http://www.youtube.com/watch?v ... DVgWc&feature=related

For all those doubters, LISTEN to the commentary. To quote "Just testing he has brake pressure on the way into turn 9"

Car weight distribution is also key here. The better you balance the car with your right foot the less you have to fight the FFB. Control the drift with your right foot first, steering wheel second.

Quote from Michael Denham :

How you have described it here is closest to how I understand it. Just improves the response when you first start braking if you do this. I really don't think they're testing to see if their brakes still work! A tiny tap on the brakes isn't going to give you any idea whether they will work when you really lean on them....

That tiny tap is enough to

(1) Pump the brake system which is required as the fluid boils and gas is introduced as others have highlighted. As I said earlier you can feel this to great effect on many road car brakes. Just pump a few times and the pedal becomes firm. Over time it goes soft again.
(2) Test if you have pressure. I have watched enough V8s to hear real world V8 drivers ACTUALLY say this is why they do it on Bathurst commentary so I tend to believe that is the reason.

As I said, believe what you want but I believe the people with the balls to drive Bathurst at race pace in a V8 not people who dispute them in a forum

Quote from [DUcK] :

You see V8 supercar drivers doing it more on tracks that a: you have to use the brakes at max pressure a lot, or b: endurance races. Mind you if we drove on a street track or in the enduro next year I would/will probably dab the pedal before big stops, ie before hairpins off a straight or something

Yep. Last thing you want to do is commit everything to a corner then realise you cant actually stop. It costs you nothing in time so it is a good practice IMHO.

The rules for V8s at Bathurst are such that you are required to change brake pads at least once in the race. Fail to do that and your are disqualified, that is if you managed to complete 1000Kms of a track like Bathurst on one set. The run down from the hill ends a 300Km/h straight in a tight 90deg bend. The brakes take HUGE punishment

Last edited by Woz, Tue 30 Dec 2008, 02:31.

Quote from dadge :

wrong. they jab the brakes to make sure they have heat in them. this is to stop them locking up due to low temperature.

After one lap at pace most brakes are up to temp, in fact you can see the disks glow. If anything the real battle is to stop them failing due to heat. Unless you have felt the effects of brake fade you will not understand

BTW: A quick jab before a corner will do NOTHING to bring cold brakes "up to temp", if it did you would kill the brakes after 1 corner. Race brakes will not actually lock up if they are not to temp, they have far less braking force until they reach temp, this is why race grade pads are not fitted to road cars. Most people would never get the required heat into them.

They jab the brakes to:

1) Pump them if needed, you can feel the effect in road cars where after a few pumps the pedal is more "responsive". It has an effect with less travel.
2) Make sure they have brakes, no way you can commit to a corner and late brake from high speed unless you know the brakes are working.

Believe what you want though. But glowing disks do NOT need more heat in them

Last edited by Woz, Mon 29 Dec 2008, 01:10.

Quote from MAD3.0LT :

extream loss of grip on road tyres once they get to hot

....

i beleave road tyres in LFS are to durable to heat and dont have enough slip passed grp levels

Out of interest, if you watch replays of yourself in LFS do you believe you push the car far harder than you would IRL and could this cause the difference?

Not trying to prove anything either way, just drill for info. I ask because it appears common in sim racing for people to over push, the lack of "seat" feel causes this.

I use 720 lock on the wheel and wheel comp 1 so the rotation matches the car. I use 101% force on the wheel and 40% in game.

Drifting like any other car control is about balance. Learn when to let the wheel spin on its own and when to fight the FFB. Also learn to balance the car with your right foot.

You will NEVER find a real race car anywhere in the world where you can floor the brakes. It would put the driver in real danger because as the brakes heat and fade they would be stuffed.

If you watch a foot cam of a real racer they will jab the brakes well before each corner to test they still have brakes

When LFS gets brake heat/fade it will put a stop to this bad sim racing technique of setting brakes so you can floor them and force people to modulate brakes or lock the wheels. Then we will see the forum full of people bitching the can no longer get their good times because they keep locking the wheels

Quote from white92talontsi :

Ok i go through about 2 or 3 windows installs every 2 weeks or so. I test hardware regularly. It is getting annoying having to wait x amount of time for my unlock to become available. I have paid for a license i feel i should be able to unlock it as many times as i need.

Do you actually use your PC or just play with hardware. The only reason I ask is that whenever I do an OS rebuild it takes many days to re-install my core software packages etc. There is no way you can ghost your setup because Windows will throw up with the hardware changes you talk about.

Don't you have enough bits kicking around to build an LFS PC, you must have loads of parts frolm the sounds of it. The demands are not that high, then just use your "main" PC to play lego with

Quote from Gunn :

Be that as it may, latency certainly does effect multiplayer gaming, especially games where the action is fast and positional updates are coming in at very different speeds. LFS suffers from this of course. Some people do call it lag, which is probably not the correct term, but on screen they see another car jumping about and it does cause collisions sometimes.

Ping times do effect online racing regardless of the connection quality.

Latency can cause issues but most games have good enough compensation systems nowdays. Most FPS games for example now compensate for sub 300-350 pings so when you aim at a player that has 300ms delay you hit them based on where they were reported 300ms ago, not where they are now. Their on screen image flows smooth also, just time delayed by Xms.

The issue is normally when the ping bounces about. A stable 300 ping should give a mostly stable representation of a car in LFS. A connection that bounces between 80-200 will give a jumpy as the changes in latency confuse the prediction list it does in FPS games.

Yes a low latency stable connection is best but I would prefer a higher latency stable connection over a low latency unstable connection EVERY time

Quote from mrodgers :

Anyone remember the guy from Australia, BO300, or BBO300, I can't remember his name anymore. Anyways, I use to race him all the time. I was on 56k dialup in the US and he was on 28k dialup in Australia while we raced on 75% full servers in the UK and Europe. We never had problems.

I raced LFS for 2 years on 56k. I never lagged and no one on the servers ever had a problem with my connection. I raced on 250-400 ms ping servers every night for 2 years. I was concerned with lag because I was 56k and asked often on the servers if my connection was alright for everyone else. If I lagged, I would not stay and ruin it for everyone else. I would choose to leave which is why I asked often. No one ever said I was lagging and I never had a problem on that 56k.

Ping has nothing to do with lag.

Yep, I had ISDN for years as it was the best I could get (Out in the wilds of Scotland at the time) and in many ways it was more stable than my current ADSL link as most ISPs in NZ run interleaving on DSL.

Quote from S14 DRIFT :

Lag is generally associated with high ping.

Say it takes 30ms for me to send and then recieve a packet, while you have a ping of say, 500ms. You're lagging and darting about the track. The 'prediction errors' are simply Interpolation (I think), which is on pretty much all online games, most notably on CSS. It predicts where you are based upon the last packet of infomation set, say you're going 100mph, it'll guess that in the next ##ms you'll be another 8 meters down the road. If when you actually send the packet (because you're laggy), and it turns out you're actually 25 meters down the road, then you'll lag and dash forward.

Lag has nothing to do with ping, the two are on the whole unrelated. You can have a low ping connection that suffers massive lag and a high pig connection that is 100% stable. Lag is caused by instability in your connection.

Quote from S14 DRIFT :

And why is that? Stupid. Why the hell would I buy a game when I can't even see my revs/speed. I'll pass now.

Its not, Net Kar Poo did all it could to stop people buying it.

Pre release it rode on the back of NetKar (Which was good) and promised a quick release of dev tools, patches etc. What it delivered was an early Alpha build with a broken offline demo and a "ghost town" online experience and very P***ed off customer base.

Since then is has moved into the same release cycle as Duke Nukem Forever and has promised much vapour wear, such as the hill climb circuit and car.

If all is to be believed we are very nearly almost at the point where Net Kar Poo moves out of alpha, skips beta and into full release. We have been promised a working demo with online etc.

Only time will tell TBH. 9+ months ago Jaap said he would resign as the voice of NKP on RSC and he is still there so something must be going on. Who knows, 2009 might be the year, but then so might 2010 and we will have to suffer another year of bitching on the NKP forums

NOTE: For those that feel LFS moves slow, go buy Net Kar Poo

I only boot into Windows MEII (Vista) for games

Never realise you could do this

Quote from Calvinaquino :

Thats an idea. but i think some people would like to tune the road cars into a deeper level for some advanced races. but there could be setup types with different limits. And thats the basic idea. creating setup types that have different limits on tuning (tuning as in suspension and transmission, not bodykits, oh gosh NO). The driver would still create its own setups, but the setup ist would be reorganized to show the special setup types and its custom mades.

I am looking forwards to the VW not having setup options It is pure driver skill then, nothing else.

I get the feeling the VW has the potential to become the new GTi replacement

Quote from tristancliffe :

I've yet to try a modern Mini (and I refuse to drive one on principle that they're not miniature and they're nowhere near as good as a proper Mini

I have owned an old 1.1ltr Mini and BMW Mini Cooper. I also borrowed a BWM Mini Works S (220bhp) for a weekend test drive where I thrashed it for 500 miles around Scotland before I left the UK for NZ.

The BMW Mini is nothing like the original Mini but it is a great fun car as long as you keep in the power band. Go and borrow one from a BMW showroom for a weekend, act right and make the right noises and you are sorted . Try and get a S or Works S on 16inch rims, the 17inch rims tramline too much and add to the unsprung weight too much.

It really is a well balanced car that sits on and holds the road well. It is just great fun to chuck about. Not sure if its changed since I had mine but just having a rev counter in front of you adds to the fun, the rest of the pointless crap dials are in the centre of the dash.

That said, in the end it is NOTHING like a real Mini which is a far more raw experience. Given the choice now I would pick the original as I prefer cars without nanny electronis to get in the way

Quote from NotAnIllusion :

I got the impression that the lock would be to limit options to certain realistic values. Not that we'd be stuck with only premade setups, and that the VWS will be the only car with these limits. Also, I doubt there will be a host option to disable the lock because
a) that would defeat the point of limiting the options in the first place and
b) the limiting happens at the client, the options just aren't available and can't appear (atm anyway) depending on the server configuration

I read it that ONLY tire pressure and toe are changable. Good this will bring good battles that are ONLY on driver skill. Many have asked for locked setups for a while, this will prove if they are a thing people want.

Makes sense anyway as VW probably allowed the car to show what the car is like. If you can change things it is no longer the actual car.

I get the feel this will be popular oline. A car where everyone has exactly the same and that everyone should be able to drive without pileups Might become the new GTi.

The stinking pile of DRM pretending to be a OS (Vista) pushed me into the arms of Ubuntu a couple of months back. Vista feels awful when I go back to it but I keep a partition with it installed just for games.

No matter if you use a Mac or Linux its best to boot into Windows for games as you get the best performance that way.

Quote from sinbad :

Here's one for when you're feelin' cool.

lol +1 as long as you can select different lens colours. I want rose tinted so everything looks better

There have been a number of ideas around setup management over the years involving folders, dates etc etc etc. I think we need something a little more tbh as even the folders idea is limiting and raises management issues.

It would be nice if setup files carried meta blocks that included the following data.

- Car type.
- Setup purpose (race, offroad, drag, other)
- Track linkage(all or 1+ tags e.g [AS1, BL1] for a setup that works on AS1 + BL1)
- Comment
- Date created
- Last modified

This would ease setup management and allow for a powerful and flexible means to filter setups in game.

The default for example when you join a track would be to only see setups for that track or tagged as All.

LFS is very quiet down under now. Think its wait for the next actual content update (cars or tracks) before it comes back to life.

Quote from Xodus989 :

methods ftw


<?php 
string replace(string in, string token, string replaceWith)
{
     return in.Replace(token, replaceWith);
}
?>



Then you can do:


<?php 
string myString = "I'm bad men.";
myString = replace(myString, " bad", "");
?>



Sorry, I'm a minimal variable freak But when working with games, doing it like I showed is much better practice.

As andriod pointed out, your "better" solution is actually slower.

1) You have an extra function call in the chain.
2) You need to pass 3 variables via the stack.
3) You need to perform stack cleanup on exit.


is MUCH faster than your "minimal' preferred solution which is actually more bloated. I am interested in finding out why you feel you should replace class based calls with a library function?

That goes against OO principles.

Mental car in the hands of a VERY good driver =

Great vid

+1, the ghost AI solves the issue of AI caused crashes and gives a simple solution to disconnects.

CPU 5.4
Ram 4.9
GFX 4.8
Gaming 4.9
Disk 5.1

Average 4.8

Not bad for lappy