Quote from pantiainen :

Your work looks so good i cannot wait. My only concern is, that if I...

yeah I also thought about that, about leaving the option to run "RETRO" tracks for extra nostalgia when the newer updated tracks replace the current ones
but seems its too much to dream for.

You can keep the old version of LFS in a different folder and run it there if your want

Quote from Flotch :

is missing August 2022 with Bancroft Autodrome and Fairfield Test Center : https://www.lfs.net/20th-anniversary

fair enough, this explains the gap in years somewhat, but my point still stands. We are talking in year(s) of development for one "world" to complete and not months. There can be enthousiastic talk about moons and stuff but it doesnt make much sense if the sand is still missing.

Quote from Scawen :

No, all tracks must be updated. This has all been explained. I know it's a lot of reading but there are links at the bottom of this page:
https://www.lfs.net/patchInfo/report-dec2024-ky.php

conclusion from this quote; no sand, no release. My projection is at least another full year.

Quote from cargame.nl :

enthousiastic talk about moons and stuff

OMG there is going to be multiple moons!
My favorite moon is Io.

Quote from Gutholz :

OMG there is going to be multiple moons!

Won't help much though - even the biggest at smallest distance are just small dots in the sky,so our own sattelite is the only useful decoration...

This is what you get with a 600mm lens + 2x converter + crop size sensor during opposition of Jupiter...



And since I feel obligated to say something on topic - some complain about updates coming too slow,some use the same old stuff and still able to create something new. Or race same classics with different people - either way real simracing fans still have their fun in at least weekly base.

cant wait to drive my XRT on mars

Coming back to this thread for a mo, I'd be interested to hear how lighting in windows is achieved, and why it would be expensive with polygons. I know nothing about computer programming, let alone game development, but I'm sure I can make sense of a dumbed down explanation on how light emitting objects in the LFS beta work. Good work team!

I think it may be the high rise buildings with hundreds of windows, in those cases Eric doesn't want to model them in an 'expensive' way with light emitting surfaces behind a glass layer, as he has done with various buildings around Kyoto (and also South City) but not the high rise ones. Although it's not something we have discussed recently, I guess the priority isn't that high yet.

EDIT:

How the lights are modelled in LFS, each object with self-lit surfaces has a lighting value that can be set (per object or object type). There are 3 different values (always on, night white and night yellow). These values are inserted in the vertex structure when the editor model is built as a game-ready mesh (on load). When drawing the triangles in game, the special values (3 mentioned above) are multiplied by the current state of that light (always on is... always on [pit garages etc] and night white / night yellow are on between sunrise and sunset). Some lights also use a "night mid" and they get half of night white and half of night yellow, to allow a bit more variation in the light colours.

These resulting light colours are used both to render those lights every frame and also in the lighting baking render which is done over several hours, getting light values from every point.

But I fear I may get more questions now that I started talking about technical things. Please forgive me if I don't answer!

Sorry for the question, but is there any forecast for this update? Or is it still a long way off?

I think that these quotes should answer your question:

Quote from Scawen :

You know I can't answer that until it's ready.

I have learned that I can't predict the future.

Quote from Scawen :

As mentioned, some important things are simply not done yet. Also, at some point I need to build a public version, actually exporting everything from the development version into a publicly releasable folder. Even that will take me a few days, probably a week by the time I've added some code support to help me build a clean version a few times during the testing stages. To move from a development version to release isn't simply a matter of declaring it ready. It's a careful process of exporting and encrypting the necessary files, possibly stored a bit differently from the current public version. It's not a big deal, I'm just trying to illustrate that there isn't a version to release yet, even if it was ready which it isn't.