I anticipate that community modding will be an option when Scawen is satisfied with the physics and underlying game engines to the extent that no _fundamental_ changes will be made to the physics and game engines (ie, not gonna happen in S2).
Why not now? Just look at the whinging when he makes a change and something as piddling as a hotlop is wiped. Now how many moaning gits would be posting if he made a change that led to their new/modded vehicles no longer working? This is also (in my opinion) why we won't see official new vehicles in S2. It's simply not worth the time and effort to develop new vehicles and then to have to tune and tweak them everytime you make an underlying change. I'm honestly surprised we've got the number of vehicles we do.
The way I see it (and of course this is just my theory and hope
), Scawen plans to develop the underlying physics to the point that creating 'new' cars or recreating real world vehicles will be simple because all the input values you'll select will be rational, real world type values. Contrast this to RFactor where the underlying physics engine is a piece of crap and where the result is;
a) some good mods where people have tweaked the input values completely outside of what you'd call rational in order to achieve a feel that's somewhat realistic
b) a whole heap of crap mods
Then consider the online situation. If modding/vehicle creation was possible now (ignoring LFSTweak etc), the end result would likely be a huge number of different and almost completely unbalanceable vehicles and the userbase could be fractured. You'd need to race a league to get any real parity in racing and outside of places like CTRA, pickup racing would disappear. This (the way I see it) is the lifeblood of LFS and a great differentiator versus other racing sims/games.
Finally, a lot of people seem to be hung up on the idea that the only possible reason for Scawen (and Eric and Victor of course) to develop the game is to make a HEAP of cash and that he must be crazy because he's not implementing every improvement suggestion on the forums and won't build the development team and won't accept offers of cash to add 'feature X' or 'feature Y'. In contrast, I'm pretty sure I've read somewhere that he said he wasn't actually keen to advertise or promote LFS to any great extent right now, was happy with the 'limited' distribution and was certainly happy with the rate of development. Is it not possible that he wants a project that he can make _some_ money from (if not a mint) for a number of years into the future while his children grow? Is it not possible that he's content to do something that he finds satisfying and to live a reasonably comfortable life instead of having to go corporate and maximise profits?
Finally x2. There's absolutely nothing stopping him from selling more S2 licenses, finalising his physics and game engines, never releasing an S3 and instead selling the engine to a development house. I know if I had to deal with a lot of the whingers around here and was made a good offer I'd certainly consider it.....
Anyways, those are my thoughts for now. In reality Scawen probably hates to be at home, wants to make a million yesterday, wishes he could expand Scavier into a game development house and would love you to mod his game but he just can't figure out how to open source it...