I searched the forums and I can't find the answer I'm looking for. Can there we an advanced autox editor. Kinda like a 3rd party program of sorts that you can more easily place the track pieces, or copy a whole bunch and paste. You know just all the tools that make it a little easier to create that masterpiece you have on a piece of paper

I agree that this would be very useful. The only reason that I purchased an S2 licence was to practice autocross, and I know two other people who attend events with my autocross club who are also considering purchasing LFS to use it as a practice tool. If the editor was easier to use and the low speed handling issues were fixed, I'm sure you could get LOTS of sales to autocrossers.

The MOST IMPORTANT feature to make the autocross editor more user friendly, IMHO, is:

1) the ability to zoom much further out when you hit 'V' to view the course from above. At a minimum, you should be able to see all of a 100 m x 100 m area. Ideally, I'd like to see 300 m x 300 m from the air. Today I had to move all the cones in a chicago box one at a time because I had placed it too close to the edge of a course. That would not have happened if I could have seen a larger area of the course at one time.

Other features that would improve the autoX editor:

2) a menu that would allow you to place entire course features (chicago box, slalom, sweeper)

3) a "mirror the course" option to allow easy production of ProSolo autocross courses

4) The ability to place cones with X and Y coordinates or offsets; i.e. define a corner of the course as 0,0 and place cones in relationship to that corner.

My dream autocross editor would actually include the ability to overlay and resize a picture of my club's course map. Then I could just click on the course map's pictures of the cones to install the cones in the LFS autocross facility.

One easy way to impliment some of these ideas would be for the LFS authors to define a text format for courses (i.e. XML or similar) and then write a tool to convert text course files to lyt files. I'm sure that the LFS community would then create many AutoX editors to produce text course files for conversion. These community-authored editors for text-based course definitions could easily created in perl or php.

This solution would allow the LFS authors to keep the lyt file format closed while still fostering an open-source method of creating courses.....the best of both worlds.

[EDIT: you could also include some of the more popular cars for autox. The mini coopers are a really good start, but I've listed a few more of them in the cars thread http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?p=76483#post76483 ]

Quote from evenprime :

The MOST IMPORTANT feature to make the autocross editor more user friendly, IMHO, is:

1) the ability to zoom much further out when you hit 'V' to view the course from above. At a minimum, you should be able to see all of a 100 m x 100 m area. Ideally, I'd like to see 300 m x 300 m from the air.

Based on google earth, I'd say that this would require a vantage point that is 215 meters above the ground.

Quote from evenprime :

Based on google earth, I'd say that this would require a vantage point that is 215 meters above the ground.

NO IT WOULDN'T!!!!!! YOU'RE SO WRONG!!!! YOU DON'T KNOW ANYTHING!!!!!!!
Yeah but I agree that you should be able to see the whole autocross areana from the V view I did some calulations and I've come to the conclusion that I did not infact do any calculations bearly making this post on the simple fact that I can.

Quote from theblackrabbi :

http://rayok.lfsnal.org/LFS/?page=layoutthingy

You rock! As soon as you have it ready for S2, I am going to download it and try it out. (I don't have S1 )