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!

 

[Billy Pilgrim]

what does this partnrrship mean in terms of budget and personnel? Is it like a threefold / xfold increase in team size?

 

[Nick Hill]

What are the chances we see a full "Road to Indy" career ladder? I would be all over that.

F2000 > Pro Mazda > Indy Lights > IndyCar

Plus all the tracks, of course.

 

[Chris]

144 is the number folks

How gross...

 

[DaVeX↯]

What are the chances we see a full "Road to Indy" career ladder? I would be all over that.

F2000 > Pro Mazda > Indy Lights > IndyCar

Plus all the tracks, of course.

This plus a WEC or IMSA (weathertech, continental, mazda calendar and tracks) career mode...

 

[paracletus]

great new to develop dx11. Actually, don't know what it is, but i guess it'll result in better graphic.
stylin new logo.

 

[Deleted member 130869]

great new to develop dx11. Actually, don't know what it is, but i guess it'll result in better graphic.
stylin new logo.

and @Marcel Offermans

This is a good post on the development. More info than most of the stuff we've written here too:

I wish they would go for Vulkan instead of DX11, a technology that is already out of date and that current gpus are no longer being optimised for.

At least with Vulkan you aren't tied to Windows 10 or even the Windows platform either (although unless something can do something about FFB on linux then i suppose that doesn't help - unless they already did and i just don't know).

Seriously though, Vulkan is way better than DX12.

In fact, with a lot of things, MS are trying to basically push developers away from DirectInput support in favour of XInput which is a far worse input library and would basically be disastrous for wheels. They already did this with gamepads, to pc gaming's detriment and now they are trying with wheels - look at how Forza on pc has a specific hardcoded list of wheels it supports, rather than just any DirectInput device.



I really hope that the 60s GP content is developed to completion with all the other teams, as Tim spoke about in the interview. I know he was just using it as an example, but it's something i've been on about for ages. Different cars in a field really add great depth and interest. There is a reason people still play GPL.
And they need to finish off a season's worth of tracks too, then I can start telling people over in GPL land that there is something they can finally gravitate towards. I mean they have 3 already, it is a good start, however a full season's worth is necessary as well as all the other little things that complete the experience.

None of the sims out there really focus on historical content (especially circuits) and this is where RF2 could really shine and differentiate itself from the competition. If it did one series of 60s racing with tracks to go along with it and all the little details necessary for a polished product, then it could really be something i could see people getting on board with.

Look at it this way - i knew nothing about historical racing before i played GPL, and since i played it it made me realise just how much circuits have been desecrated. It really showed me how much more enjoyable racing can be.
And there are many other people who could experience this given the chance. It just needs the commitment and enthusiasm behind it, and then people to evangelise it and get the mainstream press talking about it etc.

I mean a large part of pCars and AC's success is that they have touted themselves to the mainstream gaming media. In fact, especially pCars.
If RFactor 2 built something like this and built up enough interest in this way then they could get a lot more interest. Most people won't even know of it as it has been completely ignored by mainstream gaming media, unlike other sims.

Sorry for the long post, but I really feel there is an untapped part of our market for a polished historic sim and that with the right advertisement and support from the community and press it could do a lot better than people might dismiss it as. Of course it doesn't have the fashion of an F1 / GT3 game, but it has the soul and interesting content that those don't, and something like that would slowly spread through word of mouth.

 

[DaVeX↯]

As far as I know Vulkan is less (if none) cpu intensive than DX11...

 

[MarcG]

Vulkan may well be the future but right now it's not quite there yet from what I've read (example: http://arstechnica.co.uk/gaming/201...or-amd-and-nvidia-but-theres-work-to-be-done/), it may well be that Studio397 chose DX11 as it's more "accepted" currently and easier for them to code with as they know it already perhaps. They may well have plans for Vulkan support in the future *if* they want to tackle the console market for example, but f they keep RF2 Windows only then there's not really much point right now I don't think.

A long with the other areas needed for RF2 improvement I'd put Vulkan support in the Low Priority category, don't get me wrong it looks very interesting but not needed just yet.

 

[Will Mazeo]

I too want Vulkan but would not choose it now if I owned a gaming company (except if AMD/Valve gave me a very fat sponsorship check to use it).
I guess some guys here would go bankrupt pretty fast if they owned a studio

 

[Deleted member 130869]

@Marcel Offermans :

Sorry for tagging you yet again on another stream of thought, but would you consider having a virtual sit-down with kloche, mad_king, yoss, michael peters, ales, alex coutie, etc, to find out the main aspects of support needed by these modders to then be able to provide assistance that wasn't previously there? I, for one, clamor for .psd templates that seem to be more of a pain than pulling teeth in the 19th century.

 

[David Dominguez]

I guess some guys here would go bankrupt pretty fast if they owned a studio

Totally.

 

[oneWonders]

There's no need to be extremely demeaning Will and David.

What I am saying is that there is very little point in spending all the resources in moving to DX11 in comparison to moving to something which will future proof and provide way more benefit.

DX11 is still heavily CPU bottlenecked, something that Vulkan / DX12 help a lot with. Of course DX 11 would help with speed improvements on effects that have to be implemented in a slower way in DX9, but I don't feel that is one of the areas that RF2 has great issues anyway.
The graphics engine seems rather unoptimised with the level of performance you get compared to the hardware that people are running.

So what i am saying is, it is better to jump straight from DX9 to Vulkan rather than DX 11 where the benefits are marginal at best. What i did not say is that they have to do it immediately.

If they implement DX 11, then either they will decide that there is no point in going further than that, or it will push Vulkan back into the far future.

Certainly, it is vital important to choose Vulkan over DX12, not only due to market penetration but it also performs better and gives you more flexibility in the future, not being forced into corners by MS.

I would wait a while for Vulkan to mature and then move to it - although start experimenting with it immediately in order to get an understanding and be ready to go.

Another huge benefit of Vulkan / DX12 is that it means that proper multi-gpu support is actually possible. This is something that RF2 has never had. In DX11 (and 9) this is something that relies greatly on GPU manufacturers working closely with developers as well as only working if the graphics engine has been designed in specific ways (which from the results so far i would suggest RF2s hasn't).

The new apis allow far better control of multi-gpu setups that give the developers a lot more control rather relying on GPU manufacturers providing support in drivers. They allow each gpu to render different sections of the screen simultaneous and should provide less display (therefore input) lag than AFR.

Anyone who has tried RF2 with a multi-gpu setup will realise the problems it has. Particularly if you try running it on a multi-screen setup, which is an area where you may actually need multi-gpus in order to reach desired performance.
For those who haven't, when i last tried RF2 with SLI + Surround and Crossfire + Eyefinity, the microstuter was atrocious and you basically had to just turn off the other cards and run on a single GPU.

Like it or not, we will see a shift to multi-gpu rendering in years to come. The new consoles will drive this, being multi-gpu setups themselves. Hopefully this should encourage developers to get their heads around coding for such setups and we can get to a point where they are actually usable.
Certainly, Vulkan / DX12 provide a great power / control to the developer and means to help with this - something that cannot be done with DX11.

As a consumer though, I won't be buying a multi-gpu setup until the industry has got over these problems. It has the potential to eventually be a much cheaper way of increasing a PC's graphical performance, but the support is really bad atm and hopefully the new console architectures and Vulkan / DX12 will help change this.

Thanks

 

[Deleted member 130869]

People didn't know Luminis existed until two months ago. Then five days ago they learned how expansive the company actually is. So to claim such tech company wouldn't have the capacity to implement such library is borderline disrespectful. Short, near and long term benefits so easily disregarded.

 

[John-Eric Saxén]

People didn't know Luminis existed until two months ago. Then five days ago they learned how expansive the company actually is. So to claim such tech company wouldn't have the capacity to implement such library is borderline disrespectful. Short, near and long term benefits so easily disregarded.

They are a big company compared to ISI, sure, but Luminis is primarily oriented towards cloud services. If they have no prior experience with 3D graphics APIs (which is very possible), then they will need to train a developer to learn these libraries, which takes time. The screenshot we saw from rF2 running VR was actually an ISI employee:

TW: Well I posted a picture today of VR running on a screen. That's actually Joe from ISI who's doing that work for Studio 397 right now. Currently we are looking to implement for Q1 2017 as at this early stage work has already started on the project.

 

[Kevin Knorpp]

Some cleaning up does wonders (rush job):

This is what the logo looks like through the Rift. Get it?

 

[Marcel Offermans]

@Marcel Offermans :

Sorry for tagging you yet again on another stream of thought, but would you consider having a virtual sit-down with kloche, mad_king, yoss, michael peters, ales, alex coutie, etc, to find out the main aspects of support needed by these modders to then be able to provide assistance that wasn't previously there? I, for one, clamor for .psd templates that seem to be more of a pain than pulling teeth in the 19th century.

We are talking to all modders (also the ones you mention specifically here) about their feedback towards rFactor 2. To be honest, the format of PSD templates being such a pain to people is new to me. What is the biggest problem you have with them? Is it the UV mapping of the 3D car onto a 2D texture? That is a complex process and always a tradeoff between accuracy (making sure each pixel distorts as little as possible) and ease of use (having reasonably large surfaces you can paint at once without too many seams). Are you saying modders should move more into the "ease of use" direction here? Or something else? Please elaborate.

 

[Juergen]

...What is the biggest problem you have with them? Is it the UV mapping of the 3D car onto a 2D texture? That is a complex process and always a tradeoff between accuracy (making sure each pixel distorts as little as possible) and ease of use (having reasonably large surfaces you can paint at once without too many seams).

Sometimes it is really a pain to make an accurate car custom skin, because of (IMHO) wrong positioned parts...

...Are you saying modders should move more into the "ease of use" direction here?...

ISI templates have the same problems, at least a lot of them.

 

[Dan Costa]

A couple of things we have to get straight in this topic.


1- You cannot, never, understate/dismiss the abysmal difference between 60 and 144hz even if you think you are fine with 60. Not much of an argument about this one unless you have both and still deny the impact.


2- You can never fully satisfy a fan. They give us DX11 and we say "better than nothing!". However, dismissing vulkan is a mistake (all windows+mac+linux with one engine which also happens to be the fastest one. And look at that customer base, right?)


3- DX11 knowledge-base is enormous and as a result = cheap. Vulkan and DX12 are not cheap, yet.



Its all about investment/returns. Always.


I for one say: bring it on and I thank you for it!
cheers

 

[Gijs van Elderen]

are you saying modders should move more into the "ease of use" direction here?

gJED isn't finished yet. Modders still need to use 3ds Max 2012 or older. 3ds Max 2012 or older isn't available any more. Even if you have the money.

If UV maping is a problem for them in Max 2012, they could move into the "easy of use" direction.

I do believe this is Tuttles desk. He is using 3ds Max 2017... I hope he will be using gJED too.

 

[John-Eric Saxén]

gJED isn't finished yet. Modders still need to use 3ds Max 2012 or older. 3ds Max 2012 or older isn't available any more. Even if you have the money.

This. You still can't do start light animations and many other things in gJED, so those who want to build a track from scratch are still stuck with ISI 3ds Max exporters, which only are compatible with 2012 or older. 3ds 2012 crashes often on Win 10, so it's a pain no matter which approach you take to build a track. These modding tools need to be developed more constantly and more feedback taken from the community. Currently they are left in the same state as many other rF2 features, unfinished.