...why not allow the community to create and add something of their own to the game they very much love?

I just can't understand the logic behind this :twirl:

The developers "are developing" the game but there are no updates that are actually containing new game material.

Why in the world can't you (the devs) allow the community to express themselves and develop the game towards something they enjoy since You are not doing it at the moment.

The MP and the server updates are not what community really wants, although they are appreciated very much I believe.

Yes, I understand that You may be doing something but it isn't present in the community in any way at this point, the are no new track, cars etc...

Thus I challenge the devs to open this game to modding!


PS. I know this may create a sh*tstorm but please try to think openly: No dev provided content vs. mods, just to keep this community alive and evolving...

tl;dr: Q_Q

and no.

To quote a wise man from another thread:

Quote from dawesdust_12 :

Except nobody knows car dynamics. It's one thing to create a car model, but to create properly driving cars.. it's very difficult. Look at the boatloads of rFactor mods that gave cars unrealistic car dynamics? Look at iRacing, boatloads of people (IQ's withheld) who pay them monthly and the car dynamics there aren't good either. Project CARS, where the developers think they're on the correct track but have gaping flaws in their model (and their fundemental thinking behind the model). The list goes on. LFS, NKP and (theoretically, because Kunos) AC are in a very select group that does most things very well and in a consistent manner.

Creating a car model is easy. Setting up the actual vehicle dynamics is the hard part because a lot of people will believe a car is "correct" even though it's not for a variety of reasons. Reasons like "It's easy to drive" or "It's difficult to drive" or "I paid $15 for this car, and I'm gonna like it." Most people take any of those opinions and regardless of its accuracy, take it into truth.

I think there's exactly 2 people on these forums who are actually qualified to properly create a cars dynamics. Monsterator (sic) Bob Smith and Neils <long dutch lastname>.

Quote from dawesdust_12 :

To quote a wise man from another thread:

Im driving pCars from time to time and I must say it has the potential to beat LFS. They are actually working on tyre dynamic for every car in pCars and on the BMW Cars you can feel when its understeer or oversteer and they replaced completely the arcadish Physics. So with more usability it could detach LFS from its Sim-throne.

But back to topic. As seen mentioned before, everything is up to Eric and everyone knows that Eric give a shit about every complain.

Quote from Scawen :

A few weeks ago I was working on some track editor improvements that Eric had requested, when I came across a fix that could possibly affect key presses in multi byte languages. An LFS user in Japan kindly tested the change, to make sure the fix didn't break the text input. I added a few updates from the new version into the patch before sending it to him.

This was back in 2011 April. So Eric is doing his work on "something" and i'll think they will never ever give this Editor into other Hands...

Just an Idea: How about to make a Menubutton in LFS "Mod Tracks" and then we can put Community Modded Tracks in there ?

?

Quote from Gutholz :

?

lol...

now my question is, why does he ened new game content without even have driven the cars of s2?

first: the lfs online stats are a wonderful part of the lfs world and they are usefull in so many ways.

but: there is one thing the stats don´t tell you - how much someone drives OFFLINE!

if you look at my stats there are not that much online miles under my belt, but i have driven thousands of laps with every car and on every track!
lfs is meant as an "online-racing-simulator", but it can be used in lan or in singleplayer and then there are no stats.

so just to show the online stats of some player does not mean anything.

peace, mo

I stopped racing online when LFS became too popular. I derived very little pleasure for racing against strangers, but because of the amount of players and servers, I found that people I knew were scarce online.

I have done a LOT more miles offline than online in the past 4 or 5 years. I don't foresee much playing online of Assetto Corsa, rF2, LFS, Gran Turismo.

In my experience a reasonable AI is far better than crying, whining, apparently 8 years old "real" people of dubious ability. I used to love online play back in around 2003-2008, and wouldn't consider offline play most of the time, but the opposite is now true.

Quote from tristancliffe :

In my experience a reasonable AI is far better than crying, whining, apparently 8 years old "real" people of dubious ability. I used to love online play back in around 2003-2008, and wouldn't consider offline play most of the time, but the opposite is now true.

League racing mate Sometimes you have a random NIKI or joonas being idiots, but they get suspended.

also you have cargame. Very good adminning there.

Quote from tristancliffe :

I stopped racing online when LFS became too popular. I derived very little pleasure for racing against strangers, but because of the amount of players and servers, I found that people I knew were scarce online..

My hipster alert just reached over 9000

Quote from molocco :

first: the lfs online stats are a wonderful part of the lfs world and they are usefull in so many ways.

but: there is one thing the stats don´t tell you - how much someone drives OFFLINE!

if you look at my stats there are not that much online miles under my belt, but i have driven thousands of laps with every car and on every track!
lfs is meant as an "online-racing-simulator", but it can be used in lan or in singleplayer and then there are no stats.

so just to show the online stats of some player does not mean anything.

peace, mo

It is just like you said, The devs are concentrating on the online community, not on the single player community, because it's aimed to be an online racing simulator. so that part about "mp and server updates is not what the community needs" is utter bullcrap. Just because he is playing single player doesn't mean he is the aiming community for the devs.

Quote from CodeLyoko1 :

League racing mate Sometimes you have a random NIKI or joonas being idiots, but they get suspended.

also you have cargame. Very good adminning there.

Leagues require a commitment that I cannot give. When I do play online it's when I can fit in half an hour or a couple of hours, not at a specific time that I may or may not be busy.

Cargame servers are, I'm sure, well run, but again chances are it'll be against people I don't know, and that holds little fun value for me. I am lucky that I get to race in real life (at the moment), so having fun in sims on my terms is important to me. If I want to pound round learning a track or playing with gearing then I'll do that offline (and in different sims).

There is only one reasonable explanation: The project, in its current form, does still yield enough money for all of them to live comfortably and never work again. Would you if you wouldn't have to?

Additionally, neither of them seem greedy enough to go for more. There is definitely quite a fortune to earn with S3 or S4. Even if Eric wasn't available, Scawen could have simply hired some 3D modeller who produced new content.
Not that there aren't enough unemployed modellers out there.

So, its either that or internal arguments, which I don't believe as Scawen could have simply created a new project with new people if he wanted to.

So, either way, its a sad end, Mr. Roberts. You've created something really nice but you cannot rest on your laurels infinitely. Sorry.

Quote from tristancliffe :

I stopped racing online when LFS became too popular. I derived very little pleasure for racing against strangers, but because of the amount of players and servers, I found that people I knew were scarce online.

I have done a LOT more miles offline than online in the past 4 or 5 years. I don't foresee much playing online of Assetto Corsa, rF2, LFS, Gran Turismo.

In my experience a reasonable AI is far better than crying, whining, apparently 8 years old "real" people of dubious ability. I used to love online play back in around 2003-2008, and wouldn't consider offline play most of the time, but the opposite is now true.

I second that.

And for Bose & CopdeLyoko:
online is just the same loop... please read the 1st post, it's not about the MP VS SP, it's about evolving game....

So what if someone creates crappy mods, It's not like You will have to download them is it?

The beauty of the modding is that eventyally the best of the best mods are most downloaded and thus the most played by the community..

PLease read the 1st post

Y'all can say whatever you want, but at the end of the day this decision is entirely up to Scavier. It's their product, and it's closed-source.

The thing about "the best mods get used by the community" is that who is to be a judge of best. None of us are qualified to be like "yes, that is what a Porsche 911 feels like under hard braking". Maybe we all think that incorrect behaviour in that 911 is correct so we dot fight for changes. Then when someone comes along and calls foul and we jump on his back?

It can descend into madness. Look at the quantity of rFactor mods where people have created patently incorrect cars, but people love to drive them because they're easy/hard and fit what they want it to drive like, NOT that those dynamics are correct.

Quote from Californian :

And for Bose & CodeLyoko :
online is just the same loop... please read the 1st post, it's not about the MP VS SP, it's about evolving game....

And they are evolving. They are working on S3 and are still updating. Do you really think they are leaning backward right now and are waiting? And I never said something about mp is better than sp. I only said taht the online part of this game is where the devs are working on.

Also, can you explain why online is just the same loop.

I think that we might have to distinguish creating cars and creating tracks. I agree that creating user cars in LFS might not be the best idea, because it somehow destroys the "state-of-the-art balance of power".

A different story might be the idea to create user tracks: I can imagine that it might be possible to form interest groups which are able to create very interesting content (I am sure that many germans already thought about having the legend "Nordschleife" track in LFS ...).

I would offer to spend some of my spare-time and help with the know-how I can help with. Using laser scanner techniques as used for the Rockingham track sounds like a very reasonable approach - the problems begin probably when optimizing the model to fit to the graphics engine and when modelling the different surfaces of the track...

I could imagine that there are some more people like me willing to contribute without monetary interests, but this would require an opened framework. Another way this could be done is by contributing content through a review gate (or similar), so that the devs have the possibility to judge the quality of new content and decide about the integration or rejection of submitted new content (similar to what's been going on in the linux kernel development).

But at the current state this is just a dream what could be ...

The only thing about providing developer authorization is that the liability gets shifted from being fans building a track for free, to developers profiting commercially.

It's a slippery slope and opens them up to potential litigation.

Did rFactor run into legal issues when the Nordschleife track was made? Or is that one officially licensed?

I agree with dawes about the dynamics of making cars the drive properly and realistic, HOWEVER what's wrong with opening LFS to custom made tracks. Code an editor that will allow you to create tracks. Then make the tracks be submitted to a few dedicated moderators to test and either approve or disapprove for LFSWorld stat keeping and go from there. Would definately bring some new life into LFS while not really putting too much new pressure on the developers. Of course there will still be official tracks and cars from the Devs that would be considered S3 content and require a payment to receive that content, but it would also allow LFS to have a never ending stream of new content in some form without pressuring the developers for new cars or tracks every 3, 6, 9, 12 months.

But then you descend into rFactor, where to join a server you must have the correct version of the track (or the track in the first place). Then there's the actual download process of the tracks as well, which for some of us with 50 mbit connections isn't a problem.. but in some other nations and areas (South America, Australia, etc) internet connections are either very slow, have restrictive bandwidth usage limits, or both.

Part of the greatness of LFS is that with a fairly small download, you have everything you ever need to drive LFS. Minor patches excluded, but even those tend to be in the <1 mb range (as they're simply EXE replacements). The accessibility is what has been key to LFS' success.

To dent that in any way, which track downloads could add HOURS to someones attempted join time, is a lot more detrimental to LFS than lacking an Oval and a road car.

I didn't even mention sourcing of tracks either. Putting them on the official forum/LFSW could be a grey area, potentially putting the devs at risk. Then users are forced to use the internet, potentially downloading a virus/malware (considering every download site is now trying to trick their users with 5 different "download" buttons being displayed by advertisements.).

Then, when/if MEGA gets raided (as it's one of the few sites to not have gone retarded with ads), you lose a library of tracks there as well.

THEN, FINALLY, by allowing every Joe, Tom, Dick, Harry and Pete to have any track they want (potentially).. you've now eliminated their reason to even pay for more official content when it comes out, because why bother? Currently LFS has a pretty diverse selection of cars, plus LFS Tweak as well to expand upon that.

It seems like a situation where nobody ultimately wins. Sure we might get a few tracks, but the risks of opening LFS up to litigation by track owners wanting them to licence, losing the accessibility of LFS that makes it excellent, and eliminating any incentive for people to upgrade to higher levels of official content are far greater risks than it's even worth.

All fair and valid points. I have nothing further to say on that matter, except I will be here when S3 does finally arrive because LFS will always be installed on my computer even if the online aspect comes to an end for whatever reason.

I think like the one who started this thread, Californian, it looks (I say, it looks) like devs abandoned the developing of LFS or atleast they don't work as it would be. Scawen, Why not to give everybody the possibility to make our own cars and tracks? If you want to work at your own pace, ok, but atleast, let us make the game funnier by installing mods, like rFactor users do, like ROR users do, etc... in this way, people will stop asking for Scirocco and new content, and you will work at your own pace without any complaint on the forum. The most important is, that more people will join the game and more people will still playing the game.

Not doing this, it looks like devs want to make us abandon the game... well, if a developer of a game wants people still playing his game by a long time, that developer will give the comunity something to maintain the game alive, to not get boring with always the same tracks and the same cars.

We love your work, your game, the simulator that you have made, that's why we paid for it, but atleast give us an incentive, something to have more variety to play... Still woriking on the S3, but let us add our own mods and stop ignoring us.

The thing about mods though, is then nobody will actually pay for further official levels of content... because realistically, why bother? We know that for any physics changes, everybody will get them. Content is the differentiating factor in LFS, which allowing arbitrary content kinda kills peoples desire to pay for more official content (other than simply supporting the devs).