Daniel “Dahie” Senff has come up with several exciting ideas for new community web projects that could make the sim racing community a nicer and more productive place. Daniel is not just part of CTDP, he’s been active in our community for over ten years, enjoying the Grand Prix series and rFactor.
The ideas presented in this series of articles are free to picked up by everyone who feels like it, you´re very much welcome to leave your opinion and discuss the ideas in the comments area as well. Below is part 4 of his series, make sure to check out the first, second one & third one as well if you haven’t yet.
By: Daniel Senff
Wanted right now!
Mods are cool, they bring us new material to play with and enrichen the games we purchased a millionfold.
Mods are popular, creating your mod and releasing it can give you your 15 minutes of fame. Unfortunately it’s not only the quality of the mod determining how well it is received: Mods have to meet up with their expectations.
What do I want?
There are two schools of thought in Modding. Be the first or be the best. You can bring your mod fast, but the quality will suffer, or you make it quality work and it could take years. The key is the right balance. However your mod will always be met with certain expectations and knowing how many people are interested (or maybe not interested) could be important for your morale.
Quite often you see discussions in the community, where people debate, whether it’s good that a mod is done by multiple modding groups at once. I don’t want to get in this debate, because I think it’s pointless and I don’t see a problem here. The issue a friend of mine presented the other day was rather: how could modders measures how important their project is on a grander scale?
The thought was like this: the rFactor community created many tracks of various quality and various importance. Tracks aren’t only interesting for one particular series, but are driven by many series and so the idea came to rate how “important” a circuit is in terms of how many series are hosted every year and how “important” is this series. What we ended up discussing was a metric to discover which tracks are the most relevant in the world of motorsports and determining which are most universal for racing. Imagine a Drake-Formula for the demand of a mod.
So much for the dry idea. What exactly is the website behind this?
Most-Wanted
This could be the theoretical backbone for a Most-Wanted-Website. A virtual bulletin-board for mod requests. A place where ideas could be proposed, commented, rated and eventually turned real. The emphasis would be to have a creative place where mod ideas can be discussed and their relevance be compared to other projects.
This could help to answer several questions:
Which is the most requested track?
Is the most requested track necessarily a track where many real motorsport events are driven?
Is the current implementation of a track outdated or of poor quality, that we need a new version?
Do we need 3 Formula-One mods of 2009 while there is non historic from 1999?
Which historic cars would you like to drive?
The bigger the request and the interest in a wished mod, the easier it should be to find. This would also “hide” duplicate or trivial wishes, who don’t get enough support to matter.
If you have a high-requested mod, a “solution” can be attached, that is presented to every user to decide whether this fulfills his mod-wish or not. The idea process can be extended, however you easily end up recreating an extended-rFactorCentral, which should be avoided in favor of a clear focus. There is a lot more you can and need to flesh out for this idea.
This proposed website would be a place to discuss ideas, as with this series of articles. It’s no guarantee the ideas will come to live, but it’ll be a place for Modders and Drivers to come together and discuss what each others expectations are.
The next time, we dream about useful numbers and border on espionage.
