Roadmap

Roadmap-time is one of the best times of the month, even for us! You wonder why?

It gives us the chance to bring together what we worked on, admire screenshots, or just be happy about what we achieved as a team in terms of improvements, new features or content. As we´re developing and working on rFactor 2 basically 24/7, it´s important to also enjoy every little step that we did to make this simulation better. Because in the end, we´re sim racing enthusiasts, just like you!

Alright alright, enough romantic talking about game development, let´s go down to what’s actually happening outside of our continuing work on Nordschleife, UI and the competition system. And yes, it has it all, further improvements, new features and fresh content. 3..2..1.. GO!

A New Future

Ever heard that 3 is the magic number? That´s basically what happened here. Take the knowledge and technology of McLaren (1), mix it with the heritage and meaning of the name Senna (2) and add the GTR (3) badge to deliver a masterpiece. Voilá, introducing the hottest carbon fibre thingy on rubber tyres that mankind has ever tried to tame on track.

Powered by a 4.0 litre twin-turbo V8, this almost demonic piece of joy can skyrocket you onto the first place of nearly any grid around the world. But the McLaren Senna GTR is not just the track-day car that would be outside most people’s budgets, it’s more than that. It’s our chance as a simulation studio to actually try to have a look into the not-so-distant future and create something that could be the pinnacle of the next-gen sports car racing world.

So be aware, if you unleash this beast, you might time travel! 

Talking about time travel, the McLaren Senna GTR will be released within the next few weeks.

One could think that with this announcement, we burned up everything we have, especially since 2019 is already half-way through.

But we can assure you, that’s absolutely not the case! There is so much more still to come this year!

And yes, this means that we will also add more rubber tyre thingys that go fast!

Worlds Fastest Gamer 2

We’re super stoked to be supporting Worlds Fastest Gamer again with an incredible prize!  

Next week, rFactor 2 drivers will have the chance to qualify for the World’s Fastest Gamer Grand Final via an online time trial run on the Sebring International Raceway course with the Aston Martin GT3, running from August 5 to 18.

The top 20 racers will then do battle in a live-streamed, 40-minute race on August 24th. In addition to earning the chance to chase the full-time real-world racing stint worth more than US$1 million, a US$10,000 prize pool will be up for grabs in the final race. Incredible stuff!!  

The winning rFactor 2 driver will join eight racers hand-picked by the World’s Fastest Gamer judging panel plus the winner of the Gear.Club mobile game time trial.

Look out for more details soon. In the meantime, check out the WFG website http://wfgamer.com/ 

Competition heats up!

While we’re at it, let´s also announce an esports live event with Porsche! Yes, the company that makes all the great race cars we admire. We can´t say more yet, but don´t worry. As soon as the lollipop man lifts, we’re ready to launch more info onto the pitlane.  That’s not all, McLaren Shadow kicks off again soon. We will bring you more news on that shortly!

Technical Update

A little under four weeks ago, we hosted the rF24, an endurance race with many high-profile teams and drivers participating at Le Mans. Roughly half-way through we had to red flag the event because of technical issues. Immediately after the event, we released an official statement and started gathering information from all the participants and set out to try and fix these issues with a special task force. It’s time for an update now.

In the months leading up to the event, we were already investigating and improving issues some people were having with the physics calculations “freezing”. In investigating that issue, we built a very detailed “stopwatch” system that we could use internally to exactly pinpoint where these delays occurred. We learned a lot from the “logs” that our community submitted and found multiple issues. For one, our timing, code that had been part of rFactor 2 and many ISI-based sims before, turned out not to be the most efficient and reliable way to run something at 400 Hz (and 2400 Hz for the tyres). We rewrote that code, and after several stages of testing these revisions made it into the release. A second issue we discovered had to do with plugins that were taking too much time. We give plugin authors a lot of power, running plugins directly as part of the physics thread, but as you know, with great power comes great responsibility, and unfortunately in some cases, plugins don’t behave nicely. We’ve blacklisted a few plugins and are talking to authors to help them improve. A third issue was in how we sometimes talked to Steam, which has led us to rewrite that code and convert it from a plugin to internal code. We are still diagnosing more rare issues, and there is a forum thread that explains how you can submit your logs for review.

Now during the event, we ran into issues that have plagued us before, but never this severely and never in a way that we could reproduce. However, we now had so many people reporting issues that we started to see some patterns, so the first step we took was to analyze exactly what had happened. We took our time, collected a lot of data from participants, for which we are very grateful, and then started to try to reproduce specific problems.

The first issue we could reproduce were join lags. Someone would (re)join the server, and this issue then propagated to all other clients. We discovered that this would happen whenever someone rejoined the server using a car with different upgrades from the ones he used before (such as forgetting to select the low downforce upgrade). Our first fix was to add code that would not propagate such (wrong) upgrades to other clients. We then quickly confirmed that these join lags were indeed gone, which was a big improvement since these were causing all kinds of other issues as well.

When exploring this first issue, we discovered that it was currently possible to rejoin not just with the wrong upgrades, but even with the wrong livery or even the wrong car, and this was not handled correctly in the code. We saw this cause issues where you ended up with the wrong set of physics because of the upgrades and the server re-applying the same setup you had before, but to a different car. We also saw issues where a car would appear in the garage for some, but on the road for others, and a few other variations that were all caused by the same problem. We decided to solve this in two places. First of all, we now double check when you rejoin that you indeed have exactly the same car, livery and upgrades again. If you don’t, rather than letting it cause problems, the server will boot you and tell you why it did so. Secondly, we added code to the client that, when you connect to a server, will check if your intention is to rejoin. If it is, the server will now tell you directly which car, livery and upgrades to use, and we will simply show you that car in the UI instead of letting you choose anything. We also decided to make the rejoin check a bit more lenient in that you still need to rejoin with the same driver, but this driver is now identified via his Steam ID, meaning that in the case of a hardware failure, if you have multiple installs of rFactor 2, you can even take over on a different client and resume the race.

Another, slightly unrelated, issue we looked into was loading times. The good news here is we’ve found some improvements and our upcoming release will roughly halve those loading times. We’ve seen numbers being reported by testers indicating a 40-50% improvement.

Other issues still on our “fix list” are a somewhat smaller lag some people are getting when someone leaves the server as well as a few usability issues, such as the fact that if you got a disconnect right before you made a pitstop, you basically get a car with no fuel when you rejoin, and you have to try and drive a lap first (which will likely fail).

Right now our intention is to release the first of a series of updates as soon as this rejoin process is “bullet proof”. We are going through a series of tests, each with a bigger set of users, until finally we are confident that we squashed this. Our current estimate is that this first update will go live sometime next week. We won’t stop there, and remain committed to making sure everybody has a good experience racing rFactor 2. Of course, we will also do a re-run of the rF24 when we feel these issues have all been resolved and tested.

Simexpo

We’re looking forward to once again attending Sim Expo this year at the Nürburgring, as usual with a few surprises up our sleeves!  Make sure you come and visit us and say hi!

Surprise, surprise! Let’s do the roadmap a week early, at the start of the actual Steam Summer Sale!

Summer Sale

There’s quite a few packs on sale this summer, more than we ever had, so let’s go over them! And of course, rFactor 2 itself is on sale as well!

We have three car packs on sale. The GT3 Power Pack and Endurance Pack are both 50% off, and the latest GT3 Challengers Pack has a 33% discount. Our first ever laser scanned track, that set a benchmark for future high quality tracks, Sebring, has a 30% discount.

A 25% discount was applied to the Formula E Race bundle, featuring the Gen 2 car as well as two, highly accurate tracks: Monaco and Hong Kong.

Our partners at Reiza Studios also have a special surprise for the summer. Not only are all three of their packs (the full pack, the car pack and the track pack) on sale, they also provided some fixes for the MCR 2000 as well as two brand new layouts for Imola, doubling the number of layouts available!

The existing layouts, the classic, dangerous 1972 layout surrounded by nearby barriers and the current configuration, fully adapted to modern standards but still retaining a lot of the unique challenges that made it famous are now augmented by the 1988 layout that introduced a few chicanes and the subsequent 2001 layout with further modifications and chicanes. I think it’s fair to say that this track can now be adapted to suit a car of any age! Of course, you get both new layouts for free if you’ve already bought Imola before! Just check the workshop for updates.

Last but not least, our partners at KartSim have put their package on sale at 50% off, a great opportunity if you want to get into karting.

Tatuus

We know we know, it’s been a little while…. open wheel fans have been sitting at the window longingly looking into the distance hoping for a sign.  But wait no more, we are pleased to once again give you ‘open wheel’ aficionados something to get your pulse ‘racing’ again. So start getting worked up right now, because the Tatuus pack arrival is imminent. This punchy bundle of six unique open wheel Tatuus cars that includes the Tatuus F.3 T318, the Tatuus MSV F3-016 (aka British F3), the Tatuus PM-18 (Pro Mazda), the Tatuus USF-17, Tatuus F4 T014, and the Tatuus FT-50,  will hit the ground wheels spinning on Thursday this week.

And one more thing, the Tatuus pack and all of it’s cars will be ‘free’ on the Steam workshop for everyone to enjoy!

New Build

We’ve also just released a new build with some fixes and new features in it.

VR Features

We basically added two new things. Support for “IPD” or “World Scale” adjustments, which allow the fine tuning of the distance between the eye cameras in game. Some headsets have hardware controls for this too, but due to popular demand from people in our community we added this as a software feature too. This adjustment allows changing stereo separation strength, which leads to different perception of VR image and in some cases increases comfort. We’ve added key bindings to increase, decrease or even reset the IPD so you can map those and make adjustments while sitting in the cockpit (don’t adjust and drive though!).

The second feature we added is for users of the Pimax (and possibly other similarly constructed headsets). It allows you to enable or disable a specific projection mode that respects the orientation of the displays in the headsets. On the Pimax they are canted. Setting this feature, that for now needs to be changed in the player.json text file, to “1” enables this new option for Pimax. As a side effect, rendering on Pimax becomes roughly 25% more efficient, which is a nice bonus.

Below is an overview of both settings as they appear in your player.json:

"VR IPD Scale": 1,
"VR IPD Scale#": "VR IPD Scale: Adjusts IPD distance
                 between eyes. 1.0 = default IPD 
                 distance, as reported by the HMD, 
                 below 1.0 = reduce, above 1.0 = 
                 increase",
"VR Projection Mode": 0,
"VR Projection Mode#": "VR Projection Mode: 0 = 
                 default, 1 = not in-plane displays
                 HMDs",

Changes

Other, smaller changes are:

• We’ve fixed a problem with our RSS based news feed in the old launcher (news failed to show up at all, should be back again now).
• The showroom was not correctly showing up in VR, now it’s back to normal.
• Temporarily we’ve disabled the heat haze effect as it was rendering incorrectly. We are working on a proper fix, it will be back soon.
• We’ve made some improvements to how our light probes are updated when jumping around in a replay between different times of day.

Road to Le Mans

The sign up for the qualifying races is going into the final hours, deadline is 15:00 CEST on the 26th of June. With qualifying races held this weekend the current 78 entries will fight to get into the final 45 spots. Oreca, BMW, Corvette and Porsche will race side by side for the ultimate glory. We will be crowing the 2019 winners of Le Mans when the race ends Sunday, July 7th.
As mentioned this race features our Endurance pack, which is on sale now. There is practically no excuse to not enter this epic event. Try out our recently released Le Mans laser scanned track. It can’t get any better than this!

That’s it for now. Enjoy the summer!

Summer seems to be in full force already, looking at temperatures here in Europe. Besides it being a good time for ice-cream lovers, it also caters to endurance-enthusiasts, with the iconic races at Le Mans and the Nürburgring coming closer and closer. As if this wouldn’t be enough already to get our racing hearts beat faster, how about some naturally aspirated high revving machinery.

So here-it-is! You probably didn’t see it coming, but yes it’s here. No need for a long dramatic intro. We’re ecstatic to announce Circuit des 24 Heures du Mans otherwise known as “24h Le Mans” is coming to rFactor 2. And the cherry on top, it’s coming much sooner than you think. So you are right to get excited now!

As with all of our latest track content, we are pulling out all the stops. The 2018 terrain is modeled with millimeter precision using the latest in laser scan technology. Nothing but the best for this epic track. What other sim to bring out its real potential than rFactor 2 with it’s heritage with endurance multi-class racing.

Bringing this iconic track to life has been a passion of ours since we started, our studio name even includes the record 397 laps achieved in 2010. Officially licensed by the Automobile Club de l’Ouest (ACO) the 24h Le Mans circuit is over 13.6 km and unique in nature with long sweeping corners and high-speed straights. With the nature of the track also comes a unique race. Le Mans challenges drivers like no other, with 24 hours of hard racing throughout the night and often with difficult weather conditions! rFactor 2 will offer you that challenge – look out for our Road to Le Mans competition coming soon!

We will be releasing more details over the next couple of weeks.

In other news!

When it comes to things, features and content we currently work on, we could even fill an entire roadmap just with listing it. This means we are pretty busy with working on our favorite sim to ensure that we see even more great racing this year. We have our teams working on the UI, Competition system, updated shaders as well as new cars and of course the Nürburgring/Nordschleife. Progress can be seen everywhere right now which makes us proud every day, but there is still a lot of work up ahead to bring everything your way. But we are on it! Let´s get into details for some of the topics.

Competition

With Le Mans on the way, we’re looking forward to bringing an updated competition format for you all to take part in.  Details will be posted shortly!! Additionally, you may have seen that McLaren Shadow will be back for another season, so brush off your wheel and get ready to enter into this fantastic competition which we are proud to support!

New UI

The UI itself we are still very busy under the hood, working on optimizations and fixing bugs that arise as part of the new features being integrated. One big feature we can now announce is the Launcher as you now know it, a separate application sitting on your desktop will now have all of it’s features fused into the in-game UI. This means no extra interface to deal with, it’s an all in one unified UI experience, as it should be! And of course we by now also implemented more details in the in-game matchmaker, and one request we often get is the ability to filter AI vs real life humans in the server list. It’s important to know who’s a bot and who’s not! This is working now, and will be released as part of the new UI.

Enjoy the summer, we’ll be back with more news soon!

When you work hard, times just flies by, so it’s not a surprise that it feels like we just wrote our previous roadmap some days ago.

The roadmap this month takes us to the second-smallest, most densely-populated country in the world and home to many past and current racing drivers. But not just there. We basically travel everywhere and show you what´s happening in the big rFactor 2 world. No matter if you are looking for build updates, news about upcoming content or where to find the right competition for you, it’s all here and it’s called Roadmap!

Formula E Monaco e-Prix

If you had not already guessed from our introduction, the big news this month is the announcement of a new track, the Monaco e-Prix, which twists and turns through the beautiful city streets. Scheduled to be released at the same time Formula E drives the real race, this track is based on laserscan data and CAD from Formula E, ensuring an accurate layout. The track complements our existing Formula E portfolio, which features the recently released “Gen 2” car, as well as the Hong Kong and Lester tracks, and puts us in the lead in terms of Formula E content in any racing simulation.

Updates on work in progress

Later this year we are going to go 64 bit only with our rFactor 2 builds. This move was triggered by the fact that Steam hardware surveys show us that only 0.5% of our users are still on a 32 bit build, whilst within the global Steam community, this number is less than 2% too. All hardware you can buy for many years now is 64 bit, so it’s time to move forward. Doing so will save us time building and testing code, which we can then spend on improving the simulation as a whole.

There are several bits of documentation we’re currently adding. First of all, we have a guide on how to create your own car pack.  For our modding community we have now documented the new IBL/PBR based car shader, detailing how to use it when creating your own car.

In our ongoing UI  previews we share with you some of the things that are in right now and being actively tested. One important one is the matchmaker, which will make a triumphant return back in game! For now it’s the bare minimum to assure it’s working, but we intend to use the flexibility the new UI allows us, to add more features.

And just something gadgety-cool and nouveau to look forward to, a live trackmap/loading screen drawn from the actual track data – because what’s more useful than a track map before you blast out on track, and look it even has the pitlane (click on the image below to see it in motion)!

With the announcement of the second of three iconic tracks in progress, it’s time to take a look at the progress on the Nürburgring. Last month we reported we were pretty much on schedule, and that is still the case.

On the side of cars, now that the Formula E Gen 2 car has been released, we’re shifting our focus again to the Tatuus cars. They’re all drivable, the models and sounds are mostly done and we’re now tweaking and bugfixing them.

Community and Competitions

As promised on last years Simracing expo already, we continue our efforts to bring more activations and competitions to rFactor 2, enabling our drivers to enjoy racing in different championships around the globe. We want to make sure that you can find not just the best competitions in our Sim, but also the best drivers, while also giving people the chance to move their way up the leader-board and put their name on the map for drivers to look out for.

A1esports

We are more then happy to welcome A1 Telekom as one of our new partners with their A1 esports series. It´s already the third season, but new to this esports event, which features an offline final in Vienna, is rFactor 2 now. This esports championship is open to all drivers that live in a german speaking region (Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Lichtenstein and Luxembourg). If you live in one of these regions, the 7.000 Euro prizepool is surely something worth going for. On top of that you also get invited to the Offline Final in Vienna, racing on a stage. We are sure that this will be a blast. Wondering what you need to do for that or where to sign up? Just use this link. Happy Racing!

ESL MAPFRE Season 2

We started the journey with ESL and their first rFactor 2 Championship a while ago and what a journey it was. Awesome offline final, close racing action and great broadcasts. You missed that? How could you, it was for 20.000 Euro?! But don´t worry, ESL just announced their second season and it will soon be underway with the qualifier. More infos about that can be found on their site.

Verified on Discord!

Last, but not least, on the community side we are proud to announce that we now have a formally verified Discord server. We would like to invite you to drop by for an informal chat. Most of the time, there are people from Studio 397 around and you will definitely always meet a few friendly community members willing to help and answer question, or just willing to hop in a race with you!

Go to: https://discord.gg/rfactor2

…and have a great month!

Welcome to our third roadmap of the year. We’ve had quite an exciting quarter altogether with updates to many of our car packs, a new material editor, an exciting 12 hour race at Sebring and last but not least the release of our biggest pack to date, the Reiza pack, featuring no less than 6 cars and 4 tracks. Check out the trailer below. You can buy the full pack here, but there are also options to buy just the tracks or just the cars, or even individual items.

And those of you who follow our roadmaps every month will know there is a lot more to come, so let’s get started with this month’s updates!

Cars

We’ve just wrapped up the development of our brand new brake-by-wire system for the Gen 2 Formula E car. These cars are rear wheel driven, so the rear wheels also do the energy regeneration when braking. As much of the braking torque as possible will be used to regenerate the batteries, with the remaining required torque coming from the rear disc brakes. This is all controlled by a brake-by-wire system and we’re in final testing of it in the new car, so expect this one to be released next!

Tracks

The Nürburgring is going as planned as we’re moving towards the barriers and mapping out all the different pieces of graffiti on the track. Those of you who heard the podcast René and Marcel had with Davy Jones ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpBi9qKwjB4 ) already know that we have two more tracks in progress, both of which we will keep as a surprise for later this year.

Performance

Very recently we’ve released a build that embeds some very specific performance logging in an attempt to catch the few cases people have reported over the years where they are “running out of real-time” because of hickups of the physics calculations. We have a dedicated thread on our forum explaining how to report these logs to us and although we have already received a few logs, we can still use a lot more so if this has happened to you in an on-line race, please help us out and submit your data, and we will try to help you solve the issues.

Competition and new UI Update

This month we’ll take a more in-depth look at where we are with the new UI and competition infrastructure. Our current UI is really split into parts, with a Launcher that is responsible for content management and on-line matchmaking and a main executable that can either be launched in single player or multiplayer mode. For our new UI we want to merge all of that into one. We are now at a point where we’ve replaced every bit of UI in the executable for both modes. In fact, one thing we are doing is eliminating the need to have two modes, merging single and multiplayer modes.

So let’s get started. When you launch rFactor 2, you end up in the main menu that provides you with a few different options. Here you can drive in single player, view a replay or live race or participate in multiplayer, browse various aspects of our community (forum, news, upcoming events) as well as configure the game.

The game options have been cleaned up and re-arranged to give a better overview. As an example we’ve kept the settings for recording replays here, but moved the actual playback of replays to a different location as viewing replays clearly has nothing to do with options. In general we now have more space as well to add extra context and help, making it easier for users to understand the many different settings. Session settings have also been revamped.

We’ve split those up into generic settings that span the different sessions, and session specific settings. We also exposed a few extras here, allowing you to for example configure more than one practice session without having to resort to editing text files. Car and track selections have been tweaked as well. For both we have added a few different views, ranging from a more graphical, icon based view to a more compact list. In all of those modes we’ve added quick search options, which usually help you find the car or track you’re looking for with just a few keystrokes. Car tuning is also still there, and here you will see our our new material editor being integrated nicely as well.

Moving on to the garage, you see we have grouped the different tuning options for a car into logical sections. Little details to make your life easier here is that we can show you in a different color all options you changed compared to the set you last loaded or saved, and we also still allow you to compare your own setup to another one, where we no longer list all options twice, leaving you to figure out the ones that actually changed, but more clearly indicating those. At this point it’s also interesting to point out another feature. As the whole UI is web based, we will also allow you to “share” your UI with a team mate remotely.

What this means is that while you’re driving he can log in to your game and review and make changes to your setup. Such changes will then be applied the next time you leave the garage. As you can imagine such features open up a ton of possibilities for people racing as teams, but also ways to give remote support and I’m sure our community will find many other uses as well! Apart from the garage we also have a monitor that allows you to view the action live from different camera standpoints, as well as to view an instant replay. Standings have been extended to show more information and the camera controls can be used for broadcasting races as well.

Competition is being developed now as part of the new UI, so it is easy to see what are the upcoming races. From a list of competitions you can sign up for the ones you want to compete in. Zooming in you can see past and upcoming events, sessions and standings. Joining a session directly takes you to the right server. This part is far from done but we just passed a few important milestones that will allow us to run not only hotlap competitions but also qualification sessions and actual races. We’re working on different ways to score those, from traditional “points based” ones to ones that evaluate the actual racing skills of every driver involved and ranking them accordingly. Another thing we’re integrating right now is a protest system. Currently we’re evaluating, through internal testing, how to best release this to the public and we are considering doing some kind of beta as a first step.

So, what is left to do? Mainly the features that are currently in the Launcher, two of which are crucial: the matchmaker showing the list of servers and the package management system. The matchmaker will receive some love as we will add features to see if a server has players or AI on them and we will also add more detailed information about each individual server. The package management system will be extended to allow you to directly browse the workshop and our item store, so all content can be managed in one single place.

Fanatec 12 hours of Sebring

A week ago, 40 teams divided into three classes lined up for the 12 hours of Sebring, and wow what a race it was. Right from the get go we had action and close battles that lasted right until the very last minute of the race. The top 3 in each class got cash prizes and Fanatec vouchers, and commentators and spectators joined forces to nominate a driver of the day, who walked away with a SimLab rig. Also, a record number of viewers watched the event and every two hours could win a Fanatec voucher and even a Podium Series wheel! All in all this event was a big success and we will certainly host more as we ramp up towards the release of our competition system.

Thanks to Marius Nicolae for the Sebring shots!

That’s all for this month. See you all on the virtual track!

It’s the time of the year where the sun starts greeting us more often during the day. The first roar and rumble of the rare species of racecars can be heard close to racetracks all around Europe as everybody is waking up from their winter dreams. Everyone involved in motorsport is eagerly waiting for tracks to dry out, engines to fire up and for the sun to shine on their careers as they are encouraged by early test results. It´s not just heating up in Europe or in the hearts of motorsport enthusiasts, but also in our studio and offices, as slowly some of the newly developed features and content for our beloved rFactor 2 are starting to take shape.  Last year at Simracing Expo many people already said that 2019 would be an exciting year for this simulation and yes, that will absolutely be the case! Over the last months we announced many cool things, but that´s not all of it for 2019. We won´t reveal everything just yet, though! Nevertheless, buckle up in your seats as February is coming to an end. And as the snow is melting on the northern hemisphere, the new roadmap appears!

GFX updates

With the new PBR based system in place for car bodies, we are shifting attention to cockpits now. We are taking this opportunity to not just create better looking materials, but also to improve how reflections and shadows work in the cockpit. It’s still early days, but the first rough prototypes are looking promising. We are also finalizing the guidelines for modders, which is taking us a bit longer than expected, but we are committed to getting those out soon. In parallel we have also been working on a few more fixes to our GT cars as reported by various community members and we have optimized LODs on some cars that will help to make them look better as well as perform better at lower levels of detail, allowing you to use more visible cars on lower-end systems and still end up with a great looking image.

Competition

Work continues as planned, with both integrating the competition system into the UI and also work in the backend. We are adding plugable standings, which will allow competitions to choose from a great variety of ways of scoring results. At the same time, as we are running more competitions internally, we are learning a lot and adding features to improve the stability and robustness of the whole system. March 23rd will see our first real endurance event, the 12 hours of Sebring. This race will feature several well-known names within the simracing community, such as YouTuber Jimmy Broadbent, Team Redline, Fernando Alonso Racing by Logitech G, McLaren Shadow and Williams eSports.  These teams and others will also be racing along side our qualifiers from the prelude earlier in February. You still have a chance to race, make sure you enter our qualifier for this round! As one of the most prestigious races of the year, there will be a fantastic range of a prizes totalling over 5,000 euros!! More details are available on our forum.

Content

The Nürburgring is obviously a huge project and for the first couple of months in such projects we don’t have much visible progress as we transform all the data into a detailed and accurate road mesh and working our way outwards, to curbs, grass, barriers and terrain with track-side objects. We’re now in the middle of modelling the curbs and we can share some of the early wireframes of parts of the track. I’m sure most of you will instantly recognize these areas of the track.

The Reiza pack is another piece of content that we’ve been talking about for quite some time now. It’s really close now, we promise, and you might have seen Reiza Studios announcing that Imola will be part of this pack. We have more exciting news! Virginia International Raceway will also be included and to whet your appetite, we’ve included some very nice screenshots of the track.

And let’s just add a few more images of Imola for good measure!

Both the Tatuus cars and Formula E Gen 2 are almost ready to release. For the latter we are currently implementing a more advanced brake-by-wire system that matches the system on the real car, leading to more accurate regeneration and rear brake temperatures. We are also testing the last big planned update of Zandvoort, where we focus on optimizations as well as add the latest buildings on and around the track. The Dutch are still hopeful that F1 will visit the track again in the future, and in the mean time our virtual version has the advantage that it can host many and loud race cars every day!

That concludes the roadmap for the shortest month of the year. We hope to see all of you on track soon!

One month into the start of a new year saw a lot of changes at Studio 397. First of all we welcomed a handful of new colleagues, most of which with long track records in content production, to further extend the Studio’s capabilities to create content. Then, halfway through January, we could finally tell the world about the project we had been secretly working on for the last year and a half. We have licensed our physics engine and provided a helping hand to Amazon Game Studios in creating The Grand Tour Game to accompany the third season of the series that airs on Amazon Prime. Released on consoles, like the show, this is a fun game you can easily pick up with your friends. As far as we know it’s the first time a game releases in sync with a television series, adding weekly content as new episodes air and closely following the antics of the show.

Let’s also look at some of the work in progress, just to give you an update on how things are going. Our competition system and new UI are the highest priority things our developers are working on right now. Step by step we will be expanding the competition system and testing more parts of it in public, and we’re currently integrating it into our new UI to ensure it is both easy to find and join competitions. Expect us to reveal more towards the end of the first quarter of this year.

Then let’s look at some of the content that is in progress, starting with the Tatuus cars. Physics wise the cars are mostly done, but we are still doing some fine-tuning of the 3D models and making sure the materials are all using our new system. We will release this pack with an extensive set of real-life liveries, which also means we’re busy making sure we get approvals from all the teams involved. We don’t have a fixed release date yet, but these cars will be shipping soon. Then there’s the Reiza Pack, which is still being finalised and the cars in it are upgraded to the new material system. Nordschleife is obviously also still in the works and it looks like its release date will slip based on the first predictions we made, mostly because we got the right scan roughly two months later than expected. In the mean time we will also keep upgrading more cars to the new material system, releasing updated templates and upgrading the existing liveries. We are also working hard on adding more new PBR based shaders to the material system for tracks and other parts of our cars. Not only that, we are working on a number of features to enhance your experience.

GT3 Challengers Pack

Many have been racing our new GT3 cars on tracks all over the world while anxiously waiting for more liveries as well as templates and information on how to paint these cars with the new material system. For each of the new cars we’ve added a couple of liveries to brighten up the field. Some from real teams running these cars, in other cases fantasy liveries, partially because some of these cars were so new that not many teams were racing them already. Those are all included in the update, alongside the new templates.

At the same time, we spent a bit of extra time to make sure the new liveries worked well on-line. As the new material system really requires you to build a livery from multiple textures, we made some improvements to ensure that these textures automatically get packaged in a so called MAS file to ensure all parts get transferred to a server (and other clients) if the server has skin transfers enabled. All of this, and more, is explained in the guide we made for making your own liveries, which is the next thing we will discuss in this roadmap update.

Car Paint Editor

To get the best possible results when designing your own livery, we decided to create a guide on painting your own car, to accompany the new templates and material system. We tried to make this a guide for beginners and advanced painters, covering all aspects. The first version of this guide can be found on our documentation site. Please take a look and let us know what you think, and what we can still improve! We will be adding new materials over time, so do please leave feedback.  Do make sure you post your creations, we will be featuring a paint every fortnight – so get creative!

Formula E Gen 2

You might have guessed it already, but we are bringing you the new Gen 2 car from Formula E soon, with all the current team liveries and helmets. On top of that we are bringing you a new track that was adapted specifically for fast and fun racing with these new cars. The track is called Lester Formula E Edition, it’s a fantasy track that has been adapted with a few chicanes, despite that, it is still fast and flowing, great for Gen 2 action!

Competition

The Prelude – 3 hours of Sebring qualifiers are going into the final stages, with almost 100 drivers lapping around the bumpy track, the top 40 will be secured for a spot in the all GT3 powered field. On February the 16th the race will be broadcast live on our YouTube, Twitch and Facebook accounts so make sure you tune in!

Top 3 teams will get a special invite for the 12 hours of Sebring that will be hosted in March. The hotlap competition to enter the 3 hour event ends on Sunday the 3rd of February at 23:59, so buckle up and head on over to our competition page: https://rfactor2.studio-397.com/

The 12 hour event will be a diverse field of invites, qualifiers (top 3 from the 3 hour race) and teams that have qualfied into the competition. We will be hosting this race with the LMP2, GTE and GT3 packs, more info about this in the next couple of weeks. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Discord where news will be shared as well on our forum. In other news our competition system is taking real good shape and will be used for daily races within in short period of time.

The ESL MAPFRE competition has also kicked off with, featuring well-known names across sim racing, tomorrow round 2 begins so make sure you tune in.

Check out round 1 at Atlanta Motorsports Park Karting highlights here!

That’s it for this month! We certainly hope to see you on track and hope we can make 2019 into another great year for rFactor 2!

Welcome to the last roadmap update of the year! We decided to end the year with a bang, with a new car pack and the first iteration of our updated material system being released real soon now. We have a lot to share, so I’m afraid this roadmap grew a bit bigger than it normally would. So let’s get started!

Looking Back

December is always a month where we look back at the year. We started the year having just announced the DX11 graphics engine as the new default and in January we introduced a brand new trailer. A lot has happened since.

In the first quarter of the year, we announced that we would start our first laser scanned track, Sebring. We also continued to work on Zandvoort and signed a license with Portland. A lot of time was spent on improving performance of the DX11 engine, resulting in build 1110 that brought significant improvements as well as a brand new HUD and a few other fixes. We also released the first third-party paid content with KartSim, featuring three tracks and two karts. Finally we released the liveries of the GT3 paint competition as an update to the existing pack.

In the second quarter we kicked off with the Luminis DevCon, a developer oriented conference where we showcased rFactor 2 along many other things our parent company worked on. A few weeks after we were present at the Jumbo Racing Days in Zandvoort, where we collaborated with the KNAF, SRVN and CitySimRacing to show a broad audience how exciting simracing is. After teasing the five cars earlier, we also released the Endurance Pack, featuring a few new code features as well, such as position lights and in-car TC and ABS support. Soon after we updated our GT3 pack with those features too. To please the fans of historic content, we released both the Brabham BT44B and March 761 and we announced a third car from the same era, the McLaren M23. Improvements were also done to our tTool for modders. And we started doing community nights!

The third quarter kicked off with our presence at Chinajoy followed by the SimRacing Expo, where we announced and released three brand new McLaren historic race cars, the previously announced M23, the MP4/8 and the MP4/13. All of those were going to be used in the rFactor 2 qualifiers for the McLaren Shadow competition. Historic fans could also enjoy a big update to Longford, and we released Sebring, marking a new milestone in accuracy and attention to detail. A new build and demo was released alongside updates of the GT3 and Endurance pack, leveraging feedback we got from our visit to Duqueine Engineering, and we announced the second third-party pack from Reiza Studios, which incidentally should be out early 2019. We also for the first time showed a glimpse of the new material system, and we announced that we obtained a license to the Nurburgring, which we intend to release at the end of Q1 next year. Also fully laser scanned of course.

The fourth quarter of the year started with the release of Botniaring, a local and quite exciting track. Build 1112 was released with enhanced wheel support, and we announced no less than six cars to be featured in the upcoming Tatuus pack next year. We also started teasing upcoming GT3 cars, as well as more details about our new material system. Ongoing work also includes improved modding tools. And of course we could finally tell the world we had been working with Amazon Games on The Grand Tour Game that allows you to “play the show”, to be released in a few weeks from now!

The year in statistics: We released a total of three major code updates, a number of tracks and no less than fourteen new cars.

Competition

As we announced in November´s roadmap our competition system is now moving into a more serious testing. During the holidays we will host a hotlap competition each day, starting off with the two GT3 packs on Zandvoort on December 26th. A new hotlap competition will be activated every day at midnight (CET) until New Years. In January we will start hosting daily races. We have 2 focus points. One is to get the community racing and second is to gather valuable data from our competition system. While we are still merging this system into our new UI, we still need to get data on backend and performance. Remember this is early access, so there might be alterations during the competitions – such as a restart if needed. However our initial tests have worked out great and we now feel we should include each and everyone of you. We´ve currently set a time slot of 17:00-21:00 as our event time, however once our competition is building obviously other timezones should be favoured as well. Are you ready? speaking of ready…

GT3 Challengers Launch Stream

As mentioned elsewhere you might have seen the upcoming DLC with 5 new GT3 cars, the pack is being presented live and with the chance to WIN and to RACE it live as well. Tomorrow at 19:00 CET, Rene and Marcel will talk you through the new Material system and cars. Then we will switch over to Jimmi who is broadcasting 2 races. First race will be YouTuber´s only on Sebring – then after this race we will share the competition password. Then it will be open until the split is full. 2nd race is on Mores, the “mini-championship” winner will get 10 GT3 Challengers pack DLC keys to give away to their community. Remember you can still enter our giveaway here: https://gleam.io/INIxQ/rfactor-2-christmas-giveaway-2018

Material System

During the Sim Racing Expo last September we showed the very first preview shots of the material system we have been working on for the last half year or so. In the last roadmap of the year, we want to take the opportunity to look back at the things we implemented for this system, as well as look ahead at its incremental release over the next couple of months.

Let’s first take a step back at the challenge we had when we started, so you better understand why we made the changes we did. When we took over the development of rFactor 2 a little over two years ago now, we wanted to make sure we upgraded the graphics engine and future proof it, all without sacrificing backwards compatibility. Our first steps therefore were to develop a DX11 based engine that rendered exactly the same as the old DX9 one. This then allowed us two things. First of all we could implement VR support and second of all we could start using more modern techniques such as using a post processing library. It also enabled us to add proper support for rain, with raindrops that ran across the car bodies and windscreen and proper wipers to clear you windscreen again. We also used the opportunity to implement puddle maps for the tracks and linked them to our realroad system so puddles would show up in locations where there was water according to your dynamic realroad system. At his point we also made DX11 the default and removed support for the DX9 engine subsequent builds.

However, it did not fix one core aspect of the graphics engine, namely support for Physically Based Rendering, a technique that has become the de facto standard in the industry.

What is PBR? – some of you may ask. Well Physically Based Rendering has become the buzz word in the games industry, to encapsulate a whole new way of doing art. It demands big changes to how art is produced but the benefits are certainly worthwhile as it delivers much more consistent and predictable results. In the past artists were only able to create textures that looked good in specific conditions and would not behave naturally as the lighting changed. When broken down this new pipeline is actually comprised of two parts, PBR concentrates on light conservation ensuring that a surface can not reflect more light than it receives – this helps to ensure that the balance between specular and diffuse reflections are always correct. The next key part is Image Based Lighting. This helps ensure assets react to the surrounding environment more naturally, meaning that all different surfaces can be lit by the environment correctly – all the way from mirror reflections down to the roughest matte rock surface. All this combined results in a pipeline that is much more intuitive for artists to produce realistic results, especially with a range of industry standard values for different materials. There are two different types of pipeline implementation out there: Metallic/Roughness and Glossiness/Smoothness. Our implementation is very similar to Metallic/Roughness.

Implementing this was challenging for us for several reasons.

First of all, like with everything we did, we needed to stay compatible. What made this hard is that we knew there were some fundamental issues with our lighting model that prevented us from properly introducing PBR and getting the desired results. Therefore we first needed to go deeper and address the lighting model. A year ago we took the first step in that direction when we introduced “Image-Based Lighting for Ambient”, improving how ambient light got rendered on tracks and introducing ambient probes that could be strategically placed to create the right atmosphere.

The next step was to implement a convolved cubemap specular as part of our IBL system, which was an important basis for starting work on new materials. The material system we developed allows us to use unique and specialized parameters for each shader instead of relying on standard settings. The first materials we worked on were the PBR car paint shader with support for clear coats that fully used the IBL system we described above and allows a car body to be made of up to 6 different materials and a generic PBR shader that can be used to emulate a broad range of materials and covers a lot of things you see on a track. We have worked hard to ensure that the generic shader matches game industry standards, as well as being extremely flexible to be used on the majority of objects. Terrain and Road surfaces are obviously something that need more specific solutions though. Prototyping work there has already started and we are looking to give them a complete overhaul too.

This is where we are now. We are far from done, both in terms of developing the system and in terms of adapting existing content, but we decided to not try and do an “all in one, big bang release” but instead choose a more phased approach that we choose more often when making big changes.

We anticipate this phase to take a couple of months, during which we will transition things step by step. This also means the first release, that we will release really soon now, has a few minor known issues and the overall look of the game will improve. That said, the results of the materials we have developed so far were encouraging enough for us to decide to apply them to the new cars we are building.

Let’s first discuss some of the known issues. Obviously one is that we have not converted most content yet, which means that many of the cars and tracks you will be using now are more or less still looking the same. Another known issue is that our post effects are not fine-tuned yet to the new materials. That means in some conditions they produce unbalanced results, like too much glare. We are currently comparing our output to that of industry standard ray tracing solutions to make sure our output matches such solutions and when we are happy with that we’ll re-calibrate the post effects to work with realistic light intensities from things like headlights and solar specular. If it bothers you, we recommend you turn those effects down a notch or two for the moment.

So… Where do we go from here?

Looking Ahead

The first release of the new cars will not yet include instructions on how to paint them using the new materials. Therefore they will also not come with a template. We intend to provide extended documentation as well as templates in an update we plan in January. That is also the month we start updating other content and help our modding community do the same. We are polishing the workflows for defining materials, providing a wide selection of materials that can be consistently used on cars and tracks. Our next steps will be to continue development of a few very specific materials for things like realroad, curbs, grass and possibly a few other things, such as an improved system for rendering clouds. Our goal is to have materials on all major pieces of content by the end of the first quarter and to do smaller tweaks in the second quarter, making the whole system more robust and possibly further optimizing certain aspects of it.

Talking about tooling, we will also release our Max plugins for up to date versions, and we are looking at other types of tools too that should help modders and ourselves to create new content. And of course there are many other topics we should update you on, such as the competition system and UI. They are probably taking a bit longer than we all expected, but I’m confident that we will see them materialize in 2019, and since this update is already almost the size of a book, I propose we save some of that for the next edition. If you’re still reading at this point, we would like to wish you and your loved ones a great holiday and all the best for the future on behalf of everybody in and around Studio 397!

Good evening, morning, afternoon or whatever it is in your corner of the world! With clockwork precision we present you another roadmap update for your favorite racing simulator. And although we are getting closer to the holiday season, we are by no means slowing down! With the release of build 1112, we have a few other updates for you that we’re sharing this month, in anticipation of some bigger surprises next month. Let’s kick this month off with some events, the first one happening this weekend.

McLaren Shadow semi-finals

We’re really looking forward to the McLaren Shadow semi-finals, especially with some rFactor 2 regulars taking part. Each of the drivers will be competing across a number of different titles, including rFactor 2, so check out the semis this weekend!

You might want to set yourself a reminder so you won’t miss the live broadcast:

rFactor 2 at Interclassics

January 11th to 14th, rFactor 2 will be present at Interclassics 2019, Maastricht, where we will have two full-motion rigs running the simulation. To match the theme of the event, we will be running the McLaren M23 at the classic Monte Carlo track. On top of giving you this classic beast to drive during the event, we will also organize and broadcast a full race, featuring ten more high-end simulators located at the nearby Adrenaline Xperience center. During the whole month of December, a special promotion will allow you to do extensive sessions in all three historic McLaren cars at a very attractive price. During these sessions, you will get professional feedback on your performance based on telemetry data. The ten best drivers that month will get an opportunity to race against Bono Huis and Xavier Maassen during Interclassics.

VIVE Pro McLaren Limited Edition

As you may have seen our partners announce already, roughly a week ago, we’ve collaborated with HTC and McLaren to bring a special version of rFactor 2 to the VIVE Pro McLaren Limited Edition. This version of rFactor 2, which allows you to race some classic McLaren racing cars on different tracks, has special “driving” support for the VIVE motion controllers. That means if you own this VR headset, you will be able to experience driving these cars as if the controllers were the actual steering wheel! As far as we know, this is a world first for simracing, and we are proud to bring you this innovation!

Build 1112

Right before the holiday season, we bring you an update to our build with a few fixes and some new features. We made the following changes:

• We added the ability to set the maximum steering wheel rotation “in software”, even if your wheel drivers don’t support that. This is described in more detail below.
• Supporting this new feature, we added controller profiles for direct drive wheels: OSW SimuCube and SimSteering.
• We fixed an issue where tyre heat cycle history was not correctly transferred after a driver swap.
• Support for the Logitech G29 and G920 was added, fixing some long outstanding issues with these wheels.
• A small loophole was fixed that would allow you to circumvent fixed setups.

Server administrators must update all dedicated servers because we bumped the version number due to small changes in the multiplayer protocol.

Software Wheel Rotation Explained

We have added the option to set the maximum rotation of the steering wheel “in software”, so we can adjust the rotation per car even for wheels that don’t support setting the rotation in their driver. This means that current owners of various OSW and SimSteering wheels can now finally enjoy the correct rotation without having to manually set it outside of rFactor 2. The system works as follows: In order to use this new system, you have to explicitly turn it on in your Controller.JSON file (which you can find in your UserData\player folder). The line you’re looking for is called “Steering Wheel Software Rotation,” and if you don’t see it yet, please make sure you have updated to build 1112, run the game once and exit it again. The line defaults to “false,” and you should change that to “true”. The next step is to go into your wheel driver and the rotation to the maximum value it supports, up to the maximum rotation of 1440 degrees that rFactor 2 supports. Then you go back to your Controller.JSON and set the “Steering Wheel Maximum Rotation Default” to the same number of degrees you just configured. If your wheel actually does support us reading the maximum rotation, you can alternatively set “Steering Wheel Maximum Rotation from Driver” to “true” so we will read whatever you set from the driver. We do recommend setting it to the maximum value in the driver, as we can only make the rotation less in software, not more. Finally we have a value called “Steering Wheel Bump Stop Harshness,” which acts like a spring constant and defines how harsh the buildup of counter-torque will be when you go over the maximum rotation for a car. We recommend starting with a value of somewhere between 20 (soft) to 50 (harsh), but this really depends on your wheel and personal preference. For SimSteering and OSW, we added some profiles to our default set as well. You might want to give those a try as they are already setup for this new feature.

In summary, these are the new parameters in the Controller.JSON:

• Steering Wheel Software Rotation – Defaults to false, but must be set to true to enable this feature. When it is set to false, this feature should be fully disabled.
• Steering Wheel Bump Stop Harshness – A configurable value ranging from 1.0 to 100.0, which acts like a spring constant that determines how much counter-torque will be applied if you steer beyond the maximum range.
• Steering Wheel Maximum Rotation from Driver – Whether we should attempt to fetch the maximum steering wheel range from the wheel driver, assuming the driver supports this.
• Steering Wheel Maximum Rotation Default – The value of our maximum steering wheel range when there isn’t a wheel driver available that we can read this from or when “Steering Wheel Maximum Rotation from Driver” is set to false. Values from 40 to 1440 are supported.

Work in Progress

Our competition system is currently being integrated into the new UI. We want to make sure you end up with a seamless experience when joining any competition sessions. At the same time, we continue to extend the core system, making it more plugable and adapted to all kinds of competitions. Some of you might have participated or seen our latest community event, where we ran a simple competition. Expect us to do more of those as we finalize bits of the system and put it through some early access testing.

First off in our early access testing, we will be hosting a short Holiday special, planned between Christmas and New Years. Also, to kick off 2019, we will be hosting events regularly in Q1. Plenty of races and plenty of options to beat your friends – and perhaps even us at S397.

Last month we showed you some early shots of Nordschleife. The team is working all out to complete the track and all track side objects, which is a lot of work given the length of the track and all the different twists and turns. We’re confident that we can show you more updates in the new year!

For the past six months, we have been working extensively on a new material system. You may recall that we showed you some early previews of the McLaren 650S at SimRacing Expo and in a subsequent roadmap update, and we are very excited to tell you our artists are currently starting to work with the system and providing us with feedback on making it even more artist-friendly as part of an effort to start using these materials on our content. We’re not done yet, but at this point we believe we have a very solid foundation to work on as we’re fixing bugs and pushing this system. Just to whet your appetite, here’s a few more shots of the McLaren 650S.

You also deserve an update on the Tatuus license! We are still building these cars, and we can now confirm we will have no less than six different models:

• Tatuus USF-17, which is used in the USF2000 championship and can be seen as the successor to our existing USF2000 car.
• Tatuus F4-T014, which is driven in various F4 championships globally.
• Tatuus MSV F3-016, also known as ‘British F3’, is driven primarily in the UK and at Spa-Francorchamps.
• Toyota FT50, as used in the Toyota Racing Series.
• Tatuus PM18, as used in the Pro Mazda Championship.
• Tatuus F3 T318, used in the Asian F3 Championship as well as the upcoming W Series.

Winter is coming…

Looking forward to bringing you some very cool toys to play with this Christmas!

It´s getting colder outside, and most of us probably have either switched to winter tyres already or are planning to right now. Brace yourself, winter is here! But as simracers, we’re lucky, our season never ends, so let´s get into this month’s roadmap. It was once again a busy time for us. Let’s be honest here, that probably never ends either: we are pushing rFactor 2 further every single day, but it’s always great to head out to the community with good news like releases or announcements!

Botniaring

In 1989, the gates in Jurva opened to what now is known as the longest and most versatile racetrack in Finland, the Botniaring. It also features different layouts, thanks to the extension of the track in the past from a length of 2618 meter to 4014 meters, making it the longest racetrack in the country. Its smooth tarmac surface has invited multiple races to the region over the years, turning Botniaring into another Finnish motorsport center.

Mostly used for national championships, the track also became popular among northern European championships. With its 3 different layouts, the Botniaring offers thrilling racing action for all kinds of motorsport classes. It might not have seen a full European GT Championship yet, but you can change that in rFactor 2! Choose from the “Long”, “Long with Chicane”, and “Short” layouts to either be challenged by a high-speed track or to take on a breathtaking chicane that needs all your attention if you want to clock a fast lap time. Ah yes, we nearly forgot, the track is live now and servers are also running already, so what are you waiting for?!

Nürburgring

When we announced this track at SimRacing Expo, we already stated this is a monumental task. The 2018 scan data has now been fully processed, and in parallel we have been working on many of the track-side details. We don’t have a lot to show yet, as usually the phases of modeling a track involve a lot of work that is not immediately visible until quite late in the build. We did visit our artists and got some pictures from their workstations while they were working on the track. Planning-wise, we are on schedule, and in a couple of months we hope to be able to show you some in-game shots. Worth mentioning already is that this will be our first full track that is built using our new material system.

McLaren Shadow rFactor 2 Qualifier

After introducing three new free cars to the simulation, we headed into the harsh but exciting world of competitive racing, on the hunt for that one driver that would represent the rFactor 2 community in the McLaren Shadow final later on in Woking. But before anyone could claim this spot, three qualifier rounds broke down the list of participants to the last 30 that had a chance at winning this.

Round 1 at Silverstone

Round one saw our racers flying through Hangars straight at the iconic Silverstone Circuit in the McLaren MP4/8. With everyone ready to shine and willing to do everything to put their stamp on the first round of the new competition, our livestream saw plenty of action and great fights with everyone trying to get inside the top 10 to make their way to the Qualifier final. After 30 minutes we had our first podium of the rFactor 2 McLaren Shadow Competition with Jan von der Heyde winning in front of Michelle D Alessandro and Eros Masciulli.

Round 2 at Zandvoort

The first 10 had their ticket to the Qualifier final, another 20 tickets were still up for grabs. After everyone parked their McLaren MP4/8 in the garage again we went even further back in time with the McLaren M23, a pure drivers car. No electronics, just a steering wheel and pedals. And with these weapons, our best drivers out of the Hotlap Sessions had to go up against each other on Zandvoort. Long fast corners, a lot of banking, and the endless will to fight made up another great livestream during this competition, eventually seeing Georgo Baldi reaching for the top spot and sending Peyo Peev and Kuba Brzenzinski down to the other spots on the podium.

Round 3 at Indianapolis

The championship car of Mika Häkkinen, the McLaren MP4/13, was the car of choice for the last qualifier round, leading our drivers to Indianapolis for a last chance to earn their spot in the Qualifier final. With an aggressive rear end, this car meant serious business for our participants and Indianapolis GP wasn´t willing to make it any easier for them. As this was the last qualifier round, everything heated up quite quickly, with several fighting groups that had to be covered by our live broadcast. In the end it was too much pressure for some drivers which totally threw around the top 10 in the last laps of the qualifier. Managing to keep his MP4/13 under control, it was Mark Berends securing the first place with Kevin Ryan and Antonio Kolarec following closely.

Finals at Longford, NOLA and Sebring

All qualifier rounds had been done and it was time for the Top 30 drivers from around the world to face off in the Qualifier final. Due to it being the big finale with just one spot leading to the McLaren Shadow Event in Woking, we decided to send out drivers to 3 different tracks, using all the new McLaren cars to find out who will represent our beloved Sim.

Normally you would expect a write up about what happened, right? Yeah, me too… not gonna happen XD! There was just too much action everywhere and the battles really showed that everyone was willing to give his best to get the Ticket to the UK. So better watch it yourself! (You fancy a link? It’s down there!). To cut a long story short, after 3 intense races it was Nuno Pinto who leading the standings and lifting himself up to the next level of the competition, the on-site final. Nuno Pinto:

It was really good, I wasn’t really expecting to win the competition. The first race was almost perfect, pole position and win. The second race started really bad with the crash on turn 1, recovered from P20 to P9 and got some good points. The last race was so good, started from pole, but when I switched to 2nd gear the rear end stepped out and to avoid hitting the wall I had to lift the throttle and lost 5 spots, recovered to P3 and that gave me overall win. Really happy and I am already working to be in the best shape possible for the final in January, I don’t really know what to expect but I will try and do my best and make all rFactor 2 players as proud as possible!

On behalf of everybody at Studio 397 and McLaren we would like to congratulate Nuno and wish him all the best in the finals!

Developer Tooling

Developer (modder) tooling is an area we have been quiet on for the last couple of years. Internally, and when supporting our community, we have been building on the rather old 3D Studio Max 2012.  Although we released updates that allowed you to work with the 64-bit version of that tool, the fact is that we needed to upgrade to the latest tooling. We are now doing just that, and we expect to release updated plugins for the latest versions of 3D Studio Max soon (they are currently going through internal beta testing). We are also making sure that these tools will continue to work with our new material system, and as always we encourage people to tell us what else they need!

Community Night #3

Our month was once again very busy, but we like to drop some hints here and there. So believe us when we say that we are working on way more than what we can list in this roadmap. Yet with all those sleepless nights coding, writing contracts and grabbing licenses left and right, there still needs to be some time left for us to also enjoy our favorite sim!  Right?….RIGHT! Finally that time has come again, and you know its name from previous adventures: the Community Night is back for its 3rd event! Let’s dive into some racing action together on Sunday (4th of November) 7pm CET, to be broadcast on https://www.twitch.tv/rfactorlive

We wanted to celebrate the release of Botniaring and we thought it would be fun to put on our winter jackets and lap the Finnish track with you guys. Deciding on a car class gets harder with every new piece of content we add, so why not just race 2 different layouts with different classes? We will hit the short version with the USF2000, while the roaring GT3’s will conquer the longest ribbon. You can now go for your first laps on our Botniaring servers that are live with the launch, so get ready!

That’s all folks, and don’t forget we are still in the middle of the Halloween Sale, so check out our special offers!!!