Quote from Becky Rose :

we waste far too much time arguing over who's going to get rid of the spiders and communicating with mind reading

See, now this is just the sort of thing I'm not getting over at iracing. ;-)

I was definitely not lapped in the instances I am describing above. If I am lapped and the race leaders are coming around I'll usually lift a bit on the next straight to let them through. Our own guidelines here state that this is not necessary, however:

http://en.lfsmanual.net/wiki/Rules_of_Clean_Racing#Lapping

Lapping

L-1: It is a fundamental rule of motorsport and sim racing that when a driver receives a blue flag, this is to let him know that a faster car is about to lap him.
L-2: The leading driver that is lapping the slower car must treat the situation as though he's overtaking a normal competitor - and not assume the lapped driver should leap out of the way at all costs.
L-3: The driver that is being lapped should let the lead driver past and/or not resist to be overtaken if the lead driver has sufficient overlap. Only move out of the way for a lapped car when you believe it is safe to do so. For example, not on the apex of a corner.

Quote from SilverArrows77 :

Its possible you are joining demo servers now, as they have been "incorporated" into the global server list in the time you have been away...

Aha, I did not know that.

My racing buddy and I signed up for a year of iracing last night, so I guess we'll be checking that out for a while.

I'll certainly be back to LFS sooner or later, and I don't picture this keeping me from buying an S3 license when the time comes, but a week of getting hammered by the kiddies on the public servers left us really wanting to find some clean racing.

WTF?

1. How do you know?

2. So what, this is racing. There is no reason I should lay down and die just because you can turn low numbers with no other cars on the track.

3. I don't really want to let you get in front of me just to have to avoid you and the three car pileup you are going to cause in a lap or so.


What is up with all the people out there who seem to have text in the title mapped to a button and drive around the track mashing it repetitively? If you are that much faster than I am then you should have no problem making a clean pass. If you need to ask me to let you pass, then you are not that much, if at all, faster and we are going to do some racing. Note that this is not an invitation for you to plow into into me under braking or barge down the inside and take us both out. Sheesh.

I'm just coming back to LFS after a couple of years away, and the lunatic density on the public servers seems to have risen dramatically.

Quote from Rtsbasic :

Logitech's standard policy on warranty stuff seems to be you have to send the connector plugs off the faulty unit to them when the new unit arrives. Works well, they know your not pulling a fast one to resell the new one, and you save the cost of sending the whole 10KG unit back.

Not any more, at least based on the experience of a friend of mine who is currently going through the RMA process. He was first told that a new unit would be shipped right away, and that he should send the old unit back "when he got a chance." The rep really didn't make a a big deal about it. But then, a couple of days later, the same guy actually called him back to tell him that the replacement would not be sent until he first returned his unit.

*shrug* FWIW.

lyd

Quote from smith :

lyd, people should learn from the best, not mediocre or just plain bad examples.

Wouldn't that be an argument in favor of distributing your source? Or did I misunderstand your earlier post and you have been saying that you think your own code is a mediocre or just plain bad example in its present form?

lyd

Last edited by lyd, Wed 20 Dec 2006, 11:25.

Quote from smith :

I wouldn't refuse to make the program open source if code quality was on sufficient level.
Since it doesn't meet my standards, I just prefer to keep it for myself

You don't need turn the whole project into a collaborative effort just to make the source available. Maybe this is stating the obvious, but it still seems like a good idea to distribute the source so that people can learn from what you have done and experiment with their own changes for personal use, even if you never incorporate those changes into your releases.

lyd

Last edited by lyd, Mon 11 Dec 2006, 11:58.

Quote from wildwilly :

mines started making a weird ticking noise when i turn the wheel past certain points (usually 2 or 3 times every 360 deg), and it sounds like its coming from the motor with the optical encoder on it. It still performs fine though so i wont bother exchanging it just yet.

My friend's G25 started doing this a couple weeks ago. He opened it up and some small metal piece that he could not identify fell out. Then the ticking stopped.

We didn't worry about it much beyond that because it had also developed a problem where the wheel-shaft has become loose in a way that allows the wheel to rock up and down or side to side by a disturbing amount. He has a new one on the way from Logitech.

Mine is still working great, btw.

lyd

Quote from Krane :

Boy do those web sites designed for 800x600 look wierd, there's same amount of empty space right of the screen as the content is wide illepall

I have never understood this. Who uses their web browser maximized? Well, clearly a lot of people do, because I see comments like this frequently, but as I said I don't understand it. Seems like a big waste of perfectly good screen real estate to me, especially on a wide-aspect display.

lyd

Quote from Tweaker :

Mind if I ask what kind of camera you have? Off topic, but these are nice photos

I was thinking the same thing. And while I can appreciate the minor issues of exposure, lighting, and white balance that SatCP mentioned, those pics are, by a very large margin, the best I have ever seen in a context like this.

You clearly have an excellent eye for composition in addition to mad your soldering skillz, SatCP. ;-)

lyd

FWIW, I am using a Chimei 22” widescreen I got from newegg, and I am 100% pleased with it. 5ms, 1680x1050, $340 USD.

I wasn't really expecting much from it, but it was the best thing I could afford at the time. I was very pleasantly surprised. Very bright, vibrant (if not wholly accurate) color, have never experienced any ghosting or tearing, seems perfect for LFS. Not sure if I would recommend it for more general desktop use as it has some angle of view issues, and certainly not for photo or graphic design work as it is difficult to calibrate for correct gamma while maintaining the brightness*, but for a dedicated sim box (which is what I bought it for) where you are always looking at it straight on and the factory 6400k setting is close enough it absolutely wonderful.

lyd

*Actually, I did spend some time calibrating it, and got it very close to the desired temp and gamma with perfectly satisfactory contrast and brightness in the windows desktop environment and a couple of image apps I looked at, but lfs itself was way too dark with those settings. Since I use thing thing pretty much exclusively for LFS, I reverted back to the factory settings.

Last edited by lyd, Sat 25 Nov 2006, 11:25.

Thanks, tweaker, that replacement push-down spring idea seems do-able. For the amount I actually use reverse, I don't think having it a bit more difficult to get to would be a problem. Heck, it wouldn't kill me to just lock it out entirely and map R to a button, if it came to that. I don't think I am ready to go to that extreme yet, though.

What does the second spring with the metal ball (replaced with a nylon ball) do? What's the advantage of the nylon?

lyd

I am sure everyone using the G25 stick in seq. mode has experienced this at least a couple times: you reach over for a quick upshift and the weight of your hand presses down on the stick at the same time you pull it back, with the result that it stays in that position rather than springing back to center.

Not a huge deal, but passingly annoying when it happens. I was just wondering if any of you who have dismantled it and poked around inside saw any possibilities for a modification that would eliminate this problem.

lyd

What's the advantage of doing all that instead of just powering the stuff from a cheap +5v "wall wart" transformer?

lyd

Sweet! Nice find.

lyd

I've looked into this a bit and, afaik, for $25 you are looking at building something from scratch, based on a basic stamp or some other sort of PIC, with mostly scavenged components.

lyd

Quote from bbman :

I had this oscillation with my old R440 too... I found no cure, turning down FF helped just a little bit... So either you get used to it or you upgrade to a more pricey logitech wheel...

My more pricey logitech wheels both do it too. Lower force in LFS pretty much eliminates it.

I think it is just the nature of the beast, as it were. Something to do with the wheel crossing the relatively forceless null point, then being caught on the other side and tossed back. Maybe some sort of damping logic could be built into the LFS FF model, but I would rather have the oscillation if doing so will negatively impact any other aspect.

It doesn't happen (at least to me) if you are holding onto the wheel.

lyd

Quote from kompa :

And I like it.

I like it too. I think the FF model in LFS is excellent.

There is a reason that the hardcore guys who use other sims tend to favor non-FF wheels.

lyd

Quote from Goop :

@ Bob Smith - yep, the FOX is relatively easy to drive.

Grr. I've been trying to drive it around Blackwood for a couple of days now, and I am a sad case. Darned frustrating. I was doing fairly well in the XRT, I thought, but this thing is kicking my butt. *sigh*

lyd

Ditto the observations on clutches: resistance is linear. (And possibly futile.)

But...

Quote from tristancliffe :

This is why FFB pedals just aren't needed imo.

What about emulating warped brake rotors? ;-)

lyd

Quote from CSU1 :

I have to disagree with you on that one lyd! Does anyone bother with the demo??
Well 30% of my LFS time is spent on demo servers because unless you are blind you will see that it's more often than not an excellent place to race XFG_BL!
There are always good,honest competative drivers on the more popular demo servers.

I didn't ask if anyone bothered with the demo at all, I asked if anyone bothered with the demo if they didn't have to. I am casting no aspersions upon demo users as a group, just theorizing that if they are serious and it is within their means to be licensed, then they will be.

Witness your own propensity to race on demo servers, yet you are licensed.

What do I know, though, I haven't been here very long. ;-) I probably don't have enough data points to make any reasonable assumptions.

lyd

Quote from Becky Rose :

The LFS business model is the concern of the LFS devs. They put the content in they feel is best, and they have all the statistics and data from sales order tracking and LFS World access to know what's best to earn them a bigger Turkey at Christmas. I don't have that information, so I wont pretend to know what is best.

This is right on the money, imo.

Besides, does anyone really bother with the demo if they don't have to? After finding LFS and telling a friend about it, that friend downloaded the demo and used it for about two days before getting a license. I had to build a new PC in order to run LFS (all mac and *nix around here for the last several years) but once I got that sorted, I had a license before I'd installed the software. I've never used the demo at all.

It seems to me that anyone using the demo for any extended period of time is either forced to by whatever their circumstances might be, or just isn't terribly interested in serious racing sims. It would be a shame to alienate the former while trying to weed out the latter.

lyd

Well, cool. That makes me feel better. Thanks guys.

I guess I will start practicing with the FOX, as that seems to be a pretty popular car, so I have some races to join. ;-)

lyd

I have just spent a fair amount of time searching on this topic, and while I have read a number of interesting discussions I didn't really find a straightforward answer to this question:

When you are looking at the list of servers, what is the maximum ping time above which you should not even consider joining out of consideration for others racing there?

I have not really raced online much at all yet, primarily because I can never seem to find a combo that matches the couple I have become relatively consistent with so far. That would really just be Blackwood/RB4 and Blackwood/FXR at this point. In the rare cases where I find a non-empty server allowing one of these, invariably the listed ping time is >100ms, and often >150ms. This just seems huge.

I am on a 3Mbit/768Kbit DSL connection, and at the moment provisioned with interleaved data path. I know this is seriously eating into my RTT, and I will shortly start working on getting myslef switched to fast path. (Dealing with Verizon. Oh, joy.)

With luck, that will improve things significantly. In the meantime, can I join a server with these latencies without just pissing everyone off?

Thanks.

lyd

Last edited by lyd, Sun 12 Nov 2006, 14:35.

I'm not sure why several of you are saying that there should not be a shift light in the road cars.

My last several RL cars have had a shift light. Given, it seemed to be calibrated to the most fuel-efficient shift point rather than the optimum point for using all the available power, but it was there none the less.

So it's not terribly unrealistic to have one in the sim, is it?

lyd