Could we have a version of south city with all barriers removed?

It would be great for the cops and robbers style server.

Would be nice to cruise around South city, hehe

IIRC it has been suggested before, and also IIRC it cant be done because for some reason LFS isnt capable of handling big territories...
I could be wrong

It has something to do with the game engine.

Quote from BlakjeKaas :

It has something to do with the game engine.

Yes, tracks need a definate route as it uses that to dictate which polys you can see and which you cannot and therefore which to bother drawing.

Oh, snap! :doh:

so? but what if its been already prepared as kind of a "free room" which means you cant have races there. Like another layout has been added which also wont appear at lfsw and so on. CLC has proofed already thats its not necessary to have races in LFS to have fun.

Quote from 510N3D :

so? but what if its been already prepared as kind of a "free room" which means you cant have races there. Like another layout has been added which also wont appear at lfsw and so on. CLC has proofed already thats its not necessary to have races in LFS to have fun.

It was just stated a couple posts up that it is not possible with LFS's engine.illepall

I have two counters for the reasons why people think it can not be done.

1- AS Historic is a dam large track and area, easily the size of the area used by the whole of the South City complex.

2- We can build tracks and hold multi-lap races in the suto cross areas using the editor so there is no reason why a predefigned track is a requirment for the game engine.

Now I see no reason why all for the track areas can't just be open racing venues. The tracks host could then define the layout of the course just like a circuit layed out on the autocross areas. The only draw back is we loose the ability to record Hotlaps and WRs. The way around this is to have predefigned layouts that can be selected but not altered and just track Hotlap and WR stats for those configs only. All other configs are WR and Hotlap invalid.

The only limitation there might be right now is poly count. If the engines limited in its avalable mempry useage for texture and geometry then somthing like this may need to wait for S3 and the rendering engien overhaul.

Quote from MAGGOT :

It was just stated a couple posts up that it is not possible with LFS's engine.illepall

yeah from some pseudo specialists who dont know for sure or cant remember correctly and so on..... No offence guys but if you dont have a clue why do you think you have?

i dont think any of you guys have got such deep knowledge about the lfs engine to make such comments. But if so, some more details could be helpful which would also avoid our *sweet* lil needless conversation MAGGOT.

Quote from MAGGOT :

It was just stated a couple posts up that it is not possible with LFS's engine.illepall

Well then it needs to be changed But not now, if that'd be in S3/S4, that would be veery niiice! =)


What I remember (+understood) from the brief explanation someone gave waayy back, the main issue was AI route around the track. Which currently wouldn't work if there were multiple routes. But so? You could disable AI for the open-tracks like it's disabled on AutoX.

Quote from 510N3D :

yeah from some pseudo specialists who dont know for sure or cant remember correctly and so on..... No offence guys but if you dont have a clue why do you think you have?

i dont think any of you guys have got such deep knowledge about the lfs engine to make such comments. But if so, some more details could be helpful which would also avoid our *sweet* lil needless conversation MAGGOT.

It would seem to me Scawen has a clue, and he also said it's not possible with the current engine. He said it multiple times too. And this discussion has been around more than once as well. I'd rather see Scawen work on more important stuff than turning LFS into a CnR game. (yes i know someone will come and say it would be good for racing too)

Quote from 510N3D :

No offence guys but bla bla bla

none taken, we're used to your behavior
no offence


if you take would bother and look up some old threads - you would discover that somehow we remember it correctly

For sure Scawen has a clue . Im sorry for not reading every single thread, everyday like some of you guys obviously do. Since the search & find procedure is getting more and more time consuming i have to thank you for this information spam . With this in my mind i also have to apologize for the inappropriate comment i have made but sometimes things like this -> illepall makes it hard to give a proper answer.

"I'd rather see Scawen work on more important stuff than turning LFS into a CnR game"

me too but see it more as an feature for people that loves the game itself and just enjoy driving the cars or maybe get used to the game at all. You dont have to join those servers and no one said its status has first priority.

Okay, I said this before, for some reason this keeps sticking in my head, and here goes why it wouldn't work: LFS renders the track in front of you and behind you, and it calculates how far that would need to be, according to the invisible lines every track has. So here we come to problem number one: it needs that line to know what to render. A city would have multiple lines, which is impossible, or you always have to follow one route and it would probably just cock up.

Here comes number 2 which will smash down your "but the autoX works": a city would be too big to render in one part, the autoX is being rendered in one piece, so needs a lot less resources because it's kinda small.

Get it?

Its am rendering engine limitation for the most part. Getting the AI to follow the track woud lbe as easy as drawing a virtual path in the editor, but since LFS is an Online Racing Sim why do we even need the AI anymore.

Todays computers are more then capable of rendering an entire city at once many times larger then the one that encompases the South City venue. But it woudl not even need to if a moden rendering soluton was used. Some of todays FPS have huge envirnents that are not a problem at all to render for the 64+ players in then at a time.

Its not somthing that will change for S2, It may not make it in to S3. It may have to wait for what ever follows LFS, perhpas LFS2.

If that was partly directed at me, I didn't say a computer couldn't render it, I said LFS's engine can't. I'm not 100% sure about my post, it's been a while I read this, if I even read it correctly, but I think it sums it up and gives a plausible answer

No it was not directed at you. I was mearly pointing out the reasons and likely hood. I think its long overdue for a racing sim thats steaped in real physics to take this kind of approach but until the engine is completely rewritten to allow for it it will not happen.

I posted my ideas on how it could work in another thread here in this section but with the current LFS render its not possible to do and retain all the current functionality.

Games which have the ability to roam dont usually look that good. the GTA Series is the prime example. the free roam is so bad, that GTA uses i think it was 5 LOD models PER MODEL. imagine the time and effort it would take to do such a task.

Even then new Saints Row game has an LOD System, but the LOD's are so close to one another, that you hardly see the change between LOD's.

I loved the popups in driver 1 Seriously though, I played that game without any problems of me thinking it looks sh^tty, untill I found someone saying the popups were awful, I even had to start the game to look because I never payed much attention to it, it was just the way it was. Untill I got "vanishing point", how did they make that work anyways? I forgot.

Lol, looked some stuff up about it, and I can't believe how crappy it looked, I remember it so much better.

Quote from 510N3D :

With this in my mind i also have to apologize for the inappropriate comment i have made but sometimes things like this -> illepall makes it hard to give a proper answer.

Sorry if that offended you, but this has come up literally dozens of times, and anyone who has been in the community for at least a year should have seen it brought up at least once. The "illepall" was put there because you neglected to think about the previous posts, which stated it was not possible in LFS. When you were told it was not possible, your response was "So?"

Sorry if that was offensive, but your origional post came accross to me as kind of arrogant and demanding in a way. I suppose that's just the issue with a text-based communication. Really shows how important body language and tone of voice are to the human understanding when it comes to communication.

I meant no offence by what I had said.

Now back to the topic, Scawen has said LFS does not support this. He has also said, IIRC, there are no plans to change anything to allow this sort of feature. After all, LFS is intended to be a racing simulation, not a free-roam simulation.

Quote from sgt.flippy :

Okay, I said this before, for some reason this keeps sticking in my head, and here goes why it wouldn't work: LFS renders the track in front of you and behind you, and it calculates how far that would need to be, according to the invisible lines every track has. So here we come to problem number one: it needs that line to know what to render. A city would have multiple lines, which is impossible, or you always have to follow one route and it would probably just cock up.

Here comes number 2 which will smash down your "but the autoX works": a city would be too big to render in one part, the autoX is being rendered in one piece, so needs a lot less resources because it's kinda small.

Get it?

"LFS renders the track in front of you and behind you" -> "LFS renders the track around you" There problem solved. Like in Midtown Madness, Driver, GTA, Monster Truck Madness, Sports Car GT, Screamer 4x4, Mafia and all others I can't remember atm. It's not impossible, and not as easy "just removing the barriers", I know. But very much possible, they just need make it possible.

Get it?

LFS loads its track data at the start of the race. Loading is not just pumping the bytes from disk to memory; there's a lot of computation involved, including the lighting conditions. On my PC it takes 10 seconds or so.

Big city environments won't fit into memory. The game engine must swap parts of it in and out to disk as streets and buildings come into view and vanish again. The swapping must be done in small bits, otherwise you won't be able to drive for a few seconds when you turn a corner.

You can imagine that this requires a thorough rewrite of the engine. That's not something the devs will do when S2 is nearing completion. But for S3 it may very well be possible. We know dynamic weather is in the plans for S3, so Scawen will need dynamic track data anyway.

(Those aren't my ideas, but the gist of an earlier thread.)

Meh...

Quote :

Originally Posted by Scawen
We have a special software render in the dev version which draws all the objects from every point, in a colour coded way and uses that to make a special efficient list that decides which objects can be drawn depending on where you are in the track path, so raising the frame rate a lot. You may have seen that go wrong in some cases where a car appears to be driving round in the air, probably after seeing a message "follower could not find position". And another flaw is that in some rare places, an object like a lamp post or something can appear and disappear incorrectly, due to being falsely obscured in the original software render.



Anyway, the optimiser render is a bit lower resolution than your screen, and that object which is missng there, was probably obscured during the optimiser render, although really it should be visible. My plan is to draw the optimiser at higher resolution to further reduce this kind of glitch.

Quote :

Originally Posted by Scawen
Yes that is a problem, and the main reason why we don't have a free roaming mode in the tracks yet. It's not just what's visible but also the lighting including lightmap and shadows that go over the car.

It seems possible to sort this out, by somehow having more than one path available at a time, for example both Blackwood configs together would cover the whole area, or at South City, the Long and Classic configs together would cover it all. Then LFS would need to do some path switching when you went too far off one path, it could work out which one to use.

But as usual quite a lot of code reorganising is needed because it's only designed to have one path and lightmap at the moment, other than that i guess it's a bit like being in Autocross mode, that means ignoring wrong way driving and disabling disabling path lap counting and AI drivers. So it's something i'd like to do but it's not high enough priority yet.

thanks for finding this lalathegreat