Well, lets face it, every forum that is that public is a hostile place
Personally, i think Eric could loosen up a bit, although its also perfectly understandable why he/they are pissed off. Ignorance and idiocracy is strong on teh internetz
That's been the foremost issue about the development of LFS, in my opinion. Tire changes are probably more important than Eric's work, but they also are very specialized. It was pretty much expected from the start that tire physics is a very complicated subject which could get out of hand easily, as has happened. Graphical updates and improvement, though? Not so much. In theory, there's nothing stopping that work from being released. For instance, car interiors were in the process of being updated, with a few cars already in the game, when it pretty much stopped. There might have been a few posts from Eric since then, or some posts from Scawen/Victor mention him/his work, but nothing tangible has surfaced. For all we know, Eric might have stopped working on LFS years ago (and my guess is that he has indeed stopped).
In itself that isn't an issue, as Eric is probably more replaceable than Scawen, who knows all the code. That said, I do not believe we'll see the day that more of Eric's work will be released, or that he will be replaced. At this point, I'm highly skeptical of tire physics being ever released, and that's the stuff we have heard about for the past few years. The rest? Ghost development? Feel free to prove me wrong, Scavier.
It's weird to see that there hasn't even been any graphical updates that shouldn't really be involved with the tire psyhics. I don't get why Eric supposedly doesn't want to release new content by himself. There seems to be a bigger problem between Eric and LFS than we know.
I don't mean Rockingham or the VWS. I mean graphical updates like updates to the car models, new textures etc. There has been enough time to do these things but there hasn't been any updates about these things.
The blind speculation in this thread is confusing. There's been no indication of any of the things that you are all talking about. You're making hypothesises from absolutely no data other than fluff pulled from your butt.
The irony is, the lack of evidence, is the (compelling) evidence. The fact even minor interior models and textures haven't materialize in years is unexplainable.
I don't think anyone here claimed their opinion is fact. Eric is probably a really nice guy in RL. It's unfortunate what has transpired. Things got off on the wrong foot and spiraled out of control. Only he can fix this situation. That said...What I do know and he made very clear to me was, he doesn't care what anyone here thinks (based on rather blunt PM I received some time ago.) So I think nothing will change sadly for him and LFS.
LFS's future is a real mystery. It really deviated from the typical indie path of success and very much done the opposite of what everyone expected. The devs disengaged, went underground and let the best parts of the community wither away and become disenfranchised with the game.
Constructive criticism
To me it seems the blinkers are very much on. Stuck in their own view, head down, ignorant to the realities. You'd think they'd stop and consider for a moment the state of the game and how they can change that. Take pause. Establish if all the devs on the same page. Get some feedback (survey) from the community (past and present players) and demonstrate they are serious about the future of this game and want it to be a viable prospect to support their lives/families/aspirations.
Not going to happen. They won't tell you anything about development, god knows why. One of the worst approraches I've ever seen from dev towards -customers-.
They just repeat "we are working on it" and that's all. They can't accept that people are really interested in what is going on, also when you add how people perceive developers - how much respect they got for them, just because they're bringers of their game, they would gain so much from periodically revealing just tiny bits of development of new physics/content. A blog/forum post once a month would be so great for everyone - players would see that devs are really working on something and they have something more to look forward. Many people are interested not only to new tracks/cars - what will they look like / specs, etc. but also what is physics development like - what does it require, what kind of simulation is it - there are many other developers/programmers who are really interested in these things.
But they chose to be quiet, let their customers to forget their game and hope to resurrect after 5 years with maybe new website, maybe new tracks, the new car and new physics. Well, good luck with that. They somehow forgot they don't only need to bring back their players, they also need to GET NEW because old players won't buy licenses twice
While i totally agree with the rest, would love to see whats going on behind teh scenes, do they have to "bring them back"? What happens if players get the mail with the news with a lot of content and an actual working tyre model, + actual advertisement on genre specific websites? Everybody will check it out, and regardless of how much time they've "wasted" on blogs and discussions about all the million things people want to go into detail (which he already stated, isn't in his interest as it only takes a load of time with no benefits for the process) - if it's good, it will be played.
Something i am kinda wondering about, granted i don't know shit, if Scawen releases his equation for a tyre simulation, can't other devs get teh idea and put it into their profitable product? Maybe Scawen actual just waits for the right time...
What would that do? I meant someone who will deal with customer relations.
Marketing is the process of communicating the value of a product or service to customers, for the purpose of selling the product or service. It is a critical business function for attracting customers.
All this time work ONLY over physics of tires, ALL! ! ! Neither changes of time of day, nor lighting, new graphics weather conditions the Rain etc will be nothing, HERE IT is OFFENSIVE! ! ! Only tires and everything, also remains dry weather eternally.
Please, Scawen has only ever released what he's happy to release. Him telling us what he's doing would not mean that we had something else by now unless the inevitable pressure from the forum trolls and loudmouth spoilt kids pressured him into releasing something. It's understandable why their forum presence is basically nil.
The trouble is that the longer the silence the more any kind of announcement will be leaped on by everyone, and it won't be "Hooray, can't wait!" or positive vibes like that, it will be "Is that it?!" "What about my request for blah blah blah?!!" etc etc.
I think that if they do release anything there should be no announcement till it's out because people typically suck.
The formula itself doesn't have to be published. You can publish just the information needed to have picture about what is going on inside.
For example "I've divided a tyre to X smaller parts and the CPU computes pressure/temperature for those parts Y times a second." These stuff will become public anyway as the game arrives (if not publicly, someone will find out anyway) so it's not a secret.
Information like this is just so general, no one can actually profit from it I think. But it doesn't even have to be specific like this. For example I really liked blogs by Patrick Wyatt about Starcraft development
Even when this blog would be released in time of development, no harm would be done (except the internal Blizzard structure parts). If devs would be able to provide at least articles like this - what interesting happend during development process / what was just fixed - the stuff people don't see everyday - it would be great sign something is really going on.
You are wrong, simply as that I will put it.
It has been mentioned, by the devs, that the cockpits should be renewed, there should be a Westhill update and some other small feautures which yet are not seen and which were mentioned YEARS ago. That is no guessing, that's their actually words, if you do not belive me you have not been around much. Do a browsing through their posting history, but they might of course have deleted their post.
This is by no means an attack on you mate, I just want to state that some of the critism is because of lack of developement on areas which were announched way before the talk about tyre physics, scirocco and rockinham.
But instead of actually finishing at least the interiors and Westhill update, the talk about it simply vanished and nothing have happend. Instead it is now just the talk about the physics and so on.
At least they should pull their shit togheter and released those updates first, then focusing on the future with S3, rockingham and scirocco.
That's the approach at the moment and it's really become a bad joke to be honest.
The fear of making any announcements/status updates and destroying interest/credibility 'cos they change, is really bogus. That is what has happened anyway. That's why I don't buy the that line.
This quote might have been posted here a few times, but I think it’s worth posting it again.
I find it quite strange that the FZ interiors, which were near complete 4 years ago, or updates of Westhill, which I assume they were also near complete (who knows though, the post doesn’t say anything about its progress), haven’t been released yet.
At least the new FZ and/or FX interiors would be quite a good update which could easily be released while Scawen works on the tyre physics, I guess. I have no idea why that hasn’t happened yet.
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Soon after that, January of this year he announced that he was making a track editor for Eric. We are now four months ahead on that timeline. Four months is not really much.
Yes, the developing speed is slower now because of family and other stuff but apparently there is still flowing enough money in so there is no need to rush things. We have to accept the current product and if there is something better coming along you are free to try it out and leave. There is always some sort of shift within a community. However, after ten years, I still see new licensed people -every week-.
Last years netcode update was a nice intermission. Personally I would like to see more of that. Keeps contact with the community also a bit healthier. But, for some reason there is no time available.. You can see that positive, either something big is being worked on, or another burnout has taken place. Lets hope its not the last one because those ones are really nasty and 95% doesn't even understand what this is about. (Thats because 95% of world population is too dumb/lazy to be innovative/creative to begin with )