err... wheres the update guys.?

[Msportdan]

any further news seems very quite

 

[poet]

Just in case you missed that part

Never had an issue with graphics, and the physics are pretty excellent in my book.

But content-wise, still a way to go, either for offline or online players.
The silver lining being they have to sort both those out if they want any chance of console success.

Fair enough online players can now just about manage a league with a dozen or so 3rd party plugins to fill the gaps, but those won't be an option for console players, and the career/sp experience needs a major rework to appeal to offline console players.

I'm happy enough to wait I guess, just every time it gets close to update time, a lot of people get hyped as though they think this is "the one" that will deliver it all. I was just tempering with caution, I think there'll be a couple of minor improvements and we won't see "the one" until the console build is done. imo of course.

 

[Greg Latty]

Never had an issue with graphics, and the physics are pretty excellent in my book.

But content-wise, still a way to go, either for offline or online players.
The silver lining being they have to sort both those out if they want any chance of console success.

Fair enough online players can now just about manage a league with a dozen or so 3rd party plugins to fill the gaps, but those won't be an option for console players, and the career/sp experience needs a major rework to appeal to offline console players.

I'm happy enough to wait I guess, just every time it gets close to update time, a lot of people get hyped as though they think this is "the one" that will deliver it all. I was just tempering with caution, I think there'll be a couple of minor improvements and we won't see "the one" until the console build is done. imo of course.

fair enough.. Im with you on the content. But I have so many sims that I pretty much play every sim for a specific reason lol. But I hear what you are saying. This is still just a hotlap sim for most. And like you said, the fact that it is coming console should help make this a "complete' sim. It already has the foundation for it.

 

[Chris]

I really hope to see some substantial improvements to the Multiplayer aspect by the end of the year.

If not, then it's my personal opinion that we ditch the idea of running leagues with Assetto Corsa entirely, and use our time more productively with games that do have the features to allow us to run proper leagues, like GSCE and rFactor 2, as is currently being done with the RDTCC in GSCE.

Otherwise we are just wasting our own time.

Progress on MP has been so slow, that I'm not really all that optimistic that we'll see MP improvements substantial enough to facilitate proper league racing. But I hope they prove my pessimism wrong. I really do, because Assetto Corsa has by far the best physics and force feedback, it has all the content necessary to even replicate the real life Blancpain GT series, and yet it can't be done because right now the Multiplayer is akin to that of a race horse with no legs.

 

[Radu Oros]

I really hope to see some substantial improvements to the Multiplayer aspect by the end of the year.

If not, then it's my personal opinion that we ditch the idea of running leagues with Assetto Corsa entirely, and use our time more productively with games that do have the features to allow us to run proper leagues, like GSCE and rFactor 2, as is currently being done with the RDTCC in GSCE.

Otherwise we are just wasting our own time.

Progress on MP has been so slow, that I'm not really all that optimistic that we'll see MP improvements substantial enough to facilitate proper league racing. But I hope they prove my pessimism wrong. I really do, because Assetto Corsa has by far the best physics and force feedback, it has all the content necessary to even replicate the real life Blancpain GT series, and yet it can't be done because right now the Multiplayer is akin to that of a race horse with no legs.

RD managed to gather many simracers for SCE lately. It is indeed more popular than rd club events in ac. But are other league communities for SCE as or more popular than leagues in racedepartment? Where did SCE simracers race before they came to RD? However I noticed more popularity here since V8 stockcars release. It may not be popular in SCE's public mp, but seems that is for league, possibly that is a hard car and only the more skilled are prepared to race it for real. And also benefits that SCE's main forum is hosted here.

Because for example AC leagues are more popular in other places/communities. One that quickly reminds me is ACRL https://www.reddit.com/r/acrl/ which gathers many of the top AC simracers. Some that used RD in the past. Is possible that RD attendance for ac leagues shrunk due to either boredom of racing and needing to prepare/stay in form, or problems with the game/mp, or possibly due to lost of interest in racing ac in rd.
Because AC has many more league communities: http://www.assettocorsa.net/forum/index.php?forums/online-leagues-championships-room.46/
They can be satisfied currently with the game and online functionalities, but of course doesn't mean they also don't want improvements and new-better things for it.

 

[Rami]

I really hope to see some substantial improvements to the Multiplayer aspect by the end of the year.

If not, then it's my personal opinion that we ditch the idea of running leagues with Assetto Corsa entirely, and use our time more productively with games that do have the features to allow us to run proper leagues, like GSCE and rFactor 2, as is currently being done with the RDTCC in GSCE.

Otherwise we are just wasting our own time.

Progress on MP has been so slow, that I'm not really all that optimistic that we'll see MP improvements substantial enough to facilitate proper league racing. But I hope they prove my pessimism wrong. I really do, because Assetto Corsa has by far the best physics and force feedback, it has all the content necessary to even replicate the real life Blancpain GT series, and yet it can't be done because right now the Multiplayer is akin to that of a race horse with no legs.

Could you @Chris Stacey point out what exactly is missing from the mp of AC.
There are few high class leagues running at the time in AC, with no issues that would prevent organizing a proper league. Sure there are faults, but nothing so severe that it cannot be done (because it is done).
I'm really wanting to stick here with you guys on RD, because I think very highly of your site. And I have had the pleasure to get to know really nice people in here. But right now I'm wanting to take the next step in this simracing world, which for me is leagues. I think I'm not the only one with these thoughts. Some good and fast drivers have allready left to race on other sites. And I think you're about to lose more without leagues for AC. And I really don't want that to happen.
So this was not a rant, just my thoughts on the matter.

 

[Chris]

High quality leagues can be done, as I have shown here and here.

Now, that league worked well because it was designed around the deficiencies of Assetto Corsa. The races were short and there was no live broadcast because such a thing still very much requires an ugly work around at the expense of slots on the server.

Believe me, I love the game, so I say these things out of love for it and the fact that I want it to deliver on its' potential. I'm not saying that my opinion is any more worthy than anyone else with a reasonable opinion, but it would be nice to have some more progress on MP. Heck, just a sign that the core functions of the game are being progressed on would be nice, even if it's not MP! But, my experience in organising 2 successful leagues with Assetto Corsa and weekly club races ever since MP was implemented has shown me loud and clear that substantial work is needed before we can run a BIG league that RD has become renowned for, for almost a decade.

Could you @Chris Stacey point out what exactly is missing from the mp of AC.

Certainly mate
At RD, we require certain capabilities of a game if we want to run a full blown flagship league, as we are hoping to eventually do with the RDGTC and RDGPC, however Assetto Corsa doesn't handle these things well. We'd love for Assetto Corsa to be the game of choice for the GT league as is has everything required content-wise for a full replication of the Blancpain GT Series.

Fundamentals that we need from a game before a flagship league can be organised:

• A proper spectator or broadcast mode - One that does not require the usage of a driver slot on the server, thus reducing the grid size unnecessarily.
• A properly functioning penalty system - At the moment, Assetto Corsa's slow down penalty only applies to track cutting where the game registers a cut. There are many places where this can be exploited as the track limits in AC are rather vague and not necessarily defined by the white lines, as our league rules stipulate. If the penalty system could be configurable, then this would be the best solution. Yes penalties can be managed however it currently is only do-able manually and it requires a massive amount of free time of the league organiser, that the game could have otherwise handled. Drivers can also ignore necessary flag rules with absolutely no penalty (i.e. ignoring blue flags, not slowing under yellows, overtaking under yellows etc. etc.)
• Solid netcode - The handling of high pings and sensitivity to slight changes in ping is handled pretty poorly in Assetto Corsa. Even a ping jump of 1ms up or down can cause a large warp, which could result in a race ending crash for multiple people. Tied in with netcode is the less-than-good collision system that often results in heavy damage and large reactions just from light contact.
• Race finishes - When the 1st place driver crosses the line, anyone who crosses the line immediately thereafter has their race concluded, irrespective of the lap they're on.
• More server data output - This is one area that is seriously lacking from Assetto Corsa. There's no sector times, there's no registration of pitstops made and getting results into GPCOS is such a mess that it is pretty much impossible all of which makes livetiming not really possible, race positions are updated only once per lap rather than as they actually happen, and the opponent split-time app is sketchy at best.
• Lengthier Replays - Incident reports are commonplace in league racing, and if for example we hosted a 3 hour endurance race with a full grid of 24 cars (which is not enough by the way, so more slots should be added as well), and someone wanted to file an incident report from the first 10 minutes of the race, they won't be able to obtain video evidence (which is required in incident reports) because the replays in AC, for some crazy reason, are saved to the RAM memory, so a 3 hour endurance race is thus not possible because you cannot view an entire race on one replay even on the lowest replay quality.

 

[Radu Oros]

So most of all, you can very well run leagues in ac. But the interest here is to 'televise' these races. And that's where RD is finding difficulties with AC's online platform, with what the spectators see in a stream/broadcast and the ease of tools usage from the streamers to spectators.
You could very well host leagues and complete them, but the problems you're finding is with presenting them to spectators.
Have you used PLP app for penalty system? And stracker.

Maybe people are nowadays not so much interested in RD's single events. This is basically like pickup racing, just scheduled. The last time a league was run in RD was in June? I see people scattered among various rd club events, wouldn't those drivers join together for a more crowded league?

 

[Chris]

So most of all, you can very well run leagues in ac. But the interest here is to 'televise' these races. And that's where RD is finding difficulties with AC's online platform, with what the spectators see in a stream/broadcast and the ease of tools usage from the streamers to spectators.

It's doable, but it wont result in a high quality product. Look at our last league run in GSCE, the Virtual Stock Car Championship, that was absolutely incredible because the live broadcast was done very well. In Assetto Corsa, the live broadcast is substantially more difficult because the "broadcasters" are spawned on the bloody grid when the race starts! So you have to miss action while the poor broadcaster exits back to the pits. It's not at all a smooth process and is incredibly ungainly.

We're not going to make compromises on the quality of our leagues just to facilitate a game that requires terrible work arounds for multiple aspects of league racing and presentation. We aim to produce some of the highest quality leagues, and right now we don't feel that Assetto Corsa can allow us to do so.

I really hope someday though, we can get an awesome GT league going. It's just a matter of waiting for more MP functionality.

 

[Chris]

And no, the main difficulty is not just the broadcast. As you can see I listed various other points that even more importantly all contribute the reason why we are not running any leagues with Assetto Corsa, like netcode, server data and replays, all of which are vital for a high-end league.

 

[Radu Oros]

I guess is quality standards of what you want to present, like you said. So yeah, the game/mp isn't broken, isn't sh*t. But RD is afraid of not making profit with AC? Wouldn't the target of viewers be people that play ac? So the main goal would be for ac fans to watch top drivers race, even if the broadcast isn't top notch quality, but could still entertain the viewers.

But I don't understand, are you interested in turning AC in a highly spectated e-sport or are you doing it for the drivers who want to race with other fair/skilled drivers? So you're not organizing league races because you're worried about spectators not seeing all that fancy general race info and driver telemetry on screen?

But did the AC-RD drivers rebel against league racing here because of netcode/server data/replays so you're not running leagues here because of that? Or the decision of not running leagues here is based on the hosts preferences for not finding the necessary quality. If the drivers for the leagues don't mind, why are they prevented from racing in organized RD leagues for ac?
That just pushed league racers to other communities. So I don't understand why you're pushing away league racing from RD and then complain no one comes here to race. When I think that in the first place, the drivers are already aware and able to accept how AC is at the moment, and despite all that, still willing to race for entertainment/hobby/competition.

Just because according to your standards other sims have better platforms/tools for your needs, doesn't mean that AC simracers don't want to league race here in RD. And possibly by now they are bored of single events. Think about it, if there would be more leagues running for AC in RD, those single events in between the league days could have more attendance as well. Is just an opportunity for them to practice in a serious event, despite being a single event.

 

[Rami]

Thank you @Chris Stacey for your straight forward answer. First I've had/found for that topic.
I do respect your opinion on running leagues with high end standards. And as you guys do organize, it's ofcourse your call.
But how will it end up, if AC someday is able to match your standards, when all of those really fast guys are gone and that really lowers quality of the league? For me high end league means having the fastest guys in the world competing in it (and certainly not referring to myself with fastest ).
But now when knowing this, I'll be heading somewhere to be part of the league racing too.
I definitely will still be hanging in here allso and staying as premium too, because I really wan't to support your site.

 

[Chris]

But RD is afraid of not making profit with AC?

I want to make it absolutely clear that it's absolutely not at all about money. It makes my blood boil that just because we want to make a really high end experience for not only the drivers in the league, but the viewers too, and somehow we get accused of corporate greed and only doing it to make a profit.

SimRacing makes no money (unless you're a game developer). We do it for the love of the genre. I do this staff position on a voluntary basis, I have a real life, a job and a family outside of simracing. This is purely just a hobby. The money we do make from premium membership (which currently is only about 800 members out of over 200,000 members) goes directly towards to the running costs of the site. So to be accused of only doing this for money is really disappointing. I just love simracing.

 

[Radu Oros]

Thanks for clarification on the particular subject. Could you also reply to the other part please, which isn't about generated revenue.

 

[Chris]

Frankly I don't really understand the need for the somewhat passive-aggressive tone of your previous comment, but I'll do my best to answer it none-the-less.

are you interested in turning AC in a highly spectated e-sport or are you doing it for the drivers who want to race with other fair/skilled drivers?

Simracing will likely never be the highly spectated e-sport that League of Legends or any of those other gamer games are, as simracing in general is niche market, however to those viewers we do have, we want to offer a high quality product, I'm amazed that you're actually criticizing us for wanting to provide high quality leagues. Look at the awesome presentation that iRacing puts on with their F1 World Championship, it's really incredible and is very much similar to watching a real life race.

But did the AC-RD drivers rebel against league racing here because of netcode/server data/replays so you're not running leagues here because of that?

Well, I wouldn't say they rebelled, but many complaints have been made by the drivers in leagues due to the shortcomings of the MP. Heck, complaints are made even in club races.

So you're not organizing league races because you're worried about spectators not seeing all that fancy general race info and driver telemetry on screen?

No.

Just because according to your standards other sims have better platforms/tools for your needs, doesn't mean that AC simracers don't want to league race here in RD.

That's a fair point, but it's not our fault that Assetto Corsa is lacking in the fundamentally required areas that I have outlined above which we require for high quality leagues. Believe me, I wish it did have them, but it just doesn't.

Think about it, if there would be more leagues running for AC in RD, those single events in between the league days could have more attendance as well.

We already do this in GSCE with fantastic results. However, GSCE also provides the basics that enable us to showcase exceptional league races, and AC does not.

I don't really know how many different ways I can phrase it for you: Assetto Corsa does not allow us to uphold the quality league racing that we expect from an RD League. Simple as that. I really hope that changes, but until some very basic and essential functions are added, we can't do it.

I don't want to rule out AC leagues in future as things may improve with their MP.

 

[Radu Oros]

Okay that's up to RD. The simracers that want to league race had to find other communities for that. So is the same way, since RD didn't find what they wanted to host leagues for AC, you had to find other sims and focus your resources to host and broadcast leagues for those.

But do leagues have necessarily to be broadcasted and viewed by many? Ok so if you don't have the right platform/tools for that in ac, why not run "offline" leagues for the interested. There are apps like Stracker that gives you all the race and driver info per race, and even a custom penalty system like PLP: http://www.assettocorsa.net/forum/i...lty-app-for-repeated-track-cutting-1-5.17852/

 

[Chris]

But do leagues have necessarily to be broadcasted and viewed by many? Ok so if you don't have the right platform/tools for that in ac, why not run "offline" leagues for the interested.

Well that's also a good point, but unfortunately the inability to properly broadcast and livestream a league is not the only factor in our reluctance to run a league.

The two Australian leagues I organised ran very well, but they were unfortunately somewhat limited because of the AC deficiencies. We made the choice not to livestream it because A) Australian ISP's do not currently offer upload speeds that are high enough to actually livestream things, and B) The 'spectator' work around in AC is incredibly convoluted and 'ugly'.

So we made highlight videos instead, which were a lot of work, but I feel it was worth it as the production value was very good. But, David Armstrong and myself have mutually agreed not to do the highlight videos again because they were consuming too much of our time (sometimes upto 4 days) for a simple 40 minute race.

 

[Herbie]

High quality leagues can be done, as I have shown here and here.

Now, that league worked well because it was designed around the deficiencies of Assetto Corsa. The races were short and there was no live broadcast because such a thing still very much requires an ugly work around at the expense of slots on the server.

Believe me, I love the game, so I say these things out of love for it and the fact that I want it to deliver on its' potential. I'm not saying that my opinion is any more worthy than anyone else with a reasonable opinion, but it would be nice to have some more progress on MP. Heck, just a sign that the core functions of the game are being progressed on would be nice, even if it's not MP! But, my experience in organising 2 successful leagues with Assetto Corsa and weekly club races ever since MP was implemented has shown me loud and clear that substantial work is needed before we can run a BIG league that RD has become renowned for, for almost a decade.


Certainly mate
At RD, we require certain capabilities of a game if we want to run a full blown flagship league, as we are hoping to eventually do with the RDGTC and RDGPC, however Assetto Corsa doesn't handle these things well. We'd love for Assetto Corsa to be the game of choice for the GT league as is has everything required content-wise for a full replication of the Blancpain GT Series.

Fundamentals that we need from a game before a flagship league can be organised:

• A proper spectator or broadcast mode - One that does not require the usage of a driver slot on the server, thus reducing the grid size unnecessarily.
• A properly functioning penalty system - At the moment, Assetto Corsa's slow down penalty only applies to track cutting where the game registers a cut. There are many places where this can be exploited as the track limits in AC are rather vague and not necessarily defined by the white lines, as our league rules stipulate. If the penalty system could be configurable, then this would be the best solution. Yes penalties can be managed however it currently is only do-able manually and it requires a massive amount of free time of the league organiser, that the game could have otherwise handled. Drivers can also ignore necessary flag rules with absolutely no penalty (i.e. ignoring blue flags, not slowing under yellows, overtaking under yellows etc. etc.)
• Solid netcode - The handling of high pings and sensitivity to slight changes in ping is handled pretty poorly in Assetto Corsa. Even a ping jump of 1ms up or down can cause a large warp, which could result in a race ending crash for multiple people. Tied in with netcode is the less-than-good collision system that often results in heavy damage and large reactions just from light contact.
• Race finishes - When the 1st place driver crosses the line, anyone who crosses the line immediately thereafter has their race concluded, irrespective of the lap they're on.
• More server data output - This is one area that is seriously lacking from Assetto Corsa. There's no sector times, there's no registration of pitstops made and getting results into GPCOS is such a mess that it is pretty much impossible all of which makes livetiming not really possible, race positions are updated only once per lap rather than as they actually happen, and the opponent split-time app is sketchy at best.
• Lengthier Replays - Incident reports are commonplace in league racing, and if for example we hosted a 3 hour endurance race with a full grid of 24 cars (which is not enough by the way, so more slots should be added as well), and someone wanted to file an incident report from the first 10 minutes of the race, they won't be able to obtain video evidence (which is required in incident reports) because the replays in AC, for some crazy reason, are saved to the RAM memory, so a 3 hour endurance race is thus not possible because you cannot view an entire race on one replay even on the lowest replay quality.

Most probably a stupid question: I guess you guys tried to make Kunos aware of these problems?
I think they have an eye on this site as there was this open letter sometimes ago...

 

[Jempy]

Fundamentals that we need from a game before a flagship league can be organised:

• A proper spectator or broadcast mode
• A properly functioning penalty system
• Solid netcode
• Race finishes -
• More server data output
• Lengthier Replays

I just quoted here the fundamental needed points Chris mentioned and can only be ... OK with everything that was said in his post.
As co-admin of a french league ( running now only AC ), I just can answer that for most of these points .... only rescue options are all needed.

- For Penalty system, we may rely on a perfectly done Pitlane Penalty App ... but all we can do with it relies on the drivers honesty.
Although we trust them ... mistakes or forgettings or carelessness may happen.
So control from time to time are done .... but it is time consuming.
( Version Number, settings, applied or not .... )

- For Race finishes, all we can do until now is ... choose the Raceover time long enough to allow drivers passing the line just before the winner passes it ... to allow them to finish race as it happens in real races...... but if 1 or 2 laps behind passing the finish line doesn't stop them.

- For more server data output, all we have with the game itself is ... a log !!!
The rescue option once again is a very well made App by Neys Ptracker and Stracker + AC Log parser by Wally Masterson ... and both are needed as the penalties are not applied on the 1st one.
That helps a lot ... but once again these are solutions which takes much time to the race organizers and admins.

- Solid Netcode: higher pings are often causing problems on servers.

Yes it is possible to run a league with all this .... but it is time consuming and mostly relying on the drivers honesty .... and difficult to run when very high standards are wished.

We're organizing Racing Clubs every week and we're just beginning our 2nd Championship ... but it's asking much time and much attention for the whole staff. ( volunteers of course having their own life, family, etc ... )
We don't complain ... as if we're doing that ... it's a personal choice.
But more possibilities given by the game itself for the MP .... are really needed.

EDIT:
That's why we're mostly more interested by the update than by the new content itself.
I'd bet it's the 1st thing Chris does look: what's new for the MP ? ....
... that's what I do each time .... with .... desillusions mostly.

 

[Stereo]

Lengthier Replays - Incident reports are commonplace in league racing, and if for example we hosted a 3 hour endurance race with a full grid of 24 cars (which is not enough by the way, so more slots should be added as well), and someone wanted to file an incident report from the first 10 minutes of the race, they won't be able to obtain video evidence (which is required in incident reports) because the replays in AC, for some crazy reason, are saved to the RAM memory, so a 3 hour endurance race is thus not possible because you cannot view an entire race on one replay even on the lowest replay quality.

I've heard this is the main motivation behind the 64 bit build for 1.3.

At one point there were also rumours of a server plugin that could record a replay on the server side, but I think it only got to the point of "Stefano would provide some key info to plugins if someone else offered to write it" which to my knowledge nobody's stepped up. Would be a much nicer way to handle it than rely on a client staying connected the whole time and remembering to save it.

 

[Msportdan]

is it out?