Short little track for the mrt. Slow section, really fast section, tightly barriered turns/slalom as well as some really open corners. I get around the 43-44s mark, mid 41's should be entirely possible.

All done with cones and checkpoints and haybails so there are none of those damn red and white barriers to launch you into orbit. The haybails are mostly used to block your view of the cones that aren't part of the bit of track you're on so you don't get lose track of where you're going. The coloured sections were done with that in mind too.

The last screenie is the overview of the whole course. Give it a shot, have fun and please give me some feedback so the next one can be better.

Quote from Glenn67 :

oh really ...

Ok, to be honest I just assumed that a ping over 400 would be unplayable. I never actually tested it. I'll give it a shot tonight and see how it works.

Quote from Dark Elite :

...if a connection that takes fifty-ish hours to download 120MB is capable of racing against a large field, I really can't think of any reason why anybody with a connection who has the game can't play online.Sam

There are precisely four servers where I get a ping in to 100-150 range. After that it jumps up to at least 450 for every other server. This is with a 256/64 connection. The reason there are so few servicable servers is because I live in Perth . It's basically really far from everywhere else in Australia and Australia is really far away from europe and north america. The 100-150 ping servers are on the east coast, every other server in the world is at least around half a second away. Downloading from overseas is no problem as throughput is fine, but playing on overseas servers is impossible with such high latency.

Not everyone always has the connection speed or the bandwidth or the variety of servers to play online.

Still, I think a decent ai is more important than (and is necessary for there to be) a championship mode.

I think this is something like how I'm after a 1988 Holden Camira wagon. Largely a bad car, my old one never didn't have problems but it was my first car and I still miss it. It had oddly soft suspension, amazingly soft and boucy seats, was really underpowered and the electrics were a constant problem and the automatic gearbox got stuck in third (it's highest gear) sometimes but no other car I've driven has felt so honest and real. I would love to own another one in future and get it running reliably.

I've never followed MotoGP or even watched a race, but I cought the last two thirds of the race tonight and loved it. Really interesting to see a new form of motorsport and for a sport that I don't follow and didn't know anything about (except Rossi's name and the odd Roy and HG rant about Stoner) it was really exciting.

Besides, it's always good to see an aussie win a world title that isn't cricket.

Quote from Woz :

??? I have passed all the tests in LFS. Its not that hard to pass clean.

It's not that it's hard to pass cleanly, but that the ai simply cannot deal with anything that isn't following the same line as it is. More often than not you get shunted on turn one and spin out only to be shunted once again on the turn after you catch up and overake. The ai doesn't try to avoid collisions with non-ai.

I think they can overtake on straights though.

Quote from Shotglass :

...suckz0r !!!!11111 lim x->0 sin(x)/x

Hilarious!

Sorry if I sounded like I was yelling there, that's not how it was meant to come across. I could probably have left most of that post out (I forum to waste time while I'm working so I can get carried away with anything that's not an assignment).

Anyway, nice layout. I like the fast middle bit and the way you used that little side road (probably one of my favourite bits of track in the game tbh). The only bit that I would change are the heavy red and white barriers that launch you if you mess up in the tighter, technical bits into tyre walls or cones or haybails or something (but this is something I would change on nearly every layout ever).

I'll definitely give it a spin some time.

Pictures! not videos. Or if they are videos make them a little youtube style thing rather than 54mb. It'd be quicker finishing up the work I should be doing, rebooting into windows and just playing the damn thing.

There is nearly no motorsport coverage here. Maybe the V8's sometimes and the F1 delayed telecasts if I feel like staying up past midnight for the race to start. Foxtel only shows NASCAR.

The only nickname for the imprezas I've actually heard used is 'rex'. Short for WRX, but used for nearly every variety of impreza there is.

Thanks heaps. That guide is a really useful read. I think in my earlier post I might have over-estimated the effect of weight transfer at turn in and exit.

Also could someone tell me exactly what it does?

I'm guessing toe in on the front wheels will promote oversteer and toe out understeer. At the rear wheels it'd be the other way around? I'm basing this on an the way the outer wheels would be pointing when cornering hard (since there is little weight on the inside ones).

I suppose on turn in with toe in at the front it'd be sharper but then you'd be more likely to just turn the wheel sideways and skid too?

Coming off the turn with toe out at the back would help with stopping the tail kicking out (since the inner tyre would pull it back in as the weight shifts back onto it). Toe in would help the outer tyre slide if that's what you're after.

And large amounts of either will lower your maximum straight line speed.

Is there something I overlooked or is my first glance not bad?

I'm getting 34-35s in the uf1. I reckon I could cut off at least another second around those 270 degree turns if I had a wheel (gamepads that don't let you max both axis at the same time are no fun, mine hardly lets me touch the throttle at full lock).

Fun course though.

Slower ai I can deal with (with handicaps and driving a different car to everyone else). The biggest problem in my opinion is that they seem to be completely oblivious to anyone not on their racing line (and even then it's iffy).

The whole 'race online' argument is pretty silly since it's not applicable to everyone. There are two servers that I get pings below 170ms on. Of these one is always empty and the other is private a fairly often.

That's not going to do you much good if you want to shoot things that are far away. If you meant prime lenses (ie, fixed focal length) then yeah, usually they are cheaper and a bit sharper too.

If it was a full frame camera I'd tell you to dig around for some old slide holders and then hold one up at 18 to 55mm (and then a bunch of other distances) from your eye and look at the angle that is framed by it. You'd see that at 18mm (don't go poking your eye out with a ruler btw) you can see a pretty wide angle and at 55mm you frame this nice comfortable amount. Most non-zoom point and shoots have a focal length of about 50mm since it's really similar to what you normally see.

The D40 (and most (all?) low to mid-end dslrs) use APS-C format sensors which are smaller than your normal 35mm frame. To be able to use the above technique for these you need to either multiply the focal lengths by around 1.6 or cut out a piece of card with similar dimensions to the sensor (for the d40 the sensor is 23.7 × 15.6 mm). So that 18-55mm is effectively a 25-90mm or so lens. It's pretty versatile.

You can see that for taking pictures of racing or wildlife you'll be needing a much longer focal length, say 300mm and up. Landscapes and scenery tend to benefit wide angles, 18 will probably suffice. Portraiture has sweetspots at kinda wide (~28mm) and kinda long (~90-125mm). Macro photography (really close up) is typically done with lenses at around 100mm with special close focussing capabilities. Note that these are by no means rules and you can use any lens for anything you can get it to do.

There are a bunch of great sites that I've forgotten since I started to learn, but none of them were really more than a google away.

OP: the cheaper Canon 70-300 always felt kinda flimsy to me. Though maybe it's because I've only got this old solid aluminium topcon zoom lens and the Canon 60mm f2.8 macro to compare it to (neither of which I reckon I could take in a fight). Performance-wise I'm not really sure, since getting the macro lens it's barely left my camera (and since my battery died and I can't be bothered forking out for a new one it's all been getting dusty in the drawer).

I don't think it's really worth watching until the finals, when the games are a little more evenly matched. But then it'll likely be all the same games we've been seeing in the trinations.

The South Africa v Samoa game was interesting for the first half; some interesting plays on Samoa's part but some very questionable umpiring too. I think Samoa's second try not being payed pretty much broke their spirit and from then on it wasn't worth watching.

Watch the first twenty minutes, then read the score later and check youtube for the highlights for now. The finals will be more interesting.