hello koshi, adding my 2 cents.

if you want to achieve truly fast times, you have to get closer and closer to the perfect line through the corners.

I watched your first fo8 replay and you doing a great job of staying on the line. my suggestion is to keep driving slow, making it your first job to stay exactly on that line. Once you are so comfortable with a given corner, you go a tiny bit faster, staying on the same line. You'll see, over time if you keep going a little bit faster, you will get very quick.

but stop complaining about lack of grip. the truth is, every driver has this lack of grip. if that fastest driver had any more grip than you, he/she would go even faster. No, it is not the grip you have available but how you use that grip.

you are trying to match how someone else takes a corner, maybe even going on the same line, but the weight balance of your car is not set up to carry the car through the corner. you don't steer perfectly smooth. all the smallest details like that take you a bit farther from the perfect line, the best combination of all moves so that even running out of grip, you still stay on the track.

I hope to meet you on the track! see you

Hi, here is something to try that I have done recently. It helped me see where I can stand to get a lot better at racing.

Try 20 laps of fern bay green reverse XFG in solo mode. The goal is to finish in less than 30 minutes. There is a good set at team inferno site: http://setupfield.teaminferno.hu/

In theory this is not a very hard challenge. In practise, staying that focused for 30 minutes straight was very hard for me and showed me that I try way too hard to go fast. Being quick is more about not screwing up I think!

My times went like this:
30:16.77
30:06.61
30:01.97 doh!
29:52.95

That's it for my idea! Hope it helps you and good luck in LFS. Hope to meet you online soon

+1

in the form of losing credits associated with the driver, or something of value to give the death some meaning without (of course!) meaning you can't continue to drive the simulator.

the reason being I personally feel I have a lot to unlearn in my driving style, specifically because nothing I ever did in racing games actually mattered. If I started to treat the car I was in with the proper respect, I could get much quicker, I think.

would it make people hate the game or something? hmmm.. I still see value in the idea, but not for everyone I agree.

LFS works like a charm under plain Wine for me. Using Ubuntu dapper 6.06 i386 I selected Wine in synaptic and it worked right away. I have no existing Windows installation on that drive: Wine is not piggybacking on an already working installation.

Cons:
no shadows (no big deal)
dials mess up on dash if I use shift-f4
problems getting to full-screen with LFS on top
joystick range and/or deadzone
no force-feedback

Now the last 2 are what make me have windows installed still. I realise that the deadzone and joystick range problems are due to Wine's joystick mapper because in Ubuntu my joystick range is fully detected. So I am needing basically the logitech profiler in Wine.

For the force-feedback, I think it should work, I'm just too lazy to compile the code I found that sends the force messages to the controller. Certainly LFS is already generating these messages

Performance is 80fps+ running on Athlon 64 2Ghz + geforce 7600GT.

hth

I don't know about everyone else here but I find the wheel turn compensation is an option for people who don't have a proper controller at all.

When I raced with a sidewinder joystick and only had 90 degrees of motion, wheel turn compensation helped a lot. Even if I tried to steer incorrectly, the game would keep the steering wheel at an angle that made sense for the corner I was in, because if my real input went into the game, I would lose control.

With wheel turn compensation on, I feel like there is an ai deciding where the wheel should be, and my input is factored against that pre-determined angle.

With wheel turn comp at 0, where I steer is where it goes.


Also, just as reinforcement after reading that someone has their windows settings at something other than 0% for damping and spring effect.. don't do that! LFS just does not expect that kind of interference from the operating system!


to OP - try using with the profiler?

I paid 2.5 X what I paid for my Driving Force Pro.

I got 10.0 X the fun.



quick pros:

pedals!!!
you can feel the front tire grip!!!
wheel is so free is spins on its own when skidding car!!! (+ less noise)

Scawen, I was just coming to post a big thank you note and what do I find?? Another frickin patch!

Thank you thank you thank you! :yipee:

I just received my G25 yesterday and could finally fully experience the hard work you put into the force feedback engine.

The recent sound improvements top it all off. Lift the inside rear on a curb and slack off the throttle a bit, yep there's a subtle change in the gear whine before I get back on the gas. AMAZING!

You've done everything you could to grace my computer with the best simulation of race car piloting I can find.

Thank you.

This is me! ===> :eclipseeh


My coworkers' eyebrows went up as I explained that you can actually feel the flex in the front tyres during hard cornering in the :heyjoe67_ ... you rock.

Some are comparing generated sound to sampled in just one dimension.

I like the mention of listening to a race and then comparing it to LFS. Imagine both are recorded digitally, then picture a segment of audio 0.1 seconds long in high detail: the generated sound doesn't come close to the richness and perfection of the sampled sound. It's lumpy and mechanical. It's plain wrong in some places. Ewww.

But then compare two 2 hour long audio segments. The recording of the actual race will have thousands of individually recognizable seperate "sounds" as defined by humans: a misfire, an exhaust note, a car coming over a crest. A bale of hay flipping around after being hit, the separate pieces of straw each scraping on the ground.

IMO, what LFS aims for is to capture more of the breadth of sounds, a whole other dimension to the game than the precise immitation of real race sounds.

A sample for a piece of straw scraping on the ground is overkill. Besides, even if you wanted to sample everything down to that level, you couldn't get a fraction of the sounds possible. You would be binding yourself down to a particular instance of racing. Simulating a race in another country, where instead of bales of hay we're talking wooden barrels, would mean more sampling.

No, the LFS way means that as the physics engine evolves, the sound generated by the game actually improves. That's novel.

Hi Scavier! Thought I should pass on some comments made about LFS by people knowing nothing about it, and more interestingly, people currently earning undergraduate degrees in multimedia. (Cinematography, computer modelling, animation) During a recent dinner party, a group of exchange students from France saw me demonstrating your game and their universal reaction was that the graphics were fantastic.

Mind you my system is now up to date with fsaa and the like, but to counter-balance that, these are French people we're talking about, and they are reserved with their compliments by nature.

Cool eh? I also showed the game to a friend, a battlefield addict who raves nonstop about how realistic it is.. a very scientific-minded, engineering type, his comment was that the sound wasn't like other games he'd seen, that it was really believable.

Thank you thank you thank you!

trucks? yes if they have jointed bodies like in the extended bus picture.
(D4S TEW 1W9 and 9B9 A8V 1T2 are cool 1f you know what I mean )

but hey, the game says live for speed, not live for speed on a 4 wheeled platform. I'm thinking 500cc superbikes vs fo8 at ky national... and Scawen is talented enough to deliver us a solid-feeling force-simulated bike experience. At least based on what I've seen with the force model when going from s1 to s2 on a joystick.

if he could make the xrt drivable with a microsoft force feedback joystick, he can do anything

Turns out the "next step" was to plug in my DFP. No installation steps were necessary for it to work in LFS.

Not that I'm saying it's perfect as-is. It still needs calibration and tweaking. Also I played with my wheel in 180 degree mode because I didn't know (until later) that I could press a 3 key combo on the wheel to unlock full rotation Have to try that out soon!

Force feedback is weird. At first I thought it didn't work at all, but it's more like there are return to center forces mixed with what the game is sending, basically dulling out LFS's forces. I will try installing the wingman stuff from my old computer, and if that doesn't work I'll see about custom config / coding.

My cycles are now my own!!

minor update. I plugged in my microsoft sidewinder ff joystick and it worked right away. Force feedback isn't working, but neither are the higher numbered buttons so I guess I go a default joystick profile set up for me.

Before, under windows, there was a longish installation process that required hard to find software (if you were like me and lost the CD that came with the thing :shy

tonight I'll find out if I can get FF working

sorry for the delay! I had to scroll down a bit to find this post to put in the update.

after two weeks of visiting family I finally had a few hours to work at my installation again.

lfs.exe now runs correctly and smooth with all details at maximum, 1024x768x32. yes i know, crappy crt

I have yet to work at ff joystick support. however, I plugged in wacom tablet and logitech wingman gamepad and both those installed without any action on my part. not even a beep from the computer I was debugging the gamepad without realising it was already working hrhr.

I am using ubuntu dapper. their site and forums are excellent. clear and forthcoming info there even in my native French. I installed the 32 bit version for now for best support of my graphics hardware and gaming needs.

I was surprised how little effort it took. about the same time as getting tuxracer working on red hat 8 a few years ago. nvidia support is very solid and easy, much reading at transgaming.com and google took care of translating the graphics API for my hardware acceleration and I was able to do all the steps with the synaptic GUI package tool.

what can I say? I paid for my LFS license, and I paid for new hardware and spent about 4 hours reading and trying things on the OS and so far everything works.

next update after I see about supporting my DFP and maybe even my ff joystick for ffshifter

So far so good. Wireless LAN up and running, new pc suits me nicely.

I plugged in a wacom tablet and it worked within 1 second, so I was a bit impressed. I downloaded an update to have all the nice pressure sensitivity stuff.

My 7600GT doesn't come with the drivers I need on the cd. The game bundled with it doesn't specify that it requires Windows. I'm off to install the 8762 drivers and test 3d graphics. Cedega will be later, after visiting with family

I will let you know how it goes.

Thanks for your answers! You are all very helpful, even guessing a bit since I wasn't clear enough.

I have to say, the suggestion by MadCatX "Only thing you can do is disabling all services in msconfig, terminatle all unnecessary background tasks and set LFS to realtime priority in taskmanager." is something I tried, but setting to realtime downgraded performance. Effectively, the OS needs cpu cycles to serve LFS.

I had never thought of having a computer just running LFS and nothing else ever. I wish I had enough money!!! Linux would definitely be the solution in that case.

To be more clear: what I want is all the cycles reserved for LFS *except* the OS can act, if it is to serve LFS.

I don't want this always, just when LFS.exe is active.

What I *don't* want:

-BITS
-cdrom autocheck polling
-random OS calls not related to LFS
-"other" threads executing on my cpu
-basically anything that the OS does that is not in my control that takes up CPU cycles.

So, I am installing linux.


"About that linux LFS-only distribution: Linux also uses CPU cycles as same as Windows do, but in linux is everything complicated because of WineX or Cedega."

but in Windows, everything is complicated because you don't actually have final control over your machine. I dare anyone to try, shut down as many applications and services as you like, then run filemon and regmon and tell me you have absolutely no "noise" coming from your OS

I will take the (measurable, static) slowdown from cedega over .. well just what exactly is happening on my machine anyway?

My question is about cpu cycles.

I love LFS and would like to have the purest experience.

What I want is your opinion, as an expert (maybe in disguise): is it possible to run a clean système, one where all the cycles stay dedicated to LFS, while being in contact with the LFS tcp/ip world?

I have a virgin box.
Next steps are hazy.

Quote from dave81983 :

I can understand that when shifting I'm in neutral for a split second which will slow me down a bit. However the main loss in time appears to come from ... Is there any way to combat this problem.

Yeah dude, wait for the next patch (Well, not the *next* patch like U13 or the like, but the next rev of LFS)

In typical LFS style, we are inching towards an ever more real racing world. A world when when the stick of your shifter reaches a gear, your gearbox does too.

Right now when I use ffshifter it takes me about .05 seconds to hit the next gear and then the sim lets my gearbox be there .2 seconds later. I don't care.. some day when the sim is a little bit closer to the real thing, what I'm already doing (right) will be rewarded and I will look back at the slower racer using his button-clutch keyboard-crutch thingy and go "HOWS THAT DUST EDWARD?? LIKING IT???"

I need to go home.. work is too boring!!!

just for sake of comparison,

I sometimes get one or two servers under 100

at the bottom of the list, a few start to creep over 200 and I've avoided those almost always.

I don't actually notice any lag when in-game. Although.. if someone enters or leaves pit-screen during a race, I get a half-second lag spike usually. (long enough for the wheel to lose force momentarily)

Notice in the BF1 this means insta-spin in 90% of the cases

However, have to say that I stay connected, and almost always on-track and in the race. Thanks Scawen!

Cool topic.

Briefly, to get to where LFS would be watched by an audience, it would have to present something unique and/or significantly interesting compared to what is already out there.

As someone who spends a lot of time observing LFS races, I can tell you that we aren't there yet.

I love watching live races, and I think it's simply amazing to be able to hop from one car to another, with unlimited camera angles (not yet perfected but you get the picture). Also, the LFS community has some incredible talent on the side of the drivers, and also on the side of developers who create the environment.

Having said all that, I only really appreciate the racing because I know how hard it is.

In real life, I bet half the crowd only goes to a race in case there is an accident, so they can see something thrilling. Just having a thousand kilo hunk of metal flying by you at an astonishing speed is a thrill. LFS is on a computer screen. (also sitting trackside and watching cars go by in a live race is something of a stutter-fest at the moment, at for me on my sub-par machine)

So where does that leave us? We already have a great base: the environment, the driving talent. What we need is something unique, something people will be thrilled by, even if it's on a computer screen, and the human support side of the broadcasting.. the organisation and commentary, and the sponsorship hunting etc.

Personally I think if it will ever happen, the key will be that we as sim racers are not limited by reality. We already see this a bit in the way we can have unlimited camera angles to observe the race. From LFS's spirit so far, we can gather Scawen doesn't intend to publish billion horsepower cars, magnetic wheel cars, thousand foot jumps, space driving, etc etc etc as part of the LFS universe. So to attract people.. hmmm

mortal avatars?
something at stake during the race?
exceptionally dangerous courses that drivers would be too afraid to try for real?
some link to reality for comparison with real racers?

Ok ramble mode off.

Quote from Ayrton :

If they finish construction on the connector between the Aston north loop and the last turn of the Club circuit, I think I counted that there should be a potential 37 layouts in each direction...

it would be cool to have an fe black - style mega-loop where you do all the individual parts of aston in a marathon lap

Quote from 5th Earth :

I would particularly like to direct people to photo a6 in Hyperactive's post. Most people don't really understand Chicago--it goes around the left side of the tire wall and has short left turns on the entrance and exit. I've got a better picture of it here--shows the Gambon side of the track as well, but no Hammerhead (fortunately Hyperactive has another pic that shows Hammerhead quite clearly)

It's really a shame that the autocross areas we have are so small.

I spent quite a bit of time on recreating the top gear track and making many other autocross layouts and I can safely say there is no way to make the kind of corner shown in that photo in LFS at the moment.

There just isn't room to take a 120 degree corner off a straight, onto another straight.

I'm seriously thinking of going back and having a go at adding the hammerhead corner in, however. A shame 'chicago' can't be represented but maybe something can be done to give a bit of the feel anyway.

Anyhow .. back to work

Quote from Honey :

to me a solution could be a server based crash recording (maximum 10 or 20 seconds) in mpr format wich the server will upload directly to lfs master server. such thing will record usernames involved in car by car contacts and scores a negative point for each of that player. crash record and report will be triggered either by "high speed" crashes automatically or by at least 3 users voting for "crash report".

I would have loved an option like this a week or so ago.. I was home for lunch and a 5 lap race on Aston North before heading back to work. Right at the end of the race some ass parked on the verge drove in front of me just as I was coming up the backstretch hunting down 3rd place.

Some of my French friends pronounce it as in "live racing action"

Oh and by the way, the admin command parameter for enable/disabling the FXO is .. FXO

Quote from sgt.flippy :

That's what you use those two buttons for
What else would you want to use them for? I can't really think of a button I'd use that really needs to be on the wheel...

-look left
-look over left shoulder
-look right
-look over right shoulder (in LFS, big diff esp in open wheelers)
-pit speed limiter
-handbrake (rally fan )
-horn

and in the not critical but nice category:
-TC toggle
-flash headlights

I guess I can do without a horn button and a pit speed limiter, but the handbrake is something I don't want to be hunting a button for . Used correctly, you can save a little side-trip on the grass and 5 seconds out of your race. And the horn can save some accidents in multi-player.


I'm kind of in disbelief about the number of buttons on the wheel.


But can't wait to have a clutch pedal!

A bit more info..

to use the default start position, just delete your self-made start object (the big green arrow that shows up when you press S in the autocross editor.)

doing this means that more than one racer can start the race at the same time. Where they show up is usually in front of the start lights.. but do what the first reply said and restart your race to see where it puts you.


When you type /laps=0, you have to be in the race setup screen, i.e. where you go after you "end race"

HTH
-Carl