Perhaps an Oz LFS server could happen in the future. I certainly hope so. They're not expensive to have like they used to be, they're faster and better connected than ever, too. It's not a given that some of the "Asian" servers Scawen is describing could NOT be located in Oz as a matter of course, and this would be entirely in keeping with the philosophy of reliable distributed computing.
I fully sympathise with your dilemma. But this future of LFS-hosted servers is secondary to the objective fact that the LFS of locally hosted servers is dead anyway. If Scavier didn't make this move, further development of LFS using local servers is wholly implausible, already killed by piracy. Scawen is tacitly acknowledging that LFS as it's done now is dead.
I think we just need to hope that those in the far corners aren't left behind with the new LFS that's coming. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for ya.
I got to say many Chinese players are waiting this for so long... Huge appreciate!
My only concern is if the new master server will creating and running a new asia server that are technical blocked by Chinese government. This is GFW, a service that blocked some internet service provideder and website mainly by blocking IP band and redirect packets to non-related IPs in Mainland China. If that's the case we will be unable to connect to the online community.We've been suffered with raceroom's ERROR 503 for years so I really think we should get this right.
Maybe we can arrange a early test with. And this could be done after public test patch availabe. So far I think just remain original plan will be fine, the best case is straightforward 100% connection quality, which means GFW have no influence so we don't need to worry about.
Well first congrats on pulling the update on the Monday as it was holiday in a lot of country I consider it valid for the weekend still!
Jokes appart giving a big kick to the darklfs is the way to go. I hope you will work around the consequences but that is the way to go. Mods only to S3 is also very good idea. The devs need income I support that.
I hope that the mods will not dilute the racing even more, I mean I hope there will be more new racer than race classes...
As the mods will be controlled and somewhat limited I hope to have some kind of PB and stats stored in lfsworld. I miss not having pbs on layouts, I wish it works better on this side.
I see some interesting stuff in the mod menu. Already a three wheeler so I think soon we will have formula six wheeler, trucks... New mini looks good. Oldies formula too. Classic karting will be cool addition to mrt.
I really hope it works out for the community, Scavier, me... Keep up the good work.
Wow this is so cool! The soccer ball brings back memories of playing soccer with UF1000's with a soccer ball skin and trying to push it in a goal.
Also, the basic EV support and other changes are really, really cool. This will open up so many new possibilities, I'm sure people get creative with it. I'm sure the cruising servers will also have a blast with this, with rescue cars and such, and race servers with a pilot car. Would those lights on top also be controlled or just static?
Is it possible to accept/reject specific cars for a host? For example, people create their own new race class with modified TBO's or something, can you manage which mods are allowed or not via the server, or InSim? Like you can whitelist or blacklist a few mods by ID or whatever?
I'm looking forward to this huge change, and hope the physics and graphics also land soon. I don't really understand all the sour comments about server hosting though, as nothing really has changed. Sure, it would be convenient to have the InSim on the same host, but other than that it won't be a problem. I've ran plenty of InSim's that way.
About texture size, there is a maximum size of 1024x1024 for each png texture. The pngs you supply are converted to dds when you export from the editor. The texture limit is important for fast download and quick use online. Today I'm finalising the total texture area in the export check. My aim is to look at our highest resolution cars, use their texture area (combined pixel count) as a guide, and allow around 30% to 50% more total area than that.
Artists will have to be reasonable, you can save so much by using small repeating textures, for materials like a car seat. For example a massive picture to cover a whole seat in minute detail isn't suitable for uploaded mods for online racing.
I imagine there are some people with excellent graphic art skills who have focused on renders in the past, or maybe cars for single use in games, who will be able to adjust their texturing approach to make huge savings in texture area to make models suitable for in-game download and online use.
EDIT: Forgot to reply about normal maps. I haven't coded for them even in the new graphics system but would like to one day. In the meantime, the material types are very limited. Although we have more material types available in the development version, the public version car materials are limited to MATT or SHINY. And these may be SOLID, ALPHA (transparent with opacity controlled by the alpha channel) or ATEST (alpha test - though this is not recommended as it doesn't work well with MSAA).
EDIT2: Also forgot to reply about the mappings. The UV coordinates of the output vertices are all computed from planar mappings. You can create a planar mapping, to map a rectangular cutout onto a rectangular mapping on the object. It's in one of the videos. The planar mappings can come from any direction. Usually one of the main axis directions but any direction is possible. I know that artists would also like cylindrical mappings, or even manual adjustment of individual UV coordinates. I do plan to implement cylindrical mappings but it is not done yet.
You can create a skin template by having a separate 2D graphics program open, and pasting special screenshots from the LFS mapping editor, carefully positioned. It wouldn't be a good idea for me to describe it right now - I've got work to do! But I've written a bit in the incomplete modeller document. https://www.lfs.net/ed_man/modeller.htm
The idea of a skin is just that - other people can make their own skin based on your template and upload it to LFS.net in the normal way as they did for official skins.
I already have a request noted to export a wireframe image.
All features available in the LFS cars, are available in the mods. We are supplying you with the development editors.
Or of course quite a lot is covered in the videos. Documents and videos are incomplete though.
The America server is located in Ashburn, USA which has very good internet connectivity so we hope it will be good for North and South America. We'll see when we get to testing!
I hope there will be no problem for Chinese racers and mod creators. The Asian server is in Tokyo, Japan so I hope there will be no problem! I'd like to hear from you when we start testing.
It's already possible through InSim and it is marked as a high priority task to manage a list of allowed mods in game, an equivalent of our current allowed cars but it's a more complex system. Current plan is a list of up to 120 allowed mods. For first test version it's just allow mods yes/no.
it is amazing updates and i am exicted to test mod support.
i have question for SCAWEN, please consider pricing in Georgia since lfs have big amount of fans here but pricing is extremely high for our economy. it is impossible for them to buy license. like in turkey please review pricing for Georgia <3 thank you in advance
That's great to hear. I was wondering, is there like a limit for the with and height of a car? Or, a model like you showed with 9 XFG sub-objects? For example, when you drive a car that's 200m wide or something, it could be used just to mess with people and dick around. Or would such mods simply not be approved?
I haven't yet fully checked the videos, but is it also possible to create a touring car for example? With 6 wheels, or something like a truck? That would open up some new ideas and possible racing classes for truck racing.
The suggestion for a link with Automation is also great to check in the future btw. In BeamNG there are loads of fun cars that are created with Automation and then exported.
So this will be similar to the downloading skins from the master server I guess. But will there be an option for us ( the mod creators / publishers ) to have the textures at higher resolution ( 4096 x 4096 ) locally.
Like skins - When we are creating skins its ususally 4096x4096 and we put it as .JPEG in our data/skins folder.
When we upload it to the master server we downscale it to 1024x1024 so it fits the requirements for upload.
Hi, thinking about this from a Cruise server perspective,
will there be any changes to InSim to support new mod vehicles?
How about vehicle 3(4?)-letter names in IS_NPL, IS_SLC?
Number plates on modded vehicles?
Could we have a bunch of same car with different configurations that could be changed on the fly with insim (with some IS_TINY command for example)?
Could there even be vehicle intake restriction/added weight/weight position changes from insim?
I'm thinking about some cruise server fun stuff like
- NFS U2 style car tuning
- or trucks with different cargo options (no cargo, light cargo, heavy cargo
- or enforcing new driver/bad behavior by limiting performance without having a different vehicle
Georgia and Turkey are in the lower price category, which is half of the full price. I do understand that even so, it can still seem more expensive, considering exchange rates and earnings.
But it's hard to lower the prices too much as we have to run a service and it costs money. These are lifetime licenses. Most other internet services I see want your money every month or year, so I still think it's good value.
Still, that doesn't solve the problem that it seems a lot of money in some countries. But I do have a question because I am trying to understand better - how much does a computer cost in those countries with economic issues? I'd be interested to know how much an LFS license costs in relation to the price of a computer.
There aren't specific limits on every variable. I think we will have to exercise judgement when reviewing submitted mods.
At the moment you can make a truck but it must be four wheeled, as the LFS system has not been designed to handle more than 4 wheels. It might be possible in future, but at the moment I am faced with duplicating any changes in the development version to the public version so that makes it important not to change much in the existing system. We noticed when trying a test truck that it gets stuck in some pit garages. My truck wasn't developed properly, so I can't say whether the tyre physics really scales properly to that size and mass of vehicle. I want to use trucks and karts as reference points when I am working on the new tyre physics. Most likely the public LFS physics works best for car-sized mods, as that's what it was originally designed for.
I think we will have to ask people to test carefully before uploading their mod, and if there are certain issues then warning notes added. We will rely on people being sensible and we believe that most people will want to submit high quality work.
It may be possible to avoid applying limits or use lower limits when you want to test locally in LFS.
The mods have their own unique SkinID as you can see in the videos. It appears to the user or mod creator as a 6-character code. But really it is a hexadecimal number and this is represented in 3 bytes internally and in InSim, so it fits into the same slot as the official cars' 3-character codes.
You can put number plates on mod vehicles just as we have done for official cars. This is done by adding a special texture name "s_plate" in the "page" mode of the modeller.
That may be alright if Asian server is in Japan, but still depend on the actual IP area. However the ping may be up to 230ms according to master server results, dunno if it's okay for racing. Our oversea bandwith is always shortage for sure, even to Korea is 170ms. Interestingly, some EU server also at 170ms. I'll keep looking at this potential problem.
Ok, I will have to read up on everything in this thread here. As someone very active in another sim's modding scene for close to a decade now, it certainly reads like a great approach, especially the way mods need to be approved before they can be used online. My bunch could be ready rather soon. Apart from the tris count they fit your requirements rather well already. And ofc there's also the RaceAbout GTR resting on my HD for many years now.
Also can't state enough that you should not make it too easy, or else your servers will be flooded with 63485434843 Nissan Silvias ... ehm, "Nussian Sovokias", as in models ripped straight from Forza, Need For Speed and whatever games there are out there.
average "gamer" here have around $350-400 computer or even less. also 1USD = 3.2 GEL , average salary (well not average but most young ppl have) is $200
(( . i know it sounds so bad. although i still support LFS project because i think it is very rare simulator which is perfecting step by step so keep working. maybe you make new year discount or something i don't know.
Not being able to import UVs would be a serious oversight. But looking closer at the videos, I doubt it would be in any way feasible to downgrade these models to work in the new Editor.
I mean, those of us that have worked with Blender/3DSMax for years now would not want to switch to something else.
We can consider anything, after we see how it goes in testing and if there is income to run extra servers, and support from any countries where it is found that ping time is a problem.
But let's not suppose that we know what the ping times will be, before we have ever tried it.
And this could be done after public test patch availabe. So far I think just remain original plan will be fine, the best case is straightforward 100% connection quality, which means GFW have no influence so we don't need to worry about.
