This is the first time I was going to watch a MOE event. I hope it gets fixed, I'm quite curious to see the quality of the broadcast

Can you post the mpr of this?

Quote from VoiD :

Whats next..? A bloody autopilot??? The car infront/behind is the car infront/behind, no matter of what class...

We have a ridiculous Aonio-radar, a pitspotter, fuel warning, gauges, silly views etc... maybe you should play a slighty different game...?!

I don't use any of those. Actually, after configuring Aonio to look nice to me I decided not to use it because after 4 or 5 races I realized that I hadn't even glanced at any of the panels available, it's a lot of info that I don't need. For me, the cleaner the screen the better.

But, the one info that I want to know is my position in *my* race, I mean, the cars on my own class. This is important only in a multiclass server, and Airio works with classes, so I don't think it's a silly thing. When you play in a crowded multiclass server in the lowest class, you are usually in positions 12th-25th but don't know what is your actual position within your class, and you don't give a damn about faster cars because they're in a different race.

Another suggestion totally unrelated to the previous one. It could be useful to add a race position indicator relative to your car class. When there are several classes of cars in a race add something that tells you your position based only on cars of your same class. This way you can easily know where you stand within the TBO class for example, not taking slower or faster cars intro consideration.

I'll stop flooding with suggestions for some days now

Quote from EQ Worry :

First about the current state of safety rating: You are right that there will always be cases when you cause yellow flag not by your own fault. (This is when you are hit from behind or from the side, that you mostly cannot influence.) But the thing is the rating works pretty well on average. One caused yellow, bad luck. Another, well, also bad luck. But then yet another? And again? It doesnt look like bad luck anymore, it looks like something is wrong with you. So on average it works quite OK. Not always fair, but reasonable.

Second about clean overtake detection: There is no InSim info about car touch/collision, there is no info about car damage. Still, such a calculation could be possible using car locations, their distance, speed, etc. Unfortunately the data are not always reliable, lags play a big role here, and measuring car distance is possible and reasonable in whole meters, but not quite so in centimeters. Overall, it is nice idea, but it needs thinking to discover what conditions actually signify clean overtaking.

About yellow flags. I've always thought it's quite controversial the point that causing yellow flags is an indicator of clean/dirty racing. I could write a lot about it. In any way causing yellow flags means that you are a bad driver. Yellow flags are caused by many events, and many of them have nothing to do with being a dirty/unsafe driver. Examples: someone crashing into you, getting back to track safely after someone crashes into you, exiting pits safely when there are people passing by, braking to avoid on-track debris/hay bales/tyres/accidented cars (which is actually the right behaviour), etc.

Maybe penalty points should be given by other events, like receiving in-game penalties (DT, SG, +35, +45) and other factors.

About overtaking, I've seen your Aonio radar so I know that you can pull off that stuff My first simple idea:

• When two cars are within a certain "overtake chance" distance (can be measured using coordinates or nodes, or maybe both of them), the insim starts tracking their relative positions.
  
• When they get distant further than the overtake chance distance the insim checks if the one who was behind has passed the one who was in front (overtake), or the one in front managed to pull away.
  
• There's an established "safe thresold" measured in meters. If during all the time both cars were within the overtake chance distance the cars were closer than the thresold the insim decides it was dangerous and does nothing, but if all the time they were over that limit then the insim decides it was a safe overtake.
  
• Additional checks of nodes the cars are in, relative difference of speed, and direction the cars are facing might be necessary.
  

Quote from z-ro 8 :

On IHR, you get positive rating points for:
1) Completing laps
2) Completing races (75% of laps)
3) Getting Good,Great,Top laps
You get negative safety rating points for:
1) Causing a Yellow Flags
2) Swearing
3) Excessive spam

About positive points: every time that I don't complete a whole race is because someone took me out and I had too much damage to drive back to pits safely (not my fault). And getting fast laps isn't that much of an indicator of clean racing, but fast racing. A lot of fast racers will crash into you to overtake you.

About negative safety rating points. Swearing and excessive spam is OK, but causing yellow flags... a lot of times you can cause yellow flags and it won't be your fault. I dare to say that you can be a very clean racer and cause a lot of yellow flags if other agressive drivers keep hitting you and you lose control of your car. In fact, that driver who hit you will probably not cause a yellow flag himself if he doesn't lose much speed in the contact, and won't be awarded any negative points.

I think you know what I mean, I can hit people intentionally in every corner and I won't be causing any yellow flags, but they will if they end up rolling, spinning, etc. So they will get the negative rating points and I won't.

Adding all up, if someone hits you hard in the first lap of a race you will cause a yellow flag and probably you will have to retire and go to pits or spectate, thus also losing positive points because you didn't complete any laps and of course didn't complete the race. If the agressor is not kicked or banned instantly he will receive all those points (and won't receive the negative ones for the yellow flag). How is this fair?


Anyway, my post was about the possibility of implementing an overtake analyser. I think that via insim you can detect collisions that cause damage to the car, but not light collisions. If it can be done you could also add a side by side detector to it. It would detect when two cars (or more) are side by side and they don't make contact. Add side by side detection to overtake analyser and you have a very cool feature and a very nice way to determine clean and good racing.

Think of this: two cars go side by side in a straight, they have a braking contest and they take a corner close to each other without making contact and the chat announces in green "coolguy & cleanracer side by side: 3.4s; nice overtake by cleanracer". You could this too with collisions that end with one car out. The point is that people like to see their names in a chat line that says they are cool and can overtake cleanly, so they would put more effort into doing it right.

Sorry for the long post

EQW, I have a suggestion. I have been racing in the IHR server lately and I can't get a good rating no matter what I do. It's always packed with people, and it seems impossible to avoid people hitting you or sometimes not hitting the guys that just formed a massacre in front of you. I think that all that is taken into account for calculating ratings, even when it's not your fault at all.

Anyway, thinking about that and how you love to code things I've thought that you could add to Airio a "clean overtake" detector. When a car overtakes another car for position, they both have similar speeds, and there's no contact between them, then Airio detects that it's a clean overtake. That could be chat-announced, logged to stats or whatever. And maybe both guys could get rating points for clean racing.

Is it even possible? Maybe there's not a sure way to detect light collisions with insim, I don't remember. I think it would be cool to have something like tha, although maybe it's a little too hard to code.

I tried Aonio yesterday for a while and have some things to report.

First of all, if you have ever created a non-dedi server to play with some friends or to fool around or anything, you have to remove those passwords or add them to the Aonio file. It took me a while to find that info in this thread, so maybe you should point that out more clearly in the installation/usage instructions. I was rather bothered by Aonio not running at all with the TCP error message, when actually it was not a TCP error. Maybe you should fix that too, as that message is misleading both on the console and in the log file.

Second, when I connected to a server and finally launched Aonio, most of the panels were overriding info provided by the LFS OSD. It was a total mess having the racers' positions in the same place as connections list and racers positions by LFS. Ans also in the top-right corner the track and server info also goes in the same place as lap times by LFS. Also, if you use custom view, some panels get in the way of the virtual dashboard and other buttons/panels.

All in all, after a short while I had to quit Aonio because it looked awful. If I have time today I'll try to configure it a little to move/remove some panels, and to tweak LFS original OSD. I don't like removing LFS original panels -I guess it can be done, don't know where-, so maybe the default arrangement of Aonio panels after a fresh install should be different?

Quote from B3ntseN :

I agree MakaKazo, but i don't have any experience with Sony Vegas, or LFS cameras and so on.. so it takes sometime to get into it..

I will pick better replays next time

I can't help about Sony Vegas, but basic things like custom cameras and such are covered on the "how to make movies" post. That's why I tell you to have a look there because some of the basic things that your movie lacks are there, it's a very good starting point. Keep it up

Too much time without any car on cam, the drifting wasn't very good (pick better replays/scenes next time) and try to add some more editing and music sync. Just... go take a look at the movie making tutorial in this same subforum, because you're lacking the very basics, which are covered there

First of all, sorry for leaving this thread totally unassisted. I haven't been programming anything at all in the last year. Totally by chance I ended here and I find a discussion going on in the last days.

The thing about defining the text size in buttons struct is what has already been said. That line is commented in the original insim.txt file and there's an explanation that it can have a variable size up to 240 bytes, thus I didn't understand how a struct could have a member with a variable size. So, I chose 112 in my lib, but it can be changed of course to 240. I always send packets of the same size, or at least that's what I think

I'm not a good programmer so I didn't understand very well how to overcome this so I could send packets with variable text lengths, saving bandwith when the text is short.

What blackbird says makes sense. I don't know right now what changes should be done to the code to allow this. I don't think I'll have time nor feel like having a look at it anytime soon. Also I think that there have been newer updates to insim which I'm not sure if they affect this library.

I think I have the original code by TAA. Is this it maybe?

I was about to post this too. It was already happening to me a week ago. Last weekend I tried to rate some threads in the movies subforum and I couldn't. It's still happening now.

Firefox 3.6 is out and it has this new "Personas" thing which are themes that can be changed easily. Anyone with skills up to do a LFS based theme? Of course it should be approved by the devs before submitting it as it would contain original artwork by Scavier, though I doubt there would be any problem with that

Guys no need to drag this any further. The point was that there were two incorrect download links. It has already been fixed, those mirrors are gone now, so it's all good

A couple of days ago I wanted to install LFS on my new netbook. On the main downloads page I clicked on a random mirror and it was linked to a Z25 patch zip, which I knew wasn't the latest version. I have checked all mirrors and found these two are wrong:

• Serbia: Mirror 9, hosted by Serbian Racing Team. File linked is an older LFS S2 Z25 zip file, not the Z28 installer.
  
• US: Mirror 12, hosted by http://jdhost.org/. Broken link as of right now (should probably be checked again in a while).
  

The rest are OK. At least the Serbian one should be fixed so no one downloads an older version by mistake.

Quote from Victor :

We've done a lot of research into reasons why that could happen but we could only conclude that either your router or ISP is having problem routing UDP packets. Some ISP's seem to block really tiny UDP packets for example. Others just don't like UDP at all, albeit temporary usually.

I don't know about this. We have a 0.5Z13 dedicated host running that started complaining about that "host didn't receive UDP packet" starting last wednesday. Maybe something happened prior to that day that changed something. I don't know if we used the server on the couple of days before that wednesdey, but since that day we can't join our server and I have to set my own dedicated server. I am pretty sure that nothing has changed on the host side and that this may have something to do with the latest client side patches. Of course, I may be wrong.

I haven't been able to contact our host guy lately to update it to the latest version, maybe that would fix it.

EDIT: I forgot to add that we had been using that server during the last weeks without any problem. My last race on that server was on november 12th.

Quote from Napalm Candy :

I'm not sure that "Seleccione qué..." is correct, to me correct it is without accent "Seleccione que...". "Qué" is for answer or exclamations (I'm not sure is if an exception)

Well, I'm sure. "Qué" is written with a tilde when it's a pronoun (a "pronombre interrogativo" in this case), and that applies to both direct and indirect questions:
Direct question (pronoun): "¿Qué accesos directos desea?"
Indirect question (pronoun): "Seleccione qué accesos directos desea:"
Not a question (conjunction): "Seleccione los accesos directos que desee:"

This is not a linguistic forum nor the thread to discuss this, so let's end it here please.

Quote from Victor :

could you please give some examples as feedback for the translator?

First screen:

"Este asistente te guiará a través de la instalación del Live for Speed.

Haz clic en Siguiente para continuar."

change to:

"Este asistente le guiará a través de la instalación de Live for Speed.

Haga clic en Siguiente para continuar."

This way it's more formal and in accordance with the rest of the text in the installer.


License agreement screen:

All the license agreement text inside the white frame is in informal speech and it should use formal speech as the rest of the instaler. This is the most important part. Also, it should use starting punctuation characters.

"Bienvenido a Live for Speed!

Para utilizar este programa, debes aceptar el siguiente texto :

- El Live for Speed está en continuo desarrollo. Podrán ser añadidas, modificadas o quitada algunas características en cualquier momento. Podrían ser añadidas algunas características que pueden estar incompletas, aunque funcionales, para mejorar la variedad y el contenido del simulador.

- Este programa no viene con ningún tipo de garantía.

- Instalar y utilizar este programa es bajo tu responsabilidad. Los desarrolladores de Live for Speed no tienen ningún tipo de responsabilidad de los daños personales o causados a tu ordenador que éste pueda causar durante su utilización.

- El contenido de la DEMO lo puede utilizar cualquiera, es totalmente gratis. El contenido BLOQUEADO es solo para usuarios con la correspondiente licencia. No debes intentar acceder al contenido bloqueado, o ayudar a otras personas a hacerlo, de ninguna otra manera que no sea adquiriendo una licencia y utilizando la ventana del juego destinada a desbloquearlo.

Gracias."

change to:

"¡Bienvenido a Live for Speed!

Para utilizar este programa, debe aceptar el siguiente texto:

- Live for Speed está en continuo desarrollo. Podrán ser añadidas, modificadas o eliminadas algunas características en cualquier momento. Podrían ser añadidas algunas características que pueden estar incompletas, aunque funcionales, para mejorar la variedad y el contenido del simulador.

- Este programa no viene con ningún tipo de garantía.

- Instalar y utilizar este programa es bajo su propia responsabilidad. Los desarrolladores de Live for Speed no tienen ningún tipo de responsabilidad de los daños personales o a su ordenador que éste pueda causar durante su utilización.

- El contenido de la DEMO lo puede utilizar cualquiera, es totalmente gratuito. El contenido BLOQUEADO es sólo para usuarios con la correspondiente licencia. No debe intentar acceder al contenido bloqueado, o ayudar a otras personas a hacerlo, de ninguna otra manera que no sea adquiriendo una licencia y utilizando la ventana del juego destinada a desbloquearlo.

Gracias."


Shortcuts and file associations screen:

"asociación de ficheros"
"Selecciona que ... quieres crear :"

change to:

"asociaciones de ficheros" (in three places)
"Seleccione qué ... desea crear:" (in three places)


Final screen:

"Haz clic aquí para crear una cuenta LFS si no tienes ninguna"

change to:

"Haga clic aquí para crear una cuenta LFS si no tiene ninguna"




I'll say that overall the translation is good, but some things make a product look more serious. It's important to use formal speech for this kind of translation, and even more important to not mix formal with informal. The rest of the fixes proposed are minor things. There are some sentences in the license agreement text that could be changed to sound better in formal speech, but I didn't want to go that far. I hope the translator is not offended by these suggestions.

Quote from Whiskey :

It works ok with spanish.
It also change to the language selected

It works in Spanish but the translation is a bit off. It needs to be edited a little using more formal speech and there are some expressions that should be changed and mistakes to be corrected.

So... is the new installer going to replace completely the old self extracting file or are you going to keep both formats? There are many people who are happy and used to the non-installer format, and we prefer it that way. I really feel more comfortable with the non installable version, but anyway I understand that the average Windows user will go 100% of the times for the installer.

Please consider the possibility of keeping the self extracting version (or just a normal zip file) as a secondary download option for us who like to manage our folders "manually"

Hi there, I'm trying to help a league-mate solve one strange problem he is having with one specific server.

We have four servers, all hosted in the same machine (I checked it using TCPView), that we use in this league. Three of them are team servers and the other one is owned by the league. Well, he claims that since about a week he's constantly having problems with one of the team servers - ironically, his own team server.

He reports that he sees all cars in that server with over 50 seconds lag, then suddenly he see them move for a very brief moment and then they lag again. At the same time, people seem to not see him in track, "only when he's stopped".

He doesn't lose connection to the host, so that would mean that he's still having a fluent enough TCP connection to keep him alive, but what he describes looks like he's not sending (people can't see him) and neither receiving (he can't see others) UDP packets.

I repeat that he only has this problem with this host www.nls.es | XspaTM, but not with the other three servers hosted in the same machine (www.nls.es LFS-CESAV.net #Q, www.nls.es | DMS, www.nls.es |<<LFR>>).

This doesn't make any sense, does it?

Right now he's using control+T to play in UDP mode, but I told him that's not the right solution. In fact, that's only a turnaround fix, but the problem is still there.

Thanks for all your replys guys. In the end a teammate did a couple adjustments and he nailed it, but anyway the race was a total disaster for me as they took me out in the second corner... I'm going to open a new thread about dampers and I hope I get as good feedback as in this thread.

Quote from Forbin :

Why would you fiddle with the dampers if you changed the overall grip balance? Dampers are primarily for tuning transient response.

Change the ARB balance. You may wish to try changing the springs, but that will require damper changes as well.

In the beginning I was trying to adjust just a couple of corners by changing transient response, but in the end I didn't get the results I wanted, so that's why I decided to go for a global balance change.

Quote from AndroidXP :

Though it's not easy to say how to change the ARB. With the fixed tyre physics the (hopefully) clear answer would be to make the rear end stiffer, but with the current physics he's likely using a locked diff set where having a higher front ARB aids oversteer.

Interesting. Yes, I'm using a locked diff, but I thought that making the rear ARB stiffer would give me more oversteer, not the front one. I'll take that into consideration.

I'm going to try some things based on your advices and I'll see if they work or at least it gets a little better. Thank you guys

Last edited by MaKaKaZo, Fri 6 Nov 2009, 18:38.

I could use some help on this:

I have a very nice UFR set with R2 in all wheels. Now I need to change it to a race setup keeping as much of the original feeling as possible.

I have changed the front tyres from R2 to R3 losing grip in the front and this causes understeer changing the whole balance of the car.

I'd like to change the global understeer/oversteer balance so I can get a set that has a similar handling as the original all-R2 one.

Basically I want to move a little grip from the rear to the front making the least -easiest- possible changes. I've tried raising pressure in the rear tyres so they slide a little more, and also tried specific damper changes for better corner entry/exiting, but I didn't get any good results. I just want a set that handles as the original one but has less overall grip.

Any help?