Quote from Scawen :

Thanks. I'm hoping it could be in a test patch in a couple of days.

Now that the focus is on league racing and streaming, what about making high res skins freely available for everyone? You have free global server service even for demo users, S3 users have all those great community made mods, but they need to pay for community made skins. People who paid couple euros for skins in the past won't be mad at the devs for making it a free feature. You talked about using the triangles in relevant areas to make the cars look good, but then most users see cars with skins in low quality. I believe there's also reluctance in making great skins because of this.

1e for 2000 skins isn't the issue. People don't care to add balance to view other people's car skin in full detail, in the end its LFS that looks bad. It's noticeable in the streams.

You could still keep the low res skin feature as default for the case of low end PC's and even introduce higher res skins than we currently have. And still keep the warning about performance impact when changing the setting.

Quote from Scawen :

Getting better step by step.

Nice to see some series organisers have been updating their logos!

[edit by Scawen - removed quoted images to save space]

It is looking lovely. Are the times set on local time or UTC?

Quote from Facu23 :

It is looking lovely. Are the times set on local time or UTC?

Thanks. All the times are shown in your computer's local time.

I've improved the appearance some more today, see attached image.

Victor has added some new features too. A special page for each Round, and organisers can now upload an image for each Round (aka Event). If they don't do that, then it uses the Season image as before.

Quote from Scawen :

So what's up?

1) Do people not know about these events? They are on the LFS calendar and we always tweet the weekly calendar that Mandula makes. Of course not everyone has twitter and not everyone looks at the calendar.

2) Do racers know about it but don't want to enter? Aren't interested in showing up at a specific time? Are they worried about getting in people's way? What other reasons for non-participation?

3) Or is it something technical, like they know about races, would like to enter but have difficulty finding out the information and rules?

Demographics are tricky. Unfortunately even today LFS' online presence is occupied by people who've been using LFS for years, most of them within 5-20 years "service". So you're looking at older guys who probably don't really have the time to commit do dedicated series since my hunch tells me the majority of LFS players now are 5 years either side of 30 and therefore have families or intensive careers as opposed to the late 00's and early 10's when most of them were under 25, although your own stats would obviously be more accurate than my hunch.

In the interest of adding some genuine feedback :

One problem with fun leagues these days [and its not just an LFS problem] is this demand to mandatorily join a discord server when all you wanted to do is to race.

The problem I foresee with this new menu system is if it's programmed that when you click join and it just directs you to a forum post or a discord link then you're back where you started with the exact same immediate barrier of entry again.

If you click join and it's automatic and you're on that league's roster of drivers and you don't need to do anything else other than turn up on the day, then I can see it being useful and if it does work in this manner, then it would be beneficial to have a "joined leagues" list so you can see what leagues you're eligible to race in and when their next event is at any given moment.

Quote from Scawen :

Victor has added some new features too. A special page for each Round, and organisers can now upload an image for each Round (aka Event). If they don't do that, then it uses the Season image as before.
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I liked the previous version better. This looks bit cluttered. Why doesn't clicking the "upcoming events" just refresh it? Or why doesn't it auto refresh every x minutes? I thought that's how it worked the whole time. Imo a thin border line encompassing each event's area including the image would be better. Without those dark accents.

Everything looks so nice so far, thank you!

I was wondering, where does the buddy list in LFS Lazy go now? It has been the best tool for me to find races, when I see many of my buddies online on a server. Makes me join them just because I know them. So, probably adding this buddies online list would be a next move after this?

One thing to consider making racer base larger would be, in my opinion, letting all demo racers try S2 or S3 free for a dedicated period: let's say from Thursday to Monday at Eastern, or some other time. Yeah, there will be a lot of noobs on the track that time, but we can always password our league servers

Quote from pantiainen :

I was wondering, where does the buddy list in LFS Lazy go now? It has been the best tool for me to find races, when I see many of my buddies online on a server. Makes me join them just because I know them. So, probably adding this buddies online list would be a next move after this?

I have no idea about this and no plans to code something like that. My sole aim is to get back onto the tyre physics so we can release the new graphics and physics systems.

But I assume from what you say, that LFS Lazy can show a buddy list on the main entry screen. I've now made sure that the Calendar is not displayed at all if there are any InSim buttons in the so-called "recommended area" that covers most of the left side of the screen.

Looks really cool! Do it <3

Nice to see these event images appearing. I'm hoping to release a test patch today.

Organisers, if your event requires people to sign up, please make sure that is set correctly in the season information. If people see "No signup required" then I'm sure they will not even try to sign up. Example: the MRc RX on Sunday. The website and the in-game calendar say "No signup required" but apparently you do have to sign up. https://www.lfs.net/forum/post/1994626#post1994626

Fixed now, thanks. Really waiting for this update to go live.

Simple I guess?..The amount of people who used to play were also way more dedicated to the league scene. Nowadays the amount of players on LFS is low compared to how it used to be.

These sort of games are not really dying out, I just think honestly the appeal for this game compared to what is out there is just not really present. Only us the old players understand how cool LFS is, but for most newcomers they gonna look at this game as some sort of lego game.

Quote from pantiainen :

Everything looks so nice so far, thank you!

I was wondering, where does the buddy list in LFS Lazy go now? It has been the best tool for me to find races, when I see many of my buddies online on a server. Makes me join them just because I know them. So, probably adding this buddies online list would be a next move after this?

One thing to consider making racer base larger would be, in my opinion, letting all demo racers try S2 or S3 free for a dedicated period: let's say from Thursday to Monday at Eastern, or some other time. Yeah, there will be a lot of noobs on the track that time, but we can always password our league servers

Well currently Lazy only works for LFS 0.7A (non test), so you cannot use LFS 0.7Bx and Lazy at the same time.
Lazy is great for a lot of different reason, but its development is currently semi halted. Some feature should either switch to alternatives (some are being developped) and some stuff I would love to have them straight in LFS.
What I really like from Lazy in no special order.
Buddy list, favorite server
Split predict live and spb (number one for me)
Radar
Gearbox calculator
Fuel real time, engine damage clutch heat in %...

Question for the streamers:

I'd like to add options to store stream URLs to seasons / rounds. But I was wondering if the stream URL is always the same, in which case I can add it to a season. But if it changes per round (event) it should be stored with each round individually.

I think the Twitch streams are usually the same URL, but I'm not sure how it works with YouTube and others? Are those different urls for each stream?

Quote from Victor :

Question for the streamers:

I'd like to add options to store stream URLs to seasons / rounds. But I was wondering if the stream URL is always the same, in which case I can add it to a season. But if it changes per round (event) it should be stored with each round individually.

I think the Twitch streams are usually the same URL, but I'm not sure how it works with YouTube and others? Are those different urls for each stream?

Both Twitch and YouTube use unique URL for each video/stream replay
(examples: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1440374598; https://youtu.be/951aIsfdLKo)
so I believe individual storage will be necessary to do so.

Is that the same case for the live streams?

You bring up an interesting point though - do you want to store the video streams after the event, for each round as well?

Sim Broadcasts always give the same URL for twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/simbroadcasts

But they seem to give a different YouTube URL for each event.

See their "We are LIVE" posts on Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/simbroadcasts

Quote from Victor :

You bring up an interesting point though - do you want to store the video streams after the event, for each round as well?

Probably individual decision of each organiser, but speaking for myself, I would appreciate to be able to attach the dedicated broadcast link to each of my individual championship rounds.

Just to add my two cents as an overview:
- YouTube:
When a stream gets scheduled on YT, it gets an assigned URL (for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dDQ0lIsXY0) for the stream, which can be used to watch the stream live, but also it will be the same for video-on-demand watching after the livestream ends. Important though, there is a special URL on YT, which always points to the currently scheduled, or currently live livestream (otherwise to the channel page). It looks like this: https://www.youtube.com/simbroadcasts/live . If someone opens this link during a livestream, if I recall correctly, that redirects to the assigned video URL.
- Twitch:
Stream always goes live on the channel page, there is no stream scheduling (as far as I know), so viewers can always only watch the livestream on the channel page: https://www.twitch.tv/simbroadcasts .
After stream ends, like Michal says, the VOD gets stored (like https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1440374598 ), but I believe this is an option that the channel owner can control (whether to store streams for VOD watching, or store no archive footage).

EDIT: also important note: the VODs on Twitch are not accessible forever - for the SBTV Twitch channel, currently only the two most recent past broadcasts are watchable (3 and 12 days ago), older videos are not. So linking to a Twitch VOD might become a dead link quite soon.

Ok thanks, I'll begin with adding the optional stream urls to the round edit page then, so we can link to it from inside LFS as well.

Twitch / YouTube live stream urls can now be added to each round.

Should there be some new "special page for each Round" as mentioned? Now there seems to be none and therefore added stream urls are not shown anywhere.

Already made, but not yet linked to from the web pages.
It's a minimal page atm and I want to spruce it up a little. But it will be linked to from inside LFS when the test patch is out (very soon).

Stream links, if there are any, are also shown on the season overview page btw.

EDIT - I'm currently just focussing on making the new LFS Events feature functional. Up next is improving the web site pages. Still a fair bit to do to make those better.

Test Patch B10:

List of upcoming events is displayed on the entry screen
- click event name to visit the event page at lfs.net
- signup and live stream links are provided if relevant
- a "Join" button is also available if the host is running

https://www.lfs.net/forum/thread/97772

Tried B10, works great! Tried to click through everything to test, didn't find any bugs. I like how it fills in the username when clicking on "Sign up" for an event that uses the lfs.net signup system. Nice touch!
As someone who is dealing with events regularly (also organizing, partly), I really like seeing the events in-game. It does give the in-game part a little bit of more dynamic content, hopefully giving more exposure to events.

I noticed the max. 24 char limit for league names, if above that, they are omitted. At first glance, I did miss the league name from the CESAV event (also SuperStock and RTFR), but they have a very long name. Of course overflowing has to be handled somehow, so I'm not sure what's the best way to get around this.

(should we continue giving feedback here, or in the B10 test patch thread? )

There could be a default "LFS Events" image for leagues which don't/haven't set an image yet