iRacing development update

Kevin Watts · Aug 17, 2011

Tony Gardner at iRacing has posted this news about the continued development of iRacing in the iRacing members forum. Drivers swaps and 24 hour racing is mentioned, while not totally clear it looks like we may get the option to host full 24 hour races with driver swaps and also run single driver setups with a live crew chief or spotter. Improvements to the tyre model and graphics are also being worked on. The full announcement is below:

I hope everyone is enjoying their summer and having fun driving/racing. Now that
another build is behind us I thought I would let everyone know what our talented
technical staff is working on currently. This is NOT a list of what will be in
the next major quarterly build (October) but rather what is in the works at the
moment. On the other hand some of it could and will be released before the next
major build. Also remember that software development is not always a perfect fit
of priority that one might ideally want. It is also about matching skill sets,
considering size of projects, balance of short and long term projects and also
about laying foundations for things to come.

Here we go:

Priority: New Tire Model improvements to overall model - improvements to
specific cars already released - working to get NTM on more cars

Specific work on Ford GT outside of New Tire Model (and NTM). We just
received much better data on car so one of our engineers is doing a full review
and making appropriate adjustments as needed.

Working on tweaks to
several other cars outside of tire model for example to aero and damage

Working on new and more setups for cars with NTM

Working on
memory/file size for tracks in general. Very nice progress on this front. Should
be a nice overall improvement for frame rates and stuttering issues that some
people have.

Specific work to Suzuka to compress graphics to help frame
rates and stuttering- want to get this out in a build soon

Replay
versioning project: This is significant because it has prevented us from
graphically improving cars once we release them. The issue was if we added
something new to cars, anything, like brake glow which we have done behind the
scenes, we could not add to cars because replays with that car would not work.
With this project done, essentially the replays will ignore the new things added
to the cars after the replay was captured. This will allow us to add a whole
bunch of cool things to the cars that our artist and one of our engineers having
been dying to do like brake glow, backfire, pit speed limiters, grill tape
(graphically), etc and even things like roof flaps on a stock car although
something like roof flaps also requires the physics guys to get involved.

A new bug for bump issue at Darlington track (high groove)

Team
racing/Endurance racing/Driver Swaps- BIG project. Single Driver teams with
spotter, crew chief and all that plus multi-driver teams. Will be for official
racing and hosted racing and special events as in up to 24 hour racing
capability which also means being able to join races during the race, leave and
come back and all that good stuff. Along with the functionality itself,
basically lot of reengineering and additional architecture flexibility needs to
be made to overall engine. Lot more news to come about this but can pretty much
guarantee this will not be in the October build but making progress.

Making good progress on advancements to new sound system plus adding all
sorts on new sounds. Really trying to bring the pits alive for example with new
pit sounds. Also new environmental sounds like flyovers, crowd noises, etc.

New graphics and animation: Adding war wagons to pits, work on pit
boxes, driver animation, planes, birds, etc

Significant shader project
under way – probably see some of it in next build and the build after.

Some forum functionality improvements already completed and bug fixes
done. Also fixed some bugs and made some improvements to the text chat system we
just released.

Working an adding a new server farm in Holland. Working
on a project at the same time which will allow us to turn server farms on and
off by three different settings. Hosted only/Hosted and open practice only/Open
All

Three tracks currently in active production: Oulton, Kentucky and
Twin Ring. Oulton will be finished first of the three.

Seems like every
other build we come back to this. Never ending project working on site
optimization. For example, continued refinement of local caching and database
optimization which will save hundreds of thousands of calls to the database.
Always a big priority, frankly almost above anything else at this point to have
fast and stable site. Never ending project, not that sexy, but a substantial use
of resources.

Making some improvements to recently released tournament
racing. Redesign of hosted page for ease of use and usability. (Lot more will be
added to it with driver swaps, etc) While on the subject of tournament racing we
can see that over 60 tournaments have been started. I hope people are having fun
with that.

Bunch of other little tweaks and bug fixes.

This is
not a complete list and subject to change and also not to say something does not
get finished, goes into QA and new things get started.

Good Racing!

Tony