Although my comment is bit late,
But i like the new westhill very much too. Much more realistic track layout and very challenging to get it right. I am really looking forward to the tyre-physics update to complement the realistic track.

Quote from Scawen :

As I understand it, Microsoft deliberately stopped providing a debug version of DX9 in post-XP Windows, to force developers to be unable to develop software that supports XP. We do want to support XP because we have thousands of people who bought an LFS license and do not yet want to be forced to "upgrade" .

I am aware of the extra difficulties of win7/win8 which are supposed to make it more secure and better. I am also aware of nasty M$ tactics to try to force uawea to new OS. Currently, M$ currently tries to move everyone to WIN8 via some very nasty tactics.

New versions are indeed not always better. I like rhel5.x more than rhel6.x. rhel6.x has to many dynamic and yet suddenly not so dynamic features to compensate for doing everything as dynamic as possible. Still, I need to move on since rhel5.x support is ending and rhel6.x has some serious improvements. Yet I am not angry about it, why.. therei s a roadmap telling for many years rhel5.x support will end on a specific date. Microsoft also has such road maps.

How to anticipate on it and make it clear to all buyers support will shift with the support of the operating systems. You can't stay on old OS because people bought your product in 2002 while running W2K. So how to plan ahead, make roadmaps so you know when you need to move to newer versions and when old OS's or directx versions are no longer supported.

Off course, this will not solve the new added difficulties of the Vista/Win7/W8.x. Someday you will need to face it and solve the problems, in computer-technology it is always best to wait too long.... and you already waited several years. How likely is it Microsoft will suddenly enable debug functions on win7/win8? Directx10 is available since 2006, that is nearly 8 years ago!

My opinion:
Clinging to ancient technology will put most IT company's real quick out of business!

Quote from Specht77 :

I'm 100% sure he's trolling

Nah, biggest problem with vista was, people tried it to run it on outdated hardware or to slow systems. I made sure friends got up-to-date hardware before they moved to vista. Not seen much vista-installations in enterprise-market though.

Most extreme example i have seen with vista is surviving 6 full years without a single reinstall, surviving multiple system-board upgrades, several graphics cards replacements, 500+ installations and removals of software. Software ranging from simple crap to production applications and actively used as media/workstation/game-system every single day. Why did the person move on, vista is nearing end-of-life.

win7 well... as i mentioned earlier, you need to move on, Vista will soon no longer be supported so I already moved to win7 long time ago. Probably i will skip win8.x and move straight to win9(?), since working with win8 makes me seriously frustrated, angry within 10 minutes. So I will try really hard to completely skip win8 and try not to get myself into situations I have actually to do any production work on a system with win8.x installed.

I am puzzled why Scawen clings to WindowsXP, it is something from the past. The greatest system I ever had was atari ST, sold it over 20 years ago. Why, no matter how great it was, it was OUTDATED.

Last edited by Bluebird B B, Mon, 17 Feb 2014 18:22. Reason : typo

Quote from Scawen :

Windows 7 is a heap of crap that is making ordinary life difficult. It is worse than XP, has reduced functionality and keeps putting obstacles in my way. It was a waste of my money and I don't want to keep switching between Windows 7 and Windows XP. Why would I want to? I will just install XP so that I can continue working on LFS. At some point in the future we may abandon support for XP and at that point it would make sense to move to a later version of Windows. Or I might be finally forced to change at some point before that. But until then, it's not worth it. I really regret this waste of time.

Yes i wan't to run windows2000 since w2k is a LOT better than XP. And in fact Vista is better than both of them and more stable than win7/win8. Never seen a properly managed vista system that needed suddenly a re-install. How different that is with win7/win8.

But,
Support on w2k has ended, xp will be ended soon and in about 20 months about all gamers will move to win7/win8 since new software just won't run on XP and will be unsupported on Vista.

I have moved on and i am now on win7 and will try to skip win8.x, There really is no point in fighting for an end-of-life product.

My personal preference is that everybody would run RedHat/CentOS or Ubuntu since that would solve lot of daily problems. Not very likely to happen soon I am not running linux on my game-pc since games are build for win7/win8 except for lfs:auto:

Last edited by Bluebird B B, Mon, 17 Feb 2014 17:57. Reason : typo

Quote from col :

I doubt that. I think there are three objectives Scawen has for the new model. When they are all satisfied, he will release it.

#1 realistic setups: A big problem with the existing model is that realistic car setup values don't give correct behaviour. That means that restricting setups to realistic stock values in real cars e.g. Scirocco gave unrealistic handling, and made traction control(?) not work.

That is where quick fixes are needed, cars roll/dive too much, tyres heat often too much up, innerside tyre tempatures is too critical, tyres loose grip/blow too fast when overheating, tyre wear is hardly affected by overheating(slightly overheated tyre will hardly loose grip, but will wear out faster). Using quick fixes will not make it perfect, but will make the experience MUCH better because! current tyre-moddeling is very good in fact i think lfs has still the best modelling of all. It just has some flaws, which is normal for any simulation.

Instead of having gamers wait 5 years for improvement, i would like to see some quick patches to get rid of the worst faults in current modelling. Then I would be very happy and go back to online-racing(and prevent me from buying an other race game next month).

Example of what real F1 tyres (pre-2013) can handle:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCXebCya6Q0

Quote from Be2K :

Then what the problems are ??

Problem one: trying to create a perfect model without flaws?
This is a problem since no simulation will ever be perfect, you will always need some quick patches to make a simulation behave realistic.

But.... If you need too many fixes you might get it never perfect, but a perfect simulation does not exist......

So why is it taking five years, my guess is, someone is trying to be perfect, which is impossible.

Quote from shimon-ifraimov :

hello

I have a question about the Aerodynamics in lfs.

I noticed that all 3d models of lfs cars have flat floors , so does this mean we have iven on road cars like uf1000 an advantage on Aerodynamics?
could be great to have an explenation on how aero works in lfs.

also my suggestion will be non flat floor give us some details underneath the cars please !

oh ya i almost forgot to ask .............. why non of the cars have suspensions ? whats holding the wheels

Aerodynamics in lfs are rather simple, you can drive nose-up setups without averse effects. Even with a bric like uf1000 would have noticable lift if you set front ride height several centimetres higher than rear in real life. Ground-effects are not yet modelled in lfs. A Formula car (fox,fo8,bf1) in lfs with a ride-height of 7+ cm's has the same down-force generated as with 2cm ride-height, which is not correct.

Last edited by Bluebird B B, Sat, 24 Aug 2013 19:13.

"I think the neutral is for when you are in a trafic jam stuck for a while put it in neutral in stead of halving your foot on the brake"

Close actually, the oil in the torque converter heats up when in D and it wastes little bit of fuel compared to neutral. That is why when you expect to be standing stil for long periodes of time you should select the N-position on your autobox.

But don't get too worried about overheating auto-trans unless your autobox is in bad condition. I have driven many cars for many years with autobox, never had any issue's with overheating. Just use common sense.

Ontopic: Good suggestion to have a "childs"-mode, any mode that would boost sales of lfs is good for lfs in general as long as it doens't hurt the hardcore drivers.

Quote from Skytrill :

A simulation being far from perfect, 2-3 seconds of difference might explain it but not 6 seconds.

Hard to tell, even professional racing drivers some time have huge time differences. Some years ago Jos Verstappen was the cause of rule changes in LMP2 racing class. He was competing with LPM1 class in a LMP2 car! Fix was easy LPM2 cars were required to carry extra weight to slow them down.

Several seconds time difference between professional drivers But temperatures, tyres, track conditions, fuel load can also add to huge time differences.

In lfs most races are done under ideal conditions, no wind and 20c Celsius and no effect from the sun. Add them all up and you end up with 6 second difference. That is not from a fear factor, racing drivers who are scared die or are very slow.

Quote from CarlLefrancois :

we could allow servers to specify the tire temps for each car type at the start of a race.

reason: sometimes real life calls and i leave my car parked on track, then come back to find tires at track temp (20 degrees everywhere i presume).

it is quite a bit different to drive using these "cold tires" (ie _real_ cold tires) than with what you usually have at the start of an online race.

server admins could choose to enable this for extra challenge in early laps, and for the gt cars, pre-warmed tires are not a given anyway?



ps did not check if this was already suggested! bad me!:hide:

Good idea but lfs has some problems at the moment:
Real tyres and lfs tyres are very different. LFS tyres turn in to round ice-wheels at 20 degrees. Regular real-life tyres perform well from 10 to 65 degrees celcius and outside this range they don't suddenly loose all grip. LFS tyres range is only 10 degrees and only inner-side-tempature of the tyre determines how much grip the entire tyre has.

Idea has been suggested before, but new tyre physics are required to be able to have drivable cars. After that update, this is a good suggestion though

Quote from selene :

that's... 82158.9418 miles!!!
ffs, he must be racing while sleeping, too )

Anyway, he really deserves the voucher!
Well done, mate!

Mwah I think there are many drivers with more miles driven.
I have 268968km (167164 miles) driven. I don't think i make it to top 50 regarding to total miles driven since i rarely raced on ovals.

"Who gives a crap if tyres dont milimetrically perform like real life?"
It would be nice to have some quick fixes to the current tyre-modelling until complete reworked tyre-modelling is fixed.

It is seriously frustrating that if inner-side of tyre goes 1 celcius out of optimum temperature grip goes down dramatically. Tyre wear should be much more dependent on temperature of the tyre, grip levels should be much less dependent on temperature. Fixing this would improve handling of the cars a lot. In general, real life tyres are much better and than the ones in lfs and also do not overheat that fast. In fact in real life after driving 20 minutes flat out on standard road tyres on swerving roads(Germany) at 240kph; tyres got only to about 30 to 35 degrees Celsius. According to lfs they should be 180+ degrees Celsius after 20 minutes.

I am already waiting for over three years(!) for this issue's to be addressed. I am hardly doing any driving in lfs anymore. When i start racing again I get frustrated again Bernie Ecclestone requested pirreli to make tyres in season 2013 worse! F1 Tyres started to last entire races. Grip levels really got out of control; Tyres got too much grip without ever overheating resulting in dangerously high corner speeds. Back to lfs, Just looking at the tyres of the bf1 will make them go on fire...

There are other small problems like cars roll more than irl, i can accept that, nothing is perfect and no simulation will ever be perfect, but the tyre-temperature+wear defects are so seriously annoying... If those would be fixed, the worst defects in lfs will be fixed and lfs get usable as even better and greater simulator until the entire reworked physics are released

Quote from seniecka :

Well. CPU is tricky thing. Not easy to just upgrade it since, as one of you guys already stated, you need to upgrade motherboard. So.. Not a cheap excursion.

Check your motherboards compatibility list, phenom II 965/970 should fit into a board which can handle a 925 in 95% of cases. But is the money worth the extra performance? If you are lucky performance increases with 20%.

Upgrading from ddr-2 to ddr-3 memory will require a new system-board.

The GPU needs to be fed with lots of data which needs to be computed by the CPU. That is why Graphics cards have huge bandwidths available to communicate with the cpu. Over 1gbyte/sec (byte not bit) is currently very common for each graphics card in your system

Since lfs is really single threaded, one cpu core going to be very busy. GPU's are used to offload big part of the work load from the cpu, but not everything. The number of cars in view has the biggest impact on FPS in lfs. It doesn't matter whether the cars are in your mirrors or in front of you. And that is exactly what your problem is?

LFS did receive some graphical updates long time ago(three years?), also people are also using higher textures resolutions and number of cars allowed on the grid has been increased a few years ago.

If you really want to be sure a cpu core is the bottleneck you'll need to run monitoring software and check if lfs is often using 25% cpu, assuming your cpu has 4 real cores and hyperthreading is off, you most likely have a cpu bottleneck....

Ancient article about bandwidths:
http://www.tomshardware.com/re ... caling-analysis,1572.html
Please note: newer pci-express types provide a lot more bandwidth per lane!

Quote from majod :

IMHO LFS is very badly optimized. It's running on old Direct X, the graphics are far from advanced/current standard and still while looking at 20+ cars in front of me I'm lucky to get over 40FPS. (alone it's always 60fps with vsync).

I also have HD7850 OC, Q9400 and 6GB ram (Win 7 x64)

Your CPU is also a bit outdated It was introduced Q3 2008, over 4 years ago.
Simple indication how much faster cpu's are 4 years later:
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cp ... e2+Quad+Q9400+%40+2.66GHz

it performs similar to phenomII 925/940, not surprising you get the same performance as the topic starter. Sounds really identical

LFS is not multithreaded; your cpu AND memory are not particularly fast. 40FPS on an older system with many cars nearby isn't that bad, it is what you should expect from your system.

For more fps you may need more Mhz on the CPU and faster memory which would require you to upgrade your systemboard, making it not an easy upgrade. Getting a faster(more Mhz) CPU of the same architecture will probably have the most effect for the smallest price. Getting more cpu-cores won't help.

Maybe its just best to turn down the graphics a bit on busy servers?


I always get 99 to 100 fps, because i have limited the framerate to 100. Creating more frames is just a waste of energy which is really an issue with the lousy 6970 msi lighting II card. CPU usage is about 8% to 12%. 5 cores actually doing nothing at all while runnig lfs. Please note, cpu-cores from an 1100T and a phenom 925 are not very different from each other.

WIN7 64bit
amd1100T underclocked at 3.29Ghz, turbo disabled, 4x4 DDR3@1613Mhz CL9, ati 6970@900Mhz (under-clocked msi lighting II).
1920x1200, all graphics settings on maximum possible.

Quote from col :

It seems clear to me that the act of uploading skins to LFS implicitly give others the right to download and use them as they see fit.
Until LFS includes some sort of DRM, or at least a way of including a copyright licensing notice with each skin, then the idea of skin theft is blatant nonsense. For a skin to remain private, you would have to avoid uploading it.

+1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1

I agree!

Cheat detetcion relative to time won't work. Long time ago i lapped faster than wr on so sprint 1. Since other improved their setups, i am no longer fastest/or i am not good enough
But a system based om times would considered me a cheater.

I do notice some people with rubbish setups and even worse gearing manage to make fantastic times. Some case identical setups appear to be gripping and accelerating better and faster. Some will be really good drivers who are simply better than me and in a rare case it will be a cheater.

Only way to detect this, on server-side needs to to constant check on if physics-defined in game are not violated. Guess, it takes too much cpu-power unless lfs will start using at least 6 threads on server-side. Otherwise i see no way to check 20+ cars on the server-side for cheating.

Quote from 1303s_vortech :

There is torque loss with cvt/auto (due to slip factor), engine braking is weaker, fuel consumption is worst...well... apart for people with handicap, could someone tell us what's the benefit when you can use your legs & feet as a normal person do?

Please dont tell its easier to drive in traffic jam, there's none on a race track...

I suppose you will sell your vacuum-cleaner and use your broom instead? Good, it saves a lot of energy

Modern auto-boxes have very complex software built in. For example, when and how much let the torgue converter to slip so you can accelerate better from 5km/h in 2nd gear, but when to decide to change gear to 1st when throttle position is gone down too much, or when speed increases the slip will be reduced. gradually depending on throttle position, speed, load of car...

I say no to auto-boxes in lfs is very complex to program and get it really right! And i have driven a car which had a autobox with flawed software in it. the software destroyed the gearbox!! by making wrong gear down changes(3rd -> 2nd at 110+km/h on a standard road car with a standard 2 liter engine, auch!)

Quote from cargame.nl :

No big deal then.. Will be fixed in the next patch. :doh:

mm next path, i am already waiting two years for physics update and that vw car Now another reason to wait more.. more

Quote from Sobis :

pff... my specs: AMD Athlon (tm) 3000+ 1,8 GHz, 2GB RAM, 1 GB(but my Win 7 shows only 512 MB ) VRAM (nVidia GT 240).

At cruise server (For example: AS4x) I get 40-80 fps and when cars (7+) on screen I get 20-50 fps.

Maybe try updating your drivers?

Very consistent with performance of the system of the topic starter Same generation hardware same performance?

fps with lfs on my system: 100, many cars: 100fps, always 100 boring:auto:

Quote from osteriossi :

So i have some FPS lags on lfs, normally its something 50-60, but when i see few cars front of me it drops to 25-35. And one time my firend visited at my house and he has S2, i wanted to try if my computer can run open tracks, and then it drops from 50 (original track) to 5-15 (open track), what is my problem, i think my computer meets system requirements.

System specs:

AMD Athlon(tm) Processor LE-1620 2.4 GHz
2.0 GB RAM
ATI Radeon X1250 830.6 MB
Free disc space: 102.0 GB

Maybe too low ram? Thanks.

Maybe the whole system is a outdated? lfs doesn't need a very fast system, but your system-specs are really from the history books
option one: Buy new system
Alternative:
stop all unnecessary services, background programs, turn details to lowest setting possible, reduce screen resolution etc.

Last edited by Bluebird B B, Sat, 24 Dec 2011 09:06. Reason : typo

Quote from FPVaaron :

Fields of at least 400, I'm serious. I want 400 cars all fighting for position.

First we'll need a track about 60km long and then it will be very cool! Good idea for 2018 when (maybe) everyone has at least 150mbit/sec up and down.

Quote from The Very End :

It is. LFS does only utilize single core usage atm.
Scawen mentioned some time back that they are thinking of adding dual core (quad too probally) utilizing in the future.

There are now cpu's available which are really solely optimized to run multi-threaded applications, so multicore support better comes real fast!

@scipy
o ups, my knowledge of f1 rules is outdated :something

I was still thinking they still had traction control too. Without, overtaking is slightly harder but descent corner exit+DRS=overtake