Quote from Trux :

Funny...Last night I was reading an issue of AutoSimSport from July 2005 (all back issues available here http://www.autosimsport.net/backissues.php) Great reading!

It had a review of S2... So little has changed since then really but the sims still here so...

I was reading the issue, and noticed one thing:

LFS was a true "Community" simulator, created, as it was, by three guys who demonstrated that big dollops of passion and talent (and commitent to see a project through completion) could replicate (and exceed) what developers were creating with budgets these guys could only dream about it. The sim presented the world with a big example of what could be achieved without the pressure of publishers and deadlines.

Too lame what most of the users lost the passion, the desire to see the complete project, and the real LFS spirit...

Quote from Si Mclaren :

The sim presented the world with a big example of what could be achieved without the pressure of publishers and deadlines.

Sadly, example shows that something can be archived, but somehow it stops halfway when devs get bored.

Frankly, when I see a tyre wire model at the end of 2011 - huh, another one? - my passion about LFS drops a little bit.

Meantime I've spent so much money on iracing, that half of it would let LFS team develop happily ever after

Quote from SuperMelon :

Meantime I've spent so much money on iracing, that half of it would let LFS team develop happily ever after

iRacing probably hires a fair few people. With that comes massive pressure. Trying to employ one person and then adhering to all the crazy regulations is mental enough, but try a whole team. A whole team which you need to pay on time every month. To get that set-up requires a massive initial investment, which if you don't make it back, you could go bankrupt. You have to respect what iRacing are doing, but it's perfectly easy to recognise that is far from working 'happily ever after'.

As developers try to create ever more complex models then the time it takes to perfect them will increase. This is just the reality.

Quote from Intrepid :

iRacing probably hires a fair few people. With that comes massive pressure. Trying to employ one person and then adhering to all the crazy regulations is mental enough, but try a whole team. A whole team which you need to pay on time every month. To get that set-up requires a massive initial investment, which if you don't make it back, you could go bankrupt. You have to respect what iRacing are doing, but it's perfectly easy to recognise that is far from working 'happily ever after'.

As developers try to create ever more complex models then the time it takes to perfect them will increase. This is just the reality.

Not to mention their denial about the bugs right after NTM was released lol

I don't think Scawen has ever had that kind of attitude...

Ofc iRacing deserves respect for what they have done already, but LFS still remains as my favourite sim.

Quote from RenvoN :

... but LFS still remains as my favourite sim.

The LFS is a drug
Happy New year, Scavier and users of the forum.

Quote from [Audi TT] :

The LFS is a drug
Happy New year, Scavier and users of the forum.

LFS -sim! ,, "" I.R, R.F..." - "sim"

Quote from maxis123 :

LFS -sim! ,, "" I.R, R.F..." - "sim"

lol iR is 100 times more sim than LFS

Quote from E.Reiljans :

lol iR is 100 times more sim than LFS

Then Play again iR and not here as "Demo-Racer" :rolleyes:

BtT...
Its good... A Progress-Report like 2009 and 2010... Nice... Really Nice...

Quote from Stölzel :

Then Play again iR and not here as "Demo-Racer" :rolleyes:

I played LFS S2 at my friends house and it wasn't any better than demo.

Hi, I'm new to LFS, got a wheel just a few days ago, and after some time I spent with the demo, I went for the S2. Then I read a lot of topics here on the forum, and read the old progress reports by the devs, and now I have a basic idea about what is going on in the community.
I am a vehicle engineer student (haven't learned about this kinda stuff yet officially), and from the age of 14, I have a returning desire not to just play, but also to develope a racing simulator. After I took up some programming skills, I tried it several times, made some actually driveable, but not too interesting applications. I did some research on this topic, and I would like to share some info with you.
Actually it doesn't really take a lot of time, and doesn't really require any special skills to write a program, where you can drive around in some environment. There are graphics engines and physics engines to use, you just have to set them up correctly. The collision detection and general rigid body physics in those engines are pretty realistic, and physically correct, they give satisfactory results. It's not a really big deal to add some kinda suspension and wheels to a rigid box, better physics engines even have some built in functionality to do this kinda stuff, and then you can drive around in your own game happily.
Problems come, when you want some realism. It's kinda straight-forward to create realistic suspension and drivetrain models. The problem, as you can possibly guess, are tires. As you know, tires are not rigid objects, the surface contacting the road changes according to internal pressure, the actual load on the tire, the tire's physical parameters, like size, rigidity of the sides, the friction depends on road surface, tire threading, etc. etc. I can easily cause myself a headache just by thinking about it's complexity! It's really, god damn hard to describe them mathematically.
One of the actual solutions of this problem is the so-called Pacejka magic formula. Hans B. Pacejka is a professor on some university, and his way to model tire forces is really awesome at the firs sight. He collected a large amount of data about actual tires, registered the forces produced by the tires, and then, fitted some functions on these datas. His formulas usually contain some input parametes, like slip angle, and load, and some „magical constants”, and they return the forces produced by the tire. It's easy to code, and fast to execute. As far as I know, it's pretty much an industry standard in simulation. The problem is, that these constants have no physical meaning at all, the model is empirical, so you need a load of real life data if you want the car in your sim to act accurately. If you want to change something, for example, want to change the tire pressure in the sim, you have to get a tire, set it's pressure, and test it to get the correct value of the magic constants. Other downside is, that below some speed, they are not accurate, because in the formulas, you divide with the speed, and when it decreases, the resulted force gets unrealistically big. There are solutions to work around this problem, but after some reading, none of them looked very realistic for me. If you want to see Pacejka in work, check http://racer.nl.
The other approach would be some finite element analysis stuff. The problem is, that when we compare it to Pacejka, it's ridiculously complicated, and process intensive. They require a large amount of computation power, and a lot of knowledge about tire structure to do it. They are mostly used in non-real time applications. I guess the non-real time model what Scawen is usually talking about works this way.
What I think Scawen and the sim developers of these days are possibly doing (not sure, I found available , detailed stuff only about Pacejka) is finding some crossover method between the two models described above. Pacejka published the first version of his formulas in the late 80s, and the last came out, if I remember correctly, in 2006. I think Scawen is actually quite fast, LFS was published in..2003? It's only 8-9 years of developement, and he started the new tire model about 3 years ago...
I really hope that this made any sense, and I didn't write too much stupidity. Oh, and I hope I didn't make a large amount of mistakes, I rarely use my English for anything else then reading and listening.

Wall of text. Interesting info

Quote from Joe91 :

Hi, I'm new to LFS,

Nice info dude! First I thought I won't read so much of text, then I thought you are mocking devs by saying sim programming is too easy. But then your post made started making perfect sense. As I was reading your post, even I was thinking that our devs are trying to find a trade off between the extremely accurate non-real time computation and the very fast emperical computation. In fact I think in the last report our devs also mentioned this same point that, they are trying to make these models work real time, where as in labs with ultra accurate calculations, these computations take many seconds. Anyways good, objective, informative post!

Quote from rageshgr :

Nice info dude! First I thought I won't read so much of text, then I thought you are mocking devs by saying sim programming is too easy. But then your post made started making perfect sense. As I was reading your post, even I was thinking that our devs are trying to find a trade off between the extremely accurate non-real time computation and the very fast emperical computation. In fact I think in the last report our devs also mentioned this same point that, they are trying to make these models work real time, where as in labs with ultra accurate calculations, these computations take many seconds. Anyways good, objective, informative post!

Yep, this is definitely a post of the last two or three years on this subject. Can't tell until I read it, great Joe91.

Quote from Joe91 :

If you want to see Pacejka in work, check http://racer.nl.

OK, just tried it. It sucked.

Quote from E.Reiljans :

lol iR is 100 times more sim than LFS

try to go on real track with real car....damn rl noobs .....

Quote from Joe91 :

...what you said...

Interesting read for sure Scaw... errrrr, Joe! Really, that post explains the difficulties of getting a highly complex calculation into real time perfomance figures without the processing power of a death star quite well!

Still, I'm really not sure if you really ARE Scawen :-)

greetz

der butz

Great response Joe !

Guess you need to be my age to click to the reference !

Scrawen, my 2 cents worth, I fully support your work and what you want to achieve. What you've done is awesome but, and yes there is one, the new stuff that Eric's done should be released now, if it's not ready then use the work that others have done for the graphics, work with certain people and include their work as officially supported updates.
Please upgrade the graphics at least, that will shut up those who whine about no updates.
The new physics can wait until your ready but, as you've said that we all need to pay for the update, then please keep people up to date with a timetable for testing/development and involve the community, we all ( generally ! ) support your work and want to work with you.

LFS has the best feel for racing of any sim when it comes to driving, I've raced myself and this is a great sim, and we all understand that you want to make it even better. My belief is that with community assistance this will become THE sim for racing, just accept that there are a large number of people who will work for free to achieve this, it's just up to the devs to manage this work.

There are also public domain tracks ( Bathurst ! - LOL ) That could easily be included though community support without taking up any of your time.

Please allow community mods to a certain, ie controlled by you, extent. In my opinion this will only add to the game.

Sorry for having an opinion and whatever you chose is up to you guys.

Have a great New Year and all the best for everyone.

Wow.. This is the first time I've visited these forums in about.. 8 months or so. I've returned to find the player vs dev war still raging on, one sided and pointless. Actually destructive if anything. This 3 man team can only work at a certain pace compared to the 100 or so man teams of large developers... They have lives other than just developing this game. At the moment, as Joe just posted (great post btw) they are working on probably one of the hardest updates they have worked on so far. Bashing them for not releasing LFS S3 to poor little me isn't going to make it come any faster, or help them in any way. Go play another game for now, come back occasionally and see how they are doing if you're bored of S2. Support them, encourage them. Wouldn't you be annoyed if you were working your ass off on something awesome, but people were yelling and throwing shit at you because you wont show them it? Grow up.

my 2 cents.. flip the schedule around.

release s3 first, then tire update when its done.

ill bet the hole s3 content is just hanging around and waiting for the tire physics to be done..
to be honest, the tire physics that we have now isent that bad.

its the lack of content update that buggs atleast me the most.

so as i said, flip it around, makes us spoiled with content and realese the tire when its finished.

then all this crying and whining will stop and u can work in peace..

Some people might have missed this post from Jan 2011.

Quote from Scawen :

I'm sure it would have been different if we had known in advance how long this development stage would take, I guess we could have tried to plan other releases in the meantime. But it has always seemed like I was near to finishing the tyre physics, so no change of plan was required.

Remember it was the Scirocco that showed up the issues in the tyre physics (there were already known tyre physics issues but we couldn't get the Scirocco to drive as safely as a real one does while restricting ourselves to a realistic setup). So, releasing the Scirocco has been out of the question until the tyre physics system is quite close to reality.

Releasing Rockingham has also been out of the question. We want to release a real track when the behaviour of the cars is right (not perfect, just close enough so the bumps feel right and the lap times are just like real ones).

Who knows, if I had known in advance that the tyre model would take so long, maybe Eric would have thought that he should focus on some S1 / S2 content updates. With the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to pick holes in what we have done and point out the mistakes we have made. But as I said, we always thought that in a few weeks or a couple of months, the new tyres would be ready to roll.

But the carcass simulation, which I had to look into because the tread simulation model clearly ignored too much of how a tyre actually behaves, took me in a whole new direction for a good part of last year. A long time of studying and finding out a lot more about tyres than I knew before, and had never thought I'd need to know. It made my head spin quite often, I'm not an eighteen year old on a university course. I couldn't even read this stuff for full eight hour days, had to take it a bit easy at times.

But still I usually thought I was near the end. So that is probably the reason for our dreadful "strategy" and lack of communication. It wasn't a strategy at all, and I didn't want to communicate until I got solid results.

I am fully aware that this post isn't going to convince many people. But I thought I'd write it anyway, to help you see slightly more from my point of view.

From May 2011

Quote from Scawen :

That is quite apart from the fact that Eric is working on S3 content at the moment. I think it is ok for me to say, that he doesn't like being asked to switch from one thing to another. Some people like to switch tasks all the time - I have no choice - but Eric does not like that, he likes to stay focussed on what is is doing.

From July 2010

Quote from Scawen :

It's up to Eric what of his work gets released, never have I tried to stop something of his being released!

But by the look of things, the tyre physics might be still months, if not years away - would it be in everyone's best interest for Eric to revist the idea of making/releasing additional S1/S2 content or to pursue the release of S3 (maybe without the VWS/Rockingham but with other fictional cars/tracks).

What a joke

Seems like the internal communication works as well as the external

Quote from Yuri Laszlo :

Why does Scawen speak in the third person?

It's an obscure historical reference. Given the author's anglo-saxonic upbringing I'd wager it is more Shakespearean in origin.

Quote from Scawen :

if I had known in advance that the tyre model would take so long, maybe Eric
would have thought that he should focus on
some S1 / S2 content updates.

With all respect to the devs, I find this a bit weird. I thought that Eric could work on things no matter what Scawen was currently doing and how long it would take him to finish it. It looks like Eric was waiting for Scawen to finish his tyre physics until he could start working. So now, when the tyre physics seem to be nowhere near the release, Eric can make some S1/S2 updates for us. But yes, if he's working on the S3 content and doesn't like to switch from one thing to another, who knows, that might not be the best idea.

So Joe came here to disappoint us even more. The simple Pacejka formula took 20+ years to complete. Scawen wants to build a whole real-time system for this game to perfection and he is only 3 years into the project. What can we expect?