It doesn't matter.
Either he's a cracker => demo account banned.
Or he's licensed and uses a demo account => demo account banned.
See, no difference. Nobody accused anyone here either - I just remembered him to use his licensed account to post stuff related licensed content. If it had turned out that he has no licensed account... well then "whoops," I guess.
Either he's a cracker => demo account banned.
Or he's licensed and uses a demo account => demo account banned.
See, no difference. Nobody accused anyone here either - I just remembered him to use his licensed account to post stuff related licensed content. If it had turned out that he has no licensed account... well then "whoops," I guess.
Neither of the cars in LFS actually has 900° steering rotation, so you have to force them to use it by setting the wheel turn compensation in the options to 0.
Please use your S2 licensed account for posting.
As often in the Windows world, reinstalling might help.
While you're at it, make sure you're using the latest drivers and software (just in case you're using outdated ones from a CD or such). Other than that, I'm at a loss too
While you're at it, make sure you're using the latest drivers and software (just in case you're using outdated ones from a CD or such). Other than that, I'm at a loss too
Yes it is.
Either a firewall is blocking the UDP connections or somehow your connection (ISP) refuses them, or prevents your packets from being sent to the servers in the first place.
If you check the yellow/blue bar for the brake axis in LFS' axis assignment screen, does it move smoothly or is it 'digital' too?
If the bar moves smoothly, then the problem is related to ingame calibration. If it is on/off like the brake bar itself then it is indeed DirectInput screwing up.
If the bar moves smoothly, then the problem is related to ingame calibration. If it is on/off like the brake bar itself then it is indeed DirectInput screwing up.
This thread might be bad, but your handcrafted signature actually turns out to be even worse.
E: What I mean is:
1) If the devs wanted demo users to have signatures then they'd simply enable them. Right now you're essentially circumventing forum rules.
2) Some people (like me) have signatures turned off because they're mostly crap that completely destroys the readability of this forum. Why do you hate these people?
E: What I mean is:
1) If the devs wanted demo users to have signatures then they'd simply enable them. Right now you're essentially circumventing forum rules.
2) Some people (like me) have signatures turned off because they're mostly crap that completely destroys the readability of this forum. Why do you hate these people?
Last edited by AndroidXP, .
Not sure how this works in correlation with InSim, but in general LFS does not allow any connections through Hamachi IP ranges. Maybe that's your problem.
I'm not sure if my OutSim class does this for me or if it comes from LFS directly (I'm at work, so I can't look at my source code at the moment), but in the OutSim packet I have a velocity Vector3 that is aligned with the current heading/pitch/roll, so the Y axis is always the longitudinal speed (forward axis), whereas the X axis is the lateral one and Z is up/down, of course. You can then calculate the angle of the XY vector (= drift angle), or normalize it and just use the X component as "oversteer" factor. Basically any lateral motion is "oversteer" in this case (since the car always wants to go forward, not sideways), though of course in the corners there will always be some amount of lateral slip. So yeah, I just described taking the difference between direction and heading in a more complicated way 
Understeer on the other hand is a failure of the car to follow where your front tyres are pointing. To calculate this you need to take your steer input and together with the car's max steer angle (from the setup, or hardcoded for now) calculate the actual heading of your front tyres. Then just take the difference of tyre heading and car velocity vector. Don't forget to set the wheel turn compensation in LFS to be linear, though! Of course if your car oversteers and you don't do anything against it, your front tyres will now also point somewhere else than the car is going, so this does not count as understeer obviously. The oversteer factor has to take precedence in this case ("it's only understeer if there is no oversteer").
That's at least from my point of view a reasonably accurate calculation approach of getting the over-/understeer state, if you want to directly feed this information to the AI logic is up to you. Personally I would, maybe only in an abstracted form of "no, little, medium, heavy, catastrophic over-/understeer," since a human doesn't really know the exact angle anyway. Of course this info could also be attained indirectly from how your reference points move in relation to how you want them to move, but that just seems to be a very hard way with many pitfalls just to find out what a human race driver immediately knows without having to think about it.
Understeer on the other hand is a failure of the car to follow where your front tyres are pointing. To calculate this you need to take your steer input and together with the car's max steer angle (from the setup, or hardcoded for now) calculate the actual heading of your front tyres. Then just take the difference of tyre heading and car velocity vector. Don't forget to set the wheel turn compensation in LFS to be linear, though! Of course if your car oversteers and you don't do anything against it, your front tyres will now also point somewhere else than the car is going, so this does not count as understeer obviously. The oversteer factor has to take precedence in this case ("it's only understeer if there is no oversteer").
That's at least from my point of view a reasonably accurate calculation approach of getting the over-/understeer state, if you want to directly feed this information to the AI logic is up to you. Personally I would, maybe only in an abstracted form of "no, little, medium, heavy, catastrophic over-/understeer," since a human doesn't really know the exact angle anyway. Of course this info could also be attained indirectly from how your reference points move in relation to how you want them to move, but that just seems to be a very hard way with many pitfalls just to find out what a human race driver immediately knows without having to think about it.
Actually, I think the only change that should be made is figuring out a way to counteract the hardware deficiencies of wheels. Maybe this requires exaggerating certain forces for a short time to alleviate motor response time or something similar. LFS does feel kinda numb, but it's hard to pinpoint what the real cause is.
From a purely conceptual point of view the way LFS' force feedback is implemented is already pretty much optimal. It only reports the forces that the simulation generates at the steering rack - nothing more, nothing less. This in turn means that the upcoming tyre physics updates will most likely also change how the force feedback feels, hopefully for the better. And that's really how it should be done; the force feedback needs to be improved by improving the simulation of tyres and suspension, not by adding imaginary, canned forces out of nowhere to make it feel better without actually simulating what's behind those forces.
From a purely conceptual point of view the way LFS' force feedback is implemented is already pretty much optimal. It only reports the forces that the simulation generates at the steering rack - nothing more, nothing less. This in turn means that the upcoming tyre physics updates will most likely also change how the force feedback feels, hopefully for the better. And that's really how it should be done; the force feedback needs to be improved by improving the simulation of tyres and suspension, not by adding imaginary, canned forces out of nowhere to make it feel better without actually simulating what's behind those forces.
It is amazing how many people buy LFS without ever reading #3 of the already very short and userfriendly license agreement. 
Personally I think making an LFS-based AI would still be the most interesting endeavour, though I can see how that's hard to do. However at the same time you're automatically limited to rather human-like input (from the exact InSim reported position you can calculate the reference to your "track markers" and just feed your AI the track marker position information, in whatever presentation format you want to use) and output (I guess you're using PPJoy with a IOCTL controlled joystick device, so you can only control the axes, but have no influence/knowledge of actual acceleration or tyre grip levels).
Using a self-written simulation makes the required AI intelligence sort of "easier" to reach, since it won't have trouble with the highly detailed physics, but at the same time it's going to eat quite a bit of time just making that environment + sim. And even then, isn't the AI supposed to *not* know the physics to begin with and only work in a sense of "turning the steering wheel 15° left at this reference point constellation worked well" instead of knowing actual tyre grip? That could just as well work for LFS, though slightly more sophisticated of course.
Using a self-written simulation makes the required AI intelligence sort of "easier" to reach, since it won't have trouble with the highly detailed physics, but at the same time it's going to eat quite a bit of time just making that environment + sim. And even then, isn't the AI supposed to *not* know the physics to begin with and only work in a sense of "turning the steering wheel 15° left at this reference point constellation worked well" instead of knowing actual tyre grip? That could just as well work for LFS, though slightly more sophisticated of course.
LOL 
@YUSSUF: Please make sure you have installed the full version of LFS and not just an update (like Z25 to Z28). Full version downloads can be found here: http://www.lfs.net/?page=downloads
Second, if you use the installer, it is recommended to install LFS to the program files folder or similar, since installing it in the user data folder can sometimes cause access right problems as far as I know. If you're using the .zip/self-extracting .exe, make sure that all files have been correctly extracted before running the game (do not launch LFS.exe from the unzip program directly). Other than that, maybe a simple reinstall will solve your problems.
If nothing helps, maybe if you show us a screenshot from the folder you installed LFS into could give us a clue to what went wrong.
@YUSSUF: Please make sure you have installed the full version of LFS and not just an update (like Z25 to Z28). Full version downloads can be found here: http://www.lfs.net/?page=downloads
Second, if you use the installer, it is recommended to install LFS to the program files folder or similar, since installing it in the user data folder can sometimes cause access right problems as far as I know. If you're using the .zip/self-extracting .exe, make sure that all files have been correctly extracted before running the game (do not launch LFS.exe from the unzip program directly). Other than that, maybe a simple reinstall will solve your problems.
If nothing helps, maybe if you show us a screenshot from the folder you installed LFS into could give us a clue to what went wrong.
That's the front tyre shadow. The only thing missing is that the suspension doesn't generate shadows, which isn't really noticeable if the car is on the ground.
Yes, that's very much true. It's yet another IMO simple-to-implement feature missing from LFS. Most people also wisely use a profiler FF value equal or higher than 100% and adjust the final strength in LFS, making sure that the profiler doesn't artificially reduce the already weak forces at the steering-center (100% LFS, 40% profiler is completely different/worse than 40% LFS, 100% profiler).
Correction => Drawback: There are no FFB softstops for cars with lower rotation.
The G25 and G27 only have hardstops at 900° - any lower rotation setting in the profiler will use the FF motors as soft-stop at that rotation. If you set up your wheel like described above (profiler @ 720°, LFS wheel turn compensation > 0), then the wheel rotation ingame will always match your wheel 1:1, but on cars that have less than 720° rotation the ingame wheel will simply stop rotating at some point, whereas your physical wheel will continue rotating merrily until it reaches the profiler's 720° soft-stop.
That said, that's also the way I prefer to set up my wheel. If Scawen would code in a optional profiler rotation limit adjustment it would be great, but I don't particularly miss the soft stops to be honest.
Actually I think you can do something against that even now. I don't have LFS installed here, so use some common sense when following these instructions, as I'm only reciting them from memory 
- Go to LFS\data\language
- Copy English.txt as EnglishNoPenalty.txt, open the latter with a text editor
- Edit the first line or so to set the display name also to EnglishNoPenalty (or whatever you fancy)
- Search for the various penalty texts (like "STOP AND GO")
.
- Replace the texts with something less annoying, like "|__________|" or "V__________V"
The idea is to remove most of the central (view blocking) text and instead just use a symbolic representation of the penalty that will appear on the left and right side of your screen (depending on how many spaces you use).
Be sure to not replace any parameter placeholders like "%s" or similar if they are contained in the text. You can move the placeholder around, though.
.
- Save
- Open LFS and set your user language to EnglishNoPenalty
Last time I checked that thing was a huge piece of garbage. Maybe it's better now
E: Yes, it has been massively improved. Now it's only a medium sized piece of garbage.
E: Yes, it has been massively improved. Now it's only a medium sized piece of garbage.
Last edited by AndroidXP, .
Thank you very much! 
Seems like they can only be contacted via Twitter somehow.
Seems like they can only be contacted via Twitter somehow.
It already does that if you set "Fuel" (middle left button) to "In" in the garage.
You can also click on the car triangle on the minimap to jump to that car, as well as on the name in the name list (lower right corner).
Nice work, though I do have to say it looks kinda wobbly. I imagine it could twist and deform quite a bit without additional bracing, though it's hard to tell the pliability of the wood from just the photos of course.
Long story short, you're right, they're wrong (most likely).
If this situation happens on a regular basis it might be a good idea to watch the replays and see how it looked from their perspective, just in case you're really doing something strange that isn't obvious from your own view. But for the most part the problem is down this to being the internet, granting relative anonymity, which makes some older and lots of younger people behave for the worse in ways they'd never do in real life.
Regarding blue flags, many people seem to think that a blue-flagged backmarker should immediately go to pits or hurl their car into the gravel trap as soon as someone faster approaches from behind, but this is definitely not the case for anyone who has common sense. I can partially understand that sentiment if someone joined mid-race (they have no business on the track, seriously - if someone can't drive without causing interference after mid-race joining then they deserve what they get), but normal backmarkers that were in the race from the beginning (or joined shortly after the start) shouldn't be treated this harshly. Another problem from my experience is that the race craft of a lot of people simply sucks. They might be fast hotlappers, but are generally unable to deal with others being on the track, too.
If the replays say you're innocent then I guess you'll just have to keep at it (otherwise change your driving style to fix the problem). With time you'll find servers that have better behaving drivers or you simply become faster yourself, so that being blue-flagged isn't such a common scenario anymore.
If this situation happens on a regular basis it might be a good idea to watch the replays and see how it looked from their perspective, just in case you're really doing something strange that isn't obvious from your own view. But for the most part the problem is down this to being the internet, granting relative anonymity, which makes some older and lots of younger people behave for the worse in ways they'd never do in real life.
Regarding blue flags, many people seem to think that a blue-flagged backmarker should immediately go to pits or hurl their car into the gravel trap as soon as someone faster approaches from behind, but this is definitely not the case for anyone who has common sense. I can partially understand that sentiment if someone joined mid-race (they have no business on the track, seriously - if someone can't drive without causing interference after mid-race joining then they deserve what they get), but normal backmarkers that were in the race from the beginning (or joined shortly after the start) shouldn't be treated this harshly. Another problem from my experience is that the race craft of a lot of people simply sucks. They might be fast hotlappers, but are generally unable to deal with others being on the track, too.
If the replays say you're innocent then I guess you'll just have to keep at it (otherwise change your driving style to fix the problem). With time you'll find servers that have better behaving drivers or you simply become faster yourself, so that being blue-flagged isn't such a common scenario anymore.
FGED GREDG RDFGDR GSFDG