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rFactor2 [Updates]


mad_dog

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Δεν ξέρω, για τον άλλο μήνα τα βλέπω γιατί οι φωτο είναι με τα νέα shaders-materials, οπότε θα τα δώσουν μαζί με το update γραφικών λογικά.

Επίσης περιμένουμε να ανακοινώσουν τα άλλα 2 αμάξια του DLC.

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Introducing the GT3 Challengers pack, featuring some of the world’s most desirable GT cars, the McLaren 720S GT3, the Audi R8 LMS GT3, Porsche 911 GT3 R, the BMW M6 GT3 and finally the Aston Martin Vantage GT3 2019.
And the best bit about this pack? It will be available TOMORROW!

This brings our GT field to a stunning 13 cars including the Endurance Pack and first GT3 Pack!
The GT3 Challengers pack will initially have four of the five cars, with the Aston Martin Vantage GT3 joining the field as soon as we have approval.
Be the first to try these incredible cars tomorrow on Steam!

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Welcome to the last roadmap update of the year! We decided to end the year with a bang, with a new car pack and the first iteration of our updated material system being released real soon now. We have a lot to share, so I’m afraid this roadmap grew a bit bigger than it normally would. So let’s get started!

Looking Back

December is always a month where we look back at the year. We started the year having just announced the DX11 graphics engine as the new default and in January we introduced a brand new trailer. A lot has happened since.

In the first quarter of the year, we announced that we would start our first laser scanned track, Sebring. We also continued to work on Zandvoort and signed a license with Portland. A lot of time was spent on improving performance of the DX11 engine, resulting in build 1110 that brought significant improvements as well as a brand new HUD and a few other fixes. We also released the first third-party paid content with KartSim, featuring three tracks and two karts. Finally we released the liveries of the GT3 paint competition as an update to the existing pack.

 

In the second quarter we kicked off with the Luminis DevCon, a developer oriented conference where we showcased rFactor 2 along many other things our parent company worked on. A few weeks after we were present at the Jumbo Racing Days in Zandvoort, where we collaborated with the KNAF, SRVN and CitySimRacing to show a broad audience how exciting simracing is. After teasing the five cars earlier, we also released the Endurance Pack, featuring a few new code features as well, such as position lights and in-car TC and ABS support. Soon after we updated our GT3 pack with those features too. To please the fans of historic content, we released both the Brabham BT44B and March 761 and we announced a third car from the same era, the McLaren M23. Improvements were also done to our tTool for modders. And we started doing community nights!

The third quarter kicked off with our presence at Chinajoy followed by the SimRacing Expo, where we announced and released three brand new McLaren historic race cars, the previously announced M23, the MP4/8 and the MP4/13. All of those were going to be used in the rFactor 2 qualifiers for the McLaren Shadow competition. Historic fans could also enjoy a big update to Longford, and we released Sebring, marking a new milestone in accuracy and attention to detail. A new build and demo was released alongside updates of the GT3 and Endurance pack, leveraging feedback we got from our visit to Duqueine Engineering, and we announced the second third-party pack from Reiza Studios, which incidentally should be out early 2019. We also for the first time showed a glimpse of the new material system, and we announced that we obtained a license to the Nurburgring, which we intend to release at the end of Q1 next year. Also fully laser scanned of course.

 

The fourth quarter of the year started with the release of Botniaring, a local and quite exciting track. Build 1112 was released with enhanced wheel support, and we announced no less than six cars to be featured in the upcoming Tatuus pack next year. We also started teasing upcoming GT3 cars, as well as more details about our new material system. Ongoing work also includes improved modding tools. And of course we could finally tell the world we had been working with Amazon Games on The Grand Tour Game that allows you to “play the show”, to be released in a few weeks from now!

The year in statistics: We released a total of three major code updates, a number of tracks and no less than fourteen new cars.

Competition

As we announced in November´s roadmap our competition system is now moving into a more serious testing. During the holidays we will host a hotlap competition each day, starting off with the two GT3 packs on Zandvoort on December 26th. A new hotlap competition will be activated every day at midnight (CET) until New Years. In January we will start hosting daily races. We have 2 focus points. One is to get the community racing and second is to gather valuable data from our competition system. While we are still merging this system into our new UI, we still need to get data on backend and performance. Remember this is early access, so there might be alterations during the competitions – such as a restart if needed. However our initial tests have worked out great and we now feel we should include each and everyone of you. We´ve currently set a time slot of 17:00-21:00 as our event time, however once our competition is building obviously other timezones should be favoured as well. Are you ready? speaking of ready…

 

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GT3 Challengers Launch Stream

As mentioned elsewhere you might have seen the upcoming DLC with 5 new GT3 cars, the pack is being presented live and with the chance to WIN and to RACE it live as well. Tomorrow at 19:00 CET, Rene and Marcel will talk you through the new Material system and cars. Then we will switch over to Jimmi who is broadcasting 2 races. First race will be YouTuber´s only on Sebring – then after this race we will share the competition password. Then it will be open until the split is full. 2nd race is on Mores, the “mini-championship” winner will get 10 GT3 Challengers pack DLC keys to give away to their community. Remember you can still enter our giveaway here: https://gleam.io/INIxQ/rfactor-2-christmas-giveaway-2018

 

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Material System

During the Sim Racing Expo last September we showed the very first preview shots of the material system we have been working on for the last half year or so. In the last roadmap of the year, we want to take the opportunity to look back at the things we implemented for this system, as well as look ahead at its incremental release over the next couple of months.

Let’s first take a step back at the challenge we had when we started, so you better understand why we made the changes we did. When we took over the development of rFactor 2 a little over two years ago now, we wanted to make sure we upgraded the graphics engine and future proof it, all without sacrificing backwards compatibility. Our first steps therefore were to develop a DX11 based engine that rendered exactly the same as the old DX9 one. This then allowed us two things. First of all we could implement VR support and second of all we could start using more modern techniques such as using a post processing library. It also enabled us to add proper support for rain, with raindrops that ran across the car bodies and windscreen and proper wipers to clear you windscreen again. We also used the opportunity to implement puddle maps for the tracks and linked them to our realroad system so puddles would show up in locations where there was water according to your dynamic realroad system. At his point we also made DX11 the default and removed support for the DX9 engine subsequent builds.

However, it did not fix one core aspect of the graphics engine, namely support for Physically Based Rendering, a technique that has become the de facto standard in the industry.

What is PBR? – some of you may ask. Well Physically Based Rendering has become the buzz word in the games industry, to encapsulate a whole new way of doing art. It demands big changes to how art is produced but the benefits are certainly worthwhile as it delivers much more consistent and predictable results. In the past artists were only able to create textures that looked good in specific conditions and would not behave naturally as the lighting changed. When broken down this new pipeline is actually comprised of two parts, PBR concentrates on light conservation ensuring that a surface can not reflect more light than it receives – this helps to ensure that the balance between specular and diffuse reflections are always correct. The next key part is Image Based Lighting. This helps ensure assets react to the surrounding environment more naturally, meaning that all different surfaces can be lit by the environment correctly – all the way from mirror reflections down to the roughest matte rock surface. All this combined results in a pipeline that is much more intuitive for artists to produce realistic results, especially with a range of industry standard values for different materials. There are two different types of pipeline implementation out there: Metallic/Roughness and Glossiness/Smoothness. Our implementation is very similar to Metallic/Roughness.

 

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Implementing this was challenging for us for several reasons.

First of all, like with everything we did, we needed to stay compatible. What made this hard is that we knew there were some fundamental issues with our lighting model that prevented us from properly introducing PBR and getting the desired results. Therefore we first needed to go deeper and address the lighting model. A year ago we took the first step in that direction when we introduced “Image-Based Lighting for Ambient”, improving how ambient light got rendered on tracks and introducing ambient probes that could be strategically placed to create the right atmosphere.

The next step was to implement a convolved cubemap specular as part of our IBL system, which was an important basis for starting work on new materials. The material system we developed allows us to use unique and specialized parameters for each shader instead of relying on standard settings. The first materials we worked on were the PBR car paint shader with support for clear coats that fully used the IBL system we described above and allows a car body to be made of up to 6 different materials and a generic PBR shader that can be used to emulate a broad range of materials and covers a lot of things you see on a track. We have worked hard to ensure that the generic shader matches game industry standards, as well as being extremely flexible to be used on the majority of objects. Terrain and Road surfaces are obviously something that need more specific solutions though. Prototyping work there has already started and we are looking to give them a complete overhaul too.

 

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This is where we are now. We are far from done, both in terms of developing the system and in terms of adapting existing content, but we decided to not try and do an “all in one, big bang release” but instead choose a more phased approach that we choose more often when making big changes.

We anticipate this phase to take a couple of months, during which we will transition things step by step. This also means the first release, that we will release really soon now, has a few minor known issues and the overall look of the game will improve. That said, the results of the materials we have developed so far were encouraging enough for us to decide to apply them to the new cars we are building.

Let’s first discuss some of the known issues. Obviously one is that we have not converted most content yet, which means that many of the cars and tracks you will be using now are more or less still looking the same. Another known issue is that our post effects are not fine-tuned yet to the new materials. That means in some conditions they produce unbalanced results, like too much glare. We are currently comparing our output to that of industry standard ray tracing solutions to make sure our output matches such solutions and when we are happy with that we’ll re-calibrate the post effects to work with realistic light intensities from things like headlights and solar specular. If it bothers you, we recommend you turn those effects down a notch or two for the moment.

So… Where do we go from here?

 

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Looking Ahead

The first release of the new cars will not yet include instructions on how to paint them using the new materials. Therefore they will also not come with a template. We intend to provide extended documentation as well as templates in an update we plan in January. That is also the month we start updating other content and help our modding community do the same. We are polishing the workflows for defining materials, providing a wide selection of materials that can be consistently used on cars and tracks. Our next steps will be to continue development of a few very specific materials for things like realroad, curbs, grass and possibly a few other things, such as an improved system for rendering clouds. Our goal is to have materials on all major pieces of content by the end of the first quarter and to do smaller tweaks in the second quarter, making the whole system more robust and possibly further optimizing certain aspects of it.

Talking about tooling, we will also release our Max plugins for up to date versions, and we are looking at other types of tools too that should help modders and ourselves to create new content. And of course there are many other topics we should update you on, such as the competition system and UI. They are probably taking a bit longer than we all expected, but I’m confident that we will see them materialize in 2019, and since this update is already almost the size of a book, I propose we save some of that for the next edition. If you’re still reading at this point, we would like to wish you and your loved ones a great holiday and all the best for the future on behalf of everybody in and around Studio 397!

 

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  • 1 month later...

One month into the start of a new year saw a lot of changes at Studio 397. First of all we welcomed a handful of new colleagues, most of which with long track records in content production, to further extend the Studio’s capabilities to create content. Then, halfway through January, we could finally tell the world about the project we had been secretly working on for the last year and a half. We have licensed our physics engine and provided a helping hand to Amazon Game Studios in creating The Grand Tour Game to accompany the third season of the series that airs on Amazon Prime. Released on consoles, like the show, this is a fun game you can easily pick up with your friends. As far as we know it’s the first time a game releases in sync with a television series, adding weekly content as new episodes air and closely following the antics of the show.

Let’s also look at some of the work in progress, just to give you an update on how things are going. Our competition system and new UI are the highest priority things our developers are working on right now. Step by step we will be expanding the competition system and testing more parts of it in public, and we’re currently integrating it into our new UI to ensure it is both easy to find and join competitions. Expect us to reveal more towards the end of the first quarter of this year.

Then let’s look at some of the content that is in progress, starting with the Tatuus cars. Physics wise the cars are mostly done, but we are still doing some fine-tuning of the 3D models and making sure the materials are all using our new system. We will release this pack with an extensive set of real-life liveries, which also means we’re busy making sure we get approvals from all the teams involved. We don’t have a fixed release date yet, but these cars will be shipping soon. Then there’s the Reiza Pack, which is still being finalised and the cars in it are upgraded to the new material system. Nordschleife is obviously also still in the works and it looks like its release date will slip based on the first predictions we made, mostly because we got the right scan roughly two months later than expected. In the mean time we will also keep upgrading more cars to the new material system, releasing updated templates and upgrading the existing liveries. We are also working hard on adding more new PBR based shaders to the material system for tracks and other parts of our cars. Not only that, we are working on a number of features to enhance your experience.

GT3 Challengers Pack

Many have been racing our new GT3 cars on tracks all over the world while anxiously waiting for more liveries as well as templates and information on how to paint these cars with the new material system. For each of the new cars we’ve added a couple of liveries to brighten up the field. Some from real teams running these cars, in other cases fantasy liveries, partially because some of these cars were so new that not many teams were racing them already. Those are all included in the update, alongside the new templates.

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At the same time, we spent a bit of extra time to make sure the new liveries worked well on-line. As the new material system really requires you to build a livery from multiple textures, we made some improvements to ensure that these textures automatically get packaged in a so called MAS file to ensure all parts get transferred to a server (and other clients) if the server has skin transfers enabled. All of this, and more, is explained in the guide we made for making your own liveries, which is the next thing we will discuss in this roadmap update.

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Car Paint Editor

To get the best possible results when designing your own livery, we decided to create a guide on painting your own car, to accompany the new templates and material system. We tried to make this a guide for beginners and advanced painters, covering all aspects. The first version of this guide can be found on our documentation site. Please take a look and let us know what you think, and what we can still improve! We will be adding new materials over time, so do please leave feedback.  Do make sure you post your creations, we will be featuring a paint every fortnight – so get creative!

Formula E Gen 2

You might have guessed it already, but we are bringing you the new Gen 2 car from Formula E soon, with all the current team liveries and helmets. On top of that we are bringing you a new track that was adapted specifically for fast and fun racing with these new cars. The track is called Lester Formula E Edition, it’s a fantasy track that has been adapted with a few chicanes, despite that, it is still fast and flowing, great for Gen 2 action!

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Competition

The Prelude – 3 hours of Sebring qualifiers are going into the final stages, with almost 100 drivers lapping around the bumpy track, the top 40 will be secured for a spot in the all GT3 powered field. On February the 16th the race will be broadcast live on our YouTube, Twitch and Facebook accounts so make sure you tune in!

Top 3 teams will get a special invite for the 12 hours of Sebring that will be hosted in March. The hotlap competition to enter the 3 hour event ends on Sunday the 3rd of February at 23:59, so buckle up and head on over to our competition page: https://rfactor2.studio-397.com/

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The 12 hour event will be a diverse field of invites, qualifiers (top 3 from the 3 hour race) and teams that have qualfied into the competition. We will be hosting this race with the LMP2, GTE and GT3 packs, more info about this in the next couple of weeks. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Discord where news will be shared as well on our forum. In other news our competition system is taking real good shape and will be used for daily races within in short period of time.

The ESL MAPFRE competition has also kicked off with, featuring well-known names across sim racing, tomorrow round 2 begins so make sure you tune in.

Check out round 1 at Atlanta Motorsports Park Karting highlights here!

That’s it for this month! We certainly hope to see you on track and hope we can make 2019 into another great year for rFactor 2!

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Latest Build Update rFactor 2 - 1.1112 Now Available!
Steam Build IDs
client: 3523449
dedi: 3523452

Note: It is recommended that server Admins update all dedicated servers.

- Fixed an issue where canceling damage repair allowed a time advantage
- Minor edits to controller profiles to remove redundant JOY assignments
- New code to enable the car skin material editor

Note: this build was released on 01/02/2019 - (This is only the changelog) You should already be up to date

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Reiza rFactor2 Bundle

Following a delay in development, we are pleased to confirm the Reiza rFactor2 Bundle is finally back on our release schedule!

The delay has not been for naught as the extra time has allowed us to further develop the contents of the Bundle and include several of RFactor2 very latest developments.

It has also allowed us to pursue adding some exciting new content to the Bundle, which will make it even greater value than before. The new cars and tracks are already in advanced stages of development - can you guess what they will be? More about these soon!

In the meantime check out some fresh previews of the 4 cars and 2 tracks previously confirmed, featuring all of rF2 latest graphical improvements!

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Latest Build Update Now Available!
Steam Build IDs
client: 3561933
dedi: 3561935

Note: It is recommended that server Admins update all dedicated servers.
- Fixed: Sporadic corrupt textures after track load.
- Fixed: AI cars and replays now show custom liveries.
- Added: Button assignments for mouse controls (right/left/up/down) and mouse left click. Controls can be assigned to any button on a keyboard, button box, D-pad or other.

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(A small update to fix the AI custom livery issue)
Latest Build Update rFactor 2 Steam Build IDs
client: 3566541
dedi: 3566543

Note: It is recommended that server Admins update all dedicated servers.

>>>>Changelog is the same: <<<
- Fixed: Sporadic corrupt textures after track load.
- Fixed: AI cars and replays now show custom liveries.
- Added: Button assignments for mouse controls (right/left/up/down) and mouse left click. Controls can be assigned to any button on a keyboard, button box, D-pad or other.

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  • 2 weeks later...

It’s the time of the year where the sun starts greeting us more often during the day. The first roar and rumble of the rare species of racecars can be heard close to racetracks all around Europe as everybody is waking up from their winter dreams. Everyone involved in motorsport is eagerly waiting for tracks to dry out, engines to fire up and for the sun to shine on their careers as they are encouraged by early test results. It´s not just heating up in Europe or in the hearts of motorsport enthusiasts, but also in our studio and offices, as slowly some of the newly developed features and content for our beloved rFactor 2 are starting to take shape.  Last year at Simracing Expo many people already said that 2019 would be an exciting year for this simulation and yes, that will absolutely be the case! Over the last months we announced many cool things, but that´s not all of it for 2019. We won´t reveal everything just yet, though! Nevertheless, buckle up in your seats as February is coming to an end. And as the snow is melting on the northern hemisphere, the new roadmap appears!

GFX updates

With the new PBR based system in place for car bodies, we are shifting attention to cockpits now. We are taking this opportunity to not just create better looking materials, but also to improve how reflections and shadows work in the cockpit. It’s still early days, but the first rough prototypes are looking promising. We are also finalizing the guidelines for modders, which is taking us a bit longer than expected, but we are committed to getting those out soon. In parallel we have also been working on a few more fixes to our GT cars as reported by various community members and we have optimized LODs on some cars that will help to make them look better as well as perform better at lower levels of detail, allowing you to use more visible cars on lower-end systems and still end up with a great looking image.

Competition

Work continues as planned, with both integrating the competition system into the UI and also work in the backend. We are adding plugable standings, which will allow competitions to choose from a great variety of ways of scoring results. At the same time, as we are running more competitions internally, we are learning a lot and adding features to improve the stability and robustness of the whole system. March 23rd will see our first real endurance event, the 12 hours of Sebring. This race will feature several well-known names within the simracing community, such as YouTuber Jimmy Broadbent, Team Redline, Fernando Alonso Racing by Logitech G, McLaren Shadow and Williams eSports.  These teams and others will also be racing along side our qualifiers from the prelude earlier in February. You still have a chance to race, make sure you enter our qualifier for this round! As one of the most prestigious races of the year, there will be a fantastic range of a prizes totalling over 5,000 euros!! More details are available on our forum.

Content

The Nürburgring is obviously a huge project and for the first couple of months in such projects we don’t have much visible progress as we transform all the data into a detailed and accurate road mesh and working our way outwards, to curbs, grass, barriers and terrain with track-side objects. We’re now in the middle of modelling the curbs and we can share some of the early wireframes of parts of the track. I’m sure most of you will instantly recognize these areas of the track.

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The Reiza pack is another piece of content that we’ve been talking about for quite some time now. It’s really close now, we promise, and you might have seen Reiza Studios announcing that Imola will be part of this pack. We have more exciting news! Virginia International Raceway will also be included and to wet your appetite, we’ve included some very nice screenshots of the track.

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And let’s just add a few more images of Imola for good measure!

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Both the Tatuus cars and Formula E Gen 2 are almost ready to release. For the latter we are currently implementing a more advanced brake-by-wire system that matches the system on the real car, leading to more accurate regeneration and rear brake temperatures. We are also testing the last big planned update of Zandvoort, where we focus on optimizations as well as add the latest buildings on and around the track. The Dutch are still hopeful that F1 will visit the track again in the future, and in the mean time our virtual version has the advantage that it can host many and loud race cars every day!

That concludes the roadmap for the shortest month of the year. We hope to see all of you on track soon!

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  • 3 weeks later...

Latest Build Update rFactor 2 - 1.1112 Now Available!

Steam Build IDs
client: 364315
dedi: 364316
Note: Admins are required to update all dedicated servers.

- Added realtime logging to help better diagnose sporadic physics lock-ups reported by some clients. If you have experienced this issue please see instructions here on logging: https://forum.studio-397.com/index.php?threads/logging-out-of-realtime-physics-freezes.62687/
- Graphics engine and resource management improvements
New Materials
- Fixed an issue where the wrong region name was specified in the Region.JSON.
- Fixed an issue where files were erased from a custom skin .mas when no loose files were present in the same folder. The current behavior will now extract the contents of the .mas to the same folder, when no loose files are present.
- Fixed intermittent issue with editing materials.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Welcome to our third roadmap of the year. We’ve had quite an exciting quarter altogether with updates to many of our car packs, a new material editor, an exciting 12 hour race at Sebring and last but not least the release of our biggest pack to date, the Reiza pack, featuring no less than 6 cars and 4 tracks. Check out the trailer below. You can buy the full pack here, but there are also options to buy just the tracks or just the cars, or even individual items.

And those of you who follow our roadmaps every month will know there is a lot more to come, so let’s get started with this month’s updates!

Cars

We’ve just wrapped up the development of our brand new brake-by-wire system for the Gen 2 Formula E car. These cars are rear wheel driven, so the rear wheels also do the energy regeneration when braking. As much of the braking torque as possible will be used to regenerate the batteries, with the remaining required torque coming from the rear disc brakes. This is all controlled by a brake-by-wire system and we’re in final testing of it in the new car, so expect this one to be released next!

Tracks

The Nürburgring is going as planned as we’re moving towards the barriers and mapping out all the different pieces of graffiti on the track. Those of you who heard the podcast René and Marcel had with Davy Jones ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpBi9qKwjB4 ) already know that we have two more tracks in progress, both of which we will keep as a surprise for later this year.

Performance

Very recently we’ve released a build that embeds some very specific performance logging in an attempt to catch the few cases people have reported over the years where they are “running out of real-time” because of hickups of the physics calculations. We have a dedicated thread on our forum explaining how to report these logs to us and although we have already received a few logs, we can still use a lot more so if this has happened to you in an on-line race, please help us out and submit your data, and we will try to help you solve the issues.

Competition and new UI Update

This month we’ll take a more in-depth look at where we are with the new UI and competition infrastructure. Our current UI is really split into parts, with a Launcher that is responsible for content management and on-line matchmaking and a main executable that can either be launched in single player or multiplayer mode. For our new UI we want to merge all of that into one. We are now at a point where we’ve replaced every bit of UI in the executable for both modes. In fact, one thing we are doing is eliminating the need to have two modes, merging single and multiplayer modes.

So let’s get started. When you launch rFactor 2, you end up in the main menu that provides you with a few different options. Here you can drive in single player, view a replay or live race or participate in multiplayer, browse various aspects of our community (forum, news, upcoming events) as well as configure the game.

The game options have been cleaned up and re-arranged to give a better overview. As an example we’ve kept the settings for recording replays here, but moved the actual playback of replays to a different location as viewing replays clearly has nothing to do with options. In general we now have more space as well to add extra context and help, making it easier for users to understand the many different settings. Session settings have also been revamped.

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We’ve split those up into generic settings that span the different sessions, and session specific settings. We also exposed a few extras here, allowing you to for example configure more than one practice session without having to resort to editing text files. Car and track selections have been tweaked as well. For both we have added a few different views, ranging from a more graphical, icon based view to a more compact list. In all of those modes we’ve added quick search options, which usually help you find the car or track you’re looking for with just a few keystrokes. Car tuning is also still there, and here you will see our our new material editor being integrated nicely as well.

Moving on to the garage, you see we have grouped the different tuning options for a car into logical sections. Little details to make your life easier here is that we can show you in a different color all options you changed compared to the set you last loaded or saved, and we also still allow you to compare your own setup to another one, where we no longer list all options twice, leaving you to figure out the ones that actually changed, but more clearly indicating those. At this point it’s also interesting to point out another feature. As the whole UI is web based, we will also allow you to “share” your UI with a team mate remotely.

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What this means is that while you’re driving he can log in to your game and review and make changes to your setup. Such changes will then be applied the next time you leave the garage. As you can imagine such features open up a ton of possibilities for people racing as teams, but also ways to give remote support and I’m sure our community will find many other uses as well! Apart from the garage we also have a monitor that allows you to view the action live from different camera standpoints, as well as to view an instant replay. Standings have been extended to show more information and the camera controls can be used for broadcasting races as well.

Competition is being developed now as part of the new UI, so it is easy to see what are the upcoming races. From a list of competitions you can sign up for the ones you want to compete in. Zooming in you can see past and upcoming events, sessions and standings. Joining a session directly takes you to the right server. This part is far from done but we just passed a few important milestones that will allow us to run not only hotlap competitions but also qualification sessions and actual races. We’re working on different ways to score those, from traditional “points based” ones to ones that evaluate the actual racing skills of every driver involved and ranking them accordingly. Another thing we’re integrating right now is a protest system. Currently we’re evaluating, through internal testing, how to best release this to the public and we are considering doing some kind of beta as a first step.

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So, what is left to do? Mainly the features that are currently in the Launcher, two of which are crucial: the matchmaker showing the list of servers and the package management system. The matchmaker will receive some love as we will add features to see if a server has players or AI on them and we will also add more detailed information about each individual server. The package management system will be extended to allow you to directly browse the workshop and our item store, so all content can be managed in one single place.

Fanatec 12 hours of Sebring

A week ago, 40 teams divided into three classes lined up for the 12 hours of Sebring, and wow what a race it was. Right from the get go we had action and close battles that lasted right until the very last minute of the race. The top 3 in each class got cash prizes and Fanatec vouchers, and commentators and spectators joined forces to nominate a driver of the day, who walked away with a SimLab rig. Also, a record number of viewers watched the event and every two hours could win a Fanatec voucher and even a Podium Series wheel! All in all this event was a big success and we will certainly host more as we ramp up towards the release of our competition system.

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Thanks to Marius Nicolae for the Sebring shots!

That’s all for this month. See you all on the virtual track!

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  • 3 weeks later...

Latest Build Update rFactor 2 - 1.1112 Now Available!

Steam Build IDs
client: 3750893
dedi: 3750894

- Added more detailed realtime logging to help better diagnose sporadic physics lock-ups reported by some clients. If you have experienced this issue please see instructions here on logging: https://forum.studio-397.com/index.php?threads/logging-out-of-realtime-physics-freezes.62687/
- New materials fix to avoid custom team skins not showing.
- Implemented 'brake-by-wire' (for Formula E Gen2).
- Fixed 32bit crash.
- Fixed sporadic blown out scene when using car select and tuning in a multiplayer session
- Fixed glitched puddle reflections of cars bodies.
- Fixed crash for some users when joining a multiplayer session.

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When you work hard, times just flies by, so it’s not a surprise that it feels like we just wrote our previous roadmap some days ago.

The roadmap this month takes us to the second-smallest, most densely-populated country in the world and home to many past and current racing drivers. But not just there. We basically travel everywhere and show you what´s happening in the big rFactor 2 world. No matter if you are looking for build updates, news about upcoming content or where to find the right competition for you, it’s all here and it’s called Roadmap!

Formula E Monaco e-Prix

If you had not already guessed from our introduction, the big news this month is the announcement of a new track, the Monaco e-Prix, which twists and turns through the beautiful city streets. Scheduled to be released at the same time Formula E drives the real race, this track is based on laserscan data and CAD from Formula E, ensuring an accurate layout. The track complements our existing Formula E portfolio, which features the recently released “Gen 2” car, as well as the Hong Kong and Lester tracks, and puts us in the lead in terms of Formula E content in any racing simulation.

monaco_7-1920x1080.jpg monaco_6-1920x1080.jpg monaco_5-1920x1080.jpg monaco_4-1920x1080.jpg monaco_3-1920x1080.jpg monaco_2-1920x1080.jpg monaco_1-1920x1080.jpg

Updates on work in progress

Later this year we are going to go 64 bit only with our rFactor 2 builds. This move was triggered by the fact that Steam hardware surveys show us that only 0.5% of our users are still on a 32 bit build, whilst within the global Steam community, this number is less than 2% too. All hardware you can buy for many years now is 64 bit, so it’s time to move forward. Doing so will save us time building and testing code, which we can then spend on improving the simulation as a whole.

There are several bits of documentation we’re currently adding. First of all, we have a guide on how to create your own car pack.  For our modding community we have now documented the new IBL/PBR based car shader, detailing how to use it when creating your own car.

In our ongoing UI  previews we share with you some of the things that are in right now and being actively tested. One important one is the matchmaker, which will make a triumphant return back in game! For now it’s the bare minimum to assure it’s working, but we intend to use the flexibility the new UI allows us, to add more features.

Matchmaker1-1920x1080.jpg

And just something gadgety-cool and nouveau to look forward to, a live trackmap/loading screen drawn from the actual track data – because what’s more useful than a track map before you blast out on track, and look it even has the pitlane (click on the image below to see it in motion)!

Monaco_track_Loading2-1920x1080.gif

With the announcement of the second of three iconic tracks in progress, it’s time to take a look at the progress on the Nürburgring. Last month we reported we were pretty much on schedule, and that is still the case.

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On the side of cars, now that the Formula E Gen 2 car has been released, we’re shifting our focus again to the Tatuus cars. They’re all drivable, the models and sounds are mostly done and we’re now tweaking and bugfixing them.

Community and Competitions

As promised on last years Simracing expo already, we continue our efforts to bring more activations and competitions to rFactor 2, enabling our drivers to enjoy racing in different championships around the globe. We want to make sure that you can find not just the best competitions in our Sim, but also the best drivers, while also giving people the chance to move their way up the leader-board and put their name on the map for drivers to look out for.

A1esports

We are more then happy to welcome A1 Telekom as one of our new partners with their A1 esports series. It´s already the third season, but new to this esports event, which features an offline final in Vienna, is rFactor 2 now. This esports championship is open to all drivers that live in a german speaking region (Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Lichtenstein and Luxembourg). If you live in one of these regions, the 7.000 Euro prizepool is surely something worth going for. On top of that you also get invited to the Offline Final in Vienna, racing on a stage. We are sure that this will be a blast. Wondering what you need to do for that or where to sign up? Just use this link. Happy Racing!

ESL MAPFRE Season 2

We started the journey with ESL and their first rFactor 2 Championship a while ago and what a journey it was. Awesome offline final, close racing action and great broadcasts. You missed that? How could you, it was for 20.000 Euro?! But don´t worry, ESL just announced their second season and it will soon be underway with the qualifier. More infos about that can be found on their site.

Verified on Discord!

Last, but not least, on the community side we are proud to announce that we now have a formally verified Discord server. We would like to invite you to drop by for an informal chat. Most of the time, there are people from Studio 397 around and you will definitely always meet a few friendly community members willing to help and answer question, or just willing to hop in a race with you!

Go to: https://discord.gg/rfactor2

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  • 1 month later...

Summer seems to be in full force already, looking at temperatures here in Europe. Besides it being a good time for ice-cream lovers, it also caters to endurance-enthusiasts, with the iconic races at Le Mans and the Nürburgring coming closer and closer. As if this wouldn’t be enough already to get our racing hearts beat faster, how about some naturally aspirated high revving machinery.

So here-it-is! You probably didn’t see it coming, but yes it’s here. No need for a long dramatic intro. We’re ecstatic to announce Circuit des 24 Heures du Mans otherwise known as “24h Le Mans” is coming to rFactor 2. And the cherry on top, it’s coming much sooner than you think. So you are right to get excited now!

As with all of our latest track content, we are pulling out all the stops. The 2018 terrain is modeled with millimeter precision using the latest in laser scan technology. Nothing but the best for this epic track. What other sim to bring out its real potential than rFactor 2 with it’s heritage with endurance multi-class racing.

Bringing this iconic track to life has been a passion of ours since we started, our studio name even includes the record 397 laps achieved in 2010. Officially licensed by the Automobile Club de l’Ouest (ACO) the 24h Le Mans circuit is over 13.6 km and unique in nature with long sweeping corners and high-speed straights. With the nature of the track also comes a unique race. Le Mans challenges drivers like no other, with 24 hours of hard racing throughout the night and often with difficult weather conditions! rFactor 2 will offer you that challenge – look out for our Road to Le Mans competition coming soon!

We will be releasing more details over the next couple of weeks.

Le-Mans-1-1920x1080.jpg

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In other news!

When it comes to things, features and content we currently work on, we could even fill an entire roadmap just with listing it. This means we are pretty busy with working on our favorite sim to ensure that we see even more great racing this year. We have our teams working on the UI, Competition system, updated shaders as well as new cars and of course the Nürburgring/Nordschleife. Progress can be seen everywhere right now which makes us proud every day, but there is still a lot of work up ahead to bring everything your way. But we are on it! Let´s get into details for some of the topics.

Competition

With Le Mans on the way, we’re looking forward to bringing an updated competition format for you all to take part in.  Details will be posted shortly!! Additionally, you may have seen that McLaren Shadow will be back for another season, so brush off your wheel and get ready to enter into this fantastic competition which we are proud to support!

 

 

New UI

The UI itself we are still very busy under the hood, working on optimizations and fixing bugs that arise as part of the new features being integrated. One big feature we can now announce is the Launcher as you now know it, a separate application sitting on your desktop will now have all of it’s features fused into the in-game UI. This means no extra interface to deal with, it’s an all in one unified UI experience, as it should be! And of course we by now also implemented more details in the in-game matchmaker, and one request we often get is the ability to filter AI vs real life humans in the server list. It’s important to know who’s a bot and who’s not! This is working now, and will be released as part of the new UI.

Enjoy the summer, we’ll be back with more news soon!

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  • 3 weeks later...

Latest Build Update rFactor 2 - 1.1112 Now Available!
rFactor 2 version: 1.1112

Steam Build IDs:
3921932 (client)
3921933 (dedicated server)

We recommend updating all dedicated servers
Changes:
 

  • Improved performance logging to be faster and give more information.
  • Fixed skewed driver labels on triple screen multi-view (cockpit and track-side full-screen cams).
  • Removed aggressive threading as it’s not that helpful.
  • Improved timing to help avoid stutters and real-time freezes.
  • Improvements on materials and lighting (see article for full description).
  • Implemented all new ‘digital flags’ – for ‘Circuit des 24 Heures du Mans’.
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  • 2 weeks later...

Surprise, surprise! Let’s do the roadmap a week early, at the start of the actual Steam Summer Sale!

Summer Sale

There’s quite a few packs on sale this summer, more than we ever had, so let’s go over them! And of course, rFactor 2 itself is on sale as well!

We have three car packs on sale. The GT3 Power Pack and Endurance Pack are both 50% off, and the latest GT3 Challengers Pack has a 33% discount. Our first ever laser scanned track, that set a benchmark for future high quality tracks, Sebring, has a 30% discount.

A 25% discount was applied to the Formula E Race bundle, featuring the Gen 2 car as well as two, highly accurate tracks: Monaco and Hong Kong.

Our partners at Reiza Studios also have a special surprise for the summer. Not only are all three of their packs (the full pack, the car pack and the track pack) on sale, they also provided some fixes for the MCR 2000 as well as two brand new layouts for Imola, doubling the number of layouts available!

ReizaPackSummerSale-8-1920x1080.jpg ReizaPackSummerSale-7-1920x1080.jpg ReizaPackSummerSale-5-1920x1080.jpg ReizaPackSummerSale-6-1920x1080.jpg ReizaPackSummerSale-2-1920x1080.jpg ReizaPackSummerSale-4-1920x1080.jpg ReizaPackSummerSale-3-1920x1080.jpg ReizaPackSummerSale-1-1920x1080.jpg

The existing layouts, the classic, dangerous 1972 layout surrounded by nearby barriers and the current configuration, fully adapted to modern standards but still retaining a lot of the unique challenges that made it famous are now augmented by the 1988 layout that introduced a few chicanes and the subsequent 2001 layout with further modifications and chicanes. I think it’s fair to say that this track can now be adapted to suit a car of any age! Of course, you get both new layouts for free if you’ve already bought Imola before! Just check the workshop for updates.

Last but not least, our partners at KartSim have put their package on sale at 50% off, a great opportunity if you want to get into karting.

Tatuus

We know we know, it’s been a little while…. open wheel fans have been sitting at the window longingly looking into the distance hoping for a sign.  But wait no more, we are pleased to once again give you ‘open wheel’ aficionados something to get your pulse ‘racing’ again. So start getting worked up right now, because the Tatuus pack arrival is imminent. This punchy bundle of six unique open wheel Tatuus cars that includes the Tatuus F.3 T318, the Tatuus MSV F3-016 (aka British F3), the Tatuus PM-18 (Pro Mazda), the Tatuus USF-17, Tatuus F4 T014, and the Tatuus FT-50,  will hit the ground wheels spinning on Thursday this week.

Tatuus_006-1920x1080.jpg Tatuus_005-1920x1080.jpg Tatuus_004-1920x1080.jpg Tatuus_003-1920x1080.jpg Tatuus_001-1920x1080.jpg Tatuus_002-1920x1080.jpg

And one more thing, the Tatuus pack and all of it’s cars will be ‘free’ on the Steam workshop for everyone to enjoy!

New Build

We’ve also just released a new build with some fixes and new features in it.

VR Features

We basically added two new things. Support for “IPD” or “World Scale” adjustments, which allow the fine tuning of the distance between the eye cameras in game. Some headsets have hardware controls for this too, but due to popular demand from people in our community we added this as a software feature too. This adjustment allows changing stereo separation strength, which leads to different perception of VR image and in some cases increases comfort. We’ve added key bindings to increase, decrease or even reset the IPD so you can map those and make adjustments while sitting in the cockpit (don’t adjust and drive though!).

The second feature we added is for users of the Pimax (and possibly other similarly constructed headsets). It allows you to enable or disable a specific projection mode that respects the orientation of the displays in the headsets. On the Pimax they are canted. Setting this feature, that for now needs to be changed in the player.json text file, to “1” enables this new option for Pimax. As a side effect, rendering on Pimax becomes roughly 25% more efficient, which is a nice bonus.

Below is an overview of both settings as they appear in your player.json:

"VR IPD Scale": 1,
"VR IPD Scale#": "VR IPD Scale: Adjusts IPD distance
                 between eyes. 1.0 = default IPD 
                 distance, as reported by the HMD, 
                 below 1.0 = reduce, above 1.0 = 
                 increase",
"VR Projection Mode": 0,
"VR Projection Mode#": "VR Projection Mode: 0 = 
                 default, 1 = not in-plane displays
                 HMDs",

Changes

Other, smaller changes are:

  • We’ve fixed a problem with our RSS based news feed in the old launcher (news failed to show up at all, should be back again now).
  • The showroom was not correctly showing up in VR, now it’s back to normal.
  • Temporarily we’ve disabled the heat haze effect as it was rendering incorrectly. We are working on a proper fix, it will be back soon.
  • We’ve made some improvements to how our light probes are updated when jumping around in a replay between different times of day.

Road to Le Mans

The sign up for the qualifying races is going into the final hours, deadline is 15:00 CEST on the 26th of June. With qualifying races held this weekend the current 78 entries will fight to get into the final 45 spots. Oreca, BMW, Corvette and Porsche will race side by side for the ultimate glory. We will be crowing the 2019 winners of Le Mans when the race ends Sunday, July 7th.
As mentioned this race features our Endurance pack, which is on sale now. There is practically no excuse to not enter this epic event. Try out our recently released Le Mans laser scanned track. It can’t get any better than this!

That’s it for now. Enjoy the summer!

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Latest Build Update rFactor 2 - 1.1112 Now Available!

Steam Build IDs
client: 3957575

Changelog:

- Fixed a depth ordering issue that showed up with the distant mountain range in Mountain Peak, an old ISI made track.
- Fixed an issue with the transparent trainer being totally invisible.
- Fixed a small bug that crept into the Pimax VR support we just added, causing issues on the cockpit rendering using Vive.
- Small internal MAS library improvement.

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