I'm currentley pretty pissed off with LFS, just been doing a race on Aston National with the XRR and here are some things that annoyed me, yes these have been suggested before but they tend to be hidden under millions of threads about pointless crap that'd take ages to program only for the novelty to wear off after 5 minutes.

1. The time between the start forming and the green light is way to quick, about 3 seconds, if your not ready for it you're going to miss it, one of the many problems I had was running into a guy who didn't move off the start due to this. Between 30 seconds and a minute would be a more sensible time.

2. Do we really need to simulate the physics for all the other cars? I've got a 2.8 ghz P4 proccessor and it can do a 20 car GPL grid at about 25 FPS, a 42 car N2003 grid at about the same and a 20 car LFS grid at under 10 FPS. I know the Papy engine doesn't simulate all the cars, but why do I need to be making physics calculations for a car that I can hardly see 10 cars ahead/behind me? I can cope if this means cars at the far end of the grid jump around a bit, there's no danger of warping into them so why waste CPU power?

3. Can we please have flags when we use shift + F, this has been asked for so many times and we never seem to get anywhere, even a seperate addon program running an overlay would be good.

4. Pressing shift + F to see if you've got a blue flag is difficult when you can't see the keys, maybe a single key to press would be better.

5. If I press shift + G by mistake it switches to automatic, I am never going to want an automatic gear shift and even less likely to want to change mid-race.

I'm not trying to have a go at anyone, it just seems that LFS is so nearly there that it seems such a waste not to make these changes, I think these are much more important than physics updates, I can live with high nosed cars but not 10 FPS or loads of visual clutter over my screen, which IMO is like virtual bird crap.

As far as I know, cars in the distance use a "low-res" physics model that doesn't simulate all the physics, but only part of them. The thing I don't get is why they need physics for other cars? Is it not possible to define the entire car as a vector (+ gear, horn etc - you can calculate revs from the speed and the gear ratio so that you can generate engine sounds). I'm not sure if this is a significant amount of extra bandwidth but I shouldn't think so... atleast cars in the distance could be done like this. And then send the vector over the network and there you have it - every computer only works with the physics of 1-5 cars depending on how many there are near you.

6. "Can't pit - player connecting", "Can't join - player disconnecting" etc. These are annoying but I can live with them.

The physics of the other cars aren't the problem. It's their car models. They boggle down most graphics accelerators like Mike Thyson vs Benedikt XVI.
On my laptop a single car in sight makes a difference of 30 fps, just for instance.

My hate-feature:
The dodge clipping.

Vain

Ajp . Sry to hear you have only 10fps! , what GFX card are you running or are you using onboard GFX?and what resolution? what view are you using cockpit view? I suppose you don't use F9 to show your tyre info?

SD.

If your low FPS annoys you, just set Multiplayer Speedup and set the car visibility to approx 120m. It is nice to see all the cars far 250meters, but is tere is no wrecker on the track, even 100m is OK to racing...

If there were no physics modelling for onther cars, LFS will have to send all the necessary data via net, and that can be a bandwith killer. If there will be a racer with laggy or slow connection, if somewhere occures a transfer problem, it will cause a BIG mess in the grid. Imagine 16 cars on start on some fast track, 3..2..1..GO........ and now some network router breaks down and sends a corrupted data... ALL data. .... SHIFT+R
When game sends only some data and the rest calculates CPU, there is less room for there situations.

Quote from SparkyDave :

Ajp . Sry to hear you have only 10fps! , what GFX card are you running or are you using onboard GFX?and what resolution? what view are you using cockpit view? I suppose you don't use F9 to show your tyre info?

SD.

2.8 P4
128 mb Ati Raedon 9000
512 mb RAM

Ususually get 30+ (limited to 40), 10 is the lowest it can get on starts, usually I get a bit more, but 15 is still to low to be useable

Don't be offended, but R9000 is quite crappy. I bet it's VS unit isn't "power-packed". I have GF6600GT and I never got problem cleary connected with low overall performance. My S2 licence is on the way:boing:, so I will se how critical it is...

The way sometimes cars in the long to middle-distance can be seen "jumping around" a bit.....like mini-lags or something. But then when you watch from onboard their car in a replay, or from onboard a car that is much closer to their car, everything is smooth as silk.

Although it is good to see 20 cars what about only showing so many ahead and behind, like in the Papy sims, it means you can still see cars in the distance under normal racing.

Quote from MadCatX :

Don't be offended, but R9000 is quite crappy. I bet it's VS unit isn't "power-packed". I have GF6600GT and I never got problem cleary connected with low overall performance. My S2 licence is on the way:boing:, so I will se how critical it is...

Way too polite. Totally crap might be more accurate. You should have asked Santa for somehting nice for your AGP slot...

I have a 6600GT and it runs at 1600x1200 full grids etc no problem. They are less than £100 these days, spend some of your Xmas money - you won't regret it...

Back to my graphics card, I don't understand much about why some hardware is good/bad but I certainly know it manages to find every conflict under the sun

My computer has a large number of problems with conflicts, I think it's more a mixture of all the hardware put together, probably hasn't been setup correctly as the other computer we have of a similar specification is far better at virtually everything

Quote from ajp71 :

2.8 P4
128 mb Ati Raedon 9000
512 mb RAM

Ususually get 30+ (limited to 40), 10 is the lowest it can get on starts, usually I get a bit more, but 15 is still to low to be useable

My previous system was a P4 2.6 with Ati 9600Pro, it always gave 30 - 60 fps - current system is P4 3.2 Nvidia 6600GT get 80 -110 fps most times now.. so mostly you graphics card imo and an 9600Pro is alot better than 9000 so I think the fps you get is quite understandable...

FYI, I have a piece of crap HP with P4 2.5 GHz, 512 system ram, and a PCI (not the new express) Radeon 9250 256 mb and get a pretty solid 30 fps at 1024x768 res and most if not all options at max. I now get good frames at the start with a max of 15 cars. Any more and my starts suffer. I also get a drop to about 18 fps often in the Aston chicane and South City front stretch past the pits. But over all, I run it fine with my crappy computer and crappy gfx card. It is fairly new (gfx) and the best one to my knowledge that I could find in PCI configuration. I think that it is so wonderful that with the motherboards HP puts in all their computers that they are all the same, the only difference between my PC and one that probably cost $100 more is the $0.50 plastic AGP port/plug/connector and the bios. The motherboard would take an AGP card if the connector was in there. I see all the electronics going from where the connector would be illepall .

Well guess what, I also have P4 2.8, Ati R9000 but 1 GB RAM and I get about 75 fps when alone on track and about 20-30 fps on full grid starts. I don't know whats right with my PC and whats wrong with yours, but check your configs before saying some piece of hardware is crap. R9000 is still pretty much acceptable at least for LFS (and if the rest of hardware is good).

Quote from ajp71 :

Back to my graphics card, I don't understand much about why some hardware is good/bad but I certainly know it manages to find every conflict under the sun

My computer has a large number of problems with conflicts, I think it's more a mixture of all the hardware put together, probably hasn't been setup correctly as the other computer we have of a similar specification is far better at virtually everything

So why are you unsatisfied with FPS when you admit that your comp isn't in good condition? Get new drivers(Cats 5.11!!), reformat HDD, install WinXP SP2 and terminate every unnecessary background tasks when LFSing. That's how I do and when my system is properly configurated it never drops under 27 FPS(BW GP chicane in benchmark)

Quote from MadCatX :

So why are you unsatisfied with FPS when you admit that your comp isn't in good condition?

If I knew what was actually wrong with it/what to upgrade and tweak I would do something about it, unfortunatley I don't, I have recentley restored my PC for the second time, and installed all the latest drivers and I keep it clean of all background junk, all it has at start up is Windows stuff, Philips Soundcard program and the ATi Catalyst.

Quote from ajp71 :

If I knew what was actually wrong with it/what to upgrade and tweak I would do something about it, unfortunatley I don't, I have recentley restored my PC for the second time, and installed all the latest drivers and I keep it clean of all background junk, all it has at start up is Windows stuff, Philips Soundcard program and the ATi Catalyst.

As Misko alluded to, if you are running Windows XP your system probably could do with more memory... in my old system I originaly had 512mb but had to upgrade to 1gb to get "Lockon Modern Air Combat" to run well. The extra memory helped everything else to.

Also even with the same graphics card chip as someone else doesn't mean you will get the same results as them, unfortunately not all card makers are equal, there can be quite a performance hit from a porely designed card - and price isn't always the indicative factor of the card being of good quality manufacturer or not

While I can agree with most of the things mentioned here, I am in no way "pissed off" about them. It's pretty surprising how such unimportant things like games can enrage people

Well I didn't have the best day with LFS yesterday, within 2 races just about everything that could have possibly gone wrong did, then I tried a GPL 69 race and managed to get something very wrong in the car setup giving me a completely undrivable car and I got kicked for the first time ever as a result (excluding one that I guess was by mistake in N2003)

Quote from ajp71 :

If I knew what was actually wrong with it/what to upgrade and tweak I would do something about it, unfortunatley I don't, I have recentley restored my PC for the second time, and installed all the latest drivers and I keep it clean of all background junk, all it has at start up is Windows stuff, Philips Soundcard program and the ATi Catalyst.

I am not sure if this helps with the 9xxx range of ati cards but its worth the download if it does.

Heres a link to the catalyst 5.11 drivers . allthough most up to date drivers should be installed, for LFS these work better for some .

https://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894

As MadcatX has pointed out you may have some unwanted background processes or even spyware running that you are unaware of. download Adaware http://www.download.com/Ad-Awa ... 10399602.html?tag=lst-0-1 and run it at least once a month

same goes for your choice of antivirus program .

Things like realplayer ,winamp ,msnmessenger , quicklaunch , and other tray apps should be closed down before starting LFS

To maximise peformance click start , run , type in "msconfig" (without the "") press enter
click on startup tab and have a look how many green ticks you have . if you untick all then try LFS (after reboot) you may gain some FPS .

just some of the top of my head thoughts.

SD.

I have one more suggestion for you. When I posted it in Gen forum, people almost shot me... Disable HW sound acceleration in dxdiag(or set it to BASIC). I am talking about it because you mentioned some soundcard program that is running on your system. Disable ti as so as the HW accel. In my case it helped a lot.....

Thanks for your advice tbh I know about those suggestions and have tried them. My computer is kept free of all the junk, the only programs I normally run on it are Firefox, iTunes, Photoshop and other sims, none of which start automatically.

As for the soundcard I have to run the program to get any sound from my soundcard

I don't want to return to software sound as I had all manner of problems with it before, getting a soundcard and decent speakers not only improved the sound but also solved a large number of issues and improved the performance overall, I'd have thought upgrading my RAM would be the next thing to try as what ever I'm currently running is probably a heap of junk like every other part Packard Bell managed to find and through into my computer, I even have problems running an HP scanner, you'd of thought they could at least make it so it could use their own hardware.

One thing, though this is not annoying, just odd, easy to fix (!!!)

Player A who makes the fastest lap in a race goes to sectate after the is finished. The next player B then finishes the race too and drives second fastest time in that race on last lap. On screen it says: Player B made the fastest lap, even though it shows correctly in results that Player A did it.

Hope you understood it. If not, blame the Manilla man

EDIT: Just noticed this new thing in LFSW. Check for your PBs, look at the up-left corner. There you see that link: Laps chart. Click it and you can see some graphics about your track usage by car sorted by laps done. Guess it's been there for evah...

Quote from ajp71 :

I'd have thought upgrading my RAM would be the next thing to try

IMO upgrading the GFX will be better help. I've just upgraded from 512MB running in SingleChannel to 1024MB(2x512) DualChannel RAM modules. I noticed NO performance improvement in LFS. So if I were you, I will save money and get at least Radeon9600Pro....