Browse For Speed is an extremely useful tool for finding servers and joining them. It is able to query demo/s1/s2 servers, lets you maintain a favourites list and keeps track (get it? huh huh) of your friends. It also lets you remotely control your servers via an admin interface.

Querying Features:

• Ability to query/join Demo/S1/S2 servers, with filters (cars/public/private/empty/full/tracks/ping)
  
• Maintains a favourite server list
  
• Maintains a friends list
  
• View extended server information (racer list, server rules etc)

Admin features:

• Connects to servers via insim (connecting via insim relay also supported)
  
• Sends/receives server messages
  
• Ability to send private messages
  
• Shows racer list, with context menu (kick/ban/force spectate)

General:

• Ability to launch an arbitrary number of programs before LFS (Pit Spotter supported)
  
• Able to get a server list and query much faster than the in-game browser
  
• Available in 10 languages - Czech, English, Estonian, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish (thanks to the translators, see CREDITS file)
  
• Extremely easy to add translations (place an XML file in the lang folder)
  
• Free and open source. If there is any doubt in your mind about what this program does, you can get the source, go through it, and build it yourself using free tools.

The only remote machines BFS will contact are:

• The LFS master server (to get a server list)
  
• Each LFS game server
  
• LFSWorld (for pubstat queries (BFS caches these queries so you don't hit the limit))
  
• If (and only if) you have version check enabled, it will query www.browseforspeed.net purely for version checking.

0.5 to 0.6 Changelog:
* Admin interface contains player list and context menu to kick/ban/force spectate
* Fix bug where saved favourite password wasn't always used
* Saves all settings (filters, options, rather than only things in Configuration)
* Add option to refresh favourites on startup
* Ability to view server information from the friends list (gets everything except Ping, which isn't technically possible, unless the server is in your favourites, in which case it does)
* Made friend search case insensitive
* Added Turkish, Italian, Czech, Swedish translations

Browse For Speed requires the .NET 2.0 framework. I am no Microsoft fan, but .NET is something they have done right. C# is a standard, and you can develop .NET applications without using any Microsoft products. It's only a 24meg download, and doesn't require a reboot .

www.browseforspeed.net - for the community

OMG!:wow: :headbang:

Great!

THX! :bannana_g

thanks! ill be using this alot!

Just want to applaud you for what is a very usefull application for lfs...

great work....


thanks again

One problem with symbols.







This is real name (from LFS).

Quote from nesrulz :

One problem with symbols.

This is real name (from LFS).

thank you for the bug report nesrulz.

The developers have been notified and hopefully a fix will be out for this soon if not next version.

Thanks for the report. Fixed. Some servers appear to _display_ differently to LFS, I'll work on fixing that, they are all joinable now.
1ST » Racing #2
Displays properly.
http://www.browseforspeed.net/files/browseforspeed-0.6a.zip

OK, now we have problem with few DEMO server.









...

Yeah, I noticed that server. As I said, some (very very few) servers display wrongly, but you will be able to join them, so while it's not great, it's not critical like it was before. They are joinable.

Quote from wabz :

Yeah, I noticed that server. As I said, some (very very few) servers display wrongly, but you will be able to join them, so while it's not great, it's not critical like it was before. They are joinable.

Server name (Redline Racing) from Browse For Speed.





Server name from Live for Speed.

I can't reproduce this. In BFS that server shows up as:
^JÉÏedline ^JÉÏacing
Which is wrong - but LFS understands because ^J tells it to switch to the japanese set, and joining works. I've tried switching my LFS to other languages, but joining always works. There's obviously something here I don't understand.

What patch version of LFS are you using? What language do you have it set to? What version of windows are you using? Thanks!

Quote from wabz :

What patch version of LFS are you using? What language do you have it set to? What version of windows are you using? Thanks!

Test Patch U14, In LFS Serbian (Srpski) In Windows English (United States), Windows XP SP2.

Quote from wabz :

I've tried switching my LFS to other languages...

Me too, but joining don't work...

The weird thing is, your BFS screenshot doesn't show that second character as 'I' (as LFS shows it), it shows it as 'Ï' which is correct (well, it's the correct char for the wrong charset, but LFS changes it).

The weirder thing is your setup is the same as mine Will investigate.

Edit: Join2LFS shows this server exactly the same for me (exactly as: "^JÉÏedline ^JÉÏacing") as BFS does. nesrulz, can you get the latest version of Join2LFS and let me know if that works?

btw, that server is currently giving me "host has a different game code" no matter what I use to join it (Edit: works directly ingame. BFS and Join2LFS give this error, but I think it's because there's a demo server with the same name, one of them has trailing spaces).

hehe, and lfsw have problem with this server.




Join2LFS



LFS (work properly)

Yeah, LFSWorld shows ?'s because lfsworld uses charset iso-8859-1 (Latin-1).

However, when the server name is passed to LFS with ^J (SHIFTJIS charset for example, Japanese chars) jand the wrong character set characters, LFS converts them.

Both Browse For Speed and Join2LFS work with these servers (for me, and at least a few others).

By the way, in your screenshot Join2LFS is showing the wrong character after the É, so I suppose it won't work in either BFS or join2lfs for you, I don't know enough about encodings (yet) to help/fix though.

Quote from wabz :

Yeah, LFSWorld shows ?'s because lfsworld uses charset iso-8859-1 (Latin-1).

However, when the server name is passed to LFS with ^J (SHIFTJIS charset for example, Japanese chars) jand the wrong character set characters, LFS converts them.

Both Browse For Speed and Join2LFS work with these servers (for me, and at least a few others).

By the way, in your screenshot Join2LFS is showing the wrong character after the É, so I suppose it won't work in either BFS or join2lfs for you, I don't know enough about encodings (yet) to help/fix though.

well, this is only a "viewing" bug, because of the different language!
so, Join2LFS works with this given link for me!
or do u have problems, joining with J2L?

It works for me. BFS has the same behaviour btw. I am pretty sure it won't work for nesrulz though, and I don't know why

Quote from wabz :

It works for me. BFS has the same behaviour btw. I am pretty sure it won't work for nesrulz though, and I don't know why

btw: i don't think it's easy to make the name look like in LFS because scawen uses a differnt way to show those "UniCode" languages...

Quote from CrazyICE :

btw: i don't think it's easy to make the name look like in LFS because scawen uses a differnt way to show those "UniCode" languages...

Sounds to me that you need LFS code pages <-> unicode converter. I made one for LFSLapper (in C#). Might be useful for your purpose too (otherwise nesrulz will never let you go )...

BTW: I tried sdether's insim library the other day, and it didn't support LFS code pages either...

Quote from MonkOnHotTinRoof :

(otherwise nesrulz will never let you go )...

RGDS

Quote from MonkOnHotTinRoof :

Sounds to me that you need LFS code pages <-> unicode converter. I made one for LFSLapper (in C#). Might be useful for your purpose too (otherwise nesrulz will never let you go )...

BTW: I tried sdether's insim library the other day, and it didn't support LFS code pages either...

well, let's have a look?
where do i get the source

but, even I don't know LFSLapper really, I don't see a way to display this special characters correctly!

what does this "converter" exactly...
maybe we should start a new thread for this purpose, so this thread don't get off topic

Quote from CrazyICE :

btw: i don't think it's easy to make the name look like in LFS because scawen uses a differnt way to show those "UniCode" languages...

But seems that lfs manager manages to visualize that in the same way as lfs.

Is not possible to do the same?
I have received that error sometimes with the 0.5 version in english and italian.

It is definitely possible, and not that hard. We will work on displaying them properly for the next release (it should be possible to join these servers with 0.6a)

Quote from wabz :

It is definitely possible, and not that hard. We will work on displaying them properly for the next release (it should be possible to join these servers with 0.6a)

joining isn't the thing...this works also if the name is not really correctly displayed...
but me don't know a way to show the characters correctly...
not with the components I use...

how are u going to diplay those chars...using the same "bitmaps" as LFS and draw them into the list like an image?