Live For Speed InSim API 0.01a

I've been playing Racing Simulations for a while. I have an Act Labs Force RS, a wheel I truly enjoy, even though Act Labs has decided to get out of that market. My true love was Need For Speed: Porsche Unleashed. I think it was the best NFS game of the series. A good balance between Arcade and Simulator. However it is also the one that did the worst commercially and now NFS is pretty much a Console arcade racing franchise. Oh well.

I've spent some time with TOCA: Race Driver 2, a beautiful engine, but i never liked the feel of the cars. Grand Prix Legends, is of course the reigning champion among Simulation junkies, so much so that the 10 year(?) old game has been lovingly kept up to date by a devoted fanbase. But talk about hard to drive, and I am really more of a GT racing kind of guy.

While I've known about Live For Speed for a while and played the demo, it wasn't until a couple of weeks ago that I finally broke down and bought the full game. And man, it's shaping up to be my favorite simulator. S1 is already incredible, and graphically good enough. The driving is fun and challenging and extend to which you can tweak your car setup is incredible. And what's been posted of S2 pretty much puts at the top of the genre, if you ask me.

And then there is InSim, a UDP protocol for communicating with either the individual game or a game server to control many aspects, or syphon racing statistics from it. Being a geek, I was drawn to this protocol almost as much as to the racing itself and so I've been busy building an Object/Event model to encapsulate the protocol in C#. Finally all the playing with binary serialization has paid off. The first version of the lib with a VS.NET winforms tester solution can be found here, the full NDoc generate docs are here. Right now this is a binary release of the Lib itself, but once i lock down the Model, i'll release the full source, most likely under the General Public License.

This initial release understands all InSim packets, but I have not built objects around them, so really the only capabilities exposed are:

• Connect to an LFS instance, and if so configured, automatically respond to keep alive packets
• Access the LFS version information
• Send and receive messages
• Request and subscribe to Status packets.

It'll probably take me a month to flesh out the rest, at my current pace.