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!

 

[Ian Navarro]

I got a bonner reading the Roadmap...

 

[MarcG]

- Happy to hear Sebring is coming?
Yes very happy, not fussed by the Laser Scan treatment, if it makes it better/easier for Devs then no problem, if it's harder & costly and not really worth it (like ISI as good as once said) then it's pure marketing BS in my eyes, pleases the whiners though I guess!

- Pleased with the current development and future prospects of rF2?
Yes very happy again, the upcoming Packs, Performance & UI are gonna be good but I truly do hope Studio397 have learnt from past mistakes. As I've ranted on the Official Forum many a time they need to make sure their 'Quality Of Polish' is up to high standards from the first release, the GT3 DLC Pack was and still is not finished sufficiently enough in my view (lack of Skins/AI).

 

[DaVeX↯]

Maybe they licensed the URD contet so they can release it as a pack with the 'vette?

 

[RichardHessels]

Wow an article about a game on a gaming website. What a concept

News sounds interesting. Be curious how laser scanning translates since rf2 doesn't utilize a high res mesh to drive on like iR and AC. Unless they fixed it so you can run a dense mesh and still have realroad work.

The invisible laserscanned mesh of the AC tracks is not that dense at all. rF2 would have no problem showing that fully textured. The Nordschleife does not even use a invisble mesh, that track you drive on the same 3D model as what you see.

 

[omanrak]

In other news, Project Cars 2 gets another test track...

 

[Kurupt CDN]

Its good to see new additions coming to the game, too bad 397 didn't take over 5 yrs ago.
If and when this title gets a full licensed series of interest I may fire it up.....but atm I got too many sims, and not enough time.

 

[BhZ]

DID I HEAR SEBRING?

I doubt it, you probably read it...

 

[LilSki]

The invisible laserscanned mesh of the AC tracks is not that dense at all. rF2 would have no problem showing that fully textured. The Nordschleife does not even use a invisble mesh, that track you drive on the same 3D model as what you see.

And that is simply not true.

AC physical mesh

AC Visual only mesh

Typical rF2 visual/physical mesh. Not to mention how wasteful it ends up being having to render all those triangles that could have been hidden in a non rendered mesh.

In any case we will see how it plays out and if all the correct details can come though with the way they currently assemble tracks.

 

[Leonardo Ratafiá]

I love how they always use Silverstone when showcasing future updates. And still looks like a dated game even with dx11 and whatever gimmicks they put

 

[Conrad Miller]

I'm not going to buy another DLC.

Wait a minute..... this isn't FREE content??????

 

[BhZ]

Wait a minute..... this isn't FREE content??????

Considering the costs of making tracks, Sebring will be in a DLC for sure. They also talked about a pack, which will probably include at least one of the 2 cars showed. Maybe they put everything in the same pack.

 

[tr1v1um]

@LilSki
It doesn't make sense to have such a dense roadmesh as the physicsengine can't handle it anyway. In that sense rF2 has just the right density to go along with the physics. Niels Heusinkveld and a couple of other people have explained this allready very well. In that sense a mesh as dense as the AC mesh would propably be a waste of ressources within rF2. Given the fact that rF2 is even ticking at a faster rate I wouldn't be be surprised if most of those collision points are obsolte within AC. But it's all very theoretical and both sims are working different in that regard.

 

[Will Mazeo]

I love how they always use Silverstone when showcasing future updates. And still looks like a dated game even with dx11 and whatever gimmicks they put

honestly... silverstone looks lifeless no matter the sim it is running, they should avoid using that track for that simple reason, any sim should lol

 

[LilSki]

@LilSki
It doesn't make sense to have such a dense roadmesh as the physicsengine can't handle it anyway. In that sense rF2 has just the right density to go along with the physics. Niels Heusinkveld and a couple of other people have explained this allready very well. In that sense a mesh as dense as the AC mesh would propably be a waste of ressources within rF2. Given the fact that rF2 is even ticking at a faster rate I wouldn't be be surprised if most of those collision points are obsolte within AC. But it's all very theoretical and both sims are working different in that regard.

True sim refresh rate does come into play but I still believe a low poly visual/high poly physical is a better, more efficient system overall. Many triangles are being wasted to make the visual road drivable in rf2. And technically a low/high system is possible in rf2 but it is my understanding that realroad won't work.

 

[Deleted member 6919]

Sebring..someone at last has listened to the sim community..

Lets hope others follow.

 

[Zuffenhausen Weiss]

Whilst I love the mod track, finally can get to wave goodbye (reluctantly) to Virtual LM's version of it that I've been using, the still evasing problem is the lack of contents compared to rF1 unless your interests is modern motorsport and single seaters - I don't mind GT3s though and am still waiting for any sale of the packs

If they want to keep me playing (and less of AMS) please do us a favor and buy the rights of the DRM Revival off the team so we can see it where it really belongs

 

[Zuffenhausen Weiss]

I love how they always use Silverstone when showcasing future updates. And still looks like a dated game even with dx11 and whatever gimmicks they put

What do you mean by dated? Do you mean it doesn't have PCars 2 graphics or it plays like GPL?

Frankly, I rather trade in fancy PCars graphics for space for 105 cars on circuit at once

 

[Denis Betty]

What do you mean by dated? Do you mean it doesn't have PCars 2 graphics or it plays like GPL?

Frankly, I rather trade in fancy PCars graphics for space for 105 cars on circuit at once

"Incoming"
That didn't take long. Please guys, please please pleeeaassseee, can we stay away from comparing one sim to another and allowing this thread to turn into the "my sim is better than your sim" argument.
Pretty please.

 

[tr1v1um]

True sim refresh rate does come into play but I still believe a low poly visual/high poly physical is a better, more efficient system overall. Many triangles are being wasted to make the visual road drivable in rf2. And technically a low/high system is possible in rf2 but it is my understanding that realroad won't work.

Well, Real Road is an important part of the physics engine. You can't watch at all those aspects in an isolated state and it all needs to work together. I would argue that RR is one of rF2's strong selling points right now as it works fully dynamic.

Now one could start to argue what is more important: a racing line of rubber that gets defined and defines where people can drive in dry aswell as in wet conditions or a vertice in a colission mesh that will get touched in a minority of cases basicly making no difference. And at the end the question is what has the bigger impact and what is actually noticable for the driver. Maybe the system will be imrpvoed in the future for other titles like not-rF3, but with the current state of our hardware I see no advantage to change the system right now. At the end it's a matter of philosphy and how different devs set their priorities and it is what makes following those sims interesting. This will be especialy interesting for all other upcoing titles like ACC, GTR3 and Reiza18.

 

[Magnar Berset]

Ahhh, me on Sebring. Now there are a comedy of errors.