I can just see the devs talking to each other

Scawen-Oh no, one of my civilians is starting to worship Eric, he wants upgraded models!
If I give them an incompatible patch, they might convert back.. yes.. they will, they'll be mine, aaaaaaall miiiiine!!!

Eric-Forum? (no accusing/whatever intended, just a joke:shy

I'm scared to talk about devs :hidesbehi

Quote from sgt.flippy :

I can just see the devs talking to each other

Scawen-Oh no, one of my civilians is starting to worship Eric, he wants upgraded models!
If I give them an incompatible patch, they might convert back.. yes.. they will, they'll be mine, aaaaaaall miiiiine!!!

so which creature would eric and scawen choose ?

Monkey?

Its sad to see the progress on LFS slow down, it once seemed like the perfict sim to me but over the years the development track has diverged from the directions I was hoping it would take and slowed to a crawl. New cometitors are starting to pop up and look to be poised to quickly catch and pass LFS as the example of how a sim should be. I just wonder how much longer LFS can hold on to its lead.

Quote from Gimpster :

New cometitors are starting to pop up and look to be poised to quickly catch and pass LFS as the example of how a sim should be.

Really? Which ones?

Only now have read the topic. Damn, I thought it were a topic on LFS proress! not el-ef-es progress

Quote from AndroidXP :

Really? Which ones?

Racing Legends

:ufo:

Quote from AndroidXP :

Really? Which ones?

GT5.

Racing Legends? Never heard of that, tbh.

The only sims I could think of that get close to LFS in the physics department are nKP and Drivers Republic, though "close" is a relative term, and the only cars seen in these are the formula ford ones - we have yet to find out how these sims handle tintop cars. The physics are the ONLY part where these sims get reasonably close, but they are far far FAR behind in most other categories, besides maybe the graphics in nKP, but that's a moot point.

If you look at LFS, the progress might be slow, but overall it's already quite a massive package. People seem to forget that there's so much more around LFS than its physics, FF and the raw 800+ track/car combos you can drive on.

There's

• the solid, fast, configurable and easy-to-use user interface
  
• a not-so-bad and very natural looking graphics engine, that even allows old systems to run LFS if you set it up accordingly
  
• an unmatched controller support, not only working with virtually every wheel without having to resort to fishy presets, but also an implementation of mouse and keyboard steering, that is actually good enough for WR's in some cases - nobody gets excluded, just because they don't have a 100$ wheel
  
• extensive configurability, without having to edit some text files in 99% of the cases
  
• In/OutSim and OutGauge, allowing various real time applications from live race updates displayed on a website to full fledged third party sound intermixers
  
• a proper, if not the best, motion platform support
  
• LFSWorld, a massive application of it's own, tracking and storing pretty much everything that happens in the online world of LFS
  
• practically NO bugs. True, there are quite a few parts that are not finished, but the only things I've ever encountered in LFS which really deserve the title "bug" were in test patches - usually fixed within a week, in most cases a day and sometimes even in minutes
  
• an excellent and very stable multiplayer. Might not be the best, but definitely the best I've seen. Additionally you can always find someone playing LFS online. Maybe not on the combo you longed for, but there are atleast 40 players online minimum at any time
  
• easily skinnable cars, with the LFS skin viewer speeding it up even more, together with a well working automatic ingame skin distribution
  
• a development team extremely close to its customers, providing quick support when needed
  
• a community, though diverse and pretty direct at times, that is still active, helpful and overall loveable without the need of strict moderation, in a generally relaxed and friendly atmosphere - some might laugh at this, but really, where do you still have a community that is this big AND working this well? There are very few places on the internet where so many different people from all over the world can be together with relative ease. Besides that, there's also a big amount of user created tools, a high motivation to overtake support and answer questions where it's possible, together with maintaining the LFSWiki/Manual, which is almost 100% community created
  
• and last but not least, weekly progress updates and a strict release plan (okay, I joked on that one)
  

Probably even quite a bit more that I can't remember now. If you have just a slight glimpse of software development works, you'll understand how hard such standards are to archieve.

So let me think, which sim was it again that is close to taking LFS' lead?

The part about the devs being close to the customers, I find that so important. Look at racer, there is an update for it, but the dev didn't post it, and nobody is willing to tell where he actually is. I wonder if he showed up in the mean while, or someone told where he was. It's just weird. Even the very close community of racer is getting aggitated with constant fixes of what didn't had to be fixed, and nothing new

http://www.racing-legends.com/news.htm

Check out the whole site, but especially the link above; about 3/4 of the way down and further.

Note how old this link is; yet the project is continuing. Perhaps Todd will leak some info

Quote from AndroidXP :

Really? Which ones?

Well lets see, nKPro is starting to get its act togeather, Driver's Republic is beter then I would have thought before I tried it and I hear iRacing is turning out quite well from the info that is filtering out of its closed beta.

Racing Legends is a dead project that was increable in concept and apparen't too far ahead of its time.

Quote from Gimpster :

Well lets see, nKPro is starting to get its act togeather

rofl

Quote from Gimpster :

Racing Legends is a dead project that was increable in concept and apparen't too far ahead of its time.

Apparantly it's not dead though; although that's what most people think.

Quote from Gimpster :

Well lets see, nKPro is starting to get its act togeather, Driver's Republic is beter then I would have thought before I tried it and I hear iRacing is turning out quite well from the info that is filtering out of its closed beta.

Racing Legends is a dead project that was increable in concept and apparen't too far ahead of its time.

I have to echo KiD's sentiments on nKPoo. I've also read a bit about DR and really liked the concept. However, I've heard from a very reliable source that it needs a LOT of work and isn't even remotely realistic at the moment.

Quote from Gimpster :

Well lets see, nKPro is starting to get its act togeather, ...

Apparently you haven't read my long post detailing why nKP and DR are still years away from threatening LFS, or taking the 1st place in "how a sim should be", so the only thing left I can do is

Quote from KiDCoDEa :

rofl

Well, that's probably because I AM a LFS fanboy - if I wasn't I wouldn't post here so much.
I don't know where you got from that I'm implying other people cannot like other sims, I just wanted to make clear why reaching LFS' level in all aspects is quite a task. Sure, to most people motion platform support or similar is completely irrelevant, infact most focus lies on physics, FF, cars and tracks (and sound). The visible progress in these areas has been slow lately, for the whole reason that updating these would likely mean an incompatible patch, and Scawen was focusing on "minor" compatible stuff for the last 25 test patches.

But IMO, a part of the reason why LFS is so successful (compared to DR and especially nKP) is that it's so much more complete and polished all around and supports such a broad variety of miscellaneous things. Honestly, nKP and DR are the uprising stars on the horizon, they are starting to look better and they're definitely heading in the right direction, but they are young and so far away from being finished. Of course, LFS has quite a way to go, too, but Gimpster's statement was IMO a quite optimistic stretch.

And my last reply was for the whole reason that I expected Gimpster to atleast comment on some of the things I said, so I admittedly was a bit frustrated.

Anyway that's how I see things, and if you don't like my opinion, there's still the ignore list.

Quote from AndroidXP :

The visible progress in these areas has been slow lately, for the whole reason that updating these would likely mean an incompatible patch, and Scawen was focusing on "minor" compatible stuff for the last 25 test patches.

I know what you mean, but I feel the urge to expound that with Windows Vista coming up I don't think that the changes that Scawen has introduced are "minor" in many aspects. The change to DirectSound was pretty major I should think, and ensures yet another layer of compatibility with future changes (like windows vista). Major was also the introduction and expansion of the scripting system, the extra custom views controls and customization, etc

Those are part of alot of things that when you really come to think of it you miss when trying to get another sim customized to the way you want to play it and it can be very frustrating.

Quote from Sternendaal :

...If LFS was really that good as you said,everyone would be playing LFS.

Beeb wrong answer.

First of all that statement is nuts on so many levels. You can never be everything to everyone as people have different tastes. Some argue that candy graphics with thousand shaders and bumb mapped nose hair under the helmets are more important than good physics.

LFS is far from finished and it's never going to be perfect. So it's not about 'how good' LFS is (very good and has potential for years to come) when all current competition is stuck in the 'suck' corner.

I don't owe anything to LFS. If something better comes along then I'll switch camps in a heartbeat. Though Falcon 4.0 was released in 1998 and almost after a decade it's still untouchable what comes sim experience.

That's where LFS is heading, see you in 2016!




When S3 is probably released and ignore the rocky and buggy start F4.0 had...

Quote from Forbin :

I've also read a bit about DR and really liked the concept. However, I've heard from a very reliable source that it needs a LOT of work and isn't even remotely realistic at the moment.

Yeah, what a surprise because DR's current version number is basicly v0.01. Was the first ever version of LFS perfect?

At least DR dev doesn't call it 1.0 like Kunos does with nK Poo.

Quote from Forbin :

However, I've heard from a very reliable source that it needs a LOT of work and isn't even remotely realistic at the moment.

its not that bad ... actually it feels a lot like s1 to me

Quote from Gimpster :

Racing Legends is a dead project that was increable in concept and apparen't too far ahead of its time.

I can assure you it's most certainly not dead by any stretch of the imagination I spent a few days at Gregor Veble's house perhaps three or four weeks ago driving the physics engine for Racing Legends, have worked with Tony for the past couple of years on VRC, and had a nice dinner with Chris and Tony at a show in Birmingham. We all chat daily. It's most certainly real and being worked on every day as it has been all along. The web site hasn't been and won't be updated in a long time, that's all. Doesn't mean Chris and Gregor aren't still coding. They'll use something of mine in there too, so I'm counting on it a bit more than you might be