I can't speak highly enough of LFS and am enjoying it immensely BUT I still am having serious problems trying to upload, download everything and anything, setups, skins, replays, hotlaps..etc.
Whenever I go to the program it appears to be an LFSWindow all of its own and takes about a minute to "open" courtesy of WINRAR.
There's a whole pile of little icons and lines and titles of files but none of them appear to make their way obediently into the GARAGE of my Formula XR so I can do things to it.
Downloading my mediocre Hot laps is also beyond me.
A certain amount of knowhow is ASSUMED by the devs in to saying what to do to upload or download and thus far it's one big no no.
I would like it to be spelt out i.e. "UPLOADING AND DOWNLOADING FOR DUMMIES".
Any chance out there....please??

Sorry but I didn't understand a single thing in your post, other than you having upload & download problems with... something

Please try again, but this time keep in mind that we have no idea what you mean with "the program" and whatever WinRAR has to do with it? Pile of icons? Lines? Titles? Files? What are you even talking about? LFSWorld?



PS: ???

put your setups in the settings folder

but.. not sure what your talking about it taking a minute to open in a window of its own?

You're not explaining yourself clearly enough. Why is your compression program getting involved? I don't recall anything being compressed on LFS world?

Downloading a hotlap/other single player replay... just save it in your lfs\data\spr folder
Downloading skins should be automatic in-game, so long as you have it enabled, and they should be sitting in your lfs\data\skins_x folder. However if you want to use a skin yourself you'll need to move it into the lfs\data\skins folder.

Helpful?

okay.. i think i understand somewhat

what he is saying is with winRAR, is hes going to most likely team inferno's setup site, and is downloading them all at once and it opens

all you have to do, is highlight all of the 'little icons' in winrar, open up another window and go to LFS/data/settings , and drop all the 'little icons' in there and then click the little X's on the top right on the 2 windows, and then start LFS

It sounds like possibly you are playing it within the zip file? Did you extract the zip file to a folder on the harddrive? In case this is the problem, put the file somewhere you will find it again, like on the desktop, right click and select "extract to <filename>\" where <filename> will be the name of the downloaded file from liveforspeed.net. Then go into that folder and run LFS.

nothing........

Ok, I'll try to explain.
If I want to open GTR there is an icon on the desktop and I double click on that and hey presto, if I have the purchased disc in the drive, the PROGRAM opens.
With LFS I have an icon on my Desktop entitled LFS. I click on that and a huge window opens with a line of files, one of which is lfs.exe. I double click on that another bar appears and after 100 percent of it makes its way across and the main LFS opening credits appears and the PROGRAM has opened. I can then operate as normal.
I originally downloaded LFS demo and used Winrar to open up the program. Whatever I did I have had a large window with a number of lines of files accompanying lfs.exe. How important they are, I don't know. Some I have added (setups but they have not arrived where they should do, in the garage)
I have tried uploading my hotlaps but they don't show up the hotlaps file.
It's not the end of the world, I can use LFS but there are a lot of it which are not explained for twits like me to enable me to easily do all that is available.

Sorry, a correction/addition to the above.
After hitting the LFSFORUM icon i get a large window and there are a number of icons, some of which are like three books strapped together.
The main one, that of the latest patch is named
LFS_S2_ALPHA_U.zip
I double click on that and I arrive at another window which has LFS.exe and when I double click on that, a small grey box with the same title as above, (with a moving percentage figure) reads "Extracting from LFS_S2_ALPHA_U.zip" and the program LFS does appear and I am where I want to be.
I don't believe this should be the right way to open the program every time I want to join it but nothing else is opening it.

Did you read Kev's reply?

Your LFS is still in the zip file. Extract it to a directory (e.g. mine is C:\Live For Speed S2\), then run it from there. At the moment you are running it from the zip file, which is silly.

When you download LFS, all files are packaged in one big zip file. You're supposed to unzip this file to extract these files into their own directory.

When you just click on the zip file on your desktop and try to open lfs.exe directly, WinRAR extracts all of those files into a temporary folder and after it's finished runs lfs.exe. When you close the game, WinRAR deletes the temporary folder containing the extracted game.

This is also why it takes so long to start (zip file has to be extracted every time you try to launch the game) and why you have such trouble up- and downloading files (cause there's no LFS folder on your harddrive).

Just right-click LFS_S2_ALPHA_U.zip and select "Extract to LFS_S2_ALPHA_U/". This will create a folder named "LFS_S2_ALPHA_U" and the game files will be extracted to there. Then delete LFS_S2_ALPHA_U.zip.

You can either leave the folder on your desktop or move it to wherever on your harddrive by right-clicking the folder and using cut/paste.

Quote from tristancliffe :

Extract it to a directory (e.g. mine is C:\Live For Speed S2\)

oh and preferably you shouldnt use whitespaces in the directory name

Sounds to me like everyone else is right and you are running LFS from inside the packaged zip archive, which means windows has to unpack it everytime you want to play [which accounts for the window and the progress bar] and since a packaged zip archive is compressed and not like the other files on your hard disk windows can't put anything else into it without unpacking it permanantly first, and then re-packing it.

What that last sentence means is that at the moment you are making a temporary version of LFS everytime you run it. Until you unpack it permenantly onto your hard disk that temporary version basically vanishes when you stop using the program [that's not actually quite accurate but it is a simple way to understand it] Thus you're left with a compressed package which windows does not understand as seperate files and folders... it think's you've got one file. Therefore when you download a skin,setup, hotlap etc etc it's only going to work until you close the game, because at that point windows reverts to the compressed archive and can't add your recently aquired extras to it, since until you make your permanent unpacked version it doesn't understand where within the packaged version they should go. [Again that's not actually quite accurate but it's a much easier notion to grasp than having me chatter to you in binary language]

heh... just realised I basically repeated what Bal00 said... that'll teach me to only read half a topic before I hit reply... oh well

+not

Where was that 'LFS folders too complicated' thread again?

i used to understand all of this till i read his first posting

Many many thanks to all of you for your help in trying to unravel this for me.
This downloading of the original program sounded simple to begin with but I now realize that I do like the simplicity of banging a disc in. Its just showing me all over again that there's more ways of killing a cat than drowning it with cream!!

Quote from peejayh :

This downloading of the original program sounded simple to begin with but I now realize that I do like the simplicity of banging a disc in.

No offense, but nowadays it's extremely rare that someone doesn't understand the principle of a zip archive. Though it's quite common that the users don't bother to read the installation instructions

For unknown reason these instructions assume that WinZip is installed - should show how to do it with plain Windows instead (though built in zip handling is new to XP I think?). WinZip isn't good program... Guess it's not free also.

Huh, we should post a link on this discussion to every m8 who feels offended when we ask him "Did you extract the LFS from the archive?".... maybe they wont wonder anymore when we put that question.........