i would some help pointing me in the right direction for what i would want. first, i've used LFS dedilink before on a server i used to run on my own computer.
http://www.finalgear.500servers.net/dedilink.jpg

now we have a dedicated server from 500servers, and i would like to be able to control it in the same way as the picture above. problem is that we have LFSLapper running, and can't do both at the same time.

how would i go about making a program to do something like LFS dedilink, but only on my side. for instance, it would be passing the parameters through my open LFS game. of course, i would be in the game with the admin password. click a few buttons, and the program would send commands like; /track as1, /laps 10, stuff like that.

where do i need to start to do this? do i need to have it connect to InSim? i have downloaded the InSim/OutSim/OutGuage lib in .NET. thanks for any help that can be provided, and ask if more information is needed.

Quote from burnsy1882 :

where do i need to start to do this?

All you really need in this case is an InSim connection, and then a nice GUI to wrap around the commands. You could do something magic with current track detection, etc.

If you go for the option of using a pre-made library, you're best off looking at its documentation first of all. On the other hand, having a basic knowledge of how InSim works is probably a good idea. Checkout docs\InSim.txt in your LFS folder.

In your case, all you need is to send MSTs (MsgTypePack) to get the bare essentials working

If you want to do some track detection you'll want to look at the StatePack, and you'll also probably want to look out for InSimMulti packets and possibly compare the name of the host when you connect against a known list in your application (if you're thinking about some automagical / scripted stuff also). Looking out for MPE (MultiPlayerEnd) packets will be useful. You could use these 2 packet types to enable and disable the controls in your GUI.

Hope that helps

thank you very much. guess i've got some research to do first.

i think that i bit off more than i can chew with this idea. i've only had one class of vb.net and now taking a similar class for C#. never have done something like this. my dad (software consultant) says this would be OOP. anybody know of some good online books about OOP and good examples of OOP?

Believe it or not, if you want it pretty succinctly, wikipedia has it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming

It's not exactly verbose, but it gives you the rough idea.