Afternoon chaps,

I'd like to suggest a feature to help out us race admins who, if we're watching replays, need to view the behaviour of all of the field.

What would be greatly useful to me, would be the ability to have say, 9 seperate mini windows in the main LFS window, where I can watch 9 seperate cars all driving at the same time.

As it currently stands, when I'm trying to govern a race I'm having to go through a field of say... 20, by watching 4 cars at a time. Then run the replay again and watch the next 4 cars, etc etc. This means I'm having to view a single race replay no less than Five Times! As you can imagine this is "helluva" time consuming and I have better things to do with my time. (honest, i do!)

I don't mean spreading windows over multiple screens as I think someone's suggesting moving dials and times etc onto another screen (like flight sims).

I'm really looking for a way to show 9 mini screens (or more/less than 9) in an lfs window, on one screen. (A bit like a cctv system!)

Am I mad? Or are there others who are crying out for a similar feature?

Regards,

Kringle/ MR_B

Not even just for Admins. It'd be a fun feature, but due to the way that (as I've been learnt to understand), the LFS GFX engine wouldn't be able to handle it.

Quote from dawesdust_12 :

Not even just for Admins. It'd be a fun feature, but due to the way that (as I've been learnt to understand), the LFS GFX engine wouldn't be able to handle it.

So even if you could turn down the features to bare minimum (like square cars), it would still have trouble?

and think about the race commentators, idk but i assume in reality they watch at least 4 groups of fighting racers and filter the "action" for us single "monitorians"...

so thumbs up!

regards

It's not that, as much as it is the way that LFS renders the track in front and behind the cars. It would be doing X times more, for each viewport, so take your current FPS, divide by viewports. I'd be left with a stunning 12 FPS/Viewport at 9 viewports...

Quote from dawesdust_12 :

I'd be left with a stunning 12 FPS/Viewport at 9 viewports...

Ouch, yep I can see why it would struggle now. Even the option to run just 3 mini screens would be more than fantastic for me.

So LFS doesn't render a track, then store virtually? (I'm not a whizz with how a game works)

can you open a bunch of different instances of LFS in window mode and do it that way? don't know if it would work since I've never tried, i feel like you might only be able to connect with your account once.

Good suggestion,

If it where possible and practicle then yes for sure it would be great, both for admins, spectators and directors alike...

just make sure it was not available to the racers whilst the race is going on

Quote from dawesdust_12 :

It's not that, as much as it is the way that LFS renders the track in front and behind the cars. It would be doing X times more, for each viewport, so take your current FPS, divide by viewports. I'd be left with a stunning 12 FPS/Viewport at 9 viewports...

That's presuming that it simply scaled windows from rendering at your standard resolution.

Example (considering graphical aspects only):
If you run 1280x1024 and get 90fps avg. under normal circumstances, then rendering 9 * 1280x1024 screens (scaled down) would be 90/9 = 10fps avg. But you're not requiring 1280x1024 rendering for *each* 1/9th of a screen, but overall.

Therefore, you could theoretically use a lower resolution for each screen (say, 640x480), which may exhibit several hundred FPS, THEN divide that by 9, and you'd still have a decent frame rate.

Obviously, this fails to account for physics calculations, timing, etc... but just to say it's not as simple as FPS/9. Why render content at a resolution 9 times higher than needs be?

Quote from JamesF1 :

Obviously, this fails to account for physics calculations, timing, etc...

How is that relevant? The physics, etc. all [probably] get calculated for each vehicle regardless.

Quote from the_angry_angel :

How is that relevant? The physics, etc. all [probably] get calculated for each vehicle regardless.

eeexactly, so it may well be a possibility after all?!


Would it be possible to create an external program to create the screens? Or would it be exclusively down to LFS.exe to generate?