Hello.

I'd like to suggest to involve the community in track development.
This is the general proposal. Nothing more.

But in the sense of conctructive criticism I will elaborate on a system that allows this, just to gie you something to discuss and improve on.
Eric propably has a lot of track sketches that he didn't like or didn't have the time to model yet. To assist him in choosing a specific track to create or to at least help him in getting the general opinion of the community he could complete the sketches (2D, or whatever format) so we have nice tracklayouts that can be viewed in a preferably big scale. The licensed community can then vote on each sketch. They view the track or track-part, can examin it's layout closely (in a scale that allows to see the ideal line clearly, so pretty big) and give each track a rating and comment on it.
Eric can then review these ratings and comments to see what people like about the sketches and what they don't like. Based on this he can come up with own ideas and can turn his impression into a new track that will hopefully find it's fans in the community.
Of course nothing is bound to the community rating. When Eric gets the opinion that the comments on one A+-rated track are just mere BS, he doesn't have to do this track. He's still the only person in charge. However, he can use the community's opinion as a base of his own decision.

This is just one model that might work. There are obviously more possibilities that would perhaps be better. If you can come up with any, please post them.

What I await from this discussion:
1. Your opinion on the community involvement on future tracks. The devs can also comment on this if they desire to do so. It would be nice to state a "no, this will never happen" before any hopes build up.
2. Proposals for other systems of community involvement.

It'd be nice to think about wether your reply fits into the these two things or not before posting.

Call me comunist, but I like community involvement in any kind of development.

Vain

great idea

Also, 1 idea is getting the community to do little bits of the moddeling i.e. bits of scenery. That might work, and won't harm trade secrets etc.

Community involvement is always good.

It would be nice to see such a system in place, but I'm not sure of how ultimately effective it would be.

For starters, tracks aren't exactly popping out at a huge rate (not necessarily a complaint, it's not like I've driven all the combos we currently have) and so a system for community choosing tracks might be a bit futile. After all in ten months since LFS S2 Alpha was released, we've seen two new Aston configurations and a lorryload of lamposts and billboards. On that basis, I'd assume that any totally new environments are either a long way off, or being kept very quiet.

Secondly, 2d maps would give some idea of the type of corners, but that's it. We wouldn't have any idea of elevation, camber, scenery, kerbs, etc, all of which go into defining a track. For example I prefer certain tracks over others, but I'd never have been able to make that choice simply based on an overhead map layout.

If all that sounds overly negative, it's not supposed to, as I'm all for anything that helps us have more race environments in LFS. For me to make more judgement on a track, I'd need to see something more akin to concept art - such as a simple line/b&w sketch from an elevated viewpoint at selected points of proposed circuits, showing how two or three intended curves go together.