Hello everyone,

I bought a Live for Speed s2 license a couple months ago and I'd like to ask you a few questions about the game itself, its development and also give my opinion on a few subjects.
Thanks in advance for your answers and your time!

A few questions

1- First of all I'd like to know if the new sirocco is supposed to be released along with LFS s3 or if it'll be included in future s2 patches?

2- Is Live for Speed running on any particular engine or is it a custom engine coded from scratch?

3- Did the LFS devs state why they don't want to recruit more developers?

4- I don't exactly remember where but I read that the developers chose to include unfinished features to the game (which would be updated in the future)

in order to give the player more variety. When I look at the current cars there's a huge disparity, some of them look good, polished while others look

indeed unfinished. Now I've seen the screens of the new sirocco and the Rockingham track: they do look awesome! My question is: in the long term, will

all the current tracks and cars available be graphically updated to reach the same graphical standard?

5- Do the developers have a beta testing team?

Feedback

I'll get straight to the point, the gameplay is fantastic but the game [in it's current state] is seriously outdated graphically wise. That is the only major weakness in my opinion, this and some random physics bugs.

Opinions/suggestions about the game and its development

I've been browsing the forums and I read somewhere that the developers aren't really motivated anymore hence why progress is slow (I may be wrong though, feel free to correct me) and I noticed that the community feels quiet frustrated not to hear much from the developers.
I completely understand the situation of both sides; I'm part of the development team of a project called CSPromod which is a 100% custom-coded Source engine modification, its goal is to bring the gameplay, feel, and competitive spirit of the original Counter-Strike to the Source engine (for those of you who know Counter-Strike). This being said, we've gone through a lot, back in 2007 we released our first beta of the game, the community was expecting a lot from it (maybe too much) and ended up being really disappointed, for them it was a complete fail, something that would never succeed. This really killed the motivation of our staff and things started to be just like they seem to be here now: slow progress, no updates, no communication, frustrated community, and our forums turned into a complete mess totally out of control. Now, as I speak, everything is great, we've released other betas, we regularly update the community and we're all working hard on the game.
I'd like to share with the developers my thoughts on what, in my opinion, would help a lot the development and success of this game, please note that I'm not "telling" you what you must do or criticizing in any way the way you're developing the game:

-The forums need better moderation, I'd say that 8-10 active and serious moderators would help a lot to keep these forums clean and organized.
-A new forum design would also help, it is more inviting for new users and overall it's more pleasant for everyone (even if vbulletin is great it's not attractive at all)
-Posting developer logs every month informing the community about the progress even if it's just a few lines, some people don't have time to browse the entire forums to find a little piece of information. cf. http://cspromod.com/community/forums/20-Developer-Logs
-Making a "todo" list thread and updating it once something is fixed/tweaked/added
-Hiring 10-20 beta testers which know enough about the game to be useful and give constructive feedbacks. Make them sign an NDA to prevent them from leaking pictures/videos/files.
-Enlarge the dev team! There are a lot of passionate and qualified people ready to work for free.
In my opinion you'd need (in order of importance):
.a development manager
.another programmer
.a texture artist
.a 2d artist
.a level designer
.a sound designer
.a web designer

I'm sure that this would really help you to be motivated again
I'll certainly update this list with other things I currently don't have in mind


Thanks for reading! I hope it wasn't too long, a word from a Live for Speed developer would be greatly appreciated, have a nice day!

Quote from Redstar.lfs :

2- Is Live for Speed running on any particular engine or is it a custom engine coded from scratch? It is a bespoke engine created by Scawen.

3- Did the LFS devs state why they don't want to recruit more developers? They wanted to escape from the commercially driven, design-by-committee, run to a strict deadline approach, and be a small team of three.

4- I don't exactly remember where but I read that the developers chose to include unfinished features to the game (which would be updated in the future) in order to give the player more variety. When I look at the current cars there's a huge disparity, some of them look good, polished while others look indeed unfinished. Now I've seen the screens of the new sirocco and the Rockingham track: they do look awesome! My question is: in the long term, will all the current tracks and cars available be graphically updated to reach the same graphical standard? Probably, over time. Old cars will be dropped and new cars will be added. But we don't know for certain, and I doubt the devs do either.

5- Do the developers have a beta testing team? Yes.

Feedback

I'll get straight to the point, the gameplay is fantastic but the game [in it's current state] is seriously outdated graphically wise. That is the only major weakness in my opinion, this and some random physics bugs. You think? Whilst LFS doesn't have much bling, I think it looks pretty good still. It certainly doesn't look as cartoon like as rFactor or netKar, and if the circuit fidelity was as high as iRacing I think it would look just as good.

Opinions/suggestions about the game and its development

I've been browsing the forums and I read somewhere that the developers aren't really motivated anymore hence why progress is slow (I may be wrong though, feel free to correct me) (consider yourself corrected) and I noticed that the community feels quiet frustrated not to hear much from the developers. (only the impatient ones that claim they don't care anyway because they play other games)
I completely understand the situation of both sides; I'm part of the development team of a project called CSPromod which is a 100% custom-coded Source engine modification, its goal is to bring the gameplay, feel, and competitive spirit of the original Counter-Strike to the Source engine (for those of you who know Counter-Strike). This being said, we've gone through a lot, back in 2007 we released our first beta of the game, the community was expecting a lot from it (maybe too much) and ended up being really disappointed, for them it was a complete fail, something that would never succeed. This really killed the motivation of our staff and things started to be just like they seem to be here now: slow progress, no updates, no communication, frustrated community, and our forums turned into a complete mess totally out of control. Now, as I speak, everything is great, we've released other betas, we regularly update the community and we're all working hard on the game.
I'd like to share with the developers my thoughts on what, in my opinion, would help a lot the development and success of this game, please note that I'm not "telling" you what you must do or criticizing in any way the way you're developing the game:

-The forums need better moderation, I'd say that 8-10 active and serious moderators would help a lot to keep these forums clean and organized. Our moderators were active and serious, and very good. But volunteers come and go.
-A new forum design would also help, it is more inviting for new users and overall it's more pleasant for everyone (even if vbulletin is great it's not attractive at all). I like vB. I think it's cleaner and easier than any other forum software I've used
-Posting developer logs every month informing the community about the progress even if it's just a few lines, some people don't have time to browse the entire forums to find a little piece of information. cf. http://cspromod.com/community/forums/20-Developer-Logs We'd all like to hear more from the devs, but it's their choice to stay quiet until they have something to say. Some people can accept that, others think it means they've all quit the project.
-Making a "todo" list thread and updating it once something is fixed/tweaked/added I bet Scawen does! But having that public wouldn't be a good idea, as people would read too much into it.
-Hiring 10-20 beta testers which know enough about the game to be useful and give constructive feedbacks. Make them sign an NDA to prevent them from leaking pictures/videos/files. Already done, YEARS ago
-Enlarge the dev team! There are a lot of passionate and qualified people ready to work for free. Defeats the point of LFS
In my opinion you'd need (in order of importance):
.a development manager Scawen
.another programmer Scawen
.a texture artist Eric
.a 2d artist Eric
.a level designer Eric
.a sound designer Scawen
.a web designer Victor

I'm sure that this would really help you to be motivated again
I'll certainly update this list with other things I currently don't have in mind


Thanks for reading! I hope it wasn't too long, a word from a Live for Speed developer would be greatly appreciated, have a nice day!

Commented in red.

wow a nice well thought out post and a nice well thought out answer, congratulations to both of you (and yes i am being serious )

redstar the beauty of LFS is it's development team, they may be slow but it's their baby and, like the rfactor mods which are sitting top of simracing tonight's top sim car list, the devs work to get everything as perfect as they can, not just to a "good enough" standard. it may be frustrating when you see other games being changed, updated, replaced etc but like a hand built car, it's a labour of love, the superficial quality may not match some mass produced machines but the underlying quality is very high indeed.


re graphics, if you run with all the graphics options on, i'm with tris, it looks far better than most sims / games and when i last used LFS, the hi res mods made it as good as a lot of the bling over content titles. also high quality graphics have to come at either a minimum system spec price or a cutting back in other areas price, LFS is far easier on a system than for example iracing, in iracing i get a frame rate of 50 to 60, in LFS apart from the start when it falls to 90 ish, i see numbers which to be honest are stupidly high.

Quote from Redstar.lfs :

...

1- First of all I'd like to know if the new sirocco is supposed to be released along with LFS s3 or if it'll be included in future s2 patches?

Scawen has stated that the German car will be available for S1 and S2 licensed users.
The S3 license will be required for Rockingham, and a planned, but as yet unannounced extra car.

Demo/S1/S2/S3 are licenses which give access to levels of content.
The game engine is what we are waiting for the update for really, this is shared by all users no matter their license.

Quote from TAYLOR-MANIA :

Although tristancliffe missed out the first question


Well once upon a time they planned "to release the new VW Scirocco in Live for Speed during the week ending Friday 19th December" 2008. And at that time there was no S3. See LFS main site for more information.

Yes, because I couldn't recall off the top of my head what the licence situation was with the Scirocco or Rockingham...

The graphics, regardless of some rough edges, are pretty much decent. Yes they could be made better, but ATM LFS is lagging behind on those things that matters the most to simracers: tracks (quality of), force feedback and physics (tyre and suspension modeling, collisions etc)

There seems to be some kind of divergence between the evolution of this community and the direction of development.

The dev team is apparently more concerned about and working on the simracing part of LFS. The community however has been turning more and more into a bunch of gamers, while the simracers have been progressively putting LFS on hold to focus on other sims.

This post looks quite in line with this trend to me. I do wonder what will happen when the new patch comes out if it turns out to be what I expect it to be.

Nightshift, if you put the word "forum" in front of the word community then I would agree with you.

I speak to a lot of sim racers who just don't bother with this forum any more due to the way it seems to have gone (This is what I am lead to believe. I have not been around long enough to know the forum any different to how it is now).

Just because someone is not active on the forum doesn't mean they are still not part of the LFS community.

In conclusion, I don't think community position is as bad as this forum makes it look at times.

I see where you're coming from, but TBH I wouldn't think it's safe to assume the non-posting part of the community is completely the opposite of LFSforum.

Anyway I'm just trying to sniff the wind, if there is some truth to what I've said it might be interesting to see how it turns out. In the meanwhile let's go back to waiting for the test patch forum to be opened once again.

Sorry I didn't mean to imply that the non-posting part is the opposite. I was just trying to say that I believe it is not as bad as you may think.

It does very much feel that either there have been/is problems in the physics/handling tyre model etc that is proving a nightmare to fix - or the team have been busily working on a lot of new things we don't yet know about. Scawen has stated that he is not demotivated, and as a developer myself i'm pretty sure it hasn't taken an entire term of government to tweak just the tyre physics.

I suspect, what's happened, is that Scawen has done a lot extra that we don't know about - perhaps even more work from Eric, Victor, and ... maybe some members of the community might have been able to assist in some way on new features too, but one thing is for sure - they're being tighter lipped about it than Apple's R&D department.

All we've had for the last couple of years is some leaks of information from 3rd party sources regarding new content, and one of those pieces of content is scheduled for S3. There is no way the devs would hold onto brilliant new content and not release it if S3 wasn't in the picture yet.

The facts are that Rockingham is scheduled for S3, so whilst the next release might not be S3 it's certainly likely to appear within the next few years - but with the secrecy of the devs it could be tomorrow for all we know, but if they held onto Rockingham any longer than that the content would be beginning to look outdated.

If S3 is in the picture, I'm unconvinced that it would be sooner rather than later, because LFS's released are mostly content patches and we know we're only going to get 2 new cars in the next patch, which doesn't sound like a content packs worth of cars to me.

However, a number of key milestones where on Scawens to do list before he considered going for S3 - and the time since the last patch is, in my view, sufficient for a programmer of Scawens ability and work ethic to have covered a substantial chunk of those features if he so chose to do so.

The question of exactly what he's been working on is of course something only a handful of very tight lipped people can answer, and we'll find out when they're ready to tell us.

One things for sure, the next patch is a big one, and they're not going to launch it to muted wispers - so it's not coming out imminently, they'll likely be some effort to whip us up into a frenzy first. Then again, Scawen is an oddball making him extremely difficult to predict, so my words really are nothing more than speculation - and probably about as accurate as an extremely drunk elephant trying to urinate on a the head of a pin. Although quite why an elephant would do that i'll leave for someone else to answer.

Wow, that's a long post to say absolutely nothing. Have you thought about going into politics?

Quote from obsolum :

Wow, that's a long post to say absolutely nothing. Have you thought about going into politics?

OK short version:

Lots of speculation.

Quote from Becky Rose :

OK short version:

Lots of speculation.

Exactly

Quote from menantoll :

I was just trying to say that I believe it is not as bad as you may think.

Hell not even I think it's as bad as I may think :icon23:

Quote from Becky Rose :

and probably about as accurate as an extremely drunk elephant trying to urinate on a the head of a pin. Although quite why an elephant would do that i'll leave for someone else to answer.

Does an extremely drunk something relly need a reason to do that? Not in my book and if it's as massive as an elephant you shouldn't question its motives either

Thanks to everyone for your answers!

@tristancliffe

-about graphics: I didn't mean that the game itself look bad, cars and some interiors do look great, I was just referring to the overall graphical disparity which makes the game look un-polished (which I do understand now since some interiors and track textures will be updated in the long term, as far as I've understood)

-about vbulletin: I wasn't saying that they should switch to another platform, vbulleting is great, but making a new,more appealing and clean [vbulletin] theme would make the site look more inviting and pleasant for newcomers and people who check the forums regularly (even if I'm not part of them)

-And finally, I was suggesting to enlarge the dev team in order to ease the development process, meaning that the current devs could focus on what they do the best and produce fast and efficient work , I assume it's Scawen: coding, Eric: Level Design. But it's up to them and I totally understand if they don't want to recruit more people :]

Anyway thanks again for the quick, precise and relevant answers, I wish the devs good luck with the development, keep up the good work!

Redstar, you forgot Victor: I think he s a web master and he also made sounds for LFS..... am I right? (i dont know, seriously)

Quote from Bigbob1993 :

Victor also made sounds for LFS..... am I right? (i dont know, seriously)

Yes, absolutely right, he's made some nice songs for LFS, too

Personally I think LFS is fantastic, how picky can you be when traveling at speed. The only thing I would like to see in LFS is some real tracks (may be difficult I know) We all have our favs so I wont name any here. Historical cars and tracks would be fun too.

****** The big improvement I would like to see is adjustable AI driver strength. I feel that there is nothing more fun (except of course racing real peeps) than setting AI strength higher to keep the racing challenging. Today, I was on As2r and stopped twice in a FXO to let the field pass, and still won a 30 lap race.

I would Beta test for free Pay would be awsome too

Quote from MTnRunnr :

****** The big improvement I would like to see is adjustable AI driver strength. I feel that there is nothing more fun (except of course racing real peeps) than setting AI strength higher to keep the racing challenging. Today, I was on As2r and stopped twice in a FXO to let the field pass, and still won a 30 lap race.

LFS already has this - AI speed changes depending on the skill level you set (Newbie, Learner, Ok, Quick, Pro).

Although having said that, the AI still aren't fast enough to have a proper race.. but thats why you race online