rec.autos.simulators

Does anyone know whats up?

Thanks.

It means all the skeptics were right....

Get in touch if you want !

That's OK, they'll be living in an exquisitely-detailed mid-60's team
transporter, selling teddy bears out the back. <grin>

While no doubt there will be many who will say "I told you so", it's still
sad that such an idealistic bunch (including the cat) couldn't make it work.
It would be nice if this was just a re-grouping phase, and the West brothers
would simplify and refocus, and make more than just in-house technology
demos.

...Klinn

BTW., their cat, Spooky, was sadly killed by a car.  This was covered on the
main page of their site roughly a year ago.  Gotta pay more attention, folks
;-)  

Quite frankly, with all the negativity and abuse they take from the race sim
community sometimes I wonder why they bother continuing the project at all.
Your opinions and attitudes effect a developer's day more than you realize.  

Todd Wasson
Racing Software
http://PerformanceSimulations.com
http://performancesimulations.com/scnshot4.htm

You are correct, but maybe that criticism is based on the fact that
the updates come maybe once about every 8 months or so it seems, and
people get tired of that and stop checking.  Frankly, you should know,
that racing simmers are very impatient people, and like to see
progress reports from time to time, not from year to year.  I would
even be willing to do the updates from them, you know, just email what
they have been doing, even if you know it reads still working on the
same thing this week, you see my point.  I think if the consistency
was there in the updating, the criticism would drop a lot.  I think it
will be a good sim for the racing community, but the criticism from
the groups is sort of bought upon themselves.

"What does a redneck say right before he dies? Hey y'all, watch this!"
-Michael Waltrip, August 22nd, 2003, Bristol

Doesn't mean they stil can't sell it.

A lot of us wonder why they continue claiming they're working on the
"project".  Last website update was in freakin October.

How long has this project been "underway" now? Six years? That's simply
too ***ing long for ANY software project.

Although I really do wish them the best and that they do succeed - I really
fail to see that happen. They're team is too small and they are trying to
bite over too much - atleast if they're trying to achive some of the things
they've said they wanted to include in a sim.

After 3-4 years of empty "promises" who can blaim the public for giving  up
on them?

I wish them the best and really *really* do hope they'll make it - but I
seriously doubt their product will ever see the light of day..

--
Ed_

(Ok... back to the workshop again :o)

It's also important to provide small demo's. It doesn't have to be a
full drivable demo, a floating camera above a track, or a car/object
viewer will do.  As long something substantional is available...

Cheers!

Remco

And the reaction from the crowd was brutal...  That wouldn't have made me run
right out and make another update either!  Granted, I don't know the real
reason for no update.  Maybe an update just wouldn't really help get the job
done any faster and/or invite more uninvited criticism that is actually not
directed at the game itself?  I don't know.

I think RL has been underway for about 2 years as Susie said.  Before that was
WSC, but let's not forget that they had to start over almost from scratch after
that.  

Our RC project has been under development for 5 1/2 years with two of us
programming.  Now think about that a second.  That's 5 1/2 years of me writing
the physics engine, and 5 1/2 years of the other guy writing the graphics
system and so forth.  If either one of us had been programming alone like Chris
has been all this time, it could have taken 11 years to get where we are right
now.  

Anyway, before that the other developer had released the first version in 1998
on his own after perhaps two years of work, so if you want to look at ours from
the same perspective, ours has been under development for longer than six
years.  If I'm not mistaken, one of the Collin McCrae Rally sims took 4 years
to create and they had a staff of **48 people** working on it.  If it took
Chris and Tony only 6 years to do what they want to do, I'd be stunned.

People don't understand how long things take to do.  I added a track smoothing
algo recently that uses cubic N-patches.  That took about 4-5 weeks *full time*
to write, test, debug, and get working properly.  It involved writing a
seperate visualization tool that nobody but myself and a couple of other people
will ever see or know existed.  That took some time too.  This was essentially
technology from a paper that's only about six pages long, and what I needed was
really covered on about three of those pages.

My suspension model took about 2-3 months to write.  Ended up adding to it
later again and have since made a few changes, so it might have been 4 months
in all just for the suspension system to work like I wanted, and it's not a
sophisticated constraint system like Dr. Veble has running.  Let's not even
talk about the tire model....  Want to write a 3D graphics system on top of all
this and try to incorporate 5% of what everybody wants on top of it?  Yikes...
This is all a hell of a lot harder and more time consuming than you can
imagine.  You have absolutely no idea, John.  
Plus, you have to realize that developers have to figure out how to do most of
this stuff on their own.  There isn't a "make a great, realistic car game"
handbook you pick up at Barnes&Noble that shows you how to do it.  You're on
your own.

<rant over...  I feel better now>  

Anyway, folks get entirely too riled up about RL.  If it happens, that's great.
 If not, does it matter?  And if it matters, does it matter that it matters?
;-)

Todd Wasson
Racing Software
http://www.racesimcentral.net/
http://www.racesimcentral.net/

No, that's not what happened, Ed.  When their site comes back up, read Chris'
"sorry" post in the general forum to find out what really happened.  Blame
Empire for WSC, not Chris and Tony.  

Todd Wasson
Racing Software
http://PerformanceSimulations.com
http://performancesimulations.com/scnshot4.htm

Andi.

--
Remove only one zero to reply.

I think everyone should just forget about RL.  What's the big deal?  If it
happens, great.  If not, there's always GTR ;-)

Todd Wasson
Racing Software
http://PerformanceSimulations.com
http://performancesimulations.com/scnshot4.htm

Todd Wasson
Racing Software
http://PerformanceSimulations.com
http://performancesimulations.com/scnshot4.htm