Quote from danowat :

Would'nt believe everything you read, seems like a pretty spurious statement "I just learnt they tried to license the LFS engine".

Dan,

Hello,

I'm selle at RSC and I might have better not written that this way ;-) "I just learnt" means I have read it in a thread in a forum (I think in the netKar forum at RSC). There was a discussion about how cool it would be if Simbin would create content for netKar, then someone (not an official) said that Simbin wanted to license the LFS engine...
So it's all speculation...

I'm sorry, but making a racing physics "Engine" out of existing code is not that simple. Just for Scawen to produce something with a reasonable SDK and API would probably be a pretty monstrous task.

Software is ultimately malleable, and so the perception is you can unplug something, plug it into a different product, and POOF, you have cool new functionality. It is rarely that easy and usually takes a lot of pre-planning to be able to use code in that way. There are lots of simple seeming things that take a huge effort to code, and lots of seemingly complex things that are very easy to code. Software development is a contradiction in logic at times and is horribly complex.

So, in a nutshell, if you want LFS to move forward, you better hope that they don't want to sell the "engine" because it would take a lot of work just to prepare it for sale.

Quote from Vykos69 :

Eh, a day has 24 hours, if that aint enough, there is still the night

Not if you've already used up yours hours. I'm not sure which planet you are on (Does your ISP know your tapping in from off world?) but Earth has a 24hour rotation and an orbit off 365 of those 24 hour days.

Yeah, it's real pity that there are only 24 hours per day. I have been thinking about moving to the Pluto (one Pluto day is 168 hours ) but the pings in LFS would be just disastrous

Personally I'm thinking of setting up a server on Jupiters Moon Europa. You should See Io as it passes though the magnetic field of Jupiter. Talk about Aurora.

Hopefully that should improve you ping somewhat. But I still think you'll be talking in a ping of hours, not seconds.

Not unless you can do some fancy Quantum entanglement thingy. That might improve things somewhat.

You don't have to sell the engine, they can license it so they keep control, this approach works fine with FPS engines.

http://forum.rscnet.org/showth ... &posted=1#post2946835

No one mentioned Vykos' quote on that thread so I had to do it.

Quote from SamH :

Why do I always have to write a feckin essay on every feckin thing? :-\

because you enjoy it

go on admit it

try to deny it

see you cant

Do you sell smilies because you seem to have lots of 'em?

Call me thick, stupid of what ever but I have a plane and simple question for all you programmers out there, as I am game / sim player not a maker.

Now if somebody, say like Simplebin or Crapmasters or Electronic Farts wanted to copy the LFS Engine, could not they just hire some super duper coder to hack and strip LFS and find out how it works?

As I said, I am not from a coding background ( chose not to at an early age as I fell asleep to often ) so basically I don't know.

ha, no, not that easy.

Quote from Vykos69 :

ha, no, not that easy.

OK, not for Vykos, as I know he is off to bed but I am now going to be that annoying little kid and ask.......


BUT WHY

Well, Fordman, you know that a baby elephant can fit inside a vw beetle but when she gets little older she don't fit in any more. It's the same thing with the coding, once the devs get out the beetle they just can't go back in because the keys are missing!

Hope that clears it out for ya

PS: Devs =! elephants

Quote from Fordman :

OK, not for Vykos, as I know he is off to bed but I am now going to be that annoying little kid and ask.......


BUT WHY

they could stick the exe into a disassembler (sp?) but then they will only get machine code. and that will be nearly impossible to tell apart from sound, physics, graphics etc. and even if they could only get the physics code, they still need to then translate it back into c++ and that will be totaly stupid.

much faster / cheaper to write it from scratch, its only maths

It would be faster and less expensive for them to build an engine from scratch.

Quote from dUmAsS :

they could stick the exe into a disassembler (sp?) but then they will only get machine code. and that will be nearly impossible to tell apart from sound, physics, graphics etc. and even if they could only get the physics code, they still need to then translate it back into c++ and that will be totaly stupid.

...

Dont believe a word of it. Debug/crack tools now allow huge control over execution. Also machine code is not that bad if you know what you are looking for/at. All code has to call the various windows API's to do anything and these API calls leave signatures that are simple to spot. This makes it easy to find where sound, gfx etc are done. You can even get debug tools that allow you to break an app when it calls different API calls to make it easier. Its more a case now that people coming into development now have not had to work in machine code/assembler, like us oldies , so are not used to reading it.

If the code is encrypted and then decrypted on load then breaking on API calls means the code is in memory decrypted so can be dumped so it can be pulled apart. The war becomes trying to spot debug tools before you decrypt code so you can halt execution if you want to protect against debugging but that is hard if you rootkit the debug tools so you hide them from task list and directory structure, Sony know all about this one lol.

Also compilers translate similar code in similar ways so as long as you know the compiler used you can find out how it structures that code when converted from source to MC.

Just make a search on Warez to see how much cracked/hacked apps there are out there. Most of these would have involved someone pulling apart machine code to see what is going on so they can patch the code.

So if someone wanted to see how it worked they could find out. And with the budgets for games today the cost of adding a dev resource to pull apart another product for a year is cheap in comparision.

As for general hacking of LFS to allow warez version you will find reason that LFS is not hacked like other games is that it has an online part of the code. LFS World is very tightly coupled with LFS so unless the hacker can hack LFS World people can't play online which is what LFS is about. The same happened with Q3, hacks that allowed offline were available but nobody hacked master server so could not use online until iD disabled master server checking later in the product life.

Quote from Vykos69 :

I might quote Ian Bell from 2004 GamesConvention here (chief of Blimey, former head of studio of SimBin): "Yeah, I wanted to have Scawen, Eric and Vic in the team, but their game is simply to succesful, I cant pay them"

but that's a completely different thing. He was talking about licensing the engine, not the devs

Quote from inCogNito :

but that's a completely different thing. He was talking about licensing the engine, not the devs

And.. did he REALLY call LFS a "game"!?!?!? If he did, and meant it, then I'd say that he's missed the very point that's made LFS so very much our favourite pastime.. that very realism for the sake of realism, over entertainment.

I dunno about (some of) you guys, but for me, it's the realism in LFS that's the pull. The entertainment value is entirely subsequential while being entirely inevitable. Realism FIRST.

Except the setup system in LFS is totally unrealistic, as opposed to the GTL setup system where they actually have capped settings.

LFS isnt the be-all and end-all, it has some way to go before its truely realistic.

All that said, doesnt make me love playing it any less .

Dan,

Prolly a good reason is working for yourself or somebody else. When your working for yourself your setting the priorities and have control over everything, working for someone there setting them. look at what happened to west bros and empire, thats an extreme situation but things can go off the rails at any point.

Im sure that must be in the devs minds too about where they go after they have finished LFS. Maybe they will go on todo licensed material (wasnt there talk about licensed rally material?) with a solid game engine they have created, maybe incorporate licensed material into the already existing frame work.

Quote from danowat :

Except the setup system in LFS is totally unrealistic, as opposed to the GTL setup system where they actually have capped settings.

They have real cars to compare with. LFS has mostly fantasy cars and some real ones. Even if the real ones can have impossible values, Scawen leaves us with a chance to experiment with car setups. I am pretty sure that realistic setting restrictions will be in effect later on for LFS, but right now, everything is just purely a test-based feel.

Kind of nice if you ask me... you can test the physics A LOT further than any other simulation because of this. Whereas other simulations are just leaving you to defined amounts... and you really could not determine the full range of physics (like with suspension).

uncountable infinite (well actually finite) setup options is realistic in principle you can set dampers to any value you please

id like to have a restriction (or options for it) on how much you can adjust from session to session though

Yes, that is true for a fantasy simulation, but for something that is and should be so deeply routed in a realistic representation of real world racing, the fantasy aspect of the setup system, and the "pick and choose nature" of LFS fans when this game is realistic and is not, is a bit of an oxymoron.

Is it a realistic representation of real life racing, or is it a fantasy simulation?, LFS needs to make its mind up in this respect.

Dan,

Quote from danowat :

Except the setup system in LFS is totally unrealistic, as opposed to the GTL setup system where they actually have capped settings.

You mean those damping 1-4 settings?
No values or whatsoever, is not realistic.

Sure neither is 100% realistic, but at least they have fixed gear ratio's.

Also, I never maintain that either is the holy grail of Sim racing, it just grinds my gears when people harp on about the fact that LFS is more realistic than X or Y, when in certain departments it is pure fantasy.

Dan,