add support for such a feature. I also mentioned it in the FOV thread.

Multiple viewports makes LFS look 100x more realistic!

Quote from wtf im nameless :

In XP when running multiple monitors could you move them where ever you wanted?

Yeah you could do that in XP.

Ultramon also adds a taskbar on every monitor which is the most important feature IMHO.

Last edited by Technique, Tue 18 Mar 2008, 19:49.