rFactor 2 – Roadmap Update February 2019

Studio 397’s Dom Duhan published the February 2019 Roadmap Update to bring us up to date on the latest developments for rFactor2.

Roadmap Update (Quote)

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.

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 pluggable 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 sim racing 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 alongside 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 prizes totaling 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 modeling 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.

  

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 whet your appetite, we’ve included some very nice screenshots of the track.

  

  

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

  

  

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 meantime 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!

Official Webpage – www.studio-397.com