Okay, this is only a request, as my programing skills are not good enough.

the idea is simple: A sideway scrolling Overlay which shows the actual standings of a race with the time between the people as a horizontal scrolling bar. like a wallstreet ticker or like you see it in nascar on the top or bottom. mainly to use it for featured races and coverage.

in a second step, the race admin can use his own grafics (logos, cars, portrait, e.g.) before the actual drivers name to scroll with. i think this may be interesting for all kind of league racing. so who is willing to do it?

so what do you think? who is willing to invest some time for it? or is this possible with lapper?


maybe as a overall first step, just something like a rss newsfeed of an actual race via insim or even directly like becky did her watcher program?



ok as people tend to read only the first post, here is the picture i've uploaded in a later post:

Lets see. I'm not too sure about the horizontal scrolling thing you are describing. I don't watch nascar but what it sounds like is kind of like Mario Kart where you have a horizontal (or vertical) line that represents 1 lap. The far left is the start line and the right the end of that lap (also the start/finish line). Racers are placed on it depending on how far around the track they are.. For InSim, this would be perfect for NLP packets. Only "problem" with NLP packets is that node 0 is not always the start/finish and the bounds are different depending on the track. If you knew those 3 values then it would be pretty easy. Anyone have them?

But yeah, I like the idea. It would make a nice addition to easily visualize the race. And if you could overlay the graphics directly onto the LFS window, that'd be even better.

For me, I can do everything except for the overlay onto LFS but not right away. Working on releasing a VB6 InSim Framework first. Would love to help once thats done.

I think he meant the split times at the end of the lap thing that's on the bottom of the screen in F1 when the leader crosses the start line.

i like both ideas allthough in the first place i was after the one duke_toaster said.

i think that horizontal line thing is also in rFactor and can be a help, i mean we have the minimap which shows exactly that thing and is even more accurate.


ok, here is a picture. only a concept. so the idea is the standings are scrolling through from right too left. when the last one is through, the fist one starts again with the actual standing at that point in time.

its only a concept of a full idea. (i know it might not be possible that way) allthough as i*ve seen with g-meter and stuff like that you can overlay the screen.

the main purpose is for coverage (live and replay) without sitting all night long in front of adobe "after effects" and put in this stuff manually....

ok here is the picture. i used my own grafics from the lfscar, but any league will be able to change those things to their need. the car pictures have to be made privious of course. but if its a league it is no big deal to have that. you also can use portrait fotos or helmets instead of cars. anything the league admin likes to have...

so...

You mean like in Sports Car GT?
http://by.emu.edu.tr/demos/by101/ch3/images/img07.gif

nope.... look at the picture i've uploaded it now...

I think he means like the scrolling bar at the top of this vid off of youtube

Link!

exactly. but with the adition of maybe a driver/car picture and or the difference to the car in front in seconds. but basically its that.

Quote from spiderbait90 :

I think he means like the scrolling bar at the top of this vid off of youtube

Link!

They-is probly wreckin 'cause they-is readin' all that stuff along the top side of tha screen and y'all not paying attention to tha damned race.
- j/k

Anyway: might be a nice idea. Why has no-one thought of this? Isn't gap times etc. basic to racing? It would be nice to see if I am gaining on someone I can't see.

I am not getting the sense out of it ... .
While racing such a feature eats to much of the screen.
So I guess barely anyone would use it.
If u submit replays of a race u would need to submit the overlay software and all the images of cars/drivers, so someone could use it.

And if u wanna capture race movies ... I guess a post production is the easier way to implement this, as well as suiting ur thoughts of how it should look like.

Beside that I might look good, it is a waste of time for a programmer imho.

postproduction needs too much time for this. editing the actual standing on every single lap is MUCH tooo much work imo. if you sum up all races and broadcasts and every time someone has to do this all by himself through postproduction it even is more a waste of time. so having a customized program doing that for you is the only reasonable solution which can safe time for those who want to do race-broadcasts.



and again, using it for racing is not the intention. its for broadcasts or replays.

Think of FOM overlays on the Formula 1 coverage, just adapted to this. I've made a request like this, and from what I understand, no one is willing to give it a shot. I think you and me both are going to have to learn how to inject DirectX calls into Live For Speed . I'll have to start off by learning how to program for the DX SDK. Might also need to brush up on the fundamentals of C++.

I was thinking about the F1 World Feed graphics as well

I tried to do this before but ran out of time before I could solve all the technical hurdles. There's two approaches available:

Live - overlaying graphics by DX tunnelling like Kegetysis' Ghost Car mod
PostEdit - writing out the overlay as an .avi for overlaying to a multi-camera edited option

I was attempted option 2, but was having trouble with syncronising the timing - and I just havn't had time to sort it out.

DX Tunnelling would work better by the sounds of it, it would be annoying to have to put an AVI on top of it. Live it wouldn't have the timing issues. Would it show up on FRAPS?

Using DX Tunneling it would, ideal for live broadcast leagues. For me as a non-live post-edited broadcast league organiser it was better to use AVI. I just havn't got it working. I dont know how to do DX tunnelling anyway.

Quote from Becky Rose :

Using DX Tunneling it would, ideal for live broadcast leagues. For me as a non-live post-edited broadcast league organiser it was better to use AVI. I just havn't got it working. I dont know how to do DX tunnelling anyway.

What about asking Kegetys if he would support this project (i.e. send us his tunneling library)?

I find the concept interesting and would like to see it done. hell, I would even learn C# or C++ to be able to help

funny, the idea looks like the program for the GP series of Geoff Cramond: GPXPatch (http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsdi/gpxpatch.html) where all kind of Formula 1 overlays appeared in the game which orginally didn't show up because of license problems.

Hi, I've been playing with DX "overlay". There is very nice howto and code examples at mikoweb.eu. I hope this helps.

I like this idea it would make spectating much more interesting to watch, a few thing come to mind:

• perhaps LFSWorld could add an upload for "host logo graphic" at some predefined size
  
• If could it be paired to LFSTVdirector (http://www.lfsforum.net/showth ... 47&highlight=lfstv) I bet you'd get many more people interested in just spectating but that would take up far too many server slots, can a current race "spectate session" be cloned?

Quote from KSheppard :

...

• If could it be paired to LFSTVdirector

....

it will ... of course... it will ...
.... sooner or later ....

Indeed currently I am playing with 2 possible approaches to get the result,
- a wrapper/proxy dll (or tunneling as called in this thread) as described on mikoweb.eu, and
- hooking the functions directly

I have not yet decided, what approach to use. The first solution is very very easy to understand and to implement, but it has some drawbacks. The main disadvantage is, every addon developer is now writing a D3D8.dll for his purpose and copy it into the LFS folder, and therefore overwriting the D3D8.dll of others. Kegetys already used this approach, Racer_S2 with his "Drift Gauge and G-Meter" too, others (Becky, me...) might follow and complete the chaos.

I think, in the first step addon developers should come togehter an develop one unique D3D8.dll for all addons. This dll would load then an addon specific dll on demand of the addon. It is not such a huge task, so I could take the work as long as we all agree about the interfaces.

ok, so we need a more basic plan in the first place and some standard .dll stuff which has to be opensource or under creative commons license.

then a group or a regulation instance too determine the standards of that .dll

i like the networking aproach in that. so how about starting a project website, wiki or whatever?

i can setup almost anykind of groupware you wish for it. what do you think about http://trac.edgewall.org/

i could setup something like that on my server if its helpful.

Very interesting. We are broadcasting live LFS races every Sunday on AutoPlus TV in Serbia, and it would be great to have some additions like this. For us, having all this run on a separate PC and using video mixer for overlays would work greatly. As I understood Becky already did something like that and only having problems with writing to avi? Any chance we can see some of what's already been done?

okay so we may need to wait until this .dll stuff is sorted out

anyway things are rolling which is always good