rF2 New UI, DX11 and Content Updates in August Development Roadmap

[Paul Jeffrey]

The August 'Development Roadmap' for rFactor 2 has been released, with some new details on licencing agreements with a well known single seater manufacturer...

You can check out the full rF2 August Development Roadmap post below;

It’s summertime, and we are all but on holiday at Studio 397. We’ve passed the half-way mark in August, so it’s time for another roadmap update.

UI
In the last couple of months we have shown you various bits of the new UI. We are now at a point where we have basically incorporated all features of the existing user interface into the new one, with a few extensions. In the upcoming weeks, we will be testing the first beta of this user interface with our testing team. During that phase we not only intend to focus on bugfixing, but also usability testing, so depending on how our testers respond, we might make further changes to parts of the interface. Obviously we can’t predict yet how long this phase will take, but it should tell you that we’re pretty close to a first public beta release.

Competition
The first two rounds of qualification have been completed by now, with the live broadcast of the Zandvoort race coming up on Sunday, so this is a good time to look back at what were basically two very exciting weeks. Last week’s broadcast has seen a combined number of views of well over 600.000 on Facebook and YouTube and the 20 drivers in that race showed some very fast and clean racing. The top 5 finishers ensured themselves a place in the final, so congratulations to them! Many others put in a tremendous amount of time and effort, arguably in the toughest time trial ever seen in simracing. For example, at Silverstone, Miguel Ballester drove 1469 laps to earn his place in the top 20. Our second round at Zandvoort showed that the top 10 in terms of number of laps on average clocked well over 1000 laps. In the first two rounds combined, approximately 260.000 laps were driven. We wish everybody competing in this competition the best of luck!

We’ve also had quite a few questions about the brand new competition system that is hosting all these sessions. It is actually a perfect example of how we were able to leverage some of the existing technologies that have been developed within Luminis. For everything we do, our development workflow starts with setting up a fully automated system to build and deploy code. This allows us to quickly code, test and set live updates. In this case, any code update we push can be deployed to a staging environment for testing within minutes, and with a flick of a switch we can also update our production systems. In fact, our production systems use a method called “blue green deployments” to end up with zero downtime: we deploy each update to new servers, switch traffic from the old to the new ones, and then stop the old servers. Our production environment also has built-in redundancy where we run at least two servers at all times. We actively monitor those servers and if any of them goes down, it immediately gets replaced with a new one. This all happens in the cloud and the system that manages this is called Cloud RTI (run-time infrastructure).

Cloud RTI management dashboard showing our fault-tolerant production servers.

This is the custom monitoring dashboard we use to have a real-time view on competition statistics.

For horizontal scalability reasons, all our server side code is stateless, but of course we want to keep track of a lot of data and statistics. All of this is handled by another product we could leverage, the Information Grid, which is a layer on top of all kinds of data stores that manages the schema of the data and all changes to that schema over time. It allows us to work with data at a much higher level and adds extensive semantics to that data that ensure it stays manageable and usable over a long period of time. Information Grid builds on lots of cloud based data stores and adds security and advanced search capabilities. All of this infrastructure ensures that we can keep our focus on building the features of the competition system, without having to worry about a lot of infrastructural concerns.

Information Grid dashboard showing some global statistics about the data stores in use.

For the actual code, we leverage another open source project we’ve co-founded with a few other companies: Amdatu. Amdatu is a stack of modular components to build cloud applications. It provides building blocks for web based, modular user interfaces and it is in fact this toolkit that also is the basis of our new in-game UI. As soon as that is ready, you will see the competition and in-game UI merge into one seamless UI that can be accessed both in-game and outside of it. That way you can always keep up with what’s happening in the world of rFactor 2!

Content
As you know, for the competition we released an early version of Zandvoort, dubbed 0.20, indicating it is not finished yet. Although the track already is very drivable and enjoyable, we intend to further improve it over the next couple of months. Also, we’ve learned that for the DTM race this weekend, they repaved the final section of the track, and made some curb changes to the “Audi S” curve, so we’ll probably take a closer look at those for the final version.

In the mean time we have news to share on the licensing front. A lot is going on there, also in terms of tracks, but as a general rule we do not talk about licenses until the deal is sealed. We are proud to be able to announce that we signed a multi-car deal with the Italian race car manufacturer Tatuus. This will bring several of their current racing cars to rFactor 2, which should be very exciting for all the fans of open wheelers!

DX11
In May we announced the “open beta” of our brand new DX11 engine and in the following months we have received a lot of feedback and support from the community that have lead to numerous improvements to the performance and visual fidelity. Our plan is to make DX11 our new default at the end of September. At that point we will also update our current demo version. We will keep the DX9 builds in sync until the end of the calendar year. We will continue to improve the fidelity of our DX11 engine, improving every aspect of it step by step, and this process will continue in the years to come. As we discussed last month already, we also fully intend to provide an exciting new solution for plugins to render to the screen as part of this ongoing development and we will look at what information we should really be providing “out of the box”.

That’s all for this month, we hope you enjoyed the update, and enjoy the summer!

rFactor 2 is available for PC via the Steam Store.

If you like a bit of rFactor 2 action on your home PC setup then check us out! We have a great rFactor 2 Racing Club where Premium members are welcome to come try your hand at plenty of different online events. Those of you with a taste for the more extreme can check out our current RDLMS by Vesaro league and other rF2 based league events coming over the next months. If offline is more your bag, or you want to make some tweaks to your base install, check out the rFactor 2 Mods forum or have a look through our community created Setups forum. All fun and games here at RaceDepartment!

Have you enjoyed the August development roadmap for rF2? Looking forward to the future of the sim? Happy with news of the Tatuus licencing agreement? Let us know in the comments section below!

Image Credits - jayarrbee36 (opening image and second McLaren), datasting (BMW)

 

[jpalesi]

The problem is not the bloom setting, the problem is the actual artwork. Ever since rFactor 2 moved to HDR rendering years ago, some guidelines have been set on how to setup your artwork (cars and tracks) to have them properly rendered in HDR. To make a long story short, if you want to make your paint look white, you should basically use a light grey color to achieve that effect. Make it any brighter and the color starts emitting light (and this is what you are complaining about). The old DX9 engine was not capable of showing this, which meant some artists were wrongly using these "too bright" colors and got away with it. The DX11 engine is much better in that regard, and that's why this "bug" is showing up right now. So any correctly created car or track will be just fine, therefore we do not want to introduce such a slider (as it would simply make correctly done artwork look wrong again). Want the problem solved? Ask the creator of that car or track to fix it.

So, how come official tracks and cars are updated for DX11 ?
It's a little easy to blame modders when the brightness of the game has changed 3 or 4 times over the years, which hasn't helped.

 

[Chobonator]

So, how come official tracks and cars are updated for DX11 ?
It's a little easy to blame modders when the brightness of the game has changed 3 or 4 times over the years, which hasn't helped.

"Ever since rFactor 2 moved to HDR rendering years ago, some guidelines have been set on how to setup your artwork (cars and tracks) to have them properly rendered in HDR."

 

[Amanda]

Get rid of that awefull logitech profiler. It overides the rotation. Modern games don't need it anyway. They all set rotation ingame.

I find the profiler useful.

For instance, I play two old titles from Simbin/SMS, Race07 and GTR2. Since the arm animation only goes to 270 degrees, I like to set my wheel rotation to 270 whenever one of these titles are opened, and the profiler does that automatically, no problems.

For rFactor 2, I set the wheel to 900, but in-game I've set it to "Car set", which means the wheel will only rotate as much as the real car would, which I find the best way to do a simulation. If the car wheel only goes to, say, 540 degrees, that's what my wheel will turn. It's pretty good IMO

The same for Assetto Corsa, though this one needs a file edit and a "SOFT_LOCK" parameter to do that. But the effect is the same.

 

[Lars Rystedt]

For rFactor 2, I set the wheel to 900, but in-game I've set it to "Car set"

I will try that, for now I have changed the profiler to match the ingame number but if it isn't needed it would just be great.

Assetto Corsa, though this one needs a file edit and a "SOFT_LOCK

Never heard of this before I will have a look.

Not having the profiler active in Raceroom gives atleast for me a rather large deadzone and an overall less FFB feeling so I will stick with it for now.

 

[Amanda]

I will try that, for now I have changed the profiler to match the ingame number but if it isn't needed it would just be great.

But let's say you've set the profiler to the last car you've driven, and you also set the in-game rotation to "Car set". Say this means 360 degrees, both in-game and in the profiler.
For what I experienced, the next time you drive a car with a wider rotation range (e.g. 540 degrees) you'll have a mismatch, you'll turn your wheel say 30º and the game has to translate that to the new 540º, which means the in-game wheel will rotate more than those 30º on your real wheel. This means, from what I've gathered, that you'll have to setup a different "steering lock" for every car.

Too much hassle, I think

Anyway, here's how I've set the rFactor 2 profile:

This way, I've never had a problem, my G27 only rotates as much as the in-game car, and is different for every car, all done automatically. I really like the way things are working.

Never heard of this before I will have a look.

Here it is http://www.racedepartment.com/threads/soft-lock.111976/#post-2107542

Have fun!

 

[Lars Rystedt]

But let's say you've set the profiler to the last car you've driven, and you also set the in-game rotation to "Car set". Say this means 360 degrees, both in-game and in the profiler.
For what I experienced, the next time you drive a car with a wider rotation range (e.g. 540 degrees) you'll have a mismatch, you'll turn your wheel say 30º and the game has to translate that to the new 540º, which means the in-game wheel will rotate more than those 30º on your real wheel. This means, from what I've gathered, that you'll have to setup a different "steering lock" for every car.

Too much hassle, I think

Anyway, here's how I've set the rFactor 2 profile:

This way, I've never had a problem, my G27 only rotates as much as the in-game car, and is different for every car, all done automatically. I really like the way things are working.


Here it is http://www.racedepartment.com/threads/soft-lock.111976/#post-2107542

Have fun!

Different profilers for G27 and G920 unfortunately, I think the problem have been for G29 and G920 as I haven't seen anything about G25/27 having problems with wheel rotation and turning in corners. But as it seem to work adequatly for me now, I am happy.

Thanks for the tip on AC

 

[Deleted member 130869]

any correctly created car or track will be just fine, therefore we do not want to introduce such a slider (as it would simply make correctly done artwork look wrong again). Want the problem solved? Ask the creator of that car or track to fix it.

Agree on no slider for that. But on this specific topic, the Brabham BT44's stock liveries are a bit on the opposite side of the spectrum. Will the texture artists redo its colors so it closer resembles reality? One user on the rF2 forum had painted the cars and his version matched real life reference.