rFactor 2 August Roadmap: Big Things Coming to the Sim Expo...

[Paul Jeffrey]

The August 'Development Roadmap' for rFactor 2 is here!

Studio 397 have been kind enough to release a monthly 'Roadmap' blog posting since taking over development of rFactor 2, giving fans much desired insight into the inner workings of the simulation, and of course using it as a nice opportunity to tease us all with upcoming content and features!

As usual the new posting for August offers plenty to get excited about, however this time the developers are keeping things a little bit closer to their chest... teasing not one but three announcements at the upcoming Sim Racing Expo... something that we will keep a very close eye out for during our three days on sight with RD colleagues and community members.

So what exactly does the latest post say? Well you can read up in full below:

Sometimes you look at the calendar and realize that time can fly past faster than our LMP2 cars ingame. It’s already end of August and we have been so busy with working on rFactor 2 that there is no Roadmap yet. But we couldn’t do without one, right? That would be like breaking a family tradition, and since our team is more about fixin’ things than breaking them, let’s put together a Roadmap for August! As said above already, we’re pretty busy, but with what you might ask? As most of you probably know, SimRacing Expo at the iconic Nürburgring track in Germany is just around the corner and it will kick off big things for us. But let’s do this step by step, it’s a roadmap in the end! (wink)

SimRacing Expo 2018
There is enough going on at this years Expo that we could probably fill the whole Roadmap with it, so let’s concentrate on the major things you should know about it. Obviously we will have a booth at the Expo, so you can come around and meet the team, as we will bring plenty of people along. But just talking to us might be a bit boring all day long, so we will make sure that you will have plenty of reasons to visit the rFactor 2 booth. One of them will be new content that we will show exclusively at our booth, a pre-release of course. Hypemode intensifies!

You want to know more about what this could be? For now you need to live with just 3 words: iconic, fast, competition proven, more at the Expo! (wink) You think that’s it already? Enough reasons to visit us? Nah, we’re in for way more this year! The content shown at the booth will be our first announcement during the Expo, but as Germans say “Alle guten Dinge sind drei”, literally meaning “all good things come in threes”, meaning we will follow up with another announcement during Saturday afternoon.

This second announcement will probably tick a lot of boxes for simracers in terms of their dreams-list for our simulation. We are more then excited to finally share that with you. Sunday will see a third announcement (yep, you’re not getting a day to get back your breath) which will show our dedication to further improving your simracing experience. What happens if you can’t be around then? Don’t worry, we will stream all announcements and first talks about them live from our booth onto our channels. Missing them is not an option at all.

Before we all now dive into the guessing-game about what could be in the announcements, let’s have a look at the other topics of our roadmap…

UI and Competition
We are fully aware that everyone is awaiting news on the UI and we’re still working hard every day on this topic. Many steps are needed to implement an UI like the one we envision, which is taking a lot of time. We are still tweaking and optimising, and we will be able to show parts of the new interface at the Expo. Of course we are very curious to get your feedback there!

On the competition side, we have been integrating different session types so we can have events that consist of combinations of practice, qualification and race sessions and we are looking at different ways to score events. In the last month or so we have also been researching and testing a rating system, feeding it data of many races and evaluating its outcome. We’re nowhere near done, but some of these improvements we will certainly already bring to the McLaren Shadow competition next month.

Content
On the content side, we won’t yet spoil the surprises we have in store for the Expo. Previously we’ve announced both Zandvoort and the Reiza Pack to be almost ready and we do anticipate both to become available in September.

Sounds like good stuff to me, roll on the Sim Racing Expo 2018!

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Looking forward to hearing what is in line for rF2 in the immediate future? What do you think the studio could be hinting at in their roadmap post? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below!​

 

[Nigel Mansell]

I could be wrong, but I have a feeling that ACC will need a mega computer to run with all the effects enabled that Unreal engine comes with. If they can manage rain and night with 120 FPS, I'd be very surprised. Frankly I'd much rather see rF2 getting a few more FPS than having even more performance consuming effects added.

I'm a person who pushes to upgrade PC parts every few years. The nice thing about most gfx engines is the scaling. I personally prefer to run lower AI cars than max too, and use that as a way to help gfx options. I'll often sell other things in my possession as well to help fund upgrades, so I'll go without, to sacrifice upgrades, even if I buy 6 month old components. I think the 7700K/GTX1080Ti will be fine at 1080p tbh.

I do think it could take another 6 months to see Kunos fully perfect performance gains 100%, but that's ok, as that's one of the reasons behind early access - iron out all the issues etc. Won't be long before we see the results and know for certain.

I think RF2 has more performance gains left in the pipeline too, and all improvements in that area help gameplay for us.

 

[Tony Bew]

Ui is more than just how the buttons look. It is how easy it is add skins to a car, how to select cars and tracks for a session, how to change game settings (having to change things in text files is bad ui), how to configure your ui for racing (in good ui you can click buttons to turn things on and off and and drag them with mouse to good position), how easy it is to add and remove mods, how much of all this can be done from the game without needing addon tools.

It is somewhat sad to read that there are people who think rf2 ui problems are just about the colors and button layouts. It goes far deeper than that and while I am pessimistic about how much s397 can actually improve it while keeping old stuff compatible I am also happy that the mountain of work is being done. Considering how long it has taken and is taking is proof how flawed the system was but also proof that s397 are willing to do the work on the difficult stuff as well.

I am a computer programmer with 50+ years developing software so I don't underestimate the work required to produce a complex UI. I am amazed by the fantastic efforts of ALL sim developers to bring me such enjoyment at a ridiculously low price. I agree that s397 are doing difficult tricky work. All I was saying is that I can cope with out of date UI because my focus is on the driving and the immersion that I get from the driving. That is why the UI is secondary for me. I don't care about new tracks or new cars either because there are so many freely available from modders. I want s397s efforts to go into improving graphics and performance and immersion. I am just stating my point of view. I am not criticizing s397's efforts. I am lobbying for where I would like the efforts to be directed.

 

[Rastas]

Whatever the nature of the S397 content is, you can rest assured it will be buggy and poorly optimized.

Bla bla bla,more nonsense talk,keep going the EXCELENT JOB S397

 

[roadyroad]

I understand S397 needs to earn money from rFactor2 (as I assume many sales had been made before they got in the train), selling DLCs is something they have to do to pay their bills and promote rFactor2. Maybe giving the possibility to buy rFactor2 at a lower price when you buy a DLC (a bundle then) would help. Recently they just published 2 great 70s F1 cars for FREE. So yes, there is paid content, but they still GIVE content for all the users. That something we should not forget before complaining about the price of the DLCs, which sales helped to finance the free content.

There is only one thing that I think they should do to give rFactor2 much more quality content : helping all the modders, whose mods have been available for months or years in the Steam Workshop, to update them as a lot of them are outdated in terms of physics or graphics. Having all these cars and tracks perfectly integrated would be amazing and would give rFactor2 much more appeal, without having to invest in licenses to develop DLCs.

And this would give a positive sign to the modding community. At the end of the day Rfactor2's economic model is based on the modding possibilities it offers. I am still surprised that Assetto Corsa, which can't do half of what rFactor2 does, has a huge active modding community, and without the Steam workshop, and rFactor2 seems to have a dying modding community.

Just imagine if all the mods and tracks on the Workshop had the 2018 rFactor2 quality, fully operating in rainy conditions. With some good optimisation it would be perfect (the other crucial thing rFactor2 needs imo, faster loading times firstly!!!). I may be wrong, but a product which by nature is fully open to third party content should be supported by an organisation helping the third parties to complete their projects, it's kind of... logical. They may already do it, but I would prefer to read a roadmap with all the coming updated or new mods (Steam Workshop makes that easy) than a roadmap about the future annoucements (oh great, you're annoucing you're going to annouce something, how amazing, what a hype...) or about a neverending UI development. For sure, I assume licensing issues would raise, so the communication would have to be done with cautious, but at the end there is not any problem with the Steam Workshop which presents many mods fully integrated in the rFactor2 page...

 

[UnixRoot]

Would it be wildly crazy to imagine a Nürburgring DLC track announcement, from the Nürburgring Expo! ??

That's exactly what I'm hoping for. A Nordschleife DLC would bring them good money, I think.

 

[RichardHessels]

Laser scanned Nordschleife pleeaase! I only drive Nordschleife all day, with iconic cars like 962C, Lotus 49, 787B etc, its really all I need

Been driving on a laserscanned Nordschleife for years already on rF2 (and rF1).

 

[UnixRoot]

Now you got my attention. I know the ripped version with bad roadmesh for RF2 but I have never seen a laser scanned Ring for RF1.

 

[Kenny Paton]

Been driving on a laserscanned Nordschleife for years already on rF2 (and rF1).

Now you got my attention. I know the ripped version with bad roadmesh for RF2 but I have never seen a laser scanned Ring for RF1.

 

[UnixRoot]

Sir, yes sir

 

[Nigel Mansell]

That's exactly what I'm hoping for. A Nordschleife DLC would bring them good money, I think.

You set a time, and I'll try and match it lol...

 

[ricerracer]

better optomisation for VR please

 

[davehenrie]

The last update included a VR performance improvement, I don't know how much more is in that engine.

 

[Boby Kim]

Or as it it really known, How else can we milk our clients. WTG studio 397 cash cow.
BTW I ended up buying sebring,. Not that great really....... Modders did a pretty good job.

Simbin will give you exactly what you want with GTR3. Lucky you