There are definitely people who still have hope, especially since the latest AC "impression". AC might be the next best thing; the car models are amazing, graphics are up to date... its in every aspect up to date, but there is no reason LFS can't be as good.
Fact is, we don't know what they've worked on. Granted, the chances are they haven't accomplished much, but there is always the possibility they can update it and be on-par with the likes of AC, iRacing, rFactor, Raceroom Experience, or whatever.
LFS is still unique in the way it simulates (afaict). Its a raw simulation, while others try to cut corners in different (and essential) aspects
So, yeah, there is still hope, even though, it has a very bitter taste to it.
I've been looking for my "new LFS" for a while but nothing quite has the solidity or for want of a better way of putting it "fidelity" of LFS physics and general feel. Whatever Scawen and co. are doing now it would be a real shame if Scawen never worked on another racing sim because, for me at least, LFS still tops the pile in the most important ways.
I agree with you, though. There are many more viable alternatives, and why any newbie with a credit card would even consider LFS now is sadly a bit hard to work out. I recall thinking that user generated tracks would be bad for LFS, but that was when there was the prospect of actually getting more tracks from the devs.
What S3 would have to bring in order to mix it in the current environment, I don't know. More than just better tyres, though, you're right there. I'd go so far as to say they would probably basically need to be offering a whole new game under a different name. Maybe that's what they're up to......
I do kind of hope that we haven't been duped a little, though. I know "LFS is not dead" but if they basically canned it years ago, and didn't announce that because they were still selling licenses, hence the master server and maintenance patches, it would be crappy way to do it. It still wouldn't explain why they didn't want to release a little content and make some money in their part-time though.
Whatever, it's still the best sim current on my HDD
Spot on Sinbad and totally agree with you here ( paid for IRacing, got a deal, 3months for price of one) and played it once Have set a Cal reminder to cancel, but BOT.....Scawen, if your reading this, please just give us a heads up, anything, even say Hi I am still alive....little and often just as the Dr's tell us
Fordie, in iRacing, if you go into your account management you can disable auto-renew (and remove any payment details) and your sub will simply lapse after 3 months.
Project fell way to far behind and everything else like iRacing, Rfactor, Simraceway, etc. etc. caught up and took over before any worthy progress was.. even shown off.
Remember back in the days when LFS was "it" and they brought out sims and stuff to shows and racetracks and people played it? (PreS2).
LFS is old. I think it's safe to say we've all lost track of time. Last thing I remember when I was hanging around was Scawen just had a kid and was working on his kitchen. That was probably 8 years ago now...
On the other topic of user created stuff.
I think it would still have been very wise for the devs (to make some extra cash with little to no effort), release an open version for sale, give it a different code name (LFS Open? I don't know..), and run it like an app store these days; where there are "developers" that have to pay specific fees to create things for the game.
Devs could 'hire' some moderators to review the work, and if it was good enough it could be put online hosted on the master server available for download or otherwise.
Would it make the game a bit more difficult to play online with? Absolutely.
But look at Grand Prix Legends? That game is friggen 15 years old now and still has one HELL of a user backing, and all the stuff still being made for it is nothing but amazing.
Yes it is an old game with old graphics etc.
But at least you can wring a bit more fun out of it. LFS just gets to boring. The only time I play with LFS nowadays is when I need to test something out (until I discovered suspension geometry in this game is.. nothing like the real world)
From my eyes.. the devs let the project slip out of their original vision.
LFS still has a chance to be good again. But it's going to take way more than just a few tracks and cars. They need to bust ass and bring it up to date. The game is also over a decade old.
The way I honestly see it?
The devs need to wise up and sell the damn game to someone willing to invest in it and let it keep growing.
How many people stick around this forum these days? As old as the game is.. absolutely plenty. And I can guarantee a few know a bit about coding and would have 0 issue pushing this project and making some money where it's at.
Look at Automation?
Based off some old games from the early 90s that no one ever tried to make again, now it's two guys that have managed to make a semi living from working on with enough interest. And all they get to do is learn MORE by doing what they're doing.
The last 'real' news we got was almost 2 years ago now.
I have nothing against the devs, never have and probably never will, but from where I stand, their position on communication, updates, etc. are 100% rubbish compared to what it should be.
It honestly angers me a bit on the inside... to know that they know that they've worked on a game for so long, haven't said much to ALL of the followers on here, and expect everyone to cling on for juuuuust a bit longer.
S1 came out in 2003 which was right about when I found out about the game.
S2 came out in 2005.
We expected a rally pack or S3 by 2008, then when that didn't happen 2009.
Here we are, 2013. The devs remain quiet as there are so many people standing around that it's obnoxious.
Why does it piss me off so much? I am an administrator over at Mazda3forums, and watched the forum and the community DIE; LITERALLY fall apart when the forum went down for a few days. It devastated the community, and only a few of us (literally a few at this point despite it growing rapidly) are still around. Activity is less than 10% nowadays even a year later after that happened.
We lost nearly all of our sponsors.
And because of that we lost a lot of any aftermarket interest in the base.
The moment this game slips and the community is lost, it will be a mark on our hard drive we may play for 5 minutes one day per year if that.
The developers have NO idea how amazing it is that this massive community is still around.
They seriously should take a look around and see what they have sitting here.
When I joined I was in middle school. I asked my father to buy S1 for me because I had no way to pay for it.
Now I am out of college and have a full time job, and have spent countless money on my car.
The devs are absolutely blind to not see that if they release a few tracks and cars for a fee how much money they could make. In fact it's almost STUPID that they can't see it.
To knock this point out of the park; how many here have a smart phone running android or ios?
How many stupid games have you paid money for to spend 5 minutes playing?
Think about how much money those guys are making that are making those games?
If the devs produced 3 cars and 2 tracks.
I guarantee they could make a few thousand dollars in a single week.
And that's f*&%ing worth it if you ask me.
This is pretty much exactly what I have been thinking everytime I try to make a post regarding the development. They could make so much extra money if they would just push some extra content while they continue to finish the tyre physics.
There is no logical reason as to why there can't be new content before the physics comes out because when the physics is complete, all the WR's and stats will be reset anyway. Why not make some extra cash that might help fund the tyre physics progress aswell as help satisfy and bring in new licenses to the community as well. The amount of money we are talking about is pretty significant when you think about it.
i understand that LFS Tracks & Cars are Erics little babys and it is his own private work and he did superb things for LFS so we shouldnt underestimate the laserscanned Track(s) which would probably implementet in the future.
But as mentioned before its time to move on and get things done.
Its hard to gave arguements to both ways of development because their and our arguments are logical.
Its their "private" LFS project and.. sure we got what we paid for but on the other hand its said to see this pearl of beauty got no attationed anymore or what ever you would like to say about the development stages.
I know we would never see a Comment from Eric, maybe he is silently reading Threads and we made his day. Scawen will say that it is up to Eric to get some Manpower for Track designing but everyone know that this wont never ever happen. As Scawen said last year, he developed a new Designing Tool for Eric so he is still working on Things and S3 will include 1 or 2 new Tracks and i'm 99% sure some rework on the old things are allready done.
It is quite complicated right now. Its a privat project so every decission is up to them so we can complain like they wont gave a shit.
What i'm asking myself right now is, why it took so long for scawen to make the decision for implementing the open Config Layouts into LFSAnd what was his reason to do it. I mean on the other side he could implement some custom tracks
And Victor ? His LFSreplay Editor isnt that popular as it should be or am i wrong. Do we ever get some new motorsounds like iRacing or something else.
IMHO they should hire a small group of pepole which should design tracks for lfs. Everything else must be done by Scawen, Eric, Victor.
Tracks could be done easily i think (i dont have a clue how much work it could take) but there are so many Modded tracks out there and we have a great community, their must be Manpower around here which design new Tracks in no time and LFS will become popular as hell.
The fact is we don't know if they have been working on anything for the last 7 years. It is not wise to try to build this massive "wait" into some huge expectations when the reality at the moment is that you are not going to get anything at all.
Now, that right there is nothing more than pure fanboyism.
there is one thing the devs could do with little to no effort at all:
please, give us the vw scrirocco and/or the lx 8 to play with, because these cars are already built and have worked inside lfs!
we do not care if they are not 100% accurate, as the rest of the lfs universe is also not 100% perfect and still we all love it!
and, as i said earlier: just mark them as "work in progress, subject to change" an communicate these facts openly to the community.
as lfs in its entirety is still an alpha version, there is no need for perfection before releasing new content. we know that this is an evolving development and this is why many of us are still here, so please include us into the evolution of this game again.
and if you want to give us something real special, the ask eric if he could do a temporary version of the south city "industrial area" track. the outlines of this track are shown on the official track pictures for years now, and most of the track is also there. so, please open these fences and make south city a new experience for us.
The LX8 was actually cut content from S2. It was never available in an official release, as well as it being a fairly useless car due to having no competition along with no downforce making it way too fast with no grip.
If the LX8 were to be revived, I'd expect/hope it to be balanced with the current GTR cars, and styled like Donkervoort
Creating realistic race track surfaces isn't as simple as it seems. People have tried a lot of techniques for this, especially for imaginary tracks, from simple sin waves to sophisticated multilayer noise fields, or even some ontogenetic algorithms, and of course steal-from-nature LiDAR scan copies. Still, people are not very happy yet.
With that said, LFS's track surface modeling isn't state-of-the-art either.
Please don't beg, friends. There are plenty of threads saying "Please release this and that. It's already done! It's money". Scawen et al clearly don't care about the money. Either that, or someone is STUBBORN.
This is like a reality show to me. I'm just waiting for Scawen or Eric to get drunk and start posting weird stuff on here in the middle of the night.
yes, the lx 8 was a hard to control monstercar with no other competition in the field of lfs cars, but that is still not a valid point not to release it now.
the grip in game is better now than it was then and if a car is hard to control that is not bad, that is just another challenge for the driver.
if porsche had tought "oh, that 917 is way to hard to control, and it drives circles around the competition, so we better not race le mans in that car or we might win in the end..." then racing history would not been what it has been.
and also the argument of no competition is not really valid, because one could always race single car races, and the f1 and the mrt also are cars that have no direct competition.
but i like the idea of the donkervoort style lx 8 for the gtr class a lot, also!
@eric: there, you go. you know how to make us happy!
but till then, just release those finished cars to bridge the gap, before all players are gone. you can always improve them for s3 if they are not good enough to bring some fun. speaking of fun - if only the perfect programmed physics and graphics are the goal and prevent those two cars from being released - then, why did we have so much fun with the historic lfs versions when sombody sets up a s1 or a 0.04 server?
it is much easier to evolve a growing, loyal fanbase than to get players back who left for whatever reasons.
People already don't drive cars like the LX6 and FO8 because they're too difficult. The LX8 would be even less used. It would need to actually have a proper GTR version of it with downforce, not just take the current LX6 and add slicks and a V8. That would be the "bad" way to do an LX8.
No slicks and no aero and a big power would be the best lx8 version I can think of. Some years ago we did some races with a tweaked lx cars, one was high revving straight 6 and another was big and heavy v8: http://i44.tinypic.com/wjb8ub.png http://i43.tinypic.com/noekab.png
We used to drive really tight circuits with added corners and chicanes so we wouldn't mess up our lx6 times but the high revving version certainly was awesome car to drive imho. The heavier car would have been nice as well but it needed different kind of setup than the lighter one and I don't think we did all that much changes to the setup so it drove a bit like a old muscle car...
Imho the best kind of lx8 would be to have just more power higher revving NA engine like the lx6. No slicks and no aero. Make it kind of what caterham r500 is like.
This would be a better car than an LX8... or an ariel atom-like car.
That said.
This is an Exomotive car, which the father company is in Britain, and they still have been shipping a lot of the parts where they are sold as kits here.. right around the corner from my home. Soon however they'll be making their own full kits and will have all the proper tooling to do it.
Anyways, they made a race car for Global Time Attack which was to be raced at VIR. It... actually went on a flight last night as well.
But, it's a Miata everything, underneath. Difference with this was is it used the entire Flyin' Miata turbo kit.
They also picked up some Car of Tomorrow NASCAR wings. Front looks goofy but.. the car is awesome. I still haven't driven one of the normal ones but ... you can look at it and KNOW that it's fun.
i think the problem is (it says i joined in 2012, but i have played with the demo for years prior) is that as they said, content, sim racers are a niche market, so if you keep giving them the same content over and over they get bored and move on.
i think the main problem with iRacing becomming a self-imposed "top of the food chain" of sort in sim racing is that people will eat up anything. i mean, they recently released long beach, one that is 25% done, yet the community over there is so impatient that they demanded this stuff come out, even though the company had 3 years to do it. yet they got kansas done in...under 10 months.
i'm doing a complete 180 here, a year ago i said "Sanctioned series is good for sim racing" when truth is...it is not, because what happens is you will have focus shifted to that specific side of things, and in iRacing's case, it is NASCAR and GrandAM
while i am all for progress, i am glad this sim has content already there, i mean, i'm happy with what we have, i'd rather have problems fixed and adressed with what already exists rather then pushing out new content.
i'm not saying LFS is dead, i just think it needs a revival. people say nr2003 is dead yet there is leagues racing on it almost every day of the week 24/7. when you take one method to race online away from the dedicated racers, we will find another way and make it work.
iRacing doesn't need to charge for content after you already payed for the month-to-month subscription, but that is just me.
or they can adopt an LFS method, anything below class D is free-to-play, the rookie races are a wreckfest anyway so it won't change anything. And i guess as time passes and i'm disconnecting with iRacing (mainly because i cut ties with the people who were the primary reason i was on that sim to begin with) i'm starting to see the redundancy of their business model. they charge you to get started, they charge you to move up into another level of racing, they charge you to host servers (which really are still owned by iRacing, there is no dedicated servers, you just "rent rooms" so to speak for a handfull of hours) for anywhere from 2 bucks to 8 dollars, the charge you to start a league.
and as far as voice chat, you can get banned for saying the f-word over chat, but the guy who plowed you over in the mx-5 turn 1 lap 1 gets off scott free under a "Racing incident" that just boggles my mind, i'm sorry
Scawen stopped giving us updates because of abuse by a few.
To this I say, toughen up.
Because silence has cost him his livelihood.
All game devs have experience of this, you get flak mixed in with the good, but you get flak by saying nothing too. Scawen saw this as lose lose and decided not to bother, but that just alienates the supporters. It was win lose, and silence is what has killed off the community.
It's amazing how little it will take to undo the damage. But he'll need thicker skin.
What you call 'abuse' anyone could simply call 'typical internet troll times'...or like I mentioned, just people who are critical of the development process and progress because they love LFS so much they can't get enough and want more, more, and more.
To let a minority of users ruin everything for everyone doesn't make sense..it's borderline childish, imo.
"Wahh User A, B and C criticized my work so User D though Z can **** off."
Maybe it's all Vic's fault. He receives the patches in the mail, uses the envelopes for rolling papers and forgets about the patches. Maybe there's 100 USB keys at Vic's place with S3 on them
Have set a Cal reminder to cancel, but BOT.....Scawen, if your reading this, please just give us a heads up, anything, even say Hi I am still alive....little and often just as the Dr's tell us 
