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Forbin
S3 licensed
Quote from Flotch :if I had the time

That's easy: quit your job.
Forbin
S3 licensed
Quote from Flotch :...having a 'bot taking your set and destroying your laptimes can be frustrating...

Practice more.
Last edited by Forbin, .
Forbin
S3 licensed
Quote from LFSMasterMan :I Approve this message! all that hard work and effort put into a set just for it to be flushed away? what a stupid idea, i think keeping the 'send set' option is possibly the best, and i don't think many people would agree with the whole idea of people being able to just save any set they want just because they can't make their own, people should have a choice whether they want to share their set or not.

Don't be so dramatic. Nothing is being "flushed away."

You still have your set and, presumably, it will still suit you just fine. There is no reason someone else being able to download your set should change that.

---

The part about all this that leaves me incredulous is people used to share sets like crazy. It was considered courteous to send someone a set when asked. Assuming the set the requester had been using was absolute rubbish and the new one suited their driving style, it had the added benefit of providing closer racing. Everyone wins in that case.
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Forbin
S3 licensed
Quote from vitaly_m :Do I get it right: you need to be able to decrypt setup of everyone for every instance of LFS connected to a server?

Encryption isn't magic. You need to decrypt the data to use it. Encrypted data is practically indistinguishable from garbage.
Forbin
S3 licensed
Quote from Tomislav531 :I know a lot about this things and i recomend hd 7870 its better especially xfx.
R7 is in a range with gtx 650 1gb which im planing to buy but if you have more money buy the xfx radeon.

You know not of what you speak.

http://anandtech.com/bench/GPU14/815
Forbin
S3 licensed
Quote from MoMo92i :That's quite an interesting statement, in most of LFS endurance leagues the basic strategy have always been to do a complete hour and a lot of team always thought that if they were able to save a stop it was faster.

...

Anyway at the end of the day the problem isn't that often the car, but the thing between the steering wheel and the seat

Among a variety of other factors, that's how CoRe won the GT2 class in the 2008 MoE 24HR @ AS5 ahead of Mercury, arguably the GT2 class favorite for that race. They were faster, but we had a smooth setup and, most importantly, smooth drivers who could eke out those few extra laps from the tyres and maintain good pace.

Another, very fast but less smooth driver on the same team with the same setup popped a tire 4 laps before the smoother drivers would have pit.

Regarding teams tending towards a similar strategy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithms
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Forbin
S3 licensed
Quote from MonkeyHead :Evidence: Try to drive oval with minimum wings and then try again with maximum wings, are you still able to drive same laptimes?

I'm sure we can both agree that's a massive oversimplification, to the point of absurdity.
+/- 10kN/m on a spring isn't going to have nearly the same effect on lap times as +/- 1 degree of wing angle, and the latter is much easier to optimize, particularly on an oval. The former is much more nebulous and subjective.

Quote from MonkeyHead :So yeah, setups can be important and there are many reasons why it hurts league racing that much. Some of them were mentioned above already but also it becomes more interesting when there are more drivers/teams with different setups and different strategies but nowadays it's often so that everyone just steals the best available setup and maybe does some small changes to make the setup fit theirself and everybody got the same strategies.

Do you not think everyone will tend towards the same, optimal strategies over time anyway? Even without having the same setup, teams tend to watch what the winning teams do and attempt to emulate them.
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Forbin
S3 licensed
Quote from PeterN :That's only true if you don't have access to the secret key. Obviously we need access to the key else we couldn't view the replay. Burying it inside an exe is not the same as keeping it secret.

Also MD5, SHA-1, and SHA-2 are hash functions, not used for encrypting data.

I stand corrected.
Forbin
S3 licensed
Quote from Anthoop :Of course people have gained advantage from being able to see the exact set up of an opponents car...

Evidence? Even if they did gain an advantage, was it enough to finish ahead of the person/people from which the setup was taken?

Quote from Anthoop :in LFS you can have the exact car your opponent is driving without even asking for it..

You already have the exact same car, just not necessarily the same settings. That's the beauty of sim racing. No (or at least very limited) unfair advantages from funds disparity resulting in objectively superior equipment (e.g. more power).

Even coming from someone who spent hours upon hours making setups over the years, I think you're tremendously overstating the importance of a good setup. It can help, but it's no replacement for good driving/racing skills.

Quote from chanoman315 :If people shared setups stealing wouldnt be a problem.

People did, constantly, many years ago. It seems the culture has changed.
Last edited by Forbin, .
Forbin
S3 licensed
Quote from cargame.nl :Encryption also seems pointless, probably doesn't take long before somebody figures out how to crack that.

Spoken like someone who doesn't understand cryptography.

"Long" is subjective. All known encryption methods can be broken given sufficient time and processing power. As CPU power increases and time to crack decreases, we just move on to the next harder method (md5 was tremendously ubiquitous, then it was cracked and SHA was adopted in its place).

The reason we do not immediately adopt tremendously complex methods is all encryption and decryption requires CPU time. So, you don't want it to be too fast (too easy to crack), but you also don't want it to be too slow (too impractical).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-2
Forbin
S3 licensed
Quote from PMD9409 :Probably because you wanted to give it out. Not everyone feels like doing that.

I just don't see the big deal. Setups are often very personal. There is no guarantee one created by a particular driver will suit another driver's style, so it's possible a setup-stealer is just shooting them self in the foot.

Do people really think they gain that much of an advantage from having exclusive, secret setups?

(Side note: This is much the same argument against fixed setups. The fixed setup is likely to favor one particular driver over another, with no recourse for the driver the setup does not suit.)
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Forbin
S3 licensed
Quote from MonkeyHead :By the way, making setup stealing impossible would be cool fix for the next patch if it doesn't take too much effort.

I've given out my setup ahead of a league race, one I worked quite hard on and was quite possibly the best I had ever created. My primary competitor used it, in addition to many others.

I still won, but in addition to that, I got a close race that was a lot of fun. What's your problem?
Last edited by Forbin, .
Forbin
S3 licensed
Quote from Scawen :Ah... I thought you meant the shutter glasses.

Anaglyph 3d (different eye colours) I have not looked into, though it might be a good thing to support. I don't know how difficult it is to do.

[ EDIT : it looks reasonably easy - render each eye's view to an off screen render target (similar to the first step of Oculus Rift rendering). Then copy left eye's red channel onto the backbuffer and the right eye's green and blue channels additively to that, then present to the screen ]

[ EDIT 2 : ordered some cheap red / cyan anaglyph glasses, 4 for £1 can't be too bad, will probably try an LFS render at some point. Though I'm not sure I'd want to wear red / green glasses for too long... ]

You may already know or it will probably will come up in your research, but just in case:

The red and cyan lenses have different focal lengths which are not compensated for with plain paper style anaglyph glasses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A ... asses_for_red-cyan_method
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Forbin
S3 licensed
Quote from GreyBull [CHA] :Also, brilliant MotoGP race last week-end. 4 insanely talented guys handle-bar to handle-bar for 45 minutes, what's not to like. And you even get Vale and Marc joking about it at the end

I must have held my breath the whole race, and then lol'ed at those two. MotoGP at its best.
Forbin
S3 licensed
It sounds like you prefer iRacing's "safety first" mantra, so why don't you stick with that?
Forbin
S3 licensed
Quote from V8Li :At some point I just let everybody pass me at the start so I don't crush in first bend where 2-3 had to pit.

That's an effect of short, public races. League races are generally longer and don't see that with nearly the same frequency for reasons Gutholz stated: public races are generally very short and the penalty for crashing on lap 1 T1 is erased as soon as the next race starts. In a league, crashing people out on T1 repeatedly will get you kicked out of the league.

Quote from V8Li :I think it was on Kyoto, after the oval he was cutting a chicane both ways. I was like "o, can you do that?" ))

It's the same on some other tracks that have far more restrictive kerbs, but still, you can slow a little so that you don't take off but still make good time as opposed of just making the turn or chicane clean...

Not so. There are typically two long straights both before and after the chicane, so slowing down to safe speeds for it costs you a ton of time.

LFS's chicanes are just really poorly designed.

Quote from V8Li :My point is people might not want to look at others how to find flaws in the game, maybe the dev just missed that area that flags a cut track, in real life there's a person to tell you that you have 2 cuts left or get black. Of course, people can do the same with similar setups but really if you mess up cutting a track there's a chance for consistent drivers to pick up because of not having a massively developed setup as a plus.

A good gearbox setup can give you not only better acceleration but also better braking and mid-corner stability, so don't underestimate setups. You get 2-3 seconds on Blackwood but how about a longer track?

So dunno... was just looking for tight races, as long as players stay on the racing line, brake properly and exit decent in 10 laps Blackwood distance races you'll get 10 cars in 15 seconds...

Who made you race marshal? People are going to do whatever they can to get an advantage. That is what racing is about, not trundling about making sure you don't crash. The racing line is merely the fastest line. It is not restricted by your notions of what a "proper" racing line is.
Forbin
S3 licensed
Quote from V8Li :There's no point even debating this, as far as I understand a user with a setup/that cuts the track and is 13s faster than other users will always be 13s faster, no matter what...

If you're 13s per lap slower than someone, that's not your setup slowing you down. It's you. A good setup suited to your driving style should be worth 2 or 3 seconds per lap, tops.

Quote from V8Li :Anyway, that's the way things are in online racing and it's hard to change that. Just one question, if everybody has talked about setup restrictions - and by the way, setup restrictions have been imposed in real championships exactly to keep racing fair, just can't remember the championship, it was in Europe I think - has this been tried in a server? If still online, what's the name?

By virtue of being a sim and not real life, you don't have the real-life constraint of money. Everything you do in real life racing takes a huge amount of money.

During a motorbike club racing weekend, I spend ~$600 USD between entry fees, fuel, and wear items. If I crash, that number skyrockets.

Setup restrictions in real life are merely a way of reducing this cost, because spending the time to develop a setup costs real money, and whomever has the most money has the most time to develop a setup. Likewise with limitations on testing.

Not so in a sim. It's merely down to who has the most free time, which as already stated, benefits those who have the most regardless of whether you restrict setups or not. This is because it is impossible to restrict testing. Restrictions on testing have been show to benefit those are most experienced anyway. I'm sure the same is true for setup restrictions: experienced drivers know how to drive around the limitations of a particular setup, while others struggle. A custom setup would allow a less experienced driver to have a car that masks some of their deficiencies.
Last edited by Forbin, .
Forbin
S3 licensed
Both your points have been discussed and debated to death.

Suggested improvements log [READ before making a new thread]

General features:
+ Fixed / server side forced setups: http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?t=38038

Damage and malfunction:
+ Wheel-to-wheel crash physics (open-wheelers)
+ Engines can stall
+ Parts that fall off when crashing
+ Tire damage from debris
+ Oil spills
+ Engine heat and damage:
http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?t=2163
http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?t=1886
+ Perforation of fuel tanks during crashes
+ Tyres blow during crashes
+ Simulate undertray / diffuser damage
+ Broken mirrors: http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?t=19992
+ Clutch overheating
... Brake overheating
... Brake temperature and wear

---

Long story short, fast drivers will always be faster than you, regardless of how much you try to artificially level the playing field. Merely by virtue of being a sim, it's already about as purely level as possible.

If another driver's advantage is largely based upon the amount of free time available to them, restricting setups just means they'll have that much more time to practice rather than developing a setup.

The only way you're going to get better racing is by practicing and getting better and faster.
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Forbin
S3 licensed
Quote from Ped7g :Especially in endurance races, as with the aggressive drive you can shave off a tenth or two of time in qualify or sprint race, but in endurance the smooth consistency usually pays off well.

We had a perfect example of this on the CoRe Racing GT2 Team for the 2008 MoE 24HR @ AS5. We had one driver who didn't seem to understand the concept of smooth. They turned some really fast laps, but chewed up the tires badly as a result. ~4 laps before our top smooth drivers would have pit, they popped a tire and cost us all the time they gained and then some.
Forbin
S3 licensed
I played WT for a bit, but got tired of the usual F2P pay/grind-wall unlock junk.

I recently subbed to Aces High 2, a much older and graphically dated game with much better physics (sound familiar? ), larger-scale battles, and a persistent war zone (no instancing as in WT). There is only one flight model, rather than WT's arcade and sim.

There are some planes you need to "unlock" with Perk points, but they're the truly dominant planes and rarely seen. The reason is simple: it takes a while to get a sufficient quantity of Perk points to spend on a Perk plane/vehicle/boat, and if you make it back to base, you get them back. If you get shot down, you lose the Perk points you spent.

There are a number of planes of similar variety to WT, with some models having more variants and others having fewer. There are also a number of ground vehicles (tanks, anti-aircraft, personnel) and boats (patrol and amphibious). Some maps include a carrier group that has a limited number of planes that can take off from the carrier, but which can bombard a coastal base from the water.
Forbin
S3 licensed
Quote from e2mustang :When i get called a cracker thats ok?

No, it's not okay, but it also doesn't have the same history of centuries of oppression behind it that other slurs do. Likewise, someone calling you a slur doesn't make it okay for you to call them one.
Forbin
S3 licensed
Quote from undertaker00 :You are kidding me right?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyMNBHGO_zw

Worst decision in my sim life was spending 40$ on iracing this month.

To be fair, you could probably do the same thing in a 250hp FOX at Lime Rock with LFS physics, except the tires would really start to overheat and lose grip after half a lap.
Forbin
S3 licensed
You'll be hard-pressed to find a WR set with a mouse. There is one at BL1/R, and it's not even a demo combo. The rest use a wheel at that track.

I feel it's a bit misleading to say a type of control scheme is better because it allows you to flick the steering quicker. You lose an awful lot of precision in doing so. You should only really need to flick the steering if you screw up. If you can be precise enough to not need to flick the steering, chances are you'll be faster, all else being equal.

Try this:
https://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?t=46131

It's definitely a wheel set and although the time is now 1.22 seconds (~101%) off the WR on a 2 minute lap, it's still pretty quick. Also, the set was developed for racing, meaning it had to be able to wear down a set of tires and at least half a tank of fuel without any major issues, so it's probably more stable than your typical WR set.
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