Assetto Corsa Competizione | Something Cooking at Kunos Simulazioni

[Paul Jeffrey]

Kunos Simulazioni have revealed a rather cryptic image on social media recently - suggesting something interesting may be announced this December 16th...

... or it could genuinely be a question about colours and days of the month - who knows?!?

The sim racing community have always been a little bit interested in news related to Assetto Corsa Competizione, and with an upcoming Intercontinental GT Challenge DLC in development and receiving some sneak preview love these last couple of weeks, the ever present chatter from the community about in-game livery editors, and plenty of stuff I'm sure we don't even know about yet, could this be something to do with the December 16th teaser?

Not long left to find out...

https://twitter.com/x/status/1204426560532561920

Assetto Corsa Competizione is available exclusively on PC.

Online race? Setup advice? Latest news? All available on the Assetto Corsa Competizione sub forum here at RD! Head over, have a read or start a thread and let the fun begin!

 

[Ghoults]

Sure, add it as an EXTRA feature. But the fact that custom liveries are not allowed is a massive limitation of ACC.

I mean I can't photoshop myself but it takes me less than a few minutes to contact a talented skincreator and have a kick ass custom livery designed. The joy of having access to an amazing community.

Nothing wrong with a livery editor to quickly make some color changes but it doesn't have to substitute the freedom we had before.

It is sad development for sure.

I think car skinning is also an important part of creating a community and giving users more ways to enjoy a product. When I started sim racing I pretty soon wanted to make my own skins. And it was great that all the games I played at that time pretty much allowed me to do it. Live for speed even had online skin downloading system for public servers in 2005. Nowadays we have more bandwidth we even dared to dream of in 2005 yet all the steps have been backwards. Restrictions, unnecessary complexity and monetization. Ac had a great skin system but even that at its best was a side step and not a step forward.

Back when I played those games like lfs even when I got a bit bored with the game I could still open paint shop pro and make skins for that game. There were skinning competitions and people even rendering the skins. And when people can make skins people can also post skins and talk about skins which has a big positive for the community aspect of the game. Even if you are not making skins yourself it can be nice to just check what the skin makers have been able to pull off recently.

It not just makes the community little more active because there are more things to do and talk about but it also helps holding on to community members whose interest in the main core feature of the game fluctuates over time. When this fluctuation goes down chances are people want to do something different. If the only thing the game offers is driving then those people leave if they have got bored of just driving. But if they can keep making skins or even do mod tracks/cars/sounds/apps then at least some of them don't need to leave to do something different.

It is pretty sad that these kind of secondary core features are lost simply because short sightedness and greed. Some games even sell skins which I think in itself is sort of fine if it doesn't block users from creating their own. Which it of course does because greed. To me this just feels like devs are blindly copying things and practices from triple-A games thinking they make more money by adding those limitations to their not-yearly-game-franchise. They do this without understanding that these limitations are specifically designed into those triple-a games to allow them to resell the same game almost yearly with small improvements. These things are not meant to make one game sell better in the long term.

 

[guidofoc]

I think you're going too far with conspiracy theories. AC is the most moddable racing game ever but still you cannot use custom liveries in multiplayer (there are ways, like in SRS, but not easy). They worked on this in ACC and (tell me if I am mistaken) the first solution is to have customizable skins where you just set a few parameters (style, colors, sponsor etc.) so no graphics file is sent to the server and all is quicker. Ok, other games have full customized skins in MP already but Kunos did not have it at all.

 

[Jempy]

..... still you cannot use custom liveries in multiplayer (there are ways, like in SRS, but not easy).

Custom liveries are mostly used in leagues or special events or sometimes here at RD Racing Clubs.
As long as a pack is proposed for download and downloaded by every driver participating ... those custom liveries will of course be visible.
A custom livery used in private ( replacing an original skin ) will be visible only by the player.

I saw that now there are possibilities in ACC to replace an original skins by a personal one ( as I might see in the download section ) ... that's an option I'll have a look to .....as I prefer painting a car than be limited by 1 or 2 designs, with different colors and limited sponsors choice.
But that's surely a limitation requested by Blancpain or SRO at the start. I cannot blame Kunos for that.

Anyway here, we're just guessing what Kunos's message means .... but I don't play this kind of hype.
I mean the same as @Martin Fiala already said about this "not really new habit".... which I don't appreciate particularly.

 

[guidofoc]

Custom liveries are mostly used in leagues or special events or sometimes here at RD Racing Clubs.
As long as a pack is proposed for download and downloaded by every driver participating ... those custom liveries will of course be visible.

Of course I mean that AC has no feature to automatically upload your custom livery to a server when you join it. Only if everyone on that server has downloaded the liveries used on that server they can see them. SRS has a feature where you can upload your livery prior to starting the race, but it's a bit complicated. ACC allows you to use your semi-custom livery anywhere, without needing anyone to download any skin. So Kunos is making progress in this direction. My message was meant to answer the message above it, where that guy said they are preventing us from making custom liveries on purpose to make more money.

 

[Ghoults]

I think you're going too far with conspiracy theories. AC is the most moddable racing game ever but still you cannot use custom liveries in multiplayer (there are ways, like in SRS, but not easy). They worked on this in ACC and (tell me if I am mistaken) the first solution is to have customizable skins where you just set a few parameters (style, colors, sponsor etc.) so no graphics file is sent to the server and all is quicker. Ok, other games have full customized skins in MP already but Kunos did not have it at all.

Like I said. We had automatic skin transfer system back in 2005 in lfs. Ever since 2005 the development on that front in sim racing has stalled or gone backwards. Sure srs has skin sharing and iracing has tradingpaints but at the same time games seem to just want to be more restrictive.

My message was meant to answer the message above it, where that guy said they are preventing us from making custom liveries on purpose to make more money.

I'll just post a quote of what I said:
Some games even sell skins which I think in itself is sort of fine if it doesn't block users from creating their own. Which it of course does because greed.
"Some games" obviously doesn't mean acc. If you need more clarifications just ask.

 

[DrRob]

Wow...its the custom livery discussion again. I just accepted that ACC is a Blancpain GT3 license product. End of story.
Livery editors are found in other sims. Why not use these for that? Why everything has to be the same and needs to deliver just anyting? Blows my mind...

 

[Jempy]

Custom livery discussion ....due to a stupid hype message in form of a guess game.
Of course it couldn't avoid the start of a new custom livery discussion !
I'll never look at those kind of things again.

 

[guidofoc]

Like I said. We had automatic skin transfer system back in 2005 in lfs. Ever since 2005 the development on that front in sim racing has stalled or gone backwards. Sure srs has skin sharing and iracing has tradingpaints but at the same time games seem to just want to be more restrictive.


I'll just post a quote of what I said:
Some games even sell skins which I think in itself is sort of fine if it doesn't block users from creating their own. Which it of course does because greed.
"Some games" obviously doesn't mean acc. If you need more clarifications just ask.

As I hinted in my post, there is an issue with large skin files uploaded to multiplayer servers. This is why what ACC does is actually a rather elegant solution, and ranting about stuff is not an elegant solution. Ok, you surely didn't mean to criticize them. Merry Christmas.

 

[Eckhart von Glan]

Like DrRob I cannot quite figure out, what the fuss is all about. They made it quite clear it was a licensed product and that usually means at least limitations unless the license has already expired. A completely different approach is the system is open from the get go as in LFS.
One of the reasons I play ACC is because I want to "be in" the original GT3 series I love watching on TV. I can see it's not so good for league racing, but how many players actually do that? Out of the chaps posting here, a good many (me included some years back), but out of the wider player population, it is probably a small number, indeed.

 

[ThugUK]

Personally I don't care what so ever about the car skin or even the colour for that matter.
I play 'in car' only and therefore see a little bit of the bonnet and the mirrors.
I never watch replays either.
Who is bothered about the car colours* or what the graphics look like?
Am I alone?

* everyone knows that red is faster.

 

[OzzyNeil]

I figured it out, Each button corresponds to an issue, bug or wanted feature, You hover over the button and it will give you a description and then you press it to vote for that item.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1204426560532561920

 

[Ensi Ferrum]

Sure, add it as an EXTRA feature. But the fact that custom liveries are not allowed is a massive limitation of ACC.

As far as I know is it because of contract limitations.
A color picker system with a bunch of integrated designs makes sure that you don't need the skin on every machine running a MultiPLayer game to see that special skin.
Think it should be easy to use and work out of the box without manual file hazzle

 

[Miki Laggard]

Wow...its the custom livery discussion again. I just accepted that ACC is a Blancpain GT3 license product. End of story.
Livery editors are found in other sims. Why not use these for that? Why everything has to be the same and needs to deliver just anyting? Blows my mind...

This!
Same goes with the 'Boohoo, just a few tracks! Scandalous: No Nords!!'-snivellers. Dialogue usually goes as: Me: "Fun-fact: F1 has limited tracks too and no Nordschleife." Them: "Idiot! F1 never drives on Nordschleife!" Me: "Same for Blancpain!" Them: "......"
*sigh*

 

[Ben Lee]

There are many different solutions used in games from decades ago that aren't used any more by developers. One of the greatest multiplayer games on the PC, Call Of Duty (2003) had a great multiplayer system of using an FTP redirect for downloading maps on a server, so you would connect to the game server, and then the map would start to download from an FTP site, once downloaded it would instantly start loading and drop you into the game.

 

[Eckhart von Glan]

So, it's December 16th, workday should be over by now in Italy. Nothing cooking at Kunos, or am I missing out on sth.?

 

[Walles]

Same here in Germany.

 

[mms]

Looks like they overcooked it and it's not presentable

 

[LeSunTzu]

A built-in livery creator may or may not be good. If it is just automating what can be currently done with scripts (picking colors and selecting decals presets), then it is useless. If you can load your own graphic files and create stuff and use it in multi, then it is a true improvement.

 

[Rowdy Busch]

Looks like they overcooked it and it's not presentable

To be fair: the tweet didn't say 16th December 2019...

 

[EduCalza]

To be fair: the tweet didn't say 16th December 2019...

the simracing prank of the year.