While I am a very very happy LFS S2 driver, and think graphics are adequate for a simulation racer, what from time to time bothers me is the limitation to plain stereo sound.

That is, we happy LFS drivers can only hear if a tyre to the left or right is whining, but not if its the front or the rear tyre. Even worse, we can only get a very very rough idea where an opponent is from their engine sound, but to know where he is exactly we have to turn and look - sometimes you do not like to do on a twisty track.

So my suggestion would be to add positional sound to LFS - allowing us to hear if another driver is more behind, or beside, or in front of us, or which tyre exactly is overloaded. Since most shooters and a lot of benchmark programs (e.g. Rightmark 3DSound test)support this by using the DirectSound3D API, I suspect it should not be far too complicated for the skilled LFS programmers.

Atalan

3D sound is quite hard to calculate and in LFS we need every clocktick we can get to physics operations. LFS uses its own sound system which is completely software - there is no sound card additive processing. Using any DX assistance will lead to complete new sound engine, which will be capable to use DX 3D audio. We might get it in S3, but there are some more serious things to do than 3D sound.....

(yeah, I'd like it too, but more than it I wanna have proper physics...)

LFS sounds rather bland atm due to the fact it creates the sound directly from what the physics engine tells it, eventually one will get more information from listening to the sounds than in other sims, atm LFS doesn't simulate the stresses on an engine at high revs as well as other sims so you can't hear the stresses and get much useful information from it.

Surround sound is not essential, in N2003/GTP I cannot use my surround speakers, yet in stereo it still sounds great and with a large number of samples (over 30mb a car) it gives more information than most.

Winner in the sound department has to be GPLSO, it's a program that runs beside GPL and gives an extremely accurate sound overlay based on data it gets straight out of GPL. It really sounds fantastic, and unlike any other system (sample or directly created) it doesn't sound the same every time. GPL does get a bit of an advantage in that it's simulating tempramental and extremely highly stressed engines on old materials, rather than a production 4 capable of doing thousands of miles without any change to the engine. There is a price to using GPLSO, there are only soundsets for some of the cars and you can only hear your engine, but what you do hear is so good it doesn't matter