Quote from kars19 :

Tested this

Ended up with 8x af, 4x aa, medium shadows, hdr on, cube low, faces 1
I am getting 90-125fps depending on track and lightning

I just did a HDR on/off back to back test. For me HDR causes a washed out look of the track texture and clearly introduces a lot of microstutters that don't happen without HDR.

Thanks for all the advice guys.

Things that made difference for me:

4x sparse grid supersampling and the other things troy mentioned are magic: even though my average fps has gone down the game has gone from a blurry, washed out, flickering, inconsistently stuttering mess to to a crispy clean, smooth flowing, fantastic looking sim.

This combined with lowering the FOV to 50° has allowed me to actually see where the track is going and lets me get an idea where my car is heading.

Going really low on the FFB gain also does its part in letting me fight the car instead of the wheel.

One thing I'm really enjoying with the DTM M3 at Imola is the way the rear of the car dances around controllably under heavy braking, something I haven't felt in a sim before.

Also the way the balance changes between on and off throttle is great.

Tristan, what happened? Violent snap-back oversteer?

I've been having a go now and then with AC and have been trying to like it. But somehow it doesn't click. When running around below the limit the general feeling is quite good. But when I push the cars start displaying all sorts of behavior that don't feel natural to me.

First there is the dreaded snap-back when correcting minor slides. I am more likely to spin from the snap-back than from the original oversteer. Something you never see in real life.

Then you have the extreme mid-corner understeer that even increases when you add some throttle. Is there a more unsatisfying trait a car can have than power-on-understeer?

Then there's the fact that you can't turn in when you are still on the brakes a bit, the car just goes straight. In real life drivers brake into corners to but vertical load on the front tyres to reduce turn-in understeer.

And in general anything with less than 500 bhp feels sluggish and unresponsive.

To top it off the graphics don't look anywhere near as good as in the screenshots. I've tried all the AA/AF settings and the tracks are just blurred and low-detail.

I know that I've generalized a lot in the above comments and maybe I just haven't driven the right car/track/setup combo. So can anybody give me some advice what I should be driving? Or could it be that my old DFP is just too sluggish to give me enough feel for AC?

On a sidenote, I also tried RaceRoom Experience today and thought it wasn't too bad. So maybe I've just gone crazy?

Quote from Shotglass :

welcome back

thx, still lurkin', still waitin'...

Damn, someone could have mentioned earlier that Doug Arnao is in charge of physics, wouldn't have wasted 10€.

I gave it another try. To my disbelief there doesn't seem to have been a single physics update in the past 2.5 years!

The rear wheel drive skip barber formula car still encourages flooring the throttle as a remedy to oversteer. Yeah right, that's realistic, a car made for beginner pay drivers behaves as if it were trying to kill you...

Then there are still the ridiculous x1 penalties whenever you dare to put a wheel on the grass, even if you are still able to keep the throttle planted without problems.

On a positive note the graphics and performance have made a nice improvement.

A few questions for the iRacing regulars:
I'm still interested in the Formula Mazda, Spa and Brands. If I shell out for them, will I be able to drive them in competition? As far as I can tell iRacing still dictates which cars are driven where and when. Which means that there is no Formula Mazda on either Spa or Brands. Or are there free servers somewhere where people can drive on any combo they want, LFS style?

Quote from EliteAti :

That should be answer

Ah, thx. Gotten quite some cheaper since the last time I tried.

Quote from PoVo :

This of course:

Lol, good one!

Hi guys, I'm thinking about giving iracing another test after I was really put off by the terrible handling of the Skip Barber car, over two years ago.

Am I being thick or is there no price list for the cars/tracks on the site?

Thx for the update!

What I'd be interested in: If I understood you right you are using an advanced, self developed non-realtime tyre model to verify the realtime tyre model. What are you using to verify the advanced model?

Quote from J.B. :

For that matter, does anyone know if Massa is doing his karting event again this year? Was quite good the last two years, definitely more fun than the silly RoC stadium events.

Eurosport 2, today 1900 CET.
Tomorrow 1400.

Quali 1
Quali 2

Maybe worth a new thread?

Quote from scawen :

does not imply that we will definitely support the directories all over the place thing.

:d

Quote from Kegetys :

In XP one way to change it is from computer management, local users and groups, users and then right click on the user and go to properties. In the 'profile' tab there is a setting for home folder, which should default to empty (In which case it will use 'documents and settings', or 'users' in vista/7).

Thx, just tested it in VPC.

After changing the setting the new folder is created. None of the data was moved so I tried to move it manually which of course failed due to files being in use.

So then I booted my Win7 DVD to repair mode and used robocopy to move the files from the old user home to the new one. Then after rebooting Windows looked and behaved as if I had reinstalled the OS, with quite a few apps broken... Then I tried installing new software and guess what, Windows didn't even use the new user location I had set up but used 'Documents and Settings' instead.

So not only was the procedure complicated, it was also completely useless, and more or less messed up my (virtual) system.

Obviously I did something wrong along the way, but this little experiment has convinced me even more that something is very wrong with the Windows file location structure. I mean surely there needs to be a simple way to put the user data to a place that is not on the same drive as the OS?

Just tested on Directory Opus. It has a "Skip identical" option (skips overwrite if name, size and date are the same). Maybe that would work?

Quote from Kegetys :

Roaming is the only one in my opinion, and also the reason why I didn't include it in my list. Computers today are a whole-family thing and it is not unusual at all to have multiple users for one computer and I remember discussions on this forum as well where people would want to have different settings for different users in LFS. And while LFS is small, many other software (esp. games) for sure arent; My Dragon Age - Origins install is 15GB for example and duplicating this for all users would be a big waste, plus then also having to keep backups of all this data as well if the game would not separate the install data and user data.

True, about large programs like games, I guess. But concerning home users using multiple accounts, I think that the trend is more likely to be less people sharing computers than in the past due to ultra cheap PC and laptop prices.

Quote from Kegetys :

You backup your whole home dir (and the user registry keys) and its done. You can do it manually of course but typical use scenario would be to use a tool that does this for you (afaik. Windows 7 for example comes with some kind of transfer wizard that allows you to transfer these to a new windows installation very easily). And if all software would follow these guidelines then these tools would be simple to use and would really work - You backup the user data and everything "irreplaceable" is safe with minimal effort. Look at an LFS install for example; how could a generic backup tool know which files are install data that does not need to be backed up and which files are the user data? With the user data under the separate user home dir, you backup all that and everything is safe.

But what if I only want to backup one program, not my whole User folder? As an example Oblivion is at 'C:\Users\<user>\Documents\My Games\Oblivion' and 'C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Oblivion'.

So the backup procedure would be
-unhide folders
-set windows search to also search in hidden folders
-search the users folder for oblivion and hope nothing gets missed
-recreate the folder structures at your backup location
-copy the found folders

Hardly simple compared to just copying one folder, that you know exactly where it is, as you put it there yourself or were at least asked about it during install.

Quote from Kegetys :

You can change the user home dir to any path you want from the user profile settings any time.

Could you point me there, I couldn't find it. Would be extremely useful for Win 7 on my 4 GB SSD eee.

Anyway, thanks for the discussion, at least I now have an idea what it's all about. It does seem to me that the idea of data separation by type isn't a bad one, but is too complicated in Windows, or maybe missing tools and guidelines. Maybe each software should have a standard data manager, like it has an installer and an uninstaller, a tool that will tell you which data is where and let you move and copy it.

Last edited by J.B., Sun, 15 Nov 2009 17:56.

Looking interesting! I wonder if there will be any TV coverage? For that matter, does anyone know if Massa is doing his karting event again this year? Was quite good the last two years, definitely more fun than the silly RoC stadium events.

Quote from Kegetys :

The new, in my opinion proper, structuring is basically as follows:
- Executables and other static data in Program Files
- All user specific and "dynamic" data in user home directory*


(All this is documented by Microsoft and they do provide guidelines for using them, for example here. I think the only reason why the situation today is such a mess is that many developers simply do not follow these guidelines)

Thanks for the link. I'm still not getting it though.

Most of the listed benefits sound like they would only be useful in large corporate enviroments (roaming) and highly multi user machines with low diskspace (seperating static and dynamic data).

But even if it is a good idea to separate the location of data based on the type of data. How is the way this is done in Windows even close to being usable or practical?

You have to hunt down all the different locations that a program has installed itself to by searching in regedit and clicking through multiple hidden folders with names like 'C:\Users\<user>\AppData\LocalLow'. Hardly 'easy transfer and backup' is it?

And there isn't even a way to change the location of these special folders to another drive than the drive the OS is installed to.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who still hasn't understood the concept of program files, registry, users, app data etc.

What is it for and how is supposed to be used (serious question)?

From my point of view the Windows structure is just creating a huge mess for benefits that are not obvious to me. Do viruses and spyware really fail because they are not allowed to write to program files? Are there really so many private users that share their computers to the extent that it's worth splitting program files and user files (whatever between those is anyway)? For HD space?

And it also seems to be that the program files are more protected in terms of permissions than the user files, although obviously user files are far more valuable to users as they are not easily replacable.

Sorry for OT but I thought this might be a chance to find out what exactly is going on with the way Windows is structured.

Installer worked fine for me BTW.

Most likely the MB dying (worn out caps etc.) or broken RAM.

Nice one! Dis guy also rocks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIAHrLHJqq4&fmt=22

Quote from ATC Quicksilver :

You mean hydrogen powered car years, because electric cars are useless and totally unsustainable in the long term, they are nothing more than a PR stunt. I already suggested they use hydrogen powered F1 cars, because the only emissions would be water, so the cars would wet the track as they race to make it more exciting.

You shouldn't rely on Top Gear for technical information. Hint: there is no usable Hydrogen in nature. We have to make it.

Motor Racing will die once they can no longer use petrol engines. Anyone who's seen a diesel Audi on track will know why.

And if you want to know what an electric F1 might look like, start by calculating the size of the battery pack that can deliver 800 bhp for at lwast half an hour. KERS is 30 kg for 80 bhp for 6 seconds.

Quote from gezmoor :

He was probably the easiest option, and close enough to the centre of the whole controversy

That's because he is the guy who f***ed up. Hamilton also played a part in the cheat attempt but I don't think anyone else did.

Calling him a scapegoat would mean that he is being singled out alone when in fact a larger group of people had conspired to cheat by lying to the stewards. There is no proof or indication of this. Haug himself said that Lewis had been instructed to let Trulli pass in the post race interviews.

The only question left is who's idea it was, Hamilton's or Ryan's. Doubt we'll ever find out though.

Quote from J.B. :

I just wonder wth Whitmarsh is on about?

Ok, I've found the answer for this. His comments were made before the FIA decision was released. In fact McLaren haven't reacted in any way since the FIA release...

So it looks like there's only two possibilities. Either they have to admit to lying or they need to pursue legal action. Or they can of course refuse to comment at all.

Last edited by J.B., Thu, 2 Apr 2009 21:04.