Scawen,

I've spent 6 years of my life as a lead game developer; I've gone through love and hate from the community that we developed around our game.

I've dealt with thousands of messages,
from "You guys are awesome, keep up the great work" "you will go really far" "Thank you, we love you"

to "You're not working fast enough" "we need to be updated more often" "why didn't we hear from you during the last couple of days" "We deserve this, and that" "The latest patch wasn't big enough" "You make false promises, don't make them anymore"

As hard as it was, and god knows how much time I lost arguing with ungrateful kids for a game we released for FREE, I've learned to ignore the few hate messages and focus on all the people that supported us.

And one thing that I noticed and that always made us all laugh in the development team was that the worse flamers were the first ones to spread the love when we were giving news and releasing updates.

I really, really feel you, don't even take anything negative being said here personally and keep up the great work and focus. You have made a fantastic game that I'm sure you're proud of and the recent pace is thrilling and makes me very optimistic for its future !

Arnaud

(ps: if one day you change your mind and need some backup in the assets development front, message me. I have 10 years of experience in Sound Design and Level-environment Design)

I have a 120hz monitor which I can't recommend enough (120hz but not 3d): http://www.iiyama.com/us_en/products/prolite-g2773hs-1/.
The difference is HUGE for anything moving on your screen, and you actually don't know what you're missing until you've tried anything higher than 60hz.

You can set your monitor to 75hz for most monitors (I've actually done that for years before moving to a native 120hz), using a lower resolution than the native one. Try this and you'll already see how much smoother your games feel.
Then comes 120hz which is just perfection for games, higher refresh rates than 120hz are just plain marketing and won't make a difference.

Last edited by Redstar.lfs, Fri 17 Oct 2014, 04:27.

SUGGESTION

You could add a developer icon next to the thread titles whenever a developer has made a post in the thread.

Another game forum has done that and it's very convenient to seek information quickly.

Thanks to everyone for your answers!

@tristancliffe

-about graphics: I didn't mean that the game itself look bad, cars and some interiors do look great, I was just referring to the overall graphical disparity which makes the game look un-polished (which I do understand now since some interiors and track textures will be updated in the long term, as far as I've understood)

-about vbulletin: I wasn't saying that they should switch to another platform, vbulleting is great, but making a new,more appealing and clean [vbulletin] theme would make the site look more inviting and pleasant for newcomers and people who check the forums regularly (even if I'm not part of them)

-And finally, I was suggesting to enlarge the dev team in order to ease the development process, meaning that the current devs could focus on what they do the best and produce fast and efficient work , I assume it's Scawen: coding, Eric: Level Design. But it's up to them and I totally understand if they don't want to recruit more people :]

Anyway thanks again for the quick, precise and relevant answers, I wish the devs good luck with the development, keep up the good work!

Hello everyone,

I bought a Live for Speed s2 license a couple months ago and I'd like to ask you a few questions about the game itself, its development and also give my opinion on a few subjects.
Thanks in advance for your answers and your time!

A few questions

1- First of all I'd like to know if the new sirocco is supposed to be released along with LFS s3 or if it'll be included in future s2 patches?

2- Is Live for Speed running on any particular engine or is it a custom engine coded from scratch?

3- Did the LFS devs state why they don't want to recruit more developers?

4- I don't exactly remember where but I read that the developers chose to include unfinished features to the game (which would be updated in the future)

in order to give the player more variety. When I look at the current cars there's a huge disparity, some of them look good, polished while others look

indeed unfinished. Now I've seen the screens of the new sirocco and the Rockingham track: they do look awesome! My question is: in the long term, will

all the current tracks and cars available be graphically updated to reach the same graphical standard?

5- Do the developers have a beta testing team?

Feedback

I'll get straight to the point, the gameplay is fantastic but the game [in it's current state] is seriously outdated graphically wise. That is the only major weakness in my opinion, this and some random physics bugs.

Opinions/suggestions about the game and its development

I've been browsing the forums and I read somewhere that the developers aren't really motivated anymore hence why progress is slow (I may be wrong though, feel free to correct me) and I noticed that the community feels quiet frustrated not to hear much from the developers.
I completely understand the situation of both sides; I'm part of the development team of a project called CSPromod which is a 100% custom-coded Source engine modification, its goal is to bring the gameplay, feel, and competitive spirit of the original Counter-Strike to the Source engine (for those of you who know Counter-Strike). This being said, we've gone through a lot, back in 2007 we released our first beta of the game, the community was expecting a lot from it (maybe too much) and ended up being really disappointed, for them it was a complete fail, something that would never succeed. This really killed the motivation of our staff and things started to be just like they seem to be here now: slow progress, no updates, no communication, frustrated community, and our forums turned into a complete mess totally out of control. Now, as I speak, everything is great, we've released other betas, we regularly update the community and we're all working hard on the game.
I'd like to share with the developers my thoughts on what, in my opinion, would help a lot the development and success of this game, please note that I'm not "telling" you what you must do or criticizing in any way the way you're developing the game:

-The forums need better moderation, I'd say that 8-10 active and serious moderators would help a lot to keep these forums clean and organized.
-A new forum design would also help, it is more inviting for new users and overall it's more pleasant for everyone (even if vbulletin is great it's not attractive at all)
-Posting developer logs every month informing the community about the progress even if it's just a few lines, some people don't have time to browse the entire forums to find a little piece of information. cf. http://cspromod.com/community/forums/20-Developer-Logs
-Making a "todo" list thread and updating it once something is fixed/tweaked/added
-Hiring 10-20 beta testers which know enough about the game to be useful and give constructive feedbacks. Make them sign an NDA to prevent them from leaking pictures/videos/files.
-Enlarge the dev team! There are a lot of passionate and qualified people ready to work for free.
In my opinion you'd need (in order of importance):
.a development manager
.another programmer
.a texture artist
.a 2d artist
.a level designer
.a sound designer
.a web designer

I'm sure that this would really help you to be motivated again
I'll certainly update this list with other things I currently don't have in mind


Thanks for reading! I hope it wasn't too long, a word from a Live for Speed developer would be greatly appreciated, have a nice day!