No offense but am I the only one having difficulties trying to read your message Flotch? I think I understand what you're trying to say but gosh it was difficult
So because a random few people make x tracks or cars or whatever in a year that means the LFS devs should as well?
We all know Scawen has been very busy with the physics and some VR stuff etc. And the amount of details that go in a track that Eric produces are beyond most other sims out here.
Sure it isn't as fast as most other sims, and even these details are no excuse for it, but I guess there are other priorities, and there obviously are a few secret cars and tracks we don't know of.
You're right. It is just a theory I tried to share and explain :
* In November's report, we can read "1 track needed to be finished, and 2 tracks needed to be 'done'". On a total of 5 tracks which weren't shown fully, we can conclude that 2 were done or if not, almost done.
* Today, we have seen 3 of these tracks. The last one is almost finished 5 months later, so we can assume it was not the one that was on the stage to be finished in November, and so one of the two tracks to be done. And we can suppose aswell that the track to be finished has probably been 'finished'.
* as a conclusion, if Kyoto Ring was one of these two tracks, maybe only one is remaining to be done. And so either South City or Fern Bay is 'done' ("at least").
I don't suppose it does any harm to let you know where we are with the tracks, as I think you can work it out anyway. The South City and Fern Bay are not yet done. Kyoto has taken longer than expected because Eric is working to a high level of detail, and the track covers a vast area. He wanted to create interesting buildings as part of the job because as an artist he wants to create good looking work.
It's similar on my side, things have taken longer than expected and one thing leads to another, so I end up working on things that were not planned in the first place. Maybe if we had a project manager they could keep us to timescales and limit our work accordingly. But I think it's a good thing that we can experiment by going down unexpected paths of development, although it does take longer, the end result can be more interesting.
I know people may say "if you don't release it quickly it will become irrelevant and obsolete" and so on but I don't really mind about those kind of opinions. We're trying to create a nice game that we are happy with, and I know a lot of people will be happy to have a go when it's ready.
Thanks for the update Scawen! I guess this also means that there will be no "full" May progress report.
Take your time. I actually like that you guys are not limiting yourself and do what you want to do.
I already thought that SC will take long to update, especially when looking at the quality of the previously presented track updates. I guess Fern Bay may also take long due to the size of it.
I did not start LFS and race it seriously for a long time now, but at this point it just does not matter to me how long it will take. I will just return and race when it's ready, that's it.
Thanks for the update, fe and south look like they need most work done on them, so i guess it will take more time to update them than some newer tracks.
Did you guys find out how to protect from recent outages of master server?
I have no problem with this approach either, "but" ... just recently I did watch video from GDC about "Path of Exile" game, it's free-to-play "game as service", monetizing on skins/etc (I think they don't sell anything directly affecting gameplay, but I may be wrong, never tried the game).
They had some biz plans/etc... released the game, been running it for couple of years, and everything was "OK"-ish, hitting their initial goals, but not really growing... until...
They changed to fixed release-time schedule, having big-patch/small-patch every 6/4 months IIRC. The key point for you to take away from this is the "scheduled", the mere predictability of their actions bring big boost to all values, getting them back into growth.
It's similar with twitch/youtube streamers, one of the basic advice is "have a schedule and stick to it".
You can probably check yourself how much attention these scheduled LFS monthly progress reports take, if you manage to compare it with some unscheduled progress reports, I wouldn't be surprised if you would be able to pick up some trend in the numbers, although maybe it doesn't matter.
I understand this is extremely "anti" your current style of work; with hindsight, if you would even "promise" something like "big patch with physics in 3 years", it wouldn't help either and it would flop too. Then again putting at least some regularity into LFS life is maybe possible. The patch thing would be obviously very difficult to achieve (unless you would release even some unfinished "dev-test" builds at particular dates, just for the sake of releasing), but keeping like montly dev-blog reports, maybe helping to organize some "official" LFS racing event 2-4 times per year, etc.. would bring some benefits of this scheduled approach also to you.
I usually am negative about most custom made tracks as even the good ones are not perfect but these look amazing, will have to give them a try so something good has come from it
In defense of the LFS, the creators of the tracks have not had to do coding for the game itself takes time. Preference should be quality of service over quantity of content which is what scawen and others have given us
Oh I have nothing but respect for Scawen and his coding, my post there was rather aimed at the (silent) content creator of LFS. I've been am avid defender of LFS' development speed for many years, but now that I do this stuff myself (also some experimental tracks next to my cars), I can't defend the speed cars and tracks are made for it anymore, it just makes me sad.
But all this is OT, its still generally nice to see Scawen perfecting VR usage and an overall really efficient sim. Some aspects like behaviour over jumps or netcode are still top notch.
I understand where your coming from, what has to be asked is how much and how likely would the additional content be used, look at rockingham, it improves on the previous lfs content but is hardly used, i agree that a lot could of been created and added over the years but had not, things have started to look better with the dev's becoming more active so fingers crossed
(btw been doing a few laps on the thompson road gran prix track from your link, a great track)
Who told you he's on full time working on LFS, maybe he's trying to grab some few hours per week outside his full time job to make progress on LFS tracks, at least that's my guess.
I don't mind if Scawen or Eric tell us LFS is now only a side personal project, because that doesn't mean that the quality will be worse than before, but at least it will make sense from my POV why LFS developement is slow paced.
I tried to describe why things take a long time, for Eric and me. I wouldn't be able to go into much more detail without listing every detail of our personal lives.
Some people do understand and some will not. There is also life outside of LFS, we have families and so on. Things happen, it's not just a constant uninterrupted 50 hours per week on LFS.
But just to clear up one myth: Eric and I do not have any other jobs. I'm not sure why people sometimes get that idea. As you can see, we are working hard on Live for Speed and there has been a lot of progress these last few years. But it's not always plain sailing. There is life outside LFS, and within LFS there is experimentation, research, trying and testing, following unexpected avenues, backtracking, trying again, and so on.
I do say occasionally, if our aim was to make the most money possible, we should have chosen another job or way of working. But that's not the aim here. The aim is to develop something we like, working in the way we like, get paid for it and enjoy life as well. It's a great thing to be able to have some time to spend with the people you love. Some people do miss out on that part of life through working too hard, and I'm really happy that we have avoided that mistake. You don't have a second life to come back and do all the things you forgot to do in your first life. So you need to make sure you have time to do the things you like to do.
I personally feel like you do not need to explain anything, I have had more than my moneys worth and can even go as far as saying that with the people i have met through LFS, it would make LFS priceless
And very wise words, my children are now grown up, it happens so quickly that you must grab memories and special moments while you can
Better yet.. ( Or actually, worse! ) Having no life at all is also an option. Just not recommended to select for without a very good reason.
Screaming for updates would only take you so far, next to nowhere, although we are always going to hope for some things... well, improvement suggestions.
I hope they succeed in delivering these graphical updates and tire physics evolution to have something brilliant as we can be sure.
And in a not so huge amount of time !
Aim is they can breath a little before doing more funny things, like new contents to develop matching their taste
i.e. : Rally pack for the win !
I think I understand what you're trying to say but gosh it was difficult 
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