LFS - Christmas progress report

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maSonn09

maSonn09

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From The Liveforspeed website

"Dear LFS Racers,

We hope you have had a good year.

The stable Z28 has been the latest version for a long time now, while we have been working on things for the long term future of LFS. As many of you know, the tyre physics system is being updated so all the cars will behave that bit closer to reality. It has proved to be a challenging and unpredictable project, involving a lot of studying, mathematics, testing and rewriting.

Sometimes, we had a version that felt good to drive and it seemed that soon we would be able to release it to the community. But then we found situations where the simulation produced incorrect results, leading to further investigations into the way tyres perform in various circumstances and why they do so. One thing tends to lead to another and for a while it seems that the more you learn about tyres, the more you realise that there is so much more to find out!

Scawen has written a little more about tyre design and simulation in case you would like to get a bit more technical Here.

The VW Scirocco and Rockingham have seemed quite close to release for some time now, but we decided to wait for the updated tyres because these things from the real world will be best experienced with the most realistic physics system. Eric has been working on some more S3 content but he would like to get nearer to finishing before we show any new pictures.

Victor has recently produced a special program "LFS Record" which can help you to produce smooth movies from Live for Speed, using advanced camera control. It is still in a beta stage at the moment. The program has a lot of features - too much to describe here, so if you do make movies or would like to have a go, take a look at the LFS Record thread on our forum.

- LFS Developers"

Also check out the pictures on the site, hey show what Scavier have to deal with.
 
I made myself a promise, that is that I would buy LFS S3 the moment it comes out (right now I only have the demo). Seems that I won't be able to fulfill that promise anytime soon...
 
Jeez that stuff is still not released? Stopped following LFS after I got a copy of GTL in Summer 2009 and they still haven't released anything.
 
G.T.Ace
Jeez that stuff is still not released? Stopped following LFS after I got a copy of GTL in Summer 2009 and they still haven't released anything.
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Yea atm that's how the majority of LFS'ers feel right now. The patch was supposed to of been released in 09 but still nothing except these, rare, progress reports.

The only thing keeping LFS going is the amount of league racing and the close community. Although both are, albeit slowly, breaking down. At this rate by the time the devs release a major patch which includes the Scirocco and Rockingham along with the tyre physics, there will be nobody around to admire their hard work and all their time and effort would of went down the drain just because they "work at their own pace".
 
a lot of the lfsers i used to race with have moved onto iRacing. i did iracing for 2 years. i'm waiting for the new tire model to come out.
 
I still race in LFS but it is really starting to feel dated. Tempted to take advantage of the iracing promo on now, buy 1 month, get 2 for free. :)
 
maSonn09
Yea atm that's how the majority of LFS'ers feel right now. The patch was supposed to of been released in 09 but still nothing except these, rare, progress reports.

The only thing keeping LFS going is the amount of league racing and the close community. Although both are, albeit slowly, breaking down. At this rate by the time the devs release a major patch which includes the Scirocco and Rockingham along with the tyre physics, there will be nobody around to admire their hard work and all their time and effort would of went down the drain just because they "work at their own pace".
Click to expand...

If they would at least release other things in between.
The "problem" with LFS is, that it doesn't officially support mods (I know why, please don't explain it ;)), so it gets kinda stale after a while. If they would've released some more fantasy cars it would be different. Shouldn't be too difficult actually, the cars don't feature tons of graphic details. have no parts which can fall off and the sound engine is also pretty basic.

Let's say they hire a small team for cars (I bet there would be fans who would even do it for free, like modders from the GTR/rFactor games), then they could release 2-3 new cars every year for sure, either for free, or for a small amount of money (3 bucks per car for example) and voila, the game feels like new again.
 
G.T.Ace
If they would at least release other things in between.
The "problem" with LFS is, that it doesn't officially support mods (I know why, please don't explain it ;)), so it gets kinda stale after a while. If they would've released some more fantasy cars it would be different. Shouldn't be too difficult actually, the cars don't feature tons of graphic details. have no parts which can fall off and the sound engine is also pretty basic.

Let's say they hire a small team for cars (I bet there would be fans who would even do it for free, like modders from the GTR/rFactor games), then they could release 2-3 new cars every year for sure, either for free, or for a small amount of money (3 bucks per car for example) and voila, the game feels like new again.
Click to expand...

To put it simply, the devs have already completed the VW Scirocco and Rockingham. Hell, Scawen even mentioned that Eric has been making some new cars in the mean time, although no specific models were stated. Scawen won't release any of these addons untill he is done with the tyre physics, which he has been at for a while now.

I agree, there is already an unofficial site that has many LFS mods, i won't state it as it is completely illegal in the LFS terms and if you get caught using them your account will be banned. There are many talented people there who make some interesting models in high detail, well compared to the existing LFS models, but obviously there are those who should really stick to downloading the rather than making them.

The other thing the community wants are regular progress reports like there was from 2003 to 2007. Since then the dev team have not released many reports.

Here are 2 posts clearing up what i explained;

"I keep wanting to post, but can't think of anything new to say. Our reasons for working the way we do are well documented, and understood by many people, some of who have posted on this thread.

It's quite strange that some people think we are hiding something, not telling the truth and so on. Our biggest mistake seems to have been, ever announcing anything we planned to work on or release. Because those are the things that are held against us most often.

I've tried to explain the complication of developing a tyre model but really you won't get it from my few words, you'd have to try yourself to see all the issues that come up.

Anyway I know there is a lot of support out there as well, which was quite evident in the first few pages. People who do believe that we are working on things to improve LFS and that these things are not easy. For them and us, we are continuing to work on things that will make LFS a better driving experience.

Sorry about announcing things we were planning to do in the past, raising expectations and so on, either by our own fault or when things were announced beyond our control. It's a pity that difficult things can't always be done at high speed, so that previous announcements wouldn't be an issue.

Anyway, it's a new year and I'm back on those tyres trying to get it right and then into LFS, looking forward to some good results that make the cars feel good and stand up reasonably well to some scrutiny by our knowledgable community members."

"OK, thanks for the comments.

I think that nearly all possible points have been made now (from the community's side).

I'm sure it would have been different if we had known in advance how long this development stage would take, I guess we could have tried to plan other releases in the meantime. But it has always seemed like I was near to finishing the tyre physics, so no change of plan was required.

Remember it was the Scirocco that showed up the issues in the tyre physics (there were already known tyre physics issues but we couldn't get the Scirocco to drive as safely as a real one does while restricting ourselves to a realistic setup). So, releasing the Scirocco has been out of the question until the tyre physics system is quite close to reality.

Releasing Rockingham has also been out of the question. We want to release a real track when the behaviour of the cars is right (not perfect, just close enough so the bumps feel right and the lap times are just like real ones).

Who knows, if I had known in advance that the tyre model would take so long, maybe Eric would have thought that he should focus on some S1 / S2 content updates. With the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to pick holes in what we have done and point out the mistakes we have made. But as I said, we always thought that in a few weeks or a couple of months, the new tyres would be ready to roll.

But the carcass simulation, which I had to look into because the tread simulation model clearly ignored too much of how a tyre actually behaves, took me in a whole new direction for a good part of last year. A long time of studying and finding out a lot more about tyres than I knew before, and had never thought I'd need to know. It made my head spin quite often, I'm not an eighteen year old on a university course. I couldn't even read this stuff for full eight hour days, had to take it a bit easy at times.

But still I usually thought I was near the end. So that is probably the reason for our dreadful "strategy" and lack of communication. It wasn't a strategy at all, and I didn't want to communicate until I got solid results.

I am fully aware that this post isn't going to convince many people. But I thought I'd write it anyway, to help you see slightly more from my point of view.

I will unsubscribe from this thread now, which I followed up to this point. But it's a bit too distracting to receive the email notifications and too tempting to come in here and read the latest posts, which takes me away from research and development."
 
I know all of that, but it's not like the tire physics are bad now, I think it's kinda "stupid" to let the community "die" while developing for ages on an improvement, a lot of people never asked for. It wouldn't hurt to release two or three cars without the new physics.
 

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