We don't get much of that here. I think it snowed two years ago one day.
Not anything near what you'd call snow. But here when a snowflake manages to stick, we shut the whole city down and make a holiday of it. most folks here from Canada and the northern states laugh at how we freak out about a few snowflakes. You'll see neighborhood kids raiding yards for enough snow to build a snowman before it melts away. I think it got up to 80f (25c?)here today. Yeah. Winter is all but over here. Leaves are beginning to pop up on the trees.
I dunno..... Kinda depends on the exchange rate KeiichiRX7 would have to pay. Adjusting for inflation, just about anybody with an S2 license should be able to swing it. But is it worth it?
I dunno. Let's see. You get a new track they had to do all this laser scanning to get right. Personally, I like the oval, but the other configurations? I think the devs made up better tracks on their own, But those are the configs they have on the real track.... til it all gets torn down. Plus, not only do you get that for new content, you can post here and whine about stuff you thought SHOULD be in the license by now and have seniority over those with simple S2 licenses! That's gotta account for something. And the online? Man! Yeeeeeah.... Better let someone else answer that one. But all in all, I think it's ok and worth the 12 pounds. Besides. When and if the devs manage to do something in your life time, it'll automatically be updateable with a couple a mouse clicks. And who knows? The exchange rate in 2034 might really suck. So yeah. Depends on the exchange rate.
We have a saying about winter time here. If you don't like the weather, wait 15 minutes and it will change. Our weather is usually all over the place during the winter. Hot one day, cold the next. sort of OK the day after that. The TV weather news is really just guesswork.
I have noticed over the last twenty years or so, the winters having less cold days. We only had two or three days of actually freezing weather. Our winter nowdays is usually pretty much over with by the end of February.
The city I live in straddles two climate zones. Temperate and sub tropical. It's weird sometimes when the south part of the city is warm, the north part is freezing. You can feel the drop or raise in temperature
when you cross over too. We have really weird rain patterns too. Like I've seen it rain in one person's back yard every day at 2:30PM for about 15 minutes and do this for like a week. The rain doesn't fall anywhere else but in the one person's back yard. Or it will rain on on side of the street and not the other. And there's a definite border between the rainy area and the dry one. No sprinkly area in between. Just rain or dry.
Uhhh.... they kinda do that already. As far as cars goes, maybe make different cars with the same drive trains, but different characteristics like longer and shorter wheel bases and wider and narrower widths
Having cars like that could have a good overall effect.
And as far as having the same car with different versions, maybe have different year models with different motors. I dunno... like an older model FXO that was naturally aspirated with throttle body fuel injection and a three speed gear box or something.
That subtle difference could make for decent variety
LOLOLOL Did all that to get ... Heroin? Dude. Seriously?
We don't even need opium plants anymore. The crap doctors sling out here like candy is all synthetic. Kinda like bath salts and not pot, only it's approved by the FDA. If anything, those opium fields compete with big pharm, so why would that be? You know how much Pfizer can sell their stuff LEGALLY in Europe? Who's the competition? And as far as heroin goes.
Here when the insurance runs out or the pill kill gets raided, the junkees will get heroin, but it comes from Mexico.
Junkees.... Half of those poor folks weren't any sort of druggie - til they got hurt and saw a doctor.
I imagine y'all get yours from Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand.
But folks like these are more dangerous to the planet than any heroin dealer out there.
Yeah. One thing big pharm has over the other dope dealers though is when they show up to make the street dealers buy their stuff, instead of pistol whipping them, they do this
If you wanna know something, the Mexican drug wars was set off by Bin Laden. Yep after 9-11, crossing the border turned into a BIG hassle. And at one time, Nuevo Laredo was the safest big city I had ever been in. All that went to hell on September 12th. And everyone I know from there is either here or dead.
Last edited by Racer Y, .
Reason : Forgot something
The stuff I went through back then would make your head spin - and I was a very low man on a very big totem pole.
Word of advice: If you just have to get mixed up with drugs, just stick to taking them. Leave the selling to somebody else.
Yeah they do get a little loose with the facts - especially season three (Mexico).
They jumbled all of that up. Like the whole kidnapping thing was completely different than the show made it. If I'm not mistaken, Kikki (the DEA agent) was kidnapped - by accident. They thought he was an informant or something. They didn't know he was DEA. And Albert Sicilia Falcon didn't actually have much to do with the Sinoloan gangsters. He was actually busted a few years before anybody heard of cartels.
He was an interesting character all by his self.
I actually met one of the people portrayed. The American pilot for the Medellin cartel. I met him about 6 months before he was gunned down.
There's a movie about him too with Tom Cruise, but it's not all that accurate either. And I forgot the name of it.
What's sad is I'm on the forum more than the server by a long ways. When there is activity, I'm usually doing something else.
I still play single player here and there. Trying to make a set-up with the GT turbo Rally car to attempt a WR on blackwood actually. Getting there.....slowly.
You know, I guess I'm pretty weird as all this goes. I wasn't into sim racing at all when LFS came out.
I read an article on independent gamer makers (salon? slate?) and they wrote a little about LFS had a link. And everything went downhill from there. I got the demo and about two weeks later I got the license.
You're always going to have people whining for something. I've been playing this game pretty much since it came out and I haven't "raced" all the cars/track combos we have as it is. I personally don't care if there are more tracks added, but I won't complain if they do. I wish they'd do more for the drag racing and rally cross. If anything, I wish they'd wrap it up and let the modders worry about all the cars/tracks.
If I must realistically whine for a track, it'd be a simple dirt oval with the MRTs modified (converted to 1/4 scale race cars?).
But as far as promotions for LFS?
Besides how easy it is to hook up to VR and low resource demands, They still need to do something to put it further apart from the other titles to attract someone just finding out about LFS.
I think the drag strip would be cool as I don't think anyone does that. Can you drag race in Assetto Crosa?
But to be able to do drag racing right might be more trouble than it's worth.
And rally cross? I think that would be a big boost too. I think more people watch the rally cross in the X games than they do F1 racing. To me the only racing that sucks worse than NASCAR is F1.
I think the next "big thing" in real racing will be the Australian v8 super car racing. Maybe gear towards that? But then again everyone thought that D-1 would go somewhere too.
Yeah. It's easy to be an armchair quarterback. Not so much when trying to apply any of this in real life.
Anybody else watch this series? I dunno if Netflix is world wide, but if you have it, you should check this out. WARNING: It's pretty damned violent though. Definitely for mature audiences.
I don't think I could say it's better than say Game of Thrones or The Wire, but it's in the same neighborhood.
If you like shows like Preacher, Fargo or Mr Inbetween, you might like it.
Good post! Thanks for providing some actual numbers of some sort too. I really haven't seriously dug into it.
But this:
"online racing with high fidelity physics is not what drives sales, i guarantee it.
i just checked assetto corsa, and about 300 of the 1300 people playing are playing online.
assetto corsa has sold over half a million copies, btw."
Assetto Corsa sold half a million copies. I bet it's safe to say that those customers also have other racing games and that most of these folks have most of the same titles. And I'm going to go on a limb here and say that the TOTAL amount of "sim racers" is roughly around a million people. Sounds like a lot huh? Not even close.
Out of the BILLIONS of internet users you got around Hundreds of Millions of gamers. So that number doesn't look so big now. In fact, it looks more like a niche market. So you got LFS trying to compete for a million potential customers, give or take a few thousand. How many other racing titles are out there? I can think of at least five. There's probably at least double that. Now divide that million by ten (guessing at ten titles) 100k sales would be optimal.
Now let's factor in that a big chunk of those racing game sales were done as gift purchases...how about 30%?
How many times did you get a gift you thought sucked? The point I'm making is out of all those sales, you're going to see many of those games just gathering dust while the kids are playing Fortnite or something.
Your stats on Assetto Corsa sorta proves that.... half a million people yet only 300 out of 1300 playing.
1300.... so where did the other 497,000 players go?
"from where i stand, physics is not what differentiates LFS. flexibility is what differentiates LFS.
insim, layout editor, controller setup, vr setup, vehicle setup, commands/scripts... most of this stuff was years ahead of its time, and is still better in LFS than everything else i've spent time with."
Now you're in my world. Advertising and product promotion.... You're absolutely right about all of that, but none of that matters when the competitors' PR belts out about their stuff loud enough to shadow anything LFS has to offer.
Scawen knows this. He doesn't want to spring for serious advertising. I imagine he mostly relies on word of mouth as I've never really seen an ad anywhere. Word of mouth is still the best form of advertising, but when people can't hear you over the other guy's yelling, then you need to do more to get your stuff out there.
oh yeah..... "the fia has an e-sports championship ffs".
In the late 90's/early 2000's there were at least three high end racing sites geared to serious online racing like your FIA. And there were fewer titles and fewer people online back then.
But like I said, we're really not playing Scawen's game, We're playing his dream. So I guess none of this really matters.
And I still believe racing across the board is in decline.
I dunno.... Looking at the big picture, I don't see any massive amounts of new purchasers for LFS - especially in the Americas. Racing across the board is in decline. All you have to do is watch a race on TV and look at the stands. Well this extends not just to race spectating but the whole sport/concept in general. And while popularity is going down, the ratio of titles to potential customers has gone up.
For example 10 years ago you had - i dunno several hundred thousands of gaming enthusiasts for racing games with only a few titles to choose from. Most of those being crappy arcade style games.
Now you have only several thousand players - maybe - with a whole bunch of titles. They're not all gonna jump on one game.
Of course those numbers aren't anywhere near accurate. I haven't got the slightest idea of the exact numbers. There may actually be about the same amount of games to choose from and maybe more dedicated gamers to racing, but hopefully y'all get the point.
Tennis.... Tennis games are a good example. How many people play tennis? How many go out and buy and play tennis video games?
I'm thinking if you want more people on the servers, then some sort of marketing strategy aimed at more "experienced" sim-racer types would probably be a better idea than going head to head with the "pretty games" to get new people playing. This game has a pretty steep learning curve as it is. People that aren't into racing games don't really like it. It's "too hard to play".
And as much as I hate to see people taking video games too serious, I'm thinking that might be the best selling point: The realistic level of physics.
LOL definitely not the graphics. Even to this day, most titles out there can't come close to offering what LFS can with racing. They just look pretty.
But seeing that we're really playing someone's dream and not a video game, I'm guessing none of that really matters.
If y'all want more folks playing, then you're gonna have to do some leg work and learn the art of cold calling, selling something to someone that wasn't originally interested.
I doubt Scawen will spring for the ad space in YouTube videos.
Yeah.... That.
The US/Canada/Mexico bunch always was a small one. Now it's pretty much non-existent. If you live on our side of things and are an insomniac, you might find a couple of people in a cruise server, but that's about it.
I dunno. For me? I pretty much gave up on multi-player. LFS as a game is more like a time killer. Kinda like solitaire and that stupid tile game, but cooler. I also don't really play video games much anymore. This getting old thing sucks that way.
Yeah, I miss back in the day when the cars had tinted windows, everything looked like a surreal cartoon and you could casually race and stop racing pretty much whenever you wanted.
I dunno.... This MATLAB might help a developer that's in the starting processes of making a game. But with LFS this far along? I don't think it would be of much use. Maybe back in 2002 or something, but not now.
I went to a Vietnamese restaurant once. It was a front. But the food was pretty good. Don't eat there anymore. Too afraid it'll get raided or a rival will show up and shoot the place up.
You know. If this is that much of an issue for you, I know this really nasty trick involving a couple of cups of ready mix concrete and a toilet bowl.
You realize that you're complaining about a restaurant none of us will ever eat at, much less knows where it is? Do y'all have something called YELP over there? That's where you should be posting about this if you want some sort of result. Is this a chain restaurant? If so, corporate just LOVES to get complaints. They'll even give discounts and free meals for complaining to them. Even though I have a hard time wanting to eat a free meal from the very same place I thought sucked.
12 pounds for a steak dinner.....UK pounds? That's about like $24 US. I can get a decent lobster dinner for that price here - with REAL french fries! And a steak at that price? Porter House, Bone in Rib-eye and Tenderloin. But I don't do any of that. It's still too expensive and the best steak is home cooked anyways. My wife goes to the butcher down the street and gets Filet Mingon for about three dollars a piece. That's cheaper than a crappy burger and healthier. But she doesn't usually cook fries with it. More like Rosemary roasted potatoes. I use the pit occasionally, but to be honest, it's a real pain to set that up to just grill two steaks. But then again, you just can't beat a decent steak grilled over a mesquite wood fire.
OK.... I give up.
How do you have fake french fries?
Steak.
We have two restaurant chains here that are supposedly steak houses.
One is called Outback Steakhouse. It has an Aussie theme. Only Aussies don't really eat steak. At least not like this.
Then there's Texas Roadhouse. Same thing. Plus it's corporate headquarters ain't anywhere near Texas. I think Outback's corporate offices is in Dallas. Go figure. And their steaks are both about the same. So-so at best.
But they have real french fries - I think.
Packets..... It's that time of year again. May as well talk about packets. Oops my bad. Packets. Not Packages..... OK
Now the latency is affected by the amount of packets there are.
What about ISP's and them throttling customers? How much of an affect does throttling have on LFS gameplay? Enough to notice?
@Scawen:
You know these progress reports are good and all, but to be honest, most of what you go on about is so far over my head. Hell, you could post that
the reason you're doing this or that to your shaders was due to the phases of the moon on the days you coded them, I really couldn't call you on it. But I have learned quite a bit about the subject over the years thanks to you. Yeah. I learned I don't want to make video games.