ILoggable

LFSLib.NET 0.13b released

Now with full patch X goodness!

This version of LFSLib.NET takes advantage of all the new features of Live For Speed S2 0.5X (as well as the X2 test patch additions). The new version can be found here and the release notes are here. There is a new binary distro with a winforms Tester app, which is located here, but in general the tester app does not provide full coverage and will eventually be replaced with a better example and test harness. The highlights are:

• TCP connections (more on that below)
• Multiple InSim Connections at the same time
• Custom Button system
• Lots more tracking events

I've run it through its paces, but as InSim coverages is getting quite large now and I don't have an automated test suite, I cannot claim to have full test coverage. In general, if something doesn't work, assume it's LFSLib.NET, not LFS and let me know. Contact me via the email on the left, blog comments or posting about LFSLib.NET on the LFS programmer forums (which I monitor fairly consistently).

Moving the documentation to SandCastle has taken more time than I hoped. The new doc system is now a dynamic web application and provides a (IMHO) much improved interface thanks to Dave Sexton's excellent DocProject. This has required my moving of the docs off this server to a new host, so the docs and future information for LFSLib.NET from now on lives at lfs.fullmotionracing.com.

About TCP & UDP

A quick note about TCP and UDP in 0.13b. You can have up to 8 TCP connections, but you still can only have one UDP connection. When you configure the InSimHandler, set the UseTCP flag in the configuration. In general, you want to make sure that you do NOT set ReplyPort. Why? As soon as you set reply port, LFS will send RaceTrackNodelap (IS_NLP) and RaceTrackMultiCarInfo (IS_MCI) events via that port on UDP. LFSLib.NET handles that transparently, but since you've now crossed over into UDP land, you have now used up that one UDP connection that is available and things will get wonky if you connect another InSimHandler with the same settings, even though you thought you were just using TCP.

Labels: .net, c#, InSim, LFS, LFSLib.NET, live for speed, OutGauge, OutSim

posted by ether @ 6:39 AM 1 comments

LFSLib.NET v0.12b (this is a test version)

I've just put v0.12b on the server. This version does bring LFS 0.5X compatibility, but it does not expose the new functionality. The goal of this version is primarily to let 0.11b code work against LFS 0.5X with the least amount of changes (some data just isn't represented the same anymore and caused breaking changes). This version is also ill tested, as I'm not going to go through an exhaustive set of tests until i get full 0.5X feature exposure (yeah, I know, i should be doing this test driven.. But that means a mock LFS or an LFS test harness and I haven't had the patience for that).

So what has changed? Here are the notes:

• Moved to .NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2k5
• Swapped out back-end for dealing with InSim packets to more closely resemble the native LFS formats and removed the intermediate Msg* classes (all internal changes)
• Finally mostly functional Unicode support for LFS message in and out transfers
• Updated existing functionality to work against patch X, with some breaking changes in what is available in Events and how that data is represented.
• Full patch X protocol implemented, just not yet exposed, so new packets don't come across as unknown packets

An extra note on "mostly function Unicode support". Basically for conversion of unicode to LFS encoding, I am using a lookup table from unicode to codepage+byte and there are a couple of LFS specific characters that screw up under Japanese encoding. And split messages have some issues. This will be fixed in 0.13b.

The new version can be found here and the home of the lib is here

Labels: InSim, LFS, LFSLib.NET, live for speed, patch X

posted by ether @ 10:08 AM 5 comments