I just joined the livestream, not actually reading the topic (don't hate yet) first.
Now, that was irrelevant. No, im not a hardcore fan of LFS, yet i am a fan of LFS as any other game, i check the forum everyday for new posts in either a physics report or anywhere else. I usually never post anywhere either so..
@OP
Yes it would indeed be nice to see your car frame in the mirrors for immersion, and also perhaps being able to adjust them to your preferred seat position. However, remember; if you see your own car in the mirrors you got a "wrong angle" and do not use the full view available (what is the use of seeing your own car in the mirror?).
That being said, I'd mutch rather see more details in mirrors than rendering your own car. Spending time and resources on such things is hopefully low priority as I am totally satisfied with the mirrors we have in a racing point of view. Just my opinion.
The real world must be wrong then, because when I drive I see my own car in mirrors. I will post this later as a glitch in GOD's forum
¿What is the use of seeing your own car in the mirror? ¿are you serious?
The obvious answer it's err... realism. Every race driver see in the world see his/her own car in mirrors, that gives you information about your real position in track respect the other cars. Example, if someone tries to overtake you on the inside and you want to close the line, you can see if the front of the car it's level with your back or behind. Without that information you can cause an accident.
I think that the rendering time and resources can't be the answer. We are in year 2012 and computers do amazing things, and for low spec machines you can have LOD and an on/off options in view menu.
Sorry for quoting the image, but that mirror setting is wasting about 35% (rough estimate) of it's field of view for your car, thus severely hampering your field of view and greatly enlarging your dead spot.
The only "advantage" of such a setup is the huge overlap with the central mirror, thus making you have to look less to different mirrors.
I've set the mirror in a way that when I sit comfortably, I only see the slightest hint of my back door handle (the point protracting the farthest behind the mirrors).
At first I was like "but this is the passenger side" but then I saw he's driving his car on the wrong side. Maybe because of the angle of the photo, but yeah, looks wrong.
@ColeusRattus is right... For best use of the mirrors you need to set it to show everything on the side of the car, not the car...
Imagine that there is a biker on the side of your car, you wont see it because the mirror is pointed to the car...
Thats why show the back of the car on mirrors at LFS is very very low priority, because is more important to adjust it, and for best use people would use it to show what is on the side, not the car....
I do ofcourse see parts of the interior in my center mirror, but have my side mirrors set to show as much as possible, hence perhaps 1% of the view is "blocked" by my own car. If your mirror view is taken up by 10% or more of your own car it is set wrongly. You miss important information.
Not the way I race. I'd still prefer to see as little as possible of my own car, and as much as possible of my surroundings. But that's just me racing (irl).
Sure, I agree on that so in the best of worlds we should have the option to setup the angles of the mirrors ourselves, including a rendering of the carbody. That way you could acheive realism and make most of us happy . What I do not like to see is a "forced" config where the mirror views are blocked by your own car and no option to turn it off.
I'm sure the majority of the players these days have rigs back home that could handle these types of rendering once in place, but to a certain cost in developing time. My point was to highlight that instead of spending time on rendering the carbody, perhaps it would be more appropriate to render the reflection in higher resolution etc.
On a sidenote; we all play/experience games differently so there are as many "perfect" sim configurations as there are players.
People tend to forget that our sim uses an antique graphics engine which has no ray-tracing and all the 4 mirrors show different clips of the same FOV in order to save FPS...
I think it's not wrong. That's not the perspective in which the drive would see the mirror. Imagine you could go more to the left. The mirror would show less and less of the car, and probably the correct image.
If your side mirrors are set correctly, you do not see your car in the mirror.
As a car comes up behind you, you should see it in the center mirror.
As the car moves over to pass you, it should leave the center mirror FOV and enter the side mirror FOV. Either you have very large mirrors to see your car, or you do not see your own car.
As the car moves out of the view of your side mirrors, your peripheral vision picks it up giving you a complete 360° view all around your car.
