Hey!

The AI in Live for Speed is no priority at all. But for inexperienced racers and newcomers to simracing they offer a first sight into the simulation. At the moment the performance of the AI lacks behind, even on the higher difficulty levels they can be beaten rather easily. One issue is the racing line the AI drivers follow, which is also visible to the regular driver by activating the racing line in-game. To improve the racing lines, I suggest importing the lines from the hot lap charts, i.e. the world records of the official car/track combinations.
That way the AI follows the quickest path around the track and new drivers will be able to have a competitive reference when learning the tracks. It will offer more competitive driving against the AI without the need to touch the current logic of the AI driving each track.
In my naive thoughts this may be a rather efficient way of implementing a more competitive AI system. Alternatives would probably require the complete redesign of the AI logic. Of course if this is a goal in the future, such an implementation would not be of much use. Also if this proves to require more effort then benefit for a in all honesty low priority part of the game, this idea should neither be followed on.

I hope this was not suggested before. My quick search showed me no improvement suggestion, that followed a similar thought.

Thanks and best regards!


PS: Happy new year!

May I ask how you approached the layout? Did you use maps, airborne or satellite photos/orthophotos or other geodata? If so what did you use?

In the setup screen of the XFR/UFR/FXR/FZR/XRR on the bottom of the "Info Page"

Quote from Gutholz :

I upload crack so that this discussion stops going around in circles.

+1

Well to be frank, it has been an honest an revealing discussion here and there are points made on either side that sound good, not so good or bad, depending on personal views and backgrounds. At the end of the day it is a business decision, that those who run the business make. Noone else. And any customer or potential customer can ask nicely but if their wish is declined it should not start an debate about anything on the spectrum of entitlement to economic hardship. Neither should it start a dabate about the political situations, while they play their role in the great picture, they are of no help in the matter at hand anyways.
And while arguing is good if done in a calm and civil manner, I share the feeling with Gutholz that the discussion goes nowhere now.

It is a nice plot, but isn't the label "income" for the green curve more appropriate? You still have to deduct the running costs (probably with fixed, scalable and periodic terms), taxes etc., or am I wrong? If that is the case, "profit" is rather deceiving.

There once was a video floating around on discord with someone doing a skin by actually using Photoshop on a 3D model. I cannot recall how they did it though. I imagine this is a "safe" yet not easy to set up method to skin.
The best thing mathematically should be to have all tri-faces in their true size in the plane, however the skin file would some of its recognisable features plus several tris probably don't fit into their spot.
Any projection of a plane onto an 3D object will always have varying scales after all, see the distortions of different map projections.

There is already a local pricing system in place... So it is 50% off for Turkey already for example. Similar discounts are in place for other countries. The problem is it still needs to do economically sense and after all the Devs need to pay their bills in Pound Sterling.

The discussion is not new either... if you search for forum threads you will find a couple and on the Live for Speed discord it also pops up regularily.

Have you kept the replays or something? If you saved those you could go to the hosts of the server and discuss with them what went wrong etc.
Generally if you were banned from a server by vote it is a 12 hour ban. The general problem is while it helps in open lobbies, it can be exploited as you just need 50%+1 of the lobby to support a vote.

This is an example of what photogrammetry alone is capable of.

One thing I’d like to suggest is an automatic/systematic class structure all mods are classified into. An idea I had for this are the vehicle class in combination with the power-to-weight ratio. For example GT cars between 200 and 250 W/kg get into the G25 class, between 250 and 300 W/kg into the G30 class, between 300 and 350 W/kg into G35 (most current GT3 cars belong to that as far as I see) and so on. Touring cars could be T, Saloon cars S and Formula cars F, for example. Ideally it could be a filter option as well.

I think it might benefit the car choices by drivers but also hosts and league organisers to have roughly similar performance levels in such classes. In the end it would be nice to add such classifications to the original LFS cars to have them easily comparable.


EDIT: A quick working example


Maybe it does not work that easy, as the list suggests the sorting by power-to-weight-ratio would be too simple, but maybe there is another idea out there how to do that.

Last edited by TFalke55, Wed 24 Nov 2021, 16:23.

A problem I can see with popular votes like these, it can become a vote of popularity as well.

A) Popularity of the cars: Cars that are popular will most likely be voted more favourable then unpopular cars or unknown categories. I assume if there were 80s touring cars the BMWs and Jaguars of the era will get better ratings then the Ladas or Trabants of the time even if the letter were equally good or even better. If it becomes a matter of approval, this might become frustrating.
B) Popularity of the creators: Popular mod creators might get better reviews then people with less reputation even when they create a "worse" product. While this might not be too much of a problem when it does not affect the approval, it might be a problem, when the creator himself is quite unpopular and they get "vote-bombed" or similar, even if they created a good or even great mod.

For B) I could see a solution by having WIP mods being tested blind, without disclosure of the creator, at least on the in-game and file download sides. This would require some form of comment function on the mod files, so feedback can be given no matter what. If they choose to disclose their identity on the forum or on discord anyways, it still provides a partial blinding as people who just vote through the in-game function will not necessarily read and follow discord/forum/... discussions.

If it is a vote-ban, it is not a bug of the game, but of the community who was on the server at that time. In theory that can happen whenever there is a critical mass of people on the server who are willing to do so or exploit it. It really depends on the way the server is run by the hosts and how many admins are active.

Not sure if it helps, but some InSim programs struggle when there is a password entered on your local host options. Clearing it helps those.


Maybe that helps your InSim program already?

Quote from mbutcher :

I could imagine that a combination of techniques could speed up the track-modelling process. E.g. A traditional laser-scan of the track surface and kerbs dropped into models using this airborne technique. You don't need centimetre accuracy for buildings and surrounding terrain, so applying the most appropriate technique for each aspect of the model could save time and resources.

I completely agree! Track surfaces would need to have either a detailed modelling from scratch or, if available, a surface scan like it is possible with a profile scanner on a multi-sensor vehicle for mobile mapping. City agencies for road building and civil engineering are using such vehicles to generate maps and data sets to assess the conditions of the roads.
In theory the UAV photogrammetry could also work, however due to the homogenous, featureless look of the road surfaces I don't expect it to detect the undulations that well, neither with the fidelity nor with the accuracy.

Quote from mbutcher :

The resolution of airborne techniques is not currently adequate to properly model the track surface, the part that actually matters in a simulation. Minute variations in the tarmac couldn't be modeled accurately enough with the technique you presented here. You'd still need someone to laser-scan the track surface.

Yes, no doubt, the data sets I presented are more appropriate to model topography and and the general shape of the surface, as well as the building. The accuracy of the buildings in the datasets is already close to decimeter accuracy, as they are derived from the real estate cadaster (data quality and fidelity of which is a story for another time...) but with simplified geometry.

I guess less and less teams use websites for communication but rather discord servers etc. Real-life team names or brands always have the problem that they are copyright protected and thus, if they are discovered by the company owning it, they might take action to take the site down.

Anyways, why should a hacker take your site down? And how would they do so if you have a good cyber security?

Hello everyone,

one question that is on my mind for a couple of years now, is the amount of data needed to create race tracks. The current gold standard for racing simulations is the terrestrial laserscanning, which provides a quick technique to aquire large amounts of geometrical (and radiometrical) data at a very high accuracy. This comes at the cost of big data sets and a complex work flow to filter and clear the data to the customers needs. At this point the real work for the developers of digital models as used in racing games really only starts. A slightly less complex solution would be the use of UAV photogrammetry supplemented by terrestrial photogrammetry, which also creates large point clouds but is faster while slightly less accurate. Still both approaches need trained professionals and come with several challanges concerning among others the stable reference frames needed to create a correct representation of the real world structures. Both photogrammetry and laserscanning can be used complementary.
Due to the effort involved with both techniques, they might become expensive. However geodata sources are in fact more and more available, if at a very reduced information density. Some sources are even open to the public without any additional costs involved. With the view from my personal bubble I think that the following data sources might also be a good starting point for the development of race tracks with a basis on real life data.

Airborne Laserscanning provides elevation data over large areas. Unlike laserscanned racetracks with millions of points, the public data only provides 4 to 10 points per square meter with an irregular distribution and an accuracy of 30cm in position and 15cm in height. The point clouds are however processed to give rasterized data with 1m spacings across large landscapes as digital terrain models or digital elevation models. These are low-pass filtered representations of the real terrains. While it is too little in terms of accuracy and points to replicate the real-life appearance, it gives a good generalized representation of the topography in relative high detail. These data sets are provided in .csv ASCII files (terrain models) or in LAS-files and LAZ-archives (point clouds).

Especially when combined with digital orthophotos (especially true-orthophotos) from flight campaigns, they give a good impression of how the world looks. Orthophotos can be obtained in .jp2 format or as an online service via OGC-WMS standard.
For buildings especially 3D building models in the LOD2. LOD2 are untextured, where is LOD3 are textured 3D models in the CityGML format, sometimes also provided as an OGC-WFS service.




The German state of North Rhine-Westphalia provide several datasets in open data under the so-called Data licence Germany - Zero - Version 2.0, which allows commercial of these data sets, so their use as a basis for an own commercial product is allowed (and encouraged). I put the links below, however they are in German.
terrain model: https://www.bezreg-koeln.nrw.de/brk_internet/geobasis/hoehenmodelle/digitale_gelaendemodelle/gelaendemodell/index.html
building models: https://www.bezreg-koeln.nrw.de/brk_internet/geobasis/3d_gebaeudemodelle/index.html
digital orthophotos: https://www.bezreg-koeln.nrw.de/brk_internet/geobasis/luftbildinformationen/aktuell/digitale_orthophotos/index.html
Data licence Germany - Zero - Version 2.0: https://www.govdata.de/dl-de/zero-2-0

I expect one problem off all such geodata is the scale as the ETRS89/UTM coordinates (and other geodetic/geographic coordinate systems) used for georeferencing are at a variable scale. It would probably best to transform an interesting data set into a localized cartesian coordinates first.

Using such data sources does not mean, you can get a 3D-race track from just combining a few data sources, but I believe they can be a good ground to start working with, by identifying interesting areas, getting a raw geometric representation of the real world and thus improving and densifying the data by designing the missing elements and pieces into an interesting unique yet also realistic track. Especially textures would need to be created, since the available public/open data files at best have 10cm per pixel resolutions (for privacy reasons).

Best regards

EDIT: I am happy to answer your questions here. I know it's a big wall of text and partly without proper formulation.

Last edited by TFalke55, Mon 27 Sep 2021, 12:04.

My condolences

I cannot make it today. Have fun everyone and make it a worthy season finale!

Rules updated to version 6.0 in the opening post. Just like last year I am waiting until Rony again points out a mistake.

LFSW name: TFalke55
In-game name: HoR Falke
Full team name: Heroes of Racing
Nation: Germany

Christian Krognes aka Chriskart (VLN/Nürburgring 24h)
Rudy van Buren, World's Fastest Gamer (Porsche Carrera Cup Germany)
Philip Ellis aka painster (various GT3 championships)
Christer Jöns (various GT3 championships)

teamName: Heroes of Racing
teamManager: {Jueweb, Jürgen Weber}
teamViceManagers:
- {Mensafest, Christian Ecker}
- {TFalke55, Thilo Falkenberg}
drivers:
- {Jueweb, Jürgen Weber, Germany}
- {Mensafest, Christian Ecker, Austria}
- {TFalke55, Thilo Falkenberg, Germany}
car: FXR
number: 31

Personally, I am a fan of the Nürburgring Endurance Series point system, that I also use for the Open E ... I (irregularily) organise. It gives similar points for similar positions, but a first place with 10 cars is worth more then a first place with 9 cars.

Also I think that Rony's point system he uses in the Tuesday Fun Races, which also experience some grid fluctuations, works good.

Quote :

Point system:
1st=10
2nd=9
3rd=8
4th=7
5th=6
6th=5
7th=4
8th=3
9th=2
10th and lower=1
(must finish 50% of race distance to score these points)
* System based on 10 drivers starting,extra 1 point for every 3 drivers more starting the race - this adds extra positions to receive more than 1 point.

1st in q=3
2nd in q=2
3rd in q=1
(if not finished -1p from q points as a "penalty" for not finishing race)
* System based on 10 drivers qualifyinging,extra 1 point for every 6 drivers more taking part in qualifying - this adds more positions to score points.

At the end of the day, drivers are motivated to drive a particular car, when it is fun to drive in the first place. That's something I cannot assess just seeing restriction charts.

While the core idea is novel, the problem is that such a grouping splits the drivers quite drastically imo. For endurance racing such a split might be interesting, as multiclass is a regular part of endurance racing in many series, be it reallife or sim racing leagues. In a sprint format it is just splitting it into three parallel races, as lap traffic won't really occur, it does not add anything to the race for the driver.

Also, the FIA point system does not really work in such a situation: you are scoring more then twice the points as a winner of a 10 car grid compared to a 6 car grid and it gets even worse with less cars are around.