Give us the track editor, you know you wanna.

Im so happy that lfs team suprise us all with the LFS mods editor. Next thing what im really waiting for is if they give us a proper LFS TRACK EDITOR that you can build realistic IRL race tracks.

LFS in my heart to the grave what ever happens to the game, thank you scawen and lfs crew.

I think it'll be a long time before we ever get realistic tracks with the track editor. Most mod tracks in other sims are just rips from other games which likely won't fly here.

Quote from gu3st :

I think it'll be a long time before we ever get realistic tracks with the track editor. Most mod tracks in other sims are just rips from other games which likely won't fly here.

Maybe, but I wonder how copyright and licensing extends to tracks? They're not brand names of cars that are manufactured and sold. That's a completely different matter. Like maybe we're allowed to use actual track names? Who would be against that? It's extra publicity for the track owners. Why not?

Quote from Aleksandr_124rus :

Maybe, but I wonder how copyright and licensing extends to tracks? They're not brand names of cars that are manufactured and sold. That's a completely different matter. Like maybe we're allowed to use actual track names? Who would be against that? It's extra publicity for the track owners. Why not?

Well, I recall the first ProjectCARS game had fake names for some real tracks (Monaco and Suzuka spring to my mind) so there are clearly legal limitations to tracks as well.
And the even bigger issue is you'll still have to model whole track by yourself unless some big studio that made it with hard money kindly allows you to use their model...

Quote from michal 1279 :

And the even bigger issue is you'll still have to model whole track by yourself unless some big studio that made it with hard money kindly allows you to use their model...

Or you rip it from other games/AC mods and call it a day

-----x-----x-----x-----x-----x-----

If you don't have a license then for sure you can't use Nurburgring, Nordschleife, Spa, Monza, Imola, etc etc

It will be the same deal as car mods, except now it will take centuries for tracks to get the thumbs up to be published, if it isn't ripped from Asetto Corsa/AC mods or other games.

Can't wait to yeet a BF1 up Eau Croissant on Jacuzzi!!1!

Everyone wants to race their favorite tracks with LFS. The important thing is not the name or the decor, but the quality of the track.

If Scawen's tool makes it possible to create tracks from the 3D layout of the track and to automatically generate predefined environments, things can go very quickly.

Techland did something like this with the Chrome Engine in 2006 for Xpand Rally. It was quite intuitive and it worked well for the time.
Something like that would be fantastic for a game that has the qualities of LFS and we would have quickly new realistic tracks. If with the tool modders are forced to model everything, it can take a lot of time for a quality that will not always be very good.

Quote from Avraham Vandezwin :

Everyone wants to race their favorite tracks with LFS. The important thing is not the name or the decor, but the quality of the track.

If Scawen's tool makes it possible to create tracks from the 3D layout of the track and to automatically generate predefined environments, things can go very quickly.

Techland did something like this with the Chrome Engine in 2006 for Xpand Rally. It was quite intuitive and it worked well for the time.
Something like that would be fantastic for a game that has the qualities of LFS and we would have quickly new realistic tracks. If with the tool modders are forced to model everything, it can take a lot of time for a quality that will not always be very good.

Sounds too complicated and unnecessary. It will only slow down the development of the trackeditor system. I think the trackeditor should be done like the mod system. And trackeditor already exists just it is not public and it is used only by Eric. The rating and approve system makes it clear enough that we need beautiful and quality mods\tracks.

If we have people in the community who are able to fully model and texture the car so that it looks realistic and beautiful, that should be enough to model and texture a good track. It will probably take more time, but it should not be more difficult.

Quote from Aleksandr_124rus :

Sounds too complicated and unnecessary. It will only slow down the development of the trackeditor system. I think the trackeditor should be done like the mod system. And trackeditor already exists just it is not public and it is used only by Eric. The rating and approve system makes it clear enough that we need beautiful and quality mods\tracks.

If we have people in the community who are able to fully model and texture the car so that it looks realistic and beautiful, that should be enough to model and texture a good track. It will probably take more time, but it should not be more difficult.

I don't know how Eric's current tool works, or what else needs to be developed to make it public. I'm not talking about complicating things to waste time.
In my opinion, a 3D track modelling algorithm and a few specific 3D object libraries would produce tracks faster than doing everything from scratch.
No matter the visual resemblance to reality. What matters is the quality of the track. In the track environments, there are always the same things (grass, pits, stands, etc.). A track is not a car . It is totally unnecessary to model everything every time. Having standard resizeable generic objects would suffice. And we would have quality tracks more quickly.

Quote from Avraham Vandezwin :

I don't know how Eric's current tool works, or what else needs to be developed to make it public. I'm not talking about complicating things to waste time.
In my opinion, a 3D track modelling algorithm and a few specific 3D object libraries would produce tracks faster than doing everything from scratch.
No matter the visual resemblance to reality. What matters is the quality of the track. In the track environments, there are always the same things (grass, pits, stands, etc.). A track is not a car . It is totally unnecessary to model everything every time. Having standard resizeable generic objects would suffice. And we would have quality tracks more quickly.

I'm sure the track editor has its own subobject system, after all you can see plenty of reoccuring objects across existing LFS environments.

Quote from michal 1279 :

I'm sure the track editor has its own subobject system, after all you can see plenty of reoccuring objects across existing LFS environments.

I also think Scawen did something efficient and smart. A road track algorithm, such as it exists for motorway layouts, does not seem to be of insurmountable complexity. What would be the point of a trackeditor system without specific tools?

Quote from Avraham Vandezwin :

I don't know how Eric's current tool works, or what else needs to be developed to make it public. I'm not talking about complicating things to waste time.
In my opinion, a 3D track modelling algorithm and a few specific 3D object libraries would produce tracks faster than doing everything from scratch.
No matter the visual resemblance to reality. What matters is the quality of the track. In the track environments, there are always the same things (grass, pits, stands, etc.). A track is not a car . It is totally unnecessary to model everything every time. Having standard resizeable generic objects would suffice. And we would have quality tracks more quickly.

Of course the main thing is the layout and design of the track itself and reusing assets to a degree is a valid and widely used technique, but generic environments and reusing generic assets in the name of 'quickly' doesn't scream 'quality' to me to be honest.

Either way, i feel like track editor should be lower priority than more official LFS content and updating the existing content to a somewhat modern standard.

Quote from johneysvk :

Of course the main thing is the layout and design of the track itself and reusing assets to a degree is a valid and widely used technique, but generic environments and reusing generic assets in the name of 'quickly' doesn't scream 'quality' to me to be honest.

Either way, i feel like track editor should be lower priority than more official LFS content and updating the existing content to a somewhat modern standard.

You are right, creating new content for a game that is not yet updated is not the top priority. It's like creating new cars without the new tire physics. But it at least allows us to be patient, and we don't decide on priorities.

Of course, the use of generic tools and assets should not preclude creativity or quality. Tools to quickly generate the tedious part of a track would be handy. Each modder would be free to refine his track with the elements of his choice.

Compared to what was mentioned above, I was thinking to something almost automatic to reproduce existing tracks with a different environment, in order to circumvent licensing problems. We could see Daytona-like, Spa-like, Sylverstone-like, Nürburgring-like etc. in LFS, some Kinds of generic track without licensing issues.

Quote from Aleksandr_124rus :

Maybe, but I wonder how copyright and licensing extends to tracks? They're not brand names of cars that are manufactured and sold. That's a completely different matter. Like maybe we're allowed to use actual track names? Who would be against that? It's extra publicity for the track owners. Why not?

The same rights apply, modders just openly steal things with no consequence.

LFS has a different stance becuase they also host the content and are thus somewhat liable for it.

And publicity doesn't pay the bills. A game paying them tens of thousands of dollars for a licence pays the bills.

I am really happy to see all the progress, and I really want our community to prosper. Thank you devs so far.

One personal suggestion (after getting old Westhill drivable first) is that now when South City has a huge expansion, we should also have a big number of official layouts. Instead of so1-so6 we should have like so1-so20. Basically I want this so that we would have green line in every single combo we are driving. Official layouts also make it possible to hotlap all. And it seems like we got more official content without using layout editor.

Quote from gu3st :

I think it'll be a long time before we ever get realistic tracks with the track editor. Most mod tracks in other sims are just rips from other games which likely won't fly here.

I was just having a conversation with my Director of EMS about building a simulator for ambulance driving. I've had this idea for like ... 15 years ... where I would love to build my town and mod in my ambulances to use as a way to teach driving an emergency vehicle without the threat of putting a 175k - 1M dollar ambulance at risk.

Quote from Dygear :

I was just having a conversation with my Director of EMS about building a simulator for ambulance driving. I've had this idea for like ... 15 years ... where I would love to build my town and mod in my ambulances to use as a way to teach driving an emergency vehicle without the threat of putting a 175k - 1M dollar ambulance at risk.

tell your town mayor to re-shape the town layout to what it is in south city.

Hi after long break, I follow LFS almost from the beginning sa I'm rather a veteran when it comes to it. So maybe someone or even Scawen in the flesh can help me with 2 questions.

First of all does anyone know anything more about new tire model or new physics? What is going to be changed, whats the most wrong part of tire model at now, is tire heating correct and is it also sa hard in real life to be on "green" temp? In Assetto Corsa there is a lot easier to control tire temp and even when it is not green state you still have quite a lot of grip, also it does take less time to cool it down. Which is more proper?

Second question is about multithreating. I read whole topic about Scawen work but didn't find an answer. Is LFS going to use only 2 cores / 2 threads splited to graphips and physics or is it going to use more threads? As i read in other place if i'm not wrong Scawen has CPU with only 2 cores from years and doesn't want to change it at now, so probably he can't even test the code for more threads. Anyone?

Kuba

Quote from Kuba_m :

Hi after long break, I follow LFS almost from the beginning sa I'm rather a veteran when it comes to it. So maybe someone or even Scawen in the flesh can help me with 2 questions.

Good questions. But in my opinion the problem with tires is not that it's hard to control the temperature, but that the grip drops too quickly as the temperature increases. I have given this example before, but I see it roughly like the graph for road tyres, for sports tyres the situation is even worse.
I hope the situation will change for the better after the update, but we don't have any concrete information about it yet. As I understand it Scawen is still in the process of testing the new physics and some things may change.

About multitrading as I understood it was talking about more than 2 threads for some parts of code, and some others parts will use only two threads. But maybe I remember it wrong.

As far as I am aware, a new thing about tire physics will be to develop a numerical model that will simulate as close as possible the tire slip curves, where at the moment those curves are input into the game engine as some parametrized functions with rough steps, taken from somewhere else. Also, it may be that the tire model will have more than 24 radial and 3 axial zones as it has now, we'll have to wait and see. Obviously, the simulation will be more accurate if you have a smaller (more high-resolution) grid to define the tire model. This about temperatures is more about fine-tuning the model or making it with enough free parameters that will allow fine adjustments. So rather than trying to manually optimize a tire slip curve such that the end result is something realistic, Scawen wants to try to simulate the curve realistically in the first place with a more detailed tire model and avoid having to rely on external input curves.

About multithreading, Scawen is working on two threads that can run on a CPU in parallel, while sharing the same resources. Even if the CPU has only 1 core, it can still happen that it has more than 1 thread - multithread. Depending on the CPU architecture and operating system, it will always try to run the code as efficiently as possible. That may be such that both threads are run on core0 on separate threads, while other cores are remaining unused.

To sum up, one needs at least a CPU with 2 cores and 1 thread per core, or a single-core CPU with 2 threads to take advantage of this new update. Will it run better on a more capable CPU? is unlikely, but we also have to wait and see, as Scawen said he is testing it on his particular dual-core CPU where he already saw significant benefits with respect to a single thread LFS code run on the same CPU.

I've been playing Lfs for 18 years, and it's still a great game! I assume that the new Lfs update will include those 2 tracks with the 20 Lfs anniversary and slightly better graphics. Lfs will always be a great game!!!

just an idea to make "better" concreate tracks and i talked to an programmer he said it not taking long to ad concrete with textures and different frictions on the different slabs depending on what surface, alternative to give us one layout square with just dirt? then we can mix it for better types of ovals,crosscart, rallyx tracks /lunqan

im hoping that the game will also get updates from the audio department since it could use some improvements, specifically i just want to be able to hear rumble sounds when you go over the curbs since i find it really satisfying

What about the Scirocco? Will we get this in the next updates?

Quote from fastranker1 :

What about the Scirocco? Will we get this in the next updates?

The latest info is that it will be included as S1 content after new tyres physics release. Haven't seen any info that this plan would be changed. Still I don't get the big interest about it as there are a lot of better cars in the mods list already.