sorry dude, that doesn't wash with me. i'm also unemployed. i still managed to put money away for new upgrades. a penny saved is a penny gained as they say.
if you always have an excuse for not doing something, then unfortunately you won't get very many of the things you like in life.
It's precisely activity such as this which has turned Windows into the steaming bag of shit it is today. Do you remember the Windows source code leak several years back? I didn't go looking for it myself (seemed like a bad idea, commercially speaking) but apparently there are kludges like that all over it.
I use my Mac more often than my PC these days and I still think there are GUI things that Windows does better than Mac OS, which is funny really given that Apple base all their marketing on their supposedly-superior GUI. But what makes the difference for me is that the Mac has a GUI built on top of an operating system that actually works properly, not on top of a rickety pile of archaic shit like Windows.
well, for ~€100 you could get a 5480 Ati card /w 500mb for 34 euro, AMD dual core + board ( upto 8 gb DDRIII ) for 78 and i'm sure you can get 2+ gb ram for 20-30 euro ?
assuming you have everything else you need... that alone would run LFS decently no ??
Go tell them my friend!! I remember i was talking the same things a while back and it was like hitting a wall !!! You can built yourself for under $1500 dollars a pc that can play Crysis 1/1.5/2 with the full detail patches at full hd smoothly as silk and for around $1000 you can built a system that would play lfs at full hd with full 32 cars grid at least with 60 frames and a g25/g27 wheel and a 24" lcd....So even if you are poor you still can save a for a few months and buy something decent.
Hehehheh finally you bought a decent computer ? I told you you can buy a monster gaming for $1500 and less.
As for HDR i know of Enb.An absolutely amazing pluggin .A russian guy made it and for the games and programs they made configs its bloody amazing.
There was a version for nulldc1.6 an emulator of dreamcast...I played Shenmue again with full hdr !!!
Also many other classics like mafia/deus ex 1(add also the texture and hd models addon and its like playing a remake!! ) and many other have new life.
The problem is that most configs made by other users and not the original creator are for some reason flawed.For example there is a pluggin for gtr evo/race on and rfactor but its not solid.Under most conditions it looks amazing but then at some moments it messes up....
Actually registrys do get clogged up. Please note I did not advocae any program or even mention the use of programs. Thus Amp88 wouldn't use it as another excuse to try and establish his obvious superiority (being twice my age and all that).
Many programs install paths to the registry but some of these paths are not erased when you uninstall them, or if you move a game folder, new registry paths are recreated, for example if they use them to locate save game or config files.
The biggest clogger upper though are those pesky internet files which don't always save themselves to the folder specified...ah well.
Just cleaned 1Gig of junk off my PC and removed close to 200 eroneous (sp) registry entries. Probably won't speed it up because it's my HD which is getting old, but hey.
I thought I covered the reasons for LFS devs not putting much effort into 3D engine in another thread few days ago. It's not the D3D version itself that does the magic, it's the programmer who has to write all those eye candy. LFS has a lot of issues that need to get resolved. Say Scawen spent all time writing some lame shaders and stuff instead of fixing the collision detection. Nice shadows, sparks and sun glares don't change a fact that your car is heading to Mars after a collision with a barrier. Small dev teams have to prioritize and you've got to realize that...
It's not like I'm hanging on to my Cyrix 166 evil machine I had 14 years ago and sleeping with a Win98 install CD under my pillow. I have W7 as a secondary OS on my laptop, it runs on my desktop and I don't think it's any worse than XP in general. I'm just asking for a bit of consistency with the backwards compatibility strategy MS has. Doesn't it seem weird that MS reverse-engineers a 20 years old game to hack around a bug in it while requiring Vista+ for their supposedly uberawesome IE9? I'm just being rational here (at least that's what I' like to think) 'cause I have no idea what is MS gonna break next time with this kind of attitude, intentionally or not.
The way I see it the registry clogging up is not the main problem here. It's not really a problem when you have few extra entries in there because applications doesn't read info from the registry all that much. Searching though a certain subkey is not what slows you down once the data get loaded into RAM, it's the actual reading from disk that's bottleneck here.
For some screwed up reason Windows store registry as two ginormous binary files, so as you add and remove data from the registry, it gets fragmented over the time. There is absolutely no way you can contiguously store a 50+ MB file on a HDD, especially when it's constantly changed.
Deleting stuff from registry is nice, but the only way to get the registry up to speed would be to delete in and store it again on a free place on the disk. I don't think that any of those registry Mr. Propers do that...
DX9C would only benefit for LFS wfor the following:
1: Specular and Bump Mapping for Aslphalt,gravel/etc and would make Parralax ( fast ) deep normals mapping possible via shader scripts.
2: wet weather effects (ONLY AFTER WET WEATHER PHYSICSS HAVE BEEN IMPLEMENTED) - EG: specular mapping + rendertotexture reflection layers ( would only require 1 extra camera for inverse angle )
3: camera + cube map generating car reflections ( 1 camera + cube map per car , but must have the option to switch back to the current spherical simple ref maps ) Cub map rendered from a 360 camera allowing realistic reflections of sarrounding environment and objects
4: speed optimizations that became available in DX9c
5: DX9 allows use of SM2.0/SM3.0 - so all bump , specular, parralax, and other shader effects can be rendered at great speed while taking some work off the GPU it self - shaders have their own home on graphics cards. But in LFS ase it should be used wisely in a way that does not tick off die hard LFS otaku, such as myself.
Im happy with the rendering engine as it is - and any graphical upgrade in terms of rendering , and technology must have reason to do so - EG: in the event that wet/snow weather effects are needed or others.
The only real benefit for DX11 for LFS without adding useless effects is the ability to make cross thread rendering calls and such .... ( multithreaded rendering ) as well as some other API improvements.
That would be relatively easy to implement with a raycasting or r2t approach - but It seems LFS uses another mechanisim for calculating shadows that uses a region map of sorts ( the map is not available on X open layouts - were the cars aern't affected by shadows under bridges and stuff =( )
However it can also be a CPU/GPU drain if u have to cast dynamic shadows : even shadow mapping can do this - especially with alot of cars on track.
I think the cars are casting shadows using a raycasting approache ( the LFS car viewer led me to think this ) - but under assumption that Scawen chose not to have the cars cast these shadows on themselves - instead to ONLY cast shadows on track surfaces - probably for performance reasons.
Pelople only think about bloom and HDR when talking about graphic engine update, but there are so many other benefits that would make the sim look better.
Anyways, current one is not bad, and I prefer content and quality over visuals, but that doesn't mean they are not important too
The registry does get larger with time, of course, but this has an extremely minimal impact on performance. The reason I mentioned programs that promise to speed up your computer by cleaning the registry, is that those are the chief source of the myth that cleaning the registry improves performance. Orphaned registry keys have practically zero impact on your computer, which is one reason Windows doesn't bother to clean them up itself. I'm not saying Windows performance doesn't degrade with time, it frustratingly does, just that the registry isn't a culprate.
I'm actually saying the opposite, that these are the things that make Windows a good operating system. Every one of those little tweaks and hacks represent thousands of man-hours of testing and development. It's those little hacks that mean I can still run Planescape Torment on Windows 7. My understanding is that the code quality of Windows is actually pretty good, at least no worse than any other codebase of a similar size that's been in development for twenty years, which frankly there aren't many of. Seems to me that Windows works pretty well and they don't have problems adding new features, that's generally a good sign of a codebase's health.
Using DX 9 as an API does not change anything by itself. A lot of work has to be done (new textures, new data for the tracks, new material handling, new "rendering pipeline") to present bump mapping, spec. highlights, reflections, use shaders etc. Just a version change does not imply these.
Some might think it is a simple one-man work for a weekend. No, it is not.
This is obviously subjective but the environment stuff (grass/smoke/dirt/dust/trees) all look pretty awful. Certain other things that we know are in the pipeline (interiors is the main one really) also drag down the look of the game. Showing anyone who plays other games the UF1 interior is downright embarrassing. Luckily half the interiors have been updated and the other half are only a generation (LFS-wise) behind, not just gauges against a black abyss. Then just compare the quality of work of Fern Bay to the "new" Blackwood and upcoming Rockingham.
Stuff like dynamic visual tire wear/dirtiness and dirt on the windscreen (or the cars themselves) would also be pretty cool (and actually helpful, if you could look at the tires in open-wheeled cars and see how dirty/worn they are, without F9).
"Anything else is a distraction" is a horrible fallacy when it comes to realism, the more realistic what you're seeing is, the more information you can gather from what you see, from damage, wear, clean racing line (not modeled in any way in LFS), weather (same), driver contact and offs (think rubbing paint, or dirt dumped on track).
+1