rFactor 2 Moving to DX11 - New Company Partnership Announced

[Paul Jeffrey]

With the build up to this weekend’s Sim Racing Expo, Image Space Incorporated have announced a strategic partnership with the Dutch software group Luminis. The new alliance has been created to help increase development in rFactor 2, including a number of exceptionally exciting announcements in relation to the sim.

The partnership will be brought together into a new company: Studio 397. Studio 397 will have its headquarters in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands and will operate under the leadership of Marcel Offermans, a fellow sim racer and the man responsible for bringing both rFactor and rFactor 2 to the Steam platform.

Gjon Camaj, Vice President of Image Space Incorporated:

“We at ISI are very pleased to have found a partner that shares our enthusiasm and vision for the continued growth of rFactor 2. We look forward to working with Luminis to expand the reach of rFactor 2 both in Europe and beyond. After having worked with Luminis for some time and seeing their passion for motorsport simulation, this partnership was a natural next step. By leveraging each of our company’s individual strengths, we will be better able to serve our current customers and further expand our reach into the world of motorsports”.​

Marcel Offermans, Luminis Fellow and Managing Director of Studio 397:

“I’m really excited by the opportunities that our partnership with ISI offers; rFactor 2 represents the best of breed, stable simulator platform in the industry. Online simracing has been my longtime personal passion, so the opportunity to combine my passion with my business feels like a great privilege. By infusing the platform with some of our own technology we see great opportunities to accelerate development in general and specifically in the areas of competitions and training”.​

The new partnership have released an ambitious roadmap for rFactor 2’s further development including the stated plans to move over to a DX11 compatible graphics engine, including VR support for both Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. With the move to DX11, Studio 397 have committed to bringing performance improvements for high end video card users as well as maintaining compatibility with current content.

Other highlights from the announcement include a proposed new HTML based front end interface and Matchmaker support, in game UI updates and a promise to make more frequent car and track releases, working on racing cars and series as well as "popular and challenging" tracks. The new partnership also promises to work more closely with the community to support development of free and paid mod releases...

Oh, and the game has a new logo too....


All in all, this is fantastic news for rF2 and the sim racing community. I can hardly wait.

Check our rFactor 2 sub forum for news, discussions, mods, club and league races and everything in between!

What do you think of the announcement? Excited about DX11, VR support, new content? Let us know in the comments section below!

 

[Szymon Olizarowicz]

Indeed. And the "few" is this case is the win10 users. Less using that than the prev. Versions.

@Marcel Offermans does this mean the endurance simracingteam will switch to rF2 for Holland? ;P

That's precisely the problem. rfactor 2's audience is rather niche to begin with, if even half of those people don't have Win10 (and it could be a lot more than that), then moving to dx12 would be disasterous regardless of how much hype this new development creates. I see everyone saying 'there's no reason not to upgrade to Win10' and completely ignoring the fact that for 90% of users there's no bloody reason to do the upgrade in the first place.

 

[GTAce]

DX12 isn't worth it anyway, yet. A lot of cards might even perform worse with it. I use W10 and like it, but there's no huge benefit right now.

 

[John-Eric Saxén]

"Now hold on to your seats. Studio397 rolled out an ambitious roadmap for rFactor 2. They are planning to equip rFactor 2 with a new DX11 based graphics engine including VR support. Furthermore, they will revamp the user interface and try to increase the frequency of new car and track releases. Last but not least, Studio397 will try to recruit new strategic partners to secure the long-term development of the platform. "

So we have a "planning" and 2X"try"...
Also "new" engine, which is a good thing.

No solid things to show yet. More info about engine needed. VR screen posted is a good start.

Well assuming that the deal took place fairly recently, they can hardly tell us anything more concrete than what they are planning to do at this stage. Also assuming that a considerable part of the 150 Luminis developers get involved with rF2 now, I eat my hat if Reiza releases anything DX11/DX12 before this. The problem with Reiza and ISI is that they are very small teams, we are talking about a couple of coders plus the content artists, so this is exactly what rF2 needed.

 

[tpw]

I often wondered how amazing rF2 would be if it had some decent manpower and resources behind it, guess now I'm going to find out!

 

[Jim Liak]

Well assuming that the deal took place fairly recently, they can hardly tell us anything more concrete than what they are planning to do at this stage. Also assuming that a considerable part of the 150 Luminis developers get involved with rF2 now, I eat my hat if Reiza releases anything DX11/DX12 before this. The problem with Reiza and ISI is that they are very small teams, we are talking about a couple of coders plus the content artists, so this is exactly what rF2 needed.

On their page I see also a cooperation with reiza https://www.luminis.eu/blog/automobilista-motorsports-simulator-v1-0-released/

Also it is unknown how many of those 150 people will work for rf2.
Keep that hat away.

Studio 397 will be at Netherlands with Dutch guy as headman. So not ISI in charge anymore.

 

[JeffL]

So not ISI in charge anymore.

Is that a statement of knowledge or a guess?

 

[Richard Eriksson]

I wonder... Is it possible that in between the lines we may read rF2 going console? Some of the signs are there... Specialized devs, DX11 render stack, happens after success for AC on consoles.

Because for the small simulation crowd on PC i see no benefit at all in focusing on DX11. As evidenced by RaceRoom DX9 is still very much good enough, in delivering an immersive and beautiful experience. Also, DX11 brings its own problems, as my experience working with it is that it is VERY reliant on post-processing, meaning multi-pass rendering, that give some nice effects but also less sharpness (see AC jaggies and fuzz) as well as sync issues. And for a crowd that is mostly in it for the accuracy of the simulation, not the number of hollywood-movie post-processing buzzwords, i don't see DX11 bringing any real render efficiency.

If anything, some fundamental flaws in the underlying core should be fixed first, such as correctly multi-threading the physics and AI as well as doing something about some of the (few) physics bugs.

So to me DX11 for the PC rF2 is a waste of time and money. Instead improve content, license real world series with full grids. Those things will be more important to the target group than overexaggerated sheen on bumpers and artificial motion blur. I mean, even if you may entice a few more "casual" race players at first, they will then turn away again after experiencing the grueling nature of a full simulation like rF2.

Unless... Like i said, they are sneakily looking at consoles. Because then a shift to DX11 and cross platform toolchaining becomes logical.

 

[Stenne]

Great news! rF2 is my favourite sim so I'm really excited and is looking forward to the outlined developement

 

[stefaandk]

Gefeliciteerd. RF2 always looked dated but that isn't its biggest problem, I just find it to be the worst performing sim of them all when it comes to framerate. So the trade off you would expect for somewhat dated visuals would be that it runs at a high fps, the fact that it just doesn't even on modern hardware only added insult to injury, I sincerely hope DX11 if anything will help on that front. But I fear that the DX version may not be root cause there as Automobilista looks still great even with DX9 and I'll pick that over RF2 and the first reason is that I can run pretty much steadily at 144 and that's with a huge amount of forced AA even, not a jaggie in sight. Using the same level of AA in RF2 and I'm dropping down to the 20's FPS wise, I never really understood where it bottlenecks so badly.

And yes also would love to see some AI championship, the AI quality is fine and using log analyzer to run an offline championship works but having to jump through all those hoops to setup a championship with consistent drivers remains cumbersome.

Not wanting to whinge here really, I think this can only be a positive thing for RF2 going forward, give it a full makeover and call it RF3 for all I care but I hope this will finally fix some of those shortcomings from otherwise a great product.

 

[Szymon Olizarowicz]

Because for the small simulation crowd on PC i see no benefit at all in focusing on DX11.

Well, I for one hope for improved FPS. It's the main reason people requested this transition in the first place. In the modern environment dx9 is not very efficient at all and the move to more efficient technology could help save the frame rates. Furthermore, it should make it easier to implement VR, especially if ISI want to have dedicated Oculus Rift support instead of relying on SteamVR compatibility.

So to me DX11 for the PC rF2 is a waste of time and money. Instead improve content, license real world series with full grids. Those things will be more important to the target group than overexaggerated sheen on bumpers and artificial motion blur. I mean, even if you may entice a few more "casual" race players at first, they will then turn away again after experiencing the grueling nature of a full simulation like rF2.

I sincerely doubt the tech improvements were motivated by the desire to add some artificial flavour to the graphics. It's more like coming to realisation that instead of adding new paint and fixes to your 20 year old Golf it makes more sense to buy a 10 year old one.

Unless... Like i said, they are sneakily looking at consoles. Because then a shift to DX11 and cross platform toolchaining becomes logical.

If there's anything in this announcement that would suggest a move to consoles it would be matchmaking. As of now we have no details how it would function, but if the mainstream 'gaming' definition of matchmaking is applied here, then it starts to make sense. PC crowd, especially with rf2's population numbers, has no use for such feature at all.

 

[Stereo]

I just ask to please forego the need to be connected to a network at all times - as my understanding of moving to an iRacing-like browser launcher.

I would think "html-based" means like AC's launcher (which is html rendered by the Chrome engine), not necessarily a browser.

 

[Deleted member 130869]

It's what I'm hoping. Also that it scales adequately to monitor resolution like 1440p and up.

@Marcel Offermans, does this impact any pre-existing licenses like Toleman, Eagle, the couple of group c cars, and 1995 Reynard Honda so they can eventually be developed or will there be ramifications?

 

[Terry Rock]

Things were very quiet on the Rf2 side for a while...wonder how long this was in the works.
I also wonder how long it'll be before we see movement from the partnership.
I don't care which version of DX it is....I just want to see it move forward.

 

[Alex Townsend]

Seems like they wanna do dlc. So what will happen to the lifetime users?

I think free and paid DLC hopefully means that the lifetime users get free whereas the base or light users pay?
Or maybe it's just that being a lifetime user only referred to the online aspect and DLC was never even a consideration?
Not sure but would be good to get some info on this.

 

[Jim Liak]

Is that a statement of knowledge or a guess?

I read https://www.luminis.eu/blog/rfactor-2-gets-boost-isi-announce-partnership-luminis/

"The partnership will be brought into a new company: Studio 397."

"Studio 397 will have its headquarters in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands and will operate under the leadership of Marcel Offermans."

The way I see it : ISI is sold to Luminis . We have a new company, Studio 397 which will have its headquarters in in Netherlands and will operate under the leadership of Marcel Offermans.

Correct me if I am wrong. Obviously a guess.

 

[TheGrunt]

The way I see it : ISI is sold to Luminis . We have a new company, Studio 397 which will have its headquarters in in Netherlands and will operate under the leadership of Marcel Offermans.

Correct me if I am wrong. Obviously a guess.

I don't think it is that way. Studio 397 is a new company where both parties, that ISI is and Luminis, brought assetts in. That means that both companies own Studio 397. Is it split fifty-fifty? Who knows.

But if Luminis would've bought ISI this would be an aquisition, not partnership.

 

[ls13coco]

Just had a nice long interview with ISI Some very interesting answers and a couple of juicy things to share

Working on typing it up and should get it on the site reasonably soon...

Watch this space

Patience sure is a virtue...

 

[Boby Kim]

Ah...graphics. A beautiful thing when i open Pcars and do a few laps in practice. Even better when i show off friends about Pcars. But when i race, graphics going straight out of the window. The only thing that is left are the physics and personally rF2 has the best.
A shiver ran through my spine when i read @Ricard Eriksson post. Lets hope rF2 will always be exclusive for PC.

 

[Jokeri]

Gefeliciteerd. RF2 always looked dated but that isn't its biggest problem, I just find it to be the worst performing sim of them all when it comes to framerate. So the trade off you would expect for somewhat dated visuals would be that it runs at a high fps, the fact that it just doesn't even on modern hardware only added insult to injury, I sincerely hope DX11 if anything will help on that front. But I fear that the DX version may not be root cause there as Automobilista looks still great even with DX9 and I'll pick that over RF2 and the first reason is that I can run pretty much steadily at 144 and that's with a huge amount of forced AA even, not a jaggie in sight. Using the same level of AA in RF2 and I'm dropping down to the 20's FPS wise, I never really understood where it bottlenecks so badly.

And yes also would love to see some AI championship, the AI quality is fine and using log analyzer to run an offline championship works but having to jump through all those hoops to setup a championship with consistent drivers remains cumbersome.

Not wanting to whinge here really, I think this can only be a positive thing for RF2 going forward, give it a full makeover and call it RF3 for all I care but I hope this will finally fix some of those shortcomings from otherwise a great product.

That is the tradeoff of having good tyre model and fast physics engine, but you are probably right optimization is always a good thing.

 

[TheGrunt]

That is the tradeoff of having good tyre model and fast physics engine, but you are probably right optimization is always a good thing.

The problem isn't the physics engine, it is a breeze for every modern gaming PC. Problem is a graphics engine with huge CPU overhead. I hope that new DX11 renderer fixes this somewhat.