The ideal option would be making it totally customisable, having a slider that goes from 0' rotation to 180' either way. How it could be coded I have no idea, and it might be a bit strange in some road cars, but for racers it does seem like a good suggestion. It could be applicable only to cars with digital speedos, for example.

Sam

It'd need to be a server-option, and preferably with adjustable penalties, but it's a good idea

+1

Sam

Quote from OP :

know how A go cart handalles and its limits and i can surly say that a car handes even better than a go kart

...I wonder why single-seaters, which are closer in design theory to go-karts with bodywork than anything else, are much faster than road cars?

Basically, you have no first-hand experience of road cars in real life, and precious little in LFS either. You even start to compare go karts to race cars when you're talking about road cars in your original post... So your 'suggestion' really is somewhat unfounded

Sam

Nothing like patriotism, eh?

In response to the actual suggestion relating to the XRT, I wonder why no experienced users believe this to be necessary? One to ponder, I'm sure. Oh, and 'suggesting' "improved grip for stock cars" seems somewhat ridiculous when you have no experience with the majority of said cars.

All I can say is that you cannot reasonably ask for improvements to the game when you're deliberately running an older version so you can keep 'your' car, such that no improvements would be granted to you anyway.

Sam

Yeah, you can wear earplugs to protect your ears if you like, but you won't miss out on the force of machines like that passing you

I don't mind having sound muffled by a helmet when I'm on track, to be honest but as for LFS I think we can remove that factor for our ears - but remember that the sound we're getting from in-car would have had helmet blocking counted in, as the driver we are playing is wearing a helmet.

I do quite agree with what's said in your post, I was just going over reasons as to why I think it hasn't been done. I'd love to hear all the cars echoing around all over the place, but not if I got a headache or 10FPS as a result

It'd be interesting to see a percentage effect that this sort of sound increase would have on game performance, though, to see how feasible it is to have a lot more sounds going on.

Sam

I think it's fair to say that inside a car, when you're driving at full throttle, it's bloody difficult to hear anything else. You could argue that a road car isn't that loud, but - hang on a minute - it's also full of sound deadening. As a general rule, the louder a car is, the less soundproofing it's going to have, right? So, as the soundproofing level allows more noises in, the engine drowns more out when you're at full tilt.

Driving a Lotus Exige - yeah, I know having the engine right behind your head and barely soundproofed at all doesn't make this the best example in the world - on track, and passing within five yards of another Exige at 8,000rpm and full throttle, I couldn't hear the other car at all. All I could hear was wind, tyres and engine from my own car.

To turn it to LFS, I was sitting at the side of the track, in car with engine running, at Aston - and I heard an AI BF1 moving on a part of the track that was some considerable distance away, not approaching me or anything - just on a part of track that happened to be near to mine, and I could hear it. It's not that bad. However, yes, you can hear cars like that from a serious distance: camping roughly half a mile from the nearest point of the circuit at Le Mans last year, I could pick out and identify individual cars testing on track. You can hear them from a very long way away.

It's not just race cars either - I live fairly near a fast bypass that's not used often, so in the middle of the night it's not at all uncommon for me to lying in bed and listening to someone with a V12 opening the pipes on a road that's over a mile away. And I can still hear them, clearly enough to count the gears, when they're at least two or even three miles from where I am. In a house.

Standing trackside at something like the MotoGP, the bikes are so massively loud you can feel your drink vibrating, and the same goes for LM GT1-class and LM P1-class petrol cars. Back to LFS, if you just sit at the pit wall in shift-U mode, you can't hear things anywhere near as much as you would in real life - but this could be entirely deliberate. It would be pretty annoying after a while if you could hear every car all the time, not to mention the extra processing power used in making the sounds.

Sam

Hahaha, I like it

You must admit that Vlaardingens sounds much more illustrious, and we don't want people wasting good drink in their fuel tanks now, do we?

Sam

Quote from southamptonfc :

Having said that, from looking at the stats, I don't think you drive the BF1 nearly as much as me.

I'm arsing around with it offline a lot of the time now, windowed mode whilst chatting/texting/phoning seems to automatically lead me to playing with a BF1 with the blue light locked on

I was commenting about the year of the car because of the mention of it being driveable without traction control - that's why I thought I'd remind people you're not supposed to drive it with the computer disengaged, and the maps are laid out as such! But, no, I support the idea of being able to make our own engine maps. Provided it doesn't take too long to implement, of course, because as Tristan says, it's going to be a pretty select user group that makes use of them.

It's quite possible that rights for a new F1 car are being discussed, but, as I understand things, ScaViEr has never had any direct contact with BMW - the BF1 came from Intel, for some public demonstration of technology, I believe, and the FBM came from Fortec Motorsport for their V1 Challenge driver selection programme.
Anyway, I don't reckon we'll be getting a new F1 car before we get some form of official LMP-class or LMGT-class car. I mean, we've got a real-world F1 car already, and there are still other gaps in the lineup which are much larger than the gap between an F1.06 and an F1.08 car.

Sam

What Tristan says about ignition advance being a gap in programming would mean that these engine maps would not be adjustable once the car is on track, but it seems quite possible to have modifiable engine maps in the pit menu.

However, this is a 2006 car, and as such is not meant to be driven without traction control. That said, it's perfectly driveable without it...

Sam

There is also a small issue with the AI cars turning across you. If you're using 8 Lane Drag, and you're not in the very left-most lane, they're going to have to turn across your straight line from the start at some point or another. Which would be annoying if you were occupying the space they decided they needed to turn through.

Sam

Quote :

because in real races they need to do that

Your experience being?

Sam

Quote from Stang :

I would think that would make more sense...?

Considerably so.
With 'curve' in #28 I really should have been saying 'tilt' - what I meant was the curving effect the wing had on the airflow, but I managed to express it exceptionally badly!

Thanks for that. I was considering it much too much in an aircraft sense, where the tilting angle of the wing is obviously lacking, seeing as that's where my basic (and then butchered) understanding of aerodynamics came from

Sam

To be honest, I'm not overly concerned by this, although I do see the points of those who reckon it looks odd to have the same 'wheels across all tin-top cars.

I'm not voting, but for those who are saying it's too trivial to bother with at this stage, I can't imagine it's a difficult thing to do - just set things up so that each interior reads its 'wheel image from a different file. The developers wouldn't even need to give us new 'wheels, just allow us to have different ones for each car and I bet there'd be stacks of third-party ones around the skinning forums before long

Sam

Quote from Stang :

Well, air moving more quickly parallel to the surface would result in a lower pressure, pulling it up. If the air is moving more quickly at an angle less than 180 degrees then you start to get the effect of the air pushing back down on the wing. My guess is that there is a critical angle at which point the air hitting the wing overpowers any effect of negative pressure. Especially since as that angle gets larger, the air isn't really traveling as fast over the wing anymore. Wonder what that angle is...?

It wouldn't be a given angle, would it, because it would be changed by the difference in velocity, the velocities themselves (seeing as drag/lift is proportional to the square of the velocity) and then the angle. There's probably a formula for it somewhere in the bowels of Wikipedia, but... Meh. It's not important enough to find it

Right, I've looked into the pressure thing myself now- bit of research never goes amiss! The fact of the matter, it seems, is that the higher the speed of the airflow, the lower the pressure. So what I said in #22 is actually the opposite of what would happen

The tilting and curving of the wing will slow the air down in the areas that are curved or exposed - but seeing as the air will either pass straight underneath the curved area or along it, air going underneath the wing actually won't be affected by the curve very much, will it? So the air underneath remains pretty fast, whilst the air above slows down quite considerably - thus gaining a higher pressure and pushing the wing down. Then you have the effect of the air pushing against the wing as well, but whether this is the same effect, another effect, or just drag, I'm not sure.

Have I finally got this the right way round now?

Sam

Quote from Stang :

I think you got a little mixed up when you started talking about the air over the wing. The faster moving air there would actually pull UP on the wing, not down.

I'm now completely stuck between deciding whether air moving more quickly results in a higher pressure or a lower pressure. Air moving more quickly means that air doesn't need to be in the same place for as long, resulting in a lower atmospheric pressure, but also that more air hits the surfaces of the wing, resulting in a higher pressure on that. Which effect is greater?

Better find out before I go any further on this one

Sam

Last edited by Dark Elite, Thu 20 Mar 2008, 17:42.

Quote from Stang :

Normally, as your car cuts through the air, a zone of negative pressure forms behind your car as the air tries to close that space behind you. This causes vortices and stuff, but also the simple fact that there IS a zone of negative pressure tends to hold your car back just a tiny bit. If another car comes in behind you, that negative pressure still exists, but now it is acting on two vehicles, meaning that it doesn't have quite as much of an effect on you alone.

Ahh.. Of course.. The lack of air in the space the car has just vacated causes a much lower pressure, so everything around it tries to move into the space - including the car, hence the backwards pull on it. Thank you very much for that

As for the wing making the drafting effect harder to exploit, I'm not convinced: my reckoning is that the amount of air the wing displaces more than makes up for the splitting of the air currents, which I suppose is why cars with greater downforce are easier to draft - they're interfering with the airflow more to create higher pressure above them, which pushes them down onto to road, and so the air behind them takes longer to reform / is at a lower pressure.

Air travelling under the spoiler isn't necessarily a bad thing - so long as it is slowed down. Air moving slowly underneath the spoiler surface, I believe, results in a lower pressure, and so the spoiler - and the arse-end of the car attached to it - tries to move down to occupy the lower-pressure air. This effect is increased by the faster-moving air above the wing creating higher pressure, as the wing is now under a double effect - high pressure above pushing it down, and low pressure below encouraging it to move down.

Please do correct me if I'm wrong, I'm using reversed aeronautic teaching here

EDIT - Ignore this if you know what's good for you I managed to reverse the physics rather than the way they're employed!

Sam

Last edited by Dark Elite, Thu 20 Mar 2008, 18:02.

I'm somewhat confused as to why the air expanding behind a car makes it go more slowly - I thought that seeing as the air is expanding to fill a gap made by the car, it is expanding against the rear of the car, and so an increase in this effect would create a greater push behind the car, and thus greater speed?

I thought the reason the car in front experienced a reduction in drag was something to do with lower turbulence around the rear as the air is cleaved apart by the second car before it has a chance to reform.

Maybe I'm missing something, or maybe my ideas of aero physics are flawed? Maybe both

Sam

Quote from OP :

7. VS is of course free of charge.

Seeing as Demo users cannot watch replays on tracks or of cars that they haven't paid to unlock, I'm not sure about the likelihood of this.

Sam

Putting the fuel into litres rather than percentage does bring a small issue with accuracy - if a car has a large fuel tank, you can be pretty accurate with how much fuel you're putting in, but with a smaller tank you're losing quite a bit of accuracy. Those who concern themselves with saving as much weight as possible might not like the idea of losing that bit of precision.

Using decimal places could work, I guess, but then you might have a bit of an issue using a fairly small slider to get a round number if you want one. Halves seem to be a good idea, with the slider going from 25.0 to 25.5, then 26.0 et cetera. I'm just thinking out loud here.

The most likely reason the fuel is set by percentage is that a percentage can be carried over between cars, and still be about right for the same distance - there are, of course, exceptions, but generally less economical cars have bigger tanks, and so a percentage set in a car with a smaller tank won't be too far out. A very general rule, yeah, but it still exists.

Then there's the thought of what you do when there's, say, 80 litres in the tank of an FO8 and you select an FBM. The FO8 was nowhere near full, but the FBM would be way over the maximum, so what the hell does the gauge set to? If anything, it would use the percentage to decide. Isn't that where we started?

Sam

/me presses '1'

Try the running-along-the-straights thing with a car using an automated sequential gearbox and see what happens. But, by far the most important thing is the corner exit, as we know. Bear in mind that a difference in speed will change as the actual speed of each car increases, this might be where you're noticing the differences.

But this is all by-the-by, as Ikaponthus says, just butcher their gears and see what they do

Sam

For the record, Woz, I thought that was a very intuitive and useful method of explaining grip levels, and I'll definitely remember to use it. Cheers

Sam

...And look how much good they did

Sam

My Lord.

I wonder if he's ever heard of IP tracking...

Sam

Quote from pearcy_2k7 :

Its not even understeer the front wheels feels like they've just hit a patch of ice as soon as you turn in.

Er, what would you describe that as, then?

Inferno setups are not made for keyboard drivers, unsurprisingly, because nobody serious uses such a ridiculously unrealistic method of input. The car has been made more realistic, and so setups made for the updated car should not work as well on an unrealistic controller. There's your simplified explanation. I'm wondering how long it will take for you to realise that the car will only understeer if you throw it into a corner too hard... Which isn't your fault, of course, it's the car or the physics to blame for that...

This really isn't going anywhere...

Sam