Not sure why it needs another joke name, I think Windows Fista is quite suitable.

Windows is a terrible OS and desktop environment (the desktop environment argument is much stronger than the OS part imho), but it does have gaming over linux (until devs realise native linux executables are a must...)

Why do you want to do this? The program halts while you play LFS. This isn't a great design, but it helps avoid other issues. It will become responsive again when you close LFS. I really don't understand why you'd do this though - you can't make the existing LFS.exe join another server, or something. If you do have a good reason, we'll change this behaviour though....

p.s. Since the thread has gone to page 3 and our request for translations is likely to be unseen, please see http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?t=9146 if you want to help out with translations.

Browse For Speed 0.5 will have multiple language support. This is great, we think, but Australians are well known for only being able to speak one language (and poorly), so we need the community's help.

We would like to distribute 0.5 with whatever translations we can get before we decide to release it (though it will be possible to add translations afterwards simply by putting a file in the lang folder). If you would like to be the author (and maintainer) of a translation, please contact me (email, msn, prvmsg, whatever), I will add your name to the list in this post with which language you are translating to (so that work isn't duplicated) and send you a copy of Browse For Speed beta 0.5.

Translating involves copying/editing an xml file. There are about 150 (mostly small) strings to translate. You will be credited for your work (your name/details will show up in the configuration section when your language is chosen if you wish).

0.5 will have the following added features:

• Basic (but powerful) admin interface. Lets you send/receive messages to a server via insim.
  
• Ability to start arbitrary number of programs before LFS
  
• Bunch of minor things (keyboard shortcuts, copy server hostname etc)

Yes. There are three states for each car checkbox - unchecked, dimmed, and checked. Unchecked means the server must not allow the car, dimmed means you don't care, checked means the server must allow the car.

If you do the car choices before you hit refresh, it requests these car choices from the master server, so you will usually get much fewer total servers to query. You can also filter the cars after a complete list has been obtained - this is done client side.

Version 0.4 is out! The most noticeable change in this version is the ability to query Demo/S1 servers and much improved filtering. Changelog from 0.3:

• Added ability to list and query Demo/S1 servers. These servers can also be added to favourites.
  
• Added and improved filtering options. Public/Private/Empty/Full/Cars filtering works both server and client side, and ping/track filtering is done client side.
  
• Fixed friends being deleted if the query fails initially (if lfsworld is down for example)
  
• Fixed configuration updating.

Upgrade instructions: (from any version) Simply unzip into your existing folder, overwriting any files.

Enjoy!

Thanks for the positive comments people, it really encourages us to keep working on it.

Quote from Dygear :

How did you get the pings from the servers? Live For Speed dose not disclose the IP address of the server.

We only use (the most excellent) pubstat system for some of the extended server information, and for the friends system. The querying makes use of the query protocol (the one used by the ingame listing. See our FAQ). We chose not to display the IP addresses of servers as it seems the devs don't either.

Quote from (SaM) :

Finally a manly program to browse for servers and friends!

This is seemingly a very odd adjective to use, but thank you very much!

Well, version 0.2 didn't last very long at all, not because it needed bugs fixed, but because we have implemented some features we would like to be made available now. Changelog from 0.2 to 0.3:

• Pubstat queries are cached, so if you do lots of view server informations in quick succession, the pubstat system will not tell you to go and sit in the corner. Additionally, queries will seem much much faster.
  
• Added a friends system. Similar to the alert system on LFSWorld, this allows you to add to a friends list and will show you if any of your friends are racing, and some information about the server they are racing on.
  
• Track information in the display shows the full track name.
  
• Fixed crash when sorting by car names, then clicking favourites tab.

Upgrade instructions: (from any version) Simply unzip into your existing folder, overwriting any files.


When adding friends, we are unable to determine if that friend actually exists. If it doesn't, that friend will simply always appear offline - so try to get the spelling and caps (it is case-sensitive) right.


http://www.browseforspeed.net


The next release period will probably be longer than this one (unless there are major bug-fixes required), as we have a bunch of things we want to include for 0.4. Enjoy!

Release 0.1 turned out to be quite successful, with only a couple of minor bugs found. Thanks to everyone who provided feedback, we have implemented most of the requested features. Version 0.2 is now available. Changelog:

• Fixed crash when using the right-click context menu to join a server.
  
• Fixed crash when closing extended server information dialog while still refreshing.
  
• Passwords are saved for favourite servers.
  
• Sorting by connections works correctly.
  
• Fixed incorrect password being used when starting LFS from the extended server information dialog.
  
• Server list font size can be changed with ctrl +/- (numpad).
  
• Added support for Pit Spotter.
  
• Configuration and Favourite Servers files are now XML.
  
• Hiding empty servers no long retrieves empty servers from the master server on refresh.

NOTE: The xml changes will convert your current settings and favourites, but please back them up first (simply copy config.cfg and favourite.servers to another location before running 0.2). If you use the Pit Spotter option, don't forget to disable launching LFS.exe in the Pit Spotter config.

Upgrade instructions: Simply unzip into your existing folder, overwriting any files.


Note that Browse For Speed is a fully functional program, which is and always will be open source and free!


Our site is having some problems with browser caching. If you do not see updated content, clear your browser cache and restart it. Sorry.

http://browseforspeed.whatsbeef.net

Last edited by wabz, Wed 31 May 2006, 09:41.

Sorry, I can't help myself

The land of the free - The NSA offers excellent career opportunities to mathemetics or computer science graduates. Simply pick up the phone, call your mum and ask for an application.

I definitely respect your memorial day though

Quote from Rtsbasic :

I did hit a snag in compiling it,

[Task:File=/home/rtsbasic/gtkfrontend/gtkbrowseforspeed/MainWindow.cs, Line=52, Column=4, Type=Error, Description=Cannot implicitly convert type `int' to `bool'(CS0029)

Does it run on your end or is it not yet finished enough to compile?

Do an svn update, a fix for that has just been committed - should compile and run (with crashes :tilt

Quote from Rtsbasic :

Looks impressive Nice work. Any chance of a Linux release? You written the library in Monodevelop so you must have considered it. Do you have the entire application ported or just the library? If its all there, any chance of a release of that, so I can see if there's any worthwhile servers to join without rebooting.

If you only have the library compiling in Monodevelop, I could possibly knock together a GTK# front end for it.

A Gtk# frontend has already been started (the library was developed in linux)

You can check it out from our svn repository at http://home.whatsbeef.net:1339/svn/ and see the beginnings of it, it's not much yet, but should give you a bit of an understanding of the library API. We'll probably work on it a bit more now that we know there's interest

Quote from alco64 :

I've narrowed down a crash to a problem with scanning a server (By viewing information of a single server) you close the server info window while it's still scanning.
Hope this helps you.

Thanks, it does. This has been fixed, but we won't include it until the next release, as we don't think it's a critical issue (it's crap that it crashes, but server querying doesn't take very long, shouldn't particulary interfere with normal use).

Keep the bug reports coming! We've fired all our testers already!

Quote from alco64 :

Also when i did a whole scan ALOT (about 300) of the servers refused connection. But when i individually select car filters and scan they don't refuse connection (except maybe 1-5).

Thanks for the feedback. If this continues to happen, increase the value of "query wait" (by about 20-30 each time) in the configuration. This will slow down the querying, but Microsoft Windows won't start refusing more connections. See the FAQ for more details.

This is an extremely annoying "feature" in windows. The browseforspeed library when run in Linux queries 450 servers in under 20 seconds.

Hello,

I've recently got back into LFS, and I found that there are many servers, and the wait for the server list got excruciating. I only want to know if there is anyone playing on local servers, and therefore choosing filters to speed up the server list process (~3minutes!) is not great. So last weekend Snookle and myself decided to do something about it.

Here is our first version of Browse For Speed. Please read the FAQ on our website before using it, it will explain why some things are done the way they are, possible problems and fixes.

There are bound to be problems. We (Snookle, Philip, and myself) had never seen or programmed in c# before last Sunday, and the querying stuff is developed against an undocumented protocol. There has been limited testing.

http://www.browseforspeed.net


Enjoy! Feedback, complaints, suggestions are all welcome!

Last edited by wabz, Thu 1 Jun 2006, 23:40.