Hello sim racers!
Two announcements in one day, to start the week off right! Following on from our GT3 Update reveal earlier today, in this news update, we talk about something that many people in our community have been asking for within rFactor 2 – refined package management solutions!
In reality, this has been a valuable exercise for Studio 397 as we continue to dig into the code of rFactor 2 to bring about changes that help us develop in new directions and add additional features and functionality over time. With the current system, we found ourselves restrained somewhat in how we move the core rFactor 2 experience forward, so we’ve spent quite a bit of time unpicking and refining much of the existing code, in order to allow us opportunities to improve how we handle current content ownership, installation and management within rFactor 2.
For these new code change, we’ve been able to break up the content types in rFactor 2 to three distinct categories – Local Content, Steam Content and Store Content. By breaking out these three categories, we now have the ability to open up a number of user actions previously impossible with our existing code structure. Just like you could before with locally installed items, now we can present the opportunity for our players to see, install, uninstall and monitor update status of items purchased as DLC, or downloaded for free from the Steam Workshop.
As an additional benefit, this new set of features gives us the opportunity to present more information on the status of content already installed within the title – so you can see what is pending updates, if things haven’t updated correctly, if items are in your library but uninstalled and a few other things we’ve yet to implement – but more on that another day…
Fundamentally, these changes will also offer us quite a boost in terms of the overall speed of the rFactor 2 experience within the main UI. With this update, we have been able to prevent situations where the user is stuck behind a modal dialogue state within the rf2 UI, so for example, in the old system if for example a user purchases a large track like the Nordschleife, you’d be stuck in game with a locked UI waiting on a download bar for significant periods of time – this behaviour has been removed with these changes, as you can now elect to directly engage with the software while downloading, and on a similar topic, you can now launch rF2 without any game pause if you just want to jump in and do a quick race, as you no longer have to update your content when coming into the game by default.
Granted, this isn’t the most sexy of improvements we’ve brought to the sim over the last couple of years, but we think this is a very important piece of groundwork we’ve undertaken for our continued growth and expansion – adding benefits to the end user right away, and putting us on a much stronger footing to allow development to take the direction we’ve planned out for the immediate future.
Q1 2023 Announcements so Far
- GT3 Update
This new functionality is already active within the current ‘Release Candidate’ build of rFactor 2, and will be brought into the public release of the simulation upon deployment of the 2023 Q1 update. scheduled for February 7th this year.
New Package Management System – Coming February 21st to rFactor 2!
