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!

Excellent program mate.
This is exactly what i'm looking for, for LFS.
It would be nice to be able to apply the car filters in real time without having to refresh the server list again after you've selected the cars you want to scan.
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).
Another thing is (but i'm not sure it's possible without contacting the LFS master server) that could you make it so it initially scans only servers with racers in them.
I'll get back to you after i've tested and thought about it a bit more.

Excellent work mate and looking forward to future versions. And if you ever need someone to test uncomplete builds then i'm available

EDIT: Ok, I just closed BFS and re-opened and full scanned and it didn't refuse as many connections (around 100 that time)
Also i've had a few crashes and i'm trying to narrow down what the problem is for you.

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.

yeah. i've just started playing around with the "query wait" feature and getting alot more positive results.

and wow this program kicks arse. as i said before, this is exactly what i was looking for. I'll be glad to help out more if needed. Keep up the good work

Edit: Not a major bug but you can add the same server to the favorite list more than once. I'm sure this could be easy to fix.

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.

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!

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.

works nice, only thing is can it be set to run the lfs spotter executable ?

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

I'll have a tinker around with it as well. I've been wanting to learn to use C# for a while so it should be an interesting way to learn.

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?

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 tinvek :

works nice, only thing is can it be set to run the lfs spotter executable ?

Are you talking about Pit Spotter? None of us have heard of it till now.
After doing some quick reading, it might be possible to provide support for it in a later release - providing that Pit Spotter allows us to specify a server for LFS to connect to. eg: BFS would start Pit Spotter, sending it the server to join, Pit Spotter starts LFS, passing those command line variables on.

Hey it works, nice!!

You can make the pitspotter start without launching LFS. The ./spotter/config.cfg file allows to alter the spotter's behaviour. That way Browse For Speed can start pitspotter and afterwards launch LFS with the necessary commands to directly connect to the server.

Vain

Quote from Vain :

You can make the pitspotter start without launching LFS. The ./spotter/config.cfg file allows to alter the spotter's behaviour. That way Browse For Speed can start pitspotter and afterwards launch LFS with the necessary commands to directly connect to the server.
Vain

Ah excellent, thanks Vain! We'll definately look into providing support for it then!

Excellent program and thanks!

1. It does need to work with PITspotter.
2. It needs to keep/save passwords for favorites
3. Is a FONT change possible for us blind guys?

Your work is appreciated,

Great work, thanks a lot

Nice work!
tnx!

Awesome! I'm sure I'll find it useful.

Great work! It has so much use for me, that's sure!

Thanks for the great program!

One thing I saw is that when you sort by number of connections it sorts by string rather than the number, meaning servers with 12, 10, people are sorted between severs with 2 and 1 connections instead of being at the top.

@wabz

Great work, thanks for this one

@wabz is there a reason i cant find my own server on the programe

it dosnt just happen on there it also happens on the master list too in game

dont know why but i can only conect to it through the local ip

any help guys

thanks racemania

moderators: this thread should be moved to add-on section
(you can delete this message afterwards)

Quote from BrandonAGr :

Thanks for the great program!

One thing I saw is that when you sort by number of connections it sorts by string rather than the number, meaning servers with 12, 10, people are sorted between severs with 2 and 1 connections instead of being at the top.

Yeah I hope that can be sorted out soon. Other then that nice program.

Hi guys!
Thanks for all the positive feedback! We've taken the suggestions on board and have fixed a number of bugs you guys have found and added some new features you've requested.

We hope to release an update soon!

@racemania: You might have a firewall blocking LFS registering your server with the master server.