Quote from Pulped :

Unfortunately bandwidth is the point here. Even if LFS was open source/free, the bandwidth would still have to paid. It's not given away for free from the companies that own all the pipes.

I guess this really depends on figures that we don't know about, ie: does the total figure for sold licenses really allow for the extra bandwidth used. A rhetorical question as such before people start jumping, I don't want to know figures, but something I would think comes into play at some stage of the thought process.

I'm well aware how backbones and hosts etc work

I guess I should add though, that the price isn't the issue here.. I certainly don't think it's expensive and don't begrudge the devs making a "few quid on the side".. I just have different theories for some things and other reasons that I listed above and just posted my reasons for my vote choice



Regards,

Ian

Voted: won't pay.

Few simple reasons really:

• Most skins available are crap or "uber d0r1ft000000!!!!!!!1111111" stylieeeee (ala: crap)
  
• I don't care about hi-res versions of other people's skins, _if_ I do for the few people that I feel are worthy, I'll download them myself from here or master skinnerz
  
• Anything I want in hi-res I'm capable of doing myself
  
• Automagic skin downloads are disabled here as most skins aren't worth the disk space they'd occupy
  
• I'm 101% against charging for such things (don't give me the crap about bandwidth) but I'm also 101% against people putting ads on sites to gain revenue too.. so this isn't just an issue with LFS.. maybe I like the open-source theory too much hence just about everything I create / do that isn't specifically for a client I do for free

Regards,

Ian

Quote from Nathan_French_14 :

Oh that is a shame

Oh well, i'll stick with my F1 honda suit

Frenchy

Yeah there's a few glitches when using a "custom driver" like this.. lower poly and the model doesn't look right at some points when steering. I _think_ the civilian clothed dudes were from an early pre-s1(?) version originally but have been left in the game. The game settings allow from choices 1-6 for arguments sake.. LPH will allow you to pick 0 and 7-20 or whatever the range is.

All LPH really is is a very basic hex editor that only works on changing 1 byte



Regards,

Ian

Quote from SamH :

Frankly, I'd like to be able to force the plain clothing option off on our servers. There is absolutely nothing more stupid-looking than someone driving in a 30+ car race with a bald head, a beard, and no helmet. It just cheapens the place up. Nahh I mean it.

And I'd like to ban all stupid skins with text the wrong way on one side of the car........................

Dude... it's a G A M E... c'mon, say it with me.... G A M E... see, not so hard :rolleyes:

You want real, buy a ticket to a track day where people will be wearing the proper attire.

I really don't understand how people can get so worked up about it. Having a dude without a race suit is no less immersive than a car on a trip to the moon from a 5mph shunt. Just get over it :rolleyes:



Ian

Seeing as there's a lot of (repeated) requests / questions on where to download (lately), can LPH (LFS Player Hacker) be added to the list?

It's been added to my "apps n tools" site now that doesn't require registration for download.

Info / Download: http://www.clue-by-4.org/viewtool.php?t_id=3&pg=info



Regards,

Ian

Quote from mutt107 :

i dont hack.

Hacking (can be): quick solution to a problem.


The app just makes a quick edit to your player profile (.PLY file) to obtain the plain clothes drivers. This sort of edit I class as 'hacking' hence the name of the app.

Hacking is _not_ what the media would have you believe



Nathan: I think the Caribbean Cruise etc servers are a big reason for the seemingly "constant flow" of requests (and downloads) as obviously it'll suit those servers pretty well



Regards,

Ian

Quote from Davo :

The comparison I posted is a direct downloaded file from lfs using lfsworld not a conversion by me.

I've downloaded a freeware dds converter that does DXT3 and DXT5, should I try these? I only used DXT1 for my skins_x folder. The thing is now skins will taje up twice the space on the hardrive and still offer lower quality. If we could upload dds skins perhaps...

Never tried the converter, have always used the photoshop plugin, but DXT3 offers better quality than DXT1 (less compression), likewise for DXT5 although I think the _biggest_ difference you'll find between DXT1, 3 and 5 is the alpha channel. When I was doing stuff for rF, the main car skin was always saved in DXT3 format and the windows as DXT5 as 5 offers a smoother transparency shade range.

1024x1024 skins in DXT3 mode will be 1.33Mb, 2048x2048 will be 5.33Mb (don't think these filesizes are dependent on mipmaps).

Quote :

I'll get the converter out again, it took 30minutes to convert 3500 jpgs, of about 200 were 2048res ones. I'll try DXT5 and see if theres much difference.

The absolute best AFAIK would be to use the RGB 8,8,8,8 mode rather than a DXT# method (don't now what options are available in the converter).. but this is likely to affect performance on lower-spec boxes.

Quote :

Well there's not much difference between the lfsw dds and the one I just converted using DXT5, it's a little clearer but the file size is larger. I can put up with a larger file if it means better gameplay but I'd also like to see quality go up too.

Just had a thought about this... you're converting compressed JPGs to DDS, which will probably produce poorer results than saving direct as DXT#.

Attached a screenshot (screenshot used to prevent DDS->JPG further compression) of a skin in DDS format that I did for rF.. it's DXT3 at 1024x1024 saved directly from Photoshop and doesn't seem to include the artifacts, or at least not as bad

I've only learnt this much from working with DDS files in rF.. I'm certainly not an expert in this area



Regards,

Ian

Last edited by Ian.H, Fri, 11 May 2007 11:40.

Quote from Davo :

Converting 1024 to 512 and then to dds again loses some quality so infact we're getting worse quality then we began with.

for comparison... you can really see it around the oval shape and the logo.

[ snip image ]

Have you tried converting the skin manually Davo and saving as DXT3 or DXT5? I think you'll get better results (the image you posted looks like a poor quality DXT1 texture).

Granted, it'd be a bitch to do this for 3rd-party skins, but if it works (and I don't see why not), would at least work for your own skins



Regards,

Ian

EDIT: You'll always also get some artifacts when converting back from DDS to whatever format due to the original whatever->DDS compression.

No.. because the car body would be using the reflection shader, not the transparency shader, which would be used for glass etc.



Regards,

Ian

Quote from Jimmy_Lemon :

i dno why the need for the DDS is anyway. jpeg is fine.

[ snip ]

My guess is one simple reason... memory management.

There was a fair few reports of people not being able to run with the new larger grids due to FPS drops etc, AFAIK, DDS files are managed within DirectX memory far more efficiently than the likes of BMP / JPEG, hence it should help overall with performance.

The other advantage maybe future planning. DDS textures can carry an alpha channel too (unlike JPG). This opens possibilities up to 2 options:

Reflection control
Transparency control


Naturally shaders would need to be updated to be able to use them, but that maybe coming later.



Regards,

Ian

And people wonder why "drifters" are laughed at



Regards,

Ian

Quote from himself :

1

[ snip ]

2. Shadows on tracks are precalculated shadows using raytracing technique. Each and every vertex is being analised if it is visible from light source. If it is it is set to white colour if not it is set to dark gray. After applying textures the white to gray colors are interpolated and mixed with textures. The reason shadows dont look very good is that not only each vertex should be precalculated (because there are not always very close to each other) however each texel (pixel on texture) (maybe not each but one per 4 texels) should be checked. This would create a precalculated shadow map for a track and shadows would be a lot more detailed.

Some of the shadow issues look like simple non welded or overlapped vertices. This is easily spotable as the shadow is _very_ dark (not really resembling a shadow at all and in a "silly place") with hard edges.. the general track shadows themselves look similar from what we can see of the track to the method used in rF, create a simple invisible box / shape that casts a shadow rather than the higher-poly model of whatever is being represented to save resources.

I don't know how the tracks are constructed in LFS, and only have experience in creating them for rF, but have encountered some of the issues with my own stuff in the past, including car shadows being cast on vertical faces of bridges etc that I now can't remember what I did to fix.. this maybe similar to the car on the roof shadow bug mentioned in the OP.



Regards,

Ian

Quote from Funnycat :

Err, how to take screenies in Linux? (Ubuntu with KDE)

Don't know if it's the same on Linux, but on FreeBSD, from a console, I use:


The 'import' command is part of ImageMagick which you may need to install separately.



Regards,

Ian