We'd all agree that lateral visibility from all the cars is poor. It cannot be anything else unless you have three screens, one in the middle and two facing the left and right sides of your face (and software that can draw your entire field of view on these three screens). An inevitable consequence is that wheel to wheel racing ends in tears too often. I know you can look left and right but hurtling into the braking zone flat out, judging your braking point to the yard, doesn't leave time to find the right button and for the view to slide sideways and back.

I suggest a small graphic somewhere in the corner of the screen that gives you the info your peripheral vision would gather. Just a plan of the car with coloured dots or something that lets you know if you're about to touch and where, or mayber some system that lets you know if you're clear of the guy behing and safe to take the racing entry to a corner or whether you should stay on the overtaking inside line to claim the corner.

Just a suggestion, but it would prevent the needless silly accident that can blight an otherwise good contest.

Good idea, would stop quite a few unintended wreckages.

+1

+1

When Im slipstreaming a car and start overtaking it I can not find out easily if I am in front of the car or not yet. This would solve the problem.

Or have 2 extra mirrors that show you what's left and right

-1

It's true that the visibility is poor, but using those look buttons, and common sense solves it. Like in normal traffic, If a car disappears from your mirrors, it's in your blind spot. If you pay attention in what line and speed the other car is going in relation to you, it's pretty easy to conclude it's position even if you can't see it. Practise makes perfect, and tbh, I feel that kind of improvement too arcadish.

But speaking of mirrors, I think that side mirrors must be redone, from what I've heard, now they're only the rear view mirror split in half.

Quote from frokki :

-1

It's true that the visibility is poor, but using those look buttons, and common sense solves it. Like in normal traffic, If a car disappears from your mirrors, it's in your blind spot. If you pay attention in what line and speed the other car is going in relation to you, it's pretty easy to conclude it's position even if you can't see it. Practise makes perfect, and tbh, I feel that kind of improvement too arcadish.

But speaking of mirrors, I think that side mirrors must be redone, from what I've heard, now they're only the rear view mirror split in half.

IRL, in normal traffic, you can move your side mirrors to eliminate blindspots. When a car leaves my rear view mirror, it enters my side mirror. When it leaves the side mirror, I can see him beside me and of course then on through until he is past.

It was said before that making the side view mirrors render different than the rear would bog frame rates down to much, IIRC. We also need a 45 degree side view to see the side mirrors as not everyone likes that horrible stretched look to more than 50-60 degree FOV. I can't see my side mirrors at all.

Quote from mrodgers :

We also need a 45 degree side view to see the side mirrors as not everyone likes that horrible stretched look to more than 50-60 degree FOV. I can't see my side mirrors at all.

I also dislike ridiculous amounts of FOV, but I use just as much to be able to see most of the driver side mirror ~80° in most cases. It would be nice to be able to set the amount of view turning (and speed) from view buttons for personal preferences.

Quote from mrodgers :

IRL, in normal traffic, you can move your side mirrors to eliminate blindspots. When a car leaves my rear view mirror, it enters my side mirror. When it leaves the side mirror, I can see him beside me and of course then on through until he is past.

You can't completely remove the blindspots, I hope you're aware of that, otherwise you might be crashing into a car while tying to change lanes without turning your head

Edit: Well, I'm speaking only of my own experience, maybe in newer cars, you have better mirrors, in which you can see the blind spots, but I wouldn't be sure

I have no visibility problems at all, and I will stop playing LFS is such a rubbish driver aid such as a 'proximity alarm' is added, even if it is optional.

Quote from tristancliffe :

I have no visibility problems at all, and I will stop playing LFS is such a rubbish driver aid such as a 'proximity alarm' is added, even if it is optional.

You mean like Kegety's pitspotter?

(This is no attack, I'm just trying to get you to be more specific. )

Vain

-1

It's part of sim racing, the fact our left and right works to a full 90 degrees is enough. 90% of the time I know where the other car is, 10% of the time it's down to poor judgement or blindzone that would be there in real life that catches me out.

How hard is it to tap the left/right button when braking for a corner etc? I didn't even need to get used to doing that, I just do it...

Keiran

IRL, it is IMPOSSIBLE to eliminate blindspots unless your ca has transparent/no roof pillars. Even so, blind spots WILL pop up when inclination changes, etc.....

In essence, unless you drive and utterly transparent car, blind spots will exist no matter what you do. The best we can do to minimise blind spots is to mount rearward/sideward facing cameras, but them there are still limits imposed by camera perspective.

Just trying to clear up a myth of clearable blindspots. Even the most perfect mirror adjustments can only see what the pillars don't block. Unless youdrive a topless car with no spoiler/high tail to block the view, but them you still can't see too low.

I think that what would be a better idea would be where if there is a car on one side the look left/right looks at that car instead of at 90 degrees.

Quote from paulmooney25 :

I know you can look left and right but hurtling into the braking zone flat out, judging your braking point to the yard, doesn't leave time to find the right button and for the view to slide sideways and back.

There is a setting in Options-View "Button look:" with choices of smooth and instant.

Pit Spotter was a nice aid to fill this gap, a radio message from your pit crew as to the location of vehicles around you. Not really possible on road courses but I could over look that. That combined with the radio from LFS Companion makes a very nice imersive way to feed the driver info with out having to clutter up the display.

I don't like to use an FOV higher then 65 degrees, my monitor is only 17" and is about 24" from my face. At 65 degrees its still far too high to allow correct FOV in game based on distance and size, but its close enough to now messs up my corner entries, too much. I can not see the side mirror, I can not see the real rear view mirror on most cars and so use the virtual mirror on all the tin tops.

Quote from Jamexing :

IRL, it is IMPOSSIBLE to eliminate blindspots unless your ca has transparent/no roof pillars. Even so, blind spots WILL pop up when inclination changes, etc.....

In essence, unless you drive and utterly transparent car, blind spots will exist no matter what you do. The best we can do to minimise blind spots is to mount rearward/sideward facing cameras, but them there are still limits imposed by camera perspective.

Just trying to clear up a myth of clearable blindspots. Even the most perfect mirror adjustments can only see what the pillars don't block. Unless youdrive a topless car with no spoiler/high tail to block the view, but them you still can't see too low.

It's true you can't COMPLETELY eliminate blind spots, but you can minimize them to the point where they're too small to completley hide a car.

Unfortunately the limited field of view in LFS is a limitation of the hardware and of the genre. A normal human has a 180-degree field of vision. In-game that is cut to less than half normal--leaving HUGE blind spots. I'll tell you one thing though that helps--not your eyes, your EARS. Listen carefully. The game's positional audio is actually pretty good for the most part--you can hear when someone's behind or to the left or right pretty distinctly and how far away they are, even under your own engine noise. Then again, since my vision is poorer than average perhaps I've just learned to compensate for it by using my other senses. I might not be able to see the car, but I can HEAR the car, and that gives me enough information to find that other car.

This is quite common in people with a vision deficiency--their other senses become more acute to compensate. Most normal people can differentiate this stuff as well with a little practice. It helps to wear headphones (the better they are, the better off you'll be, but the ones I have are like 5 bucks and they do the job just fine)

Quote from tristancliffe :

I have no visibility problems at all, and I will stop playing LFS is such a rubbish driver aid such as a 'proximity alarm' is added, even if it is optional.

Rather abrupt and with little in the way of reasoning apparently going on there. The sort of person who plays arcade games too much maybe.

I too would HATE LFS to be arcadey. One of the reasons I play it is that I know the dev team are doing everything they can to reproduce the race experience within the limitations that sitting in a stationary chair in front of a screen imposes.

That said, I think the poor FOV is one of the barriers to making this a true sim and I just thought that an (admittedly artificial) way to overcome this might be welcomed by some. And I don't agree you *always* have time to look left or right. Flat thru the Aston Club chicane in a FOX on the first lap I'd like to go wheel to wheel but you can't or somebody will have you into the wall.

In my opinion Pitspotter offers the right trade off between "added periferal senses" and "not more information than realistically possible".
So this "graphical pitspotter" gets a -1 from me.

Vain

I dont use pitspotter, cos I don't feel it realistic (except on ovals of course), but more importantly, there's no NEED for it.

I use PitSpotter in LFS and it's hugely improved my racing as I use it to compensate for the FOV issue. IRL, I can see the cars by the side of me using windows and mirrors when I'm driving on a dual carriageway for example. In LFS this isn't possible without losing view of the road ahead so PitSpotter fills that gap for me.

About the blindspots IRL. Last I've noticed, I have yet to see a car that is smaller than my 3 inch wide A/B/C-pillar. I don't rice my vehicles, so I don't have the spoiler/tail that was mentioned earlier. Like I said, IRL, my mirrors are set up so that the moment the other car leaves one, it enters the other or enters my peripheral view.

About pitspotter, I use it and love it, but it definitely doesn't replace looking right and left. Pitspotter only tells you when a car has broken the back or front plane of your car (and on left or right, of course). You still need to look to assess the situation before you reach the corner to see if he is still passing, has backed off, or if he is going to hose the corner and run straight through it.

In the chicane is definitely not where you want to be worrying about who or what is beside you. You should already know that by looking before entering the chicane and assessing the situation as I've described above. If you go in side by side, you can pretty much assume that there is a car beside you and you should leave track room for them. If not, then I'd say you are not a very good sim racer. Unless he has entered your forward view telling you he has passed or entered your rear mirror telling you that you are passed, then the only place he could be in a chicane is beside you.

Quote from mrodgers :

About the blindspots IRL. Last I've noticed, I have yet to see a car that is smaller than my 3 inch wide A/B/C-pillar. I don't rice my vehicles, so I don't have the spoiler/tail that was mentioned earlier. Like I said, IRL, my mirrors are set up so that the moment the other car leaves one, it enters the other or enters my peripheral view.

3 inch pillar? What car do you drive? And there's a little thing called perspective. Yes, no car is smaller than 3 inches, but over a distance, some cars do disappear or get obscured into your blind spot.

When cars are almost alongside you though, one's only option is to take quick looks to the side to gauge their proximity.

Just a little idea. Look-back is pretty useless in LFS since most cars have sizable pillars that block massive chunks of the rear view. Looking at the mirrors isn't so terribly practical either. What we can do without this radar idea is to use 2 look buttons that istead of looking exactly straight/left/right, looks to the left/right mirrors instead. This allows for realistic FOV settings while still allowing for proper rear view/side mirror use and visibility.

-1
dont want any arcadeyish markers or arrows

my +1 is for an optional very wide backmirror to see things on side almost which in fact is anything but not realistic.

Right now I'm using 68° fov and move the central mirror around to fit into the screen. Speaking of that, the mirror is actually quite unrealistic, not only because the actual car you're sitting in doesn't block anything of it, but also the cars in the mirror get very small very fast, even if they're just a few metres behind you (too high mirror fov, I think).

Oh yeah and -1, because pitspotter is already a very nice and atleast semi-realistic alternative to that.

good idea