Thanks for responding. That sound is just an example. All tracks, all cars and all views are the same. the whole of Blackwood sounds like that, not just the straight - that's just the bit I recorded.

And if I've been through several sets of hardware and several OS reinstalls, surely that means the game IS to blame, as the only constant factor. No other game or application has this problem and I've been a specialist IT tech for 15 years so I'm fairly handy with this stuff ;-)

I'm also pretty certain that none of the real race meetings I've been to have sounded like that ;-) It's a real game-breaker for me - I simply can't race with it sounding like that.

A quick update. I fancied trying LFS again so I fired it up, auto-installed Patch Z and the muffled sound is STILL there. Not just a bit muffled either. Imagine a long empty tunnel at night with a car at the other end of it. That's how it sounds, inside the car and out, even spectating. The startup demo replays have the same sound problem. I like to support independent developers but titles like Race07 look good, play well and sound great. Has LFS missed its time?

Last edited by AMacdonaldLFS, Tue, 7 Oct 2008 21:40.

I've uploaded a sample of my audio to http://www.digiwake.co.uk/blackwood_straight.mp3. Tell me this isn't how the game should sound ;-)

Trust me, no realistic driving game should sound like this. My analogy about the car at the end of a long tunnel is spot-on. Maybe I'll record a sample. When it first turned up, after a while away from LFS following the original S1 release, I had upgraded from my old SBLive card to an Audigy. I was told (not by the devs) that it was an identified problem with Audigy cards so I went away. Later, with an Audigy2 I found it was still there so I went away again. Now, with a fresh download, an X-Fi, new motherboard, memory, processor, hard drives and install of XP it's STILL there. No other game does it. I've supported LFS from the very start but I can't see me shelling out on S3 if it ever arrives.

Just installed afresh from a new full download and the audio is still totally messed up. I just can't race like this - it's like being at one end of a long tunnel with the car at the other end.

For as long as I can remember my LFS sound has been hideously muffled and extremely reverberant. Whenever there's a new patch I come back and see if it's fixed but it never is. A couple of years ago I was told it was a Creative Audigy issue that would be fixed. I've been through a lot of motherboards, processors, graphic cards and sound cards since then, plus numerous OS reinstalls but this one seems set in stone. Nothing in the SHIFT-A menu makes any decent difference - the muffling and reverberance stay. So, what am I missing? Maybe I should download fresh instead of patching all the time.

Don't forget that multithreading works on single and multiple CPU systems. MS Word and Photoshop (among lots of other serious apps) are multithreaded. Most games aren't and I can only assume that's because most game programmers don't come from the right sort of background. Surely the ability to decouple the AI, graphics and physics engines would be a great thing to have. Prioritise whichever facet is most important to the game (any game, not just LFS) and take automatic advantage of all the available CPU horsepower.

Quote from stevewhite :

the reason im asking this is because my laptop cant handel having a lot of cars on the sceen at the same time... it has 1gig of ddr2 ram so i doubt thats the problem. It has the xpress 1100 chipset and graphics from ati. full detail at 1280x800x32 will rarely drop below 30 fps. however when there are a few cars on the screen, im lucky to get 14 fps. i dumbed down the detal and resolution in the game and get higher framerates when alone but the same in with a bunch of cars. I have the turion tl-50. And im guessing its the low l2 cache, having only 256k per core, i dont think it can handle the heavy physics load. If i could run lfs on both cores, im guessing it would fix the problem completly. any thoughts?

If reducing the graphics detail helps it sounds like that's one main source of your problems. The ATI xpress chipset isn't all that good at 3D processing. If you look at http://www.notebookcheck.net/M ... Benchmark-List.844.0.html you'll see it's pretty much at the bottom of the mobile chipset benchmarks list. 123 marks in 3DMark06 isn't going to impress anyone. Sorry.

I'll post a full report with piccys if I end up looking heroic at all.

It's Long Marston near Evesham. I know LFS won't turn me into an alien but it's probably the only RWD practise I'll be getting before then. I've done some Karting in the past but the nearest track is 80 miles away so it isn't really an option.

And I'm sure I'll bottle out of really hitting any performance limits ;-)

I won't be racing, just trying to go fast. The only rear wheel drive car I've ever driven is a Volvo 960 and I managed to lose the tail end on just about the first damp corner I came across. All I want is some practise in the right sort of car. Do real cars have such dreadful low speed understeer?

My cars? Chance would be a fine thing! I know nothing about them except the models and fact that the WRC is an ex-rally beast.

I have a track day coming up in a couple of weeks and how better to prepare for it than with LFS? Given that I'll be driving an Elise, Impreza WRC, Porsche 996 and Ferrari 355, what should I concentrate on? The Elise and Impreza shouldn't be too much trouble and I'd guess the FZ50 is probably 355 material but what about the 996? Does anyone have one IRL? Which LFS car comes closest?

You need to install the Winsock2 update for Windows 95. It's preinstalled in all versions from Win98 upwards.