Quote from duke_toaster :

I suggest that those persons are kept anonymous, then.

I'm not convinced by that at all!
If they are to be anonymous, who chooses them?
by what criteria are they chosen ?
who decides which users are 'respected'?
who must they be respected by?
Whats going to stop anonymous persons form exercising petty personal grudges and agendas? Its even more difficult to hold them to account if we don't know who they are!

Quote :

What IP infringements?

The majority of community mods are likely to include some unlicenced IP. If they are to be officially sanctioned (by association), how will this be prevented?
Do the panel have to refuse every mod that has unlicenced IP?
If the mod provider states they have a licence, who is going to pay for lawyers to check the legality?
Do you expect the devs to trust anonymous 'respected' volunteers possibly with no legal expertise with their livelyhood?
What if some unlicenced IP slips through because one of the volunteer 'respected' persons messes up - who is going to pay the damages after the lawsuit?

If you don't have a panel and do things in a similar way to youtube , having no selection process, instead using user ratings and content reporting mechanisms, you can sidestep all those issues. Additionally we might get some un-licenced 'real' content that doesn't get locked because the IP owner doesn't see any advantage in preventing its use. Sure some mods using unlicenced content will be removed, but many will not, and doing things this way, the devs are not in such a legally vulnerable position.

How many of the custom 'user' skins in the database have corporate IP all over them and yet have no permission? yep, plenty of them, and yet in practice, there have been no issues. If those skins were officially sanctioned, you can bet that there would be major legal problems. There is nothing significantly different in the case of mods - at least from a legal standpoint - other than that the unlicenced content wouldn't even be stored on official servers.

allowing modding in lfs could ruin it, the reason I say this is because if people start making mods like cars and tracks may make it become not so much of a realistic sim, at the moment we deal with what it has to offer, and lfs has a lot to offer and is pretty realistic, well nearly every sim I have played is no where near as realistic as lfs, well I haven't played a game what is as realistic as lfs. So letting people to add cars and tracks could make the physics of member created cars not as good as the ones created by the devs.

So my opinion is don't allow modding on lfs and leave it to the devs who create cars with very good physics. Also allowing people to create their own cars and tracks means that we could end up with some stupid looking cars and tracks what are rubbish, basically fantasy cars and tracks. We are already able to create tracks to a certain extent, as we have autocross what is enough, and we are able to create our own car skins what is decent, we don't want to turn this sim into something like Rfactor do we?

Don't think it would work. Me votes No

Quote from col :

This is one of the issues that my idea is specifically designed to avoid! Did you read my original post?

Just to clarify. Yes I read your original post, but having everything go through the Master Server like that would use more bandwidth than I could possibly imagine. It'd cost a fortune in hosting. Money best spent elsewhere.

Add to that the risk of a virus getting passed from the hosting server to the Master Server, to every game host, to every client host and you should start to see why it's not practical.

I'm not against LFS modding in a hardcore way, but I think it should be relatively self-contained. This is why I keep pimping my own ideas to minimize strain on the Master Server and lessen the downloads that everyone would need to get.
If you can join a server with no extra downloads required, download only a selection of car and setup parameters, and a single car body .cmx file to wrap it in, that would be nothing at all.

Quote from Dajmin :

Just to clarify. Yes I read your original post, but having everything go through the Master Server like that would use more bandwidth than I could possibly imagine. It'd cost a fortune in hosting. Money best spent elsewhere.

Maybe you read it too quickly
All I'm suggesting would go through the master server would be some sort of encrypted key, and on the occasion that a client doesn't have the required mod, a _short_ test description and a LINK to an EXTERNAL download.
If that would use more bandwidth than you can possibly imagine, then you don't have much of an imagination
( On average, we're talking orders of magnitude less than a single skin download !)
Add to that the fact that most of the activity will be when a new mod version is released or when a new LFS version is released and lots of new users join (and mods need to be updated), and you can see that bandwidth is a non-issue in this system.

Quote :

Add to that the risk of a virus getting passed from the hosting server to the Master Server, to every game host, to every client host and you should start to see why it's not practical.

Nonsense - there is no more danger in my suggestion than there would be with any 3rd party modding solution. In fact it is more secure, because as soon as any mod is found to contain malware of some kind, it can be banned and action can be taken - in which case far fewer end users will suffer!

Quote :

I'm not against LFS modding in a hardcore way, but I think it should be relatively self-contained. This is why I keep pimping my own ideas to minimize strain on the Master Server and lessen the downloads that everyone would need to get.

having modding 'hardcore' and 'self-contained' is exactly what causes fracturing of the community in other games.... modding becomes a cliqué activity - it tends to be regular experienced users that use the mods/ These are the same people who set up servers and populate them... this causes barriers to new and/or inexperienced users.... exactly what we want to avoid.
(just to clarify, when I talk of modding I mean adding new tracks and cars - not hacking the physics to allow ridiculous horse power or extreme setup options)

Quote :

If you can join a server with no extra downloads required, download only a selection of car and setup parameters, and a single car body .cmx file to wrap it in, that would be nothing at all.

Even that would be a much heavier load on the master server than my suggestion - remember a new car is not going to be just a .cmx file - it will also have to contain a whole bunch of data related to physics components like suspension parts, collision data etc. That is always going to be much larger than an encrypted handshake and a link to an external download site.
What about tracks - how are you going to factor those into it?
My understanding is that new tracks are at least as much in demand as cars, and that modders are at least as desperate to be able to work on tracks as on cars.

If it was just an external link there'd be no point having it go through the master server at all. That just makes it exactly the same as any other system - "go to our website, get the new version of the mod, hope we don't release a new one any time soon". Using the MS as a link generating program is a serious waste of resources.

My track creation idea, in a nutshell:
You choose a setting, using a background from one of the existing tracks. Then, like the autocross tool you select a piece of road you want to place. There are a range of options with each piece - things like starting/end width, start/end height, camber, etc. and you place it down. Select another piece and continue. On top of that you get to place features, like potholes and kerbs which have features like width, height, length.
If LFS had this as an option, you would need absolutely no downloads when you joined a server running a custom track - it would just use the same parameters to recreate that track using the features it was set up with.

The same is more or less possible with cars. LFS already has settings for multiple engines, drivetrains, etc so all you need to do to create a new car is fill in those fields - the basics to make it function are already there (as evidenced by the tweaker). Add to that things like wheelbase, tyre size/width and the like and you totally negate any downloads. Then if the server hosted a .cmx file with the car body, that could be downloaded like the skins are now, meaning an entire new car for only a kb 3d model download.

This system would take an absolute assload of work and it would take a long time to set up new tracks and cars, but the modders are already prepared to do this, and if the results could be saved to a file and distributed among server ops, you could have them added to current server rounds and loaded the same as a track does now.

Thats an esitimet of what might happen chances are if there was a custom track already using the LFS features we would all still have to download it as that we didnt already have it even if its using the same things its still new therefore not there, same with cars its new that not everyone will have therefore making more download time to get all the right blah blah blah. ect.

-1 If Scarwen Victor and Eric wanted us to have new things they will give them to us in time. Thats all there is to it.

My suggestion wouldn't be a download any more than autocross layouts are now. Autocross placements go "put object 1 at position x,y". Just like it applies user's car settings to each vehicle when you join a server.
My idea goes a bit further with "place track piece 1 at position x, y with parameter a set to 5, b set to 12, c set to 4.7" etc.

Quote from Dajmin :

My suggestion wouldn't be a download any more than autocross layouts are now. Autocross placements go "put object 1 at position x,y". Just like it applies user's car settings to each vehicle when you join a server.
My idea goes a bit further with "place track piece 1 at position x, y with parameter a set to 5, b set to 12, c set to 4.7" etc.

And unfortunately, it doesn't offer real 'modders' anything like they would want or need.
It would not be possible to create truly original content, therefor it would be kinda pointless to spend a lot of time developing what would be quite a complex management system.

Quote :

If it was just an external link there'd be no point having it go through the master server at all. That just makes it exactly the same as any other system - "go to our website, get the new version of the mod, hope we don't release a new one any time soon". Using the MS as a link generating program is a serious waste of resources.

Hmm, it seems there's another part of my original suggestion that I will have to explain again - maybe there is a lack of willingness to understand the implications of the suggestion?

The idea is that a future moddable LFS version would have some mechanism by which installation of mods is handled automatically. The only user intervention required would be to click 'OK' or 'cancel'
heres the scenario: When a user tries to join a server that is running a mod, the master server can interrogate the users install to see if they have the correct version of the correct mod for the server they are trying to join. If they don't have *exactly* the correct version, the database WILL have a working link to a VALID download stored on an external server (maintained by the mod provider - not by the LFS team... If at any point anyone tries and fails to download via the link in the database, that mod will be locked until the maintainer sorts the problem).

Heres another scenario - this time from the perspective of setting up a server.
When a user tries to create a server, the master server can interrogate their LFS version and check to see that the mods they are running are registered on the database and are up-to-date. If any of the mods are either not registered, locked, or out of date, the user will be given a message explaining the problem. If it was just an out of date problem, they will be asked if they want to download and install the latest version of the mod (or an updater?).

If you think about this carefully, you will see that it would mean everyone would always be using the 'correct' version of a mod, and that it would be simple to join a server using a mod you don't have.
No going to external websites, no searching for the correct version, no worries or hassles for the end user.
There are no 'external links' visible to the user. What there are are links to external resources that are all managed behind the scenes automatically by the software.
Look at what happens when you use the LFS auto updater - you see a list of mirror servers and choose one - most folks are not downloading the updates from the servers owned by Scavier. It would be a similar process for the mods except that if each mod was only on one server, there would be no mirror list required (might be good to have a choice for pooular mods though)...

The only way you could run a banned, locked, unregistered or out of date mod would be in single player mode or on a LAN.

To suggest that this is 'exactly the same' as saying "go to our website, get the new version of the mod, hope we don't release a new one any time soon" is to miss the point entirely.

cheers

Col