That's what I was referring to when I was saying that radio/telemetry is not cheap : the advantages it could possibly bring into club racing are quite low compared to the price you had have to pay to get them and have someone to operate the stuff (surely it would be totally useless if there's no one to tell you what's up/what's wrong), thus being unreliable unless, as you stated, you can build your system on your own (that might represent about 1% of actual club racers? )
About damage and realism : the more and more accurate, the better.
After some time HUD can even get annoying and distract from the feeling of immersion, so quite everything apart from the represented objects (thinking about car/track/physics) is accessory and unrealistic to anyone who has raced.
But then again, there is lots of people who needs something to grab themselves upon in order to not to get lost the first weeks/months, so plenty of things are useful for them to learn and not getting bored in the process.
+1 for gauges for oil temperature/pressure and water temperature
+1 for more and more realistic damage
+1 for some sort of hardcore mode, both offline and online
+1 for some kind of chat so Gekkibi and tristancliffe can express themselves
-1 for removing suspension damage indicators and tyre temperatures. They help to make setups. However, maybe accessable while pitting only. I guess this has been suggested at least about 10^3 times, but let this be 10^3+1.
I drive using suspension damage window, thus I can see if I need repairs after a collision with barriers (Damn those barriers!!). LFS lacks of physical phenomenons in a drivers body (...I wonder why...) Maybe after I can finish my hydraulic platform prototype I can really feel the g-forces (Built one many years ago for a flight simulator. Prototype was damaged due to the fact I only had ball joints in one end of the cylinders. Happened phenomenon "Nurjahdus" (Don't know what it is in English), meaning that my cylinders wasn't so straight after full incline. 400+ euros said "bye bye". I can always learn more and more from mistakes... )
Some say it's not true. But if it is true, you could inform driver when he passes start/finish. That's a few 100 meters at most on most circuits.
I doubt that. Bikers uses these for communication and i don't think the average biker is that much richer then a racer.
Why should you always know your position anyway? If you remove it from the topright it won't always be that clear. Especially in long races where you can't know in what lap all the other racers are.
What about a friend or an other racer that has his race later that day? But if the game changes the way you would like it you would have to get out of your car twice in a 3 hour race to change all the tires, fill it with gas and hammer some dents out all by yourself. I hope that day will never come
These are all fair enough points, but the point Tristan was getting at (i beleive, having raced Caterhams myself) is most club racers will go so far as even put themselves in debt purely looking after the car. I know there have been several nasty repair bills for my car. The cost to run the caterham for a standard 12 race season was about 6 thousand pounds. Now that was incident free and didn't include actually buying the car, thats just fuel, wear and tear, club membership, league fees, travel and paddock rental. I'm not sure about Tristans' experience, but I would expect it to be similar, so add on to that the cost of the car, any unexpected repair bills, it's not a cheap pass-time. The benefits of the telemetry and radio system, for example, don't come anywhere near the benefits of actually being able to replace a part on the car with a brand new part as opposed to a refurbished bit pinched from a scrapyard...
And with regards to having someone in the pits/on the pitwall waiting for you to come round, yea, you try dragging your missus 800 miles for a weekend where she sits and watches you drive around, fiddle with the car, drive around, fiddle some more, drive around, come off the track. They will only EVER do that once...
real cars have engine lights, which caters for overheating and major engine problems, a oil light which tells you about the oil pressure. so why not have those?
in the open wheelers and other race cars they could have more stuff like this because genreally they would be the serious drivers racing cars seriously and would want to care what theyre car is doing
get things right and focus on things that you would see in your road car none of this other shit
if u want to remove thous indicators than u should remove mini map too, because its so unrealistic in real car there is no such stuff, unless GPS, but it doesn't show other cars....
Am I the only person seeing that all these "realism extremist" suggestions are just removing the developers hard work?
Great and all... but come on. Be realistic here. I'd like for it to be Shift + F on alot of servers also, but not completely remove the feature! Hell.. while we're at it, why not put us in a 3-D environment and make us pay for virtual tools, and have us order gloves we wear on our hands to manipulate us adjusting the car?
Completely agreed. Not everyone is actually rich, and reality differs a lot from what people have idealized in their minds.
Agreed, that's what most people is saying in this thread. You don't have meter or light that shows engine damage, you have (in some cars you even don't have it) a water temperature gauge and an oil temperature gauge, at best, to check if everything is good engine-wise. It's all about what's more realistic AND common, taking into account the cars on LFS originate on late 80-first 90's models.
You can have a paper-printed copy of the track pasted on your dashboard, but that's not usual for people who takes racing serious. They usually know races by hearth.
However, LFS doesn't feature tracks that are available in real life, so it's a good measure to let newcomers learn, I think. In any way, it's good to have it on offline and on non-competitive game modes (for example, hot lapping).
I don't think that making a 'simulator' less realistic is going to help the developer's efforts. Prior to patch Y some mouths were thinking of LFS as 'arcadey' since it did not feature realistic clutching and you could use pedals as if it was another arcade, tire physics permitting.
There is no such thing as 'realism extremists', but rather people tired of seeing how different driving a car is compared to LFS. I mean, my car had some bearing balls broken on one wheel, and I did not have any indicator flashing indicating it was damaged, just a dull sound, and I had to find out where it came from and what was it. Same happened once when one of the small joints of the cooling system went free and had lots of smoke all over the front of the car (okai, it's an old one, that's why it has so much trouble). In real life there's nothing that comes to you flashing in front of your eyes telling you what's going on. Specially not on late 80's, early 90's models (like the one I've got).
So why should they be on a 'simulator'?
Specially when it comes to have a competitive community - leagues and so -, where all those unrealistic aids help people who doesn't know what driving or racing means or actually is to achieve something they would never be able to in real life. Then, it's just not 'simulating' real racing world.
Shift + F to eliminate -all- traces.. and a server side setting for it. Personally, I like being able to fine-tune by seeing it during track conditions. I can't sit here and spend 24 hours a day honing my car just by feel in the pits. Sorry.
On the track (real track that is) you really feel tyre , engine and susp. damage by "feel"...not so much sound or other silly simulated stuff.
When LFS let's me turn my head to listen for engine, exhaust noise or touch the bottom of my dash to check for heat (yes, it works..at least in my track car) or smell the oil burning, then we can talk about removing all simulated gauges.
Scawen has already added useless, unrealistic stuff that will need to be removed in the future, such as the silly FPS gauge on the dash because he hasn't bothered to do the real things people want, such as engine temps, oil temps etc.. of which things like an oil pressure gauge will probably replace the sh!tty FPS one.
Gear indicator, FPS gauge, entire F9 menu etc should be removed completely as it's simply nothing but arcade. Personally, I don't think LFS will ever lose all it's arcade features.. Scawen certainly doesn't seem in any hurry to remove them anyway... just adds more to them instead
I don't see why it should not be an option on single player/practice and a server-side option. Everyone should be able to play the game, but if you're met with people of your same skill level, you might be able to enjoy it double time.
You can turn your head, but sound is stereo.
There are more ways than just one to 'feel' damage - could also be done via FFB -, and visual or auditive feedback are just a couple of them.
Also, most of those failures you're using as example should be spotted via water and oil temperature gauges, which are in plenty a lot of cars and is what we're asking.
About stuff being simulated. It's a simulator. It's not a car you can race. What do you expect?
Remember, just my opinion. Not like I'm gonna bite anyone.
Actually I have to say here, apart from Fern Bay I do drive shift+F mode on most servers, I obviously allow flags to be shown (unless I'm watching replays).
I think for league races and such like there should be a server option for it, it would give the serious (observant) drivers and edge, i think, after all, I can see when a tyre is running warm by the smoke in my rear views, as am I always aware of how sluggish/enthusiastic my steering (due to tyre temps) and can tell when the slightest bit of my car gets twisted. Ok, so for the people who can't tell having this info might be good for post-race analysis, I would like to see rather than the live view (at least in the road cars and club-class racers) a pit-bench datalogging system that gives things like G-Force, acceleration and speed. For me (who has spent many hours looking at this sort of data) this would be as useful as a live data reading during a replay.... in fact more useful, because it will show more anomalous results easier... But again maybe this can be kept to league qualifiers or something?
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Sorry.