rF2: McLaren Senna Coming Soon - July Development Roadmap

Paul Jeffrey

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rF2 McLaren Senna.jpg

Studio 397 have released their July 'Development Roadmap' - with some exciting news about the arrival of the McLaren Senna GTR...

Studio 397 have further strengthened ties with the McLaren brand following confirmation that the latest machine to roll off the McLaren production line will be heading to rFactor 2 in the very near future - the McLaren Senna GTR!

Although awesome in its own right, the Senna is just the icing on the cake as Studio 397 begin preparations for next months Sim Racing Expo - an event where to studio traditionally throw out one or two surprise big announcements...

Check out the full roadmap post from the developer team below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

rF2 McLaren Senna 2.jpg
rF2 McLaren Senna 3.jpg


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

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

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

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

Worlds Fastest Gamer 2
WFG 2.jpg


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

rF2 Nurbs Preview.jpg


rFactor 2 is a PC exclusive racing sim from Studio 397 - Available now.

Check out the rFactor 2 sub forum here at RaceDepartment for the latest news and discussion regarding this excellent sim. Like your racing hard and fair? Join in with our rFactor 2 Racing Club for all your eSport racing fun! Oh, don't forget we like mods to, with our own [rFactor 2 Modding Forum for you to enjoy!

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But the best news - faster loading times!!! As someone without an SSD this is really welcome.

It was mentioned before, but trust me, for someone with an SSD, this is just as welcome. It's not the drive that slows the loading down. I can move all the content the game is loading for a Le Mans multiclass race between drives in about 15 seconds. Actually loading the race takes me almost 4 minutes. And yes, 11 of my 12 CPU threads (cores, if you want, even though it's less accurate) are doing nothing in all that time.

(Not that they're doing much after it loads, given that the game itself also basically runs on like one and a half thread.)

So yeah, this is most welcome news even if you do have SSD. But as also mentioned, if you can, get one still. They're quite affordable these days and even if rF2 doesn't really care, a lot of your stuff will, starting with your OS. It's one of the best upgrades you can get for your system.
 
I can't wait to drive this Senna GTR. Great call by s397 to jump on the hypercar (although kind of fictional) early on. They've said for a while now they are not interested in current LMP1s but whatever comes after them...this is seemingly the first step towards that. Without knowing exact numbers for the Senna, I hope it truly is fast enough to run as a hypercar in endurance races, and is a few seconds quicker than the Oreca07. If the two McLaren GT3s we already have are a bench mark, this Senna should be really really good.
 
Very surprised this most basic issue was not clear from the article/update. Either confirm it is free or list the price. Not complicated.
Now that the Tatuus pack is out, I wouldn't bank on many more free DLCs from S397. This seems to be a single car release for now, so I wont say for sure it will be Paid, but McLaren doesn't give out licenses for free, so I would anticipate this car costing money
 
Hopefully Senna GTR will come with racing tires. Not some road tires that will reduce the grip.

Why not both.

A slick tire made out of glue for guys who appreciates driving on the rails and doing oMG so fast laptimes wow

A real tire with tread and things, and perhaps even not that wide for guys who respects throttle, don't treat it like a light switch, loves modulating it and everything...

P.S. I wonder what is top speed without that giant bench on the rear.

mclaren_senna_victory_grey_19.jpg


It does look fun actually 1:11
 
Technical Update
A little under four weeks ago, we hosted the rF24, an endurance race with many high-profile teams and drivers participating at Le Mans. Roughly half-way through we had to red flag the event because of technical issues. Immediately after the event, we released an official statement and started gathering information from all the participants and set out to try and fix these issues with a special task force. It’s time for an update now.
Etc etc
Respect for the honest explanation both of the cause of the rF24 catastrophe and the problem solving action taken after the event.:thumbsup::thumbsup:
If only other competing sim developers dared to use the same transparent policy users would get a much more realistic picture of what is happening behind the official no-error facade.:rolleyes:

Hehe I cant abstain from refering to another wellknown sim service who year after year explained that the reason their servers collapsed almost every time they did hold their anual large participation online events - was because of botnet attacks.:roflmao::roflmao::roflmao:
 
At some point, I'm going to fall hook, line and sinker into this sim.

I think relatively quiet online activity has prevented it so far.

Once they get the new UI and competition stuff running, I think I'll be there.
 
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Faster loading times and no more stuttering or freezing when people join or leave!
That's really all we needed.
New UI can come and may be wonderful but it's not going to change the fundamentals of racing online with 30+ other people at Le Mans or Sebring etc.
This title is continuing to grow in the right way and the content we're getting is top drawer.
Once the competition system comes I think it could well be a turning point for this title.
 
Shame it does not have anything else to race against it; hot lapping soon gets boring.
If it's not free, I will pass :)
"One could think that with this announcement, we burned up everything we have, especially since 2019 is already half-way through.
But we can assure you, that’s absolutely not the case! There is so much more still to come this year!
And yes, this means that we will also add more rubber tyre thingys that go fast!"
 
Shame it does not have anything else to race against it; hot lapping soon gets boring.
If it's not free, I will pass :)

I think it will be similar to the Oreca which is also a solo car at this stage. Rfactor 2 AI is fantastic, I love racing in GT3 or GTE with the Oreca and GTR as the top class along with the BTCC as the backmarkers for the grid. The Senna GTR will serve as a preview of the upcoming hypercars class.

Some how this game feels the best when you have long driving sessions, compared to other games. Despite its dated graphics and rather crappy performance, the AI can be really fun and intense to race with.
 
I'd start believing in Santa again instead of the new UI
I totally agree. I don't know if this would be a part of the new UI but I've stopped playing because I'm tired of not being able to set up a multi class race with an even amount of each cars from each class. You choose one car and you get every single livery. I want only 2 Corvettes in my grid, not all 8. rF2 needs a custom grid feature like RaceRoom.

Also now for some reason every track is at night time except Le Mans. Doesn't matter if I choose a race time of 1pm It'll be night time at the track. Every track in the game.
 
Very happy about this news. Awesome car!
Here is Nico Rosberg driving this thing. You can see from his steering movement that it's basically a race-car with super direct feedback:

That looks really fun.

I thought that it was this one too for a while, it just looks amazing how it handles, edgy stuff. Realizing that it actually will be GTR was stupid feel. GTR most definitely going to be less fun. But the laptimes though... if your fun is laptimes, then GTR is definitely a thing I guess.
 
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