rF2 February Roadmap: Corvette, LMP3, Sebring and More..!

[Paul Jeffrey]

The February Roadmap update from Studio 397 is here, with plenty of exciting new content and improvements announced...

With plenty of work and features still on the horizon from Studio 397 and rFactor 2, the developers have revealed one or two interesting new pieces of information in this February roadmap update, not least of which is confirmation of a laser scan version of the epic Sebring International Raceway is under production for the simulation, alongside the 2017 announce Chevrolet Corvette C.7R GTE/GTLM that is set to release around April time alongside a couple of other interesting new cars...

For the full lowdown on what's happening in rFactor 2 world, check out the latest roadmap below:

Another month has flown by! The February 2018 roadmap is here! And as usual we haven’t just been twiddling our button boxes, we’ve been furiously making improvements and creating new and exciting content and features, some of which we are happy to share with you now. This short month has been a whirlwind of activity, which included competition infrastructure, getting in some new features for the new UI, testing performance optimizations, and building new content, both track and car.

Performance
We mentioned last month already that performance was being worked on, it’s still one of our main priorities, we’re continuing to chip away at it and have come even further, it should not be long now until we can release these improvements to you. It’s safe to say you’ll will be very surprised at the end results. In our internal testing we’ve seen a substantial performance boost and higher frame-rates across the board. As with anything though we are cautious, it’s in the hands of our internal test team to make sure it’s all working as expected.

Content
The content team has been keeping very busy, as usual, which is not hard as we have a lot of new content in the planning.

Corvette C7.R GTE/GTLM
Recently, on social, we teased this car with a short movie with a roaring V8, and the license for it has been announced over a year ago, but now you can finally see the car during internal testing at Silverstone. Scheduled for a late April release, this car will not come alone and will be part of a new upcoming pack.

Norma M30 LMP3
We’re super chuffed to see an LMP3 enter the grid! The Norma M30 is a fairly recent car that has already built up an impressive record in the races it has competed in, such as in the ELMS race last year at Spa, where we took this picture of it. We’re sure this new class will become quite popular in rFactor 2!

Sebring International Raceway
Last but not least, we can now proudly announce that we have licensed America’s oldest road racing track, host to many historic endurance races. Sebring International Raceway is being built based on a laser scan we did last month. This is a first for us and although we have made many tracks based on CAD data and other information that have been quite accurate, this scan will allow us to get every little detail right. It will take us a couple of months to finish this one, but we are working on it feverishly!

HUD
The official Studio 397 HUD is still being polished and refined, we know you are impatient to get your hands on it, while working on it we’ve come across a few bugs that lay dormant deep in the code that we needed to address, this is a win-win for the HUD in general and we decided it needs attention. It will certainly be part of the next build.

UI
Our UI is making leaps and bounds, we’ve got most of the basic features in and some new slick features. For starters we’ve looked at making triple screen setup much more intuitive, with a full set of controls via the UI settings screen. This will be an additional functionality to go along with the on track pop up widget.

Next we overhauled the live replay screen, controls are now not only selectable via controls as before but also via mouse clicks.

Also we’ve added in a modern drop down standing ticker, for easy access to driver times from the live replay. This incidentally also shows our capabilities to overlay HTML with live camera feeds, a technique we will leverage in other places such as broadcast overlays.

Competition
In the realm of competition we have our full time team actively hacking away at a very inclusive and encompassing competition structure, which is a big task not done overnight! We have big plans and that’s why we want to do this from the ground up the right way. Our next big task has been the implementation of full race series, including sign ups, practice, qualification and multiple race heats over a set period of time. These new features are ongoing and need a lot of testing so we are looking at a little while more to get this up and running, but it’s not that far off, we can see the horizon!

KartSim
We already announced that a consumer release of KartSim is coming soon. Currently this version is undergoing final testing and polishing to include our visual damage model and the latest rain effects. Just to show you how good it looks, a few more shots to keep you entertained until its release.

Community
In our ongoing effort to encourage more of that community vibe, we will be adding a new forum area to showcase your original paint artwork, screenshots, and videos. Additionally, we will also be adding all templates for existing cars to the base install, that way everyone has access to the latest updated templates. Our plan is to streamline the templates and their extra parts so there’s less guesswork and more creative time!

rFactor 2 is available exclusively for PC from Steam now.

Check out the rFactor 2 sub forum here at RaceDepartment for all the latest news and discussion with regards to the simulation. You can take part in lively debates with fellow rFactor 2 fans and take part in some great Club and League racing events..! Head over to the forum now and share the love this simulation so very much deserves...

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Happy to hear Sebring is coming? Pleased with the current development and future prospects of rF2? Let us know in the comments section below!

 

[Paco572]

Have you considered putting the car on the track and using the swingman camera?

For those who haven't noticed yet, the showroom lighting on the car renders the left side in a shadow, so even if you spin the car around, you only see the left side in a very deep shadow.

Of course, but when doing little tweaks to the paint job, this could take hours instead of minutes due to having to start the game, load a track, get in the car, drive, then use the camera controls to move about. This is "in no way easy" or fun and is a horribly time consuming, driving the frustration factor through the roof. It's bad enough they won't release a car viewer so as not having to launch the game just to check a paint job, yet they talk about making things easier, """Our plan is to streamline the templates and their extra parts so there’s less guesswork and more creative time!"""
Hardly, exactly the opposite given the showroom screw up, all talk and no go I'm afraid.

1st Officer Paco

 

[billyblaze13]

Of course, but when doing little tweaks to the paint job, this could take hours instead of minutes due to having to start the game, load a track, get in the car, drive, then use the camera controls to move about. This is "in no way easy" or fun and is a horribly time consuming, driving the frustration factor through the roof. It's bad enough they won't release a car viewer so as not having to launch the game just to check a paint job, yet they talk about making things easier, """Our plan is to streamline the templates and their extra parts so there’s less guesswork and more creative time!"""
Hardly, exactly the opposite given the showroom screw up, all talk and no go I'm afraid.

1st Officer Paco

the game itself can be used as a viewer....run the game in an 800x600 window, load your skin in the showroom, and whenever you make changes just highlight that window and press reload and you can see your changes without having keep relaunching - of course that doesn't solve the bad shadow, but it makes it easier to see small changes...another trick I use is when I am making a series of skins of the same car , I generate a replay with the first car, and just rename each successive car to the same skin name, and that one will show up in the replay instead of the original - so as to avoid getting in the car over and over again to check how the different skins look in game ...hope that helps

 

[thepharcyde]

Any idea when the next release will be?

 

[jego]

Soonish?

 

[BeefyPeeg]

Very excited for the updates as always! Thank you Studio 397 for the hard work you've put into keeping this sim alive.

Side note for Race Department moderators: could you please not use italicized text for body copy? It can be difficult to read in large chunks.

 

[Jim Liak]

I always return to rf2 when i want to try a F1 car. Such a joy.

 

[Emery]

March Roadmap is available now.

 

[leseb64]

I always return to rf2 when i want to try a F1 car. Such a joy.

best tire model ever

 

[Patrick van der Meulen]

March Roadmap is available now.

With some great news, soon to release GT3 liveries (fantasy but high quality), free historic March, finally it looks like the new UI is getting near finished, triple screen render optimizations in development and some more nice development news.

 

[thepharcyde]

Sneaky peak at Sebring on the new UI is exciting if this has progressed to the state it's ready for release