I know they said that they wanted to keep this as a 3 man team, but eventually they are going to have to add more people to the team to get the ball rolling faster.

Letting the ball keep rolling slow is always an option. As long as they sell enough licenses to keep themselves with food and beer, they don't "need" to do anything.

Quote from Jakg :

FTR Scawen said Multi-threading would take about a month to do.

True, but that was about a split down between renderer and physics and I don't think even that would be enough to remove the CPU bottleneck of LFS.

Say rendering takes about half the CPU time currently (very optimistic, it's probably closer to 2/3 in graphics heavy conditions), that means we would get a doubling in framerate in the best case. From the back of a full grid at full settings that would mean you still wouldn't get a smooth 60FPS on anything but the fastest processors available. LFS just doesn't have a level of detail that should require a CPU load like that, meaning "going multi-threaded" isn't really enough (though it would help a great deal of course).

Quote from Jakg :

FTR Scawen said Multi-threading would take about a month to do.

Then i vote he sets a month aside after the next big patch release this year. And works soley on multi-threading.. Almost everyone now has a dual core at least..

After all you can get 2gig of ram a dual core and a mobo to fit it on for £100
no excuses really

Dx10 doesn't add enough to make it worth the bother.

Dx9 on the other hand would add not only pixel shading (which would improve the texture quality to give a 3D appearance) but would also add support for fully sourced realtime lighting. That way things like shadows would be created dynamically by the engine rather than anyone having to program where the shadow would be cast like it does now. And of course that would lend itself to changing time of day really well.

But it's a big job to take advantage of the new features, so we probably won't see it for a while.

You can do all that in D3D8. Shaders, dynamic lighting, everything. The only problem is that the shader instruction limit in D3D8 (or specifically Shader Model 1.4) prevents how advanced you can make all that stuff. It won't look quite as good as it could because you have to simplify a lot of the math involved.

You can do very basic versions of it in 8, but as you said it's pretty basic.
My experience of Dx8 lighting hasn't been great. I guess it's because the old shaders are a lot more rigid than the Dx9 versions. Racing games has always been the most noticable, so you get lighting, but it's all like single-direction. I can't think of how to explain it any better, since it's been a long time since I saw any Dx8 lighting effects

Probably not worth rewriting a chunk of the engine for such a small change.

I was playing Team Fortress 2 in DX8 and then in DX9 a few days ago. The lighting in DX9 was so much better, softer shadows, deeper contrast. DX8 version seemed to have about half of the shader effects as the DX9 version as well. It didn't look bad, but when I found the DX9 button I was very impressed.

Perhaps when Scawen updates his computer he'll become inspired to work on the graphics side of things. From memory he's running a relatively old gfx card right now on a fairly old system. The last thing he'd want is to bog his own FPS down with fancy graphics.

(if anyone's looking for a suitable pressy for Scawen's B'day/Xmas, then you know what to get him )

Quote from Jakg :

FTR Scawen said Multi-threading would take about a month to do.

Also:

Quote from Scawen in 2002 :

Hello Racers! The LFS development team has come up with a plan for Release 1.
....
Our new plan for Release 1 is to release it in 4 downloadable stages, we will charge a price for these - each one at 25% of the total price of Release 1.
.....
The next three 25% releases will contain in the region of 4 cars and 3 tracks each and will come out at intervals of 2 or 3 months.

By those estimates we should be playing LFS S24 today

Let's hope Scawen keeps the shaders in check rather than exagerate them like in 90% of recent games.

Lets hope that he doesn't alienate half of the lfs population by making the graphics too much for most PCs.