Hi everyone,

since I have a few days off, I decided to give LFS a spin again, just out of curiosity. And after realizing that my last Online Laps where done in March 2019 I felt like I need to bake a cake to celebrate an anniversary... or to just post here in the Forum ;-)

What got me by surprise when I fired up LFS again after such a long time is, that I immediately felt at home when driving. It is insane how good it feels compared to all the other Sims I played in the last 15 years. I could not believe that after driving around for 10 minutes in Blackwood to get familiar with the controls again and then switching to the LX5 + BL Rallycross that I did not spin out a single time. I had a handfull of maneuvers in those few minutes that would have lead to crashes or spins in the other Sims, but in LFS I could catch them all, keep the drift angle, keep the correct steering angle and correct throttle inputs to get just around the track for multiple laps like I never did anything else. Of course I am not quick, but it all just felt... natural!

I can not believe I stopped playing LFS for so long, but there is one huge reason I did, something LFS is lacking that most other Sims have and (please don't kill me) is the Nordschleife. I need my weekly fix of Nordschleife and the other Sims can deliver it... but they are much worse in almost everything else.

There is hope for me, though that one day Scawen will open up LFS modding also for Tracks (maybe S4?) and this would have the potential to make LFS eternal in the Sim community.

What do I think makes LFS stand out from all the other competitors?

• Physics! When coming back after 15 years, hopping into a Car / Track Combo like LX4 + BL Rallycross, which is probably not the easiest and SMILING the whole run without crashing a single time, feeling every bump, every movement the car makes, then you got Physics just right!
  
• Scripting! Damn you all other Sims which force me to reassign controls when switching a car every single time! Scawen, you nailed that! LFS lets me configure my Setup for Paddle, Sequential and H-Shifter cars and switches automatically with the car. I miss this so much in every other Sim I played to date and I can not believe that a 20 year old Sim has this and nobody else felt the need to implement this too.
  
• Simple UI! The UI might not be pretty on first sight, but it is functional, easy to navigate, intuitive and boy is it quick. No matter where you are in the game, everything is accessible super quick and easily.
  
• Speed! Starting up the game always was super quick. Joining Multiplayer was always super quick. Navigating in the game no matter where you are was always super quick. I emphasise "always", because this is one of the things I remember from 15-20 years ago. It is not the modern hardware that makes it quicker than the competitors, it was always quicker than any competitor out there. Want to join a Multiplayer game in modded AC with a dozen of different cars? Yea, go and grab a coffee. In LFS? You do not even have time to sneeze and you are in!
  
• Multiplayer Experience! This is also tied to Speed, but LFS allows setting up servers where basically every car is allowed and no matter when or how many people join mid-race, there is no hiccup (I know it was in the very early days, but this got improved quickly). In Assetto Corsa, if the car you want to drive on a specific server is "occupied", you have to drive with a car you don't like. In BeamNG, if somebody changes his car and you want the game to update that, you wait a few seconds (game frozen) until that happens. In LFS you do not even realize that someone joined a server or switched his car or skin until you see it.
  
• Autocross! I do not even know if any other Sim has that... maybe BeamNG to some extend, but it is cumbersome to design a track there. LFS has Autocrossing since like forever and I remember that after memorizing all the Tracks, Autocrossing or modified Tracks with obstacles added so much fun.
  

What would make LFS the Eternal Sim (for me?)

• Track Modding
  

I believe this is the only piece missing to level up into the eternal olymp of Racing sims. LFS does almost everything better than its competitors. And it did most of those things that well 20 years ago. And all that time nobody was able to reach that level yet. The advantage many other Sims have over LFS and that kept me away for so long is just modding. LFS opened up for modding a bit with S3 and Car mods, but there is one single piece missing. Getting my favourite track in the game, there would be no need for any other sim in my life ever... OK, maybe Richard Burns Rallye for pure Rallying, but this one lives because of the Mods ;-)


A little bit of a background about me, just in case you survived the wall of text above:
I got my hands on LFS back then the minute it was possible and I remember that it was by far the best Sim experience I ever had. I got S1 and I got S2 the minute it was released and when S3 was announced and the Scirocco and Rockingham I already played for years and I remember that I was a bit burned out. So I decided to come back when the Scirocco and Rockingham are released. Well... it's been a while now and sometimes you just have to give up on your promises and jump over your own shadow.

I did that a bit in March 2023 when modding was released and I got myself an S3 license. In 2023 I just looked into LFS a bit with a Gamepad, tried a few car mods and hoped that one day Track Mods will be allowed too.
Of course this did not happen yet, unfortunately.

Why did I not come back sooner? LFS is lacking one thing for me that many other sims can deliver: My weekly fix of the Nordschleife. This might never happen officially due to licensing and labour involved to create such a massive track, but if modding would be allowed in the future, I am sure that all other sims turn obsolete (at least for me).


Thank you SO MUCH for keeping LFS alive, updating it (it got VR support a while ago too!) and improving it still. For me, it is still the best Sim out there that I ever played. And I am Sim racing since Sims exist :-)

GPL will aways have a place in my heart. So many good memories and I played it through so many hardware iterations. I am glad it is still alive. It is like with LFS... I come back to it after a while again. I played a lot of newer Sims, but the physics of LFS are still the best I ever experienced in any sim... and GPL has just a special feel to it and seeing how it looked at release and what the community did to it is just unbelievable.

I haven´t played S2 in a while, but I suppose upgrading to S3 could bring me back :-)

Quote from kars19 :

Does somebody know what the reason for the slowly updating rev gauge is?
It´s the same in the Lotus 79 in this Video:

Ooh, don´t say that. My best door to door races I had at BL1 and BL RallyX in the XFG cars. But this may also be because FBM did not exist back then :-)

Quote from sinbad :

Thank you for that Video! That´s beautiful! And I can only second what you said. That´s why I enjoyed Historic GPs the most when I visited Race Tracks regularly.

There´s one moment I probably will never forget I had on the Oldtimer Grand Prix at the Nürburgring many years ago. I think it was my first or second visit. One "race" on the schedule were GP cars of the 60s. The kind of cars you know from Grand Prix legends. Cigars, open wheels, no downforce. Pure driving machines. I think they even said this is a Demonstration, not a race. But what happened when they started was pure racing. I had mixed feelings, because on one side you don´t want that any of those cars gets damaged. On the other hand I was blown away how every driver fighted for his rank, every second. It was brilliant. Unfortunately there were also crashes and the mechanics had tons of work to do afterwards. It was a real joy seeing those cars not only in a museum and not only in a demonstration, but in real racing. High revving engines, outbraking opponents in front of the corners and going through the corners at the edge of what the cars with those tyres could do.

And just before the race ended we went into the paddock. And this is exactly what blew me away and what will probably stick in my head forever. The mechanics had to pull some of the drivers out of their cars. They were not able to get out on their own. And when they removed their helmets I had seen why. Many of those drivers where so old that it had the impression that when they are not in a race car, they drive around in wheel chairs. Many walked like Granddad and they must have been in the high 60s. But in the car those guys where 20 again, knife between their teeth and fighting for their position on the race track like they would have done in the 60s. I´m sure every single one of them, once sitting in the car, did forget about everything around them. How much the car is worth, the repair cost afterwards, that they could crash badly and get seriously injured. It id not matter. They had only one focus. Racing! And man, did they race!

Last edited by buedi, Sun 19 Apr 2015, 06:42.

Checkin´ in. Still lurking this place of course, just not really posting :-)

Brilliant! That looks like a fun ride :-)

Thank you very much Victor!
I tried it again now and after I change it I also get a message that the change was successful. After logging out and logging in again the new password works :-)

Thanks again and have a nice weekend!

Well... I tried again. This time I got no error message, but also no success message. So I logged off and tried to login with the new password (copy & paste from my PW manager). The site claims my password is incorrect. So I tried my old one. Does not work. Tried the new one again = 15 minute waiting time :-)

I also sent an E-Mail with the Web form about my problem, but now after the Password reset I can login again with the old one.

Is it possible that the login password field / script is not accepting enough characters?

Now that we have a new site and I had to login again since years I thought it´s also time to change my password.
So I tried in the "Personal Details" section. I created a long and complex password (20 chars) and pasted it from my Password Manager into the 2 Web Password fields. After saving the change, the page claims that my passwords to not match. Copy & Pasting makes it pretty sure that they match.

Is 20 chars too long?

I was positively surprised... I expected something like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBkW8DSUII4

Quote from Eric :

[...]I’ve been testing with the new tyre physics for a few years now and I refuse to drive the old one, which has just doesn’t have that visceral tyre feel and response compared to the new tyre physics.

I really hope you know what you did to me now, Sir.

Quote from Klouczech :

I, finally, had opportunity to drive a pure race car.
I practiced the track only in rFactor, but It helped.

I felt like a real racer or like playing a simulator. Great experience!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAAWmiplZZU


.

Thanks for the Video. Very nice Sound, picture quality and camera angle. I love it how you hear the echo of your own engine when you come closer to the walls.
And good job by approaching the limit not the Sim-way (from top) but from the bottom. That your best laps where around in the 60s shows that you made yourself familiar with the car and approached your limit slowly.

It looks like this was not a race, but a Trackday, right? If yes, I think that´s a good start learning a car and track without pressure. And you don´t want to break a toy someone gives to you, so this looked like a perfect day to have your first laps in a race car. Thumbs up

Quote from Boris Lozac :

Hope it doesn't sound like in the Forza..

First thing I thought when I read this was: Thank god they don´t let it sound like Gran Turismo
But I must admit I have to look for Forza Videos how it sounds. I never played it. In my opinion LFS still has the best sound engine. They might sound synthetic (because they are), but they nailed it down pretty good so you can hear engine load and the rpm very easily, which is very important for me when racing. I hate it when sims have distorted sounds to fool the people that it´s "loud" and "mean". My ears are still working and I never heard distorted sounds when visiting a race track :-)

I´m looking forward to the sound improvements. And I hope they will also release the SLS soon.

That looks brilliant. Thanks for telling us. I hope they get the physics right (I see there´s a Demo, I should try that). And I´m happy that you still have the possibility to race 2D tracks. If I remember correctly, in GeneRally you could "paint" your tracks and then race them. So if you´re not a 3D artist, you can still create your own tracks very easily.

Dammit. I saw and recorded plenty of 6R4s. The Stratos sounds more rough, I should have remembered that... but the 6R4 did not come into my mind :-)
Maybe it´s time to undust all my tapes again... should be digitalized anyway to preserve that stuff.

Quote from amp88 :

Name this car...

(People from the #liveforspeed IRC channel are excluded from entering because they have an unfair advantage... )

Stratos? I have one on tape too, but it sounds a bit different... but different recording devices, different sounds... at least to some extend.

Quote from ATHome :

Nope Stefan Roser is still alive

Exactly, he´s still around. I read a test about the RUF RGT-8 (yes, that 911 with a V8) a few days ago where the author of the article had the opportunity to drive both, the CTR and the RGT-8 and Stefan Roser was still around. I think he was a Test Driver for RUF back then and still seems to hang around with these guys.

Whatever... I hope RUF finds its way into AC, because I really like what they do and having them around the corner here sometimes you see some of those extremely tuned, but in my opinion often still pretty normal looking cars, driving around, which is always very nice.

Yupp, and having the CTR and the Nordschleife, we can finally do this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSMCfPASImQ



Edit: 2 much

Last edited by buedi, Tue 18 Mar 2014, 18:51.

Quote from N I K I :

buedi, i know all this hype[...]Well if you've got this far, thanks for reading this. Was my pleasure to share this with you, because it is very very exciting this ac and you surely want some of that.

Well, I´ve read it all, yes :-) And I appreciate it very much. I see you´ve driven a lot in LFS and you seem to be very enthusiastic about AC too.
The more I read here, the more confident I am that it was good to buy the license today.

Now I just need to buy some free time to try it out

Quote from Storm_Cloud :

Nordschleife is lovely and all that, but it's been around so many sims in so many iterations it would be cool for AC to have a different "signature" track.

IOM TT Course would be cool and arguably better suited to the fastest cars. I also already have it memorised

Everyone can have his opinion of course. If this is yours that´s fine.
In my point of view I am sick of so called "Simulators" with the Nordschleife where I only had fun for minutes because of the bad physics. I hope AC changes this and I finally will have good physics paired with the Track I like so much.
Yes, TT would also be fantastic, so would be the Targa Florio. For those I go back to GPL still.

Also, the Nordschleife for me is not (only) about driving the insanely fast cars. I´d rather have some more Stock / slower and low grip cars like we have them in LFS for example (XF GTI, UFR, RB4 etc...), where you have to manage your energy on some parts (for example the right hander after the Ex-Mühle where it goes up the hill... if you waste your energy with a slower care on that corner you lose tons of time).

But as I said: Everyone can have his opinions. But I hope that the market can and will have something for everyone out there

I don´t expect it to be the same experience (then I would not need to buy it anyway, right?)
I just expect brilliant physics, and some here seem to think it exactly has that. So I bought it a minute ago.
I don´t care for the missing Multiplayer (yet). I also don´t have too much time to spend playing, so I never really was competetive in Multiplayer. What I did the most with LFS, was jumping into a Car / Track combo and tried to go around the track as quick as possible, trying to drive on the edge and having a blast doing so.

Probably I can do that with AC too and it will include the Track I love the most and probably the only piece which was ever missing for me in LFS. Now I just need to find a bit time to install AC, tweak the sterring settings and hopefully the physics appeal to me


Oh, one more question: Do you guys log in to the Forums with your Steam Account or did you create a new one? I´m not sure what the up/downside of one method or the other is here.

Quote from Keling :

Those two sentences don't go very well together...

You´re right, if you put them both side by side
What I meant was that I think I´ve played everything which is called a Sim since that time. I did not skip many Simulators (iRacing for example, because I don´t like subscriptions) since the C64 time, and the one which hooked me up the longest and had the most believing Driving Physics up to today was LFS. And I don´t want to shell out money to take a step back.

But what I´ve read so far after my first post in this thread looks like I need to buy AC ASAP. Money spent... again... I hate you all so much

No, not really. Thanks everyone for your responses. It seems like AC is made for me, so I´ll pick it up while it´s still on sale. And when the Nordschleife is out maybe in a few months I think I have everything I need. Good physics, THE Track and a bunch of cars. Multiplayer or not, that alone will give me enough bang for the buck, I´m pretty sure