I am still concerned about adding your own hi-res skins.

Scawen said in the last thread that you now do it by adding the skin to YOUR skin folder, not skins_x as before, as Gunn said, "So does that mean that when I want to put my mates', high res skins into LFS that I have to put them into my skins folder - meaning that anytime I want to choose a skin for myself I now have a huge list of skins to browse through, skins that I never use?"

If this is indeed true, we do need some way of segragating skins that you download for personal use, and those you download for multiplayer (i.e. other peoples cars) use

I'm beginning to think this should be a spinoff discussion and we should leave this for the bugs guys

Quote from Burnzoire :

I'm beginning to think this should be a spinoff discussion and we should leave this for the bugs guys

Quote from Scawen :

I've gone through the thread and moved that whole texture size discussion into a spinoff thread. Please don't discuss that on this thread any more as I need to read about things directly related to this test patch (e.g. bugs, issues, etc so I can deal with them).

http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?t=24200

Quote from danowat :

I am still concerned about adding your own hi-res skins.

Scawen said in the last thread that you now do it by adding the skin to YOUR skin folder, not skins_x as before, as Gunn said, "So does that mean that when I want to put my mates', high res skins into LFS that I have to put them into my skins folder - meaning that anytime I want to choose a skin for myself I now have a huge list of skins to browse through, skins that I never use?"

If this is indeed true, we do need some way of segragating skins that you download for personal use, and those you download for multiplayer (i.e. other peoples cars) use

I am just wondering if there can be a way to achieve this without adding another new skins folder. Adding a new skins folder would complicate the system further (it's already quite complicated now) and I fear things may start going wrong and be hard to debug. It would also be harder for people to understand and LFS would have to search in multiple folders sometimes to look for a skin just when someone leaves the pits. The kind of thing I'm thinking of is something like, a user editable text file that lists the skins you want to see in your list, or some other way of marking skins to be not visible in your list, other than moving them to another new folder...?

That's just unformed thoughts off the top of my head, maybe someone will have a good idea for the in game skins list restriction system. Note, this is for people who manually download high res jpg skins to see on their friends' cars. This is not related to the automatic skin downloading.

How about a tickbox next to every skin in the list, and a filter that says "show / don't show ticked skins" ?

EDIT: That's quite similar to your "editable text file idea" but with an interface as described above it's easier to use

Just left a server (W21), and got this error (attached).

First time my LFS got freezed ever.

System: AMD 1700+, Ati Radeon 9800 Pro, Windows XP.

Wouldn't it be possible to place jpg and dds into the same folder? So a user could put his high-res skins into skins_y, LFS automatically converts them to dds and saves them in the same folder again. This way you could skip the skins_dds folder as well und just save the converted dds in the /skins folder.

Quote from Scawen :

That's just unformed thoughts off the top of my head, maybe someone will have a good idea for the in game skins list restriction system. Note, this is for people who manually download high res jpg skins to see on their friends' cars. This is not related to the automatic skin downloading.

i fail to see why you use so many folders in the first place instead of converting jpeg skins into the skins and skins_x folders repectively and managing the skins_x folder according to image size given in the file header

@Scawen,

I would say some kind of character in the filename would render said skin invisible to the garage inside of LFS.

Failing that, you could go the route you said, its similar to what FS2004 does, but I fear it is a little too time-consuming.

There must a simple way to "flag" the skin as invisible by the garage.............

Quote from danowat :

@Scawen,

I would say some kind of character in the filename would render said skin invisible to the garage inside of LFS.

Failing that, you could go the route you said, its similar to what FS2004 does, but I fear it is a little too time-consuming.

There must a simple way to "flag" the skin as invisible by the garage.............

Both skins though (the one your mate uses and the one you have in your folder so you can see him) need to be the same name. If a special character flagged the skin as invisible then he wouldn't be able to choose his own skin either. Either a seperate folder or a user-driven selection method would be best. As Scawen said, the current system is a bit complicated and another folder will multiply confusion, especially for new players IMO.

Quote from Gunn :

Both skins though (the one your mate uses and the one you have in your folder so you can see him) need to be the same name. If a special character flagged the skin as invisible then he wouldn't be able to choose his own skin either. Either a separate folder or a user-driven selection method would be best. As Scawen said, the current system is a bit complicated and another folder will multiply confusion, especially for new players IMO.

I would like to add another angle to this whole discussion and that is around the file name convention of skins. Many teams offer Hi_Res (1024 or 2048px) skins which have a particular filename, now as we all know if the name is changed in LFS World then the skin we sourced from the team (website or direct) does not match and you end up with another low-res skin of the same design in your LFS folder.
I would be more interested in having a fool proof system for skin file naming, if so then the original thinking of two folders would work flawlessly with no user intervention in most cases. So skins folder for user skins and skin_x folder for all other skins no matter what the resolution.

Just a thought. How about when you want to choose a skin to use in a colour profile you click 'Choose Skin', which then opens a new 'window'. In that, the available skins (all of them) are shown as little thumbnails. In addition to that, a search bar could be used.

For example, in T7R my skins are called xxx_Tran.jpg. If I type in Tran in the aforementioned search bar, only skins with "tran" in the name will show (so transition.jpg would too, but at least it's cut down most).

Not necessarily a well thought out idea, but it's an idea and might be workable with a bit of though.

The main function of skins_x for me has always been to exclude other people's skins from my list of chooseable skins. As long as I can still just select from my own skins (and still use quality high res skins for my friends) without seeing irrelevant files, I'm happy.

Quote from Gunn :

The main function of skins_x for me has always been to exclude other people's skins from my list of chooseable skins. As long as I can still just select from my own skins (and still use quality high res skins for my friends) without seeing irrelevant files, I'm happy.

Hey Gunn, If your not already it might pay to read the spinoff thread here:
http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?p=420010#post420010
I think some of your questions will be answered. I hope

Quote from flinty72 :

Hey Gunn, If your not already it might pay to read the spinoff thread here:
http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?p=420010#post420010
I think some of your questions will be answered. I hope

Thanks, but I don't have any questions.

I just want to thanks the devs a lot for increasing the maximum FOV

Quote from Scawen :

I It would also be harder for people to understand and LFS would have to search in multiple folders sometimes

What do you think about a user-data-folder which include all folders with user-needed and user definable data. At time i get confused with 29 folders and just 12 include files which can the user change or which the user need.

My little folder table:
N means: The user need never to explore this folder
Y means: the user have to explore the folder for private files or to share replays or copy stuff in another LFS

abc | N
dds | N
drv | N
hmn | N
knw | N
language | N
lesson | N
move | N
pic | N
smx | N
snd | N
veh | N
views | N
wld | N
skins_dds | N
skins_x | N
skins_y | N
ogg | Y
raf | Y
engine | Y
layout | Y
misc | Y
script | Y
settings | Y
skins | Y
sound | Y
mpr | Y
shots | Y
spr | Y

Furthermore i find its not a good idea to put skins from other racers in the skins-folder to see higher resolution for this.

This is probably planned, but it's a bit of a scare... when a skin is downloading EVERY texture on a car is white, including interior & wheels. See attached.

Quote from Burnzoire :

This is probably planned, but it's a bit of a scare... when a skin is downloading EVERY texture on a car is white, including interior & wheels. See attached.

I've noticed the same thing in Patch W too lol

That should only happen if you were driving your own car at the time that driver left the pits, and that car model hasn't already been loaded up before on your computer (normally if that driver is the first one to use that car) - so its textures were not in memory when his car was created.

That is the "pit-out glitch" avoidance, while you are driving it never loads textures from disk, it uses blank textures instead.

I saved a single player quali replay, but im not able to watch it. error message: "track start positions do not match"

Ok, so I found a bug in Patch W, but I didn't post it yet since we get a new patch soon and you didn't get the bug in patch W17...

I saw that the most "Can't ... a player is connecting" are removed, so it could be solved by that...

Anyways... The bug was that if you had your car set to automatic and a player was connecting, and WHILE he was connecting you changed the gear changing via the options to shifter, you would get Can't ... a player is connecting. BUT your car wouldn't shift...

You had to shift yourself, but the car clutched itself... (so at 5K revs it would do full clutch and no throttle and then more till it was 5K revs)

As it was an automatic which didn't shift...

Anyways, thanks for the new patch, And I'll try it 4.5 hours probably (maybe in 2.5 hours)

Quote from Scawen :

That should only happen if you were driving your own car at the time that driver left the pits, and that car model hasn't already been loaded up before on your computer (normally if that driver is the first one to use that car) - so its textures were not in memory when his car was created.

That is the "pit-out glitch" avoidance, while you are driving it never loads textures from disk, it uses blank textures instead.

yes the guy who took the screenshot was in a FOX, and I had changed to an F08 for the first time.

Send to spectate if a player connecting is now possible:

See my chat-log:
A new guest is connecting
matze^L joined the spectators
MAR^v^vDom!n!k^L connected (Kevin Jordy^L)

Thats really the best add in the Patch W21.
Edit: some delays while a player connects are still there, also sometimes by using shift+S

In a full pitlane have i with W21 now double or 3x FPS than in W17, i guess thats the new skin-texture-system.

I'm a little confused about the change to .dds
The converted skins are 18% larger than the corresponding .jpg's were
Wasn't the goal supposed to be to make the file size smaller to use less bandwidth?