The online racing simulator
New Version 0.7A - Mods Support
(173 posts, closed, started )
Quote from Scawen :It was a pretty big decision, not taken lightly.

In the end, to do all that huge amount of work and simply donate it as a gift to the pirates, was too unappealing.

I‘m just wondering if there is any chance that some people provide their server for their region and Victor just deploy offical servers on that, especially bad latency. This may sound like our pirate server used to be though.
-
(fastranker1) DELETED by fastranker1
We are going to need a 60 car server.... Great job
The new version doesn't support old version replays?
Quote from BorislavB :The new version doesn't support old version replays?

It can't play old MPRs but can play old hotlaps (except MRT / RB4). I frequently checked that hotlaps were still valid (not OOS). Maybe it can play old SPRs in general but I haven't been checking that.
Anyone who has installed the LFS Editor, please update to A2 (editor update only).

Editor update 0.7A2 has an important fix plus some help for bikes:

Steering wheel (ONE WAY) minimum value reduced to 30 degrees
Added a check for unexpected selections when selecting a subobject
Checks and warnings on some values for bikes in Steering/Driver tab
FIX: You could not type in the "Steer" value in Steering/Driver tab
FIX: Bug in freehand scaling or rotating points in editor 2D view

https://www.lfs.net/forum/thread/95664
Quote from Scawen :It can't play old MPRs but can play old hotlaps (except MRT / RB4). I frequently checked that hotlaps were still valid (not OOS). Maybe it can play old SPRs in general but I haven't been checking that.

Yes just check. SPR is ok, but MPR are "obsolete replay". Frown
Yes, it wasn't possible to keep them as so many multiplayer packets were changed. But you can have an old copy of LFS installed on your hard drive to watch old replays.
found it somewhere hidden in C disk, works properly now
Good to hear! Smile
Quote from Scawen :I hope everyone knows, you can create a free server incredible simply. It's easier than ever before. You don't have to forward ports in firewalls or anything complicated like that.
(...)

I bet not everybody knows that. Previously, creating a server ingame was likely not used often because people used dedicated servers. Now one can basically start a dedicated server from ingame, that is impossible to know without reading about it. The only hint is the new "select Country" option.

For example https://www.lfs.net/hosting only mentions rental hosting.

Also on https://www.lfs.net/hosting/admin maybe it could be added:
Quote :You are currently not renting any hosts.

Click here to create one
...or start a free host ingame.

Beside that, I tried hosting and it worked well.
Just the list of mods is getting a bit long, that might eventually need a better solution.
Nice that the web interface automatically finds all your layouts that were ever uploaded to forum.
Quote from Scawen :Is it not possible to set deadzones using the controller's software? I seem to have a vague memory of this from the past.

Xbox controllers don't have dedicated software, just basic Xinput drivers and they're good to go. Also global deadzones don't really work well since all games have different sensitives, linearities, etc. and no specific setting would work well across all games. For this reason pretty much every game I've come across has built-in deadzone options. Hopefully it can be added to LFS soon as well.

Edit: A more minor suggestion would be to also allow controller triggers to be applied at the same time or set to separate axes to make rev matching/throttle blipping possible Smile

Edit 2: Also the ability to map the Change View button to a controller button, those three things and controller support would be top notch in LFS!
Quote from Gutholz :I bet not everybody knows that. Previously, creating a server ingame was likely not used often because people used dedicated servers. Now one can basically start a dedicated server from ingame, that is impossible to know without reading about it. The only hint is the new "select Country" option.

For example https://www.lfs.net/hosting only mentions rental hosting.

It is mentioned under "In-game temporary hosts" Shrug
Attached images
5D3BE2A2-26F6-4F2C-85BC-83A4481282E8.jpeg
We can't change clock inside RB4 for example from UTC to local time zone right? ..
In case I get to it at some point, how should dead zones work? I'm thinking if someone could show me a graph of controller input -> deadzone modification -> output that actually works well, it could save me a lot of research.

Quote from BeNoM :Edit: A more minor suggestion would be to also allow controller triggers to be applied at the same time or set to separate axes to make rev matching/throttle blipping possible Smile

LFS uses all available axes presented to it by DirectInput. On my computer I have a wireless XBox controller and separate axes are reported. There's some kind of bug (or is it deliberate knobbling) by Microsoft that for some reason does not report separate axes for some gamepads, instead requiring developers to rewrite their controller support software to XInput. So to my mind it is a Microsoft bug. I think it would be a long time before I'm motivated to stop all other work simply to support XInput purely because of Microsofts oversight (or deliberate omission).

Quote from BeNoM :Edit 2: Also the ability to map the Change View button to a controller button, those three things and controller support would be top notch in LFS!

I'm sure you must know by now that you can set a controller button to perform any text commands or keypresses? You can set a controller to the text commands like:

/press V
/shift V
/view [fol/heli/cam/driver/custom] - set specific view

Quote from superlame :We can't change clock inside RB4 for example from UTC to local time zone right? ..

That is just fixed at the moment. Eric really just reused a display that was designed for use on the big clock displays at tracks. So that texture shows whatever is displayed at the current track, whether it is race time or UTC time. In fact in the development version it would show the time of day at the selected track (possibly with an offset).
Quote from Scawen :In case I get to it at some point, how should dead zones work? I'm thinking if someone could show me a graph of controller input -> deadzone modification -> output that actually works well, it could save me a lot of research.

I don't know the technical side of things or how they're implemtend, but I know that most games have a slider/percentage of how much of the axis you want to be in the deadzone. Here's an example from rFactor: https://i.imgur.com/WpCLSDW.png


Quote from Scawen :LFS uses all available axes presented to it by DirectInput. On my computer I have a wireless XBox controller and separate axes are reported.

I'm using an Xbox Elite controller and sadly both throttle and brake are reported as the Z axis.

Quote from Scawen :There's some kind of bug (or is it deliberate knobbling) by Microsoft that for some reason does not report separate axes for some gamepads, instead requiring developers to rewrite their controller support software to XInput. So to my mind it is a Microsoft bug. I think it would be a long time before I'm motivated to stop all other work simply to support XInput purely because of Microsofts oversight (or deliberate omission).

Fair enough, can't argue with that. It is a more minor thing after all, if it ever is solved one way or another that would be appreciated.

Quote from Scawen :I'm sure you must know by now that you can set a controller button to perform any text commands or keypresses? You can set a controller to the text commands like:

/press V
/shift V
/view [fol/heli/cam/driver/custom] - set specific view

Neat! I forgot you can set commands like so, cheers for the reminder Smile
Very happy for the updates. Great job LFS devs!
Quote from BeNoM :I don't know the technical side of things or how they're implemtend, but I know that most games have a slider/percentage of how much of the axis you want to be in the deadzone. Here's an example from rFactor: https://i.imgur.com/WpCLSDW.png




I'm using an Xbox Elite controller and sadly both throttle and brake are reported as the Z axis.



Fair enough, can't argue with that. It is a more minor thing after all, if it ever is solved one way or another that would be appreciated.



Neat! I forgot you can set commands like so, cheers for the reminder Smile

Hello, i use XInput Plus utility (https://0dd14lab.net/bin/xinputplus/) to make throttle and brake work as separate axis on my logitech F710 gamepad, it has a lot of options to tweak to your liking.

*edit (XINPUT plus cfg for my logitech F710 (put on LFS dir)) LINK : https://we.tl/t-yPNofaRrhF
Attached images
xinputP.jpg
f710lfs.jpg
Quote from psy00 :Hello, i use XInput Plus utility (https://0dd14lab.net/bin/xinputplus/) to make throttle and brake work as separate axis on my logitech F710 gamepad, it has a lot of options to tweak to your liking.

Awesome, thanks! I'll definitely give this a try Smile

Edit: It worked perfectly, thanks! I was also able to set the deadzones using this program, so all controller issues are sorted Smile Great suggestion!
Quote from Scawen :
there is the possibility that we've worked really hard and made good decisions.

Virtually every success requires working hard and making good decisions. But also, a lot of it has to do with luck. What made Angry Birds stand out from thousands of the same physics games? Quite literally nothing. The original one was just a shovelware clone of Crush the Castle, which itslef was a shovelware. What made something as silly as Fallguys to blow up so much, only to immediately fall into obscurity? It just happened to meet the flavor of the month. Why didn't Among Us gained any traction whatsoever for several years after release? The fact that it did was a sheer fluke, is why. And that's not unique to indies: Quake Champions was poised to be THE modern competitive arena shooter, and yet it didn't go anywhere - and these people knew what they were doing. Don't make the mistake of thinking that just because you mostly hear of success, means that success is the norm. Could anyone here name a bunch of good racing simulators that inexplicably failed hard and nobody knows about them? Yeah, exactly, nobody knows about them. Rest assured though, failure to success ratio is easily upwards of 3:1, if you count success as "it broke even". When you're trying to learn how to make indie gamedev your new job, you learn all about it pretty fast. And it's why I think your situation here is kind of a miracle - the fact that it worked in the first place is amazing enough, but then you add the amount of time it worked for? Crazy.

Quote from Scawen :In case I get to it at some point, how should dead zones work? I'm thinking if someone could show me a graph of controller input -> deadzone modification -> output that actually works well, it could save me a lot of research.

Deadzones typically work like this: a flat value is subtracted from absolute axis value, then boosted to offset max range loss, then clamped to 0..1, and then the sign is restored for the final value. See attachment. Note that deadzone is usually applied before any input mapping such as nonlinear factor.

Or actually I can just provide the code. Disclaimer: some parenthesis might be mismatched.
axis = (max(0.0, min(1.0, (abs(rawAxis)-deadzone) / (1.0-deadzone) ))) * (rawAxis > 0.0 ? 1.0 : -1.0);

Attached images
deadzone.png
Having problems running a n approved dl'd modded car in lfs
Hope this is the right place to post this.

reinstalled lfs to latest and greatest version, runs normal cars fine.

Downloaded the stockcar successfully and added it but when I add it as an AI or try to drive myself it gives a can't find knowledge file error.

I've added screen shot to the post showing error message etc. I'm expecting when i dl the mod it should dl all necessary files?
Attached images
lfs error.png
One trick that should be obvious with deadzones is to treat default-centre (steering) and default-end (throttle, brake, etc) axes differently. This is surprisingly overlooked in some flight simulators!

If you are looking at input support, will support for XInput devices ever appear? I use my XBox controller when I don't have time to set up the wheel, but with DirectInput the two trigger buttons only work as a combined axis. I believe it needs XInput to handle them separately. This is very minor though, so waaaaay down on the priorities :-)
This thread is closed

New Version 0.7A - Mods Support
(173 posts, closed, started )
FGED GREDG RDFGDR GSFDG