Quote from Cue-Ball :

Don't burst my bubble! Nobody knew ahead of time that we would get either of the BMW open wheelers, so I'm crossing my fingers that Patch Z has a little something extra in it too (I know it probably won't, but a guy can dream, can't he?).

In any case, we know the GTR interiors are on the way. That change should be enough to keep everyone interested for another few months while Scawen works on physics changes and Eric (hopefully) cranks out another track or two.

Hate to sound like an arsehole , but how difficult is it to do race car interiors?

Roll cage bars, slab of carbon fiber for the dash and a motec like display.

I dont know anything about coding and the like but to take so long for just interiors just seems incredible,whole sims have been made in less time thats not idle gossip its fact.

Yes i understand its a 2-3 man dev team, yes i understand i bought it as is. But seriously could you imagine that you have captured a market that people are crying out for more and not capitalizing on it?

Not to mention that within the ranks there are alot of talented people that can under the devs supervision add so much to LFS, personally there's no negatives in that idea..

Quote from richo :

ranks there are alot of talented people that can under the devs supervision add so much to LFS, personally there's no negatives in that idea..

Well, there must be some sort of downside. Otherwise the devs would have already asked the community for contributions. I personally don't see the downside, but there must be something. There has certainly been no shortage of people asking for user generated content, and at least a few people who have offered to provide it.

Nobody has heard from Kegetys in a while...perhaps the devs hired him on to the team to speed up development! Yeah, that's the ticket.

Now that would light a fire in LFS development. As someone on the outside Kegetys has been able to accomplish some very cool things even if we can't use them all.

In the end for me at least LFS is slowly dieing. Having been here from nearly the begining, and seeing it evolve over time I have always felt the pace of development was way too slow. I don't blame the devs personaly for this, I think alot of it has to do with what LFS really is, a cool little experiment that took on a life of its own and has managed to remain at the forfront of Racing Sims because the challangers have fallen short of their goals. Drivers Rapublic and nKPro both looked to be great but DR looks dead, I was really looking forward to this one, and nKPro fell appart and is still tryign to pick itself up.

iRacing's subscription and pay for content model is not a new one. I is exactly the same as another title that the entire comunity was going Gaga over several years ago. It did not have a subscription service but you were going to have to buy each car and track seperatly each woudl come on a credit card CD which you could add to your current content. No one was bitching about that back then. We all remember Racing Legends don't we?

I don't know how poor most of you are that has you fussed about $13 US a month. That is 1hr of work for me, 2g of fuel, 2 trips to the fast food place or 1 trip to the movie theater. Its nothing, even if I only play for 2 hours a week, it brakes down to like $1.60 a hour for entertainment. That sis dirt cheap.

So I look at it like this. I can continue to make LFS my primary racing sim and hope to get some new content, features or vehicle dynamics improvemtns from a development team of 2 people who are not wealthy and al have other distractions, (Scawen's growing family) or I can spend a little money and give iRacing a try, which has a nice experanced development team, partnerships with lots of great real racing entities and the good finacial backing from a guy who is a sim enthusist. It becomes a no brainer. I will refocus on iRacing, even if it is still lagging behind LFS on some features or even all of them it will evolve as a far faster pace.

LFS will not continue to remain on top if it continues as is has been. Of that I am absolutly positive.

On Wiki, i am declared as the person who FIRST found the FIRST LFS demo ver.

So i speak from experience, having been around since the VERY beginning.... They REALLY need to up their game, invest in themselves as a company, not an individual, this means hire one or two people more. Just think, after a few weeks of getting the extra help on the same page, the work timeline will literally be cut in half, 1\4 at worst.

LFS WAS on top 2 years ago, now its simply there. Being in the game DEV business i can see whats happening right now that will come out this\next year that no one knows about, and with confidence i can say that LFS has nothing to make it stand out... now or in the future.

I wish the devs would comment on one of these recent threads...at least give some insight on something...even if it was brutally honest regarding how they feel about everyone's 'moaning' recently...i just wonder what their thoughts, ideas and agenda is at this point

I think they have a policy never to comment on threads like this. Which is fair enough, I think, because otherwise it would be hard for them later on to draw a line between what to comment on and what to ignore.

There are around 50,000 LFS licenses sold.

50,000 x £24 shouldn't be hard, although it's misleading as this is money for tax etc.

I am never going to pay so much money for a racing sim, even if they use "laser technology" and I'm definately not going to pay by month.

So I'm not interested in the game and LFS will stay on top for me.

Quote from George Kuyumji :

but having 1 dedicated Mod Team with people of programming skills from within the community.
.....but if LFS doesnt allow controlled Modding (only quality Add-Ons) I dont see how LFS will stay infront in the long term.

+1 for controlled Modding

Take LFS:
- a constantly evolving online racing simulator
- a pay per release system
- a 3 persons dev team

Make it big, full time hard job. Increase the dev team to several dozens. Then you are obliged to ask users to pay more often than every release...pay per month for example. And you have to be sure to attract many users....a good idea is to have real cars and tracks, people like it.

What you get is iRacing. iRacing is almost LFS concept with a large company and investment. Both sims can be very successful, they offer similar concept for different simracers.

For me LFS should increase dev pace (I suppose it requires increasing dev team)...iRacing is like a big factory, maybe too big, but sure LFS looks sometimes too small. LFS product is mature and is asking for more.

I'd like to give one opinion about iRacing's monthly pay.

It is good thing for few reasons.
Kids can't play it, cuz they can't afford it. Why is that a good thing? Most of T1 wreckers are kids.
People from poor countries can't afford it, unless they have good job, or good wife
That's good because it lowers rate of bad connections, and lowers rate of LAG.
And in last point, it's good because only real sim racing enthusiast who are willing to pay are going to meat same guys as them, not noobs. You all probably know about safety rating.

In waiting for my invitation I only hope that my computer is going enough. We'll see maybe I like it, all I can read for now is good. After 3 years of LFS'ing, I'm really sick of tracks.

Quote :

People from poor countries can't afford it, unless they have good job, or good wife That's good because it lowers rate of bad connections, and lowers rate of LAG.

That's awful. Aside from being politically incorrect, it's probably factually incorrect as well. Australia's not exactly a poor country and we've got some of the worst and most expensive internet around.

I think the devs won´t hire more people to work on LFS, because there isn´t enough money available.

Since the development goes on, but people just pay once, the costs keep running.

That´s the difference to other games: the game is developed and released, then the money hopefully comes in. Scavier are working mostly with money from the past.

Maybe the devs should change this to get more people into development like paying 2 pounds a month for faster improvements. Everyone who can afford a computer to run LFS can pay this.

Quote from NikLaw :

Maybe the devs should change this to get more people into development like paying 2 pounds a month for faster improvements. Everyone who can afford a computer to run LFS can pay this.

That’s not true at all. People will have been brought their computers and LFS, people won’t be able or have the ability to pay monthly or the simple fact that they just cannot afford to have an additional monthly cost.

There are a million reasons why what may seem like a very small amount is just a step to far. To say everyone can afford it is to simplistic.

...and not forgetting those who just don't want to pay more money.

Thought this was interesting. Scale is based on the average worldwide traffic of live for speed in all years.

As you can see, the decline in the popularity of LFS is a fact.


http://www.google.es/trends?q= ... l&date=all&sort=0

EDIT:

Even more interesting - though worrying - a comparison between LFS, rFactor and iRacing:

http://www.google.com/trends?q ... l&date=all&sort=0

Quote from Boris Lozac :

GTR Interiors - I knew they are coming in 2006... They probably won't be in the Patch Z, but in the "christmass" patch, and peope will be "omg, omg, Scawen and Eric youre gods!!"

Yes, but don't the new interiors mean a physics update which means wipeing the LFSW hotlaps etc again, not too long after the last one at Xmas 07. Not that this bothers me but clearly the devs want to minimise the number of times they do this.

Quote from Gimpster :

I don't know how poor most of you are that has you fussed about $13 US a month. That is 1hr of work for me, 2g of fuel, 2 trips to the fast food place or 1 trip to the movie theater. Its nothing, even if I only play for 2 hours a week, it brakes down to like $1.60 a hour for entertainment. That sis dirt cheap.

I agree it's not that expensive for those of us lucky enough to be familiar with the above standard/cost of living. I do however, totally object to the fact that as soon as I stop paying monthly fees I lose the content I have already bought, oops I mean rented. I may be daft, but I'm not stupid

I've only been playing LFS seriously for a couple of years (c. 25k miles) so am nowhere near burnt out or bored of the content.

I also have faith the dev team will spoil us rotten with new cars and tracks, but not before S3. Keep the faith

Quote from BurnOut69 :

Thought this was interesting. Scale is based on the average worldwide traffic of live for speed in all years.

As you can see, the decline in the popularity of LFS is a fact.


http://www.google.es/trends?q= ... l&date=all&sort=0

EDIT:

Even more interesting - though worrying - a comparison between LFS, rFactor and iRacing:

http://www.google.com/trends?q ... l&date=all&sort=0

If you look closely at the graph it clearly shows a cycle (or pattern). We are currently in the final of one, and if it should repeat, we should have something new in LFS very soon.

You must have missed that each peak is lower than the one before

http://www.google.es/trends?q= ... l&date=all&sort=0

thats mostly because the main domain name was changed from liveforspeed.net to lfs.net I guess

Quote from BurnOut69 :

You must have missed that each peak is lower than the one before

Wrong. 2006's peak is bigger than the one before, 2007 Jan is bigger than the 2 before, 2007 Dec is bigger than the 2 before. The 2005 is nothing more than the release of S2, i think.

Quote from ORION :

http://www.google.es/trends?q= ... l&date=all&sort=0

thats mostly because the main domain name was changed from liveforspeed.net to lfs.net I guess

That could be, Im not into the inner workings of google trends, but I believe its based on news volume rather than website addresses. I searched for Live For Speed, so I dont think the URL comes into play.

Quote from LiveForBoobs :

Wrong. 2006's peak is bigger than the one before, 2007 Jan is bigger than the 2 before, 2007 Dec is bigger than the 2 before. The 2005 is nothing more than the release of S2, i think.

Dude what graph are you looking at? No peak in 2007 is bigger than ANY in 2006 and no peak in 2006 is bigger than any in 2005

http://img209.imageshack.us/img209/6271/downec8.jpg

Quote from jayhawk :

Of course, of course...as we all know, paying a little bit of money every month will radically alter human behavior, for the better.
No, iracing won't see any of the above grievances you state, because as we know, people are rational and logical when it come to their money and winning, they would not DARE to bump, push, cheat...whatever it takes to win.

Will it? Crashes will keep happening, no matter how much the entry fee will be. Now what do you think will happen if some guy gets thrown off track in a racing incident? He's gonna be pissed because he just lost 5$ worth of racing. I hope they'll have some full-time admins on every server, 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. If there's something I've learned until now, it's that money does not civilise people, on the contrary.

I think serverwise what the guys at UKCT have doen with the CTRA servers and the X-System is just great. Set up a scoring and reporting system. The scores permit to access new cars and voilà you've got a self-controlling environment with a motivation for the drivers and some good racing!

Contentwise for the game I think it's too bad the devs haven't tried to implement possibities for the community to create content, like has been done by Bohemia with Operation Flashpoint. Users have developed some whole new vehicles, weapons, characters, maps,... The only problem for the devs is they wouldn't have complete control over what's being released and developed.

They could let the community develop some new content and THEY could choose the really nice features and "officialize" them in an update release.

I do hope they're thinking about what's going on and trying to find solutions, because this game is too awesome to just let die.

Quote from Hoppers :

I do hope they're thinking about what's going on and trying to find solutions, because this game is too awesome to just let die.

The rejection of completely made laser scaned track(with all the licences to be in the game i guess), and no interest in contacting UK track owners is not encouraging..

Quote from iam220 :

- very short races,

like that line,

maybe take a look at MOE, IGTC , and more event , most of the events what we have here will have 30 to 45 min races in it , is that to short.


When you are talking about Pick uP racing , yeah , then you are right, that the races will be a little bit short, witch it good other wise you will never have a full grid, Because its Pick UP Racing , what means you just want to race a couple of laps

Quote from Hoppers :

Will it? Crashes will keep happening, no matter how much the entry fee will be. Now what do you think will happen if some guy gets thrown off track in a racing incident? He's gonna be pissed because he just lost 5$ worth of racing. I hope they'll have some full-time admins on every server, 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. If there's something I've learned until now, it's that money does not civilise people, on the contrary.

Good question. Safety rating is an average. If you are a wrecker, you should be involved in many more crashes than a careful driver...on average safe drivers should have a better safety rating than others, even if sometimes they can have a penalty because of another guy.

I suppose with time they will be able to refine the safety rating, and decide automatically which crash is really a fault or not. From the trajectory of vehicles before the crash it is possible to identify typical crashes for which one driver is clearly guilty.