It reminds me (the top part) of the outdoor track MACH in Heemstede NL (or it's just that most track look a lot like each other? :razz
I'd like to see this track realised in Haarlem because it would be really near me (like 20 minutes driving on my bicycle) and a great chance to get my Serpent from the attic again. Keep me updated.
See if you can tell which one is real and which is from the simulator. Doug Milliken and I showed this to a room full of engineers at an engineering conference once. It took some time for anyone to figure out which one was the real car at the real track, and which was from our simulator.
I'll try to remember to come back and let you know more about the Haarlem track when I talk to Pieter next. I know Pieter is talking with somebody about buying carpet, walls, and so on for a track to be built in Haarlem. I assumed it was to be a temporary track with the same layout he designed, but I guess I better make sure before saying that, eh?
Even EA don't charge for beta testing, and they're tight bastards. And they pay their alfa testers.
If you are taking money then you do not have testers, you have customers.
The price of this game has always astounded me from a gaming perspective. It simply isn't being sold as a game. It's being sold as a simulator, like F1 teams have advanced simulators, and it's being sold to the equivalent of F1 teams/drivers in RC racing.
But every now and then it gets posted here, I believe I may have spoken to the author here before although am unsure as it was a fair time back. Of course, attempting to find new customers on a gaming forum will always draw this reaction.
Gamers don't pay this kind of money for a game.
But from a business perspective there is absolute sense in charging high prices for niche products. That's why there are products for almost every niche imaginable. If that niche rings true for you then you'll buy, if it doesn't then you won't.
As a gamer, there is a temptation to argue over the price because there is a desire to try it. What I would do, as the author, is to realise there is a new market available to me and develop a version of my product which is catered to that new market.
It's not rocket science.
An alternative version catered to gamers with a free demo and priced for gamers (about £15 for an indie game last I checked out the indie coding forums).
Of course that product should not interfere with your existing sales, so it's content and offer needs to be adjusted accordingly.
I'm one of the original two authors, so yes, we've spoken here at the LFS forums a few times
If I could discuss the sales numbers that came in just from beta testing (we had quite a few spend $200 or more the first week that are still around), and how many of those testers are still with us as normal customers, you might be surprised at the reality of what happens here. We've done this two or three different ways over the years so have seen what happens in our product both with free beta testing and paid beta testing. In this last batch we had around 300 beta testers iirc, all of whom (with the exception of some griping from two or three) happily forked over their hard earned cash to get the product a few months before anyone else did. All we needed was a handful of thorough testers out of that group, and we got that.
Anyway, as I've said before in this thread a couple times, the demo is indeed free now.
Average gamers: I understand your point about this and at times tend to agree, but one important fact about this product is that very few people that are not in the RC racing hobby find it remotely interesting anyway. There's a big learning curve in driving an RC car for the first time from outside the car's perspective. Helping people overcome that is really how the idea of doing all this came about in the first place back in '95. VRC was originally intended to be a learning tool for people thinking about getting into real RC racing. It was intended partly to boost sales of real RC cars and expand that hobby. Eventually VRC took on a life of its own and became a product with sales value in its own right. The owner sold his real RC car company after founding/running it for 30 years, and now does nothing but VRC. Anyway, if you hand this to a kid or somebody with no RC experience, regardless of how easy the physics are made to be, they usually give up quickly unless there's a chase view. The "steer left to go right" when the car is coming toward you takes some getting used to and eliminates most gamers from our market right away.
So this isn't a typical car simulator that maybe 30% of the gaming population will find interesting. In addition, the majority of our customers drive RC cars in real life, regardless of the price we set. We've tried multiple pricing schemes over the last seven years (we've been around longer than LFS; The first version before I got involved was in '97). To get much out of it you need an RC-style controller, something very few people have, even to run the free demo and get an idea what the full version would be like. It'd be like trying to sell LFS or any other serious car simulator to the majority of people out there that don't have a wheel. Regardless, I pushed hard to get us into E3 and into some more typical game marketing channels, but the boss man wasn't having it.
Regarding price: Finding the optimum price point is tricky on any product as I'm sure you know, and we've tried several basic approaches and pricing schemes here. Originally back in 2004 we released the first version with a free demo and the option to pay as little as $7 for something that had at least one extra track aside from the free content that came with the demo. So people could spend nothing, $7, or go on up to $200 or more if they wanted. The highest sales revenues did not come from the $7 group...
Perhaps a year or two later we changed that so the minimum you could spend (aside from the free demo) was a lot higher (I want to say $50 or $60, but don't recall exactly). Sales revenues jumped substantially at the much higher price. If you stopped by our forums you might be surprised at the different attitude most of our customers seem to take on pricing. You hear a lot of "big deal, I spend way more than this on my real racing" and "this is saving me money on my hobby" kinds of comments, something I've never seen in any other simulator forum.
I tend to push for lower pricing anyway much as you suggest, so don't get me wrong. I'm not really in disagreement, just pointing out that there are some differences with our product and we've tried a lot of different things over the years.
We might not have the general high quality testing that full time, paid testers might provide. Does LFS have this? Is it needed? If Scawen posted something asking for people to test some new content for S3, there would be a line of people out the door waiting to get in. Call them what you want, but if they test and find things you missed or would rather not spend time on, they're plenty useful.
On creating another not-so-serious version for the masses: We've kicked this idea around too. Somehow we always manage to find other things to do first. In all seriousness, doing that could be a massive project of its own. I'm also afraid it would be bad for the 'serious sim' image. Imagine if the LFS guys released an arcade version of LFS. What would that do to the mainstream LFS? I'm not sure how well you can market your product as a serious simulator when you have this other version floating out there. If the Need For Speed creators released a "Need For Speed: The Realistic Simulator version" that was every bit as hard core as LFS, with vehicle dynamics engineered by Doug Milliken himself, how many people here would take that at all seriously?
Anyway, we're working on offroad (buggies/trucks/etc). I'm hoping that will tap us into the more casual gamer market without having to give up the serious sim approach and turn it into an arcade game. I have no interest in doing that.
todd since youre in physics discussion mode today i thought you might help me figure out what the bloody point behind many cars using one way bearings instead of diffs at the front is
surely having only a handbrake is a terrible thing to do?
I told Pieter (the owner) what you said on IM and he wrote "that's the kind of customer we need!"
Shotglass: I've wondered the same thing for a long time. What the top drivers usually say is they're a little quicker with one-ways than they are with diffs, at least on some of the cars. They're harder to drive that way though because as you said, it's rear wheel braking only then.
There are probably a few areas that could be pointed to here as possible benefits. In the iRacing thread where we were talking about braking and cornering, there was the state 2 and state 3 example where the braking reduces lateral force on the front. With one-ways this doesn't happen. On 1/8 scale nitro cars at least, the rear tires are enormous compared to the fronts and have a great deal more grip and downforce, so they can get away with this a bit more. They get better turn in under braking.
Another thing is that braking in straight lines is done hardly at all. At the end of a long straight with a hairpin at the end of it you might stab the brakes for a fraction of a second before you've slowed the car enough to start turning in, but I think most of the braking is done while cornering. It's sort of like this: Stab the brakes, hold it and flick the car into the turn, wait while it slows down and goes to the apex, then jump on the power. So most of the time when you're braking you're also cornering. I imagine with these cars you're probably getting down to the limit of what a human can do in such a short amount of time. A lot of the guys in some classes use anti-lock braking on their controllers that pulses the brakes when they use full brake input. This is at the world champ level and even they do this to get an advantage. Humans can only do so much in a 0.2 second long straight line braking situation I suppose.
In VRC Pro this is how I'm usually driving. I set the brake strength to give balance while braking/cornering even though I'm giving up a little bit on the straight.
With electric 1:10 cars (in VRC) that have the same tires front and rear, this doesn't work well for me at all so I use a solid axle on the front. In reality this is what most people seem to do too, even at the world championship level. Occasionally you'll find somebody using a front one-way, but I think they're a minority. I tried two different real electric cars at the LRP Worlds in 2007 (I wasn't part of the competition of course, a couple guys handed me their cars to try out between heats). One had a one-way and the other had a solid axle. This was the only time I ever drove a real 1:10 electric car, and I couldn't drive the one-way version to save my life. If I touched the brakes I couldn't control the car at all. The solid axle version was a lot easier precisely because of what you pointed out: The difference in braking/cornering.
Hehe, np! I think you guys do a good job, Im really impressed by the overall quality of the game. And well, RC isnt THAT big, so I'll rather support you guys for your astonishing job in a nish product like this. And I dont regret the money at all (even though well... I wish I had more time to play!).
Its so fun to actually meet and being able to talk to the guys who's actually developing the game. I met someone who was working on it as well in-game... :-) So yeah... keep up the good stuff! Cannot wait for more classes...
oh, but one question! The track in Oslo... where did it go? It was there in the old VRC version (I've been around for quite a while, you see ), but its not there anymore. I basically grew up on that track, and my dad become the norwegian champion in 1:8 there back in 1998. Im still there once in a while when Im eager for RC and aint racing IRL :-) Would LOVE to have that track back!
i guess theres a huge difference between the parking lot drivers like me and track drivers in that aspect
ive never actually driven on an rc track (though a friend tells me the difference in grip level is night and day) and with the way our cars are set up (generally well beyond whats legal in professional driving) on the parking lots theres corners where the braking distance can be 5m and more
so to conclude that rambling i guess my suspicion was right that its more a case of what they can get away with while giving them a bit of an advantage instead of something that is better in every way
that baffles me a bit as well
older cars all used to have ball diffs front and rear
im guessing theres an advantage there to be had in terms of weight (all 1:10 cars these days have become so light and open compared to what we drive that wed probably have to come in every lap to dislodge a stone from a cogwheel or beltwheel)
personally i find the cars way too understeery at turn in if i set the front diff up too stiff
I would, that'd be fun. In fact, I've never played an "arcade" racer that didn't spawn the thought "damn, this would actually be FUN with realistic physics". TDU 1/2 for example - that' be awesome. I'd love to throw some of those cars around mountain roads with the feeling of LFS!
In any event, I just wanted to thank you for spawning the discussions in the iRacing thread and now here - it's great reading and as stated by others, this type of stuff is why I still come to this forum because it's bound to creep up eventually with some of the core members still lurking I'm not into RC yet but if I ever do get into it I'll make sure I give your product some attention!
We released 1:12 modified with 4.5T motors yesterday. This and the 1:12 spec are probably the best handling cars in VRC Pro right now (I'll have to do something about that, now won't I?)
It's still a 30 day trial so give it a go if you're into RC cars. The spec 1:12 car (10.5T motor, not nearly as fast) is included as part of the free trial.
We went live about 30-45 minutes ago, so right now download times are really long (1h34m for me), so here are a couple vids to fill up 1% of that time at least.
Well landing in general seems really odd in those videos, visually it's like time accelerates for a fraction of a second, really throws me off. Is that what you're talking about?
that too but the wheels specifically do some weird things over the bumps and during landing
eg in the second video at around 0:58 (where the 2 cars land side by side) if you look at it frame by frame theres a lot of weird crap happening that shouldnt be
on the car on the right at least one of the wheels even appears to switch position to the centreline of the car
and in the first video the wheels sink into the ground a lot
:razz
