Quote from Don :

its not that easy as you imagine. the background images cannot be some random good looking image. it must be something that wont distract your attention from the texts/buttons, it must support range of resolutions (4:3, 16:9,16:10) etc. and with those huru`s background pics, you must be kidding? i have nothing against huru, but if you want to hear whats wrong with them:

RANDOM looking image? That's exactly what the default ones are. Very miscellaneous pictures from IRL and every pic is different. Looks exactly like there were just put there ramdomly. As far as I remember one screen had some Subaru WRC or something like that, what the hell that has to do with LFS?

Quote :

lowering saturation isnt the way how to make "real" bw photo

Why those background images should look like real photos?

Quote :

and the 3rd image (garage) is just so "fake" and arcadishplus the car CANNOT rotate there.

But the car can rotate in blue air like the default scifi garage?

ps. Ok, I cleaned up this message before someones bans me here...

I guess that the bg pics could be better but as don said it isn't a 5 min job. And that 23 Mhz... nice joke but it takes liiittle longer. There are however many good shots of edited LFS pictures in the edited pics thread and everyone can and could make good bg pictures of them. For personal use that is.

I've made my own and I guess many others have too. You can pretty much use any 3rd party made textures, pictures whatever to create better looking LFS. That includes bg pics, car dashes and interiors and those color setups for gui colors. Just don't share them publicly because the creator hasn't given you the right to do so. You don't need to wait until someone makes it for you

If you want good gauge&and related stuff, check your other driving game's folders. Using the right tools you can convert them to usable format and make your own stuff to your personal use

He certainly is right about all the quality stuff on one side, and speed on the other. I believe I run LFS on the highest settings, but actually, I don't even know for sure! My computer knowledge and english is very good, but I never really understood what mip-mapping is. One one side it makes everything very smooth but not readable, and on the other side it makes everything choppy, but very clear. What is the best setting anyway? I prefer the choppy stuff.

Second thing I don't like, when I press escape, I always expect to end up in a menu, but what happens? I find myself trying to keep driving while changing settings. There should be a key to vote for a race restart, not a menubutton. Something like how you votekick someone, someone starts a vote to begin a race, and others vote. There should also be a counter for how many votes left to start a race, it's there for kicking, why not racing?

Quote from sgt.flippy :

What is the best setting anyway? I prefer the choppy stuff.

You mean "Mip bias"? Higher settings means more "blurred" screen on the horizont and more fps, lower means sharper but less fps (the difference is more than 10 fps if I remember right).

Quote :

There should be a key to vote for a race restart, not a menubutton.

Shift+R?

Quote from Tweaker :

Honestly I think that most of the menu options should have 'rollover' tips that appear, or a small question mark right beside the name of the option. This way you could read about the option in much more detail, rather than asking on the forums . The same applies to the setups/garage, and this has been suggested before... would be very helpful for people that don't know what to do when setting up their own car, or don't know about or what a particular option does.

Great Idea!

Right. I'm sorry the conversation got two of you banned in #liveforspeed, I don't know what the heck was going on. Anyways..

The bg pics I made aren't supposed to be rivals to the default images, they are just something I made because I don't like the defaults. The main reasons why I don't like the default LFS color scheme / bg images (my opinions):

• Mixing of 3 types of bg images (real, lfs and abstract), although dev approved it doesn't make sense to me at all.
  
• Different colors in each bg, while they look cool one by one, putting them side by side makes LFS look unprofessional (and a reminder, this is my opinion) and not very well thought of.

If people are changing their bg images to something else, maybe it means there's something to be improved with the defaults? Anyone's free to change them anyways, but it would be cool if there'd be no need to change them in the first place.

The screenshots I used to make my bg images don't actually have AA at all, had some probs with my PC back then. And the garage pic is even out of perspective because of some changes, I know it's crap. Quality wise they're generally bad, and I guess will look quite off when using non 4:3 resolution. But still people like them

Quote from Huru-aito :

[*]Mixing of 3 types of bg images (real, lfs and abstract), although dev approved it doesn't make sense to me at all.
[*]Different colors in each bg, while they look cool one by one, putting them side by side makes LFS look unprofessional (and a reminder, this is my opinion) and not very well thought of.[/LIST]

Exactly. Maybe I just didn't say these clearly enough.

Quote from Cue-Ball :

This is something that has bothered me for a long time and which I think could be improved a lot. I mentioned this at RSC before the forum move but finally put together a proof of concept instead of just talking about it. Here's a (crappy) photochop of what I propose:

http://i14.photobucket.com/alb ... ue-Ball/LFS_interface.jpg

Here's a quick rundown of the changes from how it is now:

1) Things should always be arranged with speed to the left and quality to the right and there are markers to show it. This makes it quicker and easier to see what's enabled and disabled at a glance. I've also changed Yes/No options to On/Off for consistency, and moved the buttons so that Off is to the left (speed) and On is to the right (quality). I meant to change Texture Size to Low Res/High Res to make it consistent with Track Detail but forgot to do it before I uploaded the pic. If these could all be changed to sliders it would look even more uniform and easy to read.

2) The names of most items have been changed so that "On" means "Enabled". As it is now if you want trees enabled you turn off "disable trees" which is a double-negative and totally non-sensical. It's much more clear to turn on complex trees than to turn off disabling of trees.

3) I've moved the texture memory so that it's not the only element floating out there to the right as it is now. Not only does it look out of place, it's a huge waste of space. This allowed the whole interface to be much larger and fill the available space better.

4) I've moved the OK button to the right side and replaced the left side with a Cancel button. Right now if you accidentally change something there's no way to cancel the change and revert to the previous settings.

I think these would be changes that would be pretty simple to implement and would make a big difference in the ease of use of the menu. I'd also suggest moving the "Multiplayer car draw", "Screen clear type", and "Dynamic LOD reduction" items from the Misc tab to the Graphics tab since these are obviously graphics related items. Floating tool tips would also be VERY nice to have, but would probably take a lot of time to implement compared to what I've done here which is mostly text and button changes.

yes, please, somebody make it more understandable so that even if I don't know what eeach thing means I still can understand what happens if I move the slider left or right.