IMHO, it's worth paying the $20 to try it out for a month. Driving feel, ffb, sound, tracks, netcode are all very good and probably better than LFS. Whether the game is worth $13-20/month to you will be your decision I'm still undecided...

Quote from Jertje :

Alright, I got a 1.03.629 (trust me, I was surprised ), but I'm still looking for a good place to upload it to, since yout00b doesn't allow for enough quality to clearly see the speed and such, any suggestions?

blip.tv and vimeo are generally pretty good. I find it odd that I can easily record iRacing videos using Fraps at ~30FPS whereas in LFS I can barely record half-speed videos at 14FPS. I guess LFS uses alot more CPU for replays.

Also, I've read in a few places that if you record too many samples (let's say every 1000 RPM), it will be obvious when the samples are changed. Most games simply use low rpm, mid rpm, and high rpm.

I thought it would be the opposite effect. The more samples you have, the more realistic it would sound and the less obvious the change. Any thoughts?

Whatever the cause, I would expect the best sample based sound system to capture all these nuances. If you were to blind fold me, I could probably tell you whether I was in 1st, 2nd, or 3rd just based on what I hear from the drivers position.

Quote from gezmoor :

On the point of not being able to record a car in 6th gear under load, there is no need. The engine has no idea what gear you're in, it will sound the same under load in 1st gear as it would in 6th gear for the same "load" percieved. However just using rpm as the control for producing engine sounds is never going to be completely accurate. You need to factor in throttle too as an engine often sounds completely different on the overrun than under load and neutral throttle positions.

My car sounds completely different in 1st gear than in 2nd and 3rd (from the driver's position). I don't know the technical reason why But roaring up to 9k in 1st sounds much different than running up to redline in 2nd, for example.

Pretty much everything has been said. I'll approach this thread from a different perspective.

For those who have driven that other "expensive" sim, LFS is a breath of fresh air. You have complete freedom to choose what you want to drive, where you want to drive it, and most importantly, you can drive whenever the hell you want.

Here's a typical racing experience in that "other" sim with the entire chat log.
1) Get off work at 5:00PM.
2) Race starts at 5:00PM. Ah f*** I guess I'll wait until 7.
3) Eat dinner at 6:30PM. Forget to sign up for 7PM race.
4) Wait for 9PM race.
5) Signup for 9PM race at 8:56. 60 people signed up for 9PM race.
6) Join pre-race chat. No one's in there.
7) Leave pre-race chat.
8) Patiently wait for clock to countdown to 0.
9) Join race
10) Do the 5 minute warmup
11) Someone says "Hello, can anyone hear me?" on their mic.
12) No one responds
13) After one minute, I find some place safe I can pull over:

"JJ#1: yes"

14) The race is about to start.
15) Two people with the initials "BS" say good luck, but you have no idea who they are or which one is which.

"BS#4: GLA"
"BS#9: gl from germany"

16) The race ends.
17)
"JJ#1: great race red car with yellow stripe"
Bob Smith has disconnected from server
Bobdulu Sandonowski has disconnected from server
AS#5: HOW DO I WATCH THE REPLAY OF THE START?
Arse Smith has disconnected from server
...
everyone else disconnects...

When you connect to an LFS server it's like a completely different experience. Total freedom. People chatting back and forth. It's not just a racing sim. It's like a big hang out for racing nerdz Not sure how else I can describe it.

Nice review. I almost bought two of these actually, but after waiting (and waiting... and waiting...) for a reply I lost interest and bought something else

p.s. This should be in the "other hardware" section

Don't worry man. I've had plenty of those types of races. It's fairly well documented here... including my first race ever where I drove into the back of someone off the line, my 59 incident points in 4 sessions day, and my most recent... not realizing I was racing at Lime Rock when they switched the track over midday.

Added force dynamics 301 and 401 (how did I forget those!?) and a new racing chair - Precise Racing Chair.

Helo. I plays LFS 'cause of teh Scawen's hair. It'is large ands it'is scary. :spchewie:

Quote from bbman :

You even have the tool to implement it in LfS already (if it still works):
http://www.lfsforum.net/showth ... p;highlight=sound+remixer

Samples (when done right) will sound very good, at the expense of being "flat" - there isn't just as much information in it as with synthesized sounds... Problem with the latter is a tiny change can (and most likely will) make a huge difference on the output, which is why they are way harder to realise...

Thanks! Hmm... this looks like it does everything I was hoping to do actually

Last edited by Technique, Tue, 8 Jul 2008 00:14.

Hopefully this topic has not been beaten to death. I'd like to discuss the pros and cons of synthesized vs sampled sounds engines in a peaceful fashion. I realize at this stage in the game the developers are not going to change the LFS sound engine. That's not what this topic is about.

With that said, last night I had an interesting idea. Since Outsim already provides RPM data, we're actually free to create our own sound engine. I know absolutely nothing about audio and even less about audio programming - I know that libraries such as DirectSound and OpenAL "exist" and that's about it. So I started digging around looking at various resources and this is what I found.

First, I learned the basics about sample based systems... cross-fading loop based samples, changing the volume/pitch, etc. Then I downloaded this neat tool called FMOD Designer. It's free to download here:

http://www.fmod.org/index.php/download

To my surprise, it actually has a Car Engine sound system built into the thing! I attached a screenshot below. You can insert engine samples from real cars under load, off load, low, mid, high rpm, and play around with the different cross fading techniques, etc. Really cool. Also interesting is that "load" is not an input. It's just derived from the RPM change with a smoothing factor (which is good because I don't think engine load is provided through outsim). If anyone plays around with it, if you click the tiny white bar that represents the current load, it shows you the load volume curve which isn't visible otherwise. My first thoughts were, this doesn't really seem like it would be too difficult to program at all. The biggest issue would probably be getting good samples.

Recording quality sound is another thing I know nothing about. Hell after 2 years I couldn't even get my in-car camera mic working properly... I found this article here on recording audio from cars:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/ ... gine_sounds_for_games.php

It turns out the author is responsible for the sounds in iRacing and most other racing games. It seems like most recordings are done on a dyno with the mics placed inside, by the exhaust, and near the intake. Since I have no access to a dyno nor do I want to spend even more money I'd have to record the samples on a highway or something. I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to get a sample in 6th gear under load at high rpm though... without factoring in wind by the exhaust and whatnot. The article is a little old and although DAT may still be used I thought solid state would be a better/cheaper alternative. I found this site here after a bit of digging:

http://www.soundprofessionals.com

It looks like even on the lower end, it's still going to cost ~$350 to get quality stereo samples for my dumb experiment.

http://www.soundprofessionals. ... /item/TAS-DR-1-MIC-BUNDLE

Here's some other interesting reads I came across:
http://forum.racesimcentral.com/showthread.php?t=124451
http://www.developmag.com/tuto ... 41/Heard-About-Sega-Rally

So I guess my only question is, am I wasting my time and money? After playing iRacing for a couple of weeks I'm convinced that sample based sound systems can definitely sound good even if synthesized sounds are ideally what all sims should pursue. Could this possibly be a good community based project?

Discuss.

Last edited by Technique, Mon, 7 Jul 2008 20:30.

Quote from Woz :

Frex take existing wheels and mod them up so I would guess take the cost of the donor wheel and at least double it and possibly add some more

I think all their prices are in Yen last time I looked.

You guys have to keep up with the times! The new Frex wheel was released. It's probably the best FFB wheel around but it costs ~$1700 without the physical wheel. The total cost shipped to the U.S. with a wheel is probably over $2000.... Degrees of rotation = 1080

ECCI makes the best non-ffb wheels. http://www.ecci.net
The Trackstar6000 is their latest model. It's a 240 degree wheel and its their most popular model. I'm interested in the not so well known multiturn wheel myself - 6000MT.... if I can get over the fact that it lacks ffb, takes a long time to adjust the degrees of rotation, is still "only" 820 degrees max, and lacks a centering spring. It's tricky to find it on their webpage:

http://ecci6000.com/proddetail.asp?prod=6070M1W&from=ALL

Finally, you might want to keep an eye on this thread:
http://forum.rscnet.org/showthread.php?t=314424

Bumping an old thread...

Not sure if it was posted, but I just saw this old video from 2007 that shows Sega Rally Revo's surface deformation in action. I don't play any console games so I thought it was kind of neat...

The surface deformation part starts at about ~4:15

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Rdqeu-2bTT8

Quote from Waffenaffe :

I like that idea.
But the devs want to do own things...

This idea really has nothing to do with the devs wanting to do their own things though. Software development simply does not work like this.

Quote from Glenn67 :

Wouldn't necesarily agree... your assuming that the majority of forum members want to see LFS develop into an online racing simulator, and that most serious sim drivers visit/post in the forums.

That simply isn't the case and as a consequence the most popular things judged by forum members may not be what is best for the sim.

I don't think a democracy is the best structure for developing a sim (rfactor?) I am sure Scawen and co have no shortage of ideas and have also a pretty good grasp on what the community think is important. More importantly though they also have a vision of what they see in a sim and even though at times we may struggle to see that they see, they do see

I agree that the community doesn't necessarily know what's always right for the sim. A bug tracking/feature request system makes no promise that features are implemented. The problem with the current improvements forum is that good feature requests may get buried under countless repeated posts. The forum has no structure in place to put value to the ideas suggested.

Not every post has to turn into a flame war...

Inouva, your idea simply will not work, for reasons already stated by angry angel.

What could work though, is getting rid of the disorganized improvement forum and creating a separate website/bug tracking system where registered community members can report bugs, request features, etc. What's nice about these system is that bugs and features with more votes rise to the top so that it's fairly evident which features the users care most about.

This is starting to get good... :munching_

hah spanks I might have been in that race. What a disaster for me. I thought they were still running Laguna and I was completely unprepared for lime rock. In the warmup laps I was 3 seconds off of my pace last week.... In the race I spun 3 or 4 times!

Quote from Shotglass :

jesus youre easily ínsulted... pms?

eh... I had a few beers and when I got back I read your ridiculous post.. Besides having an american sports car as its base road car what about iRacing's initial road course car selection gives you the feeling they don't know what they're doing?

Certainly there's a "limited" amount of road course cars right now, but they seem to be releasing cars and tracks pretty frequently I'm sure we'll see caterham type cars eventually.

Quote from Shotglass :

i dont think the united states of americaland have ever even heard of the caterham kind you like... a 500 kilo car? a set of supersized cupholders weights more

<sarcastic>Yet... an American company is responsible for the best simulation on the market. Amazing how they can accomplish that without any appreciation for said cars.</sarcastic>

Given their choice of cars that form a progression of a racer's career path, it would seem a bit odd to focus on a Caterham at the moment when they already have a perfectly fine base car in the Solstice. But maybe with all of your racing experience they should have signed you on as a consultant.

Shotglass: "ZOMG YOU HAVE TO HAVE THE CATERHAM AND ARIEL ATOM YOU NOOBZ. DUMB AMERICANZ"

Rookie solstice - my best is 1:49.2

1:48's is fairly common in races. Fastest drivers have gotten into the high 1:46's.

Quote from mrodgers :

Also, I could be VERY wrong about it.

You are VERY wrong about it There was a list of things to be included in Z and a list of things in the works. "Breakable wings" are in the works.

This is why I never want to become a game developer.

When I purchased S1 and S2 and I knew what I was getting. I'm damn happy with my purchase. All these incremental updates are just icing on the cake.

Maybe I'm just a gullible sheep and I'm victim to the evil devs that have stolen $50 USD from me over the course of 6 years (oh noes!).

14 incident points in 7pm race
13 incident points in 8pm qualifying
14 incident points in 9pm race
18 incident points in 11pm race

lol... both my safety rating and irating took quite a big hit today..... but hey, I got some good practice in and now I'm running faster...