well at least - judging by what has been said in this thread from people with insight in programming - it would be another grand, yet not undoable and thus reasonably achievable thing to start doing.
I guess that this reflects most of Becky's thoughts from the open letter quite nicely and in order. And actually I feel about the same way. The challenge should be placed further away from finding that "perfect setup" and focus on driving and driving skills a lot more than at today's state.
I think you're spot-on stating that mentality in development is still so far off these ideas. But I disagree that it is about the projected work one has realised would bee un-doable with today's technology.
It has been mentioned before: the way how a slippery (meant: changing) condition is derived in detail does not matter much. It doesn't have to be a super-computer-exclusive real-time computation but can be pretty much simplified in it's details allowing for standard system with reasonable computing power to cope just well.
In the bottom line it's the resulting influence on the drivers and the whole race that really matters. We want to have these "effects" to "behave" as close to real life as possible in order to give us a racing experience as close to RL as possible.
After all when driving lfs for a longer periode of time there will eventually come a point where you think: "this pace, that the WR-holder puts into a combo is just unreal. If I was to challenge that track-time I would have to depart from a realistic driving-style and just hunt for the flaws in the physics/environment department - just like that other bloke does it."
A dynamic environment would not only change that condition for the better but at the same time have it's effects on online racing as it would then prove impossible to race with a hotlap set as they tend to be a LOT trickier to handle under not-ideal (clear "fast-line") conditions in a race. It would bring the fast hotlappers back closer to the ones focusing on the racing action: it would simply improve online-racing culture to resemble much better to the real thing.
The reason that sim-developers didn't come across a positive decision to try this is - in my eyes - very simple:
MONEY. It would certainly cost the part to develope such a thing. Since sim-racing is still a very young "sport" people buying a sim tended to be short-time-users, as they frequently moved on to the next-in-line "hot-product" after a few months or maybe years. Hence the return on investment would be limited given that the market (IMO with good reason) would simply reject any heavily over-prised product to hit the shelves.
With the introduction of sims like LFS, rFactor or even iRacing this thinking might prove to become a thing of a past. So maybe Becky's "open letter" is just a redundant bit of information that the devs themselves are already "on" as we speak. Or maybe not. How would we know?
However, in my opinion, this certainly is the way to strive for in future attempts. I simply won't buy any new "hot product" anymore just because it may have some nicer graphics or a better sound system. And that's because I have got so fond of actually racing a "Virtual Car" that those aspects, most magazines and review-sites happen to bark about most times, are just heavily irrelevant when adressing the real fun found in racing.
Way to go - yes.
And I believe it will be worth it big-time! As soon as the first one is to achieve a reasonably well-working product giving us all of the above-mentioned, they will have the ability to make some money out of it. It's just that they would be the ones to take the gamble of financing the whole development and the PR first - and against all these glossy magazines which just focus on graphics and such, since you cannot "sreen-shoot" the experience and fun of a real driving-challenge.
My 2 cents
DrBen