Quote from Guthix :

However this is one of the things that make me prefer developing companies over "private" projects like this. Things are done faster, usually.

LOL ..... sorry, you may be right generally speaking, but when GT4 was delayed for 2 years (and online play delayed even longer here in the US, I gave up on it ..... and found LFS and my eyes were opened to what a real sim could be and what results when online play is given priority over eye candy and 600 useless cars. And Polyphony was even more uninformative about the delays despite epic complaining on the forums.

Despite the delays, I find LFS much more "successful" as a sim, and the delays and lack of communication at times much more tolerable than Polyphony's efforts. And much more "human" - less "bureaucratic", less hype and for the most part more responsive to users. The GT community forums were populated by the more avid racers - all clamoring for online play for years and wondering why the corporation was so uncommunicative with it's most dedicated users (though that group was a SMALL percentage of all the users). Appealing to the demands of the few "serious" racers wouldn't increase the mass sales to casual users that they were aiming for. Online play wasn't a priority apparently. Little did we know at the time, but LFS had already been there done that!! And done it well.

In my case, it was the delay and poor communication by a major developer that got me on the right track, so to speak

I do miss the good ol' days when Scawen would share frequently - things like vids of getting to test the real FBM. I'm sure Scawen misses those days of real "community" as well - at least I hope so. It was such a contrast (and still is) to the distance and sterility of Polyphony's mass marketing mediocrity.

Quote from Kuba_m :

High res textures are one thing but it would by also nice to see good shadows and lighting system and other DX9 / 10 feutures, not saying about DX11 (tesselation etc.).

I agree. Better lighting and shadows are all that's needed in terms of graphics. I'd love to know if this is on the development roadmap.
The community will (hopefully) continue to produce higher resolution textures for those who like them.

Quote from Scawen :

Hello everyone!

The developers are all alive and working on LFS.

Eric has been working on new tracks. He slowed up a bit during some of the great English summer which we don't get very often. I have enjoyed test driving on two of his new tracks which look great and I look forward to the time when they can be released.

I am still working on the tyre physics, though I haven't really made serious progress this year. I also enjoyed the summer, did a lot of cycling and running too. It's a better hobby than smoking like I used to, and I really enjoy it. But the good news is it won't pay the bills!

Sounds like me trying to write the novel I've been working on for a couple of years . Glad to hear from you I've been appeased for now

Quote from cargame.nl :

Saw that one coming from miles also. One or two people from another continent is less of a problem then when you get ten of them. Problem is I need to explain -everything- again and again for people like you. Disappointing.

* But I don't like to do these extreme measurements, Sadly I only know Dutch, English, German and French but luckily we now have vipex123 which can voluntarily communicate Spanish and Portuguese explaining that some individuals are causing a problem because of their geographic location. Great guy

I'm not getting at the great job your doing with your servers, if you've got 4 or 5 mil US we'll sell you NZ citizenship and you can move here !

FYI, we do speak a form of english, in NZ anyway, Australian is it's own language and I fully understand the need for interpreters if your dealing with them.

It really doesn't matter how well I drive on your servers, the lag is the issue. I can be on a fast fibre connection and, due to our location, there is still too much lag to be acceptable.

Yes, we have servers here but until there is an update that gets people racing again, it's pretty dead in this part of the world.

So, YAY, can't wait for an update to get things going again.

offtopic: I am already living in worlds most powerful and intelligent nation which is called Germany (wat? yes, only nation which done it's homework properly, Asia excluded) and have my life in Ordnung / on track

Not many people know it but three years ago I already tried to help LFS / other regions of the world and started servers in Los Angeles and Argentina. Server replication, everything. But, most of the time it was dead, the only people which connected came from Europe because that server was nice and quiet to do hotlaps

Also I did some tests with LFS Mexico, that didn't worked out that good as I hoped.. Still laggy for them.. Could have done some more 'fun' but if there are only a handful people on this simulator and it's not backed up by actual development then a lot of people are just going to say fck it, not going to spend time on it anymore.

And I think even Victor has reached such a point if you read between the lines and the short boosts he had the last years. All of a sudden all kinds of topics to start to replace spdo database/website etc. That all died again like a candle which had no fuel to shine to begin with.

There are LOTS of people which can bring it up to a high level, a lot of people didn't even care to post here anymore. I also avoided this topic, until Flame discovered a tweet about 3D. 3D isn't even 2013, I wonder if it's going to be a success in 2014 and beyond but all of a sudden we get busy with that while the sim itself has a standstill since 2006/07 .. As outsider (and more and more start to be outsider) you can only laugh about that and even start being sarcastic and cynical.

I almost think that new successes are very unwanted. Thats all fine, but just SAY that. Instead of the same old rainbow stories every year.

Quote from tristancliffe :

Never noticed any difference in any game with any controller as long as frame rate is above about 20fps. Never noticed any controller lag in any game ever either.

EXACTLY.

But I didn't want to say it; controller lag at 60fps is a pretty silly notion for a human considering nerve impulses travel at about 200mph or so around one's carcass. (yes that's actually a limitation).

Theories are only as good as the variables one is cognizant of.

If you've not noticed input latency changes between 20-∞ FPS then I guess you lack some kind of awareness.

FPS changes are something people notice very easily.

Doesn't matter how stable the frame rate is. Anything lower than 60 is unplayable to a competitive level.

If you have 20fps per se, that means you only have 20 updates of imagery per second. On some games more than others this can actually slow down the input in games even to things that are beyond input such as your run speed in various shooters e.g. Counter Strike.

Which when holding W, you'd think would be exactly the same between players. Wrong. FPS can alter the speed of these movements dramatically in extreme cases [if you have a low FPS it's visible to other players because you're unable to run as quickly as everyone else as essentially your frame rate is choking your input/output updating.]

TLDR

When gaming there's more to 'FPS' than 'wot ur eyez see'.

Certain jump heights and lengths in CS and Call Of Duty could only be attained with a minimum amount of FPS, that incidentally, in both cases it was above 60 fps. The reason for this is as I mentioned above. With low FPS you're physically choked by the systems frame rate.



Essentially to an extent your FPS is also you input rate. Not just from the fact that you are receiving less information per second, but you're basically reacting to something that already happened.

I agree with cooper here. I have a lot of friends who ask me why I never put the graphics higher when I have more than 60 fps, but I could never really explain well enough why, thanks cooper

Quote from chris_uk :

Can i just ask... Why are you pissing about with 3d support when there are far more important things you should e working on?

Quote from Scawen :

no

I ain't the boss of nobody's time but personally things like lag crashes catapulting people into infinity and beyond and track bugs like the kerb on kyoto national affect everyone's racing on a daily basis. How many lfs users have 3d? So I kinda think he had a point though you can obviously spend your time as you wish.

yesterday i spent the whole day playing some different racing games / simulators, and even if they all were fun, the change in immersion and feeling when i finally switched to lfs was really astounding!

it was unbelievable how much smoother it ran and how much more the ffb could convince me to be in a real car. the ability to judge and react based on whats visible on the screen and what i feel thru my wheel is so much better than in all the other games. also the sensation of speed and how good one can find the apex in any corner is much better than in everything else i played.

also like one could see in the discussions on 3d - it is not always the best to simulate the reality as close as possible, because there are still some aspects missing that could not be simulated as well. in that case it is best practice to simulate the "best immersion of reality", because it is enough to convince the players mind and must not do more. in 3d for instance there will always be the problem of a fixed distance from the players eyes to the screen and this will only be overcome when a freefield projection technology is invented that really can project objects at different distances. and even then not everybody will have a big enough room for that - so it will probably stay at the current level of simulating a 3d world on a 2d screen. so some aspects of the sim always have to cut corners because of the consumers ability to playback those aspects. (for instance many of us now have wheels with ffb, but not so many of us have 6dof racingseats so the ability of lfs to visually simulate g-forces are a good compromise in that area)

so thank you @scavier for this great game and do not be so hard on your self - simulating real world physics might be the ultimative goal, but even if the new physics are just elaborate estimations they will be the best in sim world, because the actual physics of the game "as it is today" are already the best! so anything you make better from now on will just be "icing on the cake"!

peace, mo

Quote from molocco :

yesterday i spent the whole day playing some different racing games / simulators, and even if they all were fun, the change in immersion and feeling when i finally switched to lfs was really astounding!

it was unbelievable how much smoother it ran and how much more the ffb could convince me to be in a real car. the ability to judge and react based on whats visible on the screen and what i feel thru my wheel is so much better than in all the other games. also the sensation of speed and how good one can find the apex in any corner is much better than in everything else i played.

also like one could see in the discussions on 3d - it is not always the best to simulate the reality as close as possible, because there are still some aspects missing that could not be simulated as well. in that case it is best practice to simulate the "best immersion of reality", because it is enough to convince the players mind and must not do more. in 3d for instance there will always be the problem of a fixed distance from the players eyes to the screen and this will only be overcome when a freefield projection technology is invented that really can project objects at different distances. and even then not everybody will have a big enough room for that - so it will probably stay at the current level of simulating a 3d world on a 2d screen. so some aspects of the sim always have to cut corners because of the consumers ability to playback those aspects. (for instance many of us now have wheels with ffb, but not so many of us have 6dof racingseats so the ability of lfs to visually simulate g-forces are a good compromise in that area)

so thank you @scavier for this great game and do not be so hard on your self - simulating real world physics might be the ultimative goal, but even if the new physics are just elaborate estimations they will be the best in sim world, because the actual physics of the game "as it is today" are already the best! so anything you make better from now on will just be "icing on the cake"!

peace, mo

+10000, well said !

Quote from cargame.nl :

Disable your GPU, underclock your CPU and try to beat Daniel-CRO to be at the bottom of this list; http://lfsbench.iron.eu.org/?c=completemax

my old pc when I first started racing only got 9 FPS on good day so I could (if I had not killed that PC)

Quote from Ball Bearing Turbo :

EXACTLY.
controller lag at 60fps is a pretty silly notion for a human considering nerve impulses travel at about 200mph or so around one's carcass. (yes that's actually a limitation).

It doesn't really matter how fast the nerve impulses travel. Our brains work as massive prediction engines. We notice things when they don't behave as we subconsciously predicted. All the nerve impulse speed limit does is cause a lag in when we notice that there is a problem - it doesn't stop us from noticing.
Fortunately, because our prediction process is flexible and dynamic, we can cope with quite a big lag/latency, we adjust to it and it becomes undetectable. The real problem is when the lag varies in an unpredictable way.
e.g. A steady 60ms latency is much less noticeable than one varying randomly between 10ms and 40ms - that totally messes with our ability to predict and react to things before they happen.
Maybe that's why some folks can't abide lag and others claim that lag is impossible to detect - one guy could be experiencing variable lag while the other sees stable steady lag.

Quote from molocco :

it is not always the best to simulate the reality as close as possible, because there are still some aspects missing that could not be simulated as well. in that case it is best practice to simulate the "best immersion of reality"

agreed. LFS is great because everything inside the LFS world works as expected. this world might not be exactly like the real world but the important thing is that this doesn't mean a race in the LFS world is not exactly like a race in the real world.

in comparison, iRacing surely has some results that are closer to real life. if a track, tire and physics model gives a resulting lap time that is 0.01s away from a real life lap time, you can claim it is the most accurate simulation available. in a sense that is correct, even if the same model fails to simulate inertia.

LFS's #1 priority is to enable online racing. personally i think a physics model that makes sense under all conditions is better one that is the closest to real life. having a perfect reproduction of reality as priority #1 leads to compromises: the simulated world has some parts that are almost exactly like real life at the expense of having holes in the simulation.

it looks like Scawen tried to add new restrictions forcing his simulation to be closer to real life while maintaining LFS's unified physics model and eventually decided that can't work for the moment. probably mainstream hardware isn't powerful enough yet.

it also looks like he decided to make some update to his unified physics model without imposing the real-world restriction. no doubt this will give us a better immersion factor!

Quote from Scawen :

Hello everyone!

The developers are all alive and working on LFS.

Eric has been working on new tracks. He slowed up a bit during some of the great English summer which we don't get very often. I have enjoyed test driving on two of his new tracks which look great and I look forward to the time when they can be released.

I am still working on the tyre physics, though I haven't really made serious progress this year. I also enjoyed the summer, did a lot of cycling and running too. It's a better hobby than smoking like I used to, and I really enjoy it. But the good news is it won't pay the bills!

LFS income has gradually gone down as it always does between updates. That that has increased the urgency of finishing the tyre physics. So I plan to get down to it, make the appropriate approximations and sort out a good physically based system, with enough assumptions to make it workable, accepting that total realism is an unachievable goal.

I just got a bit excited about stereoscopic 3d support, which some people will like because they'll be able to see LFS in 3d on a 3d TV, if their TV supports "side-by-side" or "top and bottom" mode. Also headsets should be supported if they accept one of those output modes. The old headsets that require specific support and sequential output will not be supported. For example a Sony HMZ works but a Vuzix VR920 does not. A more recent Vuzix should work but the field of view is not really good enough to give you peripheral vision. I'm not sure how much it will benefit the Oculus Rift at the moment. I think that depends on a pixel shader to provide the proper distortion, which I think is not available in D3D8. Anyway, one of the output options will be non-squashed (full) side-by-side 3D, which may possibly make it easier to use the Oculus Rift. Anyway it is a step in that direction. It does appear that the current Oculus Rift's resolution is too low for a racing simulator at the moment. Anyway I should be able to post a 3d test patch in a few days, I'm guessing early next week. Some people will enjoy that, though I realise most people, like me, don't have 3d equipment.

Victor is still with us, although he has indeed got another job, which looks like a really good one, putting his excellent skills to more use. I'm pleased for him about that, as his job here wasn't often really full time, although he is an absolutely vital member of our team. He needed a job as well because our profit share isn't one third each and depends on our actual contributions to the project. Victor started later and never has so much work, so for that reason only, his profit share was a bit of a tight squeeze to live on, specially with the gradual reduction in profits while we are waiting for a serious update.

People ask why I don't come here more often with progress reports. But there hasn't been enough progress to give a report. And it's not appealing to come here and say that. Every month I've thought I would be making more progress, and would have some good progress to report the following month. Hope you see what I mean...

Anyway, we do have to pay the bills and I'm very interested to get the better feeling tyre model out there for everyone to enjoy. You've heard it all before so I don't expect great enthusiasm. It will take a while yet, but hopefully not too long.

Cool I will take that as a progress report. Well at least if you take better care of yourself you reduce the risk of heart attack before next update!
Keep up you can make it!

23,000 people viewed this wow

Awsome update

For all ppl "guessing" and "reading between the lines": Assumption is the mother of all fckups :P

For all "mod fans": I want it too, but it will ruin development imo, so I accualy don't.

3D: Lovely, I want a "rift" when it is out

Graphichs: Texture packs can do ALOT to improve lfs, and with dx8->dx9 + bloom makes it awsome.
I'm not alergic to better grapichs, but not important.

Development pace: I have always seen lfs as a simulator I bought "AS IS", and EVERY update is in my eyes a BONUS

New Physichs: Unsure how you can improve current physichs, other than maybe heating/wear/traction, and adding damage model.
But I look forward to see

FFB: do not touch, most direct I have felt in any sim

All I need to top it off, is better sounds, full surround sound, and "unperfect track surface"(bumps and dips an current tracks, like in the real world)


Now start flaming for anything you do not agree on

Quote from =Wolf=[NO] :

FFB: do not touch, most direct I have felt in any sim

Seriously? If there's one thing LFS never had going for it, it was FFB..

How do you figure? LFS' FFB is so great because it is the actual torque from the front wheels. There's no special effects added, just raw force output.

Why would you **** up a good thing by adding falseness to it?

The person who posted after me is a dirty dirty girl who likes to be spanked with barbed wire in bed.

Quote from BlueFlame :

Seriously? If there's one thing LFS never had going for it, it was FFB..

What!?! LFS has by far the most realistic feelings of being behind a wheel of a real car imo...

After not playing LFS for along time. rFactor2 and Assetto Corsa make LFS FFB feel spongy and outdated.

Quote from BlueFlame :

After not playing LFS for along time. rFactor2 and Assetto Corsa make LFS FFB feel spongy and outdated.

I can see you driving a real car and then complain about the unrealistic physics

LFS doesn't simulate the vibrations that you feel in a real car. Assetto Corsa does a bit but it can feel artificial, especially going over a rumble strip slowly.

LFS doesn't have a curb that's rumbled afaik..

Besides, would you actually feel a rumbled kerb in the wheel, at least that affected rotation? You'd feel it in vertical motion of the car, but would your wheels get significantly jarred left/right? Which, if you look at OutSim data, you'll probably see vertical "bumps" when going over the kerbs in LFS.

Probably not to the extreme that is indicated in other sims. So why would LFS do the same?