Great news everyone – today we are absolutely delighted to announce the fantastic INDYCAR IR-18 will be heading to rFactor 2 next week – bringing arguably the toughest and most impressive open wheel racing category in the world to our simulation for what should be an incredible driving experience.

Ever keen to ensure our players have the opportunity to experience the thrills of racing a wide variety of interesting and exciting content within rFactor 2, we couldn’t help but notice the astounding resurgence of INDYCAR racing in recent years, quickly coming to the conclusion that this type of car would be a perfect fit to replicate within rFactor 2.

Featuring cars that look incredibly aggressive and powerful from the outside, and demand a very physical and robust manner of driving in order to squeeze the maximum performance and lap time from behind the wheel, together with the help of our new colleagues within the wider Motorsport Games group, we knew these were cars we just had to bring into rFactor 2 – superseding the older DW12 already within the simulation and adding another fantastic variable for our drivers to take out onto the virtual racetracks of the world.

The Car

IndyCar has progressed significantly since our release of the Dallara DW12 back in 2014, having undergone a rigorous programme of development, with numerous updates large and small having been issued to the spec series chassis over recent years.

Now in its third iteration following a race debut for the 2012 season, the new IR18 features subtle (and not so subtle) changes to the visual representation of the cars – from the removal of wheel coverings and extraneous aerodynamic devices, to the more dramatic and somewhat controversial introduction of a fighter jet style frontal driver protection canopy developed by Red Bull Technologies, commonly referred to as the Aeroscreen.

Packing upwards of 700hp depending on the course configuration style, as INDYCAR run specific chassis setups for road course, superspeedways and short ovals, and without such driving aids as power steering to help lighten the load behind the wheel, these cars represent a true driving challenge, one that requires a driver to produce maximum concentration in order to keep the car pointing in the right direction, especially when pitched against a field full of equally competitive opponents looking to steal away any advantage possible.

Technical Specifications

• length: 5123.18mm
• Width: 1943.1mm to 1917.7mm minimum (1917.7mm minimum and 1949.45mm maximum for ovals) measured outside rim to rim
• Wheelbase: 2984.5mm to 3086mm
• Engine: Honda HI21R Indy-V-6, Chevy IndyCar V6
• Capacity: 2.2 litre (134.25 cubic inches) V-6, twin-turbocharged
• Output: 550-700 horsepower, depending on turboboost pressure used at track
• Transmission: XTRAC #1011 gearbox. Six forward gears, one reverse gear, Mega-Line Assisted Gear Shift (paddle-shift)

The IR-18 set to arrive for rFactor 2 will feature the latest 2021 specification INDYCAR IR-18, complete with all the teams, drivers and liveries of the 2021 NTT IndyCar Series – allowing our players to recreate one of the most competitive open wheel championships in existence today.

The car will come with both Honda and Chevrolet engines as per the real INDYCAR season, and will of course offer up chassis options for racing on road, oval and superspeedway type tracks – developed with the full cooperation of INDYCAR and the teams that compete within the American series – meaning we are set to have a highly detailed and ultra-realistic new car for our racers to enjoy, and one that replicates what is probably the best open wheel racing series in the world – sounds fun doesn’t it?!

New Features

In order to ensure we can produce an experience as close to reality as possible, these new cars also come complete with two brand new physics features for rFactor 2 – Push to Pass, and Weight Jacker. Both of these features are enabled with the INDYCAR IR-18 car, and can be found within the new 2022 UI Update menu options.

INDYCAR Pro Challenge and Competition System Races

To celebrate the upcoming release of the new INDYCAR in rFactor 2, a special edition esports event featuring IndyCar stars the likes of reigning champion Alex Palou, Helio Castroneves and two-time series champion Josef Newgarden will be taking place on Wednesday, 9th February. Consisting of three heats of two 10 minute and one 20 minute race, with points awarded to each driver, this celebratory event should be a great way to kick off what is set to be a very exciting time for players of rFactor 2. 

Set to air on the TraxionGG Twitch, YouTube and Facebook channels from 00:00 CET, make sure you tune in and take the opportunity to catch the stars of the real series going head to head in rFactor 2!

In addition to the Pro Challenge, players will be able to participate in official INDYCAR events through the rFactor 2 Competition System. Dates for these events, and the new schedule of activations within the Competition System will be made available in the coming days.

Release Details

The new INDYCAR IR-18 is set to release to rFactor 2 as part of a large content drop on Monday, February 7^th 2022, alongside the previously announced Daytona International Raceway and Ligier JS P320 LMP3 – plus one more announcement to come!

INDYCAR IR-18- Coming February 7^th to rFactor 2!

Car announcement!

Prototype racing within rFactor 2 is about to get a lot more exciting, with the welcome addition of the beautiful Ligier JS P320 set to join the LMP3 roster of cars within the simulation next week – adding another high downforce, high speed endurance racing thoroughbred to rFactor 2.

The Car

Ligier Automotive are synonymous with endurance racing in recent years, having originally made their name under the leadership of Guy Ligier in Formula One, proving one of the foremost competitive teams of the 1970s before gradually fading from the sport at the end of the 1990s, but not before Olivier Panis secured a famous final win for the French outfit during a dramatic Monaco Grand Prix in 1996 –  in the final year of the marque before ownership transferred to four time World Champion Alain Prost ahead of the 1997 season.

With such a rich heritage in world motorsport behind the name, Ligier returned to top level motorsport amidst great fanfare both at home and abroad, and since the rebirth of the brand as a racing constructor, after being acquired by Jacques Nicolet in 2013, the French manufacturer would immediately become a hit with fans and drivers alike – with success very close to hand, not least of which would be a highlighted when Ligier became the first manufacturer since Ferrari in 1998 to take home victory spoils in the 24 Hours of Daytona, 12 Hours of Sebring and the Petit Le Mans in 2016 with the JS P2.

Built for competition within Road to Le Mans, part of the Michelin Le Mans Cup championship and since 2021, the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, the JS P320 is a mighty competitor out on the track. .

The JS P320 comes to rFactor 2 off the back of an incredibly successful 2021, having won all the US endurance major events last season: 24 Hours of Daytona, 12 Hours of Sebring and Petit Le Mans.

LMP3 can be considered more of an entry level class of prototype racing, which makes this car a perfect candidate to introduce our drivers to the world of closed top, high downforce machinery, without having to reply too much on experience in order to pilot the car successfully to strong lap times. All the fun of prototype racing, but with the capacity to allow drivers to really get under the skin of the car and produce some great, close racing on track.

Technical Specifications

• Length: 4605mm
• Width: 1900mm
• Wheelbase: 2860mm
• Engine: Nissan VK56, V8
• Capacity: 5.6 litres
• Output: 460 hp
• Transmission: 6-speed sequential gearbox Xtrac 1152 with aluminium casing

Release Details

The Ligier JS P320 LMP3 will be made available for rFactor 2 on Monday 7^th February 2022, joining the already available Norma M30 in our developing LMP3 class.

We at Studio 397 are really pleased to bring this car into rFactor 2, and we can’t wait to take the opportunity to hand over the virtual keys to our drivers next week!.

Ligier JS P320 LMP3 – coming February 7th to rFactor 2

DAYTONAAAAAH!!!

At long last, we at Studio 397 are absolutely delighted to announce the iconic Daytona International Raceway is heading to rFactor 2 next week – adding the premium US endurance racing circuit to our simulation in a move that we are sure will delight the many members of our community who have so vocally called for this historic venue to be brought to life in rFactor 2. We heard you, and here it is!

The voices calling for this track to be added to rFactor 2 have been loud for a long time on our Discord channel, and trust us when we say it has been incredibly difficult to keep ourselves from telling you all about our plans to bring the track into our simulation – the amount of times any one of us here at Studio has almost let the cat out of the bag are beyond counting!

Although this one has been cooking for a little while back at base, we’ve been unable to put virtual pen to paper and share the good news with you all until now, however that period of enforced silence is over, and we are sincerely overjoyed to finally be able to tell you all about this exciting new addition to the sim – licencing deals have been struck, and development is almost done and we are gearing up and ready to release what must be one of the most often requested new track additions in recent years!

The Track

Turn 1

Hard braking from the lightening fast run off the NASCAR oval and onto the “front stretch”, Turn 1 is a vital overtaking opportunity and the type of corner that was seemingly invented to lull drivers into a false sense of security.

Reasonably straight forward on paper, in reality it is incredibly difficult to spot your braking point and hustle the car into the apex for the opening turn, made especially difficult as drivers have to contend with the transition from 18 degrees of banking in the oval, to the uneven road surface that leads up to, and beyond this opening portion of the Road Course configuration here at Daytona.

Turn 2

Once drivers successfully navigate their way through the opening corner, the right / left of Turn 2 is a relatively straightforward affair. Flat to the boards in a GT3 car, here drivers are often seen taking a mix of lines between using judicious amounts of kerbs or keeping it on the grey stuff, depending on the stage of the race and of course the individual characteristics of the car in question.

Rodriguez International Horseshoe

Another exceptionally popular overtaking opportunity on the Daytona International Raceway Road Course is the Rodriguez International Horseshoe, otherwise known as Turn 3. Approached from speed following a flat blast all the way from the acceleration zone of the opening corner, braking here can be left deceptively late. Encouraging the driver to dive deep into the corner and maximise the use of trail braking techniques as they look to achieve a late apex and strong launch off the turn, this is both a great place to set up a pass, and a critical corner to get right in order to carry speed all the way down into the next significant braking event of the lap, to be found on the entry into Turn 5.

Turn 4

Turn 4, or ‘The Kink’ is one of those corners that can be as easy as they come 99.9% of the time, flat chat with margin to spare, but catch this turn slightly off line, or approach too confident with tyres that are anything other than in optimal condition, and very quickly you will find out why this corner has a much bigger bite than first appears.

Unlike a lot of the Daytona circuit, thanks to plenty of run off space a mistake here doesn’t have to be race ending, but run wide onto the grass at these speeds, and expect to lose a lot of time and make yourself vulnerable to attack on the run into Turn 5.

Turn 5

Bumpy on entry and requiring a downshift of three gears, Turn 5 is similar in nature to the earlier encounter we experience at the Rodriguez International Horseshoe, in that despite being a hairpin in nature, the corner benefits from a long radius and requires drivers to fully commit late into the braking zone, with trail braking and a late apex optimal in order to achieve the highest possible minimum corner speed, and maintain strong momentum and early acceleration onto the short straight that follows.

Turn 6

The final corner of the infield road course section, put simply Turn 6 is vital to a fast laptime here at Daytona. The reason for this is the considerable amount of time drivers will speed at full throttle in the following section of track – lose time in this corner and delay getting back on the gas, and you will pay a heavy price all the way down turns 7 and 8 and onto the backstretch.

Quicker than might appear at first glance, Turn 6 again requires a driver to dive into the heavy braking zone with full commitment in order to achieve the maximum performance, starting with pulling the car as far right as possible on corner entry, before committing to turning in and quickly transitioning to the brake pedal and back onto throttle for the run onto the oval. Be careful on corner exit, as cars certainly like to dance on the power as you jump back onto the banking and into the backstretch of this exceptional venue.

Turn 7 and 8

Be smooth. SMOOTH! Turns 7 and 8 are far more used to hosting stock car racing as part of the traditional Daytona oval configuration, and here you will find you finally have a moment to relax and take in your surroundings as you firmly plant your foot on the throttle and begin the run into the world-famous Bus Stop chicane.

Begin by running up near the top of the banking on the corner exit from turn 6, then slowly and smoothly start the process of rolling the car down onto the lower line of the oval banking, keeping a firm eye out in the mirror for any faster traffic trying to find a way past in multiclass events.

Hold on, hold out, and get ready for the most risky section on the track….

Turn 9 – Bus Stop – Turn 10

… the Bus Stop chicane! A famous section of track, and one that attracts its fair share of action over the course of a long distance race event. Loved and loathed in equal measure, the Bus Stop is certainly not for the faint of heart.

Approached at absolutely full speed in pretty much any type of car, here drivers need to be brave on the brakes as they approach the first right-hand corner of turn 9, using plenty of curb in order to get the car as straight as possible through the chicane before monstering the final inside curb at Turn 10. A risky section of corners where much of your event is at the mercy of the racing gods – get it wrong and at best you will lose a whole load of time, and at worse a trip to the pits for significant repairs will be your reward.

Turn 11 and 12

Should you survive the Bus Stop for another lap, it is once again back on to the oval banking you go for these final two corners of the lap. Again, here it is all about being smooth, calm and controlled as you look to pick out the line of least resistance in order to maximise your ultimate car speed, keeping an eye out for other traffic and charging onwards to that start / finish line and another lap of this exceptional racetrack.

We’ve gone on record many times in the past to share our love of endurance racing here at Studio 397, so it goes without saying that the team back at base are absolutely stoked to bring one of the best endurance tracks to life within rFactor 2 with this new deal, and furthermore, we aren’t just adding the road course configuration, we are also releasing the speedway layout of Daytona, so get ready for some awesome Stock Car action with our epic Stock Car 2018 and Stock Car 2018x free add-on vehicles too!

As one of the absolute premium endurance racing venues in world motorsport, we cannot wait to see how this track plays out amongst the various events and activities that our community are sure to host come release day – it has been a long time coming, but we are sure you will agree – the wait will be more than worth it!

Daytona International Speedway – coming soon to rFactor 2

Hello sim racers!

2022 is in full swing, and what a way the year has started for rFactor 2! Following on from the incredibly successful Le Mans 24 Hours Virtual, the team here at Studio 397 aren’t lifting our collective feet off the gas any time soon, as we begin to ramp up to what should be a very exciting few months of news and developments coming to the title.

The New UI Refresh

2022 UI Update | More Details | CLICK HERE

Late last week, we released our exceptionally well received big 2022 UI update to the public build of the simulation, and we are absolutely delighted to see the wealth of positive feedback these latest changes have generated. Whilst we are of course delighted with this first successful launch, and as we referenced in our release notes from Thursday, the new 2022 UI Update is just the very start of our journey into enhancing the player experience within rFactor 2 – so make sure you stay tuned to our social media channels and the rFactor 2 website for more news and insights over the coming weeks and months.

A New Release Schedule

Speaking of developments, to better streamline our improvement offerings to the community, we have taken the decision to reorganize the way we deploy content and updates to rFactor 2. For 2022, we are going to move development to a quarterly series of releases, committing our resources to producing scheduled updates and content drops on a three-month cycle, in order to maximize our own internal workflows, and to help the sim racing community have greater transparency and expectation as to when new and exciting changes are planned to come to the software.

While we will of course aim to adhere to these proposed schedules, software development is fraught with new and unexpected challenges, so please do consider these dates as a broad guideline – things may well move around a little over the year, and of course we will use the intermittent weeks between these releases as opportunities to bring any hotfix updates and small surprises as and when we can, too…

Our intention is to offer a healthy mix of new game update features, functionality, and quality of life improvements, alongside an exciting collection of premium content for the sim – some as free additions, and some as part of paid Steam Store content.

It would, quite frankly, be inviting risk to detail exactly what these items are this far in advance; however we can certainly share with you the dates of each expected update release – and of course we will very much look forward to announcing the content items themselves much closer to the actual date than previously was possible before.

Furthermore, although we deemed it unnecessary to adhere to our now standard Release Candidate strategy for the 2022 UI Update build of rFactor 2, we will be following that process with these quarterly updates. That means, on average, we will likely deploy the new Release Candidate around 4 weeks prior to updating the public branch of the build. This way, we can continue to monitor the feedback from our latest changes, and ensure any further tweaks and improvements have been tested with as wide a range of different hardware as possible, before moving to the main ‘opt-out’ branch of rFactor 2. 

Below, you will find the intended months for when these release cycles will take place:

• Quarter 1 Release – February
• Quarter 2 Release – May
• Quarter 3 Release – August 
• Quarter 4 Release – November  

Again, to reiterate from earlier in this post, we will likely still deploy further hotfix updates and the odd surprise into the simulation outside of these months, however from here on in these are very much expected to represent the core development periods of rFactor 2 over the next year. We have some very exciting things in the pipeline here at Studio 397, please do stay tuned to the rFactor 2 social media channels and website over the coming days, as we begin to reveal the details of the new content that will make up our Quarter 1 drop in early February!

Stay safe and see you on the track!

Update day!

The day you have all been waiting for is here… the anticipation has built, the preview videos have been poured over in the finest of detail, and now, dear community members – release time is upon us!

That’s right, this morning the team here at rFactor 2 are absolutely delighted to welcome you all to try our new 2022 UI Update for the simulation – an update that we have put together in order to breathe a new lease of life into rFactor 2, adding a modern, fit for purpose and easy to navigate user Interface that works hard to rationalise, condense and contain all the options and features you are used to with rFactor 2, but in a structured, sensible and easy to navigate and engage visual interface. 

This new build has been developed in house by the Studio 397 team, considering the wealth of community feedback we have received in recent years, alongside our own detailed analysis and knowledge from the world of virtual motorsports. Developed to be user friendly for players fresh into the simulation, whilst also making life easier and more convenient for experienced players, we are delighted with how this build has developed over time – and we most certainly intend to use this platform as a springboard for further enhancements over time. 

The rFactor 2; UI Now, and Future

The new build today marks the start of our new UI journey, as such we still have a few minor areas of the UI where further development is required to iron out remaining issues – and we’ve also identified a number of areas that we wish to expand upon and improve as we move forward with development. In order to give you a brief overview of where some of our development thoughts are heading, we’ve put together a quick headline summary, found below:

Under Consideration

• Esports & stream watch area.
• Improved singleplayer AI selection & handling.
• Improved multiplayer server list with more server information.
• Function to override car logo’s on cars that share manufacturer name with official content.
• More car telemetry in setup screen.
• More car telemetry in monitor.

Known Issues

• Occasional white screen before start screen and when saving display settings.
• Orange compare numbers do not reset when going back to default setup and still show when changing setup settings with no changeable values.
• Some special characters are not displayed correctly in the car select page and setup pages.
• Wheel load is showing N as unit, but value is kg in setup chassis page.
• Amount of players in server field is cropped when string is too long.
• Multiclass graphics in the event screens are not visually optimized.
• There is currently no way to overwrite a custom controller profile.
• There is currently no way to remove a custom controller profile.
• Driver label above mini monitor is empty after session change.
• Steering rate is yet to be implemented in the new UI.
• Default FOV shows as 9 in graphics settings menu.

Please do remember, the build release today is the start of our UI improvement journey, and although we have some exciting plans, not all of which are detailed in the above list, we also recognise that sometimes development priorities and possibilities change over time. With that said, we will work exceptionally hard to continue what we believe to be a very positive start with this new build, and we cannot wait to share with you our developments as the year unfolds. 

The 2022 UI Update Build

Client: 8092611

Dedicated Server: 8092617

rF2 Build:

• Added Push-to-Pass and Weight Jacker.
• Custom controller profiles no longer save with -80% exaggerate yaw.
• Yaw override in controller profiles defaults to being disabled unless added manually.
• Official controller profiles have been updated to override this to 0% for all steering wheels, among other override changes.
• Reviewed Glare Settings to reduce excessive brightness in day, and improve headlights at night.
• Some small adjustments to Lighting Parameters, to bring warmer hues to the scene.
• Improved windscreen rain effects and external car glass specular
• Fixed stutters in replay monitor.
• Driver labels re-enabled, updated with new behaviour and style.

Deep Dive Videos

Here at the studio we are all incredibly excited to see the response to our new UI update, and we cannot wait to see you out on track over the coming days and weeks. 

The 2022 UI Update for rFactor 2 – Available now

Hello sim racers!

You have spoken, and we have listened –  today is the day we can finally reveal some fruits of our recent labours – announcing a wholesale update and refresh of the rFactor 2 UI!

That’s right, next week rFactor 2 players will be given access to a brand new, fully ground up re-designed and modern UI interface for the rFactor 2 simulation, adding a wealth of usability improvements, visual enhancements and design decisions created in order to enhance and improve the gameplay experience, from launch of the simulation right through to once you are out on track.

Key Highlights

With such a substantial rebuild of the entire rFactor 2 UI experience, below you will find a brief bullet point list of some of the key areas that have been improved or expanded upon within this new build. Please note, these are just some areas of change, as this new build fundamentally affects the entirety of the rFactor 2 user journey – with some aspects of the new 2022 UI Update adding substantial changes and improvements over the existing UI release. 

• Brand-new audio and visual design across all pages.
• Main menu improvements for clearer navigation, more call to actions and an easier layout to understand for new users.
• All single player related functionality brought together into one area with cross navigation from, and to, any page in this area in order for optimized user flow.
• Enhanced layout of every page to improve user flow and simplify interaction.
• The settings menu has undergone a big update with clearer navigation, an easier layout and simplified user flow with fewer pages.
• The setup area has undergone a big update with clearer navigation, an easier layout and simplified user flow with fewer pages.
• Event screen optimizations and user flow improvements.
• 2 brand-new showrooms.

Overview and Rationale For Change

When creating this new 2022 UI update, we developed each change with four significant pillars in mind – taking into account how each aspect of the player journey would be experienced by both new and established users of the simulation. Developed to help streamline and rationalize how a player interacts with the software, the 2022 UI update has been build by sim racers, for sim racers, and hopefully reflects how the majority of our new and existing player base will wish to interact with the various aspects of a title to the scale of rFactor 2. 

The four pillars of development applied to the creation of the 2022 UI update are as follows: 

• Function over form.
• Simplification: fewer clicks, less mouse movement, consistent button placement.
• Better visibility: fewer pages and less scrolling and clearer categories. Clear lower centre area of screen.
• Better performance: better frame rate than before (not final step).

Utilizing our own experience combined with the wealth of feedback from our community, and adhering to our scope of creating a fit for purpose, modern UI interface, we believe the results of our endeavours will very firmly speak for themselves once you all get your hands on the new build next week. 

Release Date and Future Developments

The big question on everybody’s lips then… when will it be released? 

Having already undergone a robust internal testing process, we do not need to run this update through the traditional Release Candidate process; as such we are delighted to confirm the 2022 UI update build of rFactor 2 will be made available to the public Opt-Out branch of Steam this Thursday 27th January! 

Existing owners of the simulation will receive the update automatically on Thursday morning (time TBC), and any new player purchasing the sim from Thursday will automatically default to this new UI design featuring all the latest improvements and changes, more details of which will be released as part of the update notes associated with the build on January 27th. 

Although a considerable update in its own right, this new build is just the starting point for our planned ongoing development of the rFactor 2 UI. We are taking a phased approach to how we structure further UI updates, with January 27th marking the first of these development phases. Going forwards, alongside maintenance and patch updates where appropriate, we intend to bring a raft of new features and improvements to the UI in the fullness of time. Feedback from the community will be monitored and implemented where appropriate, alongside the exciting plans we already have in our development pipeline. More on those another day though, as for now, the new release next week should mark a very welcome improvement to the whole user experience when navigating through the simulation, one that we hope the community are as excited about getting their hands on as we have been developing it. 

We hope you will enjoy the 2022 UI update development when it releases next week, and we look forward to reading your feedback and further developing and expanding both the UI and the different features and game modes it will offer in the months ahead.

This is just the very start of an exciting period of development for the simulation in 2022, so make sure you stay tuned to the rFactor 2 social media channels and website over the coming days, for plenty more news and announcements about the simulation.

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