Quote from zeugnimod :

Apparently it automatically is bad music and you have to be ashamed of liking it when a song/band is a bit successful.

Not at all. There's lots of mainstream music that's worth listening to. I just can't fathom how that particular song can be considered one of them. It has nothing to do with it's popularity (I hadn't heard it before I saw this thread).

Quote from Lautsprecher[NOR] :

Someone please tell me when the next flight of this [insert name of make-believe deity her]-forsaken rock's scheduled!

I'm right behind ya pal.

I just can't figure out what it is about this song some of you think is so amazing? There's absolutely nothing about it that separates it from every other pop song out there today. The lyrics are the normal superficial nonsense, the melody is not even a little bit catchy, the "beats" sound like some of the preprogrammed ones on my ancient Roland keyboard (1980's baby!) and the guy's voice is just piercingly annoying (not to mention all the processing they've done to it to make sure you end up with a bleeding headache). I sense absolutely no talent in any aspect of this song.

It just saddens me that this is what people listen to these days. Gah! Just... gah!

Quote from xaotik :

And for the record ragged/jagged arrays are not MS terms and they just define a specific type of multi-dimensional array.

Specifically one where the length of the sub-arrays (the 2nd dimension) vary. Hence "ragged".

Quote from tristancliffe :

Sadly, it's now a case of "If the electronics work, I'm safe driving"

The biggest problem in countries where we actually have snow and ice (i.e. not the UK) is getting up those last few metres of someone's driveway. The roads can be perfectly drivable and safe, but not being able to park you car in your garage because of ice and snow in the driveway can be a bit annoying. In these cases traction control is simply a very good tool. If you're a superhuman driving-stud, I'm sure you could modulate the throttle every 10 milliseconds and get the same effect, but personally I'd rather save my energy and let the car handle it.

This isn't about driving around in horrible conditions where you shouldn't be on the road in the first place. It's simple convenience in those rare conditions where you do need it.

While you're probably right that this is inaccurate, what difference does it make in a sim where you can repair any damage in 20 seconds? Everything about the pitstop is unrealistic at the moment, so why not focus on the big issues rather than these small niggles?

Quote from 510N3D :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in6RZzdGki8

The comments on that video made me feel old.

Quote from Youtube :

loserface364 (23 hours ago)
no it's not on the internet it's an old nintendo game i think supernintendo

envy641497 (21 hours ago)
na dude, it's a computer program

Kids these days...

Keep in mind that LFS simulates the sound as it sounds inside the car with a helmet on. This will muffle the sound a fair bit. I'm not trying to pass it of as perfect (it isn't), but it's not that far off. Personally I find the earlier S2 sounds much too harsh in the upper frequencies.

Quote from Billeh :

Look out number of the devil

I'm not surprised. Making rFactor actually drivable must have involved copious amounts of witchcraft.

Quote from JamesF1 :

I've seen what it's done to the others who have been working on it

Heh, I know a guy that does data recovery for a living, so I know what you mean. His big fat pay-cheque helps him cope though. People are generally more willing to spend when the shit hits the fan than they are when it comes to paying for proper backup solutions in the first place.

Quote from Stang70Fastback :

Well - it is practically as good, if you properly maintain it.

Bull. One mistake at the commandline and all your files go away. An application could corrupt the files. RAID controller failure and you have to piece it together by hand like James seems to be doing now. A power surge could wipe out all your drives and take most of the other hardware with it. A fire could take down your entire system and the data in it. The possibilities are endless. Do NOT trust RAID as your sole "backup" solution.

Quote from Gekkibi :

In other words, if you have too many programmers, it slows down bug-fixing and improvements, because everyone does everything differently than others.

I don't really think that's the issue. There are enough subsystems without significant overlap in a game engine to allow a couple of programmers to work on it without stepping on each other's toes (up to a certain point of course). One programmer could easily work on tyre physics and vehicle dynamics without getting in the way of another programmer working on international languages support and other GUI issues. It may indeed make bug-hunting a bit harder, as you won't be intimately familiar with every piece of code, but bug hunting is somewhat of a black art anyway. Most of the time I don't know WTH I was thinking when looking back at code I wrote a couple of years ago. Might as well have been written by someone else.

The sticking point for Scawen and the other devs seems to be the vision. They want it their way, and they want to get there by doing it themselves. And that's fair enough to me...

Quote from JamesF1 :

vBulletin's nightly backups 'mysteriously' stopped backing up everything at the start of December

Ouch. You have my sympathies.

Quote from h3adbang3r :

Call Microsoft, it's what worked for me.

Yep. Changing (certain parts of) your hardware changes the computer's hash value that is used when activating. To activate an OEM copy on the new hardware you have to prove to Microsoft that you haven't moved the copy over to a different computer. I'm not sure how the retail versions work on these cases. They may allow reactivation automatically.

All part of the wonderful DRM experience.

Quote from JamesF1 :

RAID array failure

RAID is not an alternative to backup. I feel your pain though.

Quote from Jakg :

Does LFS need DDR2 levels of bandwidth? Doubt it.

I was more commenting on the condescending knowitallism of the little squirt than anything else. You're right it has little real world performance benefit in LFS' case.

Quote from Eclipse2000 :

That changes nothing!

Apart from halving the memory bandwidth... yeah, that can't do anything.

Quote from The Very End :

but still, making a game / mod out from a other game, and add some cars and tracks to id don`t justify the price for the game.

Are you kidding me with this? Buying an existing engine is done in 99% of games made these days. It's called middleware. Creating everything from scratch is just completely pointless, and a waste of time in most cases. Why should sims be any different here?

Quote from The Very End :

FAIL!

Fail indeed. How you can make these bold statements on something you haven't even tried baffles me.

You're all talking nonsense (and speaking the wrong language).

Some that should be understandable for the international community:
http://www.start.no/m/?m=20071124
http://www.start.no/m/?m=20070728
http://www.start.no/m/?m=20070717
http://www.start.no/m/?m=20070706

Quote from mooneye :

I think i have the same here. Compared to rFactor, GTR2, GTL,...LFS looks a bit less "fluid"(best example is South City,when u look at the buildings, the distance shields or any sideobjects from the track,while driving,they look like there is always a little little stuttering in it....) than these games at 60 or 75Hz with Vsync on.

Have a look here and here. It all comes down to the fact that LFS physics run at a constant 100Hz while the graphics usually run at 60Hz.

Quote from KROM :

This the case with me also.

I've seen a lot of people report the same thing. Must be a driver issue...

Quote from avih :

By what I understand from your data and descriptions, It seems that everyone's oppinion/conclusion about the lower framerate on the grid is that it's NOT more physics but rather the graphics subsystem.

That is indeed true. A high percentage of the CPU load in LFS is dedicated to telling the GPU what to do. LFS does a lot of calls to the D3D8 API to tell it what to draw and where. This API overhead can be quite significant in (technically) older games like LFS as they were constructed for GPUs far slower than the modern monsters we're running. Back then the API overhead wasn't that much of a concern as the GPUs weren't fast enough to outrun the CPUs as thoroughly as today.

Reducing this API overhead is incidentally one of the main goals of D3D10 and eventually OpenGL 3. Using these you can tell the GPU what to draw with less actual calls into the API, and that lightens the CPU load related to graphics considerably. LFS could stand to see massive improvements to FPS by an API change, but the work required to restructure the entire renderer in such a way isn't exactly trivial.

Quote from avih :

Which brings me to a conclusion that separating the graphics subsusyem into it's own thread/core could be relatively easy to achieve (relatively because.. well.. software usually is never easy to modify much) and might give a nice gain on multicore systems.

I wouldn't say "easy" as it's quite a big task to separate physics and rendering completely and designing a way to transfer "frames" (scene state, positions and rotations of all objects etc.) between the two without them stepping on each other's toes. It's still probably easier than changing the API though, so it's the most likely path for LFS to take to "lighten" the CPU load. (even though it in reality would just be spreading the load around.)

Quote from avih :

Is there a way to understand on a specific system whether the limit is the GPU or the CPU, per situation in the game?

You usually do this by changing the load on the graphics card without changing CPU load and observe what happens to the FPS as you do so. The best way to do this is to take a measurement in a low resolution with AA/AF off. Then you up the resolution and/or AA/AF and see what happens to the FPS. If it stays roughly the same, you're CPU limited. The CPU can't keep up with the GPU basically. If FPS goes down, you're GPU limited meaning the CPU is outrunning the GPU.

Note that as you go up in resolutions and AA/AF levels you will shift the bottleneck from the CPU to the GPU and even if you were CPU limited at a low resolution you may end up GPU limited once you go high enough. You basically just have to experiment and see how it reacts.

Quote from Shotglass :

one problem with wind (and solar) that many like to ignore (or are just ignorant about) is that you will always end up building fossile plants that can be ramped up quickly (like gas turbines) with at least the same amount of power output to mean out varying weather conditions

You can also use hydro to do that if the conditions are there, but hydro too is dependent on weather so it won't solve the problem entirely. It can be stored for a while in dams though and put to use when needed, so it'll smooth out some of the kinks if combined with wind or solar. We already do that here by filling up the dams in the fall and then emptying them over the duration of the winter (when the water falls as snow in the mountains). Still isn't enough to keep us self-sufficient though. We do import a lot of fossil fuel power during the winter.

Quote from ajp71 :

Surely spending the money on a nuclear plant would result in far lower maintenance costs, and likely setup costs as well and would have no effect on the environment, either visual or to wildlife.

As far as I've been able to tell; if you're building here in Norway a wind farm with current technology will come out at about 0.25 NOK/kWh while hydro and nuclear will end up at about 0.05 NOK/kWh (rough numbers based on skimming a few reports). A big difference, but still not as bad as a lot of people will have you believe.

As you, I would prefer nuclear, but I don't like the thought of going 100% nuclear either. Alternative sources are important to limit the damage that could happen if for instance uranium/torium/whateverium prices go up or supply is somehow hindered (wars etc.). The dependence we have on oil today is scary enough without adding another dependency.

Quote from J.B. :

Now that's more like it. And it's offshore!

Yep, it looks interesting. It even floats, which simplifies construction a lot compared to something locked to the seabed. The technology isn't quite there yet though, so it's still a bit of a question mark whether they can pull it off on such a scale. Still in the hands of the lawmakers though.

Last edited by wien, Mon 25 Feb 2008, 00:33.

Quote from ajp71 :

...which are all silly generate a nominal amount at huge cost and are normally separated from hydroelectric in the statistics.

Well. I don't agree. There are for instance plans to create a 1.5 gigawatt wind farm out in ocean of western Norway. That's only a few hundred megawatts shy of the average nuclear plant, and represents about 4% of Norway's total energy consumption. That makes wind a real alternative in my book, even if it has a higher initial- and maintenance-cost than nuclear. You can't power the world off if of course, but it certainly works as one among many energy sources. Betting it all on one silver bullet solving the world's energy problems isn't wise anyway. We need diversity, and there's a lot of windy ocean out there ready for the taking.

The plans above probably won't go anywhere though, as too many locals complain about the aesthetics. Can't ruin that beautiful view of water, now can we?