Well, I think "real racing" just became too complicated/ complex/ time consuming but LFS is a great game and people want to play it, thus they're looking for a way enjoying LFS, too.

Quote from Dac :

if those AI drivers knew how to drive id eat my hat! they are a bunch of wreckers that cant do a decent lap.

Hasn't been a difference to players on the last servers with ... "serious" races.
Pushing the heck from someone faster passing away seemed to have become quite often used.

Well, actually a friend of mine and I no more say we're gonna "race" on LFS, we just say we go in LFS to "cruise", the rest doesn't really exist/ make sense atm.... =/

It is so sad....

Not even a single BL FOX race this evening, even Redline Racing was totally empty.:weeping:

I remember pre-patch times when there were BL FOX races 24/7 on Redline Racing or Rhain-Main-Racers before redline.

To sad that the most famous car-track combination has been smacked down to zero... :biggun:

Quote from Mille Sabords :

BF1 is way too fast and scary for me to drive

I also find a recurrent issue in BF1 pickup races, this is the wide range of skills.
At least when i'm not fast in a slow car I can still see the leaders and race mid pack after a few laps. In the fastest cars the fast drivers are long gone and the rest is spinning around, no close racing involved there.
I want battles, overtaking attempts, defending opportunities during a race and I do not have the skill / practice to achieve that at higher speeds.

I agree on this one, you need loads of time.
Maybe that's why my racing times heavily decreased to nearly zero.

Well there are actually some "wired things" with tyres.

I forgot to make a screenshot, but after a race I stopped and had -center core temp- of 540°C und -outside core temp- of around 380°C.

I wonder which rubber can stand that.

Ok I accelerated again and while breaking into the next turn it burst, but... *lol* ^_^°

I see no need in changing the graphics.
Kids get fascinated by lots of much to strong dot-3-bumpmapping, bloom- and motion-blur shaders, depth of field, antialiasing ect. but those are just eye-candy, well I wouldn't call them so any more since it does not look good.

I think clear 3D graphics with sligh eye-candy like the faked environment-mapping on the cars looks way better (espacally for a realistic game).

Quote from AndroidXP :

Ohh, slow in - fast out is the solution then.

What you've said....

Quite interesting point, I like high stability to be able to give throttle within the turn but I haven't thought about the breaking part itself (besides getting slow enough, fast enough "Who breaks later is longer fast" *lol* ), I should give it a try, thanks.

Quote from bbman :

You seem to think there are somewhat golden rules in making a setup... There aren't. Making setups is ALWAYS about shifting the balance between two extremes to fit YOUR driving, which means you YOURSELF are the key to it all, not the other way round...

If you want to learn, you can gather much knowledge just by reading some technical threads on here, keeping an eye on the advice given in the setup-forum, looking at setups in VHPA and reading Bob's advanced setup-guide (update due sometime in the future)... I haven't seen you asking questions about the things you so eagerly want to know, why? What holds you back?

I did read through both manuals, as well as through other manuals and I think I got some experience since (I'd say) I can tweak setups
but it takes a long time for me, I always feel where the balance is not right, but sometimes I don't know how I can fix it, or if fixed it can have a negative result on the rest of the track (=> much testing).

However I did aks qestions here, but not much since the answers were no real help.

But as you said there is experience stuff around here, why not putting it into a doku of some kind?

I already got some stuff like "I'm loosing my heck while accelerating: soultion 1; solution 2; solution 3" and so on, but I did not find a setup guide that cares about steering or clutch settings for example.

Sure there is a lot of helpful stuff out there, but everything is scattered around the net and most of the stuff is incomplete.
Or it is in english, well my english is not too bad, but I do not know all those technical words since I installed the german version of course.

Quote from AndroidXP :

I agree with Boris, you must be doing something very wrong. Are you actually driving the cars, you know, just by feel? Without thinking about it? The fastest laps happen when you're "in the zone", meaning it's totally your unconscious doing the driving with no active thoughts about brake points or similar whatsoever.

Over 6000 laps is a MASSIVE amount and the changes on Blackwood aren't that dramatic. You should be way better than 4-5 secs off WR. Heck I just did my first ever 4 laps on FOX/BL1 since patch Y (LFSW says I have 293 laps done on it, but they were all done a long time ago), and I managed to get a shitty 1:10.72 with the RACE_S setup and a not properly mounted wheel, and that time is already less than three secs off the WR. Okay, that doesn't help you in the slightest, but seriously, you must be doing something fundamentally wrong. I'd suggest you to practice more, but maybe you actually need to focus on the way you drive

You also seem to be overly obsessed about setups, whereas their relevance to race speed isn't that high. Sure, the setup needs to roughly fit the track, but the fine tuning of exact values is for when you get into the sub one-second-off-WR range. I usually just take a setup from the setupfield (preferably the ones that come without a locked diff), do some blind tweaks and fixes to it without even testing it beforehand and most of the time it's perfectly fine for racing right off the bat. Completely developing a own set is just too much effort for the amount of racing I do these days.

Though granted, it all also depends on how gifted you are. The people you see doing WRs left and right don't necessarily practice months on that track, on the contrary, I'm pretty sure most are up to asskicking-pace within a few laps on a combo they've never driven before. Guess some people just have a knack for "interfacing" with computer sims or games in general

Of course I lack in practise on the new BL course but I got a 1:09.xx but average laps are in 1:10 to 1:11, but I got quite fixed break points (and late => high break force; no, tires don't stop rolling =P ) but when comparing with other racers I lack in corner speed even while having more wing than the fast racers, thus there must be other reasons to improve turn speed.

Maybe better PC with more FPS or better wheel which is more precise if everything else should be ok.


There are so many factors and I can't find the reason, really complex stuff! O_O

Quote from Rooble :

I can see what you're saying with this because not everyone has the time patience or knowledge to create setups, but again I think if you spent about 30 minutes playing with a setup or trying to create a setup you would find that it really is very easy, and most setups don't require a full rework for different tracks.

80% of the time I take an existing reliable setup that suits my driving style (which I've either tweaked before, or has been given to me by another driver) and just go ahead and make fine adjustments according to what track it is I'm driving. With this method of creating/adjusting setups you give yourself the opportunity to either only make small adjustments (camber/tyre pressures/down force) or go all out and completely rework (camber/tyre pressures/down force/anti-roll/spring rates/bound rates/etc..etc..) it so its specifically created for that particular track.


Alternatively you could go to a setup site www.setupgrid.net and just download a setup for that particular track you're wanting to race on, However I think you'd get more enjoyment and satisfaction out of creating your own setup, and then having people ask for it because they think its making you fast.

Even when you read through the physics you still have not experience in racing and setting combination and what can turn out how in which combination.

Those are all long time learning factors and those should be documented, too!

For example the claw clutch, the description is very theoretical and hard to understand, I even searched through the net to find better explanations, but I found nowhere else a clutch description based and percentage values so it is useless!
And only roughly knowing how such an important part works is just not enough for a professional game in my opinion!

Or the steering settings, for 50% of the values I have no idea what effect actually can be achieved with a change.

In spring changes I got quite well so far, but finetuning takes forever since you always got to re-tweak when you are faster.
Tires get hotter, you loose grip, you have to optimize tires to not get so hot while keeping the grip.
When you've done so you can drive fast all the time, you get better, tire overheat again, everything starts from the beginning.

So I still think a game as complex as LFS needs to have far better documentation.

Quote from Boris Lozac :

Geez, was that with a default set? Can't imagine having 6000 laps on a combo and still be 2, 3 seconds average off the WR?

Maybe I'm just too bad, no wait, actually I'm a quite theoretical person and very good incalculations, but for that, I need rules (action-reaction) and/ or numbers, and that's what I'm missing in current documentations, in guessing stuff I'm not very good and without very well knowledge you can argue for a change to come up with different reactions when some knowledge is missing.

But now I'm 4-5 seconds behind and for that amount of work I put in the result is just frustration.

Quote from Hyperactive :

Imho, that is not a valid point at all. Creating setups with so many setup parametres will always take time, especially if you go all the way to get the setup fast and good to drive. No manual will help with it.

And there is always the easy option to download setups from setup sites and make some small tweaks to fine tune them etc.. Yes, the default setups are not very good but it doesn't take a lot of effort to replace those with better stuff.

From my own experience, creating setups has never been the factor that has "slowed" me down or taken time off from racing. And I'm having some difficulties understanding how it could have done so to anyone .

Actually I'm quite familiar in optimizing the setup roughly very fast, but getting it good takes much more time.
I drove 6044 laps with FOX on blackwood during the last 2 years and I really was able to drive a single good lap 1,5 secs behind WR, but average was 2-3 seconds behind, then came the new physics update and I even had holidays these times and I wanted to use the time to create a set to come up with new physics and track layout and while playing a lot of others just passed far in development, thus I found it a waste of time.

Two friends of mine did so, too, they quite with the last patch.

And I got a bunch of other one's setups, even WR setups, but I got an other driving style, I simply can't control them so it is not always as simple as downloading other's sets.

Last edited by Lhunathwen, Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:32.

Quote from smove :

Ooops ... after finding my last post maybe was a bit off-topic, here comes what I originally wanted to say when entering this thread.

I see myself as an average LFS player, nothing more, nothing less. Maybe not the fastest in the world (missing records only several seconds ), nor the slowest (of which I'm sometimes not entirely sure). So I firstly guessed there are many, many, many others like me having not the time to play LFS some hours a day, but maybe several times a week - of which I sadly couldn't find more than 10 the last months regarding the servers LFS offers when choosing multiplayer: There are the what I call pros at CTRA and CD, there are the oval junkies, the cruisers, cops and robbers, and the sad rest seems to be drifters or just-starters jumping instantly into the BF1. Means: Nobody for me I'd like to compete with, though I'm (at least I think so) rather a person of the original target group of LFS than at least five of the groups altogether I just mentioned. Hm.

So my question is: Where is the average LFS player, like me??? Where are people that have a work and/or family that are not able to play 24/7 but actually want some nice, fair, average, maybe advanced racing sometimes a week? Can anybody hear me? This is a bit disillusioning I think.

I think we both have the same kind of "driving possibility", I have a job and I'm not able to race 24/7, even when I'm at home I'm not a pure gamer any more (those times were as I was younger) and further I got other duties.
So sometimes I have no time to race for a month or more.

But I like LFS for it's realism and complexity, but while not being able to race 24/7 I'm really slow in creating a good setup for only one car on one track and when physics updates come out every now and then and all the work gets destroyed it is just not funny and so I and other players quit since the work get destroyed ever now and then.

It wouldn't be that bad if we'd been given better possibilities for setup creation, but I (we) as player feel quite left alone with the most important part in LFS.

There are still missing:
- A well documentation not only covering physics but what setting exactly causes what in LFS-
- A problem-solution-documentation covering what to change to solve speciffic balance problems (LFS still does not work as real life, as ride height does not influence downforce for example)
- Ingame tools that help you analyze replays to see which (spring *example*) settings to change in which direction to improve grip/ balance ect.

If it was not so difficult and time consuming to create setups, racers could concentrate more on racing instead of playing pit engineer, and that's what LFS is/ should be about => racing.

Quote from boosterfire :

I have mostly lost interest in LFS. Usually, it'll keep me interested for a few weeks until I get bored again and switch games. I do that all the time, maybe because I haven't bought any brand new fresh titles in a while.

I know that we're always going over and over the same things again. We all know what doesn't work in this game. We basically all agree that while the graphics in LFS are good enough for the game to be enjoyable, they aren't good enough for it to attract new customers. We all know that Eric lives in slow motion to the rest of us and should have finished doing dashboards by 2056. We all know that redundant errors of the past (notably colision system, etc) have been pissing us off for too long.

However, there's something I'd like to bring up, if it hasn't been yet. Considering that Scawen works alone on programming, he can only go so fast. That said, with this forum, it's easy to gauge how people are getting pissed off between each patch. Usually, people cheers when there's a new patch, do that for a couple of weeks, get pissed after a few months, and "demand a new patch or they'll quit" after another few months. Scawen working alone, I have a feeling that, up to a certain point, he has to release unfinished content to calm down people in here.

The reason why I bring up this point is this. Yesterday, I tried for the first time the A.I. (that shows much about how important I think it is). It was on KYGP, driving XRRs. So I go out of the pits... I brake... and BAM, the AIs crash into me just as if I wouldn't have been there. Now, that's what I called pretty damn unfinished. That makes me think: "Why on earth has Scawen released such a thing? It's flawed, and not even worthy of playing with it, not as if we'd have used A.I. in the first place, but still!" Maybe... it's not possible to finish the A.I. before there's a new collision system implanted? If so, why on earth did Scawen work on the A.I., a function that basically NOBODY EVER USES over a new collision system, a function that basically is problematic in EVERY RACE EVER?

I can understand that Scawen works the way he wants, and that he's working on something when he feels like it, but that kind of decision, working on something that nobody ever uses for a few months while he could have been doing other productive stuff is leading LFS no where. I think it's generally agreed that LFS will never attract as much people as a pure arcade racing game, then why on earth sabotage your own efforts by making - sorry - stupid decisions?

I see your main point and have to agree with your arguments.


Additionally, I tried to race with AIs every now and then, just as you said if no one else is there, internet broke down or there is just no motivation for "real" races.
But it just does not make sense, they drive too stupid that you're better trained driving alone.


What I really miss are ingame tools that help you optimizing your setup.

Like your pits crew recording your race data and showing bars compared with your setting bars what would be better in overall race average, stronges left turn, stronges right turn ect.

Everyone always says this is a sim, it hast to be so difficult, but then "sim" the pits crew that does a lot of work, too, too!

(But I doubt that'll be there, since not even a well documentation is been given, the main point seems to be try and fail, wenn fail in common of course, but if that shall be the center of keeping people here.... Oo )

Last edited by Lhunathwen, Fri, 22 Feb 2008 17:31.

Track creation by users?

I fear some of you have no idea about the difficulty of level-design and what huge amount of knowledge about internal 3D processing workflow is needed to get acceptable FPS.



Besides that, I quit with the last patch (FOX is no fun an more for me).
Maybe I'll give LFS a new try with the next physics update, they have to work on the tires most.
But all in all it became too difficult to keep up in LFS as a "after-work-hobby".
At last a well documentation is missing (comparisons with RL are useless here since this still is a SIM which implies it acts different to RL).

You'll once loose your tire if touching another car with formulas or loose your front wing when slightly touching another from behind, for realism's sake.

However I'll keep my gas down.

Quote from bbman :

In such short races, camber does matter more than temperature (if it doesn't overheat too much)... So if you can tune your tyres to have exactly 0° camber in the sharpest turn (shift + l will tell you that), and your tires don't get completely red, you'll be fine...

Too bad that Shift+l is not possible in replays, its nearly impossible to watch the numbers while giving your best taking the turn as hard as possible.

However I saw numbers around +2, thus I'd need cambers between -3 and -4, that's a bit much, even for short distance.

Quote from bbman :

In such short races, camber does matter more than temperature (if it doesn't overheat too much)... So if you can tune your tyres to have exactly 0° camber in the sharpest turn (shift + l will tell you that), and your tires don't get completely red, you'll be fine...

Good to know, I'll try that later!

Quote from danowat :

85C optimum with 80 centre and 95 inside looks about right to me, you are probably getting a mean temp across the whole tyre pretty close to 85C.

Overheated tyres are much worse situation to be in than colder tyres, I would always err on the side of a colder tyre, maybe try driving it a bit more aggresively.

Yes I tried to be a bit more aggressive now.

I created 2 sets, one with R1 and another one with R2 and managed to get them to a quite similar state, best lap time with both on BL exactly the same: 1:09.87.

But I had to to use different wing settings 8/13 for R1 and 9/15 for R2, the speed loss on the straight returns in the turns that I can take with full throttle (I like to create settings that take fast corners with full throttle).

But I still got the feeling, that slightly overheated tires (centre), well overheated inside drive better, or at least equal to optimal temp (centre) with slightly overheated inside.

lol maybe I just don't get which parts take most of the force in turns.

Quote from atledreier :

Well.... Reality check, dude. Do you actually think that real life is optimal to the 3rd decimal at all times? What will you do when we get changing temperatures and conditions? Find a setup that does better, drive the car harder, or just cope. You might lose 0.1s, but there might be a good battle there. Isn't that better than hotlapping?

Actually I don't do hotlaping, I just drive short distance races (Redline Racing, 6 Laps Blackwood on FOX).

I'm getting close to 6.000 Laps with FOX on BL soon, so I got a lot of practise there and I drive my own setup, none made by others.

However as said before I got temp problems since the latest patch, example:

R1 tires, 70°C opt.: center ~80, inside ~95-100°C (really high pressure)
R2 tires, 85°C opt.: center ~80, inside ~95°C (even below 100 PSI)

(both after 6 laps)

So R1 are heavily overheated while I don't get the centre of R2s hot enough, but R1 still seems to have better grip.

I got the feeling that the tires are now made for hotlaping or long distance races and the part inbetween seems to be missing?

Yes tire wear doesn't really matter but a problem occured with the new patch.

R1 tires heat up much too fast for short distance races while R2 tires can't really get heated up fast enough (after being below 100 PSI pressure and still not reaching the optimum temp I tried R1 again).

So the decission for short distance races seems to be overheating (feels like aqualplaning in the end) or drivin the whole distance with too cold tires not getting the best performace out of them...

At the beginning (~2 years ago) I alwys tried to equalize tire temperature so that they have outside, center and inside the same temp.

After watching others (I drive races between 6 and 10 laps most of the time) I saw they heavily heat the inside, red color.

As you can see on the image at the first posting I got the inside overheated, the center slighty too cold (85°C optimum) and the outside is nearly not used.

It was much faster than equalizing temps and I alwasy wondered why since they have best grip at lower temp (seen from the overheated inside which obviously is used most of the tire).

Then I thought about still overheating the inside of the tire, while optimizing the center to the tires best grip temp for F08 on Kyoto LONG.
I managed to get the centers of all tires at +/- 3°C around best temp and the overheated insides around +/- 5°C difference max. between each other and I gained 2 seconds per Lap from it!


The things I'm not sure about are, if center and inside with perfect temp reveal with more grip while the camber has to be lower and how important the outside is on curvy tracks where (in my oppinion) it can be ignored?


@Bawbag
Is this only for long races or in common?

Last edited by Lhunathwen, Sun, 23 Dec 2007 16:28.

Good morning LFS-mates!

I'd like to discuss about your experiences in heating tire espacally on turn-based tracks (like BL for example).



With many turns it is good to set up a negative roll, which causes the inside to heat up more than the center or outside of the tire as the picture above shows.

I always wondered how to set up your tires so that their temperature brings out the best grip.

So I optimized the inside temperature for the optimum tire temperature and tried this for a long time.

After that I tried optimized the temperature on the centre, causing the inside being overheated, but I still hat the feeling it had better grip than optimizing the inside temperature.

The last method would be optimizing inside and centre to the tire's optimum temperature, but I got the feeling this setting had the lowest grip of all three.


So I'd like to aks you about your experiences:
- Do you use one of the three methods - and if so, which is the best in your oppinion?
- Do you set up all your tires so they get more or less the same temperature development or do you set them up on how the feel during the race causing high temperature differences between tires?
- And as the last one, maybe some hint's I didn't thought of if you like (like loosing the heck if rear tires heat up more than front tires, short/ long distance races ect.)?


Thanks in advance!

Last edited by Lhunathwen, Sun, 23 Dec 2007 12:40.

Quote from bbman :

In that last sentence, you made very clear where you are wrong... LfS isn't a game, it's a simulator... You wouldn't knock Flight Simulator because you touched down too hard and broke your landing gear, would you? You also wouldn't moan about the fact that it's hard to control a plane with a keyboard in Flight Simulator, am I right?
And lastly, one thing people always seem to forget: LfS is a work in progress, hence the "Alpha"-Tag! That means that it's not a question about IF changes will happen, but WHEN!

Personally, I'm happier than ever with LfS, and there are so much more things I'd like seeing added that will make LfS ten, twenty times harder than it is right now...

Great work Scavier, despite some loudmouths, YOU DID WELL! Have happy holidays, you deserve them...

I totally have to agree with you.
But as it is with games that are more and more complex/ difficult, the amount of people that can come up with it decreases.

And I'm out if for now, I don't have the time to keep up.
Maybe I'll play sometimes just for fun, but not for serious racing anymore.
I have no problems saying that I'm not able to keep up.


Or they shall at least write a tutorial on how to drive a racing car in LFS, breaking, shifting, steering, accellerating, and not stressing the car too much, not only technical stuff about parts of the car!

Quote from Dillyracer :

No, the developers make a game that represents their vision of SIM racing, and we play it because we share the vision of the devs.

Yes you're right, since the point in LFS is, that they don't have to care about those that already payed and the open further selling possibilities with drstic changes. *lol*