yes, that's really a great mod, although it caused a BSOD here the first time i tested it.

Personaly I think ghost car is a good idea.

Some say its unrealistic (tristian), but if it is only available in hotlapping mode it would help with learning the massive amount of car and track combos in S2.
Its not like we are going to end up with loads of transparent cars floating around whilst racing online is it?!

It has been used successfully in many racing games and ive always enjoyed the challenge of racing against/improving yourself. Many hours/days spent beating my PBs by chasing a ghost car around the track.

It makes time trial fun

As for LFSW times being effected devs could it make so you cannot submit times done using ghost car as a driving aid. Also it shuld have an option to turn it on or off, so if you don't like it don't use it! simple.

There must be a way around the patent just ask Codemasters, they used it for loads of thier games.

The mod (above) looks interesting must try.

Whilst on the subject of improvements to S2 I have a few ideas:

Realistic weather effects would definately add a certain amount of realism. Imagine passing storms, dry lines appearing as track drys etc. maybe even dirt being brought on to track & leaves blowing off trees. oh yes....

More RallyX with cars similar to the classes raced in real rallyx (which I used to do, great fun :nod & based on the actual tracks used in the European & British Rallycross series. The great thing about it is that both LFS & RallyX have a huge european following.

What the hey Scawen & Victor could probably make a whole new game with licence and everything just based on the RallyX scene, think of the money .

Tracks:

I would love to see Brands & Lydden in LFS. that would be cool.
also the awesome Nordshlife (excuse my spelling) is an absolute must, not everyone can afford to drive over there and have a blast. I am sure this would be a big hit.

How about a few Hillclimbs, a often overlooked decipline that is technicaly very challenging and skillfull just like LFS is supposed to be (plus I bet a few LFS drivers have done a bit of sprint/hillclimbing) imagine blasting up harewood in the FO8.....ummm a challenge I think!

Other Ideas:

Autotests in the car park?
Shattering glass included in the damage engine.
Bits droping off cars causing track debris.
Dirt ovals for banger racing.
Improved engine sounds using real engine samples.
Ice racing.... (with cars!)
3 monitor support, See More, increase the viewable area to 180deg....maybe just, maybe.

Summary:

I think with all the ideas that LFS racers suggest and discuss in detail Scawen and Victor could make three massive driving sims based on the S2 graphics/physics engine and still not include everything! Hire some more guys, get programming and make MILLIONS! yehaw
I will apply for position of Research & Marketing and when we are finished LFS will rule! (the world).

Keep up the good work.



I really should get more sleep.....zzzzz...zzzzzz....how the mind wonders.

I was gona post the same thing...

I would like to have a ghost car....maybe you could download ghost replays of fast laps so you could learn by following the car...

It would help me a lot...

This ghost car has never helped in racing games for me. When I have it on I'm trying to hard to catch it and end up not conentracting on hitting the lines perfectly or I try to outbrake it and end up goin off. I've always been able to run faster with it off, its best to use analyze for speed to see where you're losing time.

Quote from inCogNito :

yes, that's really a great mod, although it caused a BSOD here the first time i tested it.

Yup, I've had exactly same ecperience. Complete and immidiate reboot 1st time I've tried it, but your post convinced me to give it another go. And it works beautifully. Great mod indeed.

Quote from avih :

Yup, I've had exactly same ecperience. Complete and immidiate reboot 1st time I've tried it, but your post convinced me to give it another go. And it works beautifully. Great mod indeed.

yes, when i was over the line, 1sec later a very short blue screen and then an immidiate reboot.
I tried it again for a few laps and it worked fine.

The trouble with ghost cars is that you can use them to drive a lap much faster than if you do not have a ghost car. So hotlaps will be artificially closer as people do laps they could not hope to do driving on their own. Which kind of defeats the point of hotlapping imo... One drivers versus the others in almost equal cars (i.e. setups).

Quote from tristancliffe :

The trouble with ghost cars is that you can use them to drive a lap much faster than if you do not have a ghost car. So hotlaps will be artificially closer as people do laps they could not hope to do driving on their own. Which kind of defeats the point of hotlapping imo... One drivers versus the others in almost equal cars (i.e. setups).

nahh, not really. it does eventually come down to draving ability. ghost can only help you improve consistancy imho.

Quote from tristancliffe :

The trouble with ghost cars is that you can use them to drive a lap much faster than if you do not have a ghost car. So hotlaps will be artificially closer as people do laps they could not hope to do driving on their own. Which kind of defeats the point of hotlapping imo... One drivers versus the others in almost equal cars (i.e. setups).

illepall i highly doubt that...

Well, you can see EXACTLY what line to take, and EXACTLY when to brake. All it can't help is getting on the power early.

I really do think that some people will be able to do lap times WITH a ghost car that they won't be able to do WITHOUT.

Plus, it's hardly realistic. If you want to compare yourself to the WR, use the telemetry and replay analysers (not 100% realistic itself, but at least you have to think and apply yourself to get faster).

Quote from tristancliffe :

Well, you can see EXACTLY what line to take, and EXACTLY when to brake. All it can't help is getting on the power early.

You can see it , but you still need the skill to do it
I guess you didn't try out the Mod cos your talking WR all the time. You can not extract a ghostlap from any WR .spr file. You have to record your own ghost. Or if people upload ghostcars you can use them.

But what realy sucks about the mod is the fact that it can be used in multiplayerraces when you have admin access on the server your playing.

Quote from M.Mos :

But what realy sucks about the mod is the fact that it can be used in multiplayerraces when you have admin access on the server your playing.

If that works then its a bug (Sounds pretty odd though) it should only activate when there is only one car on the track. If it does get active under some situation with more cars on the track then I would imagine things would get quite messed up as many parts of it rely on the assumption that there is only one car driving.

Quote from Kegetys :

If that works then its a bug (Sounds pretty odd though) it should only activate when there is only one car on the track.

I tested it with my dedicated server , and there was only one car on the track No Bug there , great work Kegetys

Quote from Kegetys :

If that works then its a bug (Sounds pretty odd though) it should only activate when there is only one car on the track. If it does get active under some situation with more cars on the track then I would imagine things would get quite messed up as many parts of it rely on the assumption that there is only one car driving.

great mod thx.
would you be able to comment about the reboot/BSOD when running it for the 1st time on some systems?

Quote from avih :

would you be able to comment about the reboot/BSOD when running it for the 1st time on some systems?

Well, bluescreens can only happen when there is a hardware or driver fault (Unless you run a Win95 based OS :P) so it really cannot be caused by the ghostcar mod. Something it does might trigger a bug in the video card driver for example, but I cannot do anything about that.

I'm not really in favour of ghost cars I spose mainly because they've always bugged me in other games. Now that there's a mod though I think that's fair enough and there's no need to implement them in LFS officially.

Quote from tristancliffe :

Can't you just watch the replays and learn that way? Having a translucent car on track that you can drive through is soooooo unrealistic it's just silly (before someone tries to be clever and state that LFS isn't 100% realistic, I know, but there must be boundaries to the noob-aids). I would ONLY be SLIGHTLY interested in this if the car was solid (and hence you could follow it, but NOT set good times by being able to drive though it. Thus if you want to set artificially fast times using a ghost car you have to pass him, not drive though him...

it would be very interesting with solid car (me fighting with myself ), but there would be issues:
if you hit the ghost car, what should it do? should it be perfectly rigid and don't change speed/position OR should interact according to crash phisics? in the latter case, is it possible to implment a kind of AI to make it regain the line/speed of the ghost-lap (i think it would be not easy to implement)?

however i would like even the classic transparent ghost car, BUT disabling hotlap recording when in ghost car mode, so to avoid "cheating" with hotlaps.

Quote from Kegetys :

Well, bluescreens can only happen when there is a hardware or driver fault (Unless you run a Win95 based OS :P) so it really cannot be caused by the ghostcar mod. Something it does might trigger a bug in the video card driver for example, but I cannot do anything about that.

Well, if the same thing happens for 2 people trying the mod it has to be caused by it, even if it's not its fault.
But it think we can rule out hardware faults, because it's very unlikely that avih and i bought exactly the same faulty hardware
So it has to be the driver if it's not the mod, i use FW 81.94 with a GF7800GT and the latest drivers for an nForce4 Ultra chipset.

Maybe you should "release" the tool in the addon section, so more people will see and try it, maybe we can find the reason for the blue screens.

But it still doesn't sound like a driver problem, if it just happens the first time you crossed the line tbh. And that was the first bluescreen since 2 years or so.

I have XP-Pro SP1, AXP 2500+, ASUS A7N8X-X, FX5600 Ultra, quite recent video driver and not very recent nforce drivers.

The thing that's interesting though, is that it only happens 1st time of running. So maybe you could figure out what's difference between the 1st time and next times and just modify your initialization procedures a bit?

There's nothing different done the first time you run it, and without information from the driver's developer on where the error occurs there is really nothing I could even try to do about it. The best I could do is detect the faulty driver and refuse to run if it is in use.

What you should do is look at what driver caused the BSOD, and send the crash dump to the driver developer. Its their bug and they are the only ones who can fix it.

Quote from thisnameistaken :

Out of interest: Would it be possible to start the ghost car early? So, say, you could set it to trigger <x> metres before you cross the finish line?

You can set it to drive ahead of you with the offset setting, ie. set it to 1000 and it will drive one second ahead of where it really drove.

how do you do a "crash dump"?

How do you get it to work? I have S2 licenced and it seems that the dll file you have to copy over makes the game not start. Any suggestions???