Quote from dawesdust_12 :

Except your comparison is imperfect:

The reason cars will eventually turn to electricity is not because it makes sense as current battery technology is heavy and requires a lot of batteries to provide adequate power. Never mind that batteries do have a finite life span, and do eventually fail to hold a charge.

Yeah, batteries currently have weak points, but still a viable alternative to combustion engines. Once they fix these issues, which will happen soon, there will be no reason to use traditional engines:

http://www.extremetech.com/com ... charges-1000-times-faster

Quote from dawesdust_12 :

Cars will eventually turn to being primarily electricity because we will simply run out of fuel. Oil is not a renewable resource (without millions of years of time).

No, they would turn electric anyway. Just think about the issue with the environment. It is also cheaper, and makes it possible to build safer, more functional cars.

Quote from dawesdust_12 :

iRacing aren't pioneers. They're just arrogant enough to think that people will pay them monthly for subpar physics. The wiser ones have abandoned iRacing as they've realized how terrible it truly is. Eventually iRacing will be left with a decrepit pit of users, crying every week, saying that "Kaermer will bring us good physics next build!"

And then the next build never comes...

I suppose it's been a while since you played iRacing. Give it a try, and come back sharing your thoughts. I think it's pretty good expecially with tire model version 5 (yes, they already managed to roll out the kind of complex tire model, that Scawen is still working on)

Quote from MadCatX :

This is pure speculation and doesn't have much in common with computer software. It has been explained like gazillion times that more money does not equal better product or faster development.

Who said that bullshit?
Sure, replacing Scawen with 10 monkeys wouldn't help, but a team with 10 competent people can achieve more than only 3.

Quote from MadCatX :

The devs said so, practical experience from various SW projects supports this claim. iR hasn't invented anything, its just an MMORPG business model applied onto a racing sim.

It's not even MMORPG business model. It's called software as service, an essential part of cloud computing.

Quote from MadCatX :

The devs have never ever suggested that financial difficulties were an issue. If they had, they could have sold the whole product and move on. I imagine that LFS physics engine would still be worth a lot of money.

They are not honest to the community, and not even honest to themselves. Money is a problem, otherwise you wouldn't hear shit like a dev member had to take another part time job to make the living...

My theory of what happened to LFS is that devs are working really hard to bring S3 as soon as possible and we should respect that

Regarding electric cars, I just don't see them becoming very popular with the current state. I mean yeah you can produce electricity in a better way for an enviroment, but seriously how much people does actually care about it anyway. All people care about is their "profit", but even with electric car I'm not sure that you can benefit much. All people are talking about of such a technology, but when it comes to real life, people like proven things. Also electricity price is affected by fossil fuels a lot, because electricity is produced mainly from oil and coal. One other problem are batteries, they cannot store much energy, wear fast and are very expensive. So in the end running electric car isn't cheaper at all.

Quote from Gabox :

I suppose it's been a while since you played iRacing. Give it a try, and come back sharing your thoughts. I think it's pretty good expecially with tire model version 5 (yes, they already managed to roll out the kind of complex tire model, that Scawen is still working on)

You assume it's been some time since I've tried iRacing. I assure you it hasn't been, and it's still utter and complete garbage.

Quote from Gabox :

Who said that bullshit?
Sure, replacing Scawen with 10 monkeys wouldn't help, but a team with 10 competent people can achieve more than only 3.

No. You're incorrect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

Building software is not the same as bolting together a car. Building a car, adding more people can improve the efficiency. However, with software, communication is critical. With 1 developer, you have 0 lines of communication, thus that developer is aware of all design decisions and ramifications.

With 10 developers, you've made the lines of communication grow exponentially, which adds more delays due to requiring more meetings to coordinate 10 people, more time spent managing what each developer is working on, and more potential for conflicting design decisions to cause chaos.

It's a common middle management mistake to think that you can simply throw more developers at a problem to raise efficiency, defying logic, the opposite actually rings true.

Quote from Gabox :

It's not even MMORPG business model. It's called software as service, an essential part of cloud computing.

Those are the same thing... SaaS is just a buzzword that marketing managers love, as "monthly subscription service" doesn't seem as appealing.

Quote from Gabox :

They are not honest to the community, and not even honest to themselves. Money is a problem, otherwise you wouldn't hear shit like a dev member had to take another part time job to make the living...

Or that Victor's day to day role is very little as the current LFS online infrastructure doesn't require constant attention as it's reasonably stable and now quite resilient to attacks.

Again, you keep trying to convince us that subscription model is "the future" and that LFS is moving towards that, when there is literally no proof or even reasonable prediction to back this up. It's ridiculous.

Quote from Gabox :

Who said that bullshit?

People with experience in managing projects where intellectual power is essential. Just read a summary of the book Dustin linked. It's easy to get money through a loan, startup, etc, but you cannot buy a good idea.

Quote from Gabox :

Sure, replacing Scawen with 10 monkeys wouldn't help, but a team with 10 competent people can achieve more than only 3.

Again, not necessarily - something that has been investigated thoroughly by economists.

Quote from Gabox :

It's not even MMORPG business model. It's called software as service, an essential part of cloud computing.

No matter how it's called MMORPGs were one of the first to bring this business model to gaming. Cloud computing is very different to gaming, please stop making such nonsensical comparisons, it doesn't move the conversation anywhere.

Quote from Gabox :

They are not honest to the community, and not even honest to themselves. Money is a problem, otherwise you wouldn't hear shit like a dev member had to take another part time job to make the living...

How would you know, you haven't seen the devs' accounting books, have you? You're again making assumptions that support your argument but you have no evidence to back them up with. I assume you're talking about Vic? What's wrong with him taking part in another project if he feels underutilized with LFS?

Heh. MadCatX.. GET OUT OF MY HEAD! (We virtually wrote the same post )

http://www.west-racing.com/forum/

Is the future.

Quote from MadCatX :

How would you know, you haven't seen the devs' accounting books, have you? You're again making assumptions that support your argument but you have no evidence to back them up with. I assume you're talking about Vic? What's wrong with him taking part in another project if he feels underutilized with LFS?

What's wrong with that? Is this a serious question?
Come on dude, this project is going nowhere, and something like this is a great indicator of what is happening behind the scenes.

I myself very much doubt, that underutilization was the problem. It's more likely he was not happy with the money he received from Scawen.

Had they went with the subscription model few years ago, none of this shit would have happened.

Quote from Gabox :

What's wrong with that? Is this a serious question?
Come on dude, this project is going nowhere, and something like this is a great indicator of what is happening behind the scenes.

I myself very much doubt, that underutilization was the problem. It's more likely he was not happy with the money he received from Scawen.

Had they went with the subscription model few years ago, none of this shit would have happened.

Well, good thing that those familiar with LFS know that you're incorrect on all counts.

We know Vic wasn't being utilized for too much because LFS' web services are pretty solid and issue free.


As for your assumption that a subscription model would have saved LFS is frankly ridiculous. It's clear that you're not reading the link I've posted several times in this thread, as it explains real world situations where teams attempted to bring in more programmers to finish a project quicker, when in fact it did the opposite. More money would also yield no gains, as money does not buy problem solving, nor can money actually make anyone write code quicker either.

I don't know why you insist the iRacing model is the future, considering there's a sizeable population who have rejected it for various reasons. Other simulators are being released with more traditional release models and are far superior.

Quote from dawesdust_12 :

Building software is not the same as bolting together a car. Building a car, adding more people can improve the efficiency. However, with software, communication is critical. With 1 developer, you have 0 lines of communication, thus that developer is aware of all design decisions and ramifications.

With 10 developers, you've made the lines of communication grow exponentially, which adds more delays due to requiring more meetings to coordinate 10 people, more time spent managing what each developer is working on, and more potential for conflicting design decisions to cause chaos.

It's a common middle management mistake to think that you can simply throw more developers at a problem to raise efficiency, defying logic, the opposite actually rings true.

Look, I'm an experienced programmer myself, and worked in teams consisting of 20-60 people. You can't convince me, that such an amount of people can't be managed, as I have seen it happening. All you need is a competent project manager, and perhaps some good methodology like XP or Scrum. It can be done, but the main problem here, is that Scawen don't want to get involved with this shit. Only god knows why.
You can also get away just be hiring very talented people, and you will see them creating quality stuff without any management. A good example of such a company is Valve.

Quote from dawesdust_12 :

Or that Victor's day to day role is very little as the current LFS online infrastructure doesn't require constant attention as it's reasonably stable and now quite resilient to attacks.

The current online infrastructure doesn't even come close to what iRacing has. It's a wreck fest, and now also a ghost town. Don't say, that there are no work to be done, because it's not true. We need a license system, safety rating, leagues, and much more....

Quote from Gabox :

Look, I'm an experienced programmer myself, and worked in teams consisting of 20-60 people. You can't convince me, that such an amount of people can't be managed, as I have seen it happening. All you need is a competent project manager, and perhaps some good methodology like XP or Scrum. It can be done, but the main problem here, is that Scawen don't want to get involved with this shit. Only god knows why.
You can also get away just be hiring very talented people, and you will see them creating quality stuff without any management. A good example of such a company is Valve.



The current online infrastructure doesn't even come close to what iRacing has. It's a wreck fest, and now also a ghost town. Don't say, that there are no work to be done, because it's not true.

Valve is an unusual anomaly in that they have the luxury of nearly infinite time for projects. Never mind that their process is flawed. DOTA 2 has had strange bugs, out of date tooltips and many other problems for a long time. They have yet to make HL2 episode 3 (or HL3). The most recent major DOTA patch had a game breaking bug where if a specific hero died to a non-hero, the whole game crashed for everyone.

Valve isn't perfect, in fact they are far from it. They need more accountability between projects and teams.

Also, you don't understand what Vic does (obviously). Vic is responsible for LFS' websites along with LFS World's backend. That stuff is all stable.

The servers are run by the users. If a server is a wreck fest, that's not Scaviers problem, that's the server owner. If you don't like that server because there is no admins, join a different server.

So, Vic's maintainence tasks are few and far between because he has built a stable system for all of the various things the LFS sites can do.

Quote from dawesdust_12 :

...
No. You're incorrect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

Building software is not the same as bolting together a car. Building a car, adding more people can improve the efficiency. However, with software, communication is critical. With 1 developer, you have 0 lines of communication, thus that developer is aware of all design decisions and ramifications.

With 10 developers, you've made the lines of communication grow exponentially, which adds more delays due to requiring more meetings to coordinate 10 people, more time spent managing what each developer is working on, and more potential for conflicting design decisions to cause chaos.

It's a common middle management mistake to think that you can simply throw more developers at a problem to raise efficiency, defying logic, the opposite actually rings true.

...

The things you say are basically true, according to my experience with programming.

But when you create such a big product like a 3D driving simulator, it might be better to contribute some time to declare strict guidelines and interfaces for the program, so you can involve more people into the work. Because there is always something that can be improved which requires not that much talent but amount of time... And it might be harder for 1 person to criticize his work. And it is hard to make a fresh look at some problem you been working on for past decades...

The thing about LFS is the complexity of the program, that's the main reason Scawen wouldn't want anyone getting involved. It would take maybe weeks or months of teaching what does what and that means even more off-time and then you also have to coordinate all of the people not to mess everything up.

@Gabox, your discussion about SR and whatsoever into LFS is total bullcrap, you don't even know what you're talking about. This game only provides you a website for communication and one for statistics and a master server for individuals to run servers. Which are INDIVIDUALLY ran unlike iRacing who own every gaming host, which limits the capabilities of the game at some point. It is a different approach and there is no need to try comparing the two. One of them is a wannabe professional simulator the other one is a simple racing simulator, guess which one LFS is. Try league racing and spend some time there, if you even get through prequalification, which basically works like a simple Strenght of Field system ran by people.

Quote from Kristi :

The thing about LFS is the complexity of the program, that's the main reason Scawen wouldn't want anyone getting involved. It would take maybe weeks or months of teaching what does what and that means even more off-time and then you also have to coordinate all of the people not to mess everything up.

If you write it properly, you don't need much to explain. Most important thing programmer learns to -- write the code the way it self-explain itself. Otherwise you won't be able to understand what you did after a year or even after a month. So this might not be the problem.

maybe when ipv6 is fully rolled out it will be a better time for S3

I think Scawen is writing a program which will take over every computer and turn it into a racing simulator. A plague will then emit from the fans of computers and infect people, their hands will turn into racing gloves, their head will form racing helmets, their feet racing boots. They will not be able to eat, only pipe themselves into lfsworld for nourishment. The human race will face the prospect of spending the rest of its lives doing every type of race from 4 lap demo sprints to 24 hour endurance.

Whilst people are distracted , Scawen will empty everyone's bank account in a way iRacing could only dream of, only to find that with no way to spend it, Money is worthless. So everyone will timeout of the master server and go back to normal.

Quote from Kristi :

The thing about LFS is the complexity of the program, that's the main reason Scawen wouldn't want anyone getting involved. It would take maybe weeks or months of teaching what does what and that means even more off-time and then you also have to coordinate all of the people not to mess everything up.

That was a good one man. I was laughing my ass off reading this...

Quote from Kristi :

@Gabox, your discussion about SR and whatsoever into LFS is total bullcrap, you don't even know what you're talking about. This game only provides you a website for communication and one for statistics and a master server for individuals to run servers. Which are INDIVIDUALLY ran unlike iRacing who own every gaming host, which limits the capabilities of the game at some point. It is a different approach and there is no need to try comparing the two. One of them is a wannabe professional simulator the other one is a simple racing simulator, guess which one LFS is. Try league racing and spend some time there, if you even get through prequalification, which basically works like a simple Strenght of Field system ran by people.

You don't have to explain, I do understand what the current situation is.
What I'm saying is that I would love to see LFS going in the iRacing direction. ie. a quality and consistent service run by professionals, instead of laggy and inconsistent user maintained servers, with their own set of rules and weird stuff...

Quote from englishlord :

I think Scawen is writing a program which will take over every computer and turn it into a racing simulator. A plague will then emit from the fans of computers and infect people, their hands will turn into racing gloves, their head will form racing helmets, their feet racing boots. They will not be able to eat, only pipe themselves into lfsworld for nourishment. The human race will face the prospect of spending the rest of its lives doing every type of race from 4 lap demo sprints to 24 hour endurance.

Whilst people are distracted , Scawen will empty everyone's bank account in a way iRacing could only dream of, only to find that with no way to spend it, Money is worthless. So everyone will timeout of the master server and go back to normal.

Hey, who said I'm the best in conspiracy theories!

Quote from Gabox :

That was a good one man. I was laughing my ass off reading this...



You don't have to explain, I do understand what the current situation is.
What I'm saying is that I would love to see LFS going in the iRacing direction. ie. a quality and consistent service run by professionals, instead of laggy and inconsistent user maintained servers, with their own set of rules and weird stuff...

Kristi isn't incorrect.

My boss used to work at a games studio building first party Nintendo games. When they hired a new programmer, they expected 6-8 weeks of uselessness as he gained familiarity with the code base. Then there's assigning this person a task. Then reviewing it to ensure that it is up to a reasonable specification.

Every person you add creates more channels of communication which takes time to manage. Eventually you hit the point where you have people who are literally responsible for simply managing management and doing gant charts just to be able to see what people are doing/when they should deliver something.

As for LFS becoming more like iRacing, I don't understand why you want this. iRacing exists, some people are brainwashed into paying for it, others are smart enough not to. If you like the iRacing model so much... Just play iRacing?

Quote from dawesdust_12 :

My boss used to work at a games studio building first party Nintendo games. When they hired a new programmer, they expected 6-8 weeks of uselessness as he gained familiarity with the code base. Then there's assigning this person a task. Then reviewing it to ensure that it is up to a reasonable specification.

Every person you add creates more channels of communication which takes time to manage. Eventually you hit the point where you have people who are literally responsible for simply managing management and doing gant charts just to be able to see what people are doing/when they should deliver something.

For god sake, I'm not saying that they should hire 50 people. I'm saying it's definitely not OK, that all the programming is done by one person. Scawen should focus on physics only, because that's his main interest I guess. There should be a separate guy for the graphics, and networking at least, 2 people for designing/maintaining cars/tracks, and 1 for building the site.

Not so many people, but with this build, you could actually move forward, and things would not settle because of the f*cking tire model.
Anyway, i think it's a bit too late for this. They should have expanded the team right away when S2 got released, and money was still flowing.

I respect Scawen for his technical skills, but he obviously sucks at project management, and this role should be taken away from him.

There's still 2 months of paying a person to literally do nothing except read code.

Also, Scawen clearly doesn't want to. He wants to do things in the order he feels happy with. He's had chances for people to give wholesale car data, and rejected it because it's not in "his" vision of LFS.

I can respect Scawen for having his own vision for LFS, and not compromising that vision to make a quick buck or to hop on some trend that he's not passionate about. It may not be what we desire, or at the speed we desire, but it was made extremely clear before we purchased our LFS licence that LFS was in development, and that things could change at will.

Hmm, that's almost how Scavier is constructed, like literally. From then on, the rest of your statements are invalid. There are 3 people for 3 separate roles and yup, I agree with dawe. Why would they make another iRacing, when there is one you can play already?

I always love this kind of discussions

To sort of confirm what have been said.

I know few professional driver in the loop simulator that only employ few people. Basically one expert for each area including software, vehicle modelling, track modelling,...

Regarding LFS, at the end of the day, only few people know exactly what is coming up, better not to dream too much about it.

My theory.

We have S2. All obligations met by the developers in return for my £24.

S3 will turn up at some point. Someone may still be around to buy it when it does.

LFS like all video games regardless of how successful they become, will succumb to the same fate as many games that came before it and are now long gone. It is not a matter of "if" it happens, it's a matter of "when" it will happen. It is sad but it is reality.

The reason is a four letter word..."cost"... Nearly all other games are just games we play through a few times, have fun, and that's that. There are no records requiring storage space with the exception of RPG's like warcraft where stats is a big aspect to the game. Racing also requires stats to be kept just by its nature.

Q) How much would it cost if it took $1 dollar per player per year, to save
the statistics for lap data, if it were a group of 1000 people?

A) $1000 dollars a year.

Add up a few thousand of us that have paid for LFS with hundreds of thousands of Demo users that haven't paid at all, then multiply the cost per player with the amount of years they played which even if it where a few pennies per person would still be tens of thousands of dollars within the first few years. A few MB's here and there add up quick when skins are taken into account.

For those of you that manage servers and pay for web hosting, you know as well as I do that on a small scale, data storage is affordable and no biggie. Imagine on LFS's scale where it's been steadily growing for nearly a decade. For it to add more would only require more records to be kept, more players to appease that want everything our way, and would require literally months of coding which includes beta testing to work out the bugs... If you think programming is easy, it isn't. Sure anyone can code HTML, Java, even Python, but a physics engine that controls the way an object interacts with an environment is so much more complex.

It's a dilemma that really has no single answer to explain why LFS is the way it is, it's several problems which I prefer to call "obstacles". Problems makes it sound negative when it's more of a task that could be overcome.