Mind your manners. You can state your opinion. You cannot deliver a torrent of abuse.
@geeman1: could be nicer.
Mind your manners. You can state your opinion. You cannot deliver a torrent of abuse.
@geeman1: could be nicer.
You insists discussing here instead of original thread, fine let's split conversation then.
There has been 0 games so far where modding has been planned. They just have left everything open, no wonder there is complete mess.
As I have said about 100 times already, modding does not mean mess when it is done properly and when things are planned. Think, use imagination, don't just except it goes with same tracks as everyone else has done, LFS devs are much more capable to understand key issues and for most there is will to create new, make things work, do everything better.
If you really have read that other thread and understand points there has been made you would understand that bringing up rFactor as an example is pointless, there they just left all files open with hardly any documentation, modder have to be engineer level at least to make mod that is even semi right and still there is great deal of things where it is not sure how they use data. That is fine example of how not to do it.
Modding is actually quite new in bigger scale so no wonder first efforts have gone wrong, but now there is examples showing how not to do it.
Read more about that thread, there is lot of stuff, understand that all, understand that modding does not mean end of original content, it can be made so that you can be perfectly well not aware that there is mods.
I think you were right the first time - it's probably better to not split the discussion. This isn't the right section for it anyway 
Apart from Unreal and Quake family of games I guess. UT even included editors etc out of the box.
Until S3 is out this thread is just pointless and S2 final is not even on the radar yet.
Modding WILL NOT HAPPEN until then because if allowed now it would mean the developers would need to think about the impact on mods of any changes they make. This increases the workload no end and delays the release of S3.
The LFS world database will have to log stats for mod based content otherwise it again is pointless. This means only final release of mods can be allowed to stop the normal hack, release, hack, release cycle of 99% of the modders out there.
Unless there is tight dev control over modding content it will be a mess and kill LFS and LFS World. Throuble is that if the devs do control which mods can be used etc it means NO LICENCED content will be allowed in LFS because that would mean the devs have given their OK. This is the same issue as the devs including a BMW M3 without a licence from BMW.
LFS World and how the online game works makes LFS more than any crappy 3rd party crappy mod ever will. A good mod take a team of people to put together, test on multiple platforms with beta test teams and then release and maintain in a controlled manner.
There're SO many other games out there that allow wanton modding like the aforementioned (and super awful) Street Legal, why don't the complainers go to any one of those games instead of crying here? (time and again, it seems like.)
Hint: They like this game for what it is. Yes, deep down, they do. That's a good sign wouldn't you all say?
Hint: They like this game for what it is. Yes, deep down, they do. That's a good sign wouldn't you all say?
Modding makes baby Jesus cry
I don't believe to tight dev control as that will never happen in first place.
FPS games do have tad different userbase, also there are editors and editors, Racer comes with shipped editors too, that means nothing if there is editor or not when usability is around same and when you can make same faults over and over again.
More work to devs it is sure, but also there should be also price tag, sure 100 is tough price, but I would pay that.
And you can't except to get 100% quality never, sure LFS is under development, but RAC handling anyone?
Anyone can make crap, there always is possibility of error, always there is some kid that puts out crap, so what, I would say that getting quality releases to 60% is already good, there are ways to get bad apples out.
Can't name single driving game/sim where original content has been good and it would had modding possibilities.
Also I don't think that LFS World should record any stats from mods, that is only for original content and mods should be just alternative not main case. It may have some other use, but I would think bit better method.
Might surprise but planning for modding have to be started before S3 is ready and what about if it will slow down S3? Is it bad because you would like to get everything right now no matter if it will be much less of product? I'm sure that until we see S3 there has been long time and if it is year later won't really matter in this time scale.
Why game with best physics should have possibility to make own content? Hmm, let me think, I really can't tell, oh yes it would be nice to even once get sim where you actually could make car that looks same as at your parking lot that actually is possible to make so that it also handles at least close to same thing. There is more than one crazy car enthusiast out there that shares similar ideas.
Still I don't get it why in hell we are talking in this thread that should have been locked in day one, well we can now talk same thing over and over and over and over and over again. Maybe that is what nay sayers would like, so they can say nay enough many times ?
As long as there are forums, there will be the select 5-7 repeat topics.
Why?
LFS will not be much less of a product without modding to me at all.
Maybe not to you, but it would matter to me, and I think a lot of people. Ì don´t have a big desire for mods so waiting for that would definitely be frustrating.
And I do think that if modding would come, it would have to be integrated into LFSWorld, as it is one of the defining(and to me one of the most important) features.
All in all, I will repeat the only thing the mods have said about modding in LFS: maybe we will get it, but not before S3.
So clearly, it isn´t that necessary to start on it before S3. Besides there are lots of things that have to be done before S3 that are much more important.
my guess is because they realize this is the best sim out there currently, and want to have the best platform to mod off of, to an outsider its probably very confusing this whole no modding thing
LFS it the most modded racing simulator currently on the market.
We dont have new cars or track mods and we dont need the physics mods that some sims have to have.
What we have is feature mods, and we have more of them than any other sim going. Show me another simulator that has an active RACING community like LFS does, show me another simulator that has an active DRIFTING community, a COPS N ROBBERS community, a CITY DRIVING community...
When I fire up LFS for a league race, I have a mod that tells me when to pit, when to change up gears, I have one that gives me radio messages on the race around me and tells me who i'm lapping and who i'm racing against, I have crowd noise and I hear the tannoys as I zip past them, i'm totally immersed by mods. Likewise I could have mods for my steering wheel/keyboard (if indeed I had a momoLed wheel or G15 keyboard). I then go online and race on a server running a licence mod, a driver aids mod, a track rotation mod and so on. I race on tracks with texture mods against cars with custom textures.
LFS has more mods than any other racing simulator, period.
We just dont have car and track mods. Car mods we dont particularly need as LFS has car types - and because we can skin the cars ourselves that means we have as many cars as we could possibly ever want.
Tracks we have more active and used online multiplayer tracks than any other sim - all ours are original content, other sims rely on mods to get good multiplayer race tracks that people want to play on - and consequently have less active multiplayer tracks and version mismatch problems and so on.
So to say LFS is unmoddable is just outright ludicrous - it lets us mod the things that make sense to mod. It doesnt allow modding of the things which would screw up the multiplayer.
We dont have new cars or track mods and we dont need the physics mods that some sims have to have.
What we have is feature mods, and we have more of them than any other sim going. Show me another simulator that has an active RACING community like LFS does, show me another simulator that has an active DRIFTING community, a COPS N ROBBERS community, a CITY DRIVING community...
When I fire up LFS for a league race, I have a mod that tells me when to pit, when to change up gears, I have one that gives me radio messages on the race around me and tells me who i'm lapping and who i'm racing against, I have crowd noise and I hear the tannoys as I zip past them, i'm totally immersed by mods. Likewise I could have mods for my steering wheel/keyboard (if indeed I had a momoLed wheel or G15 keyboard). I then go online and race on a server running a licence mod, a driver aids mod, a track rotation mod and so on. I race on tracks with texture mods against cars with custom textures.
LFS has more mods than any other racing simulator, period.
We just dont have car and track mods. Car mods we dont particularly need as LFS has car types - and because we can skin the cars ourselves that means we have as many cars as we could possibly ever want.
Tracks we have more active and used online multiplayer tracks than any other sim - all ours are original content, other sims rely on mods to get good multiplayer race tracks that people want to play on - and consequently have less active multiplayer tracks and version mismatch problems and so on.
So to say LFS is unmoddable is just outright ludicrous - it lets us mod the things that make sense to mod. It doesnt allow modding of the things which would screw up the multiplayer.
Where did Becky Rose get all the clarity pills from? Good medicine.
Making sim moddable properly is lot more work than just opening some files so that someone can edit them with notepad, that I don't want to see in LFS never.
There is lot of things that are need to be planned, also many effect how final product is built, one thing I would like to see is that there would be lfs mods and lfs original choice or perhaps own exe for both, to keep original content completely separated from mods.
So if they make S3 final they would need to change it quite a lot for modding (would be almost S4 then) or else it will be mess like in rFactor and every other sim or game where it has been made without planning.
It is also easier to design modding into sim early than late phase of development.
Modding is a really tough subject. I have all the "Major" sims. GTL, RFactor, GTR2, and LFS.
Of all the sims, LFS is by far my favorite. It just feels better then the rest in my opinion. And not by a small margin.
I really do not think that adding cars will be a big factor to me, but being able to add tracks would be huge.
I love Limrock Park, I have raced there a few times in real life, and would love to race it in LFS. A Fox on Limerock would be great. I am sure there are other tracks that would also add a great deal to LFS.
Adding cars is not as big a deal to me. The reason is that i have found that most sims do not take into account enough paramiters to make it 100%, so in the end, we do not have an exact copy simulated, but an interpratation of the real thing. And to that end, the cars in LFS are more then enough. Like i said, they just feel right.
Perfect example, A few months back, my wife bought me a "Nascar Experience" (For the record, i hate Nascar) What that entailed was a day of training, and 10 hotlaps in a Nextel Cup Car. Very fun!! Well, a few weeks ago, my Team wanted to try a new Nascar Mod on RFactor. It looked great, it sounded great, the tracks are fantastic. the car feels nothing at all like what i drove a few months back. Not even close.
Left a bad taste in my mouth.
But a fox at limerock still sound great!
Of all the sims, LFS is by far my favorite. It just feels better then the rest in my opinion. And not by a small margin.
I really do not think that adding cars will be a big factor to me, but being able to add tracks would be huge.
I love Limrock Park, I have raced there a few times in real life, and would love to race it in LFS. A Fox on Limerock would be great. I am sure there are other tracks that would also add a great deal to LFS.
Adding cars is not as big a deal to me. The reason is that i have found that most sims do not take into account enough paramiters to make it 100%, so in the end, we do not have an exact copy simulated, but an interpratation of the real thing. And to that end, the cars in LFS are more then enough. Like i said, they just feel right.
Perfect example, A few months back, my wife bought me a "Nascar Experience" (For the record, i hate Nascar) What that entailed was a day of training, and 10 hotlaps in a Nextel Cup Car. Very fun!! Well, a few weeks ago, my Team wanted to try a new Nascar Mod on RFactor. It looked great, it sounded great, the tracks are fantastic. the car feels nothing at all like what i drove a few months back. Not even close.
Left a bad taste in my mouth.
But a fox at limerock still sound great!
I realise that. If LFS would ever be made moddable an SDK would have to be released.
Well, I feel the final product has to be build first and then it´s " just" a matter of releasing a " consumer version" of the development tools the devs make use of.
Possible mods shouldn´t influence the way the final product is built, but the other way around imo.
Anyway, the devs probably know the best way to deal with it, no need for us to worry about.
Only way to make sure modding is not what it has been in every other game is to integrate some things tightly to game, not just give tools out to hands of those who have no idea about car dynamics. I wish that they never release their development tools, such freedom will lead to disaster.
Modding should be only possible trough official tools and tools should be made so that you don't need to be engineer to get things correct. That would mean that there are lot of limits and that is one price to pay.
Also there are several things that game has to have, ingame downloading, some rating system which can't be similar to rFactorcentral uses for example, etc. Like I said many things and lot need to be designed into game.
S3 maybe in 6 years, if that is 7 years instead, it is not big deal for me, hopefully nobody is not dreaming to see S3 in 2 years as that is not going to happen :P
I'm sure devs will think about all issues, at least I hope, no I beg them to think all issues in advance and not to make same mistakes as others have done.
I reckon there will have been such immense advances in 6 years that S2 will be unrecognisable or unplayable in its current form, in which case it might as well be shelved and something new started from scratch to take advantage of the latest DX15 technology.
Luckily LFS differs a lot from other sims concerning physics. Most others have a physics model for every car, faking it to behave in a certain way. LFS has a universal realtime physics model which applies to all cars, so it would do the same with custom made cars AFAIK.
Mod creators should definitely not be allowed to define any physics parameters.
Ofcourse they would have to release dev tools, how are people supposed to make mods without them?
Sure they would have to be restricted, hence why I said a consumer version.
See my above two points, modmakers should not be allowed to touch physics aspects. Just create the car, set the car parameters and let LFS´ physics engine do it´s work.
I realize I´m simplifying this.
How can you be so sure?
I don´t expect S3 soon, but 7 years would be way too long. I suspect the S3 stage to take less time than S2, as S2 is mainly physics driven and S3 is thought to be mainly content driven, which I suspect to be a less complex task.
I´m pretty sure the devs are really not thinking about modding at all at the moment. They never said it will be moddable in the first place. I think they want (and should) S2 finished first and then we´ll see what happens.
It's important to remember that there is always natural culling of mods (not moderators
) by the community that helps preserve only the good stuff, yet I agree on the whole with the argument in keeping LFS pure until the project has reached the end of its natural life.
) by the community that helps preserve only the good stuff, yet I agree on the whole with the argument in keeping LFS pure until the project has reached the end of its natural life.My estimate of 6 years can't be wrong, at least when I don't reduce years every year as some do 
If LFS will not have possibility to mod, then I buy my own version of LFS from them, just like Intel did
Even modding would require some work before S3, of course modding itself should not be never be available before S3 final has been done, hmmm, well, I guess it would actually be in S3 final, well worthless for me to think about that.
Do you know what it does mean when rFactor modder talks about making physics of cars?
It means spring rates, damper rates, car weight, weight distribution, etc. etc. Only tires and some inertias are actually even a close about actual physics and even there you can't touch physics engine itself, only parameters of cars.
Yes development tools, but not their versions, too complicated to use and not providing enough control.
Editors should not allow inertia to be typed for example as it is possible to calculate from parameters quite well, really lot of stuff to think about, but basically editor should not be able to let anyone produce unrealistic car.
Same with track editor, there is many things that can be made make sure one can't make stupid tracks. How ever if someone says that this track is Imola there is no way to make sure that it is accurate imola, there we need again another method how to end life of such works.
As I have written to original thread and I still don't get it why it is so hard to discuss there in original thread, why we need to do it in here again from start and over and over and over again.
If LFS will not have possibility to mod, then I buy my own version of LFS from them, just like Intel did
Even modding would require some work before S3, of course modding itself should not be never be available before S3 final has been done, hmmm, well, I guess it would actually be in S3 final, well worthless for me to think about that.
Do you know what it does mean when rFactor modder talks about making physics of cars?
It means spring rates, damper rates, car weight, weight distribution, etc. etc. Only tires and some inertias are actually even a close about actual physics and even there you can't touch physics engine itself, only parameters of cars.
Yes development tools, but not their versions, too complicated to use and not providing enough control.
Editors should not allow inertia to be typed for example as it is possible to calculate from parameters quite well, really lot of stuff to think about, but basically editor should not be able to let anyone produce unrealistic car.
Same with track editor, there is many things that can be made make sure one can't make stupid tracks. How ever if someone says that this track is Imola there is no way to make sure that it is accurate imola, there we need again another method how to end life of such works.
As I have written to original thread and I still don't get it why it is so hard to discuss there in original thread, why we need to do it in here again from start and over and over and over again.
Because you won't take no for an answer.
I agree with most of your post. LFS has more non-track, non-car mods than probably any other sim. InSim is a wonderful thing.
Speaking of which, are you going to continue development on LFS Companion? You said that you were stopping, then said you weren't. I still use it myself and was just curious. I'm also curious if you plan to release your server side tools to disable the use of driving aids. I'm very interested in such a thing. I got something a while back from another user (MonkOnAHotTinRoof) but have had a hard time getting it to run without crashing. Any chance of us seeing your version?
This is the one thing in your post that I vehemently disagree with. While I don't want to see LFS opened to modding, I certainly don't have all the cars I could ever want. We've got no rally car, we've got no V8s, no sedans, no mid-engine cars, no trucks, no buggies, no drag cars, etc, etc, etc. I love LFS and choose it over all other sims, but it still needs a lot of car types to be anywhere near complete. The same is true for tracks. We've got no ovals, no dirt tracks, no hill climb, no off-road, etc.
Speaking of which, are you going to continue development on LFS Companion? You said that you were stopping, then said you weren't. I still use it myself and was just curious. I'm also curious if you plan to release your server side tools to disable the use of driving aids. I'm very interested in such a thing. I got something a while back from another user (MonkOnAHotTinRoof) but have had a hard time getting it to run without crashing. Any chance of us seeing your version?
This is the one thing in your post that I vehemently disagree with. While I don't want to see LFS opened to modding, I certainly don't have all the cars I could ever want. We've got no rally car, we've got no V8s, no sedans, no mid-engine cars, no trucks, no buggies, no drag cars, etc, etc, etc. I love LFS and choose it over all other sims, but it still needs a lot of car types to be anywhere near complete. The same is true for tracks. We've got no ovals, no dirt tracks, no hill climb, no off-road, etc.
Ok, and why is that? What do you know more about LFS than others to make you so confident that it isn't possible that you're wrong about something?
I expect hard evidence now.
What makes you think they're selling?
Besides, Intel didn't buy their own version of LFS. The content is exactly the same, they just made a trade with the devs. They get the BF1 in the game, Intel could use LFS on their tour.
AFAIK, no money whatsoever was involved.
Not enough control? I hope the control will be as limited as possible.
And I hope the tools would be complicated to use. That way real effort has to be put in it and that could partially prevent quickly thrown together crap mods being released.
That's the reason why there are such high quality mods for GPL, and very little crap. It's because the game wasn't even meant to be modded. Only the diehards and talented people kept on trying.
No matter what editor, it will always be possible to create an unrealistic car. I could model a car in the shape of a pear and make it drive, that doesn't mean it's a realistic car.
Such as? If there are tools to lay down tarmac and grass and create elevation, people can make totally unrealistic tracks with that.
I agree, but you keep posting here as well. So ask yourself that question
after s3 is out, why not allow only track modding, we get some REAL LIFE tracks?
with a quality control probably some good stuff would be released.
i see the point of view of yours, if modding is allowed a lot of crap would be released, also online racing will become very confusing with a lot of mods around.
but if we have a team of modders, allowed(right word?) by scavier to make mods, only good mods would come out
and who wouldn't like to race a fzr(maybe a lx8
) on Nordschleife ?
with a quality control probably some good stuff would be released.
i see the point of view of yours, if modding is allowed a lot of crap would be released, also online racing will become very confusing with a lot of mods around.
but if we have a team of modders, allowed(right word?) by scavier to make mods, only good mods would come out
and who wouldn't like to race a fzr(maybe a lx8
) on Nordschleife ? One word: licenses.
It doesn't really matter if these mods are made by other people than Scavier. If modding would be made possible there would be one (IMO) very important condition. And that is, all content should be part of an automatic update system. So LFS itselfs keeps your content up to date whenever version 1.0.2.3 of mod XYZ is released. People should not have to visit some freewebs site somewhere to be able to get the new version through rapidshare or something like that just to connect to a certain server. Meaning, the devs would condone the distribution of these mods. Therefore real life cars and tracks would not be able to be distributed to prevent the devs of getting into trouble.
That's the hardest part of it all. Who's going to determine the quality standards and who is going to control them?
One thing I have proposed in the past is the following (the short version).
Anyone can create mods and release them through their own channel(s). But for singleplayer only.
Licensed users can install them and check them out in singleplayer. This way (hopefully) quality mods would create a "buzz" in the community. And then, every couple of months or so, people can nominate and vote on the mods that have been released.
The "winner" would then be evaluated by the devs in terms of craftmanship, realism, quality, bugs and if it brings something new to LFS. Then they have the final word. If they feel it's worthy of LFS and it doesn't violate any license/copyright issues, they can adjust the master server to allow that content in multiplayer.
This however would probably result in upset modders/players because their masterpiece/favourite hasn't been chosen. Then again, if this is made clear from the start only the true dedicated modders will keep on trying to bring their work to it's highest level.
This thread is closed
Live for speed modding capabilities??
(61 posts, closed, started )
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