I still have my job! And I still enjoy doing it.
I guess the last Windows you used was Win98 or ME? Crashing is pretty much non-existent since the NT/XP era 
That said, suggesting to change OS as solution to the problem is quite useless, I agree.
That said, suggesting to change OS as solution to the problem is quite useless, I agree.
It was a purely hypothetical situation of an instant transformation to a black hole. Luckily for us, our sun is not massive enough to go supernova, as about ~3 solar masses are required for that to happen and our sun will merely become a red giant (and burn everything on earth anyway. If you miraculously were alive at that point and could look at it, the sun would take about 30° of the sky). But even if it could go supernova it'd need to be about ~15-20 solar masses to be massive enough to overcome neutron degeneracy pressure and form a black hole. Anything below that will just end up as a neutron star (that however might still become a black hole if there's enough mass nearby to feed on over time).
This doesn't mean that you can't create a black hole from less mass, it's just that the natural events to form a black hole don't occur if your star is below that limit. If you'd open reality's developer-console and just arbitrarily compressed the sun (or earth) down far enough it would very well form a black hole and most likely stay that way.
Also interesting (not about supernovae or black holes): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v ... p;feature=player_embedded
Also interesting to note, were the sun to collapse into a black hole this instant, nothing would change on earth (other than the lights going out after eight minutes and everyone freezing to death after some time). All the planets of our solar system would still orbit the black hole as they did before with the sun, because the amount of mass, and with that also the amount of gravity given a certain distance, did not change.
The thing that makes black holes or very dense mass suck so much is that you can simply get much closer to the center of the gravity well, and by concentrating all the mass on a small spot you also make it go "deeper." Of course this doesn't mean the gravity would increase if you were to hypothetically dig down to the center of earth - at that point it would actually feel like zero-G again, because now all the mass is around you, pulling you equally in all directions.
The thing that makes black holes or very dense mass suck so much is that you can simply get much closer to the center of the gravity well, and by concentrating all the mass on a small spot you also make it go "deeper." Of course this doesn't mean the gravity would increase if you were to hypothetically dig down to the center of earth - at that point it would actually feel like zero-G again, because now all the mass is around you, pulling you equally in all directions.
Because then your PC has to do the complete physics calculations for every AI car you put on the track. If you want to test just graphics performance then you should pause the game, as that disables any physics calculations.
Just think about it, even just simplified:
Your car
Full resolution physics, calculate everything, everytime, everywhere.
Online competitor
High resolution physics (when close) or low resolution physics (when far). Some calculations can be skipped altogether as they're not relevant to be calculated on your PC using your CPU time (tyre heating/wear, for example, can be completely skipped locally and it would suffice to only send the results that the competitor's CPU has calculated over the network ~6 times per second or so). A lot of stuff simply doesn't have to be calculated or not calculated very accurately because it is not critical that you maintain a 100% correct state on your machine.
Repeat for every car that is visible. Invisible cars (on a different part of the track) don't require any calculations at all.
AI car
Full resolution physics, calculate everything, everytime, everywhere. Also you have to compute the AI itself - making it drive along the ideal line at the fastest speed possible with an arbitrary setup is not trivial!
Repeat this for every AI car on the track, no matter where it is located!
I hope this makes it a bit easier to understand why LFS is very CPU heavy, at least when using AI competitors. In COD4 most of the work is done by the graphics card alone. The physics for a first person shooter are hardly complex - the most CPU intensive thing are probably physics props (like LFS' movable objects) but even those only need to run at like 100Hz (compared to LFS' tyre physics that run at effectively 2000Hz) to give convincing results and you can take a lot of shortcuts. But if you do that in a simulator for the critical part that you're simulating (the car/tyres) then you'll just end up with a crappy simulation and there's no reason to bother with it to begin with.
That said, LFS could benefit a lot from parallelising AI/physics calculations by using multiple CPU cores. Once that's implemented you'd likely see a considerable performance gain on modern systems when running lots of AI (or having lots of other cars around you when online). Currently you're effectively running LFS on a single core 2.2GHz CPU.
Last edited by AndroidXP, .
Well, if it's good enough to run COD4 then the only thing I can think of is that he's testing the performance with 19 AI in singleplayer, which will of course kill your framerates on anything but the best CPUs.
Also LFS doesn't make use of multiple CPU cores, which means it's especially suffering with modern CPUs that are basically all multicore.
Also LFS doesn't make use of multiple CPU cores, which means it's especially suffering with modern CPUs that are basically all multicore.
LFS single- or multiplayer?
Why didn't you just PM him?
Also lol @ 'Sir Bob'
Also lol @ 'Sir Bob'
No, you cannot use the H-gate shifter for cars with a sequential gearbox. You can use your shifter in sequential mode, though.
No, my whole point was that your brain only "internally" uses that train of thought, but it is not what you consciously perceive. All the info that arrives at your mind is "oversteer, do something!" If you had to actively, consciously go through that process again and again you'd fail at every oversteer situation because you'd be far too slow to react. All that really arrives it the concise filtered down information of what is happening, and once you have enough experience and repetition under your belt even that is shortcircuited by muscle memory that reacts correctly before you even know what happened. In cars it might not be as obvious, but driving motorcycles would be disastrous every single time were it not for that natural automation.
What I asked with that paragraph was just which one of these scenarios - which input level - blackbird meant with "only human input."
What I asked with that paragraph was just which one of these scenarios - which input level - blackbird meant with "only human input."
If we had an energy source that could provide a constant 1g acceleration, we'd be able to reach the edge of the known universe within a human lifetime. The only problem is, once these travellers return back home, billions of years will have passed on earth.
Welcome to the mind**** that is time dilation!
Welcome to the mind**** that is time dilation!
Actually I think the problem is that you simply couldn't sustain 7g acceleration, as the energy required to accelerate your mass rises and rises the closer you get to c.
That's some dodgy collision physics.
Hmm, ok. Well, if the driver for the virtual graphics card doesn't report any screen modes then running LFS on it might simply not be possible at all.
I'd guess you have to install the nVidia GFX drivers on the VMWare Windows image, too.
Have you tried using the "alternate" shadow generation (Options > Misc) yet? If that doesn't work, maybe updating your GFX card drivers will.
However, since you're using Crossover/Wine it might simply be that it doesn't support certain GFX functions correctly. Maybe a newer version of that helps, maybe not.
However, since you're using Crossover/Wine it might simply be that it doesn't support certain GFX functions correctly. Maybe a newer version of that helps, maybe not.
No, that doesn't really happen on cars, but even if it did, it would only happen when the vehicle is moving, while FF oscillation can happen very easily even at standstill.
Any progress on the coding front? 
Turn your wheel fully left and right - this will calibrate the wheel and make sure LFS can recognize the full available steering range. The violent shaking is just FF oscillation (the wheel wants to centre, but the wheel's inertia and FF motor response lag make it go out of control) that happens because LFS thinks, or the wheel reports, that it has only like 15° steering range total instead of 900°.
Knitted ones are clearly the best.
It's context sensitive. Go out on the track, press Shift+U, then Shift+O to go in the options. The option will show up in the View menu then.
Admittedly it's not quite intuitive to find, especially if you're not used to using or simply don't know about the shortcuts, since as far as I can tell that's actually the only way to access this option (Esc just gets you out of Shift+U mode).
E: Actually I looked again, in Shift+U mode there is also an "Options" button in the lower right corner. Totally forgot about that one.
Ironically the English language makes it clear enough who drives on the right side anyway
Options > View > Full width external views: yes
As far as I understood from several discussions here, Vista and Win7 dropped support for mulit-monitor spanning fullscreen applications. Or the GFX drivers can't do it, or something similar.
Guess the person didn't give a shit about your driveway.
Oh wait...
Oh wait...
FGED GREDG RDFGDR GSFDG