hm to Munza its good arguement, but i think there is very little ppl with 56k modem etc, and in future will be fall down their count...i think this is time to made LFS more medialistic btw it could be in S3 which will realease imho in 1 year maybe later...so its 1 year to net improve etc i really dont see any problem with connection in future, btw this feature of walking ppl around track was mean mainly within some leagues etc cuz there arent so many ineteresting races on public, cuz most ppl use it for practice...but what about 24 h race, and this feature able i think it could be very very interesting

..but if you have only 56k.. do you honestly think your going to just waste your time watching a race on the computer lol?

The reason why i mentioned the 56k argument.. was simply because if u look at the thread about picture sigs.. ppl r always complaining about their slow connections etc

But ur right.. the net will be really fast n cheap soon.. i mean hell ADSL2+ is only like $60 bucks here in Australia so its not that un-affordable

It depends on where you are in the world, but as the drivers themselves would not have to show the spectators and deal with their bandwidth (or perhaps their avatar as an option) then it isnt really an issue anyway.

The bigger issue is all the extra modelling of the outside of the track, which in most places either isnt modelled at all or does not look so good when you go up close to it because it was designed to be seen from the track.

Quote from Becky Rose :

the drivers themselves would not have to show the spectators and deal with their bandwidth

just because they dont see them doesnt mean it doesnt effect lag.. the server still has to deal with it which effects every one within that server

If you still only allow 24 connections, there would be no more data usage on the server than would be possible anyway, so the server would not lag any more than it would usually.

Quote from Munza :

Awsome idea but i can see it creating a major problem for 56k Users.

Think about it.. say you've got 20 spectators, that means the server has to get information about 20 individuals walking around the track at any one time.. then you've got the 10 or so actual Racers driving around.

I can see it working, but not very well, or at least not as well as we'd like

It's not about the clients bandwith, it's about the servers. I have heard of some rumers that LFS uses a P2P kind of net code, but I've not heard this from the devs. Untill then the clients bandwith is not a factor as long as they can support the maximum number of racers in game the server supports. That said, the spectators themselves are not adding to the races total ammout of bandwith needed. The spectators themselves would be getting information the server and not the client. Once more making the clients bandwith a non-issue.

Bottom line, if a racer can play in a server with the maximum number of people racing then they should have no problem with extra spectators as long as the server itself can deal with the load, and bandwith.

The HLTV approch would be best. It takes away the limitation from the server's bandwidth totally. As HLTV tunnles the information it get from the game engine and sends it to a server that then relays the information out to all of the clients.

[edit]I just read the topic from back to front, and I get what your saying now. But and the end of the day, does the race driver REALLY need to see the grand stand? No this game is a race simulator, and not a crowd simulator. You could still have this but each grand stand would have it's own little ad-hoc server. And that could connect to the main server and get information from there. But there is no need for 2 way traffic from spectator server to race server.

It would be cool to see grand stand stats, and attendance of races tho what team had more follows in that race, and in what grand stand.[/edit]

Quote from Vain :

The spectator-possibilities should definitely improve in LFS.
For example a spectator tool that buffers the last 6 seconds of the race and can thus switch to interesting events before they happen (well, actually they already happened, but the cam switches before they are displayed). This tool could also smooth out the "steps" with the buffered data for better viewing.
The gaming-community would appreciate this and it would help LFS to become more public.

In LFS there are better races than in reallife, so why not also get better spactator-tools than in real life?

Vain

This would be amazing to see.

One thing that I could see as being fairly simple to add with the spectator mode is an option to jump the camera to a car(s) that cause a yellow flag. As in a real life broadcast, chances are an accident doesn't unfold on the camera that is actually live at the moment, but rather will jump to the action as soon as it happens.