iRacing – Tony Gardner Talks New December 2018 Build Update

iRacing is getting ready to deploy the last build for 2018, somewhere at the beginning of December. As we have mentioned earlier, it will be a big one with lots of new content and enhancements.

Over the year, iRacing already announced a multitude of new iRacing features are in the works, such as the V7 Tire Model, Day to Night transitions, HDR, a brand new Damage Model, a new Sound Engine, and the Single Player AI mode. The iRacing development team has been making good progress on these new features, with some of them currently in beta test. That brings us to the following question. What will the new December build bring us?

We already knew that the new build will include some exciting new content in the form of the Tsukuba Circuit and Charlotte Roval tracks, and the Dallara F3 Single Seater. Let us remind you that the two tracks will become available as free content. With a bit of luck, we might even get a bonus car thrown in.

In a forum post, Executive Director of iRacing, Tony Gardner talks about the new build release and shares some details regarding the ongoing developments for the iRacing online racing platform.

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Good day,

We previously have discussed several significant projects that are in development as many people want to know for various reasons. As we draw near to the quarterly build the week of December 3rd, here is an update.

 

Time of Day, AI mode, the new Damage Model, V7 Tires, new Sound Engine and many other things for that matter, are all in alpha testing which means they are in advanced stages of development. However, they are still in active development which means it is decision time.

 

Time of Day/Moving Clouds/etc. We are still confident this makes the December build, just a couple little things still to do on both the web and sim side. The team has been working weekends to pull it into the build, it was a big project. A few more things we also still will do after it releases FYI. It is looking awesome, we think you will agree when you see it. It will come with a date and time picker in hosted. You will be able to speed up the day/night by up to 8X if you want. It will be great having this feature for the endurance races coming early next year and just overall adds significantly to the immersion, dynamics of the racing and realism. I’ll ask the guys to put out a video next week. HDR will be a follow-up and not part of this build. HDR is actually done but we ran out of time to test it in combination with Time of Day.

 

The new XAudio 2 sound engine is fully integrated into the sim in alpha, but we have not finished optimizing it and debugging it. We also want to take advantage of the improved capabilities now that we have it. Right now it is just playing the existing sounds which will not be a noticeable improvement to most, in fact, some cars will not sound as good since they were tweaked for a different system. Our engineers and sound engineer will now have the opportunity to improve and better remix many more sounds. There is frankly no reason to release it other than to say we did. Therefore, we will not put this in the December build, unfortunately. Once we get everything working as we want along with adding all the new sounds the sounds guys have been dying to implement, we think you all will be quite happy.

 

V7 tires are in alpha and the feedback is very promising. We have been working hard on this project, not that us working hard on them makes you feel any better, you want them released. I’m just noting we are doing all we can to speed progress along. However, there are still a couple of things we want to do. Rather than put out another version now, possibly requiring everyone to adjust their car setups and then another version in March, we are going to hold off releasing in this build. We also only have them on a few cars at this point and need to get them on a broader range of cars.

 

The new Damage Model, we have known this would not make this build for a long time, but we are making significant progress. This probably still has the longest way to go of the things mentioned here.

 

AI, this is not to the point we want to release in this build. We considered putting it out in a beta version but opted against that. It already is very fun by all accounts but there is still a few distracting issues that need to be cleaned up. It also just gives us more time to keep making it better overall.

 

We fully understand the desire to release all of these things and want nothing more to do just that. We could release just about all of them now and pronounce them beta versions, but we feel nothing is to be gained by that in all of these circumstances. After all the effort and how excited we are about these features, we would prefer to come out of the gate with our best foot forward.

 

We are making tremendous progress and you will get to experience some of it the build. Time of Day, two new free tracks (Tskuba and Roval), Formula 3 car, maybe another surprise car you might hear about soon , and some new things we have not discussed yet like a new crowd system at every track. We are also on pace to get the Chili bowl (our first enclosed track) released before the actual race in January but it will not be in the actual early December build. We are not trying to hype anything or make excuses, just trying to communicate. There is also much more in the works than I have touched on above and some exciting announcements are coming as well.

 

Happy Holidays and good racing!

Official Webpage – www.iRacing.com