thats an olllldddd discussion... No idea if the changes ever made it to the public but I discussion this 2.5 years ago already when this JRR was created, your objectinfo is empty as we discovered earlier. You can read all about it here; https://www.lfs.net/forum/thread/89003
the online racing simulator, it says on top of every page.
It's not about unique, it's about racing. This electrical nonsense is not meant for racing. Can't race with massive accupacks on wheels. Formule E and thats about it. Says enough.
I also am not in favor of this whole Steam thing.. But.. LFS lacks heavily with paying options though.
Last week I was in Riga, visited Cryptocash with help of coinatmradar.com (actually wanted to use ATM @Moscow but this one I needed to report as disappeared), could convert some cash Euro's into bitcoin. Its the cheapest and quickest method to transfer money around. One of the things why Steam got so popular is because of the global supported paying options. LFS also needs something like that otherwise it never gets removed from the dark side of the internet anymore. It must be really made easy for people to get rid of their money and get a license.
It's like Formula One these days, first two battle for position and the rest joins the parade. It's not racing whats going on, it's cruising in a race-a-like environment. The race Gods are either passed away or permanently moved to another sim.
Had no time to reply but you answer it yourself already;
a chatroom consists of seeing who joins and leaves the room and has an overview about which people are in the room. Then there are moderators because it certainly will be abused / spammed and what not.
Its all not so easy as it looks. There is just one person who can do all this and has no time. Its a nice suggestion though, but costs too much work. Someone else should code that kind of stuff.
Every year the same cycle of discussions, in a way its amazing. Might just copy/paste some stuff from previous years to at least catch up with the upcoming yearly Xmas rumor.. Patch coming!
Assumptions are the mother of all **** ups. This forum is indeed saturated with people which only have assumptions. Pretty toxic environment but sometimes entertaining to watch.
Any good moderator/admin knows that "banning" is a last resort, in some situations it only fuels the opposite effect. It's that I am not <25 anymore (sadly) otherwise I most probably also would have created an illegal environment. You don't want to have any relation with this sh*place what it has become the last years
0.6R was released two full years ago, major updates are rare which makes piracy flourish. Releases for this five VR enthusiasts are not counted, it's indeed not interesting for the bunch.
If the main build is being kept flexibele for online play a lot of bad stuff can be kept out. (including cheats).
In order to that the update system needs refinement, should be on the priority list (if it not already secretly is).
Not only this.. LFS should update its network protocol in a way that it will only communicate with other clients which are on exactly the same update. The LAN function is being abused by pirates. If you update the .exe every month (or even every week, why not?) with a fresh encryption you get around the problem pretty much. LFS .exe updates are way to rare.
Even further, only during high peak hours of the day and not appearing in the online LFS listing anymore. The time difference is only five hours so its evening on both continents on a certain point which is very inconvenient.
It's a really bad idea to be "one server for the world" especially when there are people which only understand a different world language (Spanish/Portuguese). It gets enormously exhausting to explain every time to various people how the internet works.
It's by the way ridiculous to see that https://ella.link still is not completed. One UEFA world tournament and one Olympic Games event didn't change anything. Every year the completion date is added with +1 year. What I remember from it was reporters complaining that their live downlinks didn't work. Well.. Saw that one coming. Atlantis-2 is congested for over a decade now already, 40 Gbit/s is absolutely nothing for a whole continent.
Registered cargame.la (Los Angeles but it's also short for LatinAmerica), hired a US based server and did MySQL live data replication to work around the problem but people didnt understand. Only people from Europe connected to this server, seeking some quietness for online hotlapping.
Some idea's came from the COD2 servers which we ran pretty successfully before the LFS project started. The track voting screen idea is coming from this period but the COD2 "insim" mod also had server load balancing.. Could redirect connecting clients automatically to another server, that was awesome. Sadly LFS doesn't support such techniques.
sum all connected client numbers together from booking and pickup mode and you get well over 1500 people online even on this time of the day. I am cheating with a simplefast database sum query but a good old calculator told me the same.
What those people/computers are doing I don't know though, I haven't had that sim+DLC's installed for years now.
This is just one sim being mentioned. The racing / car driving genre is massive nowadays. Loads of choice. As sim you need to have something unique, apparently LFS lost this status of having something unique a couple of years ago. Once a status is lost it's much harder to retrieve it back. No idea whats coming up* but the sort of constant massive derailing doesn't seem to help. Maybe there will be a point in time that it can be concluded that the holy grail (tire physics) can not be done and things finally can move on without constantly looking at two dev builds.
* (ye, seen the reports but it does not make a really big impression to me, there must be more otherwise it turns into a Westhill 2.0 effect. Good for some weeks and not more than that).
I've read your problem description and all I can say is... You need to (have someone which) code(s) an InSim. But it's best to learn it yourself because then you can easily make adjustments.
I don't know if you played any Nintendo the last years (its mosly for kids and parents). But these games have helper clouds which gives tips in a timed fashion and/or based on location.
InSim is just text and can produce some extreme basic graphics at best, but it sure can do most of its job of being informal.