rF2 February Roadmap: Corvette, LMP3, Sebring and More..!

[Paul Jeffrey]

The February Roadmap update from Studio 397 is here, with plenty of exciting new content and improvements announced...

With plenty of work and features still on the horizon from Studio 397 and rFactor 2, the developers have revealed one or two interesting new pieces of information in this February roadmap update, not least of which is confirmation of a laser scan version of the epic Sebring International Raceway is under production for the simulation, alongside the 2017 announce Chevrolet Corvette C.7R GTE/GTLM that is set to release around April time alongside a couple of other interesting new cars...

For the full lowdown on what's happening in rFactor 2 world, check out the latest roadmap below:

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!

rFactor 2 is available exclusively for PC from Steam now.

Check out the rFactor 2 sub forum here at RaceDepartment for all the latest news and discussion with regards to the simulation. You can take part in lively debates with fellow rFactor 2 fans and take part in some great Club and League racing events..! Head over to the forum now and share the love this simulation so very much deserves...

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Happy to hear Sebring is coming? Pleased with the current development and future prospects of rF2? Let us know in the comments section below!

 

[LilSki]

Well, Real Road is an important part of the physics engine. You can't watch at all those aspects in an isolated state and it all needs to work together. I would argue that RR is one of rF2's strong selling points right now as it works fully dynamic.

Now one could start to argue what is more important: a racing line of rubber that gets defined and defines where people can drive in dry aswell as in wet conditions or a vertice in a colission mesh that will get touched in a minority of cases basicly making no difference. And at the end the question is what has the bigger impact and what is actually noticable for the driver. Maybe the system will be imrpvoed in the future for other titles like not-rF3, but with the current state of our hardware I see no advantage to change the system right now. At the end it's a matter of philosphy and how different devs set their priorities and it is what makes following those sims interesting. This will be especialy interesting for all other upcoing titles like ACC, GTR3 and Reiza18.

Never said Real road was a bad thing. I wish AC had it as I hate making static grooves. I'm just saying I think it would have been better to find a solution where real road could work with a high/low poly road system. iR seemed to have accomplished it as they use a high/low system and have a dynamic groove and dynamic grip like real road.

 

[KittX]

And that is simply not true.

AC physical mesh
View attachment 238342

AC Visual only mesh
View attachment 238344

Typical rF2 visual/physical mesh. Not to mention how wasteful it ends up being having to render all those triangles that could have been hidden in a non rendered mesh.
View attachment 238343

In any case we will see how it plays out and if all the correct details can come though with the way they currently assemble tracks.

It's a question of tastes maybe but I prefer properly triangulated and accurate mesh (i don't even want to imagine how much working hours were spent to remove bad triangulation from that visible mesh, and the triangulation still looks very inaccurate). plus the RealRoad as I understand works via gradually changing the parameters of each verts in real time, and on randomly triangulated mesh it would end up with random spots and really bad interpolation.
I remember the demo videos of iRacing where they use solid color to show how the track gets grooved, how the marbles growing etc. That was definitely vertex-based... on an irregular mesh that'd be a big problem.
Another thing is the invisible driving surface of that resolution will still take a lot more resources, than driving + graphical mesh of usual rF2/AMS standard. At least in rF2.

 

[Zuffenhausen Weiss]

"Incoming"
That didn't take long. Please guys, please please pleeeaassseee, can we stay away from comparing one sim to another and allowing this thread to turn into the "my sim is better than your sim" argument.
Pretty please.

I'm not trying to make comparison - I feel satisfied with rf2's graphics as it is, most of these sim centers don't have fancy graphics either so why should rF2

 

[JPL083]

Great news! And oh boy they are busy

 

[tr1v1um]

Never said Real road was a bad thing. I wish AC had it as I hate making static grooves. I'm just saying I think it would have been better to find a solution where real road could work with a high/low poly road system. iR seemed to have accomplished it as they use a high/low system and have a dynamic groove and dynamic grip like real road.

I never implied that you think that RR is a bad thing. Your argumentation is fine by me

But one just has to understand how long that technique is in use now and how much work it would be to reverse engineer stuff for existing content and rebuild something as fundamental as the RR system, to gain an advantage that is barely meassurable or noticable for the enduser. I guess it is all a matter on how you can spent your ressources. iRacing's implementation is pretty new by comparison, so they had a bit more time to refine the system. And it actually shows in some aspects.

 

[leseb64]

big roadmap

#soon

Never said Real road was a bad thing. I wish AC had it as I hate making static grooves. I'm just saying I think it would have been better to find a solution where real road could work with a high/low poly road system. iR seemed to have accomplished it as they use a high/low system and have a dynamic groove and dynamic grip like real road.

are you kidding? iracing probably the worst corelation temperature / tire / scrub ever created and not to mention the ffb ....

edit: poor Conrad...sad life....lol

 

[LilSki]

big roadmap

#soon



are you kidding? iracing probably the worst corelation temperature / tire / scrub ever created and not to mention the ffb ....

edit: poor Conrad...sad life....lol

That's not even close to what I was talking about. I was merely stating the that a real road type system can work with a high/low poly type road setup as iR indeed does just that. How each different sim translates such information is not what we are discussing.

 

[KittX]

Never said Real road was a bad thing. I wish AC had it as I hate making static grooves. I'm just saying I think it would have been better to find a solution where real road could work with a high/low poly road system. iR seemed to have accomplished it as they use a high/low system and have a dynamic groove and dynamic grip like real road.

I'm trying to come up with alternative way of getting and storing the the realtime groove in the tracks, or actually any possible way, and so far i've came up with few ways:
1 - (i'm guessing rF2 and iRacing using this way) - the data is stored in mesh vertices, so each time the car passes by one vert it changes it's information. And interpolates between the surrounding verts. This way the groove might be fully dynamic, so if only short layout is used, the groove will lay down only on that part etc
2 - the same info is stored in some coordinate map - that is again connected to track verts. Basically works more or less the same as 1
3 - pre-rendered racing line/race groove in track's vert alpha or vert colors, appeas more and more visible after some time/laps
4 - the info is stored in coordinate map which correllates with some specific texture slot and it's unique map channel. This way you could possibly avoid using track mesh verts when tracing the dynamic groove, but instead you'll have in cache the huge texture which is constantly changed by game itself (or something like that).
5 - same technique, texture in it's own map channel, but not fully dynamic, just like 3 - pre-rendered racing line that goes more and more visible after some time.
Basically 1-3 all require even and steady triangulation, either way there'll be very weird transitions in various shapes and forms.

 

[thepharcyde]

Cool, will be good to get a laser scanned version in Assetto Corsa

 

[LilSki]

Cool, will be good to get a laser scanned version in Assetto Corsa

LOL sad but true. rf2 modders have stolen AC tracks and AC modders have stolen rf2 tracks. Pretty much a two way street.

 

[Sfrost]

Loving the focus on grouped car content rather than just 1 car for a series and hoping modders make the rest. Can't wait to see what cars come with the new vette

 

[maxipolo]

big roadmap

#soon



are you kidding? iracing probably the worst corelation temperature / tire / scrub ever created and not to mention the ffb ....

edit: poor Conrad...sad life....lol

PCARS 2 > Rf2

 

[avenger82]

I hope existing content would be also updated some time. For example many ISI/S3997 cars still use older tire CPM model. rF2 has arguably the best physics engine and potential, but I think for some mods physics could be updated to leverage the engine features. There are some complains that some cars set unrealistic lap times, or have too much oversteer(at least with default setups) then real ones etc.

Also I don't know why simple things like releasing HUD, track map take so much time.

Finally defaults options/settings should be adjusted so that users have better out of the box experience :

• setups should have factory defaults(if a car has TC or ABS enabled it should be enabled by default), also some baseline car setups would be nice(i.e. some real setup from racing teams for low drag/high speed tracks)
  
  
• HUD, mirrors and things like track map should be visible by default
  
  
• Real road should be set to medium rubbered by default to closely match real racing weekend track conditions (it's often green and users are not aware of real road feature and how to change it)
  
• Graphics/visuals presets (i.e low, medium , high , ultra) should be available

 

[Matheus Machado]

I doubt it, you probably read it...

Nah, there is a transcendental voice every time laser scanned and Sebring come together in an announcement.

 

[ricerracer]

Cool, it is my favourite sim but recently been playing ti less due to the lack of official polished content. Glad to hear more is coming and I will keep supporting them by buying their releases

 

[ionONE1]

Was Zandvoort ever finished by the way, or is the update still coming?
edit: Just checked its still version 0.20,
17. august 2017: "Despite some obvious issues with the current state of the release, the track itself remains perfectly playable and Studio 397 have confirmed further developments will be coming in the near future." source: http://www.racedepartment.com/threads/zandvoort-released-for-rfactor-2.139441/
its almost march 2018 ...

I feel like the dev team is just to small to handle all the workload at this point with all the delays and now the team is about release a new game?
The ui stuff was part of the jan 2017 dev road map, over a year later its still cooking. "http://www.racedepartment.com/threads/rfactor-2-dx11-previews-and-january-roadmap-released.130829/"

 

[KittX]

+1 to Zandvoort. Btw, on some other tracks, like Mores, there's no that shadow halo effect like at Zandvoort.

 

[Will Mazeo]

Was Zandvoort ever finished by the way, or is the update still coming?

was said on Discord the updated version is going to internal test next week

 

[John-Eric Saxén]

Was Zandvoort ever finished by the way, or is the update still coming?
edit: Just checked its still version 0.20,
17. august 2017: "Despite some obvious issues with the current state of the release, the track itself remains perfectly playable and Studio 397 have confirmed further developments will be coming in the near future." source: http://www.racedepartment.com/threads/zandvoort-released-for-rfactor-2.139441/
its almost march 2018 ...

I feel like the dev team is just to small to handle all the workload at this point with all the delays and now the team is about release a new game?
The ui stuff was part of the jan 2017 dev road map, over a year later its still cooking. "http://www.racedepartment.com/threads/rfactor-2-dx11-previews-and-january-roadmap-released.130829/"

What new game? Zandvoort was made by an external guy who posts here on RaceDepartment. So he is probably not working full time on it.

 

[ionONE1]

What new game? Zandvoort was made by an external guy who posts here on RaceDepartment. So he is probably not working full time on it.

First time i hear about Kartsim, thought of it as a standalone but i see its a 20€ pack.