Roadmap

To say September was a busy month for us would probably be the understatement of the year. Last time we already hinted at some big news, and the release of no less than three free, iconic McLaren race cars has certainly been well received and confirms our commitment to adding high-quality free and paid content to the simulation. We’ve met many of you at SimRacing Expo at the Nurburgring mid September. The event was highly successful, and I am confident that we will be back next year.

Directly after the Expo, we started our qualification rounds for the McLaren Shadow competition, which will continue well into next month. In the mean time we, almost silently, also released a big update for Zandvoort, featuring all possible layouts, a significant performance improvement as well as proper support for night and wet racing.

Material and Lighting System

Our final announcement at the expo was a new material and lighting system, which is currently in progress, and is based on physically based rendering (PBR). We’ve been working on it for the last couple of months, and its release is still a few months away, but the results so far have been very good. We showed some examples of our new car paint material that simulates a multi-layer paint job, featuring a body or primer, a base coat that is possibly metallic or two-tone, and finally a clear coat – each with parameters that allow you to specify in great detail the specifics of each layer. We did not stop there though, as our cars in general come with templates that allow users to create their own liveries. We now support up to six different materials that can be used on different, configurable regions of the car. This allows people to create liveries with vinyl wraps, shiny metallic bits, carbon parts and many other things all on the same car body. We are already looking forward to the unique designs our community can create with all these new possibilities. What we’re working on in the months ahead is other materials. Arguably the car bodies are very important, but we would also like to improve our cockpit interiors, the way rubber tyres look, and also our road surfaces. Obviously we will make sure that what we do stays compatible with all current content, but what’s more important, we aim to make it very easy to upgrade to these new materials. We’re committed to updating all our own content, and we expect the community to do the same.

Nürburgring

As we told you in the announcement, the scan is done, and both the Nordschleife and GP track are up to 2018 standards. We’re finalizing the important processing of the data now, which – as you might imagine for such a large track – takes some time. In the meantime, our track team already started the huge task of modelling all the details that are visible when you drive around the track: trees, houses, audiences, camping grounds and many other things. We are aiming for a release at the end of Q1 of 2019. In the meantime, we are also looking at our options for the Südschleife. Quite a few people have responded and pointed out available information about this classic track. We have not yet made the decision to build it, and if it happens this layout will certainly be done as a separate project. We’ll keep you posted.

Botniaring

We’ve included some screenshots of a new-final version of Botniaring. As the track was officially licensed, we got extensive opportunities to survey the asphalt and its surroundings, which allowed us to accurately reproduce every little detail of the track. Like many of our other tracks, we will provide the different layouts and we are sure this relatively unknown track will offer some good racing. The release is planned for October, and as mentioned before, this will be a free track.

UI and Competition

The UI and Competition are two areas with a constant buzz of diverse development activity. We’re now at that point where the two teams merge and start to work on getting the competition functionality into the UI itself.  So in short, we’re currently integrating UI and competition and preparing for a launch of both systems ‘together’. You’ve probably seen and even participated in the multiple competitions we’ve put on over the last year, where joining and viewing stats was through our web page. We still want to offer join via our webpage, but our ultimate goal is for you to find and join a competition straight from the UI, making it that much easier and that much more tempting to take part!

Of course, we do have some new UI functionality to share with you as well. First, we now have that spiffy animated trackmap you always wished for  This trackmap highlights the leader as well as the current driver you have selected (in white). You can click on any number on the track map itself and the list auto-scrolls to and expands that driver. Next, we have a brand new expanded standings pop-up function with color-coded best sectors.  Finally, we’ve added a simple minimal graph to the standings, this gives a quick overview of your progress lap by lap as compared to the other drivers around you.

We’re hiring!

Some of you might have seen this post on our forum. We’re hiring! Specifically, we are looking to strengthen our track building team at Studio 397. We’re expecting you to bring your experience and knowledge of modeling tools, and of course you should be an expert in building good and accurate tracks. We will provide you with the necessary hardware and software, a good working environment and an education in tools you are not yet familiar with. If you’re up for a new challenge, check out the post and get in touch: https://forum.studio-397.com/index.php?threads/were-hiring-looking-for-environment-artists.61194/

That’s all for now, enjoy the remaining rounds of the McLaren Shadow competition and remember to keep it on the black stuff!

Sometimes you look at the calendar and realize that time can fly past faster than our LMP2 cars ingame. It’s already end of August and we have been so busy with working on rFactor 2 that there is no Roadmap yet. But we couldn’t do without one, right? That would be like breaking a family tradition, and since our team is more about fixin’ things than breaking them, let’s put together a Roadmap for August! As said above already, we’re pretty busy, but with what you might ask? As most of you probably know, SimRacing Expo at the iconic Nürburgring track in Germany is just around the corner and it will kick off big things for us. But let’s do this step by step, it’s a roadmap in the end! (wink)

SimRacing Expo 2018

There is enough going on at this years Expo that we could probably fill the whole Roadmap with it, so let’s concentrate on the major things you should know about it. Obviously we will have a booth at the Expo, so you can come around and meet the team, as we will bring plenty of people along. But just talking to us might be a bit boring all day long, so we will make sure that you will have plenty of reasons to visit the rFactor 2 booth. One of them will be new content that we will show exclusively at our booth, a pre-release of course. Hypemode intensifies!

You want to know more about what this could be? For now you need to live with just 3 words: iconic, fast, competition proven, more at the Expo! (wink) You think that’s it already? Enough reasons to visit us? Nah, we’re in for way more this year! The content shown at the booth will be our first announcement during the Expo, but as Germans say “Alle guten Dinge sind drei”, literally meaning “all good things come in threes”, meaning we will follow up with another announcement during Saturday afternoon.

This second announcement will probably tick a lot of boxes for simracers in terms of their dreams-list for our simulation. We are more then excited to finally share that with you. Sunday will see a third announcement (yep, you’re not getting a day to get back your breath) which will show our dedication to further improving your simracing experience. What happens if you can’t be around then? Don’t worry, we will stream all announcements and first talks about them live from our booth onto our channels. Missing them is not an option at all.

Before we all now dive into the guessing-game about what could be in the announcements, let’s have a look at the other topics of our roadmap…

UI and Competition

We are fully aware that everyone is awaiting news on the UI and we’re still working hard every day on this topic. Many steps are needed to implement an UI like the one we envision, which is taking a lot of time. We are still tweaking and optimising, and we will be able to show parts of the new interface at the Expo. Of course we are very curious to get your feedback there!

On the competition side, we have been integrating different session types so we can have events that consist of combinations of practice, qualification and race sessions and we are looking at different ways to score events. In the last month or so we have also been researching and testing a rating system, feeding it data of many races and evaluating its outcome. We’re nowhere near done, but some of these improvements we will certainly already bring to the McLaren Shadow competition next month.

Content

On the content side, we won’t yet spoil the surprises we have in store for the Expo. Previously we’ve announced both Zandvoort and the Reiza Pack to be almost ready and we do anticipate both to become available in September.

Community

Community is our favorite topic, because most of the time this means we can have some action as well. What we’re talking about? Obviously our community night! We did not forget about it at all, so you can expect a new date for some racing and talking on-stream soon. Maybe we should also do a vote for track/car combinations? As always, if you got feedback, suggestions/ideas, feel free to drop into our Discord server and let us know!

This month, we wanted to surprise you all by releasing the roadmap update a bit earlier than usual because we have quite a few things to announce, so let’s get started!

Upcoming Events

First of all, we have a few events planned that we want to announce.

ChinaJoy

August 3rd to 6th, Studio 397 will be present in Shanghai for the yearly ChinaJoy event. If you’re in the area, please drop by and take advantage of the opportunity to say hello and take rFactor 2 for a spin.

SimRacing Expo

September 14th to 16th we’re happy to announce that we will be present at this year’s SimRacing Expo at the Nürburgring. We invite everybody to come and visit us for a glimpse into the future of rFactor 2. As always we will bring a few surprises!

McLaren Shadow

Earlier this month, McLaren introduced their all new hunt for the brightest and best esports talent, dubbed “McLaren Shadow Project“. This is the follow up to last year’s “World’s Fastest Gamer” that saw Rudy van Buren take the win. We are delighted to announce that we will be part of this competition again, building several new McLaren cars for the upcoming events. And the best news is that they will all be available for free!

Upcoming Releases

Then, there are a lot of new releases coming up now and in the near future.

Today: New Build, GT3 and Endurance Pack Updates

We are about to release a new build with a few improvements and new features. Especially, but not exclusively, for our Virtual Reality users, we have included a new feature called “Stabilize Horizon” that allows you to enable a low, medium or high amount of stabilization, which helps keep the horizon stable on bumpy tracks and still works properly on strongly banked tracks. We’ve also made a few changes in our DX11 graphics engine. First of all, we caught and fixed some issues with the brake disc glow on some cars. An issue that only showed up on 6-core CPUs with no hyperthreading and caused rendering problems in our shadow maps was also found and fixed. For tracks, we added support for a new dirt map, a feature you will see on Sebring and that will be explained shortly in our developer documentation. We slightly adjusted the logic for our “pit director” that will tell you how and when to leave your garage as he was a bit oddly placed in some cases. Last but not least, we also spent some time optimizing our post effects, which has resulted in a healthy increase in performance with those enabled.

In our previous roadmap, we already announced that we were close to releasing an update to our very popular GT3 cars. Over the last couple of months, we’ve received a lot of feedback on these cars, and we sat down and incorporated all of that in this update. On top of that, we’ve included the new in-car traction control and anti-lock brake settings, position lights colored green for the GT3 class and our very latest set of tyres to align the cars with our endurance pack. We also tweaked the Balance of Performance to ensure continued close racing.

As part of our continued development of the Endurance pack, our visit to Duqueine Engineering, which we will report on in a separate blog, also got us some crucial feedback on the handling characteristics of the Oreca and Norma cars and a unique chance to compare telemetry. These and other tweaks based on feedback have been incorporated in an update of the Endurance pack.

Both packs will be released later today. Leagues that don’t want to immediately make the switch are encouraged to keep a copy of the previous version. That said, we’ve tried our best to ensure a good balance of performance and also made sure you can run classes from both packs together nicely.

Tomorrow: Sebring

Since taking over the development of rFactor 2, our goals have been clear: take an already incredible sim as a base and move the bar higher, push new and exciting features that you want, and give you the chance to experience a professional grade simulator – at home! The release of Sebring tomorrow is another step in that direction. We will follow up with more details later.

Next Month: Reiza rF2 Bundle

Some of you might have seen the teasers that were posted by Reiza Studios. We can now officially announce that they have been working hard on bringing some great content into rFactor 2. No less than four cars and two tracks will be part of this pack, all of which will be released in August. We expect Reiza to soon release more details of their planned content!

Community Night

Earlier this month, we scheduled the first community event, and we would like to thank everybody who watched and participated in it. Because of its success, we decided to do another one on Friday, July 27th at 20:00 CEST. We will obviously take this opportunity to look at the updated GT3 and Endurance packs. We will also take an in-depth look at Sebring International Raceway and provide some background on the process of creating it, so make sure you tune in and follow our Twitch channel at https://www.twitch.tv/rfactorlive. We certainly hope to see you there. In any case, happy simracing, that’s all for this month!

June has been an eventful month. We released the Endurance Pack and we’re still in the middle of the Steam Summer Sale, which discounts the simulation and the different content packs and offers a nice opportunity to complete your collection. Of course we are already looking ahead again and while some of us are taking a well deserved break, others are working on all different areas of the game.

Studio 397 was also invited to the official opening of the virtual Maastricht city racing track. It is not often that one of our community created tracks attracts the local press and the mayor of Maastricht all gathered in a local movie theatre. Even Bono Huis, winner of the Vegas eRace, was there to do a lap. By now the track can be found in our workshop and can freely be downloaded.

Content

We are currently preparing an update to our GT3 pack as we already indicated when releasing the Endurance pack. This update includes the position lights, new in-car traction control and anti-lock brake settings as well as the latest set of tyres. All of those are in, we’re now checking the BOP and doing a few minor fixes.

For Zandvoort we’ve just finished the night lighting. There are still a few other layouts to complete and obviously we’ve also addressed some of the performance issues that were still present in the latest public release.

Sebring is in the middle of testing and optimization. As you might have seen from previous screenshots, we are trying to recreate the atmosphere on the track during the yearly 12 hour race. We are also planning a version with more of a “track day” feel in case you want to do some training without everybody watching your every move.

Rain

When we released our performance update, we already indicated that we were aware that the specific combination of using VR and rain still was causing problems, frame rate wise, and that we would be addressing those in a future update. We are happy to announce that we have found a good solution that gives a significant improvement and we’ll be releasing that next month. This update also includes another visual fix which made the raindrops become too large in external TV cameras. Finally it has a few small fixes that caused the wipers to sometimes skip a frame and not always start in the correct starting position.

UI

We are currently working on a few more important details in the interface. For one we are adding a search function to all places where you select something from a potentially long list of things, such as cars and tracks. We are also improving opponent selection, allowing more fine-grained control over exactly what cars you race. The final bits we are tweaking now are the standings, including the position in class we also use with our position lights.

Community Nights

We all know, racing and especially simracing is not only about competition. It´s also about spending time with friends and teammates and tackle different challenges. We always try to be transparent and close to the community, so we thought it would be great to arrange a date every now and then! The idea for community nights was born. Race among friends and developers, ask some questions or even see a race broadcast and enjoy the thrill of a friendly competition. Who knows, we might also give you a peek at some upcoming content in some of those events. We’ve scheduled our first event on Monday, July 9th at 20:00 CEST. Stay tuned!

Looking Ahead

Earlier this month we visited the Duqueine Engineering headquarters for more simulator testing. Expect a new blog about that in a few weeks time, where we reveal a bit more about how we collaborate. And remember, if you want to have a chat with us, join our Discord server or join one of our servers, running official content.

That’s all for this month. Happy Racing!

Over the course of this month we have released a few hotfixes for our fresh 1110 build whilst our team has been working on many of the features we’ve been talking about in the last few roadmaps. We also went to Zandvoort during the Jumbo Racing Days to showcase some of our content to the huge crowds that came to see several racing series and of course appearances from Max Verstappen, Daniel Ricciardo and David Coulthard.

Needless to say, we have plenty to talk about this month, and the first announcement we have is a new hire that starts tomorrow. Now we don’t always announce people that we add to the team and, as a reference, our total team in Studio 397 is about 30 people, currently. With our focus on building the competition infrastructure and releasing that later this year, we welcome René Buttler to the team. He has been working at ESL on projects and esports tournaments with a strong focus on racing simulations, and we are very happy to have him at Studio 397!

Content

Last month we already announced that our next pack would consist of 5 cars. This will be our “Endurance Pack,” and we are ready to announce one of the two previously unannounced GTE cars that will be part of it. All cars are in the final stages of approval by the manufacturers, which is a process we don’t have full control over, but it does indicate we’re getting close to a release now. That said, it is time to announce the Porsche 911 RSR GTE! Ever since the start of Studio 397 we have had a great relationship with Porsche, so we’re very happy to finally be able to share the news. We’ve licensed the very latest spec of this car to race alongside the other GTE’s, and we are confident this car will be a joy to drive. And it certainly looks great!

Earlier this week, we also visited the offices and test track of Duqueine Engineering again and validated both the Oreca 07 and Norma M30 models in their simulator with their drivers and engineers. We are also including liveries of various teams racing these cars to ensure we end up with a great looking field of cars, as you can see from the shots below.

That’s of course not all the content we’re working on. There are a several more things under construction.

The March and Brabham cars are close to completion now. We’re adding the final rain and damage effects and doing the driver animations. Physics wise we’re very happy. Each car has it’s own distinctive character, yet they are very competitive. The McLaren is still in the middle of production, so it’s expected to come a bit later.

Those of you who visited us at Zandvoort have seen the progress we made on that track. It’s still not quite finished, but it’s looking better, and we addressed the performance issues that people reported, so we’re in good shape.

For Botniaring, all 3D work is done, and we’re currently working on texturing and optimization. That work and the AI lines will be finished this month. Then we are going to be giving the track its final shakedown before releasing it.

For Sebring we are currently in the middle of adding all the track side objects. As you might know, building a track can be roughly split in two phases. In the first phase we’re building the roads and everything “up to the barriers,” and in the second phase we do everything beyond the barriers and things like AI lines, night lighting and various other details. We’d like to share our current progress with you, bearing in mind that not everything you see here has been properly optimized yet, so “things might change”.

UI

UI testing and tweaking is still ongoing, and we’re starting to integrate the work on the competition infrastructure into the new UI whilst also making the back-end more robust. Another thing we have started working on is the integration of Motec data logging into the core of the simulation.

Competition

First of all, congratulations to Oli Ellis-Richardson for winning the KartSim hotlap competition! Oli has secured an entry to the SuperOne British eSport Championship and a copy of the KartSim Pro package. In the USF2000 challenge the winner of last years World Fastest Gamer showed that he was still one of the fastest simracers out there: with a 47.443, Rudy van Buren took pole position.

Results:

1. Rudy van Buren
2. Joonas Raivio
3. Jakub Charkot
4. Robin Pansar
5. Kevin van Dooren

All of them have won a free pick of any rFactor 2 DLC pack, on top of that Rudy also won €100.

Community

Remember, you can always chat live with us and other sim racing fans on our Discord! https://discord.gg/CruX93K

This month we released the much anticipated performance upgrades. Judging from the feedback we got, build 1110 has provided most, if not all people a significant improvement. On top of those improvements, we also added several new features, one of which was a refinement of our tyre model, which Michael explained extensively in his blog. In the last couple of weeks we’ve been monitoring our forums and other channels to resolve any remaining issues. As promised, we also intend to address some remaining issues with our rainy conditions. In VR the performance is still relatively low, and viewed from external TV cameras the raindrops, when zoomed in, look too big. Both issues are still on our list for a future update.

We also took part in the Luminis DevCon, a yearly conference that we organize in a big movie theater by developers for developers. Studio 397 was there, and we brought two rigs for people to try rFactor 2. One of them was a prototype of a new monocoque by Bernax that was setup to use VR, the other our office rig with triple screens. As a special guest we had Rudy van Buren, McLaren’s World’s Fastest Gamer, join us for the keynote and answering questions and giving advice all day, and Marcel gave a talk about the future of simracing.

Norma M30 LMP3

Two months ago we announced we had licensed the Norma M30 LMP3 car. Working closely with both Norma and one of the first team to race this car, Duqueine Engineering, we are now in the final stage of production for this car, testing the car on different virtual tracks and comparing its performance with the telemetry and other data we gathered. This car will be one of five in our next car pack, joining the Corvette C7.R and the Oreca 07 LMP2, with two more, yet unannounced GTE cars to come. In fact all five cars are actually in the final stage so pending final approval from the different manufacturers we are getting close to a release.

Actually, the whole LMP3 class is fairly new, being launched by ACO in 2015, when five constructors were selected to build the chassis with Nissan providing a 420hp engine to power all of them. Norma introduced their car, the M30, in February of 2017, and since the car has been used by a growing number of teams and winning quite a few races they entered in. At Studio 397 we met the guys from Duqueine Engineering in one of their first races with the car at Spa during the ELMS race, and this is where we started to examine the possibility of bringing this car to rFactor 2.

UI and Competition

On the topic of UI and Competition we are still working hard to finish both, and at this point we really don’t have much more to say other than that both are being tested internally. Some of the things that are currently being tested are the localisation of the interface, which we are basing on open standards to ensure that it will be easy for translators to provide a new version in their own language by leveraging existing tools. On the competition side we are now testing sequences of different types of sessions, ensuring our servers can transition from one to the other and have the results of one session (such as a qualification result) influence the next session (the grid for the start of a race).

Historics

Last week we already showed you the latest screenshots for the March 761, the first car to accompany the Brabham BT44B which has been in development for quite some time and also served as the main character in a whole series of blogs that explain all intricate details of the rFactor 2 physics engine. What we did not say is that we are not stopping there. After these two cars are released, we are going to add another, and we are very proud to announce that this will be the McLaren M23. This car is the one James Hunt drove in and won the championship with in 1976, beating Niki Lauda by just one point! We certainly hope that these cars will please the many fans of historic racing we have!

That concludes this month, and its roadmap. We have a lot of things in motion at the moment and we’re pushing hard to finish those things so we can share them with you as, believe it or not, we are as impatient as you to start driving! Have a great month!

And work goes on!… We continue to relentlessly hammer away at the new features and content mentioned in the previous roadmaps. And yes, you’ll be happy to know that this month is no exception: we will still manage to bring you some ‘new’ things to look forward to.

We know how much you all enjoy these road maps, with anticipation of the things to come, and we are just as anxious to share them with you. Keeping you informed of our broad development goals is part of our whole outlook. For us communication is key to making sure we stay on the mark and never get out ahead of our userbase. So as things begin to take shape and features mature, we do our best to show you the progression and previews as soon as we possibly can. Although these are not ‘deadlines’, they should give a you good idea of the things you need to get excited about.

Performance

The graphics optimizations we mentioned in previous roadmaps are still very much ongoing and current. We are investing a considerable amount of resources to get this done. Graphical improvements and optimizations are key to future proofing the rFactor 2 graphics engine. With that in mind, we are taking our time to methodically test each optimization pass to make sure everything stays put and is in working order, and that is why it’s taking a little longer than originally planned. Thanks to our very focused group of dedicated testers who are looking at each area, we are moving forward at a steady pace. We hope to get it out to you ASAP!

VR

And speaking of specifics, VR is one area where we know we need to improve performance, and these optimizations are showing very promising increases in stability and overall framerate.

Triple Screen – Multiview

“Multiview” has to render three separate viewpoints and because of this, it’s inherently more taxing on any system. You’ll be happy to know we have worked on some very specific optimizations that will positively affect multiview performance

Content

After releasing the KartSim pack earlier this week, we wanted to reassure you that we also have new free content coming up:

March 761

We have a solid commitment to historic racing and we hope you find rFactor 2 a good place to experience some of the great cars of the past. With that we are pleased to announce that we will be releasing the March 761 soon for free. Not just that, we have also updated the Brabham BT44 for some excellent head-to-head racing.

Botniaring

Finnish fans! We have a new track on the horizon. Introducing the Botniaring, located in Southern Ostrobothnia, Jurva, Finland aka Perkeleville (big grin) The track is perfect for our upcoming Tatuus cars as well as many others.

Zandvoort

We have a number of updates to the Zandvoort track that is currently in beta. While we were building the track, it was being repaved and our 0.20 version showed a version of the track as it was then: about three quarters done, with some old asphalt in the final sector. Since then, repaving has been finished and the Audi S curve was remodeled for the DTM races. On top of that we added a lot of detail, for example in the pit area, and at the same time optimized the track. We’re almost ready to put the track through final testing, so we hope to bring you this new version soon!

Oreca 07 LMP2

After all these free updates above, we are also proud to announce another car that will be part of a new upcoming pack – say hi to the super successful Oreca 07 LMP2! Used across all major endurance series the Oreca LMP2 almost won outright at Le Mans last year with Jackie Chan Racing DC.

UI

Most of our focus on the UI in the last months has been to include all of the current base features and test them to make sure they function properly. On the surface this might seem like an easy task, but it involves a lot of repeated clicking and trying: the UI is a complex matrix of interdependences that we need to carefully unravel to better understand and improve. So before really jumping in to conquer the new features, we needed a solid base.

As this first phase begins to wrap up and we have a stable functioning UI, our focus is shifting to those specific things that really need to be more user friendly, existing features that were either hidden or not readily visible enough to find and use. Two current examples of this are custom teams/skins and driver swaps.

Using custom skins in the current UI, although functional, has always been a bit obtuse and not straight forward for the average user. We saw a couple of ways to improve this going forward. One is to offer a simpler way to get your skin in game, and avoid the need to alt-tab or even exit rFactor 2, just to see your skin on the car. We’re still playing with a few ways to make this less fiddly. Next, custom ‘team’ creation needs to be more direct and easier to achieve. This involves thinking like a new user and making smart dialogs and using correct terminology, that way there’s no doubts about how naming or hierarchy.

Driver swaps are another area that works in the current UI, but is complicated to use in practice: having to close rF2 and navigate through somewhat hidden menus is not ideal and prone to user error, and having to assign keys to perform simple actions is a bit overkill. So the new way to do a driver swap is simple. When you join a server, we will ask you if you want to drive a car or join as as a spectator. When you choose the latter and click drive, you’ll get a pop up list of names to choose from, click select and you’re ready to drive once your team mate pits – simple as that!

Competition

The competition structure continues to take shape, and just like the UI we are focusing on the ground work. This means dealing with and squishing any bugs related to the day to day functioning of the competition structure itself. Competitions, as you may know, can span many weeks with multiple events and sessions. It’s therefore important that each code change is throughly tested for reliability and stability. By basing this on the cloud technology of our parent company Luminis we ensure the system will be very scalable, and it is certainly our intention to end up with an open system that can also be used by the many existing leagues out there.

We hope to show you more real soon!

Community

When we did the paint competition a few months ago, we were overwhelmed by the large amount of high quality entries. Encouraged by this, we concluded we wanted to do more of these competitions to showcase the many talented painters in our community. That said, assembling all these skins into packs proved to be a lot of work, so after discussing various options we decided to build some automation to more easily generate new cars, their skins, and all data and preview images associated with them. That is the reason the GT3 skins took us longer, but we’re confident we can release them next week. To give you a preview of all the nice skins you will see, we included a “spotter guide” like overview for you to enjoy!

Another month has flown by! The February 2018 roadmap is here! And as usual we haven’t just been twiddling our button boxes, we’ve been furiously making improvements and creating new and exciting content and features, some of which we are happy to share with you now. This short month has been a whirlwind of activity, which included competition infrastructure, getting in some new features for the new UI, testing performance optimizations, and building new content, both track and car.

Performance

We mentioned last month already that performance was being worked on, it’s still one of our main priorities, we’re continuing to chip away at it and have come even further, it should not be long now until we can release these improvements to you. It’s safe to say you’ll will be very surprised at the end results. In our internal testing we’ve seen a substantial performance boost and higher frame-rates across the board. As with anything though we are cautious, it’s in the hands of our internal test team to make sure it’s all working as expected.

Content

The content team has been keeping very busy, as usual, which is not hard as we have a lot of new content in the planning.

Corvette C7.R GTE/GTLM

Recently, on social, we teased this car with a short movie with a roaring V8, and the license for it has been announced over a year ago, but now you can finally see the car during internal testing at Silverstone. Scheduled for a late April release, this car will not come alone and will be part of a new upcoming pack.

Norma M30 LMP3

We’re super chuffed to see an LMP3 enter the grid! The Norma M30 is a fairly recent car that has already built up an impressive record in the races it has competed in, such as in the ELMS race last year at Spa, where we took this picture of it. We’re sure this new class will become quite popular in rFactor 2!

Sebring International Raceway

Last but not least, we can now proudly announce that we have licensed America’s oldest road racing track, host to many historic endurance races. Sebring International Raceway is being built based on a laser scan we did last month. This is a first for us and although we have made many tracks based on CAD data and other information that have been quite accurate, this scan will allow us to get every little detail right. It will take us a couple of months to finish this one, but we are working on it feverishly!

HUD

The official Studio 397 HUD is still being polished and refined, we know you are impatient to get your hands on it, while working on it we’ve come across a few bugs that lay dormant deep in the code that we needed to address, this is a win-win for the HUD in general and we decided it needs attention. It will certainly be part of the next build.

UI

Our UI is making leaps and bounds, we’ve got most of the basic features in and some new slick features. For starters we’ve looked at making triple screen setup much more intuitive, with a full set of controls via the UI settings screen. This will be an additional functionality to go along with the on track pop up widget.

Next we overhauled the live replay screen, controls are now not only selectable via controls as before but also via mouse clicks.

Also we’ve added in a modern drop down standing ticker, for easy access to driver times from the live replay. This incidentally also shows our capabilities to overlay HTML with live camera feeds, a technique we will leverage in other places such as broadcast overlays.

Competition

In the realm of competition we have our full time team actively hacking away at a very inclusive and encompassing competition structure, which is a big task not done overnight! We have big plans and that’s why we want to do this from the ground up the right way. Our next big task has been the implementation of full race series, including sign ups, practice, qualification and multiple race heats over a set period of time. These new features are ongoing and need a lot of testing so we are looking at a little while more to get this up and running, but it’s not that far off, we can see the horizon!

KartSim

We already announced that a consumer release of KartSim is coming soon. Currently this version is undergoing final testing and polishing to include our visual damage model and the latest rain effects. Just to show you how good it looks, a few more shots to keep you entertained until its release.

Community

In our ongoing effort to encourage more of that community vibe, we will be adding a new forum area to showcase your original paint artwork, screenshots, and videos.  Additionally, we will also be adding all templates for existing cars to the base install, that way everyone has access to the latest updated templates. Our plan is to streamline the templates and their extra parts so there’s less guesswork and more creative time!

That’s all for the shortest month of the year! See you on track!