Quote from Scawen :

I wonder if the people of today would be surprised to know that back then you could be doing something seemingly simple like editing a document, then the computer would suddenly get a blue screen and you would be forced to restart.

That's the exact reason why I switched to Linux 22 years ago!

Just tested AI path generation: seems to work fine so far. Thanks!

Quote from Xenix74 :

I am sure that it has already been asked ... I just don't find anything.

Can we use the AI ​​with the mods soon. Could be fun.

You can hack it while we wait for official support:

+ select a track and a mod
+ add just one AI
+ go to the race
+ you will see a message about a missing file, for example data/knw/SO1_B67665.knw
+ exit the game
+ open a file explorer and go to LFS/data/knw
+ find another SO1_*.kwn, for example SO1_RB4.kwn, and make a copy
+ rename the copy as the missing file from the previous error message
+ start the game
+ go to the race and have fun*

*Note not all existing kwn files will work with all the mods, you may need to try several until you find one that works. Sometimes the file will get deleted when starting the race, and sometimes it will seem to work, but the AI's will not start.

It does work for me with the UZM 1700, and very well. But didn't work with others I tried: seems that as soon as I add the AI to the race, the knw file gets deleted, and then when starting the race LFS complains about mising knw file.

Quote from scippie :

Just installed it and got my wheel to work again :-). It's great to drive again and now my son is old enough to enjoy it too :-)

Congrats!

Quote from scippie :

It's been long since I tried so things seem to have changed :-). And I don't know if the steering wheel will work.

I've a cheap wheel that works out of the box, but I hardly use it... I usually play LFS offline with keyboard, jut for relaxing after work.

Quote from scippie :

now I'm a full Linux user and the game doesn't work on Linux

I play it fine with Wine. 100fps.

Confirmed. With standard setups, this happens with many car types: UF1, XFG, XRG, LX4, UFR, BF1, MRT, FXR, FOX... with the rest, there is no pile-up, but many have problems (some even on the first turn). The only ones to make it flawlessly are the RB4.

Quote from vitaly_m :

You can do same in blender aswell, and I guess many other 3d editors. You can apply 3d textures and many other things. That's how people made their own ambient light textures, for example.

Yes, I know... but POV-Ray has some unique capabilities for procedural texturing.

Quote :

Now a question: how did you make fenders look so round, or is the picture just that small enough?

I did nothing... just exported from Blender to OBJ, and then used Poseray to convert that into a POV-Ray mesh. Poseray is an excellent converter, so maybe it did some magic with POV-Ray smooth triangles. Or maybe POV-Ray has a good implementation of smooth triangles.

--
jaime

Quote from Shirtkicker :

I have a feeling that this could be incredibly useful!

You could be opening up an entirely new chapter in LFS skinning, Jaime!

Well, I would not say so much, but yes, it opens up a bit the possibilities.

--
jaime

Quote from Shirtkicker :

Does POV-Ray have a UV unwrapper that you could use to translate that texture to a flat bitmap? Because that would open up so many possibilities for interesting skins

Voilà...

Edit: I forgot to add a license to these skins... consider them public domain, you can use them for anything you want.

--
jaime

Last edited by jaimevives, Mon, 7 Aug 2017 07:01.

Quote from Shirtkicker :

Does POV-Ray have a UV unwrapper that you could use to translate that texture to a flat bitmap? Because that would open up so many possibilities for interesting skins

Now that you mention it... yes, it has something called "mesh camera" which allows to "bake" an UV map (among many other interesting uses). I didn't use it for years, but I guess it should not be difficult to adapt my old lightmap baking experiments to do this. I think it's worth the effort as it will allow to make bitmap skins like in the attached pics.

--
jaime

Quote from Shirtkicker :

That looks so good! Thanks for that

I've always wondered what some of my weirder skins would look like rendered...

So shiny!

Speaking of weird skins... look at the attached one. Though is technically not a skin, just a procedural POV-Ray texture over the car body.

--
jaime

Quote from Shirtkicker :

If you're not done with FXRs yet, would you mind throwing this on it to see how it looks?

Cheeky, I know. Don't sweat it if you have other things to do.

I've created a POV-Ray scene setup that lets me change the car just changing 1 line, so it's easy. I've left out the nice area shadows and focal blur for this test, as it would take too long to render. BTW, that skin is mind-blowing (literally).

Quote from Shirtkicker :

Yes, I do like it!

There's a few rough edges, but nothing a few higher res bitmaps couldn't fix. You could also try breaking certain parts out to vary their shininess too (looking at those carbon-fibre bits in particular)...

Looking forward to seeing more

Thanks... and yes, I should put a bit more work on textures/materials. I'm still identifying them all to try to put correct values for each one.

Regards,

--
jaime

Hi:

After some years using this game, I decided to put to use my POV-Ray skills to render some LFS cars. Here is the first one, the FXR.

Credits:

+ Model exported from blender "Ready-To-Render kit" by Bogey Jammer
+ Martini skin by teaz-R

Hope you like it... regards,

--
jaime

Hi there... I made my first post some minutes ago on the main forum, and just wanted to say hi and introduce myself:

I've played LFS for about two years now... nothing serious and never online, just short races against AI for fun and relax after work.

I play on Linux using Wine (about 30fps with minimum graphics), with the keyboard only (I've a wheel, but it's so cheap and bad that I can't match my keyboard pace).

I love LFS car physics and the game in general... I just would like to see more tracks on it.

I guess you are off AI pace, so you are interrupting their lines. This happened to me at first, but now I learned and could keep up their pace, so I rarely have problems with them... in fact, it's me now who ram them in the back or the side.