Good news!

It seems that the problem has eliminated itself. All I had to do was to turn the wheel around several times (around 2 minutes) and it just seems to somehow recalibrate itself. It's strange, but it works.

Thanks everyone!

AndroidXP: Yeah, it's strange, to say the least illepall I am using a USB wheel.

I have currently un-installed all those custom drivers, so I'm just running off the standart WinXP drivers. But, by and by, that doesn't really matter, because the behaviour was the same with all three versions of the drivers (I tried XP standart, which it what the wheel should run off), the 4.0 for the FF feedback version, and the 4.0 for the non-feedback wheel.

As I said, I'm pretty sure it's some sort of a LFS <-> wheel problem, as other games don't do this. Ehh, quite a frustrating move from my gamepad it was

I've attached another screenshot.

Last edited by Aahz, Sun 28 May 2006, 13:22.

I am re-posting a problem from the wheels forum, as I believe that there might a glitch with LFS with a MS precision wheel.

The thread itself can be found here.

A short summary:

1)A properly installed and calibrated Microsoft Precision Racing Wheel refuses to work properly in LFS, yet works flawlessly in various other games, such as GTL, NFS HP2, NFS MW and UG2.

2) After messing with all the possible options in the LFS "controls" menu, I still haven't been able to get it to senses. The typical behaviour is just sporadic turning and severe de-centralization. Refer to the link above for a screenshot.

3)The wheel appears perfectly centered in the windows calibration utility. Even the in-game axis bars seem to work fine!! However, the wheel itself acts sporradic and de-centered. Please refer to the link above.

At this point, after several un-official driver reinstalls, fresh LFS installs and a few hours of messing with the controls, I am out of ideas and I'm afraid I have to conclude that this is an LFS specific problems, as all other games work perfectly...

Christian,

I got the program, and it has not really helped a dime The problem is the same, and I cannot possibly imagine what else I could do. I will try reposting this in the Bugs forum, as it might seem like an LFS specific problem.

I actually had exactly the same problem. After a fresh install, the game just would not connect to the master server. I posted about it somewhere...

Marvelously, after a couple of days the game just started to connect. Really strange...

Thanks Christian, I sent you my email adress. Indeed, your program looks different from what I downloaded. I will, of course, try it and pray that it works, even though I am skeptical, as it seems to be a LFS-specific problem...

Hmm, I don't own a car, but my parents have three, although they are in two different countries, so they don't get used much all the time. All three cars are rather old, so nothing that exciting. Anyhow here's the rundown:
1) The old, old old volvo 850 we have uses a standart casette radio system. It's actually quite good, as the six speakers are mounted perfectly, and the car seems to have nice insulation
2) the skoda fabia also has a casette player and four speakers. It's so so, nothing to be excited about.
3)The skoda octavia has a nifty pioneer cd player and the standart speakers. The quality is pretty nice, considering the setup costed us almost nothing.

Personally, however, I have to say that I love, love, love good car sound systems. On the seldom occasions in my life I got to ride in sweet cars with high-end speakers, I was left stunned by the quality of the sound. It's certainly a very expensive and mostly unneeded pleasure, but I would fall for it, for sure.

Thanks for the link, I will try the drivers, though I heard that they usually do NOT work.

Calibration lock causes my wheel to stop responding.

I tried the drivers, but all they do is point me at the standart microsoft xp settings, nothing else.

Also, I noticed one more strange thing. The axes indicators in LFS work perfectly fine!! That is, they detect wheel turning just fine. However, the actual turning of the car is sporradic and jumps around.

I am absolutely clueless.

Last edited by Aahz, Sat 27 May 2006, 15:56.

Christian,

Well, the wheel has NO drivers, per se. Windows XP just installs the drivers by default, so it's plug'n'play.
You guessed right, I bought it used (from Germany, har har!), but it can't be defect or broken, because other games run it perfectly fine. I've just ran it on GTL and in NFS MW2, in addition to NFS HP2.

Matrixi: YES! I did the calibration test several times, and I even ran the game in alt tab to see what windows sees. Let me upload a screen shot.

EDIT: here it is. As you can see, the wheel is perfectly centered in the windows settings, but is totally off in lfs.

Last edited by Aahz, Sat 27 May 2006, 15:09.

Same here, albeit with a MS wheel. LFS is the only game that does this to me. Everything else from NFS to GTL is perfectly fine illepall

Anyone?...

So, my MS Precision Steering wheel arrived today! All excited, I hooked up the wheel to the computer via the USB port, watched the popup message from windows saying the wheel is installed and I'm all ready to go!

NOT SO FAST!

I go to lfs controls and spend about 45 minutes trying to setup the wheel with various forms of success. At one point, I *think* I got the accelerator and the brake working. But I cannot, in any way, get the steering itself to work. I've tried all possibilities and options, but, basically, after a calibration, the wheel is perfectly centered, but after I move it just slightly, it starts jumping around madly. After a few seconds it settles, but the deadzone just jumps around from ten o'clock to two o'clock.

Wondering if any other games would do that, I loaded up NFS Hot Pursuit 2 and voila! Absolutely no problems, and even the brakes and the gas pedals work perfectly fine(and are not detected as a single axis as in LFS).

So, this is obviously no a wheel problem, but an inside LFS problem. I would appreciate any help and advice.

Yours,

truly frustrated

So, from a person wo plays this game for months and is still bad at it (me! ), I have 2 questions:

1)How does exactly trail braking work? I know that, in theory, it is the action of breaking into the corner in order to help the car keep the weight distribution correct. EVERY SINGLE ATTEMPT AT THIS HAS SENT ME INTO THE FENCE!! No matter how light or hard I attempt this maneouvre, I fail.

2) In this video, on lap 1 and 2, several drivers press the brake and the accelerator simoultaneously. I've seen this also done in F1 races, but I am clueless as to how might this help the cornering. Help?

I seem to be being a loner here, in that I can't connect to the multiplayer server. LFS is showing >500 racers online, so it's probably on my side. I just downloaded patch "U", and LFS worked perfectly fine on patch "T". Anyone know what's the gist, or should I just wait till tomorrow?

Since this thread seems to be a sort of a "report a bug with the new version" discussion, I'll chip in what I saw:

1) the patcht T really, and I mean REALLY, doesn't like my gamepad. I'm not sure how this happened, but I get a lot of glitches with the gamepad now. Examples are: throttle not setting to 100%, the gamepad "locking" in one direction or the other, locking brakes, sporratic acceleration, and so forth. Hitting the "recalibrate axes" several times usually solves the problem, but only for an indefinite time. With patch S, the controller worked flawlessly.

2) I use a rather weak system for LFS, it's a centrino laptop, running on an Intel graphics card. Not exactly the dream configuration, but it worked more or less fine in patch S. With patch T, I often get "stutters" in the game that drop the framerate down to 1 FPS. It happens mostly during racers, and the number of races doesn't seem to have an effect on the glitch. It seems that the game is trying to access the HDD for something (the HDD light is blinking madly), then it stops and reverts to normal. A RAM problem?

Last edited by Aahz, Tue 25 Apr 2006, 12:52.

Hola!

So, I've been playing LFS for over a year now, about 3/4th's of it on the demo version, and 1/4th on the registered version. I enjoy the game immensely, as it is much more realistic than what I've ever played before. I'm a diehard racing fan, starting all the way with Need For Speed 1(!).

Right, praise talk aside, the game is bloody hard to drive with a joystick! I currently use a dual analog setup, with a half-decent joystick from Saitek. That sucker doesn't even have FF on it However, the joystick was alright for a quick one hour spin every day, and I had fun with the game, usually staying about 1 or 2 seconds behind competition. I got my record with the Gti on blackwood down to 1:34:7x, but I've hit a big stomp now, as I find the joystick really lacking when it comes to precision detail. It's exactly the situation when you want to land a wee bit away from the grass, but due to inaccuracy of the controller I end up in the wall

So, after one year of LFS and the fact that I truly like this game, I've decided to upgrade to a racing wheel. Going to the local electronics store didn't bring much luck, for all they had were Saitek's R220 and R440 models, neither of which impressed me. I turned to ebay. And I found this baby. It's made by Thrustmaster, which I trust well enough, because I own a plane joystick by them, which survived about 4 years of carnage. Stick the Ferrari logo on it, too, and I can't really ask for more as far as brand credibility goes. The wheel got good reviews as far as quality/precision goes, the only problem being the pedals sliding all over the place. Since I mod computers and stuff every now and then, I'm sure I'll figure something out for that

The price seems to be alright,too. I hope to get it off ebay for around 30 euros, new and with a couple of games to come with it. Has any of you had any experience with this wheel, or perhaps a few tips when looking at wheels?

Sorry for my long'ish monologue, but I needed to put my thoughts on paper, and hopefully get some feedback from the veterans of LFS

Cheers,

Aahz.

They were useless since the S1 era, anyway...

Did the sound work fine in Windows after the crash? It could've easily been a hardware problem, not necessarily an LFS glitch. LFS never ever glitched on me as far as graphics and sound goes.

Well, so far it's been just on any random servers I can get my hands on. Since I do consider myself quite a newbie, I've been spending a lot of time on the [Noob] servers lately in which the people are at least friendly, and the fact that one is a newbie is taken lightly and in no offense.

Well, maybe they are right in being agressive with me. I am considerably slower than most LFS'ers. Could be due to the fact that am I using a joystick, or maybe because I haven't gripped the game well yet.

I can second the author of the original post :/

I've been playing LFS on and off for a couple of months now and I just hate how people are SO into trying to get that first place that they ignore everything and everyone. I mean, it's not freakin' Carmageddon!!

I admit, I'm not your superstar driver, but I manage to get O.K. times, usually within seconds of the best drivers. I still have to learn them RWD cars, but I do well in FWD's and the AWD's.

The bad thing is that there's usually no point for me to start in the top 6, because I get bullied into making mistakes and/or crashed into within the first 2 corners. I usually play nice and I drive clean, but it still somehow doesn't help from people crashing into me or the people in back taking advantage of careful driving and speeding past me. Mates, ican be agressive and cut off all your lines, but we're playing a racing sim, not midtown madness!

Sure, I make mistakes,too and I ocassionally tap people. But that happens maybe once or twice per day, as opposed to several times a race for some racers :\

/rant

N.B. I still love LFS!

Quote from tristancliffe :

Personally I, and the VAST majority of LFSers would really stuggle with a pad, so I salute you that you are capable of it (more so if you're a freaky type who uses two analogue sticks, cos that just hurts my brain). But I bet all of us (with a few daft exceptions) could do reasonably well in GT4 with a joypad, with no aids on, fairly quickly.

Haha, you know, I'm exactly that freaky guy who uses a gamepad, with TWO analog sticks, one for turning, one for accelerating. But I guess being called a "freaky type" isn't really that bad, is it?:P

On topic: As someone mentioned, I think the idea of showcasing LFS at "Top Gear" is doable. What needs to be done is a fairly realistic imitation of one of their tracks, a car that is close to a real one, and they might just byte it.

Quote from J.B. :

There has already been a good discussion on the subject.
http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?t=4070

Me bad! "Use the search, Luke"!

So there is this movie where a guy from "Top Gear" compares driving in Gran Turismo 4 and in real life on Laguna Seca.

Aside from it being a generally interesting movie, it got me thinking. I played just about every popular racing game there is. Nascar, GT series, Forza, NFS(back from the 1st one)...you name it.

I stumbled on LFS a couple of months back, and, like many of us, tried to collect the jaw from my floor for the first couple of days. The level of realism was simply astounding for me!

It took me a couple of months to decide to switch to the S2 license, and I damn am I happy I did! There is so much depth to this game, so much realism, that I believe I will hardly ever switch to another racing game.

But personal talk aside, the guy in this video drove a 1:41 on Laguna Seca in Honda NSX. In real life, he only managed 1:57(!) That is a huge difference in time. I know that there is room for improvement(on the GTi, I was able to come down to 1:34 in a month, but I think that is my limit, due to the fact that I use a gamepad), but he is a skilled driver, and yet the guy lost 16 seconds!

He goes on to say that, first of all, it's the fear factor. He can't physically avoid the fear of braking late before the screwcork turn. Second, GT doesn't simulate certain physical aspects, such as brake heating.

Now, this got me thinking. What if he tried the same thing, but in Live for Speed? Would the realism level in LFS be good enough to, say, make him drive just a few seconds difference between virtual and real life?

For one, I believe it'd be definetely more realistic. We know that, that's why we love LFS. I even believe that LFS simulates a part of the fear factor. Even on the GTi, in my first weeks, I couldn't put myself to break late enough. Or that feeling when this light car is doing 190km/h and you can almost feel that one mistake with the brake, one wrong turn of the wheel, one shift-down too quick and you're gonna end up against the wall. It's beautiful.

It got me wondering, if maybe we can write the guys at "Top Gear" to try out LFS, and see what would they come up with?