what is the exact meaning of the term node in the insim packets? I is just a short section of the track? Is the length of all nodes (and maybe the nodes of all tracks) equal?

Is there a glossary available with a description of all terms, so developers can save time and focus on programming instead of doing a lot of "try and error"?

Indeed it is, it is called InSim.txt.

really helpful, indeed. and now would you please answer my question? i.e. what about the length of a "node"?

Copied from the Jinsim class descriptions ...

The InSim.txt documentation doesn't say much about the definition of a "node". My guess that it is pieces of the track that compromise each "split". When you get to the end of a node, that's when it records your split time.

That looks just about right .

There are more nodes than splits, each node is actually a few metres of track in LFS.

A node is like a point on a chain. Each node, which is of varied length, is tied to the node before and the node after it. There are many nodes in a split, and the exact number of nodes varies.

Additionally the start/finish line is not node 0, due to technical issues with the pitlane, insim sends the start/finish node number and you can use this to assertain where a car is on the track.

Quote from Soeren Scharf :

really helpful, indeed. and now would you please answer my question? i.e. what about the length of a "node"?

please excuse my behaviour... had really bad headache that day so I was not able to think

We all have our bad days.

Path nodes are described in the PTH documentation found on this page :

http://www.liveforspeed.net/?page=coderfiles

And here's a description of them, I'll write on the spot :

They are a series of points with direction and width that describe the track that you drive along. LFS uses it to watch your progress along the track, decides if you are driving in reverse. They provide the data for the echoes and the lightmaps, hold information about which objects you can see from that point, define the left and right boundaries for the AI drivers and are also used in yellow and blue flag systems, the position list, timing and some other things.

Their length is not constant but there is approximately 0.2 seconds of time between passing one node and the next, when you are driving at a reasonable speed.

thanks for the hint, Scawen. After reading the description of the PTH files, I understand how nodes are used to construct a track. So a node is not a section of a track but a node is the line where 2 sections are concatenated.

A picture is more meaningful that thousands of words, the bold black line is one of our nodes.