If these havn't been mentioned, then Bathurst Australia, it really is an awesome track that goes up around and down a mountain and secondary Phillip Island which is a nice flowing track with a 5th gear right hander at the end of the straight.

http://www.mount-panorama.com/
http://www.phillipislandcircuit.com.au/

Maybe LFS tyres have tougher tyre walls ? The V8 tyres shown in that clip have very soft walls, it is supposed to give better brake feel.

That's the reason why the run so much camber on the fronts, becuase the tyre 'pulls under' so much on cornering.

hey robster, it was a shame about that nasty incident, yes, that was in the V8 development support race, although the guy that died, Mark Porter, was supposed to be a co driver during the main race aswell. Very sad and very unexpected. Those cars are full of bars everywhere and they are very tough cars.

Yeah ok, they did do some reruns of BTCC for a short time (great racing too) years back. Trackside was ditched last year and even then they offered very limited, cut up coverage of some major support races delayed by a week or more. They have done Motorbike Stuff and they do a decent job of the local rallying, I do admit.
There is alot more motorsport around nowadays, with or without 10.

My memories of 7 are Sunday afternoons watching coverage of Formulee Fords, Sports Sedans, production cars, Appendix J, and of course the main game, Group A (and with decent incar camera !) although I do recall that the coverage went bad at one point with cut up delays played at night.

None of that has gone to cable, it is all still running, plus alot more (except Group A of course), but what we see on 10 on raceday is one delayed V8 race, one live, and maybe you get the Sat race live (sometimes) or at about 11pm Sat night. It is all the top end of town stuff coupled with alot of talk to fill in the gaps where the support races are.

Don't get me wrong, there is some good racing in there, and I'm not saying TEN are totally useless, but what they do represent of Australian motorsport is a small cross section of the top end $$$$ stuff only, nothing even close to grass roots in represented.

Anyway I'm a happy camper on Sunday with 2 hours speedweek to watch, as long as it isn't drag racing or boats !

Last edited by soarer, Thu, 12 Oct 2006 05:26.

It was a great race and the ending was incredible ... bought a tear to my eye I can tell you and it couldn't have been won by a nicer guy.

Unfortunately most of the incar shots that Channel 10 show, don't show the steering wheel work so all you get is the passenger view, not knowing what is going on with the steering (except for the very occasional shot from Greg Murphy's car, but you still can't see out the front window properly).

I think the reason for the strange incar shot is that they can fit more sponsorship logos in from that angle.

I watched it all via the satellite feed, so have one TV setup with the incar only feeds and another on the main 10 feed.

I certainly wouldn't say that 10 has done great things for motorsport at all. Sure they have supported V8 "Supercars" and the V8 "Superstars" however there is no coverage of anything else anymore (from them), no more coverage of Sport Sedans, Apendix J, Improved Production, Formula Ford (and any other open wheeler class) or the new classes that are running now (eg thunder sports).

It all only V8's Supercars , V8 development series (old V8 Supercars) and a few laps of the GT3's, that's it. 3 different cars only representing Australian track racing by channel 10 all year long. Thank goodness for speed week as they show all of the really interested stuff on SBS on Sunday.

I also dislike how ten always delays the F1 for about 10 - 20 minutes on their advertised time because big brother or idol runs overtime. It happens almost everytime. They almost never show F1 live either, becuase that would interfer with their evening programs. They don't give good coverage of A1 either (virtually none).

The Group A days where much more interesting than the current era. Group A was an international class that bought international teams from all over the world to compete. It was the class the made Bathurst Famous. A class where there where more than just 2 makes of cars. Back in those days channel 7 had really good incar camera shots, on the roof shots, front bumper shots, decent incar shots showing the steering work and vision out the front in the same shot, faster pans on the incar camera etc. I personally think they did a better job, but time will tell how they go this time around (who knows they might contract out the same guys as 10 uses anyway).

Last edited by soarer, Wed, 11 Oct 2006 11:32.

Thanks mkinnov8 and I have to point out that the sponsership all came about because you where offering so much free help and advise over the last couple of weeks, so thank you very much for that. One good turn deserves another

Also mkinnov8 is now part of the LFS Servers team and is helping with LFS Servers and some other projects we have running, so our clients are in good hands.

Thanks again Kev

Thanks appreciate it.

If things go well I'll be looking for an Aussie server also ... problem is bandwidth over here is about 50 times more expensive !

Thanks to the feedback of the LFS community and some beta testing work by some kind LFS'ers, LFS Servers is now a reality.

http://www.lfsservers.com

Probably best to just click on the above link to find out the pricing information.

I've had lots of ping reports from all over the place and ping times average from 20ms to around 90ms over U.S, Canada and Europe, giving a huge usable geographic coverage area.

I hope you find the pricing and service to your liking.

Thanks again to everyone that has helped with free advice and beta testing.

Regards,
Steve

TC Admin is a control panel for users to uses to start / stop and admin the game. http://www.tcadmin.com


LFS has to start before the lapper starts. If LFS restarts, then the lapper needs to restart after it .. and yeah I thought about the batch file but not sure how that will work with TC Admin .. but I guess if TC Admin is configed to use the batch instead of the LFS.exe then that should work .... hey good idea, I'll give it a try

Edit - Actually it probably won't work becuase the batch file is just going to call LFS and Lapper, but TC Admin will simply try to stop the batch file during a server restart if it is setup to run the batch file rather than LFS.exe.

Last edited by soarer, Mon, 2 Oct 2006 15:38.

ok thanks, I guess its no big deal to start them both each time.

I have lapper running, and it looks good. I have one question please.

I've got LFS setup through TC Admin, so it can be restarted easily by users, however whenever LFS is restarted it looses lapper, even if I put in the /insim 29999 command in, it won't start unless I restart lapper.exe after the LFS start.

I guess I could setup lapper in TC Admin and then just use TC Admin to restart lapper after every LFS restart, but I was wondering if there is a way around that eg make lapper restart automatically after LFS restarts ?

thanks,
Steve

btw My Boss ... the ping rate comes up when you select the list of servers in LFS .. .you see the server name and a number on the right ... that is the ping.

Yeah that's it .... "Internatioanl" ... doh .. I've fixed that typo.

Running Windows 2003 Server on all 3 boxes. 2 Are exact same hardware, one is slightly different, but I see the same behaviour on all three boxes.

I've been able to connect 100% of the time when I try and you guys seem to be able to connect 100% of the time ... I guess it's a client side problem, maybe wrong version or a temporary network problem on their side.

Sometimes, if I leave the games running for a few days then I see lots and lots of "New Guest Timed Out" messages .... so I am restarting the games once every 24 hours which seems to prevent that, other than the odd one here and there.

I'll keep an eye on it anyway.

Thanks for that, appreciate it.

I'm seeing a few "New Guest Timed out messages" occasionally on all three of my servers. They all have the required ports open and people have been using them successfully. I'm just wondering why that message sometimes appears.

Could some kind people do a test login to the LFS game called

International UK - US GTR

Please let me know if there is any failures on login (or successes)

Thanks.

btw This beta test is available for U.K LFS users also. Our east coast server pings at 90ms from the U.K with only 11 hops (there arn't many gateways under the ocean !! ).

I have a pretty good response so far. I have just registered http://www.lfsservers.net (and .com) and I'll get started on a website soon.

Tube, I sent a PM regarding that request.

Thanks for your questions.

>Does the server come with a control panel?

During the Beta test there is no CP, but I will be able to supply a CP with paid usage (TCAdmin).

>Does the clients have access to an area where the configuration can be >changed easily, restarts, and stopped?

I believe that will be possible through TC Admin.

> Can Layouts be uploaded?

That is something I will have to investigate with the TC Admin setup. It should be possible, but I don't want to make a promise I can't keep.

> Can Unofficial mods be added, LFS Lapper for instance?

That is something that could also be beta tested, to determine any load / security issues, but yes, I would like to be able to offer the LFS lapper. I'll look at other mods on a case by case basis.

> What data is collected and where can it be accessed?

The data that is to be collected is related to the server loading. It is collected by me through various means (e.g performance graphs).

Just for the record I have attached the current loading of the East Coast server (the other 2 two servers are very much the same). There is of course much more to server usage than just CPU usage. e.g network usage, disk I/O, memory I/O times and usage, swap usage etc etc and I don't plan to make all of that info public, partly because other software such as voice servers may be running making the information for anyone other than myself on these systems, irrelevant. The data I'm collecting is designed to allow me, to detirmine the best pricing model and to make sure the servers are not going to run too hot. In todays market that is a fine balance and if it's stuffed up then your either too expensive or laggy, overloaded and unreliable. The last thing a server admin, or a client wants is an overloaded server.

Last edited by soarer, Wed, 27 Sep 2006 12:56.

Well I wasn't planning to bore them with that information, but if you do participate ejp-dmi and you really want to know about the server loading, I can send you some info, no problems at all

After discussing this with the kind folk here on the LFS forums, I've decided to offer free LFS servers for a period of 14 days as part of a beta test program.

There is no obligations at all. I will ask for a full name and email address, however the email address will be kept completely private. I will send out one email with pricing information once pricing is confirmed after the 14 days.

You get a top notch LFS server that can host up to 20 cars for 14 days and I get the data that you produce by using it. You can run the server as public or private, using whatever name you wish.

There are three servers to choose from, Seattle, Houston and New York.

If you are interested please email me at [email protected] or post a reply here.

hehe, I guess you call it the free market ... demand and supply and all that kind of stuff. I'm certainly not out to rip anyone off or make a killing out of this.

Anyway I think I have definately over estimated how much resources are needed for LFS instance, so I should be able to drop that priced based on that fact. Each server is on 100 M/bit burstable, so BW won't be an issue.

Thanks for your support. LFS is an awesome SIM, easily the best. Keep up the good work. I think I'll go and do a few laps now actually

ok, I'm going to discuss this with my partner further today and then make a new post with the final beta test offer.

Thanks for your advise and do feel free to email me if you want to take a server for a spin for the beta test

I have three physical servers, one in Seattle, one in Texas and one in N.Y. all waiting and eager to do some work ! They aren't just Dual Xeon, they are Dual Core Dual Xeon, I spec'ed them personally and everything in them is the best.

I'm not interested in hosting any of the killing games, my heart is in racing not shooting.

How about this, does anyone want to do a beta test for me ? I'll offer a free LFS 20 car 'server' free for 14 days. There is nothing else running on the servers at all, so I can then do some proper testing and get feedback from the beta testers and then maybe I could look at a different pricing model. I have web hosting servers, and it has always been a rule to run them at around 5% CPU average usage to keep them fast and reliable ... I guess with game servers it is a different story.

Is anyone interested in doing that ? Free 20 slot server for 14 days,

Yeah it's hard to beat the big guys, I know all about that.

I've got a few options for these servers, hosting LFS was the fun / dream option. I may need to look at plan B.

Thanks again for you input.

hmm, well I guess I am approaching this from a different perspective, rather than trying to be the cheapest or most competitive in price, I am trying to offer the best in performance for those that want it. I've not even looked at pricing of other services.

The way I have setup the pricing is so that each LFS cleint gets 1 whole virtual CPU for the 20 car share of the server without overselling. To go lower in price would mean having to stack more than one client per virtual CPU, which can be done, but it means a hotter server than I would normally like to see.

Anyway I do appreciate your comments and I will take them on board.

Regards.
Steve

Actually you can have one of these servers for $5000 U.S + $600 US for the bandwidth for each server, that is the facts. $50 to hire a large percentage of one of those servers is a fair price, hopefully enough so I can break even and continue the service.

I just wanted to let anyone who is interested know about an LFS server offer (with permission from LFS techs).

I have 3 U.S servers - Specs are Dual Core, Dual Xeon, hyperthreaded (4 cores per server, 8 virtual CPU's per server), 1066 Mhz FSB, 4 Gigabyte single sided RAM, 15k SCSI's with RAID 0, Windows 2003 Server, 100 M/bit connection. They are very serious servers on fast commercial networks.

I have one on the East Coast, one in central U.S and one on the West Coast available right now.

Asking $50 per month for 20 car private. Public also available.

All three servers are running as public servers, so feel free to try them out. I also have 1 demo server up and running (from Texas). Servers are under the name Trackday Media.

Also (this is sounding like a stake knife advertisment !) ... also I am offering a free website with each server (either sub domain or your own domain name) .

I'm an LFSer from way back, love the game, love motorsport and hope that I can be part of LFS by offering this service.

If you are intested drop me an email at [email protected] or reply to this post.

Regards,
Steve