Just a quick note to say that I have moved home and no longer have the uber broadband connection I once had. I doubt I can adequately stream video of races any more.


Looking forward to the new season, thanks to FF Tim and FF S.Varjonen for getting most of the work done.

Yes I know it's pre-beta and Windows 8 isn't ready for prime time but I went and installed it anyway.

This isn't really a bug in LFS but it might be fixable in game because Microsoft probably will leave it the way it is.

In Windows 8, the far left edge of the screen is now an activator for ALT+TAB, moving and clicking in that area causes the current viewed window to flip out and be replaced with another. This even occurs whilst racing in LFS in full screen (with mouse controls of course).

Only fix I can think of is to make LFS ignore the far left edge by removing say 20 pixels from the boundary or something. Is it possible? Maybe.

Well I agree with your reasoning. It's working ok as is and introducing something new is always risky.

Bump - download not working, can people please upload somewhere again?

Hi Tim,

Thought I'd some some requests - not sure if all are possible or not but worth a shot.

While Quali-ing I would like the following:

In the shift+I menu, and option to see the grid so far. Could be tricky with 100 racers but LFS may have a scroll system in place if there is lots of text - there is in the menu system.

The lap time counter that pops up in the middle of the screen to turn green when quali time has improved - red if it hasn't. Similar to the one in the top right corner but bigger.

Thanks.

Quote from Psiho :

here's my set for the first race if anyone is interested, would appreciate comments

Nice set - I actually can go around without spinning. Shame I can't go fast but currently 14/15. Dunno who the hell can be slower than me but someone managed it!

I don't think you'll find any of the staff said they minded open wheel racing or said the season isn't great - I just said I didn't like the FO8.

Ah so it sounds like Solar is volunteering to be a commentator for us this season everyone :-p

Quote from russraine :

Just been installing the GFX and Sound Packs to make it a bit better for the stream.

Yeah I have previously been using TVDirector since the first version arrived from SS. The latest one does do the player names and times every so often (at the bottom), just in our league we can't recognize everyone just from the car skins alone.
So player names are handy. Not so important if you can do commentary I grant you.

(as for Firefox, I'm finding FF4b12 quite stable)

EDIT

Just been testing out the streaming at low resolutions to start with, making sure I can get a good picture etc. Might arrange a test stream and ask quite a few people to come and watch see how the quality is for everyone.

Thanks for the setup Ant - will give that a try.

Just been installing the GFX and Sound Packs to make it a bit better for the stream.

Yeah I have previously been using TVDirector since the first version arrived from SS. The latest one does do the player names and times every so often (at the bottom), just in our league we can't recognize everyone just from the car skins alone.
So player names are handy. Not so important if you can do commentary I grant you.

(as for Firefox, I'm finding FF4b12 quite stable)

I'll give Revolution a go then.

Quote from jensbrix :

Have you never seen the MoE, GTAL, IGTC, iTCC streamings?

Nope - if you can get me a link to some video that would be cool

Just splashed out and bought myself another 2 gigs - should be ok to do high def streaming now.

I will give it a go - thanks.

Right, graphics anyone?

Quote from jensbrix :

But why can't it show names? The overlay with names and distance between the drivers like there is in the big leagues would do it for me, and then we must see how well the automatic camera works.

The auto camera app takes LFS out of it's normal camera mode and into another one, in this mode you can't see player names above the cars. I've not seen any other LFS streaming lately, if you can point me in the right direction I'll go and see what they're doing.

Hi there,

I wanted to post some info and a couple of questions and see how people feel about streaming video of races this season.

As some of you may know for quite a few seasons we've attempted to do video streaming of some of the action during the season. We've had good times and bad times but usually it's worked okay.

Now bearing in mind that LFS and the tools used to do the streaming have barely moved in in four years, is it worth setting things up to stream races this season?

Notes:

• Commentary: The way in which the footage is captured and streamed means it's impossible for live spoken commentary unless I (or someone in my house) does it. We always get people asking and offering to do it - this can only be done locally on the PC being used to upload the video/audio. I am not a commentator and as such, can't offer this.
  
• Music: I have always liked playing some great tunes on the stream to make up for commentary but nearly always people don't like it. It appears that most viewers have crap taste in music compared to me. This means that the only thing you'll hear is LFS Sounds.
  
• Camera work: There are currently two options for camera work.
  An automated system that tries to keep up with the action but doesn't always work properly. Also when it's running - you can't see player names. Manual camera controls means I need to sit here for hours and change it all myself, I've done it before but it starts to hurt my butt after a while. Usually I end up doing a mix of both.
  
• Quality: In theory I have enough upload speed (around 10Mb) to do a gorgeous High Def stream - however my PC currently only has 2 Gigs of RAM and Flash Encoding seems to have issues when I stream High Res. Also I'm still not 100% sure if I can do high def on things like UStream or JustinTV. If anyone knows more, please let me know. Also anyone rich who wants to buy me 2 extra gigs of RAM can let me know too! resent:
  

So with all this considered is it worth doing a stream this season?

If I did a stream, would you be watching?

Quote from t1ger :

If we had put together a schedule that everyone loved, we would have had a small miracle on our hands. As it is, I take the point about too much open wheel action. To be honest, I prefer open wheelers to the GTR classes, so (as I put the schedule together) it favours my choices. The RB4 and RAC are in there, and I really can't get along with either of them, so we all have to take the good with the bad.

Tim

For sure - if it was down to me we'd probably just be in the FOX all the time

Hi,

I've been looking for the last couple of hours for a basic addon (or addons) that make LFS look and sound better. There are many to choose from but many seem out of date (for old LFS versions).

The main two mentioned are Revolution and Hi Res Pack. Revolution mainly seems to focus on putting a few very nice sports car skins in and the from what I read, the Hi Res Pack isn't recommend for the latest patch.

Can anyone recommend simple addons that will just improve the look and sound for the whole game, rather than installing loads and loads of custom textures one by one?

Thank you.

I like a bit of open wheel - not sure about the FO8, it drives a lot crappier than I remembered. Maybe it's just that I'm using a crappy setup. It's been so long since I've played LFS properly.

Whoops, we missed the deadline there Tim.

Quote from Scawen :

The cheat protection system was made more strict on Friday, to reduce the number of people using cheats online.

Reduce? Why not eliminate?

This suggests there are still cheats and cheaters playing. Not that I've played LFS in a while.

regular updates. I miss those.

I forgot about this tread developing - wot's happening dudes?

Look it's quite simple, you need to buy a PS3 and preorder Gran Turismo 5 which features four Scirocco models.

probably just a local DNS issue with foreign sites. Try switching to openDNS.