Although on the plus side, LFS is the only sim I've ever played that gives you ALL of its setup parameters in proper, physical, SI units, so you can actually make meaningful calculations.

That is also very true, but what is LFS?, a physics playground, or a realistic racing sim?.

Dan,

It of course gives you the chance to fool around with physics, but when you mention a realistic racing sim... it seems you are looking for something with real cars and real tracks... AND cars in particular that have only "allowed setup guidelines". Any simulation could be a realistic racing sim regardless of these requirements you expect... even something that is fantasy should still be trying to make things realistic. Just because LFS has the ability to choose some options that would take require an engineer to work overtime on, doesn't exclude it from being in the club for attempting realism.

This is NOT a little X and Y comparison, this is an explanation. Big difference between those two, and I think people just can't explain correctly why they think LFS is more realistic or vice versa. So don't make us all seem like we are soley into LFS and dislike other simulations... many simulations have strong points and weaknesses over each other, that should be known by now.

As I said about the physics and wide range of setup options (some beyond what a normal mechanic would/could do), it is purely test based. I mean... surely the RAC couldn't be made into a rally car that easily. So I think that the way the setups are currently, they do not limit much, not at all. However, you may notice that since LFS's beginning, the setup options have been changing... and mostly being limited as newer releases come out. I think it is only due time until we have proper limits for how high or how low we can set things. It is just that we have a sort of "experimental" game at the moment. Which is fun, so you can see the depth of the physics, but when it comes to serious restricted racing settings, I think LFS will be there soon .

I think THAT would be the coolest ever

Just think about that:

you drive the WTCC with the Graphics of GTR2 and the physics of LFS... i think the netcode will be like in LFS too...

*dreaming*

I hope LFS is getting ready soon...

Oh, i forgot the SOUND of GTR

SimBin with the LFS engine? Sounds like another boring rumor....
Now if like Rockstar Games wanted it, then I'd be curious about it.

Sound of GTR? No shitty samples please.

Quote from danowat :

Yes, that is true for a fantasy simulation, but for something that is and should be so deeply routed in a realistic representation of real world racing, the fantasy aspect of the setup system, and the "pick and choose nature" of LFS fans when this game is realistic and is not, is a bit of an oxymoron.

Is it a realistic representation of real life racing, or is it a fantasy simulation?, LFS needs to make its mind up in this respect.

Dan,

agreed on the gear ratios they only be available in realistic values from rational numbers but any other setting can in principle be tuned in any increment you might want to use ... id like to have a fixed setup a limited time and a limited money (aka less values) serverside option though

Quote from Woz :

Dont believe a word of it. Debug/crack tools now allow huge control over execution. Also machine code is not that bad if you know what you are looking for/at. All code has to call the various windows API's to do anything and these API calls leave signatures that are simple to spot. This makes it easy to find where sound, gfx etc are done. You can even get debug tools that allow you to break an app when it calls different API calls to make it easier. Its more a case now that people coming into development now have not had to work in machine code/assembler, like us oldies , so are not used to reading it.

If the code is encrypted and then decrypted on load then breaking on API calls means the code is in memory decrypted so can be dumped so it can be pulled apart. The war becomes trying to spot debug tools before you decrypt code so you can halt execution if you want to protect against debugging but that is hard if you rootkit the debug tools so you hide them from task list and directory structure, Sony know all about this one lol.

Also compilers translate similar code in similar ways so as long as you know the compiler used you can find out how it structures that code when converted from source to MC.

Just make a search on Warez to see how much cracked/hacked apps there are out there. Most of these would have involved someone pulling apart machine code to see what is going on so they can patch the code.

So if someone wanted to see how it worked they could find out. And with the budgets for games today the cost of adding a dev resource to pull apart another product for a year is cheap in comparision.

As for general hacking of LFS to allow warez version you will find reason that LFS is not hacked like other games is that it has an online part of the code. LFS World is very tightly coupled with LFS so unless the hacker can hack LFS World people can't play online which is what LFS is about. The same happened with Q3, hacks that allowed offline were available but nobody hacked master server so could not use online until iD disabled master server checking later in the product life.

The real problem for someone who tried to reverse engineer LFS wouldn't be getting past encryption, or tracing windows api calls.

I would have thought that the big difficulty is that the one thing that you really want - the physics engine - is also by far the most difficult to translate from machine code back to a human readable form.
The problem is that the maths involved are extremely challenging even with fully annotated source code, reams of documents and reference literature
The original source code will be structured in such a way as to clarify which parts of the calculations apply to which attributes of the physics - tyres, aero, temps, wear, forces.. etc. Taking optimized machine code and analysing it to the point where you could seperate these math based components in a way that would allow you to maintain or update them seperately seems like a huge task to me ?

Basically, its not 'machine code --> c++' thats the biggest difficulty, its 'machine code --> math'. Thats a much higher level of abstraction, and there won't be 'WAREZ TOOLZ' to help you with it either

col

Quote from danowat :

That is also very true, but what is LFS?, a physics playground, or a realistic racing sim?.

Dan,

It seems like there can be two different definitions for a realistic sim. One definition states that the constraints of the real world like suspension settings, ability to see a track map, real world cars, and real world tracks make the sim realistic.

On the other hand, the other definition is that a sim is realistic if it closely models the physics of the real world and is a pure environment... in other words, as little as possible is scripted and controlled by the program.

Both of these definitions require quality graphics, sounds and other features.

There is a blending of these two definitions at times too. There are some people that want both in one and there are some who want nothing in the sim that they could not have in real life, like a moving track map.

So, you can have your own definition for realism, but please understand, we get tired of reading definitive statements like "Except the setup system in LFS is totally unrealistic, as opposed to the GTL setup system where they actually have capped settings."
I would argue that they are not unrealistic at all. All of those settings can exist in the real world. That is my definition of realistic. It is not physically impossible to do. Is it not plausible in an engineering and cost perspective? Sure. But that is a cool feature of simulators.

And LFS settings are capped. You can't set a value of 5000psi for tire pressure. And can you argue that you can't set 0 tire pressure on your real car? Sure you can. It would be stupid and the car would drive like crap, but it is realistic. Try it in LFS... I think you will find the car drives like crap.

Quote from Jonesy_ :

You mean those damping 1-4 settings?
No values or whatsoever, is not realistic.

Usually you don't even have the numbers, you just have to turn a knob or something one way or the other and listen to the damper going *click*..

If you're lucky you might have the specs of the dampers that'd tell some of the range's dampening values in pure figures - maybe all.

Not unrealistic at all though.

Quote from Hallen :

...a sim is realistic if it closely models the physics of the real world and is a pure environment... in other words, as little as possible is scripted and controlled by the program.

Very specifically, this is what I mean when I describe LFS as realistic. I don't personally mind if the cars are not actual cars, or if the tracks exist on some moor in the southeast of England/Coast of Jamaica or not, etc. Once I'm in the simulation, it's the representation of physics for me. If I want more than that, I also have to do something about the fact that my entire field of view is only 17" diagonally across and that there's a cup of coffee where my wing mirror should be.. that I don't have a seat belt on, and that despite the 167mph in an FO8 that I'm doing, if I turn my head to look to my right, it's my street that I see, and it's not moving at all.

In the study of literature, they talk of "the suspension of disbelief" when reading a novel, or watching a play, or sitting down to a TV drama. In LFS, I can easily condition myself to suspend all disbelief once I've focused on those 17" as the world I'm in, at that moment.

Quote from colcob :

Although on the plus side, LFS is the only sim I've ever played that gives you ALL of its setup parameters in proper, physical, SI units, so you can actually make meaningful calculations.

Since when are degrees SI units?

Quote from Forbin :

Since when are degrees SI units?

degrees are not a unit

Quote from Shotglass :

degrees are not a unit

yes it is a mesurement angle unit , but you need to set radian or sexagesimal systems, computers floating units(i want say the logical device that do floating points operations) works in radians because are more "friendly" computable.