Quote from adirany :

Thanks lfsrm for the info. I think lfs is the best simulator right now. I am investing in the future. There will be a lot of updates in the coming months or years and I want to be part of it.

Even if the multiplayer is not great I can always hotlapping or racing against ai. The cars (and the physics) are fantastic.

If you can enjoy playing solo, go for it and upgrade your licence when you can, you still have demo servers or you can host your own and invit friends to race with them.

Quote from MicroSpecV :

There are plenty of leagues running about in licenced servers, previously most leagues ran in European timezone but me and nikopdr just introduced a brand new series with slight pushback on the start time to mske it feasible for people on the other side of the globe to race with the European racers as well. (Layout Racing League)

Anyway besides the selfless promoting, in short, there are activities in licenced LFS, covering many tracks, car types and race type. There's rally, race as well as custom stuff like LRL, as well as fun races like GT4tube event days or RTFR Extra Large.

Demo is where the largest pool of users are because thats where all new users join into in Free-to-play LFS, so of course Demo has the most active and largest community - but licenced is far from dead, and if racing doesn't suit you you can always check out Cruise communities, particularly TC Citydriving or Reality Cruise and so on.

**
there are actually active rotating servers in licenced just like the ones in demo, B2R has one as well as MRc I think, just that no one joins to start the server up.

Pickup racing is where people should start practicing fair and close racing, I don't think league is the right place for that, and not everyone have time for long races anyway.

And like I said majority of licenced servers run on S2/S3 contents, so for someone who can only afford an S1 licence, he won't find much activities.

To tell you the truth, don't expect much activities lately on licensed servers, as much as I want to help the developers by recommending LFS, I can't lie to people about that.

Everyone know unless you are into cruising or drifting there isn't many licensed pickup racing servers, exclusive S1 active servers is none existante.

So think about it, try to get some fun with demo servers until there is a big update maybe people will return to LFS.

Quote from kagurazakayukari :

but that also have the same issue. However, steam/uplay/origin/etc, they do support Alipay and Wechat Pay, which makes Chinese Peoples' gaming life much much easiler..

That's why Id like LFS to join steam platform, there is some computer retailer around here who sell steam/origin vaucher cards, so we can actually buy steam games easier compared to direct payement method, but games are still expensive compared to our spending capacity ( average salary is around 200 € )

I do think it's our problem to solve this economical issue, LFS or other platforms have nothing to do with it.

Hi,

There is a way for you to buy a licence is to go through the black market buy some $ or € and financing suspect activities in the process (which I do not recommend). After that you need to open a bank account (good luck finding one whom accepte random fund deposite without justification) the most popular in that regard is AGB or BNP, I heard the BDL could offer the same services too, finally you can ask for a credit card via your bank so you can buy an s2 licence.

There is some facebook groups who are specialized in foreign country purchases, you paye them with local money and they will buy you whatever your demand with interest, if you want a link pm me.

Therefore, there is no legal way to buy a licence unless if you are paid via your job with foreign currency, which is rare here, so good luck.

Graphics improvements is way less complexe (in term of development) than tyres/aero/car dynamics physics, it will not take a huge amount of time.

The problem is we're still tied to the physics overwhole to be finalized.

Quote from Scawen :

I am pleased to say that we have an increasing number of licenses sold to Brazilian racers so maybe the tide is turning.

Good to hear, too bad my local currency can't be used to exchange goods internationally, I had to convert from the blackmarket to get my licence back in the days, I think many country's are in this situation and there is nothing we can do about it.

I will find another way when I upgrade to s3, because I will not reuse the blackmarket as it's related and supporting various illegal activities.

Quote from Scawen :

I tried to describe why things take a long time, for Eric and me. I wouldn't be able to go into much more detail without listing every detail of our personal lives.

Some people do understand and some will not. There is also life outside of LFS, we have families and so on. Things happen, it's not just a constant uninterrupted 50 hours per week on LFS.

But just to clear up one myth: Eric and I do not have any other jobs. I'm not sure why people sometimes get that idea. As you can see, we are working hard on Live for Speed and there has been a lot of progress these last few years. But it's not always plain sailing. There is life outside LFS, and within LFS there is experimentation, research, trying and testing, following unexpected avenues, backtracking, trying again, and so on.

I do say occasionally, if our aim was to make the most money possible, we should have chosen another job or way of working. But that's not the aim here. The aim is to develop something we like, working in the way we like, get paid for it and enjoy life as well. It's a great thing to be able to have some time to spend with the people you love. Some people do miss out on that part of life through working too hard, and I'm really happy that we have avoided that mistake. You don't have a second life to come back and do all the things you forgot to do in your first life. So you need to make sure you have time to do the things you like to do.

Glad that my guess was wrong .

Quote from ACCAkut :

Oh I have nothing but respect for Scawen and his coding, my post there was rather aimed at the (silent) content creator of LFS. I've been am avid defender of LFS' development speed for many years, but now that I do this stuff myself (also some experimental tracks next to my cars), I can't defend the speed cars and tracks are made for it anymore, it just makes me sad.

But all this is OT, its still generally nice to see Scawen perfecting VR usage and an overall really efficient sim. Some aspects like behaviour over jumps or netcode are still top notch.

Who told you he's on full time working on LFS, maybe he's trying to grab some few hours per week outside his full time job to make progress on LFS tracks, at least that's my guess.

I don't mind if Scawen or Eric tell us LFS is now only a side personal project, because that doesn't mean that the quality will be worse than before, but at least it will make sense from my POV why LFS developement is slow paced.

Last edited by lfsrm, Mon, 20 May 2019 19:52.

I think the main problem here is visibility, many people don't know about LFS just because it isn't present in their favorite platform/market.

Even with attractiveness (graphics update) or realism (new tyres physics) we'll not attract many new players without some sort of marketing.

Do you really think we are in the right situation to start limiting demo licence even more, why do you think devs are improving the gfx engine in the first place ? to cater more people into LFS.

We convince people to buy licence, we don't force them, and by convincing we show them how awesome LFS is with only 3 cars and one track, and even more awesome with licensed content.

Quote from THE WIZARD DK :

i got one question to the new weather system though. as we seen many different looking skies being made for lfs,will there be varities such as purple sunsets and normal and orange sunsets.
(to explain my question better)
i mean this for all kinds of skies. several colors blue/grey(before rain) etc..
im aware the 24 hour cycle will cover most but could go and get too simular in the long run. so is why i ask.

I think color variation is fairly easy to implement at this stage (with dependence to moisture % or environmental pollution etc), the problem is the clouds transition from clear sky to overcast which from what I know is fairly challenging to implement.

Aww you made my day Scawen, the waiting is getting harder and harder from excitement .

Just by curiosity, did you found any solution for clouds interaction with realtime skybox, as I noticed many games can't do it right when trying to fake volumetric diffuse light on clouds.

So only one track (Fernbay) remaining .

Clear day dynamique skybox ? :o

It will come eventually when the backbone of LFS (graphics, physics) will be updated.

I think it will be cool if they update all the cars to more modern specs (GTRs with modern engine/aero/tc/abs regulations, road cars with torque vectoring and more modern design etc), maybe with one or two old vintage replica for historic cars enthusiast.

AMD Zen 2 APU (3000G) will be even better, but the actual ones are very capable too.

It's roughly equal to an GTX750TI if it's coupled with at least 2666mhz DDR4 RAM in dual channel ( 4x2 or 8x2 instead of one stick of 8 or 16 GB ), maybe few % better in some games.

But it has more modern ( better dx_12 compatibility etc ) features and it will age way better without any doubt.

Wich mean you will get at least 120 fps at 1080p 60hz in most situations if you don't go crazy with the antialiasing ( don't use 8x ).

Quote from MandulAA :

Wow, sunset has a great feeling attached to it, well done. Love these 13-sec long snippets One thing I noticed (as did lfsrm before me): the Sun seems to be in front of the clouds, but I guess this is on the to-do list already. Serious progress!

Transparency isn't much of a problem, but as I said making clouds following sun position in term of lightning is not as simple as it sound.

But I guess for Scawen those graphical improvement isn't much of a challenge compared to tyres physics.

Very promising, I heard some games now use normal map on clouds to simulate sun light volumetric diffuse on them, maybe it's worth investigate in the future.

Quote from Scawen :

I do hope the new tyre physics can be released with the new graphics, otherwise I'll have to move a copy of the old physics into the new version. We are long past the point where the new graphical changes could be merged into the old version. Too much has changed.

Copying old physics into the new version is possible but it's not what I want to do.

At the moment I am trying to get the lighting to a reasonable state where it can be left for a while so i can sort out the tyre physics.

We do understand that Physics take time to refine, and I am sure that you will not be 100% satisfied about the new tyre physics stats when you release it, but there is patches after that and you will for sure improve it over time and just remember that we, as a player base for your game, will be still there to enjoy what you're doing for us.

Indeed, demo server gave me some of the best races I've ever had in LFS.

IMO it was and still the best selling point for LFS.

With the actual layout editor, it's more than an good idea!

Glad seeing you enjoying experimenting with LFS, hopefully it's an announcer for other great things to come.

I think the best thing to do after finishing the graphics and physics updates is to add some esport and social shit, like adding external spectating mode and some integrated streaming api, improved chat with emots or gif... at least those network gimmicks will be a piece of cake for scawen.
Tbh I am not into those heavy social trends, but if it can bring some life into our favorite sim, I say why not !

It's always a pleasure seeing new progress! keep it up!