rFactor 2 | New Build Update Released

[Paul Jeffrey]

Studio 397 have released a new build update for rFactor 2 tonight, adding a number of fixes, tweaks and improvements to the PC exclusive racing simulation.

The new build is available to download the next time a player restarts their Steam client, with some key highlights including improvements to the lighting transitions on dynamic time of day, rendering improvements to the way clouds are presented within the game - improving the look of skies within the game, UI tweaks and various other changes, detailed in the update log below.

Update Notes:

• Added back-end support for detecting the state of the Steam overlay so we can advise people to turn it on when trying to show them a shopping cart.
• Fixed a possible deadlock.
• Changed the lighting at dusk to gradually transition the fog color, preventing a sudden light change.
• Improved the shutdown of a dedi so it no longer exits with a non-zero return code.
• Fixed an issue where if we failed to load a custom skin we would not correctly fall back to the default skin.
• Fixed an issue where blurred reflections did not show up.
• Made the material editor port configurable in the scene viewer and changed it to 5396 by default so it won't conflict with the default port that rFactor 2 uses.
• Allow up to 128 scene paths in the scene viewer.
• Fixed an issue where upgrades did not correctly show in the showroom when selected.
• Enforced loading the correct upgrades before we initialize physics online.
• Added a few missing control options in the menus so they can be assigned again in the UI.
• Significantly improved the way we render our clouds, resulting in much better looking skies.
• Server will now kick a client using a custom team if file transfers are disabled because that client would be kicked when a race starts anyway.
• Various auto exposure tweaks were done, also to the cockpit view.
• Only pause the first session now if the setting is enabled on a dedicated server.
• Fixed UI mouse click control.
• Converted old FSAA values to new MSAA ones.
• Corrected some inconsistencies between the viewer and rFactor 2.
• Fixed some compound rendering issues in the showroom.
• Improved the camera editor in dev mode by fixing some assets for it.

Original Source: Studio 397

rFactor 2 is available now exclusively on PC.

Got questions? Our community have answers! Check out the rFactor 2 sub forum here at RaceDepartment for a great way to engage with your fellow fans of the simulation.

 

[Havner]

At any rate, I *hope* they are instead of the old, slow release cycle that has annoyed and frustrated their customers for years.

What I do hope for a change is that they hire some serious and experienced testers and create even a basic QA team, cause as it is now it seems they don't have any at all.

 

[DaVeX↯]

They just need to scrap the "closed beta" program and move to Open Beta one (or sorta), this will help them finding a lot of bugs before each release.
On this topic what Reiza did with AMS1 was great, in a similar way S397 could change the "lifetime access to multiplayer" we paid long time ago in "access to beta program", then they could release the beta builds to a selected wider audience (loyal and experienced userbase which paid for lifetime access to multiplayer even when it was quite dead) which would help them finding bugs easily or help them improving the sim (a good example is the UI and the mods which are improving it after official release).

 

[Durge Driven]

My Assetto Corsa can load from menu to track 20x before I'm in the garage in rF2
EDIT: actually, with the new UI the loading times are pretty awesome?! Didn't joing a server for about 3 months... See video below

You do realize that AC nords is 1GB+ and rF2 Nords is 11GB+

Load times are long for some content basically by size ...ie: GT3 cars etc take way longer ( 3x) to load then Historics

To swap cars in rF2 garage ( offline dedicated server ) is instant and I get to keep lap times of every car driven in session, no extra software needed

 

[Havner]

You do realize that AC nords is 1GB+ and rF2 Nords is 11GB+

1. rF2 Nords is 2,83 GB, not 11 GB, not sure where you got that number.
2. rF2 Nords contains also the nurburgring, which is a separate track in AC
3. AC Nords + Nurburgring is 1.83 GB. So at this point we have 1.83 vs 2.83. Admit that it's not as dramatic as 1 vs 11 as you wanted it to be.

 

[cameron_etc]

Glad to see some gradual lighting change, I love day night transitions but the abruptness of the light change was jarring to say the least.

Has anyone else run into issues in "widescreen" mode? I have a 21:9 monitor (used to control UI at desk) and a Rift (for racing) and when I enable widescreen mode (which is the only way the mouse and buttons align), whenever I try loading into a race, rF2 crashes. I can still control the UI without widescreen mode enabled but it's clunky

 

[MetalMania]

The game crashes on me frequently now too, so I've shelved it until the next update.

Not sure if it's coincidence or not, but RF2 has crashed on me twice today - once in the middle of a race and once during a replay after a race. Single player, driving C8.R at Watkins Glen (mod track on the workshop if I remember correctly), 10 lap race vs the other GTE cars. Might not have anything to do with the update but this isn't a problem I usually have with RF2. I'll have to try testing some more at other tracks I've run recently without issue before the update.

 

[Durge Driven]

1. rF2 Nords is 2,83 GB, not 11 GB, not sure where you got that number.
2. rF2 Nords contains also the nurburgring, which is a separate track in AC
3. AC Nords + Nurburgring is 1.83 GB. So at this point we have 1.83 vs 2.83. Admit that it's not as dramatic as 1 vs 11 as you wanted it to be.

My mistake .... though load time has never bothered me so I wanted nothing

My installed folder has 4 versions of Nords 2.8GB each

60 car Lemans 10 model GTE-LMP 30 visible barely enough time to make a cuppa between races
and that's assuming you change track every race where I tend to do a long session

Yes it is cumbersome but good outweighs the bad my book, each to their own

Lemans took 1 minute 30 seconds to load .. Track took 30 seconds and 60 GTE-LMP took a minute

Lemans + 60 F3 takes me 40 seconds so cars 4 x faster if I had done 60 488GT3 would be only 3 x faster
as I said other post

I can't get anything else to run 60 cars

Gsync 100 fps F3 I can run 144fps same settings ...why I love Historics

 

[Vilmos Vas]

My mistake .... though load time has never bothered me so I wanted nothing

My installed folder has 4 versions of Nords 2.8GB each

View attachment 437911

60 car Lemans 10 model GTE-LMP 30 visible barely enough time to make a cuppa between races
and that's assuming you change track every race where I tend to do a long session

Yes it is cumbersome but good outweighs the bad my book, each to their own

Lemans took 1 minute 30 seconds to load .. Track took 30 seconds and 60 GTE-LMP took a minute

Lemans + 60 F3 takes me 40 seconds so cars 4 x faster if I had done 60 488GT3 would be only 3 x faster
as I said other post

I can't get anything else to run 60 cars

Gsync 100 fps F3 I can run 144fps same settings ...why I love Historics
View attachment 437908

View attachment 437909

View attachment 437910

Wait, does your 1st screenshot mean that you have 9GBs of space wasted by previous versions of one single official track?

 

[opmike]

For reference, the size of my Nurburgring_2018 folder is 5.66 GB.

 

[davehenrie]

RIP the Yellow LEGO


Not really. In my server we only used official content with no custom skins, and LEGO still appeared when we started to join practice session one by one. It goes to normal when race starts or we go to pits.

And that is normal behavior isn't it? Lego car is a placeholder to eliminate those momentary lags when a skin is loaded. Waiting til you return to the garage limits the intrusion.

Does everyone know you can force the cars to load and get rid of a the yellow bricks without having to return to pits (I only realised this one recently). You can bind a key to it, forget what it is called in the controls menu, but there is a function there to do so.

If you allow the cars to load while you are on track, you will be downloading the custom skin/default skin that dresses up the car. This causes a momentary lag for everyone on track. The Lego car was the solution to prevent everyone enduring pauses as your computer and the other users all download the latest car to join. It has been a long time, but I would guess, when your computer pauses to download the skin, it will also affect any car near you when the download occurs.(i.e. your car freezing for a brief moment right infront of someone following you)

 

[Tony]

So you have to pit to see skins lol umm so ???

Can you change cars in AMS2 RRE iRacing pCars and ACC while in your garage ? Big no !
rF2 can.
So to test 10 GT3 cars in those other sims means 10 room reloads .................and you reckon rF2 is slow lol

Cool can you point me in the right direction on how to do this with the new UI? As far as ican see In multiplayer you can no longer switch vehicles

 

[Tony]

Does everyone know you can force the cars to load and get rid of a the yellow bricks without having to return to pits (I only realised this one recently). You can bind a key to it, forget what it is called in the controls menu, but there is a function there to do so.

Think the button is load vehicles?

 

[Sam12H]

Could you qualify this comment in some way, perhaps give examples and reference them? Otherwise it really doesn't mean a great deal IMO. OK that comes across as a bit of a snarl... sorry. But I hope you see my point?

EDIT: I've just realised that the recent bug in VR with the outline of the UI showing (?) would be a great example of what you're saying.

But yeh "most of these issues" would still need something to back it up IMO.

Erm, follow the bread crumbs. Or do I need to cut and paste the whole original post?

I, and Duddy who I replied to, am referring to all the things that got fixed by this update because previous updates had introduced and subsequently broken them. I am also cynically suggesting this will be a never-ending cycle because they keep trying to change/add stuff for the sake of just adding stuff.

If you want me to be more specific about the actual fixes I would like to see, the first two that come to mind are some optimisation in the rain would be nice (it has me praising ACC for its optimisation, seriously), and AI that aren't throttle-stabby-stabby morons since this game does not have any hotlapping or other things for offline/semi-offline players.

 

[Squared Circle]

As someone who does not experience any (serious) bugs in rf2, I'm asking those who do, to list their extensions/mods/anything they use. In my case it's just a few additional tracks and the great Global Endurance Mod.
The bug reports I read about are so severe that I really suspect the extension-system to be instable.

 

[kart1]

I don't get it. For years the development is slow, and when they feel the breath of Reiza they suddenly doing stuff. Well, guess competition is good. Curious where rFactor 2 will be in 2 years. AMS 2 is now the champion.

yes AMS2 champion to get out of broken content!

 

[tr1v1um]

They just need to scrap the "closed beta" program and move to Open Beta one (or sorta), this will help them finding a lot of bugs before each release.
On this topic what Reiza did with AMS1 was great, in a similar way S397 could change the "lifetime access to multiplayer" we paid long time ago in "access to beta program", then they could release the beta builds to a selected wider audience (loyal and experienced userbase which paid for lifetime access to multiplayer even when it was quite dead) which would help them finding bugs easily or help them improving the sim (a good example is the UI and the mods which are improving it after official release).

I think that's what they allready do. Looking at some issues with content and features that get released there is some stuff that is easily noticable but slips through QA. For example, if you use the Ligier other cars are rendered at very low quality, easily noticable after one minute on track. I have no idea how this wasn't noticed and made it into the release version. Granted they wanted to release something for the holidays so I will give them that. But it makes me wonder why it isn't fixed yet, while we see new features (hello autoexposure) with the backlog of such issues increasing and new bugs added on top of it. Was the autoexposure really needed now? There comes a point where you can't single out anymore what's actually causing certain issues, so you see people reporting content specific bugs as update related issues and vice versa. That's not good.

Then there comes the point that people don't know how to actually beta test properly, very few people do actually. Most people think that it is fun but it isn't. It was allready a big issues when the DX11 beta was released, so I don't understand how they considered the new UI release ready. They propably wanted to release the competition system and had to ship the new UI with it as those two things are depend on each other. With DX11 it worked pretty good, but you could allready see people who weren't actually forced to use the beta starting sh1t storms not understanding what the beta branch actually means. Now the siutation is a bit different, as the UI still is in beta stage, yet forced on top of us. The competition stuff works reasonably good, but if basic stuff around it doesn't work it's hardly something that keeps people attracted.

I did beta testing for the new UI and saw a few things implemented, but there is still alot of functionality that isn't transfered from the old to the new UI and some basic principles don't work. There is a reason why the majority of UIs aren't designed with white or very bright colours, and if they are, there are dark versions available. I am not that sensetive to bright monitors but just thinking about people staring with VR headsets onto a white screen makes me question who came up with the idea and how this had lower priority than autoexposure in the cockpit.

To sum it up: there is still alot of work ahead and they should reconsider their QA. They amanaged the DX11 transition so I am confident, but I know that there are people who don't share the same amount of patience

 

[henkjansmits]

People can argue about development procedures etc but this is just a very small team with a very large + ageing codebase + graphics assets. It is what it is unless a million people buy rf2.

The super basic bad design errors on the UI do frustrate me though.

Its good this competition system is somewhat up and running, i think this was by far the most important thing this sim needed (god knows there are lots of other things)

 

[Havner]

For reference, the size of my Nurburgring_2018 folder is 5.66 GB.

Which only means you have 2 versions there (3-4 subdirectories) and unless you keep an old one on purpose you can safely delete the older.

 

[thepharcyde]

Wait, does your 1st screenshot mean that you have 9GBs of space wasted by previous versions of one single official track?

Yes, it's another of those RF2 nuances that you just have to live with.
Legacy ISI coding right there

 

[sbabb]

Yes, it's another of those RF2 nuances that you just have to live with.
Legacy ISI coding right there

No, that is when you have either created or installed mods that depend on older versions of items (tracks and cars), otherwise the old package file gets deleted before the updated one gets installed, resulting in always just two folders, an even and uneven numbered one