Quote from CSU1 :

not even with all this racing going on?

All what? What does that mean to a new person contemplating buying LFS?

I would bet that many people don't know there's even a link to LFS World on the main site. Its such a good sim it seems such a shame not to breath some life into the place where the majority of people have there first contact with LFS.

Quote from DoctorZoom :

blah blah ~SNIP~
This video says it all imho.

Replaced crap with appropriate source.

Quoting this for better visibility, as it hits the nail on the head really:

Quote from jasonmatthews :

I am not complaining at all regarding the development speed of LFS. My gripe is with the lack of information regarding it's progress, which I believe has had a negative affect on the community. I totally understand Scawen's reasoning, which he has stated quite clearly, but I urge him to reconsider his view. It seems to me that he has changed the way LFS works fundamentally, to please the wrong people....

I came into playing LFS quite late (4 years ago), but was lucky enough to witness it's evolution from the very beginning (2002), due to my brother and mates. What I saw was a sim developing with the community involved, and it seemed like a new way of doing things. That, in the last year, has been totally dumped in favour of a big game company approach, i.e. we will tell you about what we have done when it's done.

This has, in my opinion, had a tragic effect on the core followers of the LFS "project". The old skoolers who care so much about LFS and have avidly followed it's progress for the last 7 years, are now left with nothing but noobs, cruise servers and drifters posts, and moans about the Shicokko... I would bet a million dollars (if I had it) that most of the old community, who have been around for at least 3 years or so, couldn't give a flying f**k about the scirocco, but care deeply about what Scawen "wants" to do in the future.

This used to be the way LFS worked, but not anymore it seems....

The forum community, as it is now, needs to understand where the thousands of us, who have been around for a long time, are coming from. Show some respect to the Devs and also to the people (hosts, mods, programmers etc) who have made this sim what it is. If you do.... Maybe, just maybe, the Devs will give us back the LFS Project that we all have supported for so long, and stop listening to the pathetic whining little kids that have infected our sim

Quote from PMD9409 :

They want to keep it as it is.

Then the game will reach a point in the near future, if not right now, where it can no longer be improved by the current team. If LFS is to grow very much more they need to grow as a studio. An IndyCar racing team does not have 3 members. 3-man teams are for club races. Do you want LFS to be stuck at the club level for the rest of it's career? Why not bump it up to pro-am?

I never asked that they do it, I asked why they do it.

Wrong, IMO, they are working hard on LOADS of stuff atm, and an extra man would just slow the process down in Scavier's opinion.

The only difference is, we now have no idea anymore what the fook is going on as the moaning bitches that have destroyed our community have louder voices then me and others

Quote from jasonmatthews :

Wrong, IMO, they are working hard on LOADS of stuff atm, and an extra man would just slow the process down in Scavier's opinion.

The only difference is, we now have no idea anymore what the fook is going on as the moaning bitches that have destroyed our community have louder voices then me and others

amen buddy

i think we will have a great surprise this year... and for me its equal if we get the new stuff tomorrow or christmas...
moanin does not make things better, they just told the devs not to feed us to prevent moaning and whining...
okay, its just a year past the release of patch Z, but i think scavier will give us a very good patch for the long waiting

my opinion: all moaners shut up here, close the browser, mount your f*cking wheel (or squeeze your mouse) and start this absolutely impressive simulation to have some fun on track!

Thing is people are bored with LFS. But obviously anyone who's bored is automatically a moaner and is told to either "shut up and play" or go elsewhere......

Rather ignorant don't you think? After many tens of thousands of miles I think many people have a right to be bored.

Not quite true Jamie. People are bored of the same tracks yes, but the people who have followed LFS for a long time USED to fix the boredom with the excitement of the upcoming features that Scawen would let us know about. This has cruelly been taken away from us now (ahhh bless), so we spend our time explaining to the new forum DriFt0rZ that the shikkockoi will be done when it's done......

Again, do we give a fook about a new car?
How long did it take for the fbm to get completely unused because everyone realised that the fox is simply a better car?
How long does it take for a new environment to get unused??
NEVER
Name me the ONLY advantage of iRental over LFS?
TRACKS+FFB

Why, you ask, is the ffb in iracing so much better than LFS?
Answer = TRACKS

If LFS had tracks with plenty of contours & bumps (we don't even need to go to the scanned route btw) then we would get the feeling of a real car on the road. This would bring LFS to a totally different level IMO, and would go a long way to improving the sim....

But, as I said, we need tracks, not reworked configs of old ones....

So, saying that, in the future of LFS's development I hope they go towards this route. It would then not be inconceivable that we could get to a point of user generated tracks, approved by the devs, with laser scanning etc. This would also get around the copyright issue...

I know for a fact that I would happily give the devs at least another £50 on top of my s2 license to see LFS move towards this way, but I know it is not a matter of money, just will

Reading some of the posts in this thread makes me realise how easy it really was for Scawen to make this religious following put all the blame and hatred on the moaners/bored people instead of the actual lack of development/progress news.

It is no longer possible to pinpoit the exact content of what LFS really "needs". This many years without much anything new, it now requires a bit of everything. Not just graphics, physics, cars or tracks alone, it needs all of those to become modern again.

In the end, we are beating a dead horse with threads like these. The devs won't change their stubborn ways, no matter what the userbase writes on this forum. We get what we get and that's the end of it. And saying that makes me feel sick of repetition.

Quote from Matrixi :

Reading some of the posts in this thread makes me realise how easy it really was for Scawen to make this religious following put all the blame and hatred on the moaners/bored people instead of the actual lack of development/progress news.

It is no longer possible to pinpoit the exact content of what LFS really "needs". This many years without much anything new, it now requires a bit of everything. Not just graphics, physics, cars or tracks alone, it needs all of those to become modern again.

In the end, we are beating a dead horse with threads like these. The devs won't change their stubborn ways, no matter what the userbase writes on this forum. We get what we get and that's the end of it. And saying that makes me feel sick of repetition.

Any new content, car, track etc would cure 90% of the moans.

Well for a few weeks anyway.

Several teams and series have closed recently and this in 99% due to lack of new content and i cant see CD using LFS next year if something does not happen soon.

There are enough cars in the game allready, but not enough tracks. If we take away the various config's of the different tracks, we are down to a pretty small amount of tracks.
We have various cars that covers most of it, but not enough track to fullfit their usage.

My reply is in read in the quote...

Quote from MadCat360 :

What I find hard to understand is the negative difference between 3 men and 5 men in this case.

With 3 men you have people doing many different jobs. Whereas with 5 men:

1 mapper/asset artist - Eric does this. It means his work matches his models, which is probably easier than trying to map someone else's models

1 car builder/tester - Eric does this

1 coder/network guy - Scawen

1 PR/tester - We have Victor (and Geraldine) for the PR, and thousands of testers (plus a private beta testing group as well)

1 project lead/producer/creative director/little bit of everything - I would say that's Scawen, as the coder. They might think differently of course.

They're doing a really impressive job as it is, but you can always make a situation better. Tell me the benefit of having a 3 man team versus a 5 man team. Less overheads, less sharing of work and the complications that bring, and most importantly because THAT IS HOW SCAWEN, VICTOR AND ERIC WANT TO WORK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THEY LEFT JOBS TO WORK ON A PROJECT WITH A SMALL TEAM. HOW HARD IS THAT TO GET INTO YOUR BRAIN?

Quote from CSU1 :

not even with all this racing going on?

I think that regular news on the main page would be far more helpful to sales than that.

It's a bit late for the devs to change their tune before the next patch, but I really hope for a change in attitude afterwards.

Regularly updating the community is a really important thing IMO. Doesn't have to be detailed or specific, just a means to touch base and confirm that they're still active in development.

Quote from farcar :

Regularly updating the community is a really important thing IMO. Doesn't have to be detailed or specific, just a means to touch base and confirm that they're still active in development.

They have "touched base" recently -

Quote from Scawen :

Had a few minutes spare to read some posts here.

Once again I see some people are really getting angry again, and that is a pity.

I have said we are working on things but of course that does not calm some people down. The problem is that we are working on some things that will be released at some point, and some things that may or may not be released (experimental). But experience has taught us to just keep quiet when we are developing things, experimental or not.

Why?

In the case of things we are developing that will almost certainly be released, we would really love to tell the community. And thousands of forum or website readers might be pleased about that. But in time, a few people (maybe a hundred or so) will begin to become angry and frustrated, if for example we were unable to reach our release estimate. Just look at the Scirocco. While we wait for me to improve things that will improve the Scirocco, we can see hundreds of posts of anger and frustration, so we are constantly reminded, never to post information about a future release, until we are 99.9% certain that we can make the release date. We made the Scirocco announcement when we were only say... 95% certain we could make the release date, and this has caused the most amazing amount of grief. We have only ourselves to blame, and a direct apology does not fix the mess we caused by this announcement. Most community members accepted our apology but you can just read the forum to see hundreds of attacks on our work rate, secrecy, rudeness and our general bad attitude.

In the other case, where we are working on things that are in an experimental stage, and may or may not turn out to be released in the end, it's even more important not to say anything. Because this would just raise expectations and excitement, that is highly likely to turn to anger once again, when some weeks of experimental work may possibly turn out to be unused in the end.

In the past, we did write development progress reports on our website, but sometimes we had to make changes, drop an idea here or there before release, sometimes adding something else instead. Sometimes the thing we were working on did not get released, but the backlash for such a thing is just too much.

Face to face I could say to someone, "this is what I am working on". And later I could say "I couldn't finish that, for this and that reason, anyway this is what we have come up with". There would be some kind of acceptance or discussion about that. But on the internet there are some angry people around! And they make it very very clear that they are very very angry! It really is a minority of people... most people out there reading the forums behave online just the same way as in real life, with some manners, and normal human respect. But some people really lose it and unfortunately they do so, very long and very hard. So in the end, it turns out that the best way forward is just to keep on working, ignore the angry posts and so on, remind ourselves, that is just a small minority of people, and just keep going. The less information we reveal about our development plans, the less there will be to moan about when something changes or we don't meet the expected release dates.

Even with all the arguments, moaning and anger about our apparent secrecy, it's still better to keep quiet, even though it would really be nice to be able to say things like "this is something we are working on, although we're not sure when it will be finished" or "we are taking a few weeks to experiment with this thing" for the sake of general interest. That really is what we used to do but experience has led us to where we are now. I don't think that will ever change, it won't be possible to go back to a time when we could give a lot more information about our plans. Because as the realism level goes up and up, it becomes harder and harder (and takes a lot more time) to make one small step. That is what we are doing, small steps, LFS goes forward a little bit more each year. It would be really great if we could work 10 times as fast or whatever, but we just have to go on at a sustainable rate, doing this work that we enjoy, and in the way that we want to work (not by moving into an office and employing people - that's not why we are doing this - and if anyone wants to do that you are very welcome to do so yourself - there are programmers and artists for hire and you can start up your own company).

Anyway, once again, we are working on things and expect some good releases this year!

That's more of a blurb on why the devs don't touch base with the community more often. Not really what I meant...

Quote from farcar :

That's more of a blurb on why the devs don't touch base with the community more often. Not really what I meant...

Although they were touching base - albeit about not touching base

Peoples expectations for the next patch are very high, and if the patch doesn't meet peoples idea of reasonable for the amount of time spent on it (Which it won't, it couldn't possibly), there will be a shitstorm. And honestly, the devs have only themselves to blame. They are choosing to do things for the minority. This quote backs my point up:

Quote from Scawen :

In the case of things we are developing that will almost certainly be released, we would really love to tell the community. And thousands of forum or website readers might be pleased about that. But in time, a few people (maybe a hundred or so) will begin to become angry and frustrated, if for example we were unable to reach our release estimate.

Anger thousands to.. well.. not change anything about the hundreds. Brilliant!

Quote from Khann :

Anger thousands to.. well.. not change anything about the hundreds. Brilliant!

That's what I don't understand
The major part of the community is getting bored of not knowing anything for 7 months...
There's a problem in communication...

I really don't care, dunno about the majority though, it might be a hard thing to understand for people who ain't with LFS since its beginning of birth (which seems to be the majority nowadays)

Could all of this 'Where's my patch?' business be worse because of the ever-increasing downloadable content in newer console games that the new generation of gamers is getting used to as the norm ?

The soon as a game hits the shelves nowadays you seem to be able to buy extras for it, then every month or so some more.

In the olden days, games didn't get updated at all. You just forked out for the sequel.

Quote from Bean0 :

Could all of this 'Where's my patch?' business be worse because of the ever-increasing downloadable content in newer console games that the new generation of gamers is getting used to as the norm ?

No.
It's because we are waiting the patch with no information since December.
As simple as that...

Well even a such a sort of feedback from Scawen which is posted above is more then welcomed...at least from me. The only problem is that I could not see it anywhere and thats the problem.

Blame me anyone who want for I will say now. Its just my personal opinion.

I am in LFS since the start practically when even the current webiste or forum did not exist at all and I think Scawen is starting to missing some points( to be honest I feel really bad that I have to say something like that towards Scawen) or just dont see it, dont want to see it. Dunno what is really is.

The first thing which is the worse and worse is the communication with the comunity and the second is the slowdown in the development...at least how I see that. I talked sometime ago with the old guys, some of them very well know and people are getting really frustrated that its not happening too much for quite a long time(not talking only about the Scirocco delay). Thats why these well know people also disapeard from LFS. Its a shame and I still love LFS and keep crossed my fingers to this game as well but something is simply not going right.

The lack of communication is really making me sad.

The other thing is how in past all the other possible competitors where so far away from LFS in a lot of areas.They are now a lot closer mayve somwhere simply better. LFS is not even cathing for example in graphics development and the traing is getting more and more far away. Its not that I would blame how LFS looks. Its nice indeed but it could be simply much better. I remmber Scawen saying that when most of the cards will be DX9 then he will start using these possibilities but we are getting from DX10/DX10.1 almost close to start of DX11. Not so important to be honest but as I said thing started moving more quicker and LFS is sometimes starting to getting farway then closer :-(. Just look at iRacing, Forza motorsport. Their physic engines are getting very interesting.

Also what I dont see right with LFS that its just following the old days. The gaming world has changed a lot like extra content you can pay for and other things. LFS in my eyes is just simply starting to loose. As I said I still keep my finger crossed and even planning to buy G25 wheel just because of this game I have passion for but getting frustrated a lot from a lot of things which does not go well.

Quote from ignission :

They have "touched base" recently -

I acknowledged in my original post that the developers visit the forums frequently and communicate with the forum community. What I was asking, however, was that they would communicate with the overall community, by placing the information on the official website instead of spreading it out across hundreds of forum posts.

Quote from the_angry_angel :

Extreme? Genuinely if you think we're extreme then I seriously need to suggest that you visit other forums on the internet. If you genuinely are refering to our moderation here then that makes me sad and I'd happily talk to you/anyone via PM who wants to point out certain things..

Don't forget that moderators don't just moderate here. We also take part in the conversation. I would be very happy if we could leave the moderator hat at the door of a thread, so to speak, and that everyone would learn that just because we're commenting doesn't mean we're doing so as a moderator

At the end of the day everything you said could be true. However, the dev team want to develop LFS in their own way, and have repeatedly stated that they want to continue in this manner. I'm not convinced that another thread is going to help. But, whilst it's civil

Perhaps I was being unclear. In "extreme" I meant the moderating level of presence. I have nothing against the moderators being a part of the forum by participating in discussions and other threads. But when it comes to bureaucratic oversight, this forum is by far the worst I have ever experienced. Just consider that a few posts back, you were considering closing this thread - a thread which, originally, seemed like a very sensible starting point for a debate.

I feel for Scawen I really do, not because he has nice hair and is a bit of a dish, but because he's in an impossible situation.

Software goes through various phases during development, at the start things happen very quickly and slowly things slow down, it's when things slow down it's hardest to keep your motivation and I think one reason Scawen isn't getting too involved in the community right now is because all this moaning is going to be the last thing he needs to stay on mission.

The LFS dev's way of licencing the product meens it is ok to them if old users go away from the product and then come back later. It's not that they don't care, but they know that die hards who stop racing now (as I have) will come back again at a later date (for sure I will) and when they do will find all the new features.

Now Scawen's been quite clear in the post quoted above that he's experimenting with some new things. Whilst I am in no better position to hypothesise what those things might be than anyone else, and if I tried i'd only start a rumour anyway, what I can do is explain what that might meen and the implications of it.

Picture if you will that he might be experimenting with marbles on the track. Now if he said to us "I'm experimenting with marbles off the racing line" our reaction would be to have kittens on the spot, but let's look at the implications of that.

It might be that in order to render the marbles he needs to rejig the track system. If the change is quite fundamental that might meen a wholesale rewrite of various rendering routines and the internal track editing/rigging tool. That would also break insim, and it would break positional calculations and AI, suddenly a lot of work needs to be done, worse, is that degredation of the track is a slow process which meens the testing is very time intensive to do.

It is simply a fact that later developments take longer, have more repurcussions, and require more related features to be tested. If things being written at this stage where easy then they'd have been done near the start.

As I disclaimed earlier I don't know what Scawen is working on, maybe it's free roaming (no track layout limitations) or maybe it's go karts or maybe it's weather effects or maybe it's a whole lot less ambitious.

There's been lots of suggestions in this thread about what the development spirit of LFS is or was, but to me I got my monies worth already.

To me, the spirit of development in LFS is more like this: We're free to leave, and we'll be more than welcome back again later when there's new things to show. It's up to us what we do, and it's up to the devs what they do.

Sometimes, when some idiot makes claims of Scawen sunning it up on the beaches in Malibu I think to myself "If he is, then good on him".

How can I begrudge the extensive use i've already had out of the small change I bought this game for?

The fact that Scawen intends to keep on delivering new updates long after i've had my monies worth and my level of interest has withered is testement to how great value for money LFS is as a sim, I meen no subscription fee in a niche market product with a multi-year development cycle? That's unheard of.

So i'm not moaning. Sure ok, i'd love to know what Scawen is working on just out of curiosity, of course i'm curious, but as has been stated he is experimenting with things at the moment which means there is a good chance whatever he is working on just wont work out, so it's a moot point anyway.

Becky I respect you as person here even I dont know you much but when someone saying his opinion about something is not well why he has to be a moaner. I dont think this is right to say.
I really hate to see that when someone is saying something bad about LFS here or that he would like to see something different, more comunication or what so ever what is no rude to developers has to be called often a moaner. Its used so often. The sometimes goods points or discussion is not welcomed. The point why is something I am missing.

The old people I was talking about will simply will not come back because they lost simply interest :-(.