The online racing simulator
#1 - amp88
Overlay Display - Ideas/Comments/Constructive Criticism
I'm trying to develop an overlay to be used for pre-race onboard laps (to give viewers an idea of the track the race is on and what speeds/forces etc the cars used will provide) and potentially for during a live stream broadcast. At the moment I've got a fairly simplistic overlay, so I'm looking for some ideas, comments and/or constructive criticism so I can improve on it. Here is a video showing the current version. As I mention in the comments the arrows to show peak G force are just temporary, so don't mention changing those arrows to better ones specifically, please.

What I'm considering at the moment:
Changing the gear display so that it only displays the current gear rather than showing all gears for the current car.
Adding a shift light notification.
Somehow notifying the user if the driver over-revs the engine on downshift (e.g. if the car has an 8500rpm rev limit and the driver changes down so that the engine momentarily hits 10000rpm the rev display flashes or changes border).

Thanks.
#2 - amp88
Uploaded a test video of version 2. Made a few small changes/improvements as noted in the description:
  • The gear display is now larger and only shows the current gear.
  • When changing up/down a gear there is an animated transition of colour (so rather than going from red to blue, for example, it will go from red to red/blue on to blue).
  • The arrows to indicate G force peaks have been slightly improved.
Awsome work ... keep going ...
Nice work amp! Nice and simple to read .
nice one amp. Hope you will show the speed in kph too
Are you using DirectX injection or a small window over a windowed version of LFS? Or something different from either of those?
#7 - amp88
Quote from fireb0llch :nice one amp. Hope you will show the speed in kph too

Yep, mph/kph conversion is just a config change. I could display both at the same time but it would need an increase in the size of the overlay to remain readable.

Quote from blackbird04217 :Are you using DirectX injection or a small window over a windowed version of LFS? Or something different from either of those?

Well, it's written in Java so I've created a translucent JPanel that's "always on top" and overlayed it on a windowed LFS. I realise if it was written in C++/C# etc I could use DirectX injection to overlay on a full screen window, but I don't know them well enough and don't want to learn the intricacies. I don't think there's a way to overlay a Java window in full screen.
Ahh I see, I've been thinking about doing an overlay system for a while, I just don't know the DLL injection technique. I mean, I get the idea of it, but I don't know how to technically pull it off.

FGED GREDG RDFGDR GSFDG