For me, the only things that lfs needs are smoke, crash efects and weather efects.

Smoke, well, in LFS today, theres almost no smoke, even with user created addons, smoke isnt really a problem, for me, the pure adrenaline on racing with fast cars is the impossibility to see the road, i am yet to have a real license, so i cant really drive a car (well...normally i would not xD , but, sometimes theres no one around :evil: ), anyway, when my dad goes on the highway and we get like massive rain or on high montains where you get inside clouds, and you can only see some meters in front, my adrenaline really rises, on rain, when he goes behind other cars, they trow a big screen of water that makes it almost impossible to clearly see the cars around you, so you must trust your other sences and hope no one brakes.

As in racing, i have seen that when cars pass on the dirt on the sides of the track, the drivers behind get a good screen of dirt that makes it hard for them to see, or when they drift a bit at high speeds, the tyres leave a dense smoke screen on the track that is very dangerous because you never know if you will ever came out of it.

So, basically, its essencial, and i have never seen it on a car game.

This brings me to crash effects, other than the massive pieces of debree flying around, that can blow up tyres, damage windshelds, etc,etc, car fluids such as oil or gazoline that can ignite and make alot of black smoke, make windshelds dirty, with dust, oil, etc. Oil causes cars to lose grip (have seen a real car lose control over splid oil on the road after a crash).

Simpler stuff is adding a system to make formula cars lose downforce as their upside down winds are smashed.

And add random car problems, and tyre blows, these cars are too.... perfect, real race cars brake down alot.


And rain, yes, this, i think its the easiest of the ones i saied, to implement, maybe implement it on waves, like, make the animations such as rain fall, low visibility and water on windsheld with repetitive filters that dont need to be dynamic in the 1st phase, and random track lose of grip, real time, on a sector based way, not a very detailed one in the first phase. Then slowly add more detail to them as time lets you.


Other thing is, that you should make the game a bit more moddable, so that comunity could also help you guys, this way, no code source from the main game would be needed. Make more enveronment variables viewable from the outside, so we can implement better and better addons. And make the game more comunity build, so that good addons could be directly implemented into the game itself, i bet no one will give any objections to this nor ask for any kind of payment. As a programmer, I would only want my nick in the "thx to" of the credits section if i made anything good to implement to the game.

Making the game support user created cars would be cool too, for S2 users, like the skin system, just add a module template for cars (AKA 4 wheels) and one for motos (AKA 2 wheels), give us the protocol for the file, and let us do our magic. I wonder, new cars could be implemented in the official version, with no time from the admins wasted on it. Core programming for the main coders, content made by comunity, then filtered by admins, that, deside if it gets or not in, make changes they want, etc, they dont have to waste time making the car/moto from scratch, same for tracks, think about it, faster development, less work, comunity driven content, more sales, everyone happy

Remember that, this game is becoming more and more just not your game, but our game, we play it, we use our time coding for it, just to make it better, cause... we love it.

Best regards,
SilentWarrior.

(note to other gamers : i see lots of ppl saying no to new features, good ones, and bad ones, if you dont want the game to evolve... leave, stop wasting your time, this has to evolve, good games tend to fade away in time, but great games always live 4 or more years after the devs leave it, thing is... i dont want to play LFS for 4 years with no updates, and i dont think you want it too (if you love the game..), i know game dev team is small, but if you say no to everything, wats the point of this section?)

ps: flaming will be ignored, as usual.
ps2: this took some time to write because its 2 am and i am sleepy, so, dont mind any mindless repetitions or crazy spelling xD
ps3: for those who dont want stuff added because of cheaters or non payers get special content, well, this is something we have to deal with, we cannot stop our lives because of terrorists can we? so, why stop development because of cheaters? just find new ways of catching them, like a client-server anti-cheat program aside from the game as other games use (some examples are PunkBuster and its comunity-driven black lists PunkBusted, and "DMW client 3"), they work for other games, why couldnt a similar system work for this?

"yes" to things like damage, smoke, damage affecting aerodynamics, dust and definitely "yes" to weather. Some or all of these have been mentioned a few times before (as a search would have revealed) and always get loads of agreement, so +1 from me.

I'm not sure that making LFS open to modders will be happening for a while though, not while LFS is still in its alpha stage (that's the impression I get from previous threads that have mentioned modding anyway). I'm uncertain if it will happen at all, but then again it's just as likely that it will. We shall see! rFactor, as an example, seems to cop a lot of flak for being almost too moddable - loads of mediocre mods, community friction, plagiarism and confusion are oft-mentioned problems, even by rFactor modders & players themselves - and I wouldn't like to see that happen to LFS. I'd prefer to see the existing LFS platform perfected as much as possible before opening it up to modders, and even then with limits. Very expensive devkit maybe?
Oh, and don't hold your breath for motorcycles - unless of course Logitech release a full-size FFB bike seat

As for random car problems - no thanks. There are already enough things that can go wrong in a race (mostly to do with humans but also involving temperamental PCs, wonky ISPs, blackouts, dogs unplugging things etc) without adding failures in-game that happen for no apparent reason. Real race cars do indeed brake down a lot, but we don't race real cars in LFS ...

BTW It's interesting to see that you're expecting to be flamed right off the bat Don't know why, your post seems reasonable

edit: I don't get your point about cheaters, or about terrorists for that matter I haven't heard about any LFS content being left out - or development being held back - because of cheaters and I hang around here avoiding my job every day If you mean crackers, people who have cracked copies of S2 can't use them online anyway, so they're kind of out of the picture from the start afaik. There's a community blacklist known as the Wrecker Barricade if that's what you meant - that's to list known crashers and idiots and from what I've heard it works pretty well. As for actual cheating, it's usually clear if someone's using a tweak online and they more often than not get kicked or banned for their trouble. Or at least soundly abused

For the mediocle modding, maybe i didnt make myself clear : enable that, but dont allow it online like skins for example, make it only off line, then, re-viewed by players and admins using a downloadable mod file that holds everything, like a zip file, with a xml file pointing to wat mods wat, then, admins could be able to use those files as start off, for example, the 3D model, animations, i am sure this is where they take lots of time.

The cheaters comment was for comments i saw on the add moded content, like, "mods? no!! they would make demo racers have more cars", these coments are purely stupid...

As for flaming, i am used to be flamed alot because i propose too radical stuff, or too minor stuff (details, that can be easily added), like for example, a poor tarmac only track for speed rally... Most times i cannot get my ideas to be thinked about, because smacktards think its easier to say no way, or that sucks, etc than to think a bit, and i have to make the stuff myself like... i once proposed some addons for a web-page like game i played, they were good ideas, and i know this because i created my game with those ideas and got 50k players in 2 months, and the very same people that were saying it suck, keeped playing the game... (just as for an example)

Quote from silentwarrior :

... when my dad goes on the highway and we get like massive rain or on high montains where you get inside clouds, and you can only see some meters in front, my adrenaline really rises, on rain, when he goes behind other cars, they trow a big screen of water that makes it almost impossible to clearly see the cars around you, so you must trust your other sences and hope no one brakes.

No, you slow the hell down and drive responsibly so that you actually have time to react if someone brakes. That negates the need to "hope" and prevents you from becoming a gooey stain on the asphalt.

+1 for everything

i would love to see that in the game and it would make it a lot more intresting.

(and that is alot of typing to i really just skimmed it.)

+1.

Debree from crashs is my most desired one. It would even have to be part of the actual car model, the car model could stay intact, while "Fake" debree could be spawned from the car and thrown within a certain radius around the car, Then cars that run over it, would pop their tires and such.

A friend of mine once made a system for debree, but for a piece of wood, he basically put like a web in piece of wood, that was tied to a 3D array, of 0 and 1, when he wanted debree, he would make the debree as other objects and turn the 1 to 0 on the square (represented by the array) so that its texture would become transparent but not desapear or change.

But he quit after some time.. too much work for a piece of wood xD

Quote from Gunn :

No, you slow the hell down and drive responsibly so that you actually have time to react if someone brakes. That negates the need to "hope" and prevents you from becoming a gooey stain on the asphalt.

On a high way, if you enter a blind zone (500meters of lenght for example) you cannot brake or reduse speed, or others behind will crash into you, thats why sometimes theres pile ups in the north, someone brakes and the rest dont, so boom crash. In a race i would like to see you brake to a speed that gives you time to full stop tro the smoke... would be like...40km/h no? while other cars would come to you at 250km/h