I'd like to sign up, but I'm waiting for an admin to approve my account. Hopefully someone can get to that before thursday

I'm in.
Sweet Reid

RBR, and need for speed: porsche unleashed have already been mentioned. Number 3 can be F-Zero for the Super Nintendo. It's visionary.

Lots of good advice here! Bob's setup guide is a great way to get introduced to all the settings, always good to have it within reach. I like to keep a notebook, writing down changes as I go, and my perception of those changes on my driving. I'm not a pro, I can't effectively tweak the suspension yet, but I fiddle around with everything, and try and write down as much info as I can. Paying attention to things like, tire temps, corner entry speeds, apex speeds, exit speeds, and over/understeer tendencies in certain corners.

From my experience, it's a good idea to start out with a specific goal. I'm sure you could use 'go faster!', but something a little easier to gauge helps to break things down into smaller chunks. I spend time working with my tire pressures and camber, making sure that my tires will stay at some consistent temperature for decent length stints. Nowadays I play with pressures first, and leave fine tuning the camber assymetrically til later in the process.

My next goal is to look at my corner entry speeds, compared with others, and see where I'm losing time. I don't like being passed, so I try and make sure people aren't much faster than me entering the corner. To achieve this I play mostly with coast differential, roll bars, and wings. By reading the guide and playing with these 5 settings, you'll be able to figure out which ones give you over/understeer, and in which ranges they work.

I don't worry about mid corner, because I find that if I can get it turned in, I can usually hold on for the ride. My solution for mid corner is pretty much practice practice, of course this advice goes for everything I've written

Corner exit is mostly by feeling out where I want the power differential. I like a little bit of oversteer, so that's what I aim for here.

Then there's the straight parts. I'm don't have much advice here. The one thing I do know, top speed is less important than cornering speed, usually

I wouldn't consider any of this real advice, but I remember being in the same spot you are now, a good intention of going faster, but no idea where to start. You've just got to find a method that works for you, set some goals, and practice alot. Patience is key, usually I don't have enough of it though!

I'd like to run this game on my single-tape turing machine. kthxbye

Quote from Funnybear :

What car holds the AS. NAT WR? I havn't checked but I would bet it's an XRR that holds it. The XRR is a very fast car and can deal with the FZR in the corners. The FZR is a very good ont he straights but show it a corner and it struggles in comparison with the XRR.

xrr:1:41.27
fzr:1:39.96

There is only one track where the xrr is faster than the fzr, South City Sprint 2
xrr:0:33.92
fzr:0:34.15

On normal length tracks it's pretty standard that the fzr will be 1-1.5 seconds faster than the xrr. I think the fzr needs a bit of a castration, or a boost for the xrr/fxrs.

Quote from george_tsiros :

In a formula one car, you do not have a clutch, like you have in a road car, to shift gears. You squeeze on the paddle and it does the job. At least i think it is this way. There IS a clutch control device of some sort, but it is used sparingly and, with the exception of pitting, in emergencies. Therefore, it is not realistic to use an analog clutch control in LFS to launch the BF1.

They use the clutch on the launch, and from the pits. It's used to go from N->1st.

Quote from Phill :

found this: http://www.driverheaven.net/smartshader

allthough im not getting anything out of it with LFS.. it even says on the page that its only openGL applications, well, LFS sure is an openGL application "WORK!!" but it wont..

any help!? what drivers do i want? catalyst? my current driver dosn't have smartshader options.. maybe up-to-date drivers has?

As Maggot says, it's directx (direct3d), not opengl.

Hiya North American guys, I'm going to miss to be missing the next few races. I fell off of a pocket bike in what I'm sure was a very amusing display, but it's left my back and shoulders a bit messed, so I can't race for more than 20 minutes. Hope to be back soon.

Looks great, thanks!

Obvious pick: Brazil
Sleeper pick: Cameroon

2 people have brought up Mathematica as a pro for Macs so far. You do realize that:
a) Mathematica runs on lots of platforms, so OMG port LFS to HPUX.
b) Maple is, in every single way, better than mathematica.

Save the cash on the soundcard, you'll just be throwing away money.

For a video card, maybe a geforce 5700/6200. Should be a cheap little upgrade, with either of these cards your processor will be the bottleneck. You could go for a 6600 if you're feeling cheeky, don't know if there will be any difference for you though.

Don't go hog wild on the card, because it will not likely make the trip to your next computer since AGP is out and PCIE is in.

I think it's fine as is. Time limited demos do little to encourage buying. Having lots of people playing the demo isn't a bad thing at all. It's certainly a much better case than no one playing it.

Set mip bias to -4.00 to get the sharpest textures.

Quote from Tweaker :

Well, you have 9 FPS in the pits (tells us your PC could be low-spec), graphics look fine to me, and to top it all off, you are using what looks to be a GTR car when you are a demo racer??? :doh:

I'd prefer helping someone with a licensed username, sorry.

Geez, the kangaroo court is insession; a GTR with road tires? Looks like XRT to me He's fine.

The graphics look fine to me too though. Maybe try setting the mip bias higher if you want it to look softer?

Ah damn my power went out I think it's time to invest in a UPS.

Quote from axus :

tyre deformation means that the tyres have to be generated in real time and as such they cannot be reflective.

Not at all true.. When you dynamically create the mesh, you can also generate the normals and get lighting effects.

I don't know if home made skins illegally using copyrighted tobacco logos qualifies as advertising.

Tobacco ad laws are crap, people can make up their own mind one way or the other.

Quote from Slidaaaa :

Yes it is, for people whit a comnputer that runs lfs allready on performance limit, an extra program running can slow down the game (like happens to me) each less mb of memory and mhz of processor makes the diference in slow computers like mine.

Winamp lives in about 5 mb of ram, so that shouldn't be to much of a problem. Decoding mp3's takes extra clock cycles in winamp or lfs, there's no free lunch.

You would still have to convert your music. m3u is just a list of mp3s/oggs/whatevers to be played.

Quote from Nitemare :

i don't want to make a new thread for it, but when looking at the streering wheel, the other thing came to my mind - the differential in BF1...

from the setup screen it seems to me that bf1 uses the same salisbury diff model as the other cars in lfs... but in f1 diffs are quite a bit more sophisticated - they are electrohydraulic, and the way they transfer torque to each wheel can be changed in real time by car's onboard computer, depeding on track and car conditions...
so that would be IMHO a nice feature to implement...

The fancy active diff is the traction control.

From the FAQ

Answer to: Is there a Linux or Mac port available, or will there be?:
No, there is and will be no port of LFS to Linux or Mac. Doing this would take a huge effort and a long time and because our development team only consists of 3 people, we simply do not have the manpower to do just that. The time we would spend creating a port can be much better spent improving the sim itself.

I don't know about that. LFSNAL attracts a pretty big crowd. I posted a quick message in the forum over there, but so far no one's interested

Thanks for looking after us North Americans! I see lots of leagues that I'd like to sign up for, but usually the races start about half an hour or so before I get home from work. Email sent.