The online racing simulator

Poll : Are you using the hi-res skin downloads?

No
230
I won't pay for hi res skins
168
I will when official patch X comes out
119
Yes
78
It's too expensive
8
#76 - wien
Quote from deggis :Doesn't this basicly mean LFS S2 price tag is too cheap?

Well, I assume LFS will live on long after the devs have finished the thing and moved on to other projects, so they will need to charge for the bandwidth and servers they need to keep it functional (LFSWorld/master server/forums). I don't think they can cover that exclusively with new licenses since at some point that revenue source will dry out, even if they up the price tomorrow.
I may pay if my parents alow me to use their credit card again. or if I pre order S3 I'll pay a few more $ than what it costs. I don't know if my computer can handle it though. 20 AI with high res skins is a lot for my dell XPS laptop. I'd still like to see say 100 high res skin downloads put into your LFS initial buy.
I paid mainly to help support LFS, but as some of the comparison screenshots show the higher res makes skins much more readable and just makes good skins look better. I have extra computing power to throw at it so why not.
Quote :Postings like "I buy a house with the money you gave me and now I must take a break from finsihing the game" really sucks imho.

Damn those bastards. How dare they spend the money they earned on themselves? How dare they take a break from work? The bloody nerve.

Anyway, I like that this option exists but I won't be taking advantage of it. I just don't race often enough to justify having hi-res skins, and when I do race I don't look at people's skins anyway
Not really sure if its worth the extra money to be honest, how many people really bother making high-res skins anyway? The average Joe Racer on a public server is probably going to use some publicly available skin thats lower quality to begin with.

As for league events and such, people will probably do as they do now and create a skin pack for the participants to use.
Quote from Batterypark :What's the difference between "I won't pay for hi res skins" and "No"?

The difference is my case. I would pay for hi-res skins, but since I am only using an onboard gfx chip and have skins and textures at half resolution, I would essentially be paying for 512x512 skins.

It's not that I refuse to pay, my vote is no because it would be useless for me to use.
First of all, I thought the uploaded skins were 1024 to begin with and 2048 was high-res, lol. I voted "I won't pay for high-res" simply on the principle of it. That is not enough of an upgrade to pay for, and while you're at it, care to pay me for making my skins high res and clean looking? That's silly!

However, if I decide to upgrade to S2, the extra couple dollars will likely go in for the high-res skins. I'm just not that thrilled about a high-res option, I would rather see new rally tracks or new cars before I see a new checkbox in my graphic options. I'm surprised we should even have to pay for something so simple.
Quote from SKaREO :I'm surprised we should even have to pay for something so simple.

The fee is to cover the additional server-side storage and bandwidth costs which would be required to store and serve high-res skins.
Not interested. And I don't want to support these kind of features by paying for them. Again I can think of few hundred more interesting features instead of slightly better looking skins... What about giving more skin slots in lfsworld?

500g of cheese sounds ok to me

Maybe a feature to send SMS messages from LFS next? Oh! :doh:
#85 - Gunn
Quote from SKaREO :I'm surprised we should even have to pay for something so simple.

I'm surprised that you don't understand that we don't have to pay.

Quote from seinfeld :so we have to pay for hi res?

No.


Personally I won't be paying for the option to download 1024 x 1024 skins hosted by LFS. I use higher resolution skins than that already and I am happy with how easy they are to obtain and share. I like being able to choose which skins I download rather than download every racer's personal skin (many of which are undesireable anyway) so the auto download feature gets used rarely by me. LFS World is not the perfect solution to skin sharing, but there is no perfect solution.
The number of skins in the community has been growing fast for years, there is no way we can expect them all to be hosted by someone for free. LFSW helps to ease the burden by hosting many low res skin for each licensed player. This is a perfectly acceptable stop-gap measure to ensure that every server is not filled with plain white cars. It does the job and is included free with your LFS license. Scawen has added an optional service at a small fee (serving 1024 x 1024 skins in-game) for those people who want to use it.

I share high-res skins with the people who I race regularly, so I almost always have good quality cars to race with. For random racers met online, the original 512 auto downloads fill the gaps. So... the existing system works well for me as it is.
I remember back in ye olde LFS days when the sharing of skins brought the community together. Some of the newer people probably missed out on that which is a shame really, it would always be 'oooh i have a really nice skin, add me on msn and i will send it' or something like that. Now its just done automatically, people join, race, don't talk, leave.

On topic, I would probably not pay unless I noticed a severe difference, which I have not yet, but considering I already have around 3000 high res skins in my skins_x folder, I might not be seeing any new ones
My LFS looks bloody fantastic.

I dont waste my time hunting down high res skin downloads, i'm too wimsicle to stay with one class of car anyway, so the auto skin download is fantastic for me.

Sure sometimes now I ask "I spent money to download that skin? You could have put more effort in" when I see miscellaneousDiabolicalSkin01 which I didn't before.

The main thing i've noticed, is pople who have 3 year old crayon drawings for their skins really stand out. But the majority of skins are good, and the nice skins now ... well they're really nice .
naw not paying
Quote from seinfeld :so we have to pay for hi res?
if thats the case i simply wont buy it, ive already payed for a game that has less then mediocre graphics anyhow, if this is how its going to be in future meaning we have to pay for a car or a graphics upgrade, I think id rather leave lfs behind

couldnt have said it better myself.
I will pay when the official patch is out, looking at the comparison of the pic by the other people made me more into it. They looks good IMO.
Before I start my rant...I just want to let you know that I HAVE paid...for numerous reasons.

I notice a LOT of people drawing comparisons between the different screenshots that were posted earlier in this thread.
I would just like to point out that he states that the shots were taking with compression ON..._IF_ he had done the screenshots with compression off, then the difference would not have been so pronounced.One of the first things we noticed when we were testing patch W21 on our server was how crap our skins looked...after posting on the bug report section of the Test Patch thread, somebody suggested we turn compression off....bingo..the skins looked better (at 512).
Also, why are you tight buggers ( "Pay for skins? NO WAY!") crowd..so against Scavier getting some dosh? I know that they look on LFS as their 'baby', but at the end of the day, they are trying to make a LIVING out of it. What has gone unsaid here is the fact that until S2 turns into S3, the sales are at a low point at the moment, income has probably slowed, therefore they not only have to find a way to increase revenue, they ALSO have to find a way to decrease expenditure. Making people pay a SMALL contribution to offset the increased bandwidth costs seems like good business practice to me, and if they make a few pennies extra out of it, then its even BETTER business practice.
I suppose all of you that don't wish to support the devs in this way would be quite happy to see a post from ScaViEr one day saying "Sorry Guys, but the cash has dried up, we cannot afford to pay for the servers, the kids are going hungry, so we are shutting up shop and calling it a day".. Will you begrudge them the extra £3.00 then??
I do not use skin myself, I rarely download classical skins, so I am not interested in hi-res ones , so my answer is : No
This would be cool if I paid to have everyone else be able to download my high-res skin, rather than me download theirs. That way my car will look good no matter if other people pay or not.

Isn't 2048 high-res? Someone was saying 1024 is, but uhh.... well you should allow 2048 skins as well.
#94 - mr_x
My answer is no.

Main reason being my computer struggles enough with low res skins! doesn't need high res to make it worse.

When I eventually get a new computer, this answer will change to yes.
Quote from Bladerunner :
I notice a LOT of people drawing comparisons between the different screenshots that were posted earlier in this thread.
I would just like to point out that he states that the shots were taking with compression ON..._IF_ he had done the screenshots with compression off, then the difference would not have been so pronounced.

I enjoyed your rant... +1 Great post

I dont know if I misunderstood you, but he did post compressed and uncompressed comparisons controlled via the LFS menu option here
Quote from DEVIL 007 :http://www.home.karneval.cz/0222338601/test/
is this enough?If not let me know and I will do some more shoots for you

His example: Compressed
His example: Uncompressed (full)

You are absolutely right though.... the uncompressed versions aren't as different from each other as the compressed versions are.

Quote from SKaREO :This would be cool if I paid to have everyone else be able to download my high-res skin, rather than me download theirs.

I initally thought this might be cool, but if you use the current calculated costings which is 1 pound for 2000 skins downloaded and you have to pay for 10,000 potential other people downloading it, then you might have to pay 5 pounds to upload 1 skin.
a lot of people are forgetting that this is an OPTION!!! you are not being forced to pay ANYTHING extra it is still exactly the same as it was before this test patch.

however, some of us want this option and do not mind paying a few quid for it so please do not have a rant at the devs for 'ripping us off' or anything like that... its entirely our choice as to whether we use it or not and i assume that the purpose of this thread and poll was merely to find out the proportions of people using it and not for people to whine about spending any money. if you think its expensive fair enough but do you seriously think the devs are using this new option to rake in the cash and sit on their backsides for the next year?? .............Didnt think so

apologies for the rant
Quote from SKaREO :Isn't 2048 high-res? Someone was saying 1024 is, but uhh.... well you should allow 2048 skins as well.

Well, but where to get these 2048 skins from? Magic?
You know, all skins uploaded to LFSW are 1024...
I barely play LFS anymore, in fact only two or three times recently after probably 10 months break but I've shelled out the three pounds.
I'm already used to getting 2048x2048 skin packs from forums etc. so it's nice to be able to do much the same automatically.
Quote from joen :No, you CAN pay for hires IF you want to.


Who said anything about paying for a car? And this is hardly a graphics update, just an extended feature people have asked for which you can take or leave.


You've said this so many times already but you never do. Sadly.


Ontopic: No, I'm not using the hi-res skins service. Maybe I will in the future though, it's just not very important to m right now.

well they released the things I wanted fixed, the sounds, and now diff preload, which makes the LSD clutch packs actually work, as I said in other threads ill stay if we see improvments, and I am so no need to leave,

if you read my post IF a big IF thats the way it is making ppl pay for better content on top of the price then ill leave lfs behind "IF"
Quote from seinfeld :well they released the things I wanted fixed, the sounds, and now diff preload, which makes the LSD clutch packs actually work, as I said in other threads ill stay if we see improvments, and I am so no need to leave,

if you read my post IF a big IF thats the way it is making ppl pay for better content on top of the price then ill leave lfs behind "IF"

It's essentially not much different than the SMS service though. The thing is, not everyone can make use of this feature and not everyone wants it so it'd be unfair splitting the charge between everyone by increasing the license cost. At the same time, it's a great feature to have because some people will find it useful. This isn't content, or anything that increases the functionality of LFS, just a nicety.

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