Hello sim racers!

Today we are pleased to deploy a new Release Candidate update for rFactor 2!

The new build deployed today sees a return of a much-requested feature by our sim racing community here at rFactor 2 – driver labels! We at the studio resolved to review and improve how these labels are shown in the simulation with this new update, and I’m sure you will agree the new design is far more appealing visually than before, with the added bonus of new functionality introduced that now finally shows any in session penalties applied to the driver. 

We have extensively tested these new driver labels to ensure they offer the best solution between clarity and visual effect, without compromising the view of the driver and ensure the labels appear and disappear at appropriate distance from the player car – we hope you like what we did!

Other changes that form part of this latest Release Candidate include some further refinements to our graphics engine, with particular attention paid to the way rain is presented on car windshields and subtle but immersive improvements to glare and lighting situations. These changes have offered us the opportunity to further improve this aspect of the software and produce what we believe is a far superior way of representing rain drops on windscreens – adding what we believe is a much enhanced visual experience. 

Update Notes

Client 7889012
Dedi 7889035

HUD

• New driver labels

Graphics

• New wet windscreen shading that can be tweaked per car
• Adjusted Lighting Calculations correcting some issues with Direct Light Hue.
• Updated PostFX Glare Settings for more control day vs night
• Updated Windscreen Shader and new Glass shader for Tracks, with improved specular calculations.

Modding

• Fixed duplicated Road and Curb shaders displaying in Max plugins.

How Build Update Branches Work

We now have three separate branches of rFactor 2 for players to select, and depending on your individual requirements you may have a preference for the particular build you wish to use when launching rFactor 2. 

Opt-Out – This is the main public build of rFactor 2, without any beta branches or additional early updates applied. This is the build that will be available as default.

Release-Candidate – This build will always feature the latest updates and improvements that have been introduced by our development team ahead of main public release. Although these changes will have been reviewed by our test team here at Studio 397 prior to deployment, we will use this build branch to give our users the opportunity to opt into these changes early, and report any unexpected issues that may or may not occur before we launch to the main public ‘opt-out’ branch of the software.

Previous-Build – This branch will contain a copy of the last public ‘opt-out’ version of rFactor 2, prior to updates being deployed, should any communities need to revert to the last known stable branch of the software for any reason.

As we release new updates for rFactor 2, each branch will ‘move up’ to the next step of the branch ladder, from ‘release-candidate’ to ‘opt-out’ to ‘previous-build’, replaced by the respective new updated version.

rFactor 2 – Available now exclusive to PC on Steam

THE THIRD ANNUAL SIM FORMULA EUROPE SERIES RETURNS TO RFACTOR 2 WITH THE SFE 2022 COMPETITION AND THE HEUSINKVELD PEREGRINE COMPETITION.

Welcome to Sim Formula Europe 2022!

In 2020, SFE hosted an incredibly entertaining event at the immense MECC Arena in Maastricht (NL), with live viewers enjoying a superb performance from Risto Kappet to take home first place in the Grand Finals. In 2021, the final of the SFE competition moved online due to the health pandemic, with a live world broadcast and commentary from a dedicated studio at MECC, and the racing remained as intense as ever as Erhan Jajovski overcame all challengers to be crowned the Sim Formula Europe 2021 winner.

This season, all is lined up for racing the SFE 2022 finals once again live on stage at the SFE Sim Expo. Today, six weeks from the on-site event at MECC Maastricht, the decision has been taken to again adapt plans due to the ongoing pandemic, and reschedule the 2^nd edition of the SFE SIM EXPO including the third SFE live on-site finals. Confidence remains high that Sim Formula Europe can return to an on-site presence in the near future, just a little later than originally planned. NEW DATE: Sim Formula Europe Finals Day will be held on September 10th, 2022.          

Sim Formula Europe have taken the pragmatic approach to continue the online series as planned and adapt with a new date for on-site. It’s time to start your virtual engines and set a time. Thanks for your support.

Sim Formula Europe | Offical Series Discord | CLICK HERE

Prizes

1st Place | 3,500 EU, Heusinkveld Sim Pedals Ultimate + and MH650 Cooler Master Headset

2nd Place | 2,000 EU and MH650 Cooler Master Headset

3rd Place | 1,500 EU and MH650 Cooler Master Headset

4th Place | 1000 EU and MH650 Cooler Master Headset

5th Place | 500 EU and MH650 Cooler Master Headset

6th Place | 500EU and MH650 Cooler Master Headset

7th Place | 500 EU and MH650 Cooler Master Headset

8th Place | 500 EU and MH650 Cooler Master Headset

Total Prize Pool Value | 12,000 EU

Every finalist can keep the Cooler Master headset MH650 with which they drive in the finals.

Schedule

03.12.2021

09:00 CET

Hotlap Qualification begins – Zandvoort 2021, McLaren Senna GTR (rFactor 2 Competition System)

12.12.2021

23:59 CET

Hotlap Qualification ends.

16.12.2021

From 20:00 CET

Qualification Quarter-Final Split 1 – McLaren Senna GTR, Monza Grand Prix Circuit, 20 minutes.

Qualification Quarter-Final Split 2 – McLaren Senna GTR, Monza Grand Prix Circuit, 20 minutes.

Qualification Quarter-Final Split 3 – McLaren Senna GTR, Monza Grand Prix Circuit, 20 minutes.

21.12.2021

From 20:00 CET

Qualification Semi-Final – McLaren Senna GTR, Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps, 30 minutes.

10.09.2022

Finals Day – McLaren Senna GTR, Maastricht Circuit, format TBC

Format

So, how does it work?

A hotlap qualification process will be used to identify the top 60 fastest drivers registered to take part in the competition. Those top 60 drivers will be invited to take part in a three split Qualification Quarter-Final event race at the Monza Grand Prix Circuit driving the McLaren Senna GTR car. Each race will last for 20 minutes without a requirement to perform a pit stop, and the top 10 finishers from each split will move forward into a combined 30 car Qualification Semi-Final 30 minute race at the Spa-Francorchamps Circuit, again driving the McLaren Senna GTR. The top seven finishers of the Spa Semi-Final race will automatically qualify for the Finals Day races on September 10th 2022. Finalists have to attend and race in Maastricht at the SIM EXPO.

Last year’s champion Erhan Jajovski will be our last finalist and will try to defend his title.

Each Qualification Quarter-Final split will be made up of 20 drivers from the hotlap qualification phase. The configuration of each split participants will be communicated during the invitation phase at the close of the hotlap competition. Sim Formula Europe and Studio 397 reserve the right to promote drivers who failed to make the top 60 times into the Quarter-Final races, should qualified drivers be unable to commit to the Quarter-Final event. Should this be necessary, the next fastest driver from position 61 down will be invited to participate, until such a time as the three splits are full. Should drivers from either split one or two be unable to attend, the next driver down will be promoted up 1 place in the ranking.

The minimum age of participation is 18 years.

Sim Formula Europe 2022 | Terms and Conditions: CLICK HERE

Heusinkveld Peregrine Competition

The Peregrine Returns. After the mod competition we now start the hotlap to the finals. The Peregrine Falcon is the fastest animal on Earth. Capable of reaching speeds in excess of 389 km/hour this graceful bird can easily outrun a modern race car. With its incredible manoeuvrability, lightning fast speeds, superior aerodynamics and strategic insight, the Peregrine Falcon is the perfect ambassador for our brand-new esport racing series.

The Heusinkveld Peregrine Hotlap Competition

Prize

The winner of the Heusinkveld Peregrine event to be held on a date in 2022 to be confirmed, will take home a set of the spectacular Heusinkveld Sim Pedals Sprint pedals, a 3 pedal set of high-end sim racing hardware that introduces the user to the next level of realism and adjustability and the brand-new Heusinkveld Sim Handbrake.

Schedule

22.12.2021

09:00 CET

Hotlap Qualification Begins – Maastricht, Oreca 07 LMP2

03.01.2022

23:59 CET

Hotlap Qualification Ends

Date to be Confirmed

Heusinkveld Peregrine Finals Race – Oreca 07 LMP2 Peregrine Mod, Maastricht, 30 minutes, open setups, rolling start, formation lap, no pitstops.

(As with the SFE finals, due to the pandemic an update we will be given in due course regarding the date of the final). Join the Sim Formula Europe Discord channel to stay up to date: https://discord.gg/UJGbSvC2yY

Format

How does it work?

The event will begin with an initial hotlap competition using the Maastricht Street Circuit mod and the Oreca 07 LMP2 car within rFactor 2.

Hotlap Qualification – rFactor 2 Competition System.

Drivers will have the opportunity to set an unlimited amount of laps on the server, with the fastest 10 drivers at the end of the qualification period then invited to take part on the broadcasted Heuskinveld Peregrine Mod Competition race on a date in 2022 to be confirmed.

Should a driver be unable to attend the race event having qualified for the finals day race, Sim Formula Europe and Studio 397 reserve the right to promote drivers outside the top 10 qualification times, in order of the leader board finishing position.

The race will be held on the Maastricht Street Circuit (link here) using a specially created livery mod of the Oreca 07 LMP2, containing the 10 winning liveries from the recent Heusinkveld Peregrine Livery Competition. The fastest driver of the hotlap competition will have first choice of livery design for the race, down to the 10^th place hotlap driver. Sim Formula Europe reserve the right to invite additional guest drivers to the race at their discretion.

Race Details:

Car: Oreca 07 LMP2 with Peregrine Livery Mod.

Track: Maastricht Street Circuit

Qualification: TBC

Race: Date / Time TBC. The race will be a rolling start from a full formation lap. Setups will be open and can be changed between qualification and the race. Weather will be 3pm in game time, with 20 degrees humidity and 15 degrees temperature, cloudy conditions.

The overall winner of the race will be crowned the Heusinkveld Peregrine 2022 champion, and take home a set of the outstanding Heusinkveld Sim Pedals Sprint and Heusinkveld Sim handbrake.

Please note, the minimum age of participate is 14, worldwide entry.

The 10 finalists of the Sim Formula Europe 2022 series may not enter this competition.

The event will be broadcast live on the various Studio 397 and Sim Formula Europe media channels.

PUBLIC VOTE FOR THE BEST MOD DESIGN 2022

10 fastest racers and the 10 nominated mods come together in one final race.

Before the Final Race, each of the 10 finalists will have to select one of the nominated liveries which they will use for the race event (fastest driver first choice, second fastest 2nd choice etc)

Before the race, Sim Formula Europe will post on the SFE Facebook and Instagram page 10 separate posts containing a picture of the livery, the name of the designer and the name of the driver who selected that design. As of that moment – this date will be confirmed asap – people can start voting by liking (one or more) pictures of the 10 mod designs.

ONLY the likes on the post on Sim Formula Europe Facebook and Instagram pages will be counted in the vote. The livery with the highest number of likes will be confirmed as the winner

The overall livery design winner will be announced after the finals race (date TBC).

Heusingveld Peregrine Competition 2021 | Race Recap | CLICK HERE

Heusinkveld Peregrine Competition 2022 I Terms and Conditions: CLICK HERE

Rules

Alongside our code of conduct,  just some hotlap/time trial rules, we will be reviewing all laps that qualify in the top-60 and performing spot-checks, those that do not observe correct driving may have their lap removed or will be disqualified (DQ)

• Observe the track limits at all times, if we observe track cutting that is unrealistic with all wheels in an off-track position the lap will be invalidated
• Do not use off-tracks prior to the lap starting to gain speed
• Do not use external software to modify performance
• Respect your competitors

Good Luck!

Welcome to the second part of the cars blog. It’s been a few weeks now since the first one and looking at the list, this one ended up no smaller than the one before, so again thanks for all the questions and I hope we answered them appropriately, fully realizing that not every answer will be satisfactory right now. We just released a new build, promoting the release candidate that has been tested for a while now by parts of the community, which is obviously good news as it clears the path for the next build. 

We’ve also obviously been working on new cars, but as outlined on social media earlier this week, we’re not quite ready to announce those and some of the other things we are working on. For that reason we decided to, by exception, skip the monthly roadmap post. But just like there is a saying that warns you to not confuse activity with progress, let me tell you that this silence is not an indication that nothing is happening. You’ll just have to take my word for that.

Before we move on to our Q&A we have only one thing left to announce, and that is the topic for the next Q&A, which will be “MODDING”. A great topic considering the upcoming holidays!

Q&A

Would you be willing to give the community the opportunity to vote on upcoming car content? Maybe put a list of 5 or 6 attainable licences, and see which one(s) are most popular?

CinCey

I think I answered this in part 1, but we’re not sure if voting is the best way to find out what our community wants. One tricky part for us is that we typically don’t know what a license costs until we ask. So we’d need to check those first and keep an option open while we go through the process of voting or we run the risk that we end up with content that is very expensive to license.

Similar topic, do you think it would be a good idea to poll the community on the type of content they want to see next? Maybe some categories like GT, Prototype, Touring Car, Historic, Formula etc?

JoeyD

I think from the feedback we are getting everywhere we have a reasonable idea what types people would like to see next. We’ll take that into account when planning ahead. Obviously we also need to look at what the wider business needs here.

Is it planned to properly fix this slipstream issue on GT3 cars? I had assumed that this “dirty air bugfix” in February was just a temporary workaround. Currently, there is no slipstream effect at all with GT3 cars. 

Ernie

Yes.

Why are the mirrors such a mess on most official cars? Many modders release cars with mirrors pointing the right direction. 

Mibrandt

Feel free to report this as bugs for us to look into in specific cases.

What is the reasoning behind the fact that you have to adjust the mirrors and the ffb level for every skin/livery instead of just for the car? That’s extremely annoying. 

Mibrandt

That’s because in rF2 every single car can be different in terms of appearance and physics. So we keep that data for every “.VEH” file as there is no other way to keep track of it.

Are you going to make the cars VR ready? So you Can see the rear wheels, the mirrors work according to head position etc? 

Mibrandt

I don’t think we will change the way the mirrors work any time soon as this is a trade-off already between rendering speed and being a “true” mirror and typically VR is already challenging enough on the framerate, we don’t need to make it more expensive. The fact that in the cockpit view parts are missing also has to do with performance. Granted, older cars that were done before VR was even around, did not bother as nobody would look at those parts from within a cockpit anyway.

Any plans to enhance the sound engine?

Mibrandt

It’s taken into consideration as an option.

The Le Mans virtual championship is going on right now. In the live stream, we can see lots of drivers crashing out hard in Eau Rouge and Pouhon for example. Really high-speed crashes, yet not race ending. Even with sideways impact, tyres stay on the car, suspension only gets bent. The only thing that breaks off is the rear wing. I doubt they are not running with 100% damage, and I notice it in other definitely running 100% damage series as well. Why is it so hard to make cars get realistic damage (at least a realistic result) from high-speed impacts? rF2 has the ability to have proper damage, why isn’t it utilized? 

Remco Majoor

Some of this is because of the things in the question below. Your other point of critique really being that the cars should break down sooner on impact, so they are too robust. I think you have a point there. Another thing that makes it harder to properly do damage when dealing with car to car contacts in multiplayer is latency. We have to typically predict where your opponents are now, and if we get it slightly wrong it might cause huge collisions (if cars as a consequence end up inside each other) often causing the typical cars skyrocketing into space type crashes you see in all sims really.

Is it true that damage effects in sim racing (thinking about rF2 and sim racing in general) is influenced by manufacturers as much as engine limitations?

Fraser 

It’s definitely a combination of both, yes. And different manufacturers have different guidelines which sometimes means (to keep cars “equal”) we need to settle for only those aspects that they all allow.

A long time ago now, if memory serves me correctly, rFactor 2 had dirt build up on the cars and, more importantly, the windscreens. Why did this go away, and can we please get it back?

Fraser

Your memory is correct. We had that on a few cars. However, this was at the time a very simplistic animation that would change a dirt layer over time. Literally it would happen too if you just sat still in the garage. At the time, I deemed that much too simple so we decided to turn it off until we had time to do a proper model that would depend more on the weather conditions, if you’re driving in spray and/or close to other cars, through the grass and sand-traps, etc. It’s still on our list today. I don’t have an ETA for its implementation yet.

Do S397 have any desire or intention to add some type of livery sharing tool in rF2, to make it easy for players to develop custom skins and share them with the community in game or via a html shopfront of some kind?

CameronBennett

Yes, and we want to create something that also works with our competition system.

I would like to see better Body damage. Yes you can make parts fall off or get bent but what about a crinkled fender, hood or rear deck lid when you smack into something? rFactor1 did this with vert damage, and with today’s tech you should be able to accomplish this at some point. Another damage I would like to see implemented in the tire model is too low of tire pressure damaging the tire as in real life and the possibility of tire punctures or cuts due to contact to a sharp object. Do you think this will be implemented in the near future as well? 

mschreiner

Well, near future is something I certainly can’t promise for all of these, Mike, but you certainly make a couple of very sensible suggestions. One thing I’d like to note is that a lot of cars nowadays are made of very stiff materials that would not dent but break or scatter, so we would have to account for those situations too. And a few people have indeed mentioned tyre damage due to wear or running over sharp objects.

Is it planned to update more cars (especially DLC cars) to PBR in the near future? For example the “new” Bentley GT3 looks amazing meanwhile the Porsche is a nightmare compared to it. 

Fabian Balle

In general we try to do PBR upgrades in between “bigger projects” and I agree that the new Bentley is a lot better looking than the Porsche, which was done longer ago. I hope we can indeed bring these improvement over time.

Do you plan dynamic dust and dirt accumulation on cars/windshields in the near future? 

Balazs Magyar

Yes, as soon as we’ve improved the technology so this dirt does not cause problems at night.

Always looking at how things can be made graphically consistent across DLC and mods, leaving less up to interpretation by mod makers. In terms of PBR tyres, would it be possible to have the damage to be a common map? Maybe the user adjusted settings for the shader could be just the tyre texture and an added region map to show the game where the tyre tread is and perhaps a JSON tweak to allow scale/depth of damage and possibly direction of travel if needed?

Woodee

I don’t feel I’m qualified to answer that question, but I’ll pass on the suggestion.

Is it planned to add the maps of accelerator, brakes, etc…?

Julien Lemoine

You mean as a global setting in the options where you configure your axis or do you mean car specific settings? I think the newer Heusinkveld pedals come with ways to configure that. Other brands might allow it too, I’m not sure.

When will flashlights be introduced?

Julien Lemoine

In a flash! Sorry, I could not resist that bad joke. I hope we can quickly sneak that in so you don’t have to rely on third party solutions for it anymore.

Good day, it is possible in the near future, to enter races with open-wheeled cars that are not exaggerated and difficult to drive, such as the car that is now in the competition system: “F3 Tatuus MSV”, I find it wonderful and brings many people to this amazing simulator, thanks. 

Germano Cervini

I think we do try to offer a mix of open wheel and tintops as well as easy and harder to drive cars. Most of the Tatuus cars are great starting points if you’re into open wheelers and we typically do feature them in the competition system. I’m not sure if this answers your question?

 Could you maybe introduce an option where we have the ability to save a tyre set (and of course load them on the car again). This would enable me to work on multi-stint setups, without having to commit to sitting at the computer for 3-4 hours at the time. 

Jan Molbech

As a workaround you could of course use time acceleration as an approximation. A more elaborate workaround might be to use a virtual machine and the “snapshots” it provides to create a snapshot and “resume” from that later. Your question is noted though, having race weekends where we have a fixed set of tyres and/or the ability to fit used tyres is something that is on our wishlist.

Could you add an option please where we can add tyre allocation to endurance races. This would add more facets to an endurance race strategy wise. 

Jan Molbech

Oops, I might have addressed that above. We’re considering this.

Is there a plan to bring new GT3 cars into the game. Things such as latest Porsche 911 GT3R also well as potentially the Lamborghini Huracán GT3 and also new cars such as the M4 GT3 as we haven’t seen an update to the GT3 pack in a while. Would be awesome to have them. 

CB Racing

The situation around the Lamborghini I’ve already explained in part 1, but we are working on a new GT3 car. I’m not going to tell you yet which one though.

Is it possible to add graphical effect on GAIN/LOSS metrics which is used in endurance cars on steering wheels to make it work inside the cockpit? 

Nick9320

It is possible, but it requires some development work to enable features like that.

Is it possible to add system just like helicorsa both for UI and car cockpit? Would be awesome to have it especially for cars with closed cockpit. 

Nick9320

We can consider that. Ideally we’d like to include something that gives you better situational awareness that is closer to reality though so we have not decided yet.

Can you please share some common materials for your cars such like driver model with animation assets (450/720/900 degrees), HANS system and driver helmet with all textures? 

Nick9320

Noted. I have to pass this on to the team to see what we can do for modders.

Not sure that it’s car’s relatable thing, but could you improve wet weather just to make it less dark? Even with overcast weather without rain, it’s hard to enjoy rF2 when everything you see around is darkness, such like it’s late evening or something. Colours correction should do the work to make dark colours a bit lighter to balance the whole scene from car and track cameras. 

Nick9320

This is for sure not car related but mostly a graphics thing, partially related to auto exposure, and we are still looking to improve that.

Is there any chance for improvement of the game sound engine? Will be awesome to have more options such like automatic reverberation of the samples to increase sense of immersion. 

Nick9320

We are certainly exploring this as the sound engine is one of the modules that we have not significantly upgraded since we took over development.

When will you make a package for LMP2 cars, so they are downtuned slightly. Right now, you can only use the DPi with LMP2 cars when you select the Hypercar option. It should be possible because the LMP2 cars normally race in the IMSA series. 

Fineraft

That is in development right now, so you can expect an update that addresses the fact that LMP2 cars have been slowed down to better “fit”.

When will we be able to make a custom grid. I am talking about selecting which cars you want to drive against. Currently, this is only possible when making a season mod which is a bit of a hassle. R3E has it in its UI. 

Fineraft

For now, you can build your own series (rfmod) as a workaround. We need to add some features to the UI to do it differently.

Will we get more real Hypercars? The current Hypercars don’t drive in the WEC. 

Fineraft

I would say it’s likely at some point, also given the fact that MSG have a license to do a WEC / Le Mans game.

Will we get some sort of KERS in Rfactor2? This is something Rfactor2 really lacks, and it shows how old the game is (the game being developed before hybrid systems became a thing in racing). 

Fineraft

Correct. We’ll develop that when we build a car that needs it.

Will the dashboards be updated? Most of them are low resolution and don’t give much information -> Multiple pages would be great for that. 

Fabian Balle

If we can do this as part of updating a car (to PBR for example) we will. To be honest though, some dashboards are quite old and would need to be redone almost from scratch to get them to current standards. That makes it a bigger job that might take some time before we get to it. As outlined, the multiple pages option for a digital dash will take more development work.

Small quality of life thing, but would it be possible to filter official content from community content? 

Pepperoni

Technically yes, there are a few ways we could do that. We can factor this into our UI plans as a specific option.

When the protection of the gearbox to finish with the feat 6th>1st faster than a F1? 

leseb64

We know our gearbox and shifting model is quite simple. So unfortunately is most hardware. We can only have simple switches for either a sequential or a manual gearbox and although we can implement something like a minimum shifting time admittedly that is a model that can be improved. We’d like better hardware support too though!

Do you ever plan on introducing cockpit LEDs and internal night lighting for night races? 

leseb64

We’ve experimented a bit with this in the past, this will probably need some extra development and research time for us to get it right. It’s on our long wishlist.

When will we have a clutch worthy of the name? 

leseb64

Alright, I’ll bite, what exactly is wrong with our clutch? Or do you mean how it interoperates with our gearbox?

Will the setup be standardized with a quick explanation?

leseb64

I’m not entirely sure what you’re asking for here. Do you mean you would like to see our default setups come with a “note”. What exactly would it say? Do you have some examples of what you are after?

Can we hope for the introduction of some vintage GTs in future please? 

leseb64

It seems a common theme in this Q&A to ask for some form of “historic” cars, so that is certainly a lesson I’ll take away and discuss internally. So there is hope!

Any car from the 20th century planned? Something like 80s turbo sportscars and touring cars? Group 5, C…? 

Donat

Likely, yes.

Do you have any plans to update “Physics Calculation Tool” and “TGM Generator”? Both have been nearly three years since the last update. 

I_Bellett

Not right now. We might do another update after implementing new physics features.

Recent GT3 and GTE control traction control separately for Long Force and Lateral Force. Will these features be added to rFactor 2 in the future? 

I_Bellett

I think that is likely to happen going forward. Our current system is not flexible enough to split those two but in general we’re seeing more electronics being used in racing cars to help drivers so that’s a trend we need to follow in the simulation too.

Does the “Better Drivetrain” plan include a realistic reproduction of the 4WD mechanism? The 4WD mechanism reproduced by the current rF2 is very inconvenient because the front and rear differentials cannot be set independently. 

I_Bellett

I don’t know yet.

In an interview conducted by Race Department two years ago, Marcel said either GT4 or TCR would be coming to rF2 – is this still the plan? 

I_Bellett

We had a TCR car licensed at the time. Quite some time later we decided against licensing more TCR cars and we ended up swapping out that license for a completely different car. So no, that is a plan that ended up never materializing. Some of the reasons at the time are that we are in general not seeing many people racing those classes. Most people that lean towards GT4 cars end up picking the more powerful GT3 cars and the TCR in for example iRacing is not exactly a big hit either. Can those things be debated. I’m sure. I’m just summarizing our reasoning at the time to come to this decision.

Do you have any plans to make the strut suspension reproducible? 

I_Bellett

Like the better drivetrain plan above, this is also something that is on the list but we are not sure yet when and if we will get to it.

While I appreciate the attempt at trying to replicate the overlays in the rearview cameras in the GTE cars, it looks incredibly bad due to just being a 2D overlay that doesn’t actually do anything. To the point where it’d look better if it wasn’t there. Is there a possibility of removing it until you can get the system of rearview camera overlays to actually be functional? 

andi36356

It’s an artistic choice to add the static overlays. I agree working ones would be much better, emulating the real-life radar system that’s used to drive them. I can ask the team if we can make the overlays an upgrade that can be turned off if you don’t like it.

The horrible looking dashboard displays aren’t a secret, they’re even mentioned in this thread a couple of times. It’s a real shame that the thing you’re mainly looking at while driving looks so bad. Something that surprised me though is that for the C8.R GTE, the display actually looks really good for rF2 standards. The fonts are mostly correct, it has the correct background, and the rearview camera doesn’t have the previously mentioned overlay. It’s not that far off from the iRacing version, and even with an extra screen that’s just turned off in iRacing. However, the Cadillac DPi, released alongside it, has the old problems of wrong fonts and cut off text among other things. So what happened that the Corvette has it looking so much better? 

andi36356

Comparing those two cars, if I remember correctly, they were simply done by different members of the team. Revisiting some of them certainly makes sense.

Something I noticed when looking at the Racin’ USA Pt.1 DLC Pack for AMS 2 are weird similarities to the rF2 DLC cars. Not just that it’s the GTE/DPi cars that are also available for rF2, but they also have the non-functional rearview camera overlays. Except for once again the Corvette C8.R which doesn’t have it in either game. Did Reiza buy the 3D models from Studio 397? 

andi36356

No, they did not, and I can confirm we did those models in-house.

Why is the rear wing not on the wireframe layer of so many cars’ skinning templates? Trying to hunt for it shouldn’t be necessary at all for such an important part. 

andi36356

I think I explained this elsewhere but for some older cars those wings were made out of carbon fiber and the only way we could properly create that material then was to apply a tiled texture to it. For new cars this should no longer be a limitation.

Will there be a possibility to mod DLC cars in the future? Two things that would come to mind would be sound mods but also being able to change or remove the restrictors on the GT3 or GTE cars so that you could do things like league/track specific BoPs or even run the cars unrestricted with no BoP. 

andi36356

You can already do league or track specific BoPs right now. If you know how the upgrade system works, you can use that to tweak values like the fuel tank size or the weight, and also tweak the power and torque output of the engines, just to name a few examples. This is probably not the best place to provide a step by step explanation, but I know several leagues doing this. Sound and graphics mods are probably a lot more difficult this way though.

I, too, would love an update on the car reflections during the night. I tried racing at midnight and was surprised about the bright glow of the car’s red, orange and yellow parts at night (for example the paid content GT3s) which looks totally unrealistic. Perhaps good for close racing, but for me no immersion. I first thought it might be some problem with my rFactor 2 installation and graphic settings. But I saw identical glows in videos on YouTube. And some track side objects have similar unrealistic reflections. For example all the red signs at the Nürburgring (red sign of Schumacher S). 

Joe Vogt

How the simulation in general looks at night is the topic of much discussion internally as most of us feel we will need to improve a lot there. Reflections is one part of that. How headlights light up the cars is another.

Any plans of future historical 60s-70s cars?

Unknown

We have some plans for historical content, probably slightly newer than the era you mention.

About historical existing cars like the Brabham BT24. 1968 EVE F1, 1968 Spark F1, Brabham BT44, McLaren M23, March 761, 1968 Howston G4 and G6 – which of them will be updated to latest rf2 standard, and which ones will surely no longer be supported? 

Mauro

In general, the newer the cars (in terms of when we released them in rFactor 2) the bigger the chance of them getting more upgrades. There are a few really old cars that we feel we would have to completely redo and we’re not sure if that is currently worth it.

What is the future plan for Motorsports Games in giving rF2 licensed cars, as opposed to cars they license for the new titles of NASCAR, BTCC, LeMans/WEC and IndyCar? The most pressing of these is with LeMans/WEC. If there’s a title that is to be dedicated to that, it follows that LMDh and LMH cars will be licensed for it, but will those same cars come to rF2 for anything other than closed esports events? We can already see GTE is a dying category, and we have most of the GT3 cars already. Save for the BMW M4, we can be pretty sure is coming. We might get a Lambo and an Evo or two, but I’ll be surprised to see the Lexus or Acura. Of the other popular categories and series, we don’t yet have any TCR cars (front-wheel drive) or GT4s. Which doesn’t leave much for rF2 to go get or develop. FE, I guess, or other fake electric racing. 

burgesjl

If you look at licensing in general, then most licenses we acquire are per “game” and not exclusive, so in terms of cars and tracks we can still pick a lot of the cars you mentioned above. And yes, there will certainly be overlap, so it’s not like every car or track can only end up in one title.

Any news about The PBR update for all the Porsche in the game? About Porsche again, the new 992 is scheduled for the game in the near future? 

Mikawelll

I can’t mention anything specific about the Porsche cars yet, sorry.

Is there any plan to add light to numbers when racing at night for endurance classes? 

Art_Pereira

Yes, that’s on the list and needs a new type of material for the car paint.

Most tire companies keep their info to themselves so competitors don’t get their info. How are you going to help modders with tire info to make their mods with a realistic tire model ? IMHO this info would be very hard for any modder to gain access to, and most would have a bad/ wrong/ unrealistic tire model in their mod. 

Binny

Our plan for this is to provide an updated set of “standard” tyres that can be used as a starting point for cars. Obviously we are going to be very careful about making sure we’re not exposing any sensitive data as you are totally right about tyre companies being very secretive about how their tyres are made (and rightly so).

Will the classic Eve and Spark be updated at all? If this is not possible, how about a new incarnation of these two great cars with the latest tech while retaining the great driving feel? 

boxer

They would indeed need a ton of work, up to the point where it might make more sense to start from scratch.

Any change of getting classic open wheels like Champ Car or F1? 

boxer

We’ve done quite a few F1 cars already, and we’re definitely working on more open wheelers. Stay tuned!

Could we maybe one day see a non-fictional modern F1 car? 

boxer

We could, the Marussia was the latest one we did. License wise you will always end up with loose cars that way though as we obviously don’t have the license to make an F1 sim. And not having all the cars makes some forms of esports more difficult. As more teams get an association with a specific real car brand, they might not be allowed to drive in another brand so for those scenarios a fictional one that you can brand in different ways is actually better.

Same sort of topic, how about a few classic Le Mans Prototypes, new IndyCar and/or classic CanAM? 

boxer

You can expect something here.

Any chance of introducing flat/blown tires? 

boxer

We’re considering this, it needs some physics and graphics work for sure.

Are you planning on fixing the graphic glitch with the DW12 introduced two years back with the updates? 

boxer

Likely, yes.

As it has been asked before, hybrid system coming anytime?

Unknown

Not any time soon, it’s a lot of work to build a hybrid system that covers all the bases.

Any plans to improve the way sounds (particularly exterior) function? Things like proper doppler and such. They never seem as powerful/impactful as they should be. And can we please get updated crash effects that don’t sound like sheet metal in a dumpster? 

Tnadz

Plans yes, details we are not ready to share yet.

While the code has sections dedicated to vertex damage (soft body) modelling, it’s unlikely we’ll see this implemented. Would there be any kind of path towards key framed damage like we’ve seen used in games like NR2003 where a model can have % deformation applied related to how much impact the car has taken? i.e. The modders set the maximum deformation in 3d (like an animation) and rF2 interpolates the % towards max based on how much damage/impact has happened? Alternatively, setting model damage based on animation frames in a similar fashion? 

Tnadz

With more and more racing cars using carbon fiber and similar light and very hard materials, dents are becoming less of a thing and things in general just break off or shatter. That said, we do not have a good model for those things yet, which is why we are currently sticking to mainly rendering scratches.

We’ve seen calls from Studio 397 for people who can handle physics and other major components of the engine. Are there plans to overhaul rF2 in car dynamics or will most work by these new hires be on MSG titles that could backflush into rF2? 

Tnadz

The jobs for Studio 397 are to work on rF2. Other parts of MSG are hiring as well, but those are separate jobs.

You mentioned in the track questions that car damage will start to have more impact on aero and engine performance. Will this be something we can expect in the near future? What kinds of tools will be available to modders to update these values? 

Tnadz

Hard to say. These things are probably not the hardest things to add to the cars physics wise and they will probably just end up as a few new properties that we can expose to the modding community as well (with some sensible defaults). Why I’m a bit in doubt is that for example during pitstops it used to be the case that you could repair damage but your car would never end up being as good as it was before. We took that out last year for the Le Mans 24 hour race and I don’t think anybody complained about that going missing. So I’m a bit afraid that if performance of cars degrades over time, not everybody will like that. WDYT?

Shaders have been updated quite a bit, and there are a lot of historical ones. Are there plans to obsolete any of them? Are more coming? 

Tnadz

We would certainly already advise people to use the new shaders over the old ones. Consider the old ones “deprecated”. We can’t actually remove them completely though without breaking a lot of existing content, so we’re not taking that step. And yes, more shaders are coming.

We have plenty of road cars. What about RALLY cars? 

czajson7

Rally is not really an area we’re focussing on right now. We’re leaving that to the community for now.

Will there be at anytime an option for running different tyre brands on gt3 cars? 

hallenstein

At this point that is unlikely if we’re talking about our GT3 cars.

What are the plans for adding addition classes of cars, especially GT4 as a modern class and Group C as a classic class. 

James A Evans

We’re not sure about GT4 at this point. Group C sounds great!

Sorry if this question is already on the list. Do old cars, mainly I refer to the most important cars in the Competitions like GT3’s, GTE’s, Oreca… will be updated to last PBR standards in the inside area? Do you have plans to improve TC, ABS, engine maps to match with every different car, instead to have generic ones? 

Miquel Ramos

We’re considering updates to those cars and if we have new physics features these cars will definitely be upgraded to take advantage of those (where they would in real life).

Can you change POSLED on AMR GTE? This is only one GTE with POSLED on Windshield. Same like, if you can set the same size of this LEDs on cars in one class. 

Jimmy

Why is the position of this display a problem? I agree it would make sense to make them all of equal size. I guess in some case we smuggled a bit to make them fit better.

Can you add choice LED colours in VEH files via GENSTRING? 

Jimmy

We decided to stick to one colour per class. You could probably make your own upgrade that changes it though.

Can you add some LED Stripes or other Decals for Endurance cars like iRacing / ACC and Real live? (lightning bar on windshield, A Pillar, lightning Grill). 

Jimmy

We considered this and might still do so as part of our “night update”.

Can you add Endurance Headlights for GT3 Challengers + Bentley and Ferrari, like on 5 old GT3 cars? 

Jimmy

This is less likely to still happen. It was a nice extra on those cars though.

 I think – this year would be one year from new UI, and we still don’t have any tools for Car Icons in new UI. 

Jimmy

Correct. The tools to do so are still only suitable for internal use right now. We are still considering how to make a tool that would work well for the community.

Will you add new skins for Formula Pro? Like those of the E-Sport championship? 

Stefano Vidale

That is pretty likely!

Will there be new collaborations with teams like the one with McLaren? 

Stefano Vidale

We are constantly talking to teams and manufacturers, so in general I would say yes, you are likely to see more of those.

The hybrid question has appeared more than once in this thread, but i’d like to be more specific. Have you planned to implement the hybrid technology in the Formula Pro or a similar car? (with a 1.6 L V6 and MGU-K for example). 

lagg

No, for the Formula Pro car we specifically decided to give it a “traditional” engine as we thought that would be more fun to drive. Apart from the DRS it now supports we did consider adding some form of boost or push to pass system. That might still be added.

How is the progress going for the online competition, it was said before that once its completed then work will start for single player modes, is still valid? 

cristianuk

It’s going a bit slower than we would have hoped. I think I’ve explained the situation a bit in the introduction of the previous blog, which means we have to shuffle people around a bit. That we will work more on single player modes after that is still valid.

This is in regard to the consistency of force feedback strength across different cars. RF2 has a less well known, but well-thought-out feature to automatically adjust force feedback strength for weaker wheels, and allow FFB wheels that are powerful enough to relay the force 1:1. However, ‘steering wheel torque maximum’ in the player.json is often overlooked, especially by new users. Do you intend to make this option very clear in the new UI settings, to make sure it is configured correctly? 

doddynco

We are certainly looking in general at settings that we need to expose in the UI. You might have seen us adding a few new ones over the last year. This sounds like a good candidate as well.

 Further to this, in general, with official content, the FFB multiplier always needs reducing down to 60% to avoid clipping. Why do S397 always set the ‘steering torque nominal’ in the physics configuration file too low when they release new content? Is this so that people with weak wheels will think the FFB is stronger and therefore better? If this is the case, I would like to argue that a correctly set ffb signal, with minimal clipping, is actually more intense for the driver, and therefore this should be the default. A flat clipping signal does not produce a change in wheel torque, and so does not feel as strong as a signal which is varying motor torque dynamically beneath the clipping point. 

doddynco

I will pass on this information to our physics team as they make the decisions on how to set this up and they certainly need to take into account all the different wheels out there as you say.

What would you consider as the next big improvement regarding car physics to be even more realistic? 

Agahnim

I think one of the more important things for us to address are the wet weather grip levels on various surfaces.

Are there any plans to improve the way mirrors can be setup from inside the cars? Now controls can not be assigned from the UI only from the .json file. I think there are no graphical settings turn on and off what part of the vehicle is seen in the car only from the player.json. In game, it is hard to get a good reference point to set up the mirrors view, In some cars the resolution in rearview is low pixels (part of the mirror.bmp) resolution. It would be a great that this would be configurable from the UI to trade of fps vs resolution for the mirrors. 

Gert-Jan van Osch

I think you pretty much can setup all the mirrors from inside the cars, so I’m not sure what part of this you are actually struggling with. One suggestion I seem to be able to extract from your question is a “configurable” resolution of the mirror? That sounds like a thing we can consider.

Do you plan to visually represent and simulate (loss of grip) dirt accumulation on tires? 

Balazs Magyar

This is still on our wishlist but I can’t tell you when we’ll get to it.

Any chances of fixing/reintroducing heat haze? 

Paweł Andrzejewski

I will have to check with the team about that. There’s two areas where we had some of that (heat from the engine and heat from the track in the distance). It’s been pushed down a bit by more “important” graphics updates we would like to do for now.

How about sparks coming from beneath the car? It does a great detail in visual aspects as well as functionally it will indicate the suspension is set too low. 

Paweł Andrzejewski

When talking about our “particle effects” bringing back sparks is the number one feature request, apart from tweaking how some of the other effects look. Expect some news on this soon!

If I remember correctly, once, you mentioned some tweaks to the sound engine. Do you have any updates on that? 

Paweł Andrzejewski

Not yet, no. I can confirm we’re working on something here, but it’s too early to go into details.

Are the shadows following you on the barriers will be fixed ? I can accept the lack of AI fix, and race alone, but even alone, there is something for ruining the immersion. 

AlexHeuskat

We’re working on an improvement to our shadow system. This is an algorithm that most games use btw, so you will see similar effects on all of them. The update intends to make these effects less visible and, where possible, extending the shadow range as well.

I’d like to see ‘custom’ number of weather slots, during a race. Now we have 5 (start, 25%, 50%, 75% and Finish). Why not giving us the ability to choose between, e.g, from 1 to 5 slots? Plus why not adding ‘random weather’ slot? 

Haris1977

If you want truly “custom” weather then your best bet is to write a (weather) plugin which gives you all of this control. I know there are some floating around that do “live weather” but that is not the only thing you can do. There are also plenty of ways to customize the weather in different ways. For the UI we had to choose something reasonably simple. It will not ever suit everybody (especially when you do long races).

Why isn’t the Ligier lmp2 wheel used on Oreca and Cadillac? It’s so much better quality and would improve those 2 cars a lot. 

Darius Andrei

They were done by different people in the team is the honest answer to this question. That said, I hear what you are saying and we will keep this in mind going forward.

Are there any plans to implement 1-way Shock absorbers? If implemented, I think that the reproducibility of racing cars equipped with 1-way Shock absorbers (e.g. M2 CS Racing) and general cars will be improved.

I_Bellett

I agree with you on that point. No model is perfect so our physics team always needs to find the best way to model a car given our capabilities. Talking specifically about the M2 we did need to make a few adjustments to model the car and sooner or later adding more types of shocks would be more than welcome.

I remember that rFactor 2 had a partnership agreement with Motec. Do you have any plans to use the contract to change the vehicle’s LCD to an object compatible with Motec Display Creator? 

I_Bellett

Actually that partnership was about the data logging only and we have put that on the back burner for a few years now, prioritizing other aspects first. But to answer your question, I don’t think we would actively replace displays in vehicles with ones from Motec (and the Motec Display Creator). We try to stick to what’s in the real cars (given our limitations on what we can currently display).

We saw an improvement to the loading times regarding track on the last Release Candidate update, but now the loading process seems to slow down once it start to load the vehicles. Will the cars receive a similar improvement in the future?

L0P3X

Our initial profiling (the process of trying to figure out what aspects of certain code are slow) showed we could gain the most by improving a few specific aspects of track loading as well as some generic improvements (loading common compiled shaders from a cache). Whilst we will certainly keep looking for ways to improve loading times, I think we already addressed most of the “low hanging fruit” when it comes to optimizing that code

I would love to see different updates to the cars displays and dashboards, such as the different LEDs for ABS/TC activation, onboard delta, or different pages, any plan to update this?

L0P3X

I believe I answered that question above, most of these are dependent on code updates, and for now I would advise you to use third party tools to enhance your cockpit.

I’ve heard some people saying that the GT3 cars had some “shader inconsistency” between the different cars from this DLC pack, Will this cars receive some graphical updates in the future?

L0P3X

The GT3 cars have been produced over a considerable period of time, so there would always be some differences between older and newer cars as we improved our techniques, grew our team and had better shaders available. Probably most differences are in how cockpits and other small parts are modelled and textured. It’s likely we will do another pass on some of those cars.

Recently we received an update to the Tatuus pack, where one of the cars received revamped sounds. Any chance to see this kind of update on more cars, or a general Audio Engine update on the long term?

L0P3X

Without going into details we are certainly aware that some of our cars as well as the sound engine could use some work. Where possible we try to sneak that in (if we have better sounds available, such as for this Tatuus update).

Will we ever see text in the menus that tells us how many AI cars can be used for each track? i.e. How many garage spots are available. Often now we have to boot or add AI to either get a full field or prevent a mess of cars blocking each other in the garages. If we could see the available options PRIOR to loading the track, we could then tailor the amount of AI we would load without congestion.

Davehenrie

I think it’s a good suggestion to show some of this information (from the GBD and AIW files) in the UI. I’ve added this to our internal issue tracker.

New build update! 

Hello dear sim racers, today is a good day indeed. Why, I hear you say? Because a new build of rFactor 2 has just been released!

That’s right, today we have pressed the big green update button to transfer our current rFactor 2 Release Candidate build into the main public branch of the simulation, and with it, we introduce a number of updates and improvements aimed at enhancing the user experience within rFactor 2, as we continue to push forward with our development of the software now and into the future. 

Anyone who has been involved in our Release Candidate build program will already be aware of the majority of these changes, and as always we at the studio remain exceptionally grateful for your continued support with opting into these builds early, and the excellent feedback we regularly receive from many of our community – helping us ensure these builds are as robust as possible before transitioning the fixes into the main branch of the simulation.

One of the key highlights we are delighted to introduce as part of this latest build is the work we have undertaken to speed up the loading process within the software. For this new update, players should notice a very nice decrease in the amount of time it takes to navigate throughout the software, from loading and switching between the different series within the title, to the all important loading into the tracks themselves. The feedback we have heard so far suggests these changes have made a very real improvement to the user experience for our players, and we cannot wait to hear the thoughts of a wider cross-section of the community once you all get your hands on this build release. 

Update Notes

NOTE TO SERVER ADMINS | With this build you will need to update your servers.

Steam Build IDs:

Client: 7810236

Dedicated Server: 7810246

rF2 Build: 1.1126

Game Loading

• Optimizations to Game Loading and Series switching.
• Optimizations to Texture Loading.
• Added the ability to load cached track files from the component to improve loading times.
• Improved shader loading and added pre-built shader cache to improve loading times.

UI

• Fixed an issue where Exaggerate Yaw would default to -80%

GFX

• Minor pass on cloud texture balancing.
• Adjusted PFX settings to allow for more exposure in low light conditions.

Audio

• Updated minimum number of audio effects to 32.
• Fixed: Number of audio effects sometimes resetting to 1.
• Fixed: Audio cutting out after changing force feedback settings.

Modding

• Updated ModDev to save and load CBASH and RRSHD files into track folders so that they can be packaged with content.
• Detect if VisGroups affect collision and log this occurrence and in ModDev only show a pop up.

Controller Profile Updates (General)

• Set Exaggerate Yaw to 0
• Fixed various missing ‘Clutch-In’ entries that had been deleted by accident
• Fanatec Podium Wheel Base DD1/2
• Default “Steering resistance type”:0,
• Added pedal inputs
• Thrustmaster T300RS Racing wheel
• Fixed mappings

rFactor 2 – Available now exclusive to PC on Steam

Arriving much later than originally planned, we have a massive Q&A session this time, and we would like to start by thanking everybody for taking the time to submit all these questions! We decided to split the list in half, with the second half arriving next week.

Before we get started with those questions though, we would like to address a question that has been asked quite a few times in these past weeks. A lot of you are wondering what our involvement is in the just released NASCAR 21: Ignition game and how this affects our ongoing commitment to rFactor 2.

We were already involved in the development for over two years now, so way before the acquisition. Over time the team working on the NASCAR game, although sometimes varying in composition, has been roughly the same size. Still some of you observed that updates to rFactor 2 have slowed down over the last few months. This is due to the fact that we’ve had a few developers leaving Studio 397 and even though we are actively looking for new people, this is a process that will take some time.

That said, there are certainly a few longer-term developments that are still being worked on, but are not yet in a state that we feel comfortable revealing them, and we are also looking at backporting a few of the developments from the NASCAR game back to rFactor 2. On that note, let’s move on with the first half of our questions about cars.

Q&A

As this time is about automobiles, will the Lamborghini be included in the GT3 in future? Thank you! 

juanchioooo

Good question, and I would be rich if I could predict the future. The main reason why we did not add this car to the pack yet is licensing cost. Of course, that might change over time. If we get a better deal, we’ll consider it.

When will the car descriptions for some cars get fixed so that all available liveries can be selected? For example, try selecting AUDI GT3 2018 #1 and AUDI GT3 Evo #1 and check loaded cars (there are a couple other issues with official car description as well). Thing is, this is absolutely easy fix but has not been done ever since cars have been released, and we are talking about paid content here. 

Tomislav Leskovic

I’ve passed this on to our QA department for validation, and I’m sure they will address these.

Is there a plan to provide correct car displays (edit: with displays I mean the dashboards of course), with correct data? 

Tomislav Leskovic

We are still rather limited in what we can show on dashboards and in the digital displays. I think you can see that more recent displays are better than the older ones, but we need to overhaul the code that renders these to really add data like wheelspin indications, multipage displays, etc. I’m sure you are aware that there are some great third-party tools out there such as SimHub that do a great job, and I would certainly recommend taking a look at those.

When will the opportunity finally be given to select the vehicle opponents in the UI that I want and then save them? In RRRE a matter of minutes, in rF2 currently, well ….

memoNo1

The best way to save those is to create a new series (rfmod) but I’ll admit that is a lot of work to just select a few opponents. The opponent selection is a part of the UI that we ported straight from the old UI, but we know we need to overhaul it completely to make it more useful and user-friendly. I don’t have a timeline for it yet though, so in the short term, making your own series is probably your best bet.

In the Tracks Q&A, you mentioned how the suspension can be bent and damaged. However, this damage can only occur as a result of impact from a wall or another car. I would really like to see the track itself have an effect on suspension damage – it would mean drivers actually have a reason to not hit certain curbs too hard, improving racing. It would be so cool to see in esports too. 

doddynco

Noted, I think it’s an interesting improvement that we should consider.

Could we see the implementation of maximum stresses to suspension components in the chassis file? Some lines are still in the Chassis file ‘MinForceOrTorque0=’ ‘MaxForceOrTorque0=’ ‘Breakability0=. 

doddynco

I don’t know to be honest.

What about legendary cars, like the 70´s and 80´s DRM Gr. 4 and Gr. 5 Cars? Any chance to drive a beautiful BMW CSL for example in top quality? 

Ralph_Raccoon

A while ago we helped the DRM Modding Team to explore the possibility of porting over their cars to rFactor 2. Unfortunately, at the time, they concluded they did not want to go ahead with the project. Licensing wise, these cars are a bit special too, being custom-built mostly. I guess as a community, you could kindly let this team know that you would still appreciate a port. We would certainly try to help (again).

In-car dashboards and their limitations. What is the biggest obstacle in upgrading that? 

Paweł Andrzejewski

The development time needed to update the code. As you might have read in the intro to this Q&A, we are a bit light on developers at the moment, but even before that, there have been more important things that we have prioritized over this. Obviously, another consideration is the work we would have to do to update all cars to take advantage of any improvements we make.

What’s left in the tank for the Formula Pro? As was said it’s not the final release, so I’m curious what will be updated. 

Paweł Andrzejewski

We’re not ready to share all the details yet, but we are considering for Formula Challenge a slightly slower version of the car (less horsepower and less downforce) as well as some upgrades to the Pro car, possibly a “push to pass” system as well as visual upgrades.

How do you rate the cooperation with Goodyear? Are you going to update tires in your content based on that experience? 

Paweł Andrzejewski

We are extremely happy with our collaboration with Goodyear, and we are working on updating several tires based on the data and feedback we get from them.

Will you update tyre database based on the effects of this cooperation? 

Paweł Andrzejewski

I think that would be a good idea next year, to provide a new set of baseline tyres for different types of cars. It’s a bit too early right now, as several types of tyres are still being developed.

How about extensions to the car adjustments like differential, more TC options as well as a possibility to tweak them while on track?

Paweł Andrzejewski

We’re working on a few right now, but we know we also need an updated TC (and ABS) system to be better aligned to the modern systems found in various GT cars.

A mapping for flashing lights would be very appreciated as well!

Paweł Andrzejewski

Yeah, most people right now solve that by programming a macro for this using a third-party tool, but I agree we could add this as a mappable control going forward.

Considering the new Goodyear tyre model is already in the M4, Formula Pro and a few others that I have forgotten, which cars will be the next ones to get the new model? GT3s? Tatuus’? Or maybe will a new car/cars be released before any other content gets the new model? 

VirusGR42

Next car to get it is a new one which we will release soon!

Last blog said that a track may take around 3 months to complete. On the other hand, how much time does a car take to be made from the green light to begin (assuming after licence has been acquired) until completion? 

VirusGR42

Right, let’s take as a starting point that we have a licence, the appropriate CAD models and all the physics data that we need as well as some sound recordings then typically we can build the car physics in about 4-6 weeks – models take a bit longer. We do calculate 2-4 weeks extra after that as cars and liveries typically require sign off from the licensor and teams, which typically takes a few iterations.

Additionally, what is the sort of testing process do they go through, and how long is it (I guess they are also tested by manufacturers?)? 

 VirusGR42

The length of testing depends a bit on the type of car and in some cases also involves “balancing the performance” for the class it is in. Typically, we try to leverage the time it takes for final approval of the car and liveries to do the testing, so 2-4 weeks. Interestingly, most cars we licence do not require the licensor to test the car. Typically, such approvals focus mostly on getting the visuals right. That said, there are cases where this is definitely different. Radical for example provides a lot of feedback, often early in the process, and our collaboration with BMW on the M2 also involved several of their test drivers providing valuable input.

In terms of car series, everything seems to be either GTE or GT3. How about some other full series cars, maybe even older touring cars, or something to run with the civic from 2013? 

Andy Bonar

Those are definitely the big ones, and to be fair also the ones the community were asking about a lot. We are considering a few possible other “tintop” series at the moment.

Do you see yourself coming down under to implement any of these cars as most sims do not cater for much from the Southern Hemisphere & this could be a good market base: S5000, TCR, Aussie Cars, V8 Supercars, HQ’s, Aussie Ute, Super 2, Super 3, Toyota 86 Race Series, Touring Car Masters? 

Binny

We recently discussed the S5000 but decided against it. In other news, there is at least one series in your list we are seriously considering right now.

I find it really quite immersion breaking to see those standard helmets on each car – especially for full series content – that’s one of the reasons I enjoy the Formula E so much. Can you please consider adding more helmets, or even better, real life correct helmets, in future content please (where appropriate).

SiC58

Noted. We don’t always do this as chasing licences for all the helmet designs and (personal) sponsors can be quite time-consuming, but we will consider adding more helmets going forward.

Also, are you going to implement a minimum standard for modding as some cars and tracks are very bad when it comes to racing rain, night ect.. I see people commenting loss of FPS is bad.

Binny

Unlikely, as we don’t have time to review and provide feedback on all modded content. Anything that is in the workshop, we would encourage people to review and leave comments though so others in the community can judge this content based on feedback. We do try to provide more and more information for modders on how to properly develop content.

Is there any hope, that fans of historic racing will get stuff like a Group C DLC, a Historic GT/IMSA DLC or a 90s GT1 DLC? Given that there are already cooperation’s with manufacturers like BMW, Porsche, McLaren, Mercedes, Nissan, Chevrolet, Panoz or even Ferrari there would be a fantastic opportunity to showcase historic endurance racing within rF2 as a counterpart to the modern endurance racing, that is a trademark of rF2. And I guess I am not alone in thinking that the M1 Procar would have been the perfect fit for the legends trophy. 

hitm4k3r

Let me tell you a little story. You may or may not know that some of us at Studio 397 in a past life were involved in the GTP mod for NR2003. In the year prior to starting Studio 397 a few of us had the plan to create a paid mod for rFactor 2 featuring these Group C cars, officially licensing and building them. We were actually about halfway through that project when we continued the development of rFactor 2 and had to put this on the back burner. Ever since, we’ve been discussing if such a series would make sense. I personally still think it would! And the M1 Procar, yeah, that could be a good “cup” series by itself.

Could we maybe get just a tiny visual update for the historic F1, F2 and F3 cars (please …) ? Or in other words: have you considered reaching out to the guys who developed the 1967 F2 mod? How about a real licenced Matra, Honda, McLaren, Brabham or Ferrari to update the late 60s car roster? 

hitm4k3r

We’re certainly open to starting a dialogue if there is anybody from the community that wants to upgrade these cars.

Have you considered voting for the next DLC cars or DLC themes, as Kunos did it in the past? 

hitm4k3r

We did consider this, but we’ve never done it, obviously. My concerns here are that we might not get enough people to vote to get a good representation of our user base and that if we do, we might end up without any clear winner (ask people about their favourite car or track now, I’m sure there won’t be any consensus). So whilst I’m not saying we should ignore what people want, I will argue that probably everybody wants something different, and that is fine.

When will we see a proper hybrid system developed in RF2? Is it already in development? 

RNeves

We’ve always said that we will build such systems if we need them for any cars we license. So far we have not done that, so there is no such system in development right now. Given the licences that Motorsport Games has acquired though, it’s certainly possible we’ll do this next year. I am not allowed to speculate on that though.

When will we see tyre punctures in the game? 

RNeves

I’m not sure yet. Code wise, due to tyre wear, there is a spot in the code that states when the puncture should occur, but it has not been implemented yet. This is one of many physics features we would still like to add. It’s had a fairly low priority, as typically way before you reach this point you will come in to pit for tyres anyway. That said, punctures could also happen from running over stuff or hitting sharp edges of curbs, so I’m definitely not saying we won’t implement them at all.

Are you planning on developing vintage car classes like Group C, DRM, GT1 or something along these lines? 

RNeves

I’ve touched on Group C and DRM earlier in the list of questions. We did not have much discussions about GT1 cars. I guess they are still a bit too modern to be vintage!

Have you ever considered outsourcing car updates to external modding teams, such as ASR, Schumi’s or Tchachalowski? 

Delzimar

We have sometimes outsourced car development to external modding teams, Enduracers being an example. We’re in contact with some of the ones you mention, and we actually tried to work with ASR a while ago, but back then we could not reach a business agreement with them.

Sadly, rFactor 2 has quite a disparity of quality between some content – think the awful Porsche GTE for example. This really spoils the sim in my opinion. Can we champion for a thorough refresh upgrade to this car, and paid DLC in particular, as a matter of urgency please?

SiC58

You’ve certainly brought it to my attention again. Noted.

This is kinda on the cars’ topic, so I’ll go with it… setups. Default setups in rF2 for the most part are not great. Sims like ACC have a really good feature where they come with a default Aggressive and stable setup, and rain. This would be a major improvement to rF2 if you could implement something like this – please, can I implore you to think about this and add it in soon?

RangoliniGustavo

Do you think this is true for our more recent cars as well? For the record, I like the idea of providing more than one setup.

Where is the GT3 BOP from GT Pro? We need a new BOP!

Rici Migali

Good question. My initial answer is that I do not know and obviously I’m not going to leave it at that and discuss this internally. I agree that we should release such improvements going forward.

I find it upsetting that historic content in rFactor 2 is sadly neglected. Please, please, please add more historic cars and tracks to the game!

Lennon Acton

Quite a few people have made the case for more historic content. We are reviewing some ideas in this area.

Would love native MOTEC / telemetry support in rF2.

Lennon Acton.

I personally agree, but other priorities so far have prevented us from completing this development. It’s not cancelled, but it was put on ice. For now at least.

Appreciate this is a super minor thing, but… can we please have a graphics update to add the old school ‘Sticker Tyres’ for new slicks (like in 90’s F1 where they came out of the pits with stickers on the tyres that eventually wore off)

Paul Jeffrey

It’s a great idea and I believe we have most code in place to do this. You might have seen that we can render tyre wear on those cars. We might or might not have to tweak that a bit for these stickers.

Sorta cars, sorta UI. The way rF2 represents car choices in the UI list is mega confusing to me – any plans to look at and improve this going forward?

SKaine

Assuming you mean the way we order the cars in a hierarchy is what is confusing you, do you have any suggestions on how we should improve this? From a personal point of view, I’ve seen it is very hard to come up with a single, consistent hierarchy that works for all types of cars. For example, sometimes you want to group them by class, sometimes by make, sometimes by series, but never have I found a single way that works best for all the different sorts of cars we have, so I’m very much open to suggestions here.

Still on the sorta cars, sorta not topic – ‘Self in Rearview’ rarely works, and I think it is super immersive to see bodywork in the mirrors (like in the F1202X series) – will this be improved in future, or even better, added into the default instal of rFactor 2?

SKaine

If you’re talking about cars we’ve produced, I’m happy to get bug reports for such cars as I believe it makes sense for us to support this.

I still love the golden oldie cars like the Skip Barber and especially the historic EVE formula cars. Are these going to be updated to PBR at some point? I really think these cars are far, far too good to let slide off into retirement.

Luke Stanton.

A few people in this Q&A have made a case for this, so we’ll explore our options.

Is S397 interested in boosting up manual transmission simulation? 

mantasisg

This is a tricky one. The simple answer would be yes, but the more complicated one is that we would really like to improve both the software simulation and the hardware here. We feel the current way that particularly H-shifters interface with ours and other simulations is inadequate to provide a really good implementation. We would love to have ways to ensure that the layout of the H-shifter is correct, and also the feeling when shifting with and without clutch, the grinding of gears when you mis-shift and all things like that. The simple “on/off switches” that are now used per gear simply don’t allow any of this. That said, there are still a few things we could do, even for the current generation of hardware.

Is S397 interested in revising solid axle simulation? 

mantasisg

See below.

In addition to this question, can S397 confirm that something is not right with how solid axle ultra chassis simulation works right now ? I have worked on many cars with it for rF2, and I think something is not right about things related to body pitch and probably roll too. 

mantasisg

This is a question I will need to ask our physics team. It might be best to send us an e-mail directly with the problem you are seeing and what you would expect. Maybe with an example car that we can look at ourselves. If there is something wrong there, we would be happy to address it.

Is studio happy about recently made improvements in how studio builds tires, such as for BMW, FPro and new Tatuus car ? And does it seem that simracers welcomed the differences ? (I did btw!) 

mantasisg

We are certainly happy with this direction as well, and mostly we had good feedback about them from the community. Obviously, we’ll keep looking for further improvements to the model and data.

What is the root problem of interior windshields responding to light in a reversed way, which makes for big troubles during night ? The dirt textures, and baked in interior reflection texture on inner windshield is a massive immersion boost, is this high on priority list of future graphical improvements? 

mantasisg

I would say this is fairly high on the list, and our main problem is how headlights respond to these dirty windshields at night. In the past those could blind the drivers completely, and we did not want to negatively impact players that way, which is why we removed them until we’ve improved that situation.

When will the glass shader on cars be updated to reflect the sun? 

Balazs Magyar

When we have fixed the issues at night is the simple answer. The reason why we’ve made the glass completely transparent is that otherwise at night, with lots of headlights from behind, it was becoming hard if not impossible to see. So once we address that, we can bring back dirt and other imperfections.

Also, better tire shaders would also be nice. Are they car specific? 

Balazs Magyar

Yes and no. We have generic shaders, so people can in theory pick any shader and apply it to a tyre. In more recent cars, I believe we use the same shader (and it could even be named explicitly for this, I don’t remember). We’ve made a few improvements more recently already. I think internally, the USF-2000 was the first car to receive those (an update that was released fairly recently).

Do you see any benefit in going after Vintage licences? The heritage back catalogue of Williams F1 for example. Having rFactor 2 be a way to archive these pieces of machinery that may not be able to run in real life for too much longer. 

Woodee

We never really approached it from that angle to be honest. It’s certainly an interesting idea to preserve such cars digitally in a simulation. It would be worth exploring to see if we could somehow work with manufacturers to make this happen.

Why the rain visual was not implemented on cockpit view for open wheel cars? Could we expect something to be done about that? I have the same question for the mirrors too (Exteriors / back cameras). 

Spyro

I’m not totally sure I get the question, so my apologies if I answer it wrongly, but I am wondering what parts of open cockpits you are talking about? Mirrors typically don’t get wet while driving. Windshields to, and we should have that modeled. In fact, we will even add some new technology soon as you might have heard. Or are you maybe talking about the raindrops on a “visor” of a helmet?

Also, I know that some drivers disable on purpose rain drops to avoid having rain on their windshield. It gives an unfair advantage and no wipers movement on exteriors cameras (weird on live broadcast). Could we have a workaround, like static rain texture appearing on the windshield for this case? 

Spyro

Yes, that is a good suggestion. I think that is what we should do for this case.

Also, as mentioned on other posts, I would love to see punctures implemented… 

Spyro

Agreed, it’s missing completely right now. From wear, but also from driving over sharp objects and/or curbs.

Are there any plans to allow the option for cars to have an adjustable Weight-Jacker while on track? Something similar to how the anti roll bars and brake balance work with assignable buttons. This would add to the immersion of IndyCars new and old. 

DiggerHawk

Yes. Probably in early 2022!

Hi and thanks for this kind of interaction with us. What’s your statement about onboard adjustable differential lock? Would it be so hard to implement that would be months-years away, in case it’s planned to be added? 

Javibeza

It is currently not planned, but conceptually I don’t think it would be hard since we already have diffs that are adjustable in the garage and typically changing them while driving is mostly a matter of having controls mapped to allow that.

Is it planned to implement KERS and hybrid technologies? 

lagg

We’ve always said we’ll do that when we build cars that need it. I can’t disclose anything about that yet. We would like to implement a generic system for hybrid technologies. It’s a big job (as there are quite a few different types of hybrid systems).

Forgive me for not being too good on the technical, so this might already be in the sim, but can rFactor 2 simulate turbo lag like we would see in 80’s F1 cars? If no, is this something that might be on the agenda for the future?

Frankie

We can already simulate a turbo, and our simulation includes turbo lag, so we could certainly simulate an 80’s F1 car or anything else with a turbo.

Also speaking of technical stuff, it’s long been known rF2 has difficulties with tire pressures and running minimum possible – again, is this a known issue within the Studio, and are plans afoot to rectify it as this has a huge impact on the realism aspect of the game.

Frankie

This is something we are trying to fix as part of our partnership with Goodyear. We are certainly aware about it and some other “techniques” for going fast that should not allow you to go that fast.

Final one from me – driver animations. It has bugged me since forever – will rFactor 2 ever have driver animations, so we can see gear shifting, for example?

Frankie

Let’s focus on gear shifting, as that is something that is missing for a reason. The reason being that we can’t really do such animations in real time. The first time we hear about a shift is when you press the (H-)shifter button. Obviously before that time, you already moved your real hand and fingers, but we don’t know that. So if we had to start an animation, we would be way too late, and we decided that playing such an animation “too late” does not make much sense.

Do you intend, in a general way, to improve the overall sounds and sound effects in RF2? In particular: When are you going to implement the “scrub” function in the “SKID SOUNDS” part as well as the temperature effect on the brake hiss? 

philman

We are looking into this, and I will pass on the specific improvements you mention to the sound team.

Still on the subject of audio, do you intend to make the echo and reverberation of sounds appear according to the configuration and topology of the circuits? 

philman

This is an interesting, and complex topic. Probably the best way to model sound is to have it rendered in a 3D world, where all the reflections you would get because of the surroundings would be accurately calculated. We have not seen a system yet that can do this without significant computational effort. That leaves us with some simpler tricks, such as the one we already use when you drive through a tunnel or close to a solid barrier. We are certainly following technology here as the full effect of, for example, standing at an F1 race at Spa and hearing those cars accelerate and shift gears in the distance is quite a unique experience. One we’re not close to replicating! That said, we are still in the R&D phase for any possible improvements, so I don’t have any details yet.

The last builds have made huge progress in RF2 in terms of headlight and headlamp reflection on wet roads, even if everything is not perfect yet. Do you think it’s possible to improve this subject and to extend it to dry tracks? 

philman

The simple answer is yes. Especially at night we can still make big improvements, but some things we do will probably also positively influence how things look during the daytime.

Also, the power of the headlights of the cars at night seems to be really too low compared to the reality: is it also possible to improve things? 

philman

We had to balance them a bit to get the best out of the technology we have for them right now. So partially see my answer above. Better technology is needed to give us more freedom here.

Is it possible to publish the TGM files of the tires of the GT3, GTE and LMP2 cars? 

philman

We’re considering releasing a new set of “generic” tyres as a database for people to get started. We want to be a bit further ahead though in our improvements based on our collaboration with Goodyear.

What’s about PTP? 

memoNo1

Expect an update about that in 2022!

Will the Porsche GTE receive an update as the interior is nowhere near the level of the Ferrari GTE. 

r00b Driver

We are aware of this. We’re not yet sure if and when we will do this though. As you know, there is also a newer version of this car available in real life.

Do you intend to improve the sounds of the cars? You only have to play ACC or R3E to know how better sounds increase immersion. 

r00b Driver

We are certainly aware that our sound engine and the way we use it has plenty of room for improvement. We’re exploring our options here currently.

Do you plan to implement a downshift protection that doesn’t allow to downshift if the revolutions are high? 

AlexHeuskat

Yes, for cars that have such a mechanism, we intend to add it.

Is a night PBR update planified, about the car reflection by night, it’s not really beauty, and with the lights, it’s not at the ACC level at all, even AMS2 is far more beauty, the night immersion needs a really long work. 

AlexHeuskat

For sure this is a weak spot currently and something on our list. The type of rendering engine we are using in rF2 is a forward rendering engine. ACC uses a deferred rendering engine. Both have strong and weak points, and the trick is to try and work around those as best as possible.

Smoke update ? I think yes, with dust particles… 

AlexHeuskat

We’re researching some ideas in this area, but it’s too early to show or commit to anything here. And yes, we’re not forgetting sparks.

Are 3d grass + flowers planified? I like the AMS2 grass (and trees). 

AlexHeuskat

Those really need better support in the graphics engine to be done well, so it’s a coding effort first, and then we need to find a good way to do this that does not put a big burden on artists upgrading existing content.

About the tracks, you release more cars than tracks, maybe can you put more resources on the tracks team maker? 

AlexHeuskat

Our track team is more than twice the size of our car team already! Fact is, a track takes way more time than a car. I think we have a reasonable balance right now, but I’ll make a note of your feedback.

About the AI update? We arrive soon at 1 year after the UI update release….do you have plans for the AI update? Or maybe you can start with an AI selection feature, it’s still a nightmare to choose the AI liveries. 

AlexHeuskat

We’ve spent some time on the AI recently for the NASCAR game, and we intend to bring that back to rF2. The “opponent selection” is something that keeps coming up. I agree, the current UI (which is a straight port from the old UI) does this all wrong, and it’s very awkward. That will need a full redesign. Your only workaround now is to create your own series (rfmod) and pick the cars there.

Really loving rF2 especially recently. One question I have had is that would you guys be able to create an option to be able to turn the virtual car dash display on or off, so for anyone with a real life display mounted to their rig, can drive using their dash only and without the one on the screen. Maybe saves a tiny bit of fps too with the virtual car display screen hidden???? Anyway, thanks for your time. 

Connor Clifford

I did not test this, but I would argue the performance gains would be quite minimal. You can try this for yourself by using a “hood view” for example. I have a virtual dash myself, and it’s mostly in front of the car dash already.

If I count correctly, the cars made by S397 in the last 5 years are approximately 55 cars. When the improvement of the current tire model thanks to the Goodyear data is ripe enough, one of my greatest wishes for rFactor 2 is that all, yes all of these 55 S397 cars are updated to the tire model which is improve (Formula Pro, M4 class 1…). Is this something that can happen (that would be fabulous)? 

pilAUTO

This is certainly something we are discussing. Without going into details, when we model a tyre we always use a combination of data we have and data we need to take an “educated guess” on. Recent experiences have shown that some of those guesses (not surprisingly) were not completely accurate, so it makes sense to go back and correct such inaccuracies.

I want S397 to make some very realistic FWD and 4WD/AWD cars (upgrade the transmission for 4WDs), not a lot. 

pilAUTO

There are some FWD ones coming and this year we did an AWD one (eX ZERO). I’m sure we will do a few more going forward!

I dream of a very realistic “street car” (supercar) made by S397, just one, not 2 or 3 !! Can this happen? 

pilAUTO

So far we’ve always said that our focus will be on race cars, not street cars. That does not mean we will never do a street car. I’ve seen quite a few community based street and track day cars being done.

In addition, can you list the improvements and new functionality in the physics of the cars say in the 18 months, that would be great and of course that would not be a commitment but more evoke your projects in the matter. 

pilAUTO

There are a couple of new cars in development that require some smaller new features. I’ve hinted at a few of those in my answers. We really have not finalized our plans for next year, so I do not want to look ahead for 18 months right now. Obviously there are a few topics that keep coming up: hybrid support, tyre model improvements, weather effects and our drive train. I’m probably forgetting a few now.

What about a rf2 paint booth for cars like iracing has? 

Binny

We are looking at a better way of supporting custom paint jobs. One that also works better with our competition system. That’s not the question you have though. We’re looking at options to make painting your own livery easier. I think a strong point of the new NASCAR game is actually its paint booth. Maybe over time we can adopt something similar alongside what we have now.

Cold tires… Now, I think almost rF2’s tires has great grip on cold temp. Have you planned cold tires? I want to spin on 1st corner after pit out. 

yashiman

When our tyres are cold they are less grippy, so you should already experience this effect. Unless you’re driving a car that is using tyre warmers so they are at temperature from the moment you leave the garage.

Modding. I think it seems that AC is easier to make car mods, and only AC mods are being made in Japan. The behaviour of rF2 is great, so I don’t think there is any need to twist this, but the spreadsheet may be too high level for all but the most experienced. Are there any plans to provide easier-to-build tools or a base vehicle for beginners? 

yashiman

We intend to keep improving our documentation, and we might release a few more examples. We have no plans currently for a “simpler spreadsheet” although I know some in our community (such as Niels Heusinkveld) have experimented with this, and I’ve seen some great results from those.

Bug report form. This is off the theme of “Car”, If my remember is true, you mentioned in your CS blog or roadmap that you were going to create a “bug report form”. Although the parent company has already changed and the structure is different, bug reports are still scattered around the forums and discord. Do you have plans to create a form yet? 

yashiman

Still being worked on, but I don’t know the exact status.

The rFactor 2 blog is fantastic! Thank you. 

yashiman

Thank you for your kind words, and for supporting rFactor 2. As you can read from the many questions and answers, I really try to explain everything we are doing and not doing. These sessions do provide valuable input when it comes to prioritizing what we do next!

I know the question has already been asked about how long it takes to build a new car, however, I’d like to know how long it usually takes to update an existing car to the latest PBR shaders please?

Louie

That first question has been answered above. Updating a car to PBR shaders depends a bit on the actual car, but it’s typically a job that will take a few days, depending on how many shaders were used before and how they were mapped to different elements of the car.

I can’t speak for everyone, but I do know a lot of us would strongly preference more pack releases than single cars in future – I find loose cars (fine if a cup series) aren’t that engaging as a customer – we want others to race against!

Louie

I can only agree with you, and we try to release series that involve multiple cars in a class as a pack. We make exceptions if a car runs in a “cup like series” because in those cases a pack makes no sense (unless you start to bundle cars and tracks maybe).

Often the default S397 liveries with new releases are… a bit unimpressive. Any chance for future if you could work on more detailed and realistic designs please? Maybe even consider letting the community submit ideas?

Louie

We have done livery competitions and in some cases we have included liveries later as upgrades (remember the Le Mans Virtual 24h last year for example). Sometimes it’s a chicken and egg problem though. If we do not release the car yet, the community can’t make liveries yet. Once it’s out, it’s too late to make the initial release, and we can only do so in a later update.

In real life, drivers very often have a track map on the wheel or dash – something that some S397 cars have – however, what I would like to know is if you could make that dynamic, so it shows the correct map for the track you are driving on please?

Louie 

Some cars have it and the correct map is loaded from the track you are on, if available. So the feature does work if the car actually puts it somewhere on the dash or wheel and the track actually provides an image.

Please, please, please, please, please can you add Caterham to the car list in rF2? Thank you!

ShadowFlopper

I know at least one colleague at Studio 397 who will instantly back you up on this car!

Car question #1: How much of work is it to refresh or re-export the textures on older content, like GT2 and GT1, and Corvette street cars? There are some purple/greenish compression artefacts all over the interior and headlight halos, and tail light halo textures are flickering on some cars.

vmgn021

It depends on the car actually. For some we never got the full source files (in photoshop) so in those cases we would have to redo them from scratch. In other cases we could. We’re actually considering such a pass next year, as compression techniques have been improved, and we could see some nice gains by doing this.

Car question #2: Have you considered licensing historic cars? Although there is MAK Corp 1991 endurance car mod already, I would buy official Mazda 787B DLC in a heart beat. 

vmgn021

We have, and we did license a few over the years, such as the different McLaren historic formula cars. And you’ve just mentioned a personal favourite of mine! 🙂

Have you planned to make easier the creation of the icons of the cars/skins? At this moment is not possible to create an icon with transparent background as before. This makes the task much more difficult if you want to get a good result. 

lagg

Let me show you a little trick in “dev mode”. First make sure in your player file you have enabled “Screenshot Depth Alpha”: true and selected PNG as the format “Screenshot Format”: 3 and load up your favourite car in the showroom. Now press the ‘1’ key on your normal (not numeric) keyboard. The background will go black. Make a screenshot! You’ll find that it has a nice alpha layer with soft, blended shadows. An and you can press ‘2’ to enable the rendering of the environment in the showroom again.

Would it be possible to add a bunch of information about the cars into the UI? Stuff like what type of gearbox they use (sequential / h-pattern etc) and other useful things?

ShelbySr

Certainly that would be possible. We already added a bit, but there’s a lot more we could add.

I’m not proficient in modding my instal, so any options and filters you can add to improve the car selection process would be very much appreciated please.

devicemanagerKiNg

A personal favourite of mine in the new UI is the search box. Typing a class there or a brand typically gets me to the car I like to drive quite quickly.

Stay tuned for Part 2 on Wednesday 1st December!

Fasten your seatbelts and get ready to enter the high-speed competition utilizing either your design skills or hitting the pedals out on track – either way, you can win a spot in the final race. Peregrine is where two competitions come together in a hunt for the title ‘Best Livery Design’ and ‘Heusinkveld Peregrine 2022’ race title.

The name of the game, the Peregrine falcon, is known for its extreme high speeds when going for the kill at 389 km/h, claiming the title for being the fastest animal in the world due to its streamlined aerodynamic shape, dive-bombing manoeuvrability and superior strategic insight.  All ingredients for a great new series of SFE esports, where the best designer and the race winner will grab fantastic prizes: Heusinkveld’s Sim Pedals Sprint.

The Heusinkveld Peregrine Competition

Open to contestants worldwide, the Heusinkveld Peregrine competition is all  about speed and design. Opening with a livery competition in which the ten best submissions will be selected by a jury and will make their appearance in the final race, part two of the competition is about speed and racing… More about that in Peregrine “The Race”.

Missed out last year’s final race? Click HERE

Part 1 | Heusinkveld Peregrine Livery Design Competition

We are delighted to announce that 10 community created livery designs will be selected for use in the Heusinkveld Peregrine Livery Competition aspect of Sim Formula Europe 2022. The selected liveries will adorn the cars used by our Peregrine “The Race” finalists. Community votes after the final race will decide who is the winner of the Heusinkveld Peregrine Livery competition.

The winning livery designer take’s home the fantastic Heusinkveld Sim Pedals Sprint.

The livery competition begins Tuesday 9th November and closes at 23:59 CET on the evening of Monday 29th November. Livery submissions should be sent to peregrine-livery@simformula.eu no later than this date, and all submissions should be packaged in a suitable mod format to work within rFactor 2.

The Car

Oreca 07 LMP2 | Steam Store: CLICK HERE

rFactor 2 | How to create a livery mod: CLICK HERE

Livery designs are for the Oreca 07 LMP2, available as DLC content within rFactor 2.

The Submission

Liveries should be submitted in line with the guidance issued below, and using the logos provided within the ‘Logos and Resources’ section of this post. Each mod submission should be sent to peregrine-livery@simformula.eu before the end of November 29th and include at least 4 images of the design (front, back, top and side view).

The livery should be packaged as a mod that can be installed in rFactor 2, and should be applied to the ORECA 07 LMP2 car model. 

The Livery

Each livery submission must include sponsor logos from our partners Heusinkveld, Sim-Lab, MasitaEsports and the design should be based around our competition theme of the Peregrine Falcon.

Why a Peregrine Falcon? As the fastest animal on Earth, this majestic bird is capable of achieving speeds up to 389 km/h and is the embodiment of strategy, aerodynamics and speed – something we think is entirely fitting with the ethos of our esport racing activity.

As Heusinkveld is the primary backer of this series, the Heusinkveld logo should appear as the most prominent ‘title sponsor’ of all submitted livery designs and the Sim-Lab logo has to be used above the front window on the ORECA LMP 07 as a banner.

Logos and Resources

All the logos required for your livery design can be found on the following link: CLICK HERE

Participation Restrictions and Time Limits

This livery design competition is open worldwide to anyone over the age of 14 years old, and will run from 09:00am CET Tuesday 9 ^th November to 23:59pm CET Monday 29th November inclusive. The 10 nominated mod designs will be communicated on December 19^th via the official Sim Formula Europe 2022 media activities.

The overall livery design winner will be announced on Sunday, January 23rd 2022.

Peregrine 2022 needs to be symbolized in drawing and/or in words within the livery – submissions may not use licensed photo’s illegally. Sim Formula Europe will select the winning 10 livery designs to be used within the Heusinkveld Peregrine Livery Competition presented by Sim Formula Europe, with the overall winning design and Heusinkveld winner to be announced following the conclusion of the Sim Formula Europe 2022 competition.

The Prize

Heusinkveld Sim Pedals Sprint are a perfect choice for both casual simracers as well as professional esports drivers. A strong, compact and highly adjustable design with custom electronics and powerful SmartControl software. Fully adjustable pedal geometry and force (120kg load cell with up to 65kg of actual force at the brake pedal plate), limitless configuration options in the software.

“The winner ain’t the one with the fastest car, it’s the one who refuses to lose.”

Every tenth of a second counts! If you’re looking for pedals that help you to be both quick and consistent, look no further. Years of experience and all new testing methods have been used during the development of this innovative top-of-the line simulator product: the Heusinkveld Sim Pedals Sprint.

Road to Sim Pedals Sprint: CLICK HERE

The Heusinkveld Peregrine Mod Competition is just one aspect of the upcoming Sim Formula Europe 2022 series of events and activities, and we can’t wait to announce further news about exciting additions to our hugely successful Sim Formula program. Stay tuned in the coming weeks as we reveal more from the 2022 event… and get designing – we can’t wait to see your submissions!

By submitting a livery, you grant the organizers (Sim Formula Europe and Heusinkveld) the perpetual right to use your livery for promotional and marketing purposes.

To find out more about Sim Formula Europe 2022 and the competition, visit simformula.eu for more information.

New updates! 

Today, we are delighted to introduce a raft of new updates for our vast collection of Tatuus open wheel cars in rFactor 2. For this new release, each car has been reviewed and where appropriate received visual updates in order to fully represent the latest safety feature designs implemented across the brand, as well as plenty of other tweaks, fixes, improvements and changes. 

These new Tatuus group updates have been deployed to their respective cars within the Studio 397 Steam Workshop today, and should download automatically the next time players restart their Steam client.

Full details of the changes introduced as part of this latest release can be found below. Of the main improvements brought to the cars today, players can look forward to a wide-ranging selection of visual updates, audio improvements and physics changes, as the development team have been working hard behind the scenes to review any outstanding issues that may have been reported by the community in the months since the cars first released, as well taking the opportunity to bring forward a few quality of life improvements that should make a nice difference to the driving experience behind the wheel. 

Of particular note, the new build also introduces a rather exciting Oval configuration for the USF 17 and PM 18 cars, opening up another new and unique way to experience these exciting little formula style cars. 

Update Notes

Tatuus F4-T014 v1.14

• RPM limiter update
• Added turbo whistle and pop-off sound
• Reduced oversteer on coming of the brakes
• Default brake force 90kg

Tatuus USF-17 v1.14

• Added Frontal Impact device
• Added oval setup option
• Adjusted Rear ride height default 40mm
• Adjusted Rear wing default from D1 to B1
• Brake Bias default 56-44
• Default brake force 70 Kg
• 56% front pressure bias.
• Template fix for the nose cone
• Fixed typo in Halo upgrade.

Tatuus PM-18 v1.32

• Add Frontal Impact device
• Removed rear geometry description from tuning page
• Add oval setup option
• Brake Bias default 56-44
• Default brake force 70 Kg

Tatuus FT-50 v1.14

• Gears added preload setting in LSD
• Brake Bias default 56-44
• Default brake force 80 Kg

Tatuus_F.3_T318 v1.20

• Added turbo whistle, pop-off sound, ALS (anti-lag-system Upshift bang)
• Gears added the LDS linear
• Reduced oversteer on coming of the brakes
• Removed brake blanking option
• Default brake force 70 Kg
• Added front caster setup option, range 2,5-4,5 0.5 steps default 3,5.
• Added UMP front setup option, range -5 +10 default STD (=0)
• Change rear default tire pressure from 109 to 115 kPa
• Asia F3 only: Gitti tire drop off, wear. Increased wear by 25%.

Tatuus Cars – Available now in rFactor 2

Another two weeks and a day gone, and we were pleasantly surprised by the number of interesting questions we got about tracks and their development in rFactor 2! We’ll proceed with this, rotating topics every two weeks from now so we can cover all aspects of the simulation. In two weeks from now our next topic will be (you guessed it) “cars” so get your questions in.

Q&A

I’ll go first with the track specific questions: What is with those clouds?

davehenrie

Are they not fluffy enough for you? 😉 We did a few upgrades to them over the years, but mostly fairly minor stuff. We know there’s better (but also, in terms of rendering, more expensive) technology out there. Horizon Zero Dawn comes to mind, and Guerilla Games have presented on the technology in the past at SigGraph2015 for example. What is important for us is that we stay true to our dynamic weather, so we can’t just pick something that looks good, we also need something we can control and change based on (real or scripted) weather. That’s a big job and one we have not committed too yet.

Do you have plans to implement the graphic improvements of PBR in all the circuits listed on the web https://www.studio-397.com/cars-tracks/#tracks or just some of them?

Diego Barjollo

Upgrading some of our older tracks is something we typically do in between bigger track projects when the team has time to do so. Therefore it is unlikely that we will get to all of them soon. Obviously there are also a bunch of tracks on there by partners (Reiza Studios and KartSim) so for those the answer depends on their priorities and timeline. I know that KartSim is continuously improving their content, so I’m hopeful we will see more of those improved over time too.

On the same topic, how about the Reiza tracks, will they get updated, and do you know for when is that scheduled?

Diego Barjollo

That really is a question only Renato can answer. I know he’s shown some interest to do so in the past, but I cannot see nor influence his timeline.

Why don’t those originally listed by ISI, such as Montreal and Bathurst, appear on the web?

Diego Barjollo

Montreal is so old that we did not ever “port” it over and left it in the ISI workshop. It would need too much work. The same, to a lesser extent, goes for Bathurst. If we had to redo these, we would probably do them from scratch.

Is it possible for rF2 to simulate the fact that it’s raining on one side and not on the other, as it often happens at Nürburgring or Le Mans?

Julien Lemoine

It is possible in theory. The weather system allows for “local” weather in a few different areas of a large track. Beyond that this currently has not been implemented though. For Le Mans and the Nordschleife this would certainly make sense though.

One of my friends wanted to modify the track limits in dev mode, which works perfectly, but at the time of the switch to “prod” if I may say so, the track limits were 100x more severe than in dev mode. From 1, do you have the answer why? And finally, wouldn’t it be a good idea to provide a guide for this?

Julien Lemoine

It’s hard for me to comment on this beyond saying that obviously the track should behave the same in both. So you might have found a bug or something else might have been going on.

As Alex had confirmed, there is a real problem with the rain, 20% of rain rate corresponds to a borderline storm, are there any plans to adjust this? To allow our dear Jimmi to offer us more races in the rain.

Julien Lemoine

The short answer is yes, probably as part of a more generic “wet weather overhaul”. It needs better balancing (physics and graphics).

It was a bug with the overlay with the Nürburgring, it displays the whole map and if it’s the GP, the track map is very small, has this been fixed?

Julien Lemoine

I am not sure, but this too sounds like a bug that needs to be reported. We might need to tweak the way we scale the track in this case.

Finally, speaking of the Nürburgring, is there an update planned for the 24-hour version that allows you to cut the last corner and start the timer in qualifying? As in reality.

Julien Lemoine

I don’t think that will happen soon as it would need some code changes just for this track, so other more important stuff tends to get prioritized. I’m not arguing it would not be useful.

Is there any way, with how the licensing and track creation is done, to have those tracks that appear in other MSG titles such as NASCAR Ignition, IndyCar, WEC and BTCC added in to rF2?

burgesjl

These are two separate questions, really. Licensing content is something that in general, we would like to do for all games in the MSG portfolio. In reality though, that typically is also more expensive and in some cases, like BTCC, specific layouts of certain tracks are included in the BTCC licence. So in the end, every licence negotiation is different, and any track might end up in only a few games. In terms of content, it’s too early to say how this will turn out. Obviously a lot of different technologies are coming together here, with rFactor 2, KartKraft and the first NASCAR game, the latter two using Unreal Engine but in a different way. So we are looking at what can be reused. For some games we also need to keep into account that they must run on consoles, that typically have memory that is a lot more restricted, so some things we can do in rFactor 2 will not work there.

As regards the Competition System – you state it’s not intended to be iRacing. What is it intended to be? Have to tell you, the competitions you have so far are severely, badly lacking. You’ve been asked in every CS Blog for daily, highly frequent series using Taatus F3/F4 and other more basic cars, and you refuse to create them. You need to tell us why.

burgesjl

I think you will find us listening to this request and trying something like this for the next week (which we will extend if successful).

Are flags for offline racing part of the track? If so, when can we expect it to function where full course yellows don’t dominate a race?

DucMan888

I’m not quite sure I understand this question. Could you please follow up and elaborate?

Have you considered adding more geotopographic information for tracks, like the altitude of tracks which would add some nice options for ambient effects like air pressure to influence the power and reliability of cars (like at Mexico for example) and which could also be linked to other ambient effects that haven’t been unlocked yet like wind, humidity and the ambient and track temperatures?

hitm4k3r

The altitude is already a parameter that we set for each track and, from memory, it does influence air density and feeds into physics for aerodynamics and the engine.

How far away are features like fog that are available in devmode but not in the real game. Any chance of getting the proper alignments of stars and the moon based on the TOD and TOY?

hitm4k3r

Stars and the moon should already align if the track is setup correctly. Note that each track has a “race date” and that is used (not whatever day today is).

There seems to be a big influx of free roam tracks that are very popular in games like AC have you considered to use procedural terrains to create such free roam tracks like desert highways, alpine passes or tropical islands with coastal routes?

hitm4k3r

No, we’re sticking to racetracks and cars mostly. We’ll leave those to the community.

Speaking of community created tracks: have you considered porting some historic tracks from Fat Alfie that are very popular and that would most likely be pretty cheap to licence? Other tracks were ported from other products already, so why not expand in that area?

 hitm4k3r

We did not. We’ll give that some thought, but in general we have quite a wish list of tracks already and even porting tracks can be a considerable effort.

Any chance we see updates to the historic tracks within rF2 in the foreseeable future with the same treatment as Silverstone, Lime Rock Park and the likes?

hitm4k3r

We don’t know yet.

Have you thought of offering track packs like Reiza with each track and their layouts throughout the years, like we have the Imola track pack from Reiza? Tracks like Spa, Monza, Monaco, Nürburgring, Silverstone or Le Mans, that have a rich history would offer great opportunities for something like that.

hitm4k3r

We did consider it, but decided against it for now.

Have you thought about something like a forgotten track DLC with tracks like old Brno, Sachsenring or Rouen?

hitm4k3r

Not really since most of our focus has been on current tracks that we can laser scan and licence so far. I guess we have been playing catch up in that department and are now getting to a point where we could consider doing some other types of content. It’s being debated internally for sure.

What do you think about something like a track editor similar to Garry’s mod for Half Life or Zeus in ArmA 3, where people would have a few selected objects that they can place in an open world (tyre stacks on a car park for example) to build stuff like Kart tracks on the fly, where people could interact in real time? You could start with “small” worlds and expand the concept if it is popular.

hitm4k3r

I think those are great ideas, but probably best implemented (and possibly monetized) by the community. Honestly I don’t see us having the time to build such tools.

I saw that the new Nascar game is bringing wind and dynamic track temperature to the mix, so are those also coming to RF2 official content at the very least in the near future?

Nieubermesch

Formally, we are not allowed to comment on new features of games that are not yet released. That said, any new features developed for other games, we will always try to bring back to rF2 too. Ask me again after release!

How high in the priority list is the implementation of a proper damage model to the engine and transmission? Can you give us a rough timeframe?

RNeves

The basic damage model for the engine is good. There are a few tweaks we could make such as making engines lose a bit of power over their lifetime, but we have them taking damage on impact and because of abuse (overheating, over revving, etc.). The transmission could use a better damage model, damaging your gearbox if you mis-shift. I remember an implementation in NR2003 where you’d lose gears during a race, sometimes ending a race with only 2 of them left. Whilst that might be a bit over the top, we are considering improvements. I’m not able to give you a timeframe, though.

Are you planning on implementing a more refined damage model? Not only body panels, but suspension components too.

RNeves

We have no immediate plans for this. Our physics model can have several parts breaking off already and those affect the car’s handling. We also have suspensions that get bent, and wheels breaking off. Most of those also have a visual component. We might look at visually improving some of those effects.

Are you going to implement in UI a way to override the parameters of the GDB of the track, in order to set up the races? Such as: Add practice sessions and configure the duration and start of every session / The tags related with the unticut code / The pit lane speed limit.

lagg

Probably not. There is a system in the RFM files to override certain parameters in the context of a racing series, so we would like to continue to use that going forward. Obviously that raises the question about tooling to create RFM files more easily. That is something we are considering, as well as the option to provide a bunch of reusable series in general (for competition, multiplayer and off-line use).

It was probably answered at the time the track came out, but what was the reason for not scanning the Bugatti track alongside the 24H one?

Yoann Kerjean

Licensing and the extra cost for adding that layout.

Personally think that Loch Drummond is a really believable track (even if it’s one of the hardest to master). Do you plan on making some other fictional tracks? If yes, can we send some designs?

Yoann Kerjean

Loch Drummond started life as a personal project by Alex if I remember correctly. We’ve had a few similar ones, and I know our artists sometimes release tracks under a pseudonym. Right now, I know at least one other fictional track that is being worked on as a side project, but that’s all I want to say about it now. We have not considered letting the community design a track.

Urban tracks are nice because you can scan them without a licence (I think???). My city has a track called “Circuit des Remparts”, on which Fangio and Trintignant drove in 1950. The track is still in use, every year in September. Are you interested in tracks like this? (which would go well with the older cars we have in game).

Yoann Kerjean

Mostly yes, you can scan public roads without a licence. In most countries. There are exceptions though, for example certain landmarks might be restricted (Eiffel Tower in Paris is an example). You still have to be careful with naming and certain temporary changes that are made to public roads. I had to look up this event online. Looks like we would have to contact the owners of this event about the name. To me this sounds more like something the community, or that event themselves, could model themselves. Much like we ended up with the Maastricht track. That was funded locally as well and ended up being the core of a yearly event, Sim Formula Europe (probably a whole different story)!

Regarding the general track quality, I am absolutely thrilled with all official tracks. The only thing that doesn’t match the general quality here is the AI (not always but often) as well as the general “rain quality” (especially regarding rain spray etc.). The AI is still one of the best out there in general from my point of view, but a few minor bugs make the AI feel worse than it actually is, this mainly includes from my point of view: AI always runs hard tires in qualifying / AI drives on some tracks (also original ones) wrong or strange lines / AI behaves strange at different flags (blue and yellow for example) /I think here would be the chance to achieve great effect by relatively small adjustments, this is from my point of view the foundation for the offline championships. So my question on the track topic would be what is the plan regarding the necessary adjustments to the AI?

Christian Wolter

We are very much aware of the problems with our AI. We have in fact fixed some issues with them, mostly on ovals, as part of the NASCAR game. Obviously we would like to extend those fixes to road courses and bring that code back to rFactor 2. A timeline for that is hard to give as we have quite a few projects competing for attention at the moment.

With many of the tracks already in sim, I think it would be really nice to develop historic variants such as the old ‘Bus Stop’ chicane version of Spa, older Silverstone layouts and of course the various Monza goodies and bankings, amongst others. We don’t really see much of this from rF2 – why is that, and I suppose the second part of my question is, do we have any potential to bring alternative versions in the future?

SiC58

One part of the answer is those versions we can’t laser scan, so they would be of a slightly lesser accuracy. That’s not the end of the world though. The other part is that historic versions, done right, are much more work than just changing a few turns and chicanes. You have to insert period-correct track side objects too, and since those are most of the work of building tracks, these projects end up much bigger than you might initially think.

I appreciate you have rightly been going after big track licences lately (Spa, Monza, Nords, Sebring etc), however a wealth of really amazing lesser known tracks are in existence and would be great to see in the sim – can we expect smaller profile venues in future?

SiC58

We’re getting quite a few of those questions. We did a few lesser known ones (starting with NOLA motorsport part, including Zandvoort that then became an F1 venue) so we will definitely consider some. As long as a track can be used by many classes, it is interesting. That said, there are so many tracks we could do that we will probably never get to making all your favourite ones. We hope the modding community will help fill in the gaps!

Also on tracks, North America and Australia are really underrepresented in rF2, and generally in sim racing – any prospect of these regions getting any love from Studio 397 at all in the near future please?

SiC58

We have about 15 tracks out of 40 that are not in Europe, and four of the remaining 25 are fantasy locations, so roughly half of our tracks are indeed European. That’s not even that bad, considering well over 60% of our sales are in Europe. So our “bias” towards that is less than what you would do based on sales. That said, there are certainly quite a few nice tracks in different parts of the world that we would love to add. We are working on one right now!

 If you are going to build new tracks, will it be Macau, Jerez or Long Beach?

juanchioooo

We have a couple of new tracks in production right now, but they are not these three.

In terms of track development, roughly speaking, how long does it take the studio to build a new track from receipt of the laserscan data (for example, an average sized F1 venue).

Marco

As an average we’re talking about roughly three months. That said we typically work in parallel on more than one track.

Looking at the old ISI 3PA tracks, why has this initiative been abandoned in recent years, and additionally, can you foresee these old tracks ever being updated, or probably more likely being licenced and built from scratch by Studio 397?

Marco

We abandoned 3PA as we wanted to do properly licensed tracks and from a technical point of view we wanted more control over the whole content creation pipeline. For a lot of these tracks, we either don’t have all the proper sources or our track team has stated that they would have to redo them from scratch anyway. So your last question is probably where we would end up with those.

I would really like to see more diversity in the trackside signage, as seeing a lot of S397 / rF2 / Traxion logos really breaks immersion for me. Do you think we could get to a place where either modders could add their own signage (without breaking online compatibility), or if the tracks could ship with some more realistic looking but fake sponsorship signs?

Marco

A lot of tracks limit what we can and cannot do in terms of signage, so allowing everybody to add their own sponsors is not very high on our list.

Loving these recent PBR updates – go on, tell us which track is next on the list to be updated…

Yuri Shelkon

I don’t know yet. As explained earlier these are things we do in between bigger projects. At the same time we have seen a few other smaller projects come in to create updates with special advertising for series like Le Mans Virtual. So currently there is no update in progress. I am sure that will come though.

Not really on topic, but thank you for doing these blog posts, it is great to see S397 communicating so openly with the community, and I’m sure I speak for a lot of people when I say we really appreciate it!

Yuri Shelkon

You are welcome. We always try to be as open as we can, given the limitations we have because of NDAs and other contracts.

Is it possible to have separated graphics options saved for each track to maximize graphics quality for each one in the future? Like the car specific FFB settings for example.

Balazs Magyar

That’s an interesting idea. We’ll give that some more thought.

When you give the race with the sign “+” or “-” you can go up to the cars of other drivers live, but in VR only if there is an odd number of drivers on the server, you can go up to all the cars, this It is so easy to change when the code is modified, could you please enable it so that in Virtual Reality we can get into any car? Thank you so much.

juanchioooo

This bug is unfortunately still in our bug database and has not been solved yet.

Alongside the Windscreen Rain effects announced on the last roadmap, any chance to see updates to the “track particles” like grass or gravel in the future?

L0P3X

Possibly. That’s all I can reveal right now (and that’s a hint).

Are you planning to upgrade grass and gravel, in terms of not being forgiving like it is right now? Right now you can cut on grass or gravel and run wide on so many tracks, which is faster, but you don’t get any real punishment for doing that. eg. getting a bigger slow down on gravel or losing traction on grass.

Mario Tump

I interpret this question mostly as a question about “cutting the track and gaining an advantage”. So we try to punish people by giving them penalties if they repeatedly do this. Can our system be even better? I’m sure it can! I don’t think our grip levels and bumpiness are that far off on these materials.

In the current “Real Road Shader”, marble and rubber are reproduced, but sand and grass rolled up from the side of the course are not piled up on the road surface. Does S397 have any plans to update the Real Road Shader so that the sand and grass that are rolled up on the road are piled up?

I_Bellett

That might not be as easy as we would need to keep track of more different types of buildup, which puts more strain on our networking. Given that our worst case here is Nordschleife we would have to make sure we design something that works there as well.

Is it possible to apply the system of showing yellow flags when there is a crash or a stopped car in the section between Marshal A and Marshal B, to show oil flags when certain sections become slippery?

I_Bellett

I’m wondering under what conditions we would show the oil flags? Maybe you want to follow up on that.

Are altitude, humidity and wind working?

I_Bellett

Wind is not. The other two, see above (yes).

Even on wet roads, I think there is a problem that the line on which the rubber is on is faster. Does S397 considering improving this?

I_Bellett

That’s still on our list, yes, we know the grip levels on rubbered-in lines is not correct in wet conditions.

As weather providers are pretty accurate and real time nowadays what about adding a “Real Weather” functionality depending on the tracks location?

Kevin Karas

There are plugins that do this already. We have considered adding such a feature natively.

Automobilista 2 has an awesome feature of allowing players to select a custom event date, and the track presenting the appropriate time of year changes like leaves on trees etc, is incredibly cool and immersive – plus adds a significant visual differentiation to the various tracks. Do you foresee something like this for rFactor 2?

Ben Lotts

I admit it’s a very nice feature. I’m not sure if we’ll get to this soon for rFactor 2.

On the same sort of topic as above, AMS 2 also allows players to choose weather scenarios based on historic weather data – so essentially you can replicate weather conditions from any time / date in history. Would love to see that in rFactor 2 – do you have a desire or plan to bring something similar into the software?

Ben Lotts 

You have to set those conditions yourself in rFactor 2. We don’t have plans to add a historic weather database. Maybe if some external provider can give us that we’ll consider it though.

Tracks = content. What are you planning in order to better represent your DLCs in the steam store? Bought items are not marked, newer tracks cost the same as ancient ones, quality differs hugely, no mentioned “last major update date” etc. The community is asking for a better store experience for many years now. It would certainly help a lot with sales also.

Kevin Karas

So what are we doing? First, since the item store mechanism we use was actually recommended to us by Valve as the best system given our requirements, we have since been asking them to help us improve this system. The most important thing we need them to change is to flag certain items as “things you can only have one of”. If they have such a concept, then they can figure out what you already own, and they could allow bundles (packs) that let you buy only what is missing. What we could do on our side is implement our own storefront. We might even be able to do that and provide you with some missing information (such as what you already own). Remember that in the competition system, we do have a feature that will figure out what content is missing and what the cheapest way is to buy that (combining bundles and/or single items) and putting it in your basket. We can build on that, but we would also really need Valve to help us with the above.

Are you guys going to implement any “clutch engaged” option? As it is now there is no clutch option for the h pattern shifter cars, which means that can change gear without pressing the clutch (I know there is a tweak bout that but i was talking about a native solution)

Haris1977

This is certainly an interesting topic, and I would argue that to get to a significantly better implementation we would need to have a combination of hardware and software support. Current H shifters cannot block gear shifts based on signals they get from the software, so even if we would block a shift in software (because you did not use the clutch or whatever) the hardware would still allow you to make the shift. That could get weird really quickly. So for now we did not make any improvements yet.

Do you plan something like “initial track dampness (percentage)” in session settings in the future? It’d be great to have a (somewhat) wet track without rain at the start of a session.

Balazs Magyar

Your best bet right now is to create and load a custom real road (rubber) file that has some water on the track already.

Internals Plugin documentation says, the rain intensity can be diversified by inserting different values in the 3×3 matrix. However, it is also written, the middle node is working. Any chances of updating that?

Paweł Andrzejewski

A similar question was asked above. We might, we have not decided yet.

Is track temperature being simulated right now? And is it affecting how tires perform?

Paweł Andrzejewski

Not all aspects, no.

Turkish GP had shown how humidity can affect track evolution. There was little to no rain (drizzles reported) and due to 95% humidity, drivers didn’t get a chance of utilizing slicks. Any chance of seeing that in rF2 in some time?

Paweł Andrzejewski

Partially we have that. How quickly the track dries depends on the temperature, so on a warm and sunny day it will dry quicker than a cold and overcast day. We could add more detail for sure here based on other weather conditions, such as humidity and wind.

Which tracks from the legacy group like Malaysia, Sao Paulo, Brianza, Monte Carlo etc. are likely to be updated to current standards?

Paweł Andrzejewski

I think you roughly ordered them by likeliness already (probably by coincidence).

Is 3PA programme shut down?

Paweł Andrzejewski

We never really had one at Studio 397. This was only with ISI. So yes.

We had seen Alpine seasons, now there has been a ByKolles released with team supported physics, so it can be considered as an official content. Have you considered creating some public pack of standards and rules that a content needs to meet so it will be considered as worthy of use in the competition system?

Paweł Andrzejewski

We might, we are still looking at the possibilities.