Live for Speed Forum - Es tut sich was...

Scawen hat Folgendes geschrieben

Hi there, I'd just like to reply to some questions I've seen asked several times :

1) The laser scanning process

The hardest thing was trying to arrange days. We were trying to get the laser scanning done last year in Rockingham's high season, and there were very few days available. The apr guys needed 2 to 3 days to do the scanning (preferably not weekends). It turned out to be 3 days to get all areas scanned, plus one day when they went there and it was just raining, I seem to remember.

Anyway, I think they took a pickup truck and drove to various points around the track. The laser scanner was mounted on the truck and the camera (which took a photo to add colour) was mounted on the scanner. I don't know much about the scanner but I think the laser beam is deflected by a rotating mirror. That light hits the ground or an object and somehow that is interpreted as a 3d point in space. I'm sure you can find a much better description, I didn't really need to know exactly how it works.

They take scans from various points, to maintain the accuracy and make sure they see the back of things and cover all areas. They stick some spikes in the ground as reference points to line up the data (points in the point cloud) taken from several observation points.

We designed a convenient file format that just had x, y, z, r, g, b for every point which is all we needed. apr stitched the data together and uploaded it for us. The original data is very thick near the scanner and more sparse further away. After thinning and some more processing by me, the file we used was about 350 MB.

2) Licenses and versions

Some people made various comments on this. It's right what some people said - we are moving gradually away from the software versions being named S1, S2, S3 and so on. The S numbers are license names and really refer to the content you can access (cars, tracks, certain functions). It makes a bit less sense now to call the version of LFS "S1" or "S2" . The software is continually developing. Anyway this frees us from having to "finish" S2 before releasing S3 content. It's not clear what "finishing S2" means any more. The LFS software and content can just keep improving and we can gradually do the features and improvements that we want to over time.

One thing we discussed was the possibility of just calling the software "Live for Speed 0.6A" and forget about the Alpha / Beta tag. It's very stable software so doesn't really need those tags. There are several things that can be improved and added but that is beside the point. I hope that explains a bit more what we are thinking. The version number being less than 1.0 does express that it still has a way to go.