I could see somehting like autocross working pretty good here, in nature, but not in content obviously.

I can imagine a number of servers hosting an event sequentially, and drivers hopping from one section/server to another in sequence as they complete each section.

Those sections would be put together from basic components by those running each server. Like auto cross is done right now.

It should be set up so that no one would be able to practice a whole event in advance.

I could see this approach working around many of the short comings mentioned here.

Obviously we would need a mechanism to carry over damage accumulation from one section/server to the next for the duration of one event.

The less we need to demand from devs then the less reason for them not to let us have a play with what many of us clearly want. For them the developing of a whole race and stages would represent quite a considerable investment, but given the basic parts & tools to work with, we can lighten that load like a real community can and would want to. Also this could allow it to evolve into what most people are looking for in this area of motorsport.

We just need to acquire and maintain a realistic perspective on our own wish list really.

If any others have anything to add to how this could be tackled then we could start a new thread I guess. I would prefer not to hijack this one. But this is a concept we could discuss further. If anyone wanted to discuss it enough to start a thread then I'd certainly be agreeable to participating for sure. I'm simply not sure of the best place and how to do it properly. Maybe a kind and thoughtful mod would be able to advise best on that, and perhaps even wield their experience to start it in the right place with a sensible title?

I was mention about the similar system some time ago:
http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?p=1288929#post1288929

I was even talking with Victor, about extend his autocross competition system
http://competition.lfs.net/lx_autox/
to be able to manage and run sequential server-layout event. But there was to many things to modify, and the conclusion was that it will be better to run such system from the scratch.

The plan for me was to write my first inSim application, which will be controling multi stages autocross event. But as always, lack of free time caused me to abandon that.

Maybe we should start the thread in Program / InSim requests part of this forum, to find someone which will be able to write this kind of app.

Quote from MudPuppy :

It should be set up so that no one would be able to practice a whole event in advance.

Unfortunately this is the biggest problem with it. We will need an server side option to disable layout saving at the client.

Yeah, the more I think about it, it makes sense for the community to make more of LFS for themselves. If the devs would help out a bit when we hit a rock in the road, then the users would help out making fresh content in terms of coming up with fresh rally stages, albeit with some rather limited sub set of tools and the right textures to make it halfway credible, much like autocross.

I could see say ten servers being traversed one after another; maybe ten teams having a server each in that chain. Make it team disqualification for a server to be publicly open with the race section before the first driver needs to use it in the event. No driver partaking can be a member of more than one team. That way each team could practice their own section in private but only ever get to see 10% of the entire racing surface before the event.

The number of entries you had going on your 3 events is impressive enough to show that people would probably join in, in reasonable numbers too. I'd guess that it looked viable at that time.

We need some coders and some discussion somewhere now. I've not been into LFS long enough to know in detail what is and what is not possible. I stopped coding about 20 years ago (burned out).

either way, even if the devs will take some long time to get to it, I would be fine with this being the kind of stuff they are now targetting for "S3", whatever that will be like. They already hinted that development cycles as thought ought in the bginning of lfs would be unlikely to persist in future coding, meaning that there will not be such a sharp definitiv edge between S2 and S3 anymore (as there was with S1.-.S2)