Roadmap

2017 is well underway! We hope you all made a great start to the new year once the lights went out 😉 Here at Studio 397 we’ve jump-started our new year full of ambition. In with the new, out with the old: don’t forget our migrate to Steam for free offer will end on January 31st, 2017.

DX11

As we have already revealed last month, DX11 development is ahead of schedule. We have migrated much of the engine, and although there are certainly still quite a few things to do and it’s far from a straight port, we’re taking advantage of this opportunity to fix some long-standing issues. We are updating the overall look of the graphics. Lighting improvements include a new HDR tonemapper to achieve better color balance and more saturated colors, which interacts nicely with our dynamic sky model (adding contrast to our clouds). We are also updating the entire shadow system (faster and better looking shadows) and adding some ambient occlusion techniques that provide more dynamic shadows in areas such as engine bays, the underside of tyres, and parts of the inside of the marshal hut. Here are some sneak-peek shots of our work in progress. They do not, of course, reflect the finished product, but we wanted to show you where we are right now.

These upcoming graphics improvements should be a big step up for everyone in the modding community, giving you a stronger and richer visual base to build from. We will provide a set of  guidelines on how elements should look to ensure as much consistency as possible without impacting on your creative freedom.

Next month we are starting a new beta program exclusively for modders to facilitate a smooth transition to DX11. So far it looks like we’ve been able to port all existing shaders, which means existing content should continue to work. Some mods that rely on custom shaders as well as plugins that request to render to the screen (such as some overlay plugins) currently expect a DX9 graphics context and will require an update to work with DX11. In both cases, we will actively help any modders whose work is affected.

UI

We’ve spent this month building the technical foundations for the new user interface, which allows us to link the game logic directly to an HTML5 front-end that we can embed into the simulation. At the same time, we’re putting the finishing touches on our interaction and graphical design, which means we can start building, user testing and refining the actual screens now. The new user interface offers far more flexibility, which gives us the freedom to create additional functionality down the line such as incorporating single player championships and results.

Here’s a look at the new home screen with simple sliding panels to reveal deeper options.

As part of the new user interface we are developing the in-game competition structure.  We all know that competition is at the heart of all racing sims, and rFactor 2 has a long-standing relationship with some of the greatest leagues in simracing covering multiple racing disciplines.  Building on this strong foundation, our new competition mechanics intend to encourage frequent racing and greater accessibility, offering a rich career progression coupled with new aligned content.

We are focused on building competition mechanics that are unique and embrace leagues and competitions.

Content

Our content team is still working hard on the Radical and starting work on the Corvette C7.R. Last month we gave you a little Christmas present with the Nissan GT500, and we were overwhelmed with the positive responses to the car. At the same time we also got a lot of feedback from the community about little things we could improve. We’ve tried to fix all of them and our goal is to release an update before the end of this month. This update will also include a paint template. The following shots show many of these improvements.

NOLA Motorsports Park will likely be released around the end of February. A lot of work was put into showcasing the aesthetic possibilities, and we spared no effort to bring you those 10 different layouts of the track and kart track, giving you plenty of variation and suitable configurations for all classes of cars. As more and more trackside objects are being added, we can now share some high resolution (4k) shots that show you different areas of the track. We chose to give you the full experience and modeled the whole garage area, so it’s actually a little bit of a drive to get to the actual track from there. Don’t worry though, we’ve put up some signs to guide you!

That’s all for our first monthly update of 2017. We wish you all the best and hope you will enjoy the many updates that we will bring this year.

On Tuesday, December 20th, we will release build 1108. This is our first Steam-only release, and we would like to remind you of our offer to migrate to Steam for free, which will be extended until January 31st, 2017.

To reiterate where we are, we are making really good progress with a new development team coupled with a new vision. As long time sim racers, we understand the need for a strong platform with great content, physics and visuals as well as competition, both online and offline.

A detailed changelog will be posted alongside the actual release, but some of the highlights of this build include a huge update to our Stock Car rules, better support for running Steam in offline mode – which can be very useful in LAN situations and a fix for the nVidia driver bug that has been plaguing some users of certain series of nVidia cards.

Good news! We’re ahead of our DX11 development schedule and are internally testing the first builds now. There is still a lot to do in terms of adding new features such as depth of field and motion blur effects on external cameras as well as overall improvements such as the shadow system. Needless to say, the results so far are looking good. We are really excited about the capability we have already and where it’s going. Our goal to keep the engine backward compatible seems achievable, and in the upcoming months we will start engaging the modding community providing information on the improved engine and how best to utilise it.

As we’ve announced last month, we are completely revamping the user interface of rFactor 2 to make it easier to use, nicer to look at and ready for VR. We’re leveraging modern web technology and are currently in the middle of the design phase. To give you a first impression, we’ve added a screenshot of a WIP car selection screen.

Concerning content, we are very excited with the direction we are headed, certainly in the way plan to match cars and tracks. We will start to develop this approach over the next few months.

We have a number of car developments underway. With our current focus on the Radical, we are adding the finishing touches to the 3D model right now while we wait for some additional data to complete the physics model.

More great news! We have just signed a license with General Motors for the 2016 model of the Corvette C7.R. Development of the model and physics will start early next year. The 2016 model has significant aerodynamic improvements with a new, larger splitter and a large diffuser to generate more downforce. The car is the weapon of choice for Corvette Racing in their 2017 IMSA campaign as well as their effort to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans. As an added bonus, this car will also contribute to improving car physics overall.

Photo: Courtesy of Chevrolet, made available under Creative Commons 3.0. (Photo by Richard Prince for Chevy Racing)

In terms of tracks, we’ve already shown you previews of NOLA Motorsports Park in earlier updates, and we’re now in the final stages of development. The track will feature 5 different road course layouts and 5 different karting layouts, and we’re currently placing track side objects, such as grand stands, trees and a ferris wheel and are working on AI paths. It’s looking good for release early next year.

Now let’s talk about online. Since the release of rFactor 2 the pricing consisted of a one time payment and an online subscription, with the option of buying a lifetime version of that subscription. Over the years we have received a lot of questions about charging extra for online access, and what people were getting for this in return.

We understand that online racing is key to the future of the platform. As online racers ourselves, we have decided to provide online access for everybody with the Steam version for free – simplifying the pricing model and encouraging everybody to race online. Steam will take care of automated updates. We recognise that some of you have made this purchase over the past few months, and it was a difficult decision. However, we’re positive that you’ll agree we’ve made the right decision for the future of the platform.

With the Steam Winter Sale approaching what better way for you to relax and driver rFactor 2. Look out for an exclusive offer for the holiday period!

That’s all for our last monthly update of 2016. Happy Simracing and have a great holiday. We hope to see you all in the new year!

Last month I mentioned that the USF2000 was almost ready and some of you have been asking when it will be released. I am happy to announce that it will be released on Wednesday, November 23rd. This release features the 2016 car and teams, and we are happy to announce that we have also licensed the 2017 car. The 2017 chassis, which is very similar to the F4 car, will be released somewhere next year.

We also wanted to take this opportunity to congratulate our fellow simracer Pablo López on being selected by our colleagues at iRacing to take part in the Mazda Road to 24 Shootout. Since that event took place at NOLA Motorsports Park we sent him an early build of the layout he would be driving to practice.

Community wise we updated our forums and, behind the scenes, also moved our beta forums to this new location. Over the next couple of weeks we will be moving more of the website, including the development blogs, some of which have already been moved.

Development has been focussing on the DX11 engine and laying down the groundwork for our new UI. There’s not much we can show here yet until we’re a bit further along, but we are very happy with the current progress. In the mean time we are getting closer to our next Steam-only build. Remember to take advantage of the free option to migrate to Steam if you have not done so yet. Apart from a lot of smaller fixes this build will also feature the work we’ve done with the Stock Car community and we hope this will make rFactor 2 an even more enjoyable simulation for oval racing. As soon as the new build is out, we will also update you on Fallston.

Another new feature we would like to announce is support for paid content. It will integrate nicely with our workshop, and modders will also be able to leverage it to sell their creations. Obviously we would like to use this feature to offer you a wide selection of high quality and high profile content. This does not mean that all future content we create will be paid though.

That’s all for the second monthly update. Happy Simracing!

Hello everybody, and welcome to the first monthly roadmap update. A month ago, at the SimRacing Expo, we announced the Studio 397 partnership and since then we have talked to a lot of simracing websites about our plans. Thank you all for your positive and honest feedback. We’ll keep an open dialogue with the community.

Let’s start this update with some of the things we have been working on.

A car we’ve teased before is the USF2000 and we are happy to report that it is almost ready for release. We are particularly proud of this car as we were able to build it with a lot of support from the series and teams so we’ve ended up with a car that is extremely accurate in terms of both physics and car model. On top of that it is also a lot of fun to drive and has become a favourite of many people on the test team.

Our next track release is going to be NOLA Motorsports Park. Both the race and kart track will be available in different configurations. We’ve been working on it for the past couple of months. Most of the 3D objects are done and we’re currently assembling everything in preparation for further testing.

On the development side a lot has happened. In the background we have moved everything over to new infrastructure that allows us to work on new features in parallel, ensuring that they are only added to the next release when done and tested. We have also spent time automating our processes and intend to use those improvements to deliver updates more quickly.

Over the last year we have been working hard in close cooperation with the Stock Car community to improve the rules for oval racing. That work is still ongoing, and we feel we’re on the final stretch now!

Announced a month ago, the development of the DX11 engine with VR support is still ongoing. This is obviously a big project and apart from building and integrating the new engine we also need to make sure that we stay compatible with our existing content. Our current timeline for getting this integrated is by the end of Q1 2017.

We are also moving closer to the first public release that will be Steam only. It will definitely be released this year and is scheduled to contain a whole list of bugfixes and improvements to the codebase. I would like to take this opportunity to invite everybody that is still using the non-Steam version to take advantage of the free option to migrate to Steam. Future updates will start leveraging more Steam features so the only way to take advantage of those is to move to Steam.

Finally, we have an announcement to make. We have secured a license with Radical sportscars and will be bringing those into rFactor 2. With full access to CAD drawings and performance data we can deliver these cars with a very high amount of accuracy. Work on this has just started, but we are very excited as these are great cars to drive and race!

That’s all for this month. Happy Simracing!