I started autocrossing my new car with a local club recently and I've been testing a GPS-based data acquisition unit to get friction-circles & lat & long G plots & stuff. So, I thought it might be cool to try to walk one of the courses with the GPS unit and hack up some code that would take the lat/long feed & build a layout automatically in LFS.

First attempts are written up in this Cayman club forum post. I was actually pretty impressed at how close the LFS version was to the feeling of driving the real course, though I'd like to have been able to add my own car as none of the built-ins are particularly close.

The post contains screen shots & video of both real & simulated driving (though I'd sure have liked the simulated camera angles in the real video!). It also has the .lyt file for the layout I generated. It's not particularly exciting or complex, but it's cool that it came from a real course.

I'll keep hacking on the track-builder program and may post it at some point.

Cheers,
John.

This is really amazing. Good work! You must release that track builder program you're working on! If you can get it to be clean and user-friendly, it would really streamline AutoX course building. I'm very impressed.

Holy..Wow, great job, look forward to seeing this as a downloadable program sometime :]

Very cool stuff John!!! And nice club, I haven't seen many Cayman clubs yet, I guess they are becoming quite popular (One guy mentioned something about Alameda... are you guys in Northern California area?? (if so, I'd like to know how you guys know where events are happening in the area... like on a website? (I am in Redwood City))

And regarding your TrackLab program there. I would really like to see how that turns out!! I have always wanted something like that, and what you have there is a very ingenious idea, I must say. I hope it grows into something that the public could use. Nice stuff, I've always wanted something like that! (I have tons and tons of layout plans drawn up on paper or on computer, but building them is a hassle in LFS when you start from scratch and try to recreate them (or it takes too long). This would help jump through sooo many steps to make it easier, I like it

Thanks for the encouraging comments! I plan on improving the program, adding the other AX areas in LFS and probably allowing bezier-curve based manual track layout, so you could use it to help build your layouts, Tweaker.

I'll post again when I have more to show.

Cheers,
John.

Oh, I forgot to mention the NoCal autocross sites for Tweaker (I'm in Los Gatos). At least for the Porsche club, the local chapter sites are Golden Gate and Loma Prieta, and their AX pages are here and here. The PCA site has an overall event calendar as well. You could also try the local SCCA solo site, and in fact, most of the car marque clubs will run AX.

Cool, and thanks for working on that cool program and the AX info

That program you are making is what I've always asked around here about. Basically some have said such a program is not possible. Placing cones via a program with a path is what some said could never be done. I had my doubts, so this is really neat to see . Beizer curves and stuff would be really nice.

What would be even more helpful is preset arrangements. For instance you could go and place a slaom that is evenly spaced, and set how many cones/length you want it to be. And other typical autocross layout pieces. Having that would be a real lifesaver

As for the AX clubs in our area, thanks for the headsup, because I used to goto a lot of events a few years back, and sometimes will goto ones at Candlestick parking lot (now called Monster Park I guess). My family now owns a plain ol' Boxster which was formerly part of PCA, so I am trying to get them to be a part of PCA so we can go see some cool events and cars

Very cool. If you manage to get this program all up and running I have a feeling I'm going to be heading down to every autox in future with my GPS! Great use of technology :up:

The "TrackLab" program started out as an alternative to the charting and analysis software that came with my GPS DAQ unit, which is pretty crude, and this seems to be the case with most of the DAQ systems I've seen. The GPS-to-LFS layout was just a quick hack for fun, though it did work out quite well and I will refine it. For the moment, I'm going to continue working on the charting and analysis features, and will probably provide an importer for LFS RAF data logs, so you can use it to analyse your LFS driving. Adding a decent interactive AX layout editor is a fair bit of work, mostly because of all the curve & line drawing & editing code, but I will get to it in time.

Meanwhile, if Tweaker or interested others have drawing programs like Illustrator or Visio, etc. that can output SVG files (scalable vector graphics), I can knock up an SVG-to-LFS AX layout converter pretty quickly, at least as a tool to get the initial bulk of the layout done. Let me know if that would be useful. Certainly, placing AX objects along a curve is actually quite trivial, I don't know why someone would say it was impossible.

BTW, I noticed the 3D Render section in the forum mentions 3D Studio MAX as the renderer of choice. Does anyone know if the LFS programmers use it as their main modeller? It turns out I was one of the developers of MAX back in the days.

John.

Quote from johnw3d :

Meanwhile, if Tweaker or interested others have drawing programs like Illustrator or Visio, etc. that can output SVG files (scalable vector graphics), I can knock up an SVG-to-LFS AX layout converter pretty quickly, at least as a tool to get the initial bulk of the layout done. Let me know if that would be useful. Certainly, placing AX objects along a curve is actually quite trivial, I don't know why someone would say it was impossible.

very cool!

SVG is totally in my ballpark. If you were just able to make it recognize a simple path, that would be good. But how about if you could have the program recognize 'pieces' of a path. Like lets say you made two vector straight lines like this attached below. The colors you could use for basic objects would make the process much easier. For instsance, the pure 'basic' colors, like red would make plain orange cones, the blue line would make tire stacks or something

Either way, if you make it just draw a track with basic cones (or maybe an object of your choosing?? (tires, cones, poles, etc), that itself is a big time saver anyways, and then you could replace and move objects around to customize the layout and make it look nicer

Interesting program!

I also made a layout program a while ago in VB6, at my long outdated site: Layout Thingy. It can only open AU1 layouts saved from S1. But! since I will have some free time in a week or so, I will slowly continue the program to open up more/different layouts with all the objects from S2. Eventually, I want to make the program an editor but like you know and everyone says, it's quite a bit of work.

Maybe we can combine skills to release something better?
I dunno, just playing around with ideas.

edit: If you don't have a layout for S1, here is one made by Boosterfire thats pretty fun. (the one in the screeny too)