What's actually going on here isn't about the rate of progress or xyz feature, although that does add fuel to the fire. What this is really about is the fact that Scawen has become an unwilling celebrity. If you watch this thread it goes something like this;
Fans: Random murmurings for a while
Fans: "Scawen, what's going on?!?!?!??!!" (Or other offensive/rumour-mongering forcing Scawen to respond)
Scawen: "Still working away, nothing worth announcing, I don't want to have to update you guys all the time."
Fans: "Yay, thanks Scawen, it's good to hear from you."
And everybody is happy for a few weeks then the whole process starts all over again.

Seriously, people were anticipating Scawen's 4000th post. People start rumours about him not liking his work or abandoning LFS.

Scawen is an engineer who just wants to get his work done, and I can relate to that. He doesn't want to feel like he has to answer to or appease the community. Perhaps, if he looked at it from the perspective that he is a celebrity in the sim world and that his celebrity status adds value to the LFS brand, he might be more willing to promote a closer relationship between him and the community.

Or not, it's his call.

Wow, that's cool. I stand corrected.

About what Shinanigans said;
When a person does a skid on cold tires, the surface of the tire becomes very hot quickly, ans starts smoking. For this to happen, it isn't required that the rest of the tire is hot enough to smoke. So really, the surface of the tire should be simulated separately to the bulk of the tire. See pic.
I think that would make it smoke as you think it should.

Haha, touche.
But seriously, that modelling equation is dependant on the deceleration of the vehicle as opposed to the rotational velocity of the disc. So that would be applying wear to a locked disc (and as a bonus it is rather hard to tell what that equation is doing.)

I didn't understand that section on pad wear in the least. It seems very obsessed with the vehicle in general and relies heavily on the assumption that the brakes don't lock.

I have written a simplified version of the first attachment which would probably be much more useful from a development perspective, have a peek at the attachment if you would care to.
Of course, in regards to Tristan's last comment, this is on the premise the brake is assumed to be a point contact, as I don't think heat conductivity within the metal of the disc will be modelled in the near future.


edit: This has been bugging me; assuming that the braking torque is proportional to the radius the section of pad is from the axis of rotation, then it increases proportionally to the area that the torque is spread across. ie. twice as far from the axis, twice as much braking force but also twice as much material for the heat energy to be dispersed over. So the brake disc should increase in temperature proportionally. As heat is conducted well within metal, I don't think that the greater air cooling for the outer regions of the disc is a major concern, I could be wrong. I also don't know if the temperature of the pad itself is of importance, as the section of the pad furthest from the axis would get hotter than the rest.
I don't know about leading-edge and trailing-edges of brake pads, though, if that's what you meant by the sections discussed in the book.

Last edited by Live for Sideways, Wed, 7 Nov 2007 13:47.

Quote from Gunn :

Initiated by brakes, not controlled by.

Anyway FF can't drift. Lol.

Until the Apex, the balance and angle of the car is controlled by the brake pedal. After the apex the accelerator is used (RWD).
Fact is, it's the corner entry that seperates the good drifters from the bad, anyone with a heavy foot can go sideways out of a corner.

^ Lets pretend he didn't say that.
I'm with shotglass. The main appeal of LFS is how raw it's system is. That's the main secret to how it feels so realistic.
Not that I'm crediting them with being realistic sims, but Forza and GT4 may have the most realistic car handling models around. Big budgets allow big research. The catch is that each of these games has assists built-in to aid the driver. Thing such as ABS and TC (GT4) and speed dependant steering (Forza) allow the use of controllers, these are what you are asking for. You are asking for LFS to stoop to GT4 level.

I have no idea how this thread became yet another GTR balancing discussion.

Quote from tailing :

Anyway to get back to the original post I'd be happy with any new cars, whether they're in a current class or totally new. I'd hate to hear that a potentially great car wasn't added to the game simply because it had no direct competitor though.

This poll only indicates there should probably be about two new class cars for each individual class car added to the game, and I'm sure the Devs have already decided what projects they are developing next.
By the way, which dev does modelling? Do we have any idea what they are doing?

True. Anyone who has watched the Drift Bible knows that in real life drifters try to go as fast as possible with maximum friction and that most of drifting is controlled with the brakes rather than the accelerator.
But that's real life. All the FZ50 drifting on road normals in LFS is the complete opposite, all accelerator and inertia thanks to the fact that the most powerful street car is a rear-mount monster.

That's funny, I've never thought of using wheelbase to balance cars.

Seeing as it looks like class racing has a comfortable majority, can we start taking ideas then a poll on in what ways we want classes developed, or is that just taking polls a little too far?
It sure would be nice hearing from one of the devs which direction they would like to take the game in.

Quote from sinbad :

You'll never balance LRF everywhere, or TBO for that matter.

You will never balance any class anywhere. But that doesn't mean that class racing isn't going to be very fun and competitive. The very nature that different cars are going to be faster in different sections of the tracks promotes overtaking and racing strategy (FZ5 vs LX6 on the kyoto infield). Leagues that don't allow the changing of cars between races will certainly test the drivers and the cars to their limits.

It seems from the replies that people's greatest concern with classes is their balance, not that there will be a lesser variety of interesting cars to drive.

Drifting is all four wheels, ie "Drifting" across the road.
Pushing and Sliding are pretty obvious. Those are pretty old-school racing terms, though.
So it isn't really drifting, it's "Sliding," in which case, a FWD can do it.

But Chubbs, you really should take that onto a demo server and try twin with a RWD. Tell us how you go.

Haha, okay, for pedantics sake let's say a front wheel drive vehicle can not powerslide.
Back on the topic - enter that in a drift competition, see what the reaction is.

Tweaker: It would be nice to have stacks of cars, individuals and class cars.
Unfortunately, we aren't allowed to clone our devs to get it done...

Micha: There is more to balancing cars than their oval time. That's like using a drag strip to compare cars. The XRR's strength is in it's endurance. The FXR, well, that's another story that could do with fixing...

Last edited by Live for Sideways, Wed, 28 Dec 2005 04:26.

There have been a lot of threads popping up about people requesting cars, most haven't acheived any conclusions.
A lot of people are asking for imitation this and imitation that, there have been some good ideas, but few that would fit into classes.
This is an attempt to see which the community would prefer;
More individual cars for variation between races
or more cars within classes for more variation within races.

Quote from masternick :

u mean less angle drifting? because thats what speed drifting is, u want to drift good u should balance out how much angle and speed u get for a good drift IGP is a good mix of both angle and speed

No, that's not what I mean; it's about course layout. The IGP round I saw the corners started slow with a short run-up, then got progressively faster.
I would prefer there was a long straight allowing an as fast entry as wanted into a mildly fast corner then progressing into slower corners. This is the way most real life drift courses are, because they are run on race tracks. The judged area is usually off the end of a straight into a series of corners, as tracks with a tight corner at the end of the straight are plain dangerous, they choose more open corners to start with, then progress into tighter corners. Seems the logical way to do it, to me.
In effect, the driver must shave off speed through corners rather than put it on, which means I am actually advocating for greater angle drifting.

I don't mean to knock the IGP, as I have only seen one round, but as you can tell; that layout was not to my taste.
Enough ranting. Peace.

Quote from Gabkicks :

there's already a big drifting competition. :/

There are many different styles of drifting. From what I have seen through the kyoto round one video, the IGP is the slower, accelerating "Hackies" style of drifting. Perhaps the D1 GP could be the on-the-edge high speed drifting (ie, none of that road normal tyre stuff) to contrast the IGP.

Further development of the street cars would be nice. An old school V8 with equivalent power to the FZ5 but a healthy two tonnes of iron should make it competitive with the XRT (Plus the drifters would love it)(Let's call it the XR V8). And to contrast it the XF GTX, the 4wd 1800 dohc turbo big brother of the GTi, nimble and quick (Plus the rally fans would love it).
Adding more extreme comparative advantages to cars of the same class will promote lots of overtaking, and allowing different cars an opportunity depending on the track.

Edit; I called it the street class, but really it's the TBO class. That name would have to change if we had a V8, though.

Edit2; I have tried the V8 with tweak on S1. I tried two laps with my XRT on Blackwood, got 1:36.8x on the second lap, and left it at that. After about ten laps with the XR8 (Abbrv, hint on car specs) , I had a best of 1:38.6x. To be fair, the XRT has had a lot more time put into it's setup, and I know I could have got a second faster than that if I learnt the braking points better, I think they're about equal.

Last edited by Live for Sideways, Tue, 11 Oct 2005 07:30.

Well then how did Huru-aito perform that little miracle? Is it just a photoshop?
Was your creation a bit of hacked code to load two models at once, Nuse?
It'll be possible, we just either need to find some really smart mates or convince Scawen to give us a way to hack them without messing with online play.

That's off the hook.
I've been trying to edit the models, and have managed to get the CMX's into 3DSmax, but how do you get the models back into the game?
Finding a way to convert it back into a CMX could be done, but the game doesn't use them, does it? It doesn't need them to run.

Thanks for any help, I really wanna get my van going sideways.