LFS will never die so long as people are here whinging about it.
10 years, and its still shit.
I'm no computer programmer but lets apply some common sense; I would imagine building a turn based strategy game with relatively simple graphics is quite a bit quicker and easier than building a racing simulator with convincingly realistic physics, regardless of how many people you have on the team.
People need to realise that we are all really just guests at the developer's party and they can do whatever they bloody like. LFS is not a conventional commercial sim and you need to get over that.
When I saw the nearly empty Scirocco Cup child board, it reminded me of the naive days when we all thought Scirocco would have had its own server on CTRA.
LFS IS dead if you want really close competitive pickup racing with big grids . Why are the people who run these STUPID multiclass servers under the impression that they're good?
They are just the ultimate recipie for carnage
And the server admins insulting you is hardly encouraging *cough* cargame.
Stay tuned for the opening of the New NDR public server in ~3-4 weeks time, where we will have single class racing without stupid points restriction and levels and licenses. And in addition to that, there will be admins on server kicking out the noobs and wally brains.
in my mind, LFS is not dead. it's in hibernation, like some people have already said. i just don't really play it anymore. i just moved along and found something else, which clearly appears to be something this forum cannot do. IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT, PLAY SOMETHING ELSE! DON'T WHINE ON ABOUT IT!
EDIT: lots of forum members probably have switched to another game, in which case ignore my comment. but many posts in here could have been avoided easily.
LFS is very much alive to a lot of people. If you think it's dead then you're doing something very wrong when you check to see how much interest there is. It may be boring to people who have been here for the better part of a decade, but that happens with pretty much everything. There's plenty of new drivers/teams that the community at large is quite alive, and most people who says otherwise are bitter that their promised* updates haven't arrived. Get over it, plenty of us are having a great time, it's not dead.
LFS is in hibernation, I'll randomly pop back to check if there has been a patch, as for now I don't play it...
I bought a 1 year membership to iracing for $70, they have promotions fairly regularly, and I don't regret it at all... But I hardly play it save for the offline system because of the nazi online play regulation.
Gran turismo 5 is okay, I would put it physically the same as LFS, because it doesn't simulate tire pressure at all (I think), but LFS's tire-wear and heat is so gimped that it's not any better. GT5 was never meant to be a full racing simulator, because then no one would buy it; they want people to think it's a racing sim, while toning it down so people with the sixaxis do not break their TVs regularly by throwing one against the other, in which-ever order.
Development of a OLD Game by one person : reasonably hard work.
Development of games in the MODERN WORLD. A crap load of hard work for even a full Live Team, 3 People in a realistic racing sim that also have a huge community to tend to, server maintenance, and what now -- most likely extremely overloaded.
And then the community bitches when Scawen (or all of Scavier) goes on X-Mass leave.......
Try programming a Modern game engine, from scratch, with you OWN Physics model, your OWN 3D engine, YOUR OWN audio management framework, your OWN AI, you own Image loading, decoding, conversion ..... overall and entire DirectX game engine framework, and additionally, the game that runs on top of that.
Now look at Everquest (i'm a MMO type as well):
3D yes, AI, no, only NPC mobs that attack nearby players without much thought, generally serverside managed.
Complex Physics, NO.
An audio synthesizer that generates all of your character sounds, NO. They use PCM formatted audio buffers from file streams.
Internet Gameplay, Yes. precise UDP position updates, no. Not needed as much as FPS or Racing sims.
Damage Model : no
Complex Tyre Model. no
Advanced player tracking and comparisons in real time (LFSworld), as well as permanent statistics for every last action anyone has ever done: Not even close, but limited data exists.
LFS: 21st century development.
Everquest: 1990s development initially.
... should I continue listing them?
Next thing your gonna try to use as comparison is Ultima, or something right? Or some old N64 racing game...? Sega Scud Race?
The LFS code in the Game Client is far more complex than MMO's released in the 90s, and most MMOs released since 2000. It is safe to assume the coding quality is much higher as well... better planned.
Do you know 3D math? try mentally working out how a huge collection of Vector3 variables need to behave by yourself, and implement it... in 2 hours... that's a huge demand....
Not only do most people lack common sense in this community, but they lack the development skills to understand what Scawen could be going through ATM. Scawen has a big issue to work around, and then he has to worry about the response the community has to give them in return.....
You want them to give you dev updates.... but then the community flames them, very harsh.
They have a right to keep quiet, in order to keep their own stress levels down (Scavier, that is)....
Scavier WILL NOT, for reasons of purity, hire additional developers. They want the simulator to work in a certain way, Scawen codes in a certain way, Eric and Victor do their work as well in their own particular way. Adding additional developers could mean compromising the way you manage your work, since another person's code could change the whole feel of the application framework, and perhaps loose it's taste altogether. They know as much as anyone that more developers = faster development, but they also know that faster development can also mean loss in quality.
I am employed as a Web Developer. I code in .Net and PHP, I do 3D Modelling for an Opensource project, and I have 3 years of Architectural Modeling experience working for an Architect. I am in development of a PHP CMF, and I am overloaded with feature requests , from my employer alone - for this thing. He has already suggested adding a developer to assist me in coding it, and I refused. I have coded this framework by myself for a year now, and am still near releasing it. There is a waiting list of websites that want to use it as well, and they keep waiting.... and they WILL wait until I have it working the way I intend to make it work by myself with no assistance from anyone.
Most of them have been patient, and understand that I as their developer and webmaster want to give them the most powerfull PHP Content Management Framework I can conjure out of my fingertips. The others, especially those that have the IQ of goldfish, were not patient, one of them expected it to work in a week, and complained. 3 Websites that run test copies of that framework at no additional cost to their regular hosting packages, provide me with bug information.
The framework itself on the other hand keeps track of errors for me as well. We don't use a help desk for PHP development around the CMF, and we dont publicly advertise it yet for the fact that we already know that we would have to deal with a community of ungrateful know-nothing that have yet to mentally age to their physical number.
Some developers manage their code by themselves because quality is far more important to them than features. Look at the browser wars during the 90s, it is perfectly relevant to that kind of reasoning - were competition and adding as much content as possible to be better than the next guy, resulted in buggy incompetent and unstandardized web browsers. Developers who think content is better than quality have usually found themselves more more work after release - fixing all their screw ups because they were worried about get more a bugger feature set in 'rush hour'.
Scavier wants to release a content feature, but a previous portion of code made that feature imperfect. Therefore, for the sake of perfection, their new content has not been released, and WILL NOT BE released until IT IS PERFECT: is fast, reliable and usable by the ENTIRE community here at LFS.
The new physics appear to have a performance issue for slower CPUs, were generally in the past LFS has always been a pretty fast sim by itself. If the new feature does not live up to expectations, then their is no way developers should release it whatsoever until it IS perfect.
That is why they test privately. Their private tests failed, therefore they cannot release public tests. If they did it would become a quality issue in a public product.
Stop DEMANDING them to release a feature set that isn't ready, because your essentially and deliberately asking for low quality content to be delivered.
Try telling your pizza restaurant to bring you your food NOW in WHATEVER state of preparation it is in: what will you get?
Bloody red T-Bone steak, uncooked rice and a living crab on your plate, and a sheep next to your table.... will you still eat it?
No, you will instead flame the waiter and the chef because your food isn't prepared correctly, yet it is your fault for demanding it delivered right away.
The same logic applies to all industries. Games, Software, Hardware, Cars, Food, Airline, whatever - you name it. How it is implemented will vary, however.
I bought LFS S2 in February 2009...in december 2008 I wanted to wait till Scirocco release, but I decided to buy S2 sooner so I can learn the new tracks. Result: today I know every track in LFS very well and start to get bored with racing for fun, now I get to LFS only if there is some league on interesting event.
Now I think, that LFS needs track mods (we have enough various cars), because 16 months without new content is too much. Track mods will ensure enough new content for free and developers could continue in physics improvement.
Recently I bought GTR Evo and now I play it more than LFS, because there ist just much more content (Rockingham ).
So to finish this post: LFS is in coma and every other comparable sim is going further.
Wow, big post... sorry to truncate to a single quote, but I agree entirely with it. These threads are always such a waste of time- good to see some empathy shining through every now and then.
Maybe that just means Scawen is hard at work and we're due a big patch. Maybe people will stop asking then (because I'm sure he must be as desperate to shut them up as the rest of us)
If you get tired of a game - get a new one.
The argument certainly has nothing to do with the state of the actual game. It lives for everyone who enjoys it - newbe or oldtimer.
"Poker is dead, I've played it so many times I'm really bored of it" = Poker is dead!
Dont think so.
By the way:
iRacing: 14 000 subscribers, 20000 members
LFS: >40 000 members (whereof 200-1000 drivers are online every day/night)
I could not find any figures on how many actually race on iRacing per day, but when I subscribed I found about 8-10 drivers that were doing the low class (spontaneous) races / day. Must be higher rates as you advance of course. And the actual online users/day may be more than in LFS. I have no reliable figures, maybe you do.
Note, my point is not to compare iRacing vs LFS but to highlight the fallacy in some of the above comments.
