Edit: Oh.. you clearly said "in-game" and I failed to read it. Well... here's an out-of-game one if you're interested....

Browse For Speed has some admin functionality - you get all the txt going on in the server (chats, pitting, penalties etc) and can send msgs, and has quick ways to kick/ban/force spectate people. It does it via insim, and should work with the relay as well.

Last edited by wabz, Wed 24 Jan 2007, 07:58.

Quote from wsinda :

In LFS, the list of S2 servers also contains the S1 servers. In BFS, you can see the S1 servers only if you choose "S1" as filter.

I noticed this lately because one of the 2 STCC Copper & Bronze servers is an S1 server. It doesn't appear in the S2 list in BFS, but inside LFS it does.

Oh okay, I guess this must be a new LFS thing - I'll add an option to request both.

Davo - yeah, that's a good idea. Maybe just put the user where they left off?

Warlost - thanks for the offer! We have a French translation already (it was sent to us after 0.7 was released - we host translations here and will distribute them in the next release):
http://www.browseforspeed.net/lang.html
But feel free to make any corrections, or help maintain future versions.

Funnycat: If you want to do a Russian translation, feel free! We haven't received one yet. There are instructions in the english xml file.

Note that this thread is fairly old (but still relevant) - BFS is up to 0.7 (and is available in 11 languages), link in my sig.

Yes, a new version with a fix for your problem. See only a few posts up:
http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?p=261585#post261585

You did redownload it right? You definitely downloaded 0.7b? (Note: the version check in config won't tell you there's a new version available, because I didn't bump the version number). What patch of LFS are you using?

Quote from Davo :

I can't seem to connect using the admin function. The server is on my LAN and insim is on because LFSLapper is working but I can;t connect to admin i. Is this because something is already using InSim?

Yes, you can only have one app connected to insim at once.

Quote from Davo :

Is it possible to have a miniimse/close to tray function. I'd like to leave it open so I can do quick refreshes instead of full ones and being in the tray would make it handy.

Okay, noted!

Quote from Davo :

The version check doesn't seem to work. I'm on 7a and 7b is out but it does't let me know a new version is out.

I decided not to bump the version number for this update as it wasn't critical and I don't like bothering users too much. Major version updates or critical fixes will definitely let you know about updates (it does work).

Quote from Davo :

The blue background would probably look better if it were lighter like in LFSWorld. If you could get white text to be shown as black on a white backgriound and black text to be shown as white on a black background adding those options would rock.

This this has been heavily requested, we'll add this in the next version. I haven't decided the best way to do this without cluttering up the UI yet though.

Quote from noemfie :

Hey I have a weird bug , if I join a favourite server it sometimes tries to connect in demo mode , altho it's a s2 server , I then have to switch modes and connect from lfs again

I believe I have found the issue and fixed it. Please try 0.7b and let me know if it has fixed the issue.

This would have happened when joining from the extended server information window, if you clicked join after the pubstat query had finished but before the query to the actual server had finished. So I think it would have been a fairly rare occurance. Let me know how it goes!

Quote from Scawen :

Isn't there some way to contact Phlos? A readme file in the original download, something like that? Doesn't he have his own website and forums? I think there must be a way, and there isn't anyone who can fix LFS manager for you except Phlos.

This is why you should use open source software that anyone can fix

Quote from Omen :

grrr, the "friends" of Browse for Speed 0.7 does not function smooth, too.

Can you explain what you mean? I don't understand your issue, but would like to fix it. Note that BFS caches pubstat queries for 30 seconds - is that the problem? 30 seconds is too long for you?

Quote from jegorchangai :

Thanks for the program, im having a small problem though: The admin adminstrate function doesnt work for me for some reason, it just keeps on saying ''Couldn't connect to insim,, . I asked another admin and it didn't work for him either. Anyone?

Make sure that insim is properly running on the remote server (either start it with /insim= or type that from the server) and that there isn't a firewall blocking it.

Quote from Jakg :

I think LFS has to be running, as from the screenies i've seen it can be used to ban people on the server your on (if your an admin), but LFS has to be running and connected first

Nope, the admin section can connect to a remote server (direct or through the relay) - LFS does not have to be running. The screenshot just has LFS in the background because I happened to be connecting to that instance

Quote from abz1 :

Can you remove the blue background in the table it does not look nice and reminds me of phlos program which in return does not look nice .

The reason it's blue is because that's the colour of the in-game one - all the colours for the server names are nicely visible. A few people have requested this, so we might make it configurable (though I'm not sure how many other background colours are good for this). I would rather keep the number of options down though, and have something that works for everyone. One solution is to make the background white when turning off coloured hostnames?

Quote from wsinda :

Being a Demo user, I race almost exclusively on Blackwood GP. When I browse servers from LFS's own list, it doesn't re-load the track each time (except when it needs to, e.g. to change the lighting). And re-loading takes about 10 seconds on my PC, so that's a considerable delay when checking out several servers in a row.

Unfortunately there isn't a way we can interact with a currently running version of LFS to tell it to connect to a server, so LFS has to be started each time.

Last edited by wabz, Thu 9 Nov 2006, 21:25. Reason : Quote reply

Ah. Do you remember what server this was? I have a feeling there is a demo server with the same name (possibly with trailing whitespace) as the S2 server. I remember this happened before with the Redline Racing servers - I'm not sure this is a bug in BFS, but in the way that ambiguities with a hostname can't properly be resolved.

Does it only happen for one server or does it randomly happen? Have a look at favourites.xml - has it been saved as a demo server (there should be a <version> tag)? If so, try removing/readding the server.

Or just use Browse For Speed, which is far superior and free (in every sense of the word). The UI is, in fact, usable!

I know this is a shameless plug - for people who think it may be innapropriate for me to post in this thread - CrazyICE did go and send a private message to everyone who replied in my initial thread announcing BFS.

It does save passwords for favourite servers (it's a bit crazy to remember them for any server, as servers come and go, and the saved passwords would just pile up). Add your servers to your favourites.

Thanks for the comments!

If you managed to download 0.7 and not 0.7a, go and download 0.7a, because I packaged the wrong dll. Sorry!

Edit: Note that this thread is fairly old, BFS is up to 0.8a which is compatible with S2 patch X10 - the below text still describes BFS quite well though.

Recently pubstat's new idkey system broke some functionality of BFS, so we're releasing BFS 0.7. 0.7 doesn't bring a huge amount of new features, but it does do some cool stuff and has some speed improvements (gets you on the track faster, uh huh). See below for the changelog.

If you haven't heard of Browse For Speed:

Browse For Speed is an extremely useful tool for finding servers and joining them. It is able to query demo/s1/s2 servers, lets you maintain a favourites list and keeps track of your friends. It also lets you remotely control your servers via an admin interface.

Querying Features:

• Ability to query/join Demo/S1/S2 servers, with filters (cars/public/private/empty/full/tracks/ping)
  
• Maintains a favourite server list
  
• Maintains a friends list
  
• View extended server information (racer list, server rules etc)

Admin features:

• Connects to servers via insim (connecting via insim relay also supported)
  
• Sends/receives server messages
  
• Ability to send private messages
  
• Shows racer list, with context menu (kick/ban/force spectate)

General:

• Ability to launch an arbitrary number of programs before LFS (Pit Spotter etc supported)
  
• Able to get a server list and query much faster than the in-game browser
  
• Available in 9 languages (thanks to the translators, see CREDITS file)
  
• Extremely easy to add translations (place an XML file in the lang folder)
  
• Free and open source. If there is any doubt in your mind about what this program does, you can get the source, go through it, and build it yourself using free tools.

The only remote machines BFS will contact are:

• The LFS master server (to get a server list)
  
• Each LFS game server
  
• LFSWorld (for pubstat queries (BFS caches these queries so you don't hit the limit))
  
• If (and only if) you have version check enabled, it will query www.browseforspeed.net purely for version checking.

0.6 to 0.7 Changelog:
* Improve list drawing - faster, no flashing, huge friends lists are now very fast
* Coloured server names
* Supports all the characters found in LFS (providing you have appropriate fonts installed)
* Added quick refresh to only refresh currently displayed servers
* Fix more encoding problems
* Version column included in Favourites list

Browse For Speed requires the .NET 2.0 framework. I am no Microsoft fan, but .NET is something they have done right. It is a standard, and you can develop .NET applications without using any Microsoft products. It's only a 24meg download, and doesn't require a reboot . There's a link to the download on our main site page.

www.browseforspeed.net - for the community



Edit: Oh, btw, translators: We wanted to release this asap because of the broken pubstat functionality - if you send in updated translations we'll put them on the site - we'll send out instructions shortly.

Edit: If you did not download 0.7a (your download did not have an a on the end), please re-download. I screwed up and packaged the wrong dll, and pubstat queries will not work.

Last edited by wabz, Thu 12 Jul 2007, 10:23. Reason : Old thread note

What's the motivation for this? Are you seeing demo users racing around in S2 servers? I know I'm not. If you just want to stop demo users being able to unlock it (and play offline/lan/whatever) then I think you'll have a hard time doing that (suggestions here merely make it slightly more difficult). In my view, the license system is working fairly well (you can't just crack the game and play on normal s2 servers).

Honey is right - LFS already does send the username (and password, sort of) when requesting a server list, and it is supposed to match versions, and the master server won't send a list otherwise. It also hopefully checks these details again when joining any server.

BTW, I think 'speed' cheats are very hard to detect properly. Just look at Valve - they still haven't got detection right. Connection issues can give false positives, among other things.

Last edited by wabz, Wed 23 Aug 2006, 23:41.

Becky: uh, and enter into the world of itunes/ipods? If you want to get away from (the flawed concept of) DRM, I wouldn't start walking towards Apple....

LFS is pretty enough as it is I reckon - looks much better than GTR2 anyway (as long as one turns up AA/AF). Efforts would be better spent elsewhere, imho.

Why not make the relay part a completely separate application? That way anyone can use it (useful for existing applications), and other people writing insim stuff don't have to code a similar thing into their apps.

Heh, sorry if I came across too angry - I thought the "Omg Plagiarism@!*&" thread title should have been sufficient to show I wasn't that serious Just would've been nice I think, because it is so different (and so much less) to the code you gave in that thread.

No comments in sdether's code required....

Quote from MonkOnHotTinRoof :

Here is my quick patch for code pages support. 1 new function (and one replaced) in byte2string class, and one-line changes in other 3 files dealing with conversion.
.

Parts of this patch look EXTREMELY similar to code given in getLFSString.txt in the BFS 0.6 thread over in unofficial addons. While it had no copyright/license attached, I think it's a bit rude to not give credit .

I left out ^G in there, which is Greek, which is missing from your patch too. You might want to add it.

Here's a snippet of code that connects (doesn't use an xml config file, just hardcoded values) and sends a message. Might get you started:

Note that there exists a bug where the reader thread doesn't stop if the connection fails. Here is a small, stupid patch against InSimHandler.cs which provides temporary relief:

Hello,

I've found it's quite hard to join some servers from outside of LFS.

1) Server "ﾉﾏedline ﾉﾏacing " (the characters from codepage 932 will only show up here if you have an appropriate font installed). The problem here is not those characters, but the fact that the guys hosting this server have a demo server with the same name, and one of them has trailing spaces. This works fine through LFS, but trying to join this S2 server results in "host has a different game code" when trying to join with Browse For Speed or Join2LFS. I could never get it to work when joining specific server and entering those characters either - only by clicking the server from the ingame browser. I think LFS is trimming trailing spaces somewhere here...

2) Would it be possible to join (from /hostname) with characters from those code pages? Or do we have to give it the characters from latin-1 and ^J etc?

3) A server starting with a "/" is unjoinable through Join2LFS - LFS says parameter 1 is blank. Tried quoting/escaping.

I think the best solution to these problems is to support joining a server by giving the IP/Port, and possibly (though I don't believe necessary) the version - demo/s1/s2. At least, I think this is better than trying to code a work around for everything that can go wrong here.

No. You need to read up on character encoding (and probably fonts).

I have it working - but I won't release it yet as we have some other things in mind too, and as this is purely a display thing it's not urgent. Attached is the code I use, but I'm reading it from the network (we don't use pubstat for this stuff) - so I have it in bytes already. You will need to do some conversions.
http://www.browseforspeed.net/redlineracing.jpg

BTW, this doesn't display properly in LFS Manager either.

Note that it appears you have to give the hostname in the other silly format (latin-1, with ^J etc to specify charsets) for LFS.exe /hostname.

getLFSString.txt

have fun

p.s if you have questions, can we please take it out of this thread (programmers forum?) as this has gone quite off-topic.

Last edited by wabz, Wed 19 Jul 2006, 13:31.

It is definitely possible, and not that hard. We will work on displaying them properly for the next release (it should be possible to join these servers with 0.6a)

It works for me. BFS has the same behaviour btw. I am pretty sure it won't work for nesrulz though, and I don't know why