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rFactor 2 - Racing into the future!


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Offermans ha rilasciato un'intervista riguardo rFactor 2. Le prime due parti sono già disponibili

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Q: Hi Marcel, thanks for taking time for this interview.
Let’s begin at the start. In 2016, Studio 397 took over development of rFactor 2 from Image Space Incorporated. What’s the studio’s past before rFactor 2 and why did you decide to take over from ISI?

A: This is a story that started in spring of 2016. At the time I was working for Luminis and in my spare time helping out ISI with various tasks. We were in fact just wrapping up the migration of rFactor 2 to Steam, which I had done at the time when one evening I was casually talking to Gjon Camaj. In that conversation, he asked if I would be interested in maintaining rFactor 2 and I thought it would be a great opportunity to run with it and see how we could evolve it.

The conversations that followed led to the creation of Studio 397 as a new entity that was part of Luminis. The initial members partially were contractors that had been working for ISI on rFactor 2 before and partially people who already worked at Luminis. We quickly started recruiting others from the sim racing community and now, four years later, we have grown to over 30 people.

So why did we decide to do this? Because we believed that the foundation of rFactor 2 is a solid base with a lot of potential. Sure it needed a lot of work. The community at the time was critical that we did not have VR support, that our graphics engine was still based on DirectX 9, that we hardly had any licensed content in the simulation and that our user interface was showing its age. So we started working on those issues, one by one.

Q: Is there something that has surprised you in a positive and/or negative way since you took over in 2016?

A: I really can’t think of any negatives. Well, maybe one, but it was not new and it’s not just related to rFactor 2 either. It’s the constant bashing by a few people in our sim racing community. I mean it’s great that you like one sim better than another and quite frankly, there is a lot to like in each of them, but there is no need to be so negative about the sims you don’t like as much. Sim racing is still very much a niche in the esports arena, and we should grow it together. A strong ecosystem and different simulations are catalysts to that growth, so let’s all embrace it.

On the positive side, we were pleasantly surprised by the amount of interest there is in our technology. Within our first year, we were already talking with Amazon Games about licensing our physics engine and helping to integrate it into the Lumberyard game engine for The Grand Tour Game. Since that, there have been many more of these and they show the versatility of our technology.

 

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Q: rFactor 2 is known for its great physics. However, bugs have been a known issue for some time. Some might think it can’t take years to fix those issues. How are you sorting these out and how complicated is it?

A: That is a very broad question, as there are a lot of bigger and smaller bugs and wishes that have been brought up by the community. I agree there are issues that have been around for many years. Most of them we “inherited” with the original codebase. Typically how we work is that we are focused on a specific area or topic as a development team and try to make a big improvement there.

We’ve done so for graphics, writing our own DirectX 11 based engine and adding VR support, and during that process we fixed a lot of long standing bugs. Just to pick one, when we started out, alt-tabbing back to the desktop did not work too well and would often freeze or crash the game completely. In terms of wishes our community has, we know we still need to work on improved cockpits and possibly a brand new HUD concept.

We are still working on the UI, which, admittedly, took us a lot longer than we anticipated, but this is the basis for a lot of future extensions and improvements, as well as our competition system.
One area where we still need to go in and make big improvements is our physics engine. We did make a bunch of smaller improvements, but there is still a long list of things to do here, from improvements to our AI to a more extensive drive train model.

Q: How will the new UI improve the experience of rFactor 2? What can people expect in the final version?

A: Probably the most important point to make is that the new UI should not be seen as an end goal but as a new beginning. We are fundamentally changing a big part of the codebase to future proof it and allow us to add innovations more easily. As you know it is fully based on HTML, which means it’s much easier to extend and integrate with online services.

Soon we will make the switch to the new UI and will start this process of improvement. The first thing we want to do is to improve the way to set up rFactor 2 after installation. We will also start our journey of the integration of the competition system. Smaller things we will tweak are the opponent selection system as well as finding and filtering online servers.

Q: You have released a lot of content focused on endurance racing. Is that something you plan on continuing, or are you aiming for a wider range of motorsport disciplines in the future and what’s in the pipeline in terms of cars and tracks?

A: Our focus is certainly broader than just endurance racing, even though that shows off a lot of strengths of our engine, like the dynamic weather and track, and the 24 hour cycle. We want to offer a broad spectrum of racing cars, so really anything on 4 wheels that drives on asphalt is in scope. Track wise I think we needed to catch up a bit on our iconic tracks, but now that we have the full “triple crown” in as well as other unique experiences like the Nordschleife, we are looking to broaden the spectrum there, adding tracks across the different continents that cater to the wide range of cars we have planned.

Our pipeline currently includes another iconic European track, and we’re also discussing a few other tracks that are related to future esports events. Long overdue is a new “sample track” for the modding community that will come with extensive documentation on how to leverage our new shaders to make tracks that look awesome and are future proof as we continue to evolve the engine.

On the car front expect more cars to fill in gaps we still have in our portfolio. We are also still working with our stock car community to bring a huge update that will also see some improvements in our stock car rules plugins.

 

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Terza parte dell'intervista a Offermans disponibile

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Q: Esport have escalated as a business in the last few years, but sim racing hasn't had its big break. But with the 24 Hours of Le Mans Virtual being such a huge success, do you see things changing?

A: It’s true that within the esports world, sim racing is a niche. You could even argue that, except for maybe F1, the same holds true for racing in the world of sports. That said, the last year or so we see an increase in interest for esports from the world of motorsport. There are probably several reasons for this, apart from the current situation in the world. Most importantly, sim racing and real racing require a very similar set of skills and as we get more successful in simulating cars on consumer grade hardware, there is a growing interest to use rFactor 2 for all kinds of training purposes. At the same time, sim racing democratizes racing, lowering the barrier of entry into motorsports, which traditionally has been labeled as a sport for the very rich only.

I would like to see the two worlds merging even more, and that is definitely a trend we are seeing right now. It’s hard to predict the future of motorsports. With the changing ways we all think about future mobility, it’s clear to me that there will be big changes. We grew up with the car as a status symbol. The current generation sees it much more as a way to get from A to B, with many alternatives that are more environmentally friendly. Over time, I’m sure that will make the big car manufacturers rethink their huge investments into motorsport and that might actually be a good thing, as it pushes the sport in a direction where it’s not all about money, but about competing on equal terms where the skills of the driver are decisive and not the research and development that goes into the cars.

Q: While we are at the esport topic, Studio 397 are working on a competition system for rFactor 2. How will it work? Will it be a matchmaking system as we know from other platforms and how will drivers be sorted or will you do something completely different?

A: We have a couple of goals with this system.

First of all, we want to provide people with daily races, where they can pick their favourite series and compete against people of similar skills as well as race with their friends. We focus here on making this as easy as possible by obviously hosting the races, but also by making sure it is easy to download the content, required for such a series. We realize that a large part of our community enjoys racing and the competition, but not everybody has the talent or the time to compete at the highest level.

Secondly, we want to build a system where people can move up the ranks, from regional and casual racing with friends to national and international series. This is where we also want to involve existing leagues, integrating them into the system and providing them with the benefits of the system.

Finally, this system should also cater for a few “special cases”. We’d like to be able to use the same system for people who enjoy racing the AI in offline championships, where they are free to race whenever they want. Other cases we are targeting are LAN environments and esports tournaments, where an automated system needs to be flexible enough to also be used with humans doing race control, live broadcasts, etc.

Q: Last question. What does the future of rFactor 2 look like?

A: In short: bright. We started on this journey four years ago and year after year we have managed to increase the user base, grow our sales and extend the world of rFactor 2 in many interesting ways. It’s our intention to keep evolving the platform over time and stay relevant for many years to come.

Those words conclude our conversation with Marcel who was very open and transparent about the issues the studio are facing in their effort to unlock the potential of rFactor 2. A big thank you to Marcel Offermans for the talk and Studio 397 for their contribution to grow sim racing as a whole.

 

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Thread aggiornato con l'ultimo update.

Latest Track Updates!

Le Mans 2018/2020 v2.51

Berlin FE 2020 v1.07

Silverstone v2.10

New York FE 2020 v1.05

107599011_3292489780801911_8005493050715449032_o.jpg

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Update di oggi 17 luglio.

Nürburgring (2018) v1.75

- Added new layout "Support 24H"

- First optimization pass.

Update del 14 luglio

Nissan GT500 2013 v2.08

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  • 2 weeks later...
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Sometimes our roadmap is focused on a specific topic; sometimes it’s a huge box of surprises. Today’s roadmap feels like the latter. Actually, the beauty of rFactor 2, and probably one of the reasons why you love it, is that there’s not just one type of racing or motorsport — it can be whatever you feel like today. So let’s try to bring this vibe of spontaneity and surprise to the July roadmap, which features many different aspects of what we are currently working on behind the scenes.

The first topic we want to talk about is connected to our last summer sale. We hope you were able to grab that piece of content you really wanted to add to your collection and are already enjoying it to the fullest. But we also listened to those of you who voiced disappointment about us restructuring DLC packs, especially since specific smaller packs were missing from the offer, packs that would “complete” your inventory. We value community feedback a lot, so we went back to our library, put on our spectacles, and dug out some of the “old” packs.

The great news is that some of those packs will now be discounted. Like waiting for the after party, the after sale is even better, so everyone who missed the packs can grab them now. Please keep in mind that nothing lasts forever: this  discount offer and the packs themselves will go away after roughly 2 weeks, so grab them while you can (smile)

The following packs will be brought back for the “After-Sale”:

  • Two Strong Pack – featuring the tech-packed McLaren Senna GTR and the mighty Aston Martin Vantage GTE  Get it HERE
  • GT3 Pack – our first and basically original pack with the beloved GT3s, featuring cars like the McLaren 650S GT3, Radical GT3, Callaway Corvette GT3 and more (5 GT3 in total)  Get it HERE
  • GT3 Challenger Pack – our second GT3 pack featuring another 5 GT3 class contenders such as the Audi R8 GT3 (normal and evo), BMW M6 GT3, Aston Martin Vantage GT3 etc.  Get it HERE
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Cars

Part one is done, now let’s head over to the section showcasing the main actors in simracing: the cars.

As previously mentioned, this roadmap aims at diversity and with it we bring back a section we haven’t talked about for ages —  oval racing, or more precisely, the rFactor 2 Stock Car Mod.

We are proud to announce a major update to the Stock Car mod. We’ve been hard at work for nearly 16 months redesigning almost every aspect of these cars. The main component of this update is the tire model.  A lot of development was spent making sure they reacted correctly, giving the car a much improved feel and a better sense of realism. This update consists of brand new tire compounds for every track the Gen 6 CUP cars run on that are available in rFactor 2. The update uses the 2018 rules package with reworked aerodynamics, proper center of gravity, shocks, default setups, engines from dyno data (750+ horsepower), and, most importantly, rebuilt tires (24 different compounds/sets).  The decision to stay with the 2018 rules was due to horsepower.  In 2018, Stock Cars had 750 horsepower.  In 2020 they have 550 horsepower.  We felt the higher horsepower would provide a better experience of how a real stock car drives and feels. A lot of testing went into this to make sure the cars reacted correctly, and the default setups make it fun to drive right out of the box. Just like in real life, when behind a pack of cars you get slightly aero tight, but up front in clean air the car turns into the corners a little better.  The new tire model gives it the feel you need to tell when it’s at the limit.  However, when you go over the limit, be ready to catch it.  You can’t just stomp the gas pedal, you gotta drive it up out of the corner while trying to keep its 750hp engine under control.  As the tracks rubber up, you have to search for grip in different grooves.  But with an in-car adjustable track bar, you can adjust the handling while you drive. We have also updated the car shaders to the new PBR shader and updated the templates as well with region maps. The Stock Car Team would like community feedback on the new cars and will have more exciting updates in the near future for them as well. Their main goal was to get the Stock Cars driving as close to a real car as possible by collaborating with real stock car drivers. Feel free to give feedback to the stock car team on Discord in the oval section. As a way of saying thanks, we added new default Stock Car paint jobs to reflect drivers that helped test and give feedback while developing this new beast!

Stockcar 2018

Changelog

v2.10

  • Developed New Tire compounds for 24 tracks.
  • Default setups for each track tweaked
  • BOP tweaked per track
  • Engine torque/HP tweaked per Dyno sheet information on a Stock Car Engine
  • 3D bodies exported with new PBR shaders.
  • Templates updated with Regions and contingencies layer
  • Adjusted Aero Package to represent 2018 package

We hope you’re not going crazy in circles already because there is more to come in this section. In other news: Do you remember us saying that there are two new GT3s coming? With one being the obvious elephant in the room, it’s time to introduce the other fresh contender to this popular motorsport category.

Subscribe to the Stockcar 2018 Steam Workshop item  HERE

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Bentley Continental GT3 2020

Rolling out of the factory with its fiercely striking design, this British masterpiece of the renowned luxurious car brand is going for the big wins again. We are very pleased to welcome the 2020 Bentley Continental GT3 to the lineup of cars available in rFactor 2. It is powered by a 4-litre-twin-turbo V8, 4.8 meters long and hungry to be at the front row of whichever track you choose to enjoy the roaring sound of your new race car. If you’re already on your way out of this roadmap and into the steam shop – stop! While we want to get the new Bentley into your hands as early as possible, it’s not ready to be launched off the grid just yet. Give our mechanics a bit more time to put on the slicks and do the last radio checks, then we’re ready to rock.

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Tracks

After all this car-talk, let’s change focus to the locations we want to race at. While there won’t be a new track announcement just yet, we think we have some news to share in this category that people will like. Starting off with Loch Drummond you might be like Loch what?!” but hear us out. Loch Drummond is an amazing track that poses a real challenge to every serious simracer out there. And to make sure that you enjoy seeing your expensive toys on four wheels on this track, we gave it a complete overhaul, bringing it up to the latest tech. If there is still a question mark above your head as to why we would do this – we have good reasons: There will also be an upcoming Dev Mode release of this track, giving you guys a better look at our electronic flags and other cool assets for track building.

Loch Drummond

Located just outside Stirling in the small vilage of Drummond, Scotland, is perhaps the home of the earliest known location of racing. Whether you consider it to be simple folklore, or to have some basis in reality, the valley has certainly held racing events since the 1950′s, but possibly for thousands of years. Based around what is assumed to be a disused and abandoned military installation, and surrounded by the walls of the valley, Loch Drummond is a relatively slow speed and highly technical track of two layouts (1.2 and 1.97 miles), that can really punish with lost time over a whole lap, for a mistake in a single corner. The area was once thought to be a place of ancient religious ceremonies, centered around a small henge of rounded stones located at the foot of the valley. Many people considered the area to be haunted, and there are many stories of disappearances and sightings of unusual things going back thousands of years. By 1946 however, the area was largely deserted, with only a handful of local farmers working in the valley. June 1947 saw a flurry of activity, when the British military constructed a base to handle radio traffic for the region. Of course, due to the location, there was some controversy, especially as the area saw little need for such an installation. Less than two months later, after a period of strange activity, the installation was abandoned, and it was found that the stone circle had been used as the foundations for a brick tower within the base. As time went by, ‘Glen Station’ and many of the valley stories were forgotten by all but a few. It wasn’t until the mid-1950′s, when a young farmer’s son began to travel from Duns, Berwickshire, to race at both Loch Drummond and nearby Crimond, that the area saw life once more. Soon, a young gentleman’s racing club was formed and saw great success for the next decade, using a simple set of racing rules: “no contact, and show respect to your fellow competitors.” Fully resurfaced in 1972, 1993 and 2008, the track also saw the addition of a new section in 2009, but could not attract high profile racing categories until safety improvements were made, and the dangerous runoff areas were widened. Sadly, the recent financial crisis of 2012 proved to be a tough challenge to overcome in terms of organizing the races, and covering the costs of recent improvements to the track. This saw the gentleman’s racing club (then known as GRC) sell the track to local racing enthusiast, John Livet, who has promised to make sure the legacy of the Gentleman’s Club carries on.

Changelog:

v1.23

  • Full PBR update
  • Added score tower
  • Added Big TV screen objects
  • Fixed smoothing on pit trucks
  • Small tweaks to terrain materials
  • Small adjustment to AI at uphill chicane
  • Fixed collision gaps
  • Improved smoothing on outer terrain
  • Fixed issues with shadow casting on tunnel

Subscribe to the Loch Drummond Steam Workshop item  HERE

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Nürburgring PBR Update

As we were already in the flow of updating tracks, we also revisited the famous Nürburgring. While you wait for the release of this new PBR version, enjoy some of the shots taken by our track team that is currently updating every single square meter of not just the Nürburgring GP but also the Green Hell. In addition to PBR, we continue to add more optimizations and other performance tweaks. More to come!

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Code

No, we didn’t forget about our promise to give you an update after last month’s roadmap, in which we talked extensively about our search to find and fix some long standing issues that tend to pop up in some of our endurance events. This work has continued, and we are now at a point where we have a few scenarios that we can consistently reproduce. Based on these, we are now also investigating a few other areas of the code to ensure we leave no bug behind, using a mix of code reviews and static code analysis tools. Part of this process is also creating some new test tooling to automatically run a lot of complicated and long scenarios. So far this has resulted in quite a few improvements to the codebase already, and even though we are not completely there yet, we are very positive about where we are right now. It’s hard to predict exactly when this process will be done, but we are committed to making sure we completely fix the issues, and it’s likely the next build will already have some improvements.

It’s been a while since we’ve given you an update on our UI. Earlier this year we started doing regular development updates on it. Those have slowed down a bit as we were addressing some bigger modules of the code, but we are now getting to a point where we are ready to switch on the new UI by default. That does not mean the old one instantly disappears. We will keep it around as a “beta” on Steam. Another change we are looking to make is to go 64-bit only. We already announced that intention a while ago, and we can see from hardware surveys that our community has moved to this platform already.

We spent the last couple of weeks doing smaller tweaks and bugfixes, and as explained before, switching to this new UI should be seen as a new beginning that adds a lot more features and improvements.

One of those new features is our competition system. The current system, on which we have been running a lot of hotlap competitions, was just the first step, and our current intention is to come out with the next update in December. As development continues in the upcoming months, we’ll explain in more detail the features we are targeting for this release, but our end goal is definitely to have a tightly integrated system that you can use to easily find races and compete against people with similar skills. This will eventually also include features to do off-line races, as we know many of you enjoy competing against our AI as well.

Competition

Exciting racing action in every single round of the championship – that probably describes our GT Pro Series and Challenge Series in the most accurate way. As promised back then, this championship came here to stay, and so it does!
While we can´t give you a fully detailed schedule yet, we are happy to inform you that the Series will be back soon! We are planning to have the Relegation Race Day in August to finalize the GT Pro Series Season 2 Grid. You´re not familiar with what´s happening there? Let me give you a quick overview: it’s a 1-day event featuring three races where positions 25 – 21 of the GT Pro Season 1 and position 6 – 10 of the GT Challenge fight for the last five remaining Pro Series Spots for Season 2. This will be good, promise!
Right after Relegation, we will get going with the hotlap qualifier for GT Challenge Season 2, everyone’s chance to be on the grid of this major rFactor 2 GT series, competing for a spot in the Season 3 Pro Series. Some info on this already: The Hotlap Qualifier will feature the same car/setup for everyone, and drivers will be able to choose the GT3 car they want to compete with after they earned their spot in this championship. Sharpen your skill and racecraft until then, and we will see you on the broadcast!

But if GT-racing isn’t really where you see yourself on the top, then don´t worry. We are hard at work on another series with a similar format (Pro and Challenge) featuring a team championship and a different style of racing. More on this soon (smile)

Road to NBR24h

X-factor, a word we throw around a lot, but what do we actually mean? We mostly deal in R-factor. So maybe we should say someone has that ‘R-factor’ when it comes to being a racing talent!

We are happy to see one of our own is tapping into real world motorsport. Rene Buttler, our Business manager, decided to bring together simracers for a real racing team. On this real-life team made up of virtual racers even the mechanics are sim guys. Together with his team, the support of the studio, and drivers like Dave Gaming or Jimmy Broadbent, Rene wants to achieve participating in the Nurburgring 24 hours race in 2021. Rene went all out: he bought a race-ready Astra Cup car, got his racing license, and — most importantly —  decked it out with rF2 logos. For him, it’s about the journey of combining simracing and real racing. His first NLS (formerly known as VLN) race is planned for August 29th, a 6-hour endurance race, broadcast live from the race. Rene is currently preparing the nuts and bolts of the project, and we celebrate this first big step towards the 24h race with the release of the Nürburgring Endurance Bundle.

This all new bundle will includes: Nürburgring, Porsche 911 GT3 Cup, BMW M2 CS Racing and Radical SR3-XX. With this new pack we give you a sampler of options to get to know Endurance racing at the Ring! From the more approachable to the more advanced in terms of handling, work your way up and conquer the Green Hell.

Get the Nürburgring Endurance Bundle  HERE

Endurance_pack.png

We will also have open hotlap servers for each of the cars – allowing you to challenge the top times in the world!

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Summary

That’s all for this month! Stay safe, keep cool, and have a great summer everyone! 🙂

 

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On 7/31/2020 at 10:37 PM, Walker™ said:

 our current intention is to come out with the next update in December.

😂😂😂

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