Any increase is welcome! :-) Do you mean 24 for each host / real driver? For me at least 9 AI drivers instead of 3 are enough. But bigger values are also welcome.
In the current Test patch thread I ask you following question:
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In multiplayer replays you have smoothed the steering wheel movements some time ago. Would that be possible or feasible during a multiplayer (live) race?
The background of my question is that I stream our training races (more or less) weekly on Youtube. The view changes among other things also in the cockpit view. If the cockpit is shown by a vehicle that is not on the streaming PC, the steering wheel movements are still jerky. Is the information missing for the "gentle" movements or is it possible to improve the behavior? Maybe - depending on the effort - does this improvement still have a place here? :-)
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I guess this one went down? At least you didn't react to it. Maybe that would be something (small) to implement?
If you do end up implementing the changes to maximum lock could you also consider allowing the steering wheel to turn 720° for those cars as it does for the other road cars? The problem is that driving these cars with 45° steering lock but only 540° steering wheel rotation makes them feel extremely twitchy in comparison to the other cars since you're effectively increasing the steering sensitivity (this is from my personal experiences on mouse but I'd imagine it's a similar feeling on other devices as well).
Even better would be allowing us to tweak the max steering wheel rotation ourselves for individual car/setups (obviously keeping 720° as the limit) but I feel that might be too much to ask for at the moment.
There are already ways to use larger rotation on a steering wheel if needed (assuming your controller has enough rotation to do so). Sensitivity is only affected by in-game rotation limits if you're set up for your wheel to be 1:1. This can already be changed to increase/reduce sensitivity in various ways, depending on how linear you want your steering.
Changing the in-car rotation limit won't affect mouse/joystick control at all, it's only a visual thing for those types of controllers.
I don't think we're on the same page here. Let's use the example of an XRT (45° steering lock, 720° steering wheel rotation), then compare it to an XRR with the suggested changes (45° steering lock, 540° steering wheel rotation). If I took the XRT and moved my mouse 2 inches to the left which results in the steering wheel turning 90°, then took the XRR and moved my mouse the same distance it would also turn the steering wheel 90°. However since the XRR only has 540° of steering wheel rotation to work with, the angle of the tyres on the XRR will be greater than the XRT despite the physical input being the same and the steering wheel being rotated the same amount. This is annoying for muscle memory and is already annoying when using cars like the FXO which are limited to 30° steering lock, but still have the full 720° steering wheel rotation which is why I added the 2nd suggestion at the end. Hopefully this was a bit more clear.
Setting wheel turn compensation at 0.00 in controls menu makes the steering sensitivity feel very similar to the xrt's steering when steering lock is at 45(if you're on 900 degrees and the car has 60 degrees steering lock, that is), so there's a simple workaround for this at the moment. or if you're using mouse, you could always adjust dpi or windows sensitivity settings to reduce the twitchiness. If you were to edit FZ's steering wheel degrees i fear it might affect the existing setups and it'd require lots of time to find the amounts that would correspond to how it used to feel.
That being said though, would it be a good idea to also allow mouse axises to be adjusted under 1.0x sensitivity in the axis menu in controls? It could eliminate the need to edit windows or mouse driver settings.
In race use propably not, you'd spin the tires everywhere. In drifting, road normals do hold quite well, around 1 lap of aggressive drifting with XRR @ FE3R if i'm not mistaken, when with XRT and FZ5 they hold a bit more than 2 laps.
Haven't tried to race with road tires, supers feel ok but they do heat up very fast, so do hybrids, however knobblys feel like they might be a bit useless for the GTRs as they provide very little grip on tarmac, and there's not really any tracks that would be 100% gravel at the moment.
NGTs might be great with hybrids too, i do remember it being quite understeery but it might be because i usually just tried to slap different tires on race setups that weren't really designed with rally driving in mind.
https://www.lfs.net/forum/thread/94763-FOX-tyre-pressure-bug this ?
Also a suggestion i have is for setups order, the ability to have different folders for each track and have the ability to create folders in case of layouts or different kind of setups in general.
As tires will have a larger (performance) impact on (league) racing. I think it would be great if available tire options (for each car) could be managed via the server, something like /car=xfg tire=r1,r3 (so only r1 and r3 available for the xfg).
I think that's still not going to work. Changing tyres was easy with most tweak programs, but GTRs lack suspension travel/ride height and the softest dampers and springs are still too stiff for off-roading.
It is achievable with specific parts but not with the kind of front wheel sizes we have on GTRs I think. There'd have to be a drift mode to tick on or off, that changes suspension geometry.
Thank you all for the feedback. There's too much for me to answer at the moment. I have to read the thread and make some notes, will consider each thing but will not be able to answer all.
This is not possible on a live connection, because the remote computer does not know where the driver's controls will be in a future position packet. During a multiplayer replay, LFS looks ahead to the next position packet and if there are changes in controls that can be interpolated, it does so (e.g. steering, throttle, brake). But that is because the next position packet is there in the file.
There is only one way I can think of that this could be done, and that would be to watch a live replay, slightly behind time. I was thinking about this when watching a race on Sim Broadcasts. As mentioned, increasing pps may bring some small benefits, but cannot improve things anywhere near as much as some people seem to think. Packet frequency cannot solve latency. I was thinking if the commentator of sim broadcasts could have one instance of LFS saving a MPR, and another instance watching that MPR, a second or two behind time, this could in theory allow two things.
1) the smoothing you see in replays
2) allow rewind to replay something interesting before switching back to real time
I do know this isn't very easy. I'm not sure how far away it is from being possible but I'll have a look into it.
Thinking of that aspect: Would it be possible then that the "live mpr" is on some server that streams it to clients that are connected to that server and watch the race as a spectator without having to connect to the servers?
While endurance races are not as popular as they used to be, it was usually a problem that people wanted to watch the race server side to coach/"race engineer" their team mates. With the current connection limit there usually are rules or gentlemen agreements in place to only connect to right before a driver takes over from his team mate and disconnect right after it.
I hope this will not look like im trying to bash on anyone or anything but ive got a few points to make here, please bear with me on a rather lenghty post.
First - as part of a nowadays (it seems) minority that is about the pure driving experience and none of these changes will appeal or make any difference to. That minority actually had some amazingly constructive feedback attempted to be given about some specific aspects of the mentioned GTR class which would have had big effects on the (at the time) largest and most interesting leagues ran at LFS. Somehow, all that valuable information was neglected at the time. Somehow we come to the times when some minority asks for absolutely invaluable options which would make no sense implementing and wasting time at (from that same hardcore, hardloving purist minority PoV).
On the AI's front, other sim's workaround this issue is to run the bots server side. Granted this puts the load running them at the servers hands but the benefits are that the lag experienced by their movement is set.
Ofcourse, this will cause a rethink of the whole structure of the connection between the server and users, overhaul of the dedicated server etc etc.
Finally, it all comes down to what appeals to you guys - the developers. Once having arguably the biggest events in simracing, environment that was high class in terms of knowledge, respect and confidence, that gave the opportunity to a few to make the switch to real world racers, endurance races that kept hundrets of people on their toes in terms of interest in the game or a casual drift/cruise simulation. I however yearn to get my hands on the redesigned tracks you so effectively are teasing us with.
there are way too much topic replies and i don't know if it's been replied, but for road cars i suggest adding semi-slicks, as it won't be real to put slicks on a road car. Also going offroad tyres on gtr would be realistic only on FXR, because it could be used to replicate WRC events easier
It may not be optimum, but I am sure it will be fun. I remember having done some laps in the past with the FXR with hybrid tires, it was insane
Note that rallycross cars irl are not having necessarily crazy ride height, and if stiffer suspension is needed to have the necessary height, the drivers will adapt
That's some great news you're into making a small update. As i've been drifting in LFS for way too many years and it's the mean thing that learnt me what i know in real life, i'd really love to see the changes you're talking about. Steering lock doesn't really have to be 65 as you said. Especially for road cars. 45 is kinda enough(especially when tires are cold), as the car hasn't enough horsepower and push and use that lock. 55 would be ideal. Just these 10 more degrees to the XRT(and the rest road cars so we can use RB4 for example as well). I really wonder how XRR/FZR will handle with road tyres, but i'm sure it'll be lots of fun. I'm really into it and would love to give it a try!
We already have those, they're called "road super" IIRC. They're missing from UF1, XFG and XRG, but as Scawen mentioned, they run the risk of tipping over very easily. Possibly once we have both revised tracks (curbs) and tyre physics, the devs could look into this, but that's still far away.
The thing is when there's not enough suspension travel and/or too stiff dampening, you will continuously suffer suspension damage from all the bumps and jumps.
NDR.DeathRally is updated with U13 DCON, will be a good test for it.
Scawen, I am curious if it would be simple to allow more connections to a server. 38 driver slots is just fine, but only having 47 total slots is a hindrance, especially for endurance racing.
Even a bump to a total of 57 connections (+10 from current), would be a large help. Ideally, perhaps eventually having 38/80 at some point would be most ideal, allowing essentially everyone to have a second driver.
I understand if it's not just a simple integer switch, but it would really help the endurance side of racing, and even those full grid weekly events would benefit from it, especially if trying to qualify > 38 cars
1) Wouldn't streaming be much smoother already with higher PPS? People in streamed races are generally more hardcore, and have low latency internet. It's bit more serious than your casual Blackwood FBM.
And nowadays people have CRAZY pc's Scawen. They aren't even that expensive anymore. I have 8 core 16 threads Ryzen with 16 GB ram. And that's like average Ryzen, not even considered top end, I can open 10 LFS instances and run max AI on all of them. (Probably more actually) LFS is already way too friendly to old hardware. I can run LFS with a 20 year old PC. Literally. Maybe not with max graphics and max AI or 999 FPS, but it WILL run. And that's probably also because you don't cut corners and code cleanly.
2) I think this one would require a new broadcasting interface with specific controls. It wouldn't be nice to see the guys fiddling with the menu and trying to find where the incident happened, going back and forth in replay etc. Something like a "control room" would be amazing, where viewers don't see what's being done and when the specific replay is ready, just "send" it to the main stream, maybe even choose different views to play it from, and then it goes back to live automatically after replay ends. Hell maybe even a quick LFS logo animation before and at the end of the replay, not to jump straight into it and confuse people. Streamers would basically get the replay and angles, the playback speed ready, and send it in during a calm moment in the race.
You talk about "muscle memory" on mouse.
The way LFS is at the moment and using your example above:
XRT has 45° steering lock with 720° wheel turn, XRR also (hypothetically) has 45° steering lock but only 540° wheel turn.
If you move your mouse 2", the front wheels will turn the same amount on both cars, as they both have the same lock.
Your muscle memory moving the mouse the same distance will result in the cars moving in the same way (ignoring understeer). Your mouse doesn't have more "wheel turn" on cars that have it, it's just the *visual representation* of the steering wheel on screen will be different.
LFS mouse control is based on where the pointer is relative to the edges of the game window. If you turn on the mouse pointer, you can see it clearly. This means that when your pointer is at the far right of the window, your car will be full lock to the right regardless of whether the limit is 30° or 45°.
If it's the visual representation of the steering wheel being different that's throwing you off, then you may be better off turning off the steering wheel to stop it being a distraction, and rely on your muscle memory instead.
Regarding the different steering lock/wheel turn on the different cars, this is completely realistic.
If you drive two different cars IRL, you will get different amounts of lock and wheel turn. A drift car with a fast rack and 50° lock will move the front wheels very quickly, whereas an old road car with no power steering and 30° lock will take many turns of the steering wheel to go lock to lock. It's just something that drivers have to get used to.
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1) Indeed, PCs are a *lot* more powerful now than they used to be. Multiple cores won't help in LFS atm as it's single-threaded, but as an example, the single-core performance of Ryzen CPUs has increased by more than 50% since 1st gen Ryzen. Additionally, 1st gen Ryzen had about 2x the single-thread performance as the previous gen AMD CPU.
[Edit: for reference, my laptop is 8(!) times faster single-threadded, than the desktop CPU I used for my first few years of LFS]
The additional calculations that might be necessary for higher PPS sound like a perfect candidate for multi-threading as presumably there's a lot of independence in the calculations. Something to think about for the multi-thread rewrite Scawen has suggested might happen eventually.
2) Indeed, having replays on-stream would require extra tools, but would be perfectly doable now with what LFS gives programmers access to. I've had several ideas of how to implement such things on my (very long) Sim Broadcasts todo list for some time
This will be an amazing features for some types of event like Destruction derby on Piran Moto server and others.
Instead of allowing it only on few cars maybe it can be better to allow the use of all compounds and types of tyres on all the cars including single seater. It can be a little unrealistic but the possibilities for races and event would be much more. Some server like france pro crash allow the use of fbm on rallycross track, with offroad tyres the races would be extreme!
I'm all in for all tyres available for all cars, that would make up for some interesting challenges.
Scawen, I got two small requests, that (I believe) could be solved with changing few lines of code.
1) Allow for actively limiting the fuel tank size.
A month ago we did run an E-Challenge event, where we did run FOX at custom layout with limited fuel. Unfortunately the only way to limit the cars on fuel is to have them run at 100% tank capacity and disallow refueling. Sadly that means, the E-Challenge race took well over 2 hours to finish because of that limitation.
With the ability to limit the percentage of allowed fuel in the tank (either via slider or via /command) would allow us to run such or similar race at more reasonable distance.
I'm sure some other leagues would take a use of such feature if available.
2) For future time-limited endurance races, please consider adding a commmand, that resets the remaining time back to its original value and keeps it until the leader starts another lap.
Pretty much all endurance races here start with a formation lap, but the time it takes to complete counts into the total time of the race, so in the end we get 23h 55m of racing instead of pure 24 hours.
Haven't tried with Full server yet but the few guys who joined me seem more smooth. Was thinking maybe 18 pps or more on test patch for trying out what is Best.
Is it good idea to separate GTR's specification via a button in setup menu?
It would maintain campability, and open possibilities for unexptected needed changes like suspension geometry, rim size, engine mapping etc.
