If there's a stadium it'll get a stadium sound emitter, if there's a large group of people standing they'll got a group of people sound emitter. I've not looked at the drag strip particularly so I dont know yet what is there.
Currently my plan is to play noise on overtakes for position, I would like to add noise for yellow flags too, especially if I can find some crowd "ooh" and "ahh" samples . I'm not really sure how I would detect a burnout or a donut from the available data though.
If the relay was set to a very high frequency in order to detect the start of it... We shall see.
I've not been able to download this program yet. Does it give yellow/blue flag notifications, and can I just enable them as all the radio I get? It would be great as I could finally start racing in shift + F.
I believe those messages still appear on shift-f don't they?
You do get notification of whether a leader is behind you, but LFS doesn't actually export blue/yellow flag data as far as I can tell. It would be nice if it emmitted data saying a driver who has caused a yellow flag because this would be really handy and open up all sorts of new possibilities.
Personally I wouldn't know how to score a drift so I doubt I will do this.
Should be the same version that Becky posted yesterday. Saving doesn't work yet, but it only takes me about 10 seconds to set things up. I change volume to 20% and turn off backfires. Open LFS and start playing.
No it's still v0.2. I'm going to add config file saving, and maybe a few quick things this weekend, then i'm going to start doing the features I need for the STCC (which spawned this whole project) because the first race is only a few weeks away now and i've a bucket load of stuff to do.
The major improvements planned will be a little while coming, but config file saving is my top priority - I may even get it done tonight after i've eaten, but I have only just finished work and i'm still not back to 100% health, so we'll see.
Hmm. I have some troubles to get it working with the U19, I just reinstalled LFS and companion, let's see (pit radio worked with U17 but not the backfire...
Just out of curiosity, what are the features you need for STCC and how exactly did it spawn this project? I'm guessing that other leagues may find this tool very helpful as well. I was looking at the STCC page and didn't see any downloads for videos...do you guys have any? I've always thought it would be cool to make a video of a really good, long race in the broadcast style. Something similar to Le Mans, but using a replay from the Endurance League or something. I think the biggest barrier would be the time it takes to capture video, especially with multiple camera angles. That, and the addition of a position ticker at the top of the screen.
On the topic of the tool - I'd also like to suggest the default sound volume be set to 20% once you get configs working. That's what I use and someone else in the thread mentioned the same setting as well. At the very least, it will be easy for someone to turn it up louder if they need to, but the low setting will keep people from getting blasted out on their first try.
STCC is all about what you mention, the first race is later this month which is why there isn't a video yet, just a trailer.
I got started with LFS' insim & outguage because I needed to measure the gaps between each car for the commentators and television captions to use, but had no way to find and store the data in a format the commentators could conveniently use for the way we where working - as it's a highlights show with spit and polish watching the race replay file for the splits would not have worked.
The features it needed are not much, but of course now i've started i'm going to take it to the nth degree, basically i'm going to extract more stats from the race than have ever been previously given for a league race and all of the features will be available from within the mod for everyone to use.
I'm not much of a web page programmer though so I intend to read off a standard .html file and look for a marker (probably '*1' and so on) and insert the data at that point, i'll put a very plain default template in with the mod.
The information also needs to be historic and not dissapear off screen. I asked the guy who did LFS Stats (the popular post race league stat tool) but he was not keen on doing it, so I figured i'd do it myself. I am after all a programmer.
And I figure if i'm going to do a tool then it's going to have everything, plus bells and whistles, and a bit of spit and shine, because when I code anything that's basically what I do.
I guess by now a few might start to doubt the project as i'm very ambitious, i'll just say i've been around a long time.
Probably the better tool for this kind of thing might have been Pure Basic (assuming it has UDP support, which I think it has) but I only have passing acquitance with that and as I knew I was going to be ambitious it had to be a language I was more familiar with, if I was recommending a language to somebody else to write this that would be my first thought.
I chose Blitz3D because it has UDP and a surround sound engine all built in, although it's data handling isn't OO - tbh I find OO slows me down on something this size and just gets in the way. There is an OO version of Blitz3D as it happens, but working in B3D I get so much more done so much faster.
I've experimented with B3D before, seemed quite well equipped, although I'm not exactly a programming guru. Personally I prefer VB.NET but I only do a quick bit here & there once in a while.
At least that explains the slightly unusual interface
I hate coding UI's, so I keep them quick and simple. UI coding, if done "properly" with windows gadgets and so on, ends up dominating the source code and taking most of the time to develop. The way i've done the interface here is quick, simple and effective. I know it's not the greatest interface in the world, but I hope it is acceptable for the purpose .
This is all pretty neat, but i've got a few suggestions nonetheless.
Don't hardcode the loading of backfire sounds, let your program load either any sound files in the backfire directory, or any files matching "backfire (x).ext".
Don't load the radio sounds into RAM, even if you switch to a compressed sound format it's really alot of unecessary memory usage. Just stream from disk once you've picked a sound to play. Needing a bit of performance for backfires makes sense, but you'd probably never notice a radio sound playing 50ms too late.
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Making really good quality videos will only be really possible with a system that has the ability to stop the playback and process each rendered frame in a non-realtime fashion. So that even the slowest of machines capable of running LFS can render movies at a full 29.97fps 768x525 NTSC DVD with everything turned to maximum eyecandy. It will also need to be able to grab the audio from the engine (so that it can perfectly sync audio to video). If such a system is created, then adding a ticker (you're american and used to watching FOX and NBC broadcasts, aren't you? ) would be just a matter of creating a flexible add-on for the capture engine.
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I would add to the volume a slider control, so there's more freedom than 10% increments if possible. And recode the wavs to 8khz... It's radio transmissions, those aren't CD quality anyway. 8khz is more than enough, and make it sound like a radiotransmission.
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768x576 here, i'll do a letterbox version for you Yanks after ! I dont get the point though, I have all the eye candy on and record to a DVD recorder, then (I have to find a good app for this still) decode the vob files to avi and edit. Full eye candy and max quality. All I have to do is find said application and get my gold cables from my parents house before the first race.
I 'could' do a slider, but i'm not going too. I can make it go up less than 10% though as there seems to be a few requests for that, i'll make it 5%. I dont think it needs terribly accurate settings for the volume, provided enough volume steps are there to cover the range of different sound settings people have.
This one might be worth doing though. I was a bit hap hazard with the initial audio sounds and just worked with what I was given with a wee bit of editing. I'll be migrating to an mp3 codec too.
I'm not sure how the sound profiles for each car would know which sample to play if I did that.
I was concerned that on some systems, especially single processor systems, systems with HDD's that power down in short order, and slow access HDD, that this might cause pauses in the main LFS display so for wider compatability I loaded into RAM, which if you think about it means i'm making use of memory if it's there, or using virtual memory (ie: The Hard Disk) if it isn't. The only downside to this is if you are running other applications in addition, but as LFS is a game, this is unlikely. I could make this an option, but I think I need to hear a reasoned argument to counter my thoughts on it first.
. I'm not really sure how I would detect a burnout or a donut from the available data though.
) would be just a matter of creating a flexible add-on for the capture engine.