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Prezados usuários,
Por questões de segurança, a partir de 22/04/2024 os usuários só conseguirão logar no fórum se estiverem com a "Verificação em duas etapas" habilitada em seu perfil.
Para habilitar a "Verificação em duas etapas" entre em sua conta e "Click" em seu nick name na parte superior da página, aparecerá opções de gestão de sua conta, entre em "Senha e segurança", a primeira opção será para habilitar a "Verificação em duas etapas".
Clicando alí vai pedir a sua senha de acesso ao fórum, e depois vai para as opções de verificação, que serão as seguintes:
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***Códigos alternativos*** >>>Esses códigos podem ser usados para fazer login se você não tiver acesso a outros métodos de verificação.
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Tópico para tirar dúvidas>>>>https://forum.adrenaline.com.br/threads/obrigatoriedade-da-verificacao-em-duas-etapas-a-partir-de-24-04-2024-duvidas.712290/
Atencionamente,
Administração do Fórum Adrenaline
rFactor 2 - [ PREVIEW ]
- Iniciador de Tópicos SpeedRacer
- Data de Início
o jogo é sensacional, um dos meus favoritos junto do ams1 e assetto corsa 1 e competizione, mas infelizmente tem muito mod impreciso e disponibilizado na oficina da steam, por exemplo a williams de 1994 é super estável e por algum motivo eu sou 4 segundos mais rápido nela do que os tempos de pole do senna e convenhamos eu não sou nenhum mito hahaha, o mesmo ocorre com a mclaren de 1993 que já vêm no jogo e até a de 91 tb via mod, vários mods de pista tb cagados como de sochi que o grip da área de escape é o mesmo da areia inclusive solta areia quando vc passa na área de escape haha po podiam caprichar um pouco mais
Tudo que eu queria era que o rFactor 2 fosse ruim pq o jogo é um lixo em quase tudo menos nas partes que interessam: física, IA e force feedback. Que delícia que é pilotar esses carros, pqp. Nenhum simulador consegue superar ele esses quesitos.
Fiz um vídeo pra experimentar a pista de Portland e no fim acabei fazendo uma corrida a mais pq tava legal demais.
Fiz um vídeo pra experimentar a pista de Portland e no fim acabei fazendo uma corrida a mais pq tava legal demais.
Roadmap Update July 2020
Sometimes our roadmap is focused on a specific topic; sometimes it’s a huge box of surprises. Today’s roadmap feels like the latter. Actually, the beauty of rFactor 2, and probably one of the reasons why you love it, is that there’s not just one type of racing or motorsport — it can be whatever you feel like today. So let’s try to bring this vibe of spontaneity and surprise to the July roadmap, which features many different aspects of what we are currently working on behind the scenes.
The first topic we want to talk about is connected to our last summer sale. We hope you were able to grab that piece of content you really wanted to add to your collection and are already enjoying it to the fullest. But we also listened to those of you who voiced disappointment about us restructuring DLC packs, especially since specific smaller packs were missing from the offer, packs that would “complete” your inventory. We value community feedback a lot, so we went back to our library, put on our spectacles, and dug out some of the “old” packs.
The great news is that some of those packs will now be discounted. Like waiting for the after party, the after sale is even better, so everyone who missed the packs can grab them now. Please keep in mind that nothing lasts forever: this discount offer and the packs themselves will go away after roughly 2 weeks, so grab them while you can
The following packs will be brought back for the “After-Sale”:
Cars
Part one is done, now let’s head over to the section showcasing the main actors in simracing: the cars.
As previously mentioned, this roadmap aims at diversity and with it we bring back a section we haven’t talked about for ages — oval racing, or more precisely, the rFactor 2 Stock Car Mod.
We are proud to announce a major update to the Stock Car mod. We’ve been hard at work for nearly 16 months redesigning almost every aspect of these cars. The main component of this update is the tire model. A lot of development was spent making sure they reacted correctly, giving the car a much improved feel and a better sense of realism. This update consists of brand new tire compounds for every track the Gen 6 CUP cars run on that are available in rFactor 2. The update uses the 2018 rules package with reworked aerodynamics, proper center of gravity, shocks, default setups, engines from dyno data (750+ horsepower), and, most importantly, rebuilt tires (24 different compounds/sets). The decision to stay with the 2018 rules was due to horsepower. In 2018, Stock Cars had 750 horsepower. In 2020 they have 550 horsepower. We felt the higher horsepower would provide a better experience of how a real stock car drives and feels. A lot of testing went into this to make sure the cars reacted correctly, and the default setups make it fun to drive right out of the box. Just like in real life, when behind a pack of cars you get slightly aero tight, but up front in clean air the car turns into the corners a little better. The new tire model gives it the feel you need to tell when it’s at the limit. However, when you go over the limit, be ready to catch it. You can’t just stomp the gas pedal, you gotta drive it up out of the corner while trying to keep its 750hp engine under control. As the tracks rubber up, you have to search for grip in different grooves. But with an in-car adjustable track bar, you can adjust the handling while you drive. We have also updated the car shaders to the new PBR shader and updated the templates as well with region maps. The Stock Car Team would like community feedback on the new cars and will have more exciting updates in the near future for them as well. Their main goal was to get the Stock Cars driving as close to a real car as possible by collaborating with real stock car drivers. Feel free to give feedback to the stock car team on Discord in the oval section. As a way of saying thanks, we added new default Stock Car paint jobs to reflect drivers that helped test and give feedback while developing this new beast!
Stockcar 2018
Changelog
v2.10
We hope you’re not going crazy in circles already because there is more to come in this section. In other news: Do you remember us saying that there are two new GT3s coming? With one being the obvious elephant in the room, it’s time to introduce the other fresh contender to this popular motorsport category.
Subscribe to the Stockcar 2018 Steam Workshop item → HERE
Bentley Continental GT3 2020
Rolling out of the factory with its fiercely striking design, this British masterpiece of the renowned luxurious car brand is going for the big wins again. We are very pleased to welcome the 2020 Bentley Continental GT3 to the lineup of cars available in rFactor 2. It is powered by a 4-litre-twin-turbo V8, 4.8 meters long and hungry to be at the front row of whichever track you choose to enjoy the roaring sound of your new race car. If you’re already on your way out of this roadmap and into the steam shop – stop! While we want to get the new Bentley into your hands as early as possible, it’s not ready to be launched off the grid just yet. Give our mechanics a bit more time to put on the slicks and do the last radio checks, then we’re ready to rock.
Tracks
After all this car-talk, let’s change focus to the locations we want to race at. While there won’t be a new track announcement just yet, we think we have some news to share in this category that people will like. Starting off with Loch Drummond you might be like Loch what?!” but hear us out. Loch Drummond is an amazing track that poses a real challenge to every serious simracer out there. And to make sure that you enjoy seeing your expensive toys on four wheels on this track, we gave it a complete overhaul, bringing it up to the latest tech. If there is still a question mark above your head as to why we would do this – we have good reasons: There will also be an upcoming Dev Mode release of this track, giving you guys a better look at our electronic flags and other cool assets for track building.
Loch Drummond
Located just outside Stirling in the small vilage of Drummond, Scotland, is perhaps the home of the earliest known location of racing. Whether you consider it to be simple folklore, or to have some basis in reality, the valley has certainly held racing events since the 1950′s, but possibly for thousands of years. Based around what is assumed to be a disused and abandoned military installation, and surrounded by the walls of the valley, Loch Drummond is a relatively slow speed and highly technical track of two layouts (1.2 and 1.97 miles), that can really punish with lost time over a whole lap, for a mistake in a single corner. The area was once thought to be a place of ancient religious ceremonies, centered around a small henge of rounded stones located at the foot of the valley. Many people considered the area to be haunted, and there are many stories of disappearances and sightings of unusual things going back thousands of years. By 1946 however, the area was largely deserted, with only a handful of local farmers working in the valley. June 1947 saw a flurry of activity, when the British military constructed a base to handle radio traffic for the region. Of course, due to the location, there was some controversy, especially as the area saw little need for such an installation. Less than two months later, after a period of strange activity, the installation was abandoned, and it was found that the stone circle had been used as the foundations for a brick tower within the base. As time went by, ‘Glen Station’ and many of the valley stories were forgotten by all but a few. It wasn’t until the mid-1950′s, when a young farmer’s son began to travel from Duns, Berwickshire, to race at both Loch Drummond and nearby Crimond, that the area saw life once more. Soon, a young gentleman’s racing club was formed and saw great success for the next decade, using a simple set of racing rules: “no contact, and show respect to your fellow competitors.” Fully resurfaced in 1972, 1993 and 2008, the track also saw the addition of a new section in 2009, but could not attract high profile racing categories until safety improvements were made, and the dangerous runoff areas were widened. Sadly, the recent financial crisis of 2012 proved to be a tough challenge to overcome in terms of organizing the races, and covering the costs of recent improvements to the track. This saw the gentleman’s racing club (then known as GRC) sell the track to local racing enthusiast, John Livet, who has promised to make sure the legacy of the Gentleman’s Club carries on.
Changelog:
v1.23
Subscribe to the Loch Drummond Steam Workshop item → HERE
Nürburgring PBR Update
As we were already in the flow of updating tracks, we also revisited the famous Nürburgring. While you wait for the release of this new PBR version, enjoy some of the shots taken by our track team that is currently updating every single square meter of not just the Nürburgring GP but also the Green Hell. In addition to PBR, we continue to add more optimizations and other performance tweaks. More to come!
Code
No, we didn’t forget about our promise to give you an update after last month’s roadmap, in which we talked extensively about our search to find and fix some long standing issues that tend to pop up in some of our endurance events. This work has continued, and we are now at a point where we have a few scenarios that we can consistently reproduce. Based on these, we are now also investigating a few other areas of the code to ensure we leave no bug behind, using a mix of code reviews and static code analysis tools. Part of this process is also creating some new test tooling to automatically run a lot of complicated and long scenarios. So far this has resulted in quite a few improvements to the codebase already, and even though we are not completely there yet, we are very positive about where we are right now. It’s hard to predict exactly when this process will be done, but we are committed to making sure we completely fix the issues, and it’s likely the next build will already have some improvements.
It’s been a while since we’ve given you an update on our UI. Earlier this year we started doing regular development updates on it. Those have slowed down a bit as we were addressing some bigger modules of the code, but we are now getting to a point where we are ready to switch on the new UI by default. That does not mean the old one instantly disappears. We will keep it around as a “beta” on Steam. Another change we are looking to make is to go 64-bit only. We already announced that intention a while ago, and we can see from hardware surveys that our community has moved to this platform already.
We spent the last couple of weeks doing smaller tweaks and bugfixes, and as explained before, switching to this new UI should be seen as a new beginning that adds a lot more features and improvements.
One of those new features is our competition system. The current system, on which we have been running a lot of hotlap competitions, was just the first step, and our current intention is to come out with the next update in December. As development continues in the upcoming months, we’ll explain in more detail the features we are targeting for this release, but our end goal is definitely to have a tightly integrated system that you can use to easily find races and compete against people with similar skills. This will eventually also include features to do off-line races, as we know many of you enjoy competing against our AI as well.
Competition
Exciting racing action in every single round of the championship – that probably describes our GT Pro Series and Challenge Series in the most accurate way. As promised back then, this championship came here to stay, and so it does!
While we can´t give you a fully detailed schedule yet, we are happy to inform you that the Series will be back soon! We are planning to have the Relegation Race Day in August to finalize the GT Pro Series Season 2 Grid. You´re not familiar with what´s happening there? Let me give you a quick overview: it’s a 1-day event featuring three races where positions 25 – 21 of the GT Pro Season 1 and position 6 – 10 of the GT Challenge fight for the last five remaining Pro Series Spots for Season 2. This will be good, promise!
Right after Relegation, we will get going with the hotlap qualifier for GT Challenge Season 2, everyone’s chance to be on the grid of this major rFactor 2 GT series, competing for a spot in the Season 3 Pro Series. Some info on this already: The Hotlap Qualifier will feature the same car/setup for everyone, and drivers will be able to choose the GT3 car they want to compete with after they earned their spot in this championship. Sharpen your skill and racecraft until then, and we will see you on the broadcast!
But if GT-racing isn’t really where you see yourself on the top, then don´t worry. We are hard at work on another series with a similar format (Pro and Challenge) featuring a team championship and a different style of racing. More on this soon
Road to NBR24h
X-factor, a word we throw around a lot, but what do we actually mean? We mostly deal in R-factor. So maybe we should say someone has that ‘R-factor’ when it comes to being a racing talent!
We are happy to see one of our own is tapping into real world motorsport. Rene Buttler, our Business manager, decided to bring together simracers for a real racing team. On this real-life team made up of virtual racers even the mechanics are sim guys. Together with his team, the support of the studio, and drivers like Dave Gaming or Jimmy Broadbent, Rene wants to achieve participating in the Nurburgring 24 hours race in 2021. Rene went all out: he bought a race-ready Astra Cup car, got his racing license, and — most importantly — decked it out with rF2 logos. For him, it’s about the journey of combining simracing and real racing. His first NLS (formerly known as VLN) race is planned for August 29th, a 6-hour endurance race, broadcast live from the race. Rene is currently preparing the nuts and bolts of the project, and we celebrate this first big step towards the 24h race with the release of the Nürburgring Endurance Bundle.
This all new bundle will includes: Nürburgring, Porsche 911 GT3 Cup, BMW M2 CS Racing and Radical SR3-XX. With this new pack we give you a sampler of options to get to know Endurance racing at the Ring! From the more approachable to the more advanced in terms of handling, work your way up and conquer the Green Hell.
Get the Nürburgring Endurance Bundle → HERE
Sometimes our roadmap is focused on a specific topic; sometimes it’s a huge box of surprises. Today’s roadmap feels like the latter. Actually, the beauty of rFactor 2, and probably one of the reasons why you love it, is that there’s not just one type of racing or motorsport — it can be whatever you feel like today. So let’s try to bring this vibe of spontaneity and surprise to the July roadmap, which features many different aspects of what we are currently working on behind the scenes.
The first topic we want to talk about is connected to our last summer sale. We hope you were able to grab that piece of content you really wanted to add to your collection and are already enjoying it to the fullest. But we also listened to those of you who voiced disappointment about us restructuring DLC packs, especially since specific smaller packs were missing from the offer, packs that would “complete” your inventory. We value community feedback a lot, so we went back to our library, put on our spectacles, and dug out some of the “old” packs.
The great news is that some of those packs will now be discounted. Like waiting for the after party, the after sale is even better, so everyone who missed the packs can grab them now. Please keep in mind that nothing lasts forever: this discount offer and the packs themselves will go away after roughly 2 weeks, so grab them while you can
The following packs will be brought back for the “After-Sale”:
- Two Strong Pack – featuring the tech-packed McLaren Senna GTR and the mighty Aston Martin Vantage GTE → Get it HERE
- GT3 Pack – our first and basically original pack with the beloved GT3s, featuring cars like the McLaren 650S GT3, Radical GT3, Callaway Corvette GT3 and more (5 GT3 in total) → Get it HERE
- GT3 Challenger Pack – our second GT3 pack featuring another 5 GT3 class contenders such as the Audi R8 GT3 (normal and evo), BMW M6 GT3, Aston Martin Vantage GT3 etc. → Get it HERE
Cars
Part one is done, now let’s head over to the section showcasing the main actors in simracing: the cars.
As previously mentioned, this roadmap aims at diversity and with it we bring back a section we haven’t talked about for ages — oval racing, or more precisely, the rFactor 2 Stock Car Mod.
We are proud to announce a major update to the Stock Car mod. We’ve been hard at work for nearly 16 months redesigning almost every aspect of these cars. The main component of this update is the tire model. A lot of development was spent making sure they reacted correctly, giving the car a much improved feel and a better sense of realism. This update consists of brand new tire compounds for every track the Gen 6 CUP cars run on that are available in rFactor 2. The update uses the 2018 rules package with reworked aerodynamics, proper center of gravity, shocks, default setups, engines from dyno data (750+ horsepower), and, most importantly, rebuilt tires (24 different compounds/sets). The decision to stay with the 2018 rules was due to horsepower. In 2018, Stock Cars had 750 horsepower. In 2020 they have 550 horsepower. We felt the higher horsepower would provide a better experience of how a real stock car drives and feels. A lot of testing went into this to make sure the cars reacted correctly, and the default setups make it fun to drive right out of the box. Just like in real life, when behind a pack of cars you get slightly aero tight, but up front in clean air the car turns into the corners a little better. The new tire model gives it the feel you need to tell when it’s at the limit. However, when you go over the limit, be ready to catch it. You can’t just stomp the gas pedal, you gotta drive it up out of the corner while trying to keep its 750hp engine under control. As the tracks rubber up, you have to search for grip in different grooves. But with an in-car adjustable track bar, you can adjust the handling while you drive. We have also updated the car shaders to the new PBR shader and updated the templates as well with region maps. The Stock Car Team would like community feedback on the new cars and will have more exciting updates in the near future for them as well. Their main goal was to get the Stock Cars driving as close to a real car as possible by collaborating with real stock car drivers. Feel free to give feedback to the stock car team on Discord in the oval section. As a way of saying thanks, we added new default Stock Car paint jobs to reflect drivers that helped test and give feedback while developing this new beast!
Stockcar 2018
Changelog
v2.10
- Developed New Tire compounds for 24 tracks.
- Default setups for each track tweaked
- BOP tweaked per track
- Engine torque/HP tweaked per Dyno sheet information on a Stock Car Engine
- 3D bodies exported with new PBR shaders.
- Templates updated with Regions and contingencies layer
- Adjusted Aero Package to represent 2018 package
We hope you’re not going crazy in circles already because there is more to come in this section. In other news: Do you remember us saying that there are two new GT3s coming? With one being the obvious elephant in the room, it’s time to introduce the other fresh contender to this popular motorsport category.
Subscribe to the Stockcar 2018 Steam Workshop item → HERE
Bentley Continental GT3 2020
Rolling out of the factory with its fiercely striking design, this British masterpiece of the renowned luxurious car brand is going for the big wins again. We are very pleased to welcome the 2020 Bentley Continental GT3 to the lineup of cars available in rFactor 2. It is powered by a 4-litre-twin-turbo V8, 4.8 meters long and hungry to be at the front row of whichever track you choose to enjoy the roaring sound of your new race car. If you’re already on your way out of this roadmap and into the steam shop – stop! While we want to get the new Bentley into your hands as early as possible, it’s not ready to be launched off the grid just yet. Give our mechanics a bit more time to put on the slicks and do the last radio checks, then we’re ready to rock.
Tracks
After all this car-talk, let’s change focus to the locations we want to race at. While there won’t be a new track announcement just yet, we think we have some news to share in this category that people will like. Starting off with Loch Drummond you might be like Loch what?!” but hear us out. Loch Drummond is an amazing track that poses a real challenge to every serious simracer out there. And to make sure that you enjoy seeing your expensive toys on four wheels on this track, we gave it a complete overhaul, bringing it up to the latest tech. If there is still a question mark above your head as to why we would do this – we have good reasons: There will also be an upcoming Dev Mode release of this track, giving you guys a better look at our electronic flags and other cool assets for track building.
Loch Drummond
Located just outside Stirling in the small vilage of Drummond, Scotland, is perhaps the home of the earliest known location of racing. Whether you consider it to be simple folklore, or to have some basis in reality, the valley has certainly held racing events since the 1950′s, but possibly for thousands of years. Based around what is assumed to be a disused and abandoned military installation, and surrounded by the walls of the valley, Loch Drummond is a relatively slow speed and highly technical track of two layouts (1.2 and 1.97 miles), that can really punish with lost time over a whole lap, for a mistake in a single corner. The area was once thought to be a place of ancient religious ceremonies, centered around a small henge of rounded stones located at the foot of the valley. Many people considered the area to be haunted, and there are many stories of disappearances and sightings of unusual things going back thousands of years. By 1946 however, the area was largely deserted, with only a handful of local farmers working in the valley. June 1947 saw a flurry of activity, when the British military constructed a base to handle radio traffic for the region. Of course, due to the location, there was some controversy, especially as the area saw little need for such an installation. Less than two months later, after a period of strange activity, the installation was abandoned, and it was found that the stone circle had been used as the foundations for a brick tower within the base. As time went by, ‘Glen Station’ and many of the valley stories were forgotten by all but a few. It wasn’t until the mid-1950′s, when a young farmer’s son began to travel from Duns, Berwickshire, to race at both Loch Drummond and nearby Crimond, that the area saw life once more. Soon, a young gentleman’s racing club was formed and saw great success for the next decade, using a simple set of racing rules: “no contact, and show respect to your fellow competitors.” Fully resurfaced in 1972, 1993 and 2008, the track also saw the addition of a new section in 2009, but could not attract high profile racing categories until safety improvements were made, and the dangerous runoff areas were widened. Sadly, the recent financial crisis of 2012 proved to be a tough challenge to overcome in terms of organizing the races, and covering the costs of recent improvements to the track. This saw the gentleman’s racing club (then known as GRC) sell the track to local racing enthusiast, John Livet, who has promised to make sure the legacy of the Gentleman’s Club carries on.
Changelog:
v1.23
- Full PBR update
- Added score tower
- Added Big TV screen objects
- Fixed smoothing on pit trucks
- Small tweaks to terrain materials
- Small adjustment to AI at uphill chicane
- Fixed collision gaps
- Improved smoothing on outer terrain
- Fixed issues with shadow casting on tunnel
Subscribe to the Loch Drummond Steam Workshop item → HERE
Nürburgring PBR Update
As we were already in the flow of updating tracks, we also revisited the famous Nürburgring. While you wait for the release of this new PBR version, enjoy some of the shots taken by our track team that is currently updating every single square meter of not just the Nürburgring GP but also the Green Hell. In addition to PBR, we continue to add more optimizations and other performance tweaks. More to come!
Code
No, we didn’t forget about our promise to give you an update after last month’s roadmap, in which we talked extensively about our search to find and fix some long standing issues that tend to pop up in some of our endurance events. This work has continued, and we are now at a point where we have a few scenarios that we can consistently reproduce. Based on these, we are now also investigating a few other areas of the code to ensure we leave no bug behind, using a mix of code reviews and static code analysis tools. Part of this process is also creating some new test tooling to automatically run a lot of complicated and long scenarios. So far this has resulted in quite a few improvements to the codebase already, and even though we are not completely there yet, we are very positive about where we are right now. It’s hard to predict exactly when this process will be done, but we are committed to making sure we completely fix the issues, and it’s likely the next build will already have some improvements.
It’s been a while since we’ve given you an update on our UI. Earlier this year we started doing regular development updates on it. Those have slowed down a bit as we were addressing some bigger modules of the code, but we are now getting to a point where we are ready to switch on the new UI by default. That does not mean the old one instantly disappears. We will keep it around as a “beta” on Steam. Another change we are looking to make is to go 64-bit only. We already announced that intention a while ago, and we can see from hardware surveys that our community has moved to this platform already.
We spent the last couple of weeks doing smaller tweaks and bugfixes, and as explained before, switching to this new UI should be seen as a new beginning that adds a lot more features and improvements.
One of those new features is our competition system. The current system, on which we have been running a lot of hotlap competitions, was just the first step, and our current intention is to come out with the next update in December. As development continues in the upcoming months, we’ll explain in more detail the features we are targeting for this release, but our end goal is definitely to have a tightly integrated system that you can use to easily find races and compete against people with similar skills. This will eventually also include features to do off-line races, as we know many of you enjoy competing against our AI as well.
Competition
Exciting racing action in every single round of the championship – that probably describes our GT Pro Series and Challenge Series in the most accurate way. As promised back then, this championship came here to stay, and so it does!
While we can´t give you a fully detailed schedule yet, we are happy to inform you that the Series will be back soon! We are planning to have the Relegation Race Day in August to finalize the GT Pro Series Season 2 Grid. You´re not familiar with what´s happening there? Let me give you a quick overview: it’s a 1-day event featuring three races where positions 25 – 21 of the GT Pro Season 1 and position 6 – 10 of the GT Challenge fight for the last five remaining Pro Series Spots for Season 2. This will be good, promise!
Right after Relegation, we will get going with the hotlap qualifier for GT Challenge Season 2, everyone’s chance to be on the grid of this major rFactor 2 GT series, competing for a spot in the Season 3 Pro Series. Some info on this already: The Hotlap Qualifier will feature the same car/setup for everyone, and drivers will be able to choose the GT3 car they want to compete with after they earned their spot in this championship. Sharpen your skill and racecraft until then, and we will see you on the broadcast!
But if GT-racing isn’t really where you see yourself on the top, then don´t worry. We are hard at work on another series with a similar format (Pro and Challenge) featuring a team championship and a different style of racing. More on this soon
Road to NBR24h
X-factor, a word we throw around a lot, but what do we actually mean? We mostly deal in R-factor. So maybe we should say someone has that ‘R-factor’ when it comes to being a racing talent!
We are happy to see one of our own is tapping into real world motorsport. Rene Buttler, our Business manager, decided to bring together simracers for a real racing team. On this real-life team made up of virtual racers even the mechanics are sim guys. Together with his team, the support of the studio, and drivers like Dave Gaming or Jimmy Broadbent, Rene wants to achieve participating in the Nurburgring 24 hours race in 2021. Rene went all out: he bought a race-ready Astra Cup car, got his racing license, and — most importantly — decked it out with rF2 logos. For him, it’s about the journey of combining simracing and real racing. His first NLS (formerly known as VLN) race is planned for August 29th, a 6-hour endurance race, broadcast live from the race. Rene is currently preparing the nuts and bolts of the project, and we celebrate this first big step towards the 24h race with the release of the Nürburgring Endurance Bundle.
This all new bundle will includes: Nürburgring, Porsche 911 GT3 Cup, BMW M2 CS Racing and Radical SR3-XX. With this new pack we give you a sampler of options to get to know Endurance racing at the Ring! From the more approachable to the more advanced in terms of handling, work your way up and conquer the Green Hell.
Get the Nürburgring Endurance Bundle → HERE
FORFUN GT3 em INTERLAGOS Hoje, 27/08, às 22h, faremos um ForFun com o GT3 Pack no RF2.
Todos estão convidados. Serão 60 minutos de adrenalina.
Inscreva-se: http://www.ligavpg.com/forum_vpg/index.php?board=652.0
Servidor: LigaVPG-4FUN-Dover
Roadmap Update August 2020
Waiting for the monthly roadmap has become a bit of a tradition on the last day of the month. Whilst some just keep an eye on our Discord server, others are known to keep hitting F5 in their browser to catch the first glimpse of the much anticipated news. And that’s great, because coming back to the roadmap each month gives us the opportunity to reflect on what we worked on, get an overview about what happened and enjoy what we accomplished, as well as look ahead at what’s to come. So let’s get started!
Development
On the development front we have just completed a whole series of automated and real-life tests to ensure the fixes we have been making for endurance events are indeed working. All of them have been positive, so we are now at a point where we are looking at making these part of our upcoming release.
Our UI is nearing the point where we switch to it by default. We’re currently making sure that we can properly translate all aspects into multiple languages, including a mechanism to do that for content so we can translate things like track and car descriptions. We have also integrated the material editor for custom liveries, making it easier to tweak those materials to perfection.
Last month we released our new stock cars, and in our upcoming release we will release an important update to the plugins that go with this series. We will also include more documentation on how to properly setup races with these cars as we are aware that some of you have struggled a bit with this.
Also in our new update will be many tweaks to support the new modding documentation and PBR shaders. That documentation has been proof-read internally for the last couple of weeks now and we are curious to see what our community can achieve with it! As an example of how to use all of these new goodies, we will include a “dev mode” version of Loch Drummond for everybody to examine and toy around with.
Finally, you might wonder when this next release will be out. Definitely this month an sooner rather than later.
Content
We’re getting super close to releasing both the Bentley Continental GT3 and Ferrari 488 GT3 Evo – which will make a total of 13 official GT3 cars in rFactor 2 – each with their own unique strengths and weaknesses. In view of that, we are also updating the BOP for each of the cars, some of which have had some significant makeovers. We look forward to sharing more details over the next few weeks.
Also on the horizon is the release of a free update to the Nürburgring Nordschleife as we have migrated the track to PBR. The PBR update provides a much more natural look for this outstanding track, our team of Banksy wannabees are furiously re-adding he graffiti as we speak – we’re really looking forward to showing off more screens and releasing the update soon.
We’re also excited to bring more updates for our Formula E content, after the successful ‘Race At Home’ series by Formula E, we are working on a number of improvements to make the racing more realistic, including physics updates, and for online activity the “attack mode”. Although “attack mode” is quite specific for Formula E, in theory you could use the same feature for other cars as well. Triggered by you driving over a certain section of the track, attack mode gives you slightly more power for a limited amount of time. This promotes more exciting races as well as an extra tactical element and we applaud Formula E for pioneering such features in their series! Not just that, look out for another stunning Formula E laser scanned circuit soon.
Competition
As announced on last month’s roadmap, we’re preparing the launch of Season 2 of our GT Series in both Pro and Challenge. But there was one last crucial event before we all can concentrate on Season 2, and that was the Relegation. A one-day event with everything on the line. Positions 6-10 from GT Challenge went head to head with positions 25-20 from GT Pro, fighting for the last 5 tickets to the pinnacle of GT racing in rFactor 2, the Pro Series. Same evening as roadmap, it turned our monday into an action packed series of working hours. We had chosen shorter layouts to make sure our 10 contenders really fight every second, so we visited Silverstone International, Sebring School and the Nürburgring Sprint layout.
Drivers in the Relegation event:
Race 1 showed us already what we had been in for in this event. After a great start for Buttler-Pal Motorsport driver Peyo Peev in his Porsche GT3 it was Alex Siebel with the BMW M6 GT3 who challenged him for the win every single lap. Alejando Lopez unfortunately connected with Jan von der Heyde and Zbigniew Siara in turn 1 and found himself at the last position where he stayed for the reminder of the race. With a few skirmished everywhere on the grid the 20 minutes flew by pretty quickly but it was Peyo Peev at the end who managed to fight of Alex Siebel and bringing home his first 35 points at the UK stop.
Over in the US it was a completely different picture compared to Silverstone, basically mixing the entire result. After a super fast qualification viewers saw Alejandro López defending his position like an angry mother-dinosaurs right from the famous movies, bring home a start-finish win with Peyo Peev spinning his Porsche and ending up on the opposite site of the leaderboard. Zanshos quick driver Jan von der Heyde was once again right within reach of the win but couldn´t find a way around López McLaren and had to settle for 2nd position. With the results opening up the competition for the top 5 spots again, it was all about the 3rd and last race – the decider.
Coming to Nürburgring we had 3 drivers sitting on top of the scoreboard, Lopez, von der Heyde and Peev, and another 4 drivers that could close out the top 5 and go Pro (Siara, Stanley, Polesny and Weijer) with Alex Siebel being right between these 2 fighting groups, just having to get a decent finis hto make it into Season 2 of the Pro Series. Pole Position once again went to Peyo Peev who was on fire on this monday night. RIght from the start tho it was López again who went for the highlight moves, squeezing through 2 cars right in the middle into turn 1 and getting into third, which left Peev and Siebel uncontested for the first laps and giving them time to spread their lead. It all seemed settled as we approached the half way point when things got out of hands fairly quickly. López was fighting with von der Heyde again, basically a replay from sebring, with the Zansho driver lusting for revenge, when it was Siara from Buttler-Pal Motorsport who saw his chance in passing both but instead tapped the rear of von der Heydes McLaren, unsettling his car and costing him a lot of time. Siara then decided to give back the position to the Zansho Ace but lost so much momentum on the straight that also Polesny and Stanley went by. With this change in the leaderboard, it was all of the sudden Siara who wouldn’t make it to stay in the Pro Series. Nail-biting minutes followed for Polesny and Siara, with both fighting for points. While Ferris Stanley in his Mercedes AMG GT3 had to let Siara by at one point, it was Polesny from Deuce Motorsport who claimed the last spot for Pro Series in the end, with Peyo Peev winning his second race of the night.
With the 3 races done and dusted we say welcome (back) to the Pro Series to following drivers:
Now all the teams and drivers have to get prepared for the new challenge that is arising with season 2 and we wish them all the best for preparation phase.
If you missed the exciting livestream of the relegation you can obviously re-watch it on our twitch channel:
In other news, we want to congratulate our very own René Buttler and his team for finishing their first NLS race, surviving the 6 hours while also claiming their first pole position! We will start following them, and a lot of other “simracers who turned real racers”, in a new series starting soon!
Welcome
Last but not least, tomorrow we formally welcome our newest member of Studio 397, Paul Jeffrey. Most of you will know Paul from his many great contributions to RaceDepartment, and he will keep doing those of course. We are very excited to have him on board and we are confident that you will be hearing a lot more from him soon! Have a great month, enjoy your sim racing and on behalf of all of us, stay safe!
Waiting for the monthly roadmap has become a bit of a tradition on the last day of the month. Whilst some just keep an eye on our Discord server, others are known to keep hitting F5 in their browser to catch the first glimpse of the much anticipated news. And that’s great, because coming back to the roadmap each month gives us the opportunity to reflect on what we worked on, get an overview about what happened and enjoy what we accomplished, as well as look ahead at what’s to come. So let’s get started!
Development
On the development front we have just completed a whole series of automated and real-life tests to ensure the fixes we have been making for endurance events are indeed working. All of them have been positive, so we are now at a point where we are looking at making these part of our upcoming release.
Our UI is nearing the point where we switch to it by default. We’re currently making sure that we can properly translate all aspects into multiple languages, including a mechanism to do that for content so we can translate things like track and car descriptions. We have also integrated the material editor for custom liveries, making it easier to tweak those materials to perfection.
Last month we released our new stock cars, and in our upcoming release we will release an important update to the plugins that go with this series. We will also include more documentation on how to properly setup races with these cars as we are aware that some of you have struggled a bit with this.
Also in our new update will be many tweaks to support the new modding documentation and PBR shaders. That documentation has been proof-read internally for the last couple of weeks now and we are curious to see what our community can achieve with it! As an example of how to use all of these new goodies, we will include a “dev mode” version of Loch Drummond for everybody to examine and toy around with.
Finally, you might wonder when this next release will be out. Definitely this month an sooner rather than later.
Content
We’re getting super close to releasing both the Bentley Continental GT3 and Ferrari 488 GT3 Evo – which will make a total of 13 official GT3 cars in rFactor 2 – each with their own unique strengths and weaknesses. In view of that, we are also updating the BOP for each of the cars, some of which have had some significant makeovers. We look forward to sharing more details over the next few weeks.
Also on the horizon is the release of a free update to the Nürburgring Nordschleife as we have migrated the track to PBR. The PBR update provides a much more natural look for this outstanding track, our team of Banksy wannabees are furiously re-adding he graffiti as we speak – we’re really looking forward to showing off more screens and releasing the update soon.
We’re also excited to bring more updates for our Formula E content, after the successful ‘Race At Home’ series by Formula E, we are working on a number of improvements to make the racing more realistic, including physics updates, and for online activity the “attack mode”. Although “attack mode” is quite specific for Formula E, in theory you could use the same feature for other cars as well. Triggered by you driving over a certain section of the track, attack mode gives you slightly more power for a limited amount of time. This promotes more exciting races as well as an extra tactical element and we applaud Formula E for pioneering such features in their series! Not just that, look out for another stunning Formula E laser scanned circuit soon.
Competition
As announced on last month’s roadmap, we’re preparing the launch of Season 2 of our GT Series in both Pro and Challenge. But there was one last crucial event before we all can concentrate on Season 2, and that was the Relegation. A one-day event with everything on the line. Positions 6-10 from GT Challenge went head to head with positions 25-20 from GT Pro, fighting for the last 5 tickets to the pinnacle of GT racing in rFactor 2, the Pro Series. Same evening as roadmap, it turned our monday into an action packed series of working hours. We had chosen shorter layouts to make sure our 10 contenders really fight every second, so we visited Silverstone International, Sebring School and the Nürburgring Sprint layout.
Drivers in the Relegation event:
- Dennis Lind (who unfortunately wasn’t able to compete)
- Jan von der Heyde
- Ferris Stanley
- Peyo Peev
- Zbigniew Siara
- Vojta Polesny
- Alex Siebel
- Sido Weijer
- Matthew Beaving
- Alejandro López
Race 1 showed us already what we had been in for in this event. After a great start for Buttler-Pal Motorsport driver Peyo Peev in his Porsche GT3 it was Alex Siebel with the BMW M6 GT3 who challenged him for the win every single lap. Alejando Lopez unfortunately connected with Jan von der Heyde and Zbigniew Siara in turn 1 and found himself at the last position where he stayed for the reminder of the race. With a few skirmished everywhere on the grid the 20 minutes flew by pretty quickly but it was Peyo Peev at the end who managed to fight of Alex Siebel and bringing home his first 35 points at the UK stop.
Over in the US it was a completely different picture compared to Silverstone, basically mixing the entire result. After a super fast qualification viewers saw Alejandro López defending his position like an angry mother-dinosaurs right from the famous movies, bring home a start-finish win with Peyo Peev spinning his Porsche and ending up on the opposite site of the leaderboard. Zanshos quick driver Jan von der Heyde was once again right within reach of the win but couldn´t find a way around López McLaren and had to settle for 2nd position. With the results opening up the competition for the top 5 spots again, it was all about the 3rd and last race – the decider.
Coming to Nürburgring we had 3 drivers sitting on top of the scoreboard, Lopez, von der Heyde and Peev, and another 4 drivers that could close out the top 5 and go Pro (Siara, Stanley, Polesny and Weijer) with Alex Siebel being right between these 2 fighting groups, just having to get a decent finis hto make it into Season 2 of the Pro Series. Pole Position once again went to Peyo Peev who was on fire on this monday night. RIght from the start tho it was López again who went for the highlight moves, squeezing through 2 cars right in the middle into turn 1 and getting into third, which left Peev and Siebel uncontested for the first laps and giving them time to spread their lead. It all seemed settled as we approached the half way point when things got out of hands fairly quickly. López was fighting with von der Heyde again, basically a replay from sebring, with the Zansho driver lusting for revenge, when it was Siara from Buttler-Pal Motorsport who saw his chance in passing both but instead tapped the rear of von der Heydes McLaren, unsettling his car and costing him a lot of time. Siara then decided to give back the position to the Zansho Ace but lost so much momentum on the straight that also Polesny and Stanley went by. With this change in the leaderboard, it was all of the sudden Siara who wouldn’t make it to stay in the Pro Series. Nail-biting minutes followed for Polesny and Siara, with both fighting for points. While Ferris Stanley in his Mercedes AMG GT3 had to let Siara by at one point, it was Polesny from Deuce Motorsport who claimed the last spot for Pro Series in the end, with Peyo Peev winning his second race of the night.
With the 3 races done and dusted we say welcome (back) to the Pro Series to following drivers:
- Peyo Peev
- Jan von der Heyde
- Vojta Polesny
- Alejandro López
- Alex Siebel
Now all the teams and drivers have to get prepared for the new challenge that is arising with season 2 and we wish them all the best for preparation phase.
If you missed the exciting livestream of the relegation you can obviously re-watch it on our twitch channel:
In other news, we want to congratulate our very own René Buttler and his team for finishing their first NLS race, surviving the 6 hours while also claiming their first pole position! We will start following them, and a lot of other “simracers who turned real racers”, in a new series starting soon!
Welcome
Last but not least, tomorrow we formally welcome our newest member of Studio 397, Paul Jeffrey. Most of you will know Paul from his many great contributions to RaceDepartment, and he will keep doing those of course. We are very excited to have him on board and we are confident that you will be hearing a lot more from him soon! Have a great month, enjoy your sim racing and on behalf of all of us, stay safe!
Release of Build 1121
It’s been a while since we last updated our build and in the mean time we’ve been working on quite a few bugs and improvements to the code base, so we felt it was time to share these in a fresh update. A full overview of all changes can be found below.
Old UI (opt-out)
It’s been a while since we last updated our build and in the mean time we’ve been working on quite a few bugs and improvements to the code base, so we felt it was time to share these in a fresh update. A full overview of all changes can be found below.
Old UI (opt-out)
- Client build ID: 5504070
- Dedicated server build ID: 5504080
- Client build ID: 5503999
- Added key binding for hide cursor. This is useful when running the in-game overlays and doing a broadcast to a capture card that insists on showing your cursor otherwise.
- All replay controls can now be custom assigned in the controller tab. By default all replay controls are mapped to the same defaults unless re-assigned.
- Added first time start up wizard. For now only has name and nickname fields. This will be extended.
- Added player area in the main UI. For now only has name and nickname fields.
- In showroom we now check for upgrades on page load and do not show info if there aren’t any.
- Disabled select button in list layout for category items. When switching from grid or thumbnail layout to the list layout, and having a “category” item selected, the select button would be available and would glitch things when clicked.
- Clear car configuration info when viewing a “category” item.
- Updated the pop-up layout and styling.
- Renamed event screen “Drive” button to “Passenger” when in multiplayer spectator mode.
- Made transitioning to packages area page smoother:
- Get packages after the page has loaded to avoid blocking.
- Show a pop-up message while getting packages.
- Use a dark grey background during switching to the page.
- Enabled a chat message for single player admin commands.
- Fixed a game crash when switching sessions.
- Fix accessing garage data properties if data is not available.
- All controller profiles are updated. This fixes various issues when using ‘Detect’ on first time hardware setup.
- We have new controller profiles for:
- Simucube 2 Sport;
- Simucube 2 Pro;
- Simucube 2 Ultimate;
- Logitech G923 PlayStation 4 and PC;
- Logitech G923 XBox One and PC;
- VRS OSW;
- XBOX One Controller For Windows.
- Added “PlayerFileOverrides” to various profiles to ensure proper driver aids are enabled/disabled on first time wheel detect.
- Added use thread “true” for all profiles.
- Ensured that the “920 workaround” is set to “false” on all non-Logitech profiles.
- Fixed profile naming and removed redundant profiles.
- Fixed stuck ‘look left’ on TS-XW profile.
- Thrustmaster F1 wheel Integral profiles: Fixed all mapping conflicts: T-GT, TS-PC, T500 RS, TS-XW.
- Thrustmaster Racing wheel profiles: Fixed all mapping conflicts: T-GT, TS-PC, T500 RS.
- Thrustmaster F1 wheel Integral profiles: Fixed all mapping conflicts: T-GT, TS-PC, T500 RS, TS-XW.
- Thrustmaster Racing wheel profiles: Fixed all mapping conflicts: T-GT, TS-PC, T500 RS.
- Added correct max torque to Fanatec CSW v1, v2, V2.5 and Direct Drive profiles.
- Published a ton of new information about modding for rFactor 2 on the documentation website.
- Large update to modding documentation, will full documentation on PBR material system, dedicated Development Tools section and more.
- First official release of 3ds Max 2021 Plugins.
- First official release of Material Editor.
- First official release of Maps Converter Tool.
- Added Loch Drummond (PBR Track) to ModDev.
- Added ability to disable auto albedo correction on pre PBR shaders.
- Added ability to choose cube Fresnel default settings on pre PBR car body shader.
- Corrected Deformable Tire shader naming in Max Plugins.
- Exposed Atmospherics section in Wet file to configure Haze and other settings..
- Updated ModDev to use main game HUD.
- Added ability to save preset positions in the Scene Viewer.
- Added new pit exit marshal textures, thanks to Alessandro Micali!
- Small refactor of glare settings in PostFX
- Many other minor tweaks to various shaders and settings.
- Significantly improved logging for multiplayer sessions.
- Fixed race conditions in our low level socket node list.
- Increased the size of an internal array to accommodate all possible cars in a session.
- Fixed an issue where not just the server would send out node reordering messages.
- Changed some very “spammy” log messages.
- Fixed several crashes where some code would reference invalid data.
- Added descriptive names to all threads.
- Improved the handling of an application crash to ensure logs get flushed.
- Made qualifying box sector colors correspond to best lap sectors instead of absolute best sectors.
- Added fallback for drivers with no last name set.
- Added drop-down in control panel to select overlay configuration.
- Made replay transition follow the configured series color.
- Added an option to show more data in tower field 4 (gap to next, number of pit stops).
- Added an option to automatically enable race update box when timing box is enabled.
- Fixed pit timer getting stuck after leaving pit lane.
- Fixed displaying of gaps to leader/fastest lap time in tower and banner.
- Extended field 2 data with manufacturer and team logo.
- Added turning lap time green or purple in the qualifying box after the lap.
- Added option to minimize boxes in the control panel.
- Fixed starting order not working with multiple events.
- Fixed replay jumping to wrong time.
- Cleaned up the CSS to make it easier to make changes in the custom.css.
- Added a replay marker button to mark replay events.
- Updated team name and car number to use the entries from the .VEH file.
- Added mixed/overall standings option.
- Added an option to toggle between driver name, team name and description.
- Made b-roll a standalone element.
- Added option to condense tower by hiding field 2 or 3.
- Fixed schedule slide date comparing.
- Added an option to start the overlay in multi-class or single-class mode.
- Updated banner behavior based on the selected car class (or mixed/multi-class mode).
- Rearranged control panel.
- Known issue: tower animation flickers when swapping pages.
free for 2017 Bentley Continental GT3 DLC owners!
------------------------------------------------------
Temporada 3 de DTM da Liga VPG em 2020
1ª ETAPA –> seg 14/09/2020 –> Race: 22h05min –> Circuito: Hermano Rodrigues/MEX
2ª ETAPA –> seg 28/09/2020 –> Race: 22h05min –> Circuito: Magny-Cours/FRA
3ª ETAPA –> seg 12/10/2020 –> Race: 22h05min –> Circuito: Jerez de la Frontera/ ESP
4ª ETAPA –> seg 26/10/2020 –> Race: 22h05min –> Circuito: Barcelona – Catalunya/ ESP
5ª ETAPA –> seg 09/11/2020 –> Race: 22h05min –> Circuito: Portimão – Algarve/POR*
6ª ETAPA FINAL –> seg 23/11/2020 –> Race: 22h05min –> Circuito: Hockenheimring/ALE
Mais informações: http://www.ligavpg.com/blog/vpg-lanca-calendario-e-abre-inscricoes-da-t3-2020/
E ai pessoal! Pra quem curte o jogo e quer correr sem compromisso, sem ser em liga tem a https://www.justrace.net/ que ajuda bastante. Corridas praticamente todos os dias, GTE, GT3, conteúdo pago, conteúdo grátis. Quem curte o jogo, não tem disponibilidade de correr em ligas...pode ser uma boa.
Eu e alguns amigos fizemos a corrida em Interlagos semana passada, corrida de 50 minutos, pessoal bem de boa. Pra corrida de amanhã já tem 18 confirmados. Sabado vai ter corrida em Le Mans (DLC) com o Endurance Pack (DLC), já tem 17.
Eu e alguns amigos fizemos a corrida em Interlagos semana passada, corrida de 50 minutos, pessoal bem de boa. Pra corrida de amanhã já tem 18 confirmados. Sabado vai ter corrida em Le Mans (DLC) com o Endurance Pack (DLC), já tem 17.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Temporada 3 de DTM da Liga VPG em 2020
1ª ETAPA –> seg 14/09/2020 –> Race: 22h05min –> Circuito: Hermano Rodrigues/MEX
2ª ETAPA –> seg 28/09/2020 –> Race: 22h05min –> Circuito: Magny-Cours/FRA
3ª ETAPA –> seg 12/10/2020 –> Race: 22h05min –> Circuito: Jerez de la Frontera/ ESP
4ª ETAPA –> seg 26/10/2020 –> Race: 22h05min –> Circuito: Barcelona – Catalunya/ ESP
5ª ETAPA –> seg 09/11/2020 –> Race: 22h05min –> Circuito: Portimão – Algarve/POR*
6ª ETAPA FINAL –> seg 23/11/2020 –> Race: 22h05min –> Circuito: Hockenheimring/ALE
Mais informações: http://www.ligavpg.com/blog/vpg-lanca-calendario-e-abre-inscricoes-da-t3-2020/
Nürburgring Nordschleife PBR Update
Update day! Today marks a very pleasing day for us here at Studio 397 – after a considerable amount of work behind the scenes, we present to you what we consider to be a rather substantial new update for our Nürburgring Nordschleife track in rFactor 2.
Busy as we’ve been with the recent developments on the GT3 BOP and physics front, not forgetting of course the 2020 Bentley Continental GT3 and Ferrari 488 GT3 EVO, we couldn’t let the one-year anniversary of our most substantial track release pass without some additional love from the studio – and now, 12 months on from bringing this great venue to the rFactor 2 public, we’ve given all layouts a substantial refresh in terms of both visuals and optimization – and the results are, if we do say so ourselves, rather pleasant indeed.
So, what’s been happening behind the scenes to make this new update possible – and what does it mean for the end user?
In short, it means a more optimized track with prettier visuals. Two very welcome things on what is by far and away the largest and most demanding layout within rFactor 2.
Nürburgring Nordschleife | Steam Store: Click HERE (https://store.steampowered.com/itemstore/365960/detail/36/)
In real terms, the development team have been working incredibly hard behind the scenes to add all the latest PBR shaders and lighting balances to the track for this new upgrade, bringing the Norschleife itself and the various additional layouts of the venue bang up-to-date with the latest visual developments within rFactor 2.
When we looked at the circuit in detail, we decided to revisit much of the surrounding trackside furniture to give things a little refresh and bring them closer to its real life counterpart. This means items such as emergency support vehicles around the venue have been updated, as has the addition of new crowd and public vehicle models dotted around the many popular campsites. Talking of being out in nature, we’ve also planted plenty of new trees to ensure the experience is as closely matched to that of driving through the 20+ km circuit in real life as possible.
Oh, and we added support for up to 90 vehicles on all Nordschleife layouts using the Grand Prix pit lane… so we doubt you’ll have time to admire the scenery when that many cars are out on the track!
Now I’m sure you are thinking all these wonderful sounding changes are going to grind most PC’s to an absolute standstill… well, we’ve also worked very hard to bring a new optimization pass to the track as well, so not only does it look much better than it has ever done before, it also has further optimizations too – something we are sure will be well-received by our rFactor 2 community.
The Nürburgring Nordschleife really is one of the most spectacular circuits in motorsport, and now it looks better than ever following this update – we hope you enjoy it!
Changelog
GT3 AI BoP Updates and Minor Fixes
While the track team was hard at work on the new version of the Nürburgring Nordschleife, part of our team responsible for cars and AI went back to our GT3 lineup to fix some minor issues as well as balance the AI for all those out there that love some single player action.
Quite a list, so all the details can be found below! And yes, the Ferrari GTE also sneaked into the list while we we’re at it
AstonMartin Vantage GT3 2019
v1.77
Audi R8LMS GT3 2019
v1.51
Bentley Continental GT3 2020
v1.11
Callaway Corvette GT3 2017
v2.91
Ferrari 488 GT3 2020
v1.29
Ferrari 488 GTE 2020
v1.83
McLaren 650S GT3 2017
v2.77
Mercedes AMG GT3 2017
v2.87
Porsche 911 GT3 R
v1.69
Radical RXC GT3 2017
v2.77
Steam Build ID Client 5694072
Dedi 5694077
NEW UI Only
Steam Build ID Client 5694164
Update day! Today marks a very pleasing day for us here at Studio 397 – after a considerable amount of work behind the scenes, we present to you what we consider to be a rather substantial new update for our Nürburgring Nordschleife track in rFactor 2.
Busy as we’ve been with the recent developments on the GT3 BOP and physics front, not forgetting of course the 2020 Bentley Continental GT3 and Ferrari 488 GT3 EVO, we couldn’t let the one-year anniversary of our most substantial track release pass without some additional love from the studio – and now, 12 months on from bringing this great venue to the rFactor 2 public, we’ve given all layouts a substantial refresh in terms of both visuals and optimization – and the results are, if we do say so ourselves, rather pleasant indeed.
So, what’s been happening behind the scenes to make this new update possible – and what does it mean for the end user?
In short, it means a more optimized track with prettier visuals. Two very welcome things on what is by far and away the largest and most demanding layout within rFactor 2.
Nürburgring Nordschleife | Steam Store: Click HERE (https://store.steampowered.com/itemstore/365960/detail/36/)
In real terms, the development team have been working incredibly hard behind the scenes to add all the latest PBR shaders and lighting balances to the track for this new upgrade, bringing the Norschleife itself and the various additional layouts of the venue bang up-to-date with the latest visual developments within rFactor 2.
When we looked at the circuit in detail, we decided to revisit much of the surrounding trackside furniture to give things a little refresh and bring them closer to its real life counterpart. This means items such as emergency support vehicles around the venue have been updated, as has the addition of new crowd and public vehicle models dotted around the many popular campsites. Talking of being out in nature, we’ve also planted plenty of new trees to ensure the experience is as closely matched to that of driving through the 20+ km circuit in real life as possible.
Oh, and we added support for up to 90 vehicles on all Nordschleife layouts using the Grand Prix pit lane… so we doubt you’ll have time to admire the scenery when that many cars are out on the track!
Now I’m sure you are thinking all these wonderful sounding changes are going to grind most PC’s to an absolute standstill… well, we’ve also worked very hard to bring a new optimization pass to the track as well, so not only does it look much better than it has ever done before, it also has further optimizations too – something we are sure will be well-received by our rFactor 2 community.
The Nürburgring Nordschleife really is one of the most spectacular circuits in motorsport, and now it looks better than ever following this update – we hope you enjoy it!
Changelog
- Comprehensive & Extensive PBR Update to the entire Circuit
- New Textures for Roads & Terrain
- New Features on Roads such as dust and improved real road dynamics
- Reworked outer terrain materials
- Reviewed trees and treeline objects, materials and placement
- All new crowds
- Reviewed night-lighting
- Further optimisation pass
- Added “Grand Prix No Chicane” Layout
- Added Support for up to 90 vehicles on Nords layouts using GP pits.
- Added New Support Vehicles
- Various General Fixes
- Extended white line on layouts using the GP pit exit so cars can merge safely further down
- Moved tire barriers in that slightly blocked pit entry transition on 24H layout
GT3 AI BoP Updates and Minor Fixes
While the track team was hard at work on the new version of the Nürburgring Nordschleife, part of our team responsible for cars and AI went back to our GT3 lineup to fix some minor issues as well as balance the AI for all those out there that love some single player action.
Quite a list, so all the details can be found below! And yes, the Ferrari GTE also sneaked into the list while we we’re at it
AstonMartin Vantage GT3 2019
v1.77
- AI: More forward downforce
Audi R8LMS GT3 2019
v1.51
- AI: Added slightly more grip
Bentley Continental GT3 2020
v1.11
- Adjustments to aerodynamics to reduce excessive front lift.
- Fine tuned to ride height sensitivity.
- Fixed cams
- Updated brake disc materials
- Adjusted cokcpit AO
- Fixed shadow in showroom
- AI: Added grip, especially front end
Callaway Corvette GT3 2017
v2.91
- Fixed wet tires starting temp
- Adjusted collision mesh
- Adjusted lower LODs (removed endurance light covers)
Ferrari 488 GT3 2020
v1.29
- Fixed onboard cam clipping the curbs
- Adjusted bonnet cam
- Fixed clipping TV cams
- Adjusted rev lights on the rev limiter
Ferrari 488 GTE 2020
v1.83
- Fixed onboard cam clipping the curbs
- Adjusted bonnet cam
- Fixed clipping TV cams
- Adjusted rev lights on the rev limiter
- AI: Slightly improved pace
McLaren 650S GT3 2017
v2.77
- AI: Reduced understeer
Mercedes AMG GT3 2017
v2.87
- AI: Reduced spinning in certain situations
- AI: Reduced understeer
- Adjusted collsion mesh
Porsche 911 GT3 R
v1.69
- Added speedo to dash
Radical RXC GT3 2017
v2.77
- AI: Slightly slowed down
Steam Build ID Client 5694072
Dedi 5694077
- Fixed some cars showing all white in the showroom
- Fixed cars showing in the list that shouldn’t be there at server join
- Fixed chrome material not working in the showroom
- Fixed an issue that could cause a client to load an old version of a track when joining at server join
NEW UI Only
Steam Build ID Client 5694164
- Added real descriptions for cars and tracks in the content selection list
Roadmap Update October 2020
Roadmap day!
Hello everyone and welcome to the rFactor 2 October Development Roadmap – can you believe it’s been a month already since we last wrote about the happenings back at Studio 397 HQ? It’s certainly been another busy one for us here in the team, as we continue to push hard to make rFactor 2 the simulation we all know it can become. Although the festive holidays are getting ever closer, that certainly doesn’t mean we are taking our foot off the gas behind the scenes, far from it in fact.
So, what’s been cooking back at base, and what do we have to look forward to in the very near future?
First, let’s have a quick look at some of the highlights from the last month before we dig a little deeper into what’s coming up.
We’ve been busy recently adding some quality of life improvements to existing content within the simulation, and I think it fair to say that the changes we’ve brought to the Nürburgring Nordschleife in particular have elevated the circuit right into the top echelons of track content within rFactor 2.
Nürburgring Nordschleife DLC | Purchase HERE.
We’ve been delighted with the visual uplift our latest PBR update has brought to the venue, and we are gratified to see the community appears to agree!
Ermin Hamidovic
Since the update deployed for the Nürburgring Nordschleife, we’ve realised a few little details have been overlooked during the PBR facelift, details like curb visuals at key points of the circuit for example, so we’ve got our track team back on the case and should be in a position to push out a new update for this immense circuit in the not too distant future.
In terms of cars, we also deployed a new GT3 AI BOP that added significant improvements to the way the AI drivers behave and their balance of performances against each vs and the player, which came directly off the back of our new Bentley and Ferrari DLC releases; really helping to flesh out the GT3 category of cars within rFactor 2 as the class continues to prove itself as an exceptionally popular choice within the sim racing community.
Ferrari 488 GT3 EVO 2020 | Purchase HERE.
Bentley Continental GT3 2020 | Purchase HERE.
Also on the topic of cars, October would see us release a new build for the often overlooked Stock Car 2018 content. We are delighted to see that the new update seems to have done a great job of bringing these powerful and entertaining cars back into the consciousness of the sim racing community – and hopefully exposing some players to a new and enjoyable driving experience that they perhaps overlooked earlier in their rFactor 2 adventures.
Stock Car 2018 | Download HERE.
In terms of competitions, this month marked the start of our two premium Esport racing series – as the very best of the rFactor 2 racing community took to the circuit for the opening rounds of our returning GT Pro and GT Challenge Powered by VCO championships – taking in the bumps and twists of Sebring and Portland in two incredibly entertaining encounters out on the virtual track.
GT Pro and Challenge Series | Catch all the action again HERE.
While those championships kicked off in fine style, another popular series would come to its dramatic conclusion this month too – with the BMW M2 CS Racing Cup hosting its final round at the daunting Nordschleife – another fantastic series that really showcased some virtual driving heroics amongst our Esport drivers. We thoroughly enjoyed seeing how the drivers adapted to the BMW M2 CS Racing machine, and look forward to hosting more action with this car in the future.
Now, before we get onto the subject of future goodies within the world of rFactor 2, we wanted to take this opportunity to highlight a very insightful interview our Managing Director Marcel Offermans recently undertook with sim racing YouTuber Ermin Hamidovic… be warned, it’s a long watch but well worth an hour of your time…
So, let’s talk about the future. We are continuously working hard behind the scenes to bring as much development and improvement to rFactor 2 as we possibly can, whilst juggling that difficult tightrope of ensuring the base software remains stable, and any unexpected issues are identified and resolved as quickly as possible.
Often we hear the community asking for certain improvements within the simulation, and of course we see and hear as many of these comments as we possibly can. Rest assured, we as just as keen as the community to bring all of these suggestions and more into the title in the future.
One such item is our Competition System – something we believe will add considerable enrichment to the online multiplayer experience of our players. Before we talk about that though, let’s examine the state of the new UI.
As we explained in some earlier roadmaps, the new UI should be seen as a new beginning, its initial version offering most if not all of the features that were in the old UI, and quite a few tweaks and improvements. It integrates the old launcher with its multiplayer and package management features as well as the workshop and store interfaces. For quite a while we have developed both versions side by side, which allowed us to get a lot of feedback from the community. Ultimately though, maintaining both versions is slowing us down… so before the end of the year we are switching!
We are also taking that opportunity to cease updates to the 32 bits version of rFactor 2. Steam hardware surveys for our simulation have shown us that everybody is on 64 bits operating systems right now, so this move should be completely transparent.
While we are on the subject of compatibility, for a while now we have been shipping updated versions of our 3D Studio Max plugins, originally for 2021, and more recently both for 2017 and 2021 versions of their software. Our new policy when it comes to these tools is that we will support the latest version of 3D Studio Max as neither 2012 nor 2017 can be bought anymore.
So with the new UI in place, we have a solid basis for the competition system. Our primary goal is to ensure that the system provides everybody with something to race, every day and at every level. That requires an integration that makes participating in competitions as painless as possible.
We do that by making sure that once you’ve decided on the competition you want to join, we automatically subscribe you to any content you might need. If the competition uses content you need to buy, we will list that too and figure out the best deal for you to get the missing content. With the content in place, joining a session becomes painless. You just show up and register and as soon as it starts we automatically connect you to the server for your split. When you are done, the standings so far can be reviewed in the competition overview.
The first public beta should be released in time for the holiday season. The focus is on running a variety of competitions, trying out different formats and gathering feedback from the community about the direction they would like this to go in. Some parts of the system will not be immediately available, such as the rating system, a way to submit protests and endurance racing. Those are planned in the first half of 2021.
In other developments, we’ve also been working hard prototyping a new way of rendering the UI – these are very much still in development but results have been very encouraging behind the scenes and we can’t wait to share our hard work with you as part of the next update. The old UI, and until now the new UI, used the graphics thread to render as well as do everything else that a user could command. This included loading new cars, tracks and series, responding to questions from the operating system, and just about anything else you can think of. Needless to say some of these things take time, and during that time the UI basically was “frozen”. That was easily visible in some of the UI transitions we have in the new UI, that would sometimes animate inconsistently or even freeze up completely, and if you looked for it, you could see similar things in the old UI. What we have now done is leverage the fact that modern CPUs have four or more cores and put the rendering of the UI on a separate thread. This means that no matter what the code is doing in the background, the UI will remain responsive, and going forward we will leverage and extend this design to make as many things that take time load incrementally.
To take us back to the topic of content, as we released a nice update for the Stock Car 2018 cars this month, we’ve also resolved to bring a new Stock Car Rules Plugin and some userguide instructions to support better use of these powerful cars. We didn’t want to hold back the car update while we finish off developing these tools however, but we still have a little way to go in order to get these finalised and pushed out to the wider community. Fear not, we are close to the finish line getting the userguide and plugin ready to go, and we will of course keep you updated as to when these can be expected to release for the simulation.
Still on the subject of content, we did speak about some new licence agreements secured by our licencing team recently, and of these new cars we just couldn’t resist sharing some very early development screenshots…
Can you tell what it is? Yes, those of you with a good knowledge of Prototype cars will have spotted this is the exceptional Cadillac DPi-V.R that has competed in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship in North America since 2017.
We’ve been working exceptionally closely with JDC-Miller MotorSports on this new car, and the relationship with the team has proven to be an outstanding collaboration that is really helping us to go that extra step in terms of access and data, resulting it what is turning out to be a very detailed and realistic new addition to the car content portfolio within rFactor 2. As you may know, JDC-Miller Motorsports are a long established racing team that have taken part in numerious series across the world, from F2000 and Star Mazda to top tier international prototype racing. The team are responsible for running a two-car Cadillac Prototype DPi program in the US IMSA WeatherTech Sportscar Championship, allowing Studio 397 some incredible access to the inner workings of how these amazing machines are put together, and run out on the race track.
The Cadillac DPi-V.R prototype is a potent race car, a high speed and high downforce pure racer that represents the first official Cadillac involvement in top level motorsport since the Northstar LMP of 2002. We are absolutely delighted to be bringing this outstanding machine to rFactor 2, and what’s more it will form part of a wider car pack that we plan to release close to the holiday season… but more on that next month…
Regarding tracks, although not Nürburgring specific, we couldn’t resist popping in another image from the German venue to illustrate our next point… in recent weeks we’ve been working hard developing a feature that dropped out of rFactor 2 over the passage of time, but is set to come back strongly in the near future… god rays!
Previously this feature just didn’t quite work how we would have liked in rFactor 2, so we turned the functionality off a little while ago while our code and art team went to work understanding how we can make it better within the title, while not inducing a considerable impact on how the simulation performs. We feel like the time is right to start sharing some of the fruits of our labours with you all, and as you can see from the screenshot in this post, visually we feel the new god rays within rFactor 2 really bring another important layer of immersion to the playing experience – which is always the aim of the game within our current graphics engine updates. We remain hard at work testing and fine tuning these graphical improvements within the simulation, hopefully with a view to getting them back out into the title in the near future.
That pretty much wraps up most of what we can speak about for this month, rest assured we continue to put in the hours and hard work behind the scenes to continue developing, expanding, enhancing and improving rFactor 2 in the weeks, months and years ahead.
Roadmap day!
Hello everyone and welcome to the rFactor 2 October Development Roadmap – can you believe it’s been a month already since we last wrote about the happenings back at Studio 397 HQ? It’s certainly been another busy one for us here in the team, as we continue to push hard to make rFactor 2 the simulation we all know it can become. Although the festive holidays are getting ever closer, that certainly doesn’t mean we are taking our foot off the gas behind the scenes, far from it in fact.
So, what’s been cooking back at base, and what do we have to look forward to in the very near future?
First, let’s have a quick look at some of the highlights from the last month before we dig a little deeper into what’s coming up.
We’ve been busy recently adding some quality of life improvements to existing content within the simulation, and I think it fair to say that the changes we’ve brought to the Nürburgring Nordschleife in particular have elevated the circuit right into the top echelons of track content within rFactor 2.
Nürburgring Nordschleife DLC | Purchase HERE.
We’ve been delighted with the visual uplift our latest PBR update has brought to the venue, and we are gratified to see the community appears to agree!
Ermin Hamidovic
Since the update deployed for the Nürburgring Nordschleife, we’ve realised a few little details have been overlooked during the PBR facelift, details like curb visuals at key points of the circuit for example, so we’ve got our track team back on the case and should be in a position to push out a new update for this immense circuit in the not too distant future.
In terms of cars, we also deployed a new GT3 AI BOP that added significant improvements to the way the AI drivers behave and their balance of performances against each vs and the player, which came directly off the back of our new Bentley and Ferrari DLC releases; really helping to flesh out the GT3 category of cars within rFactor 2 as the class continues to prove itself as an exceptionally popular choice within the sim racing community.
Ferrari 488 GT3 EVO 2020 | Purchase HERE.
Bentley Continental GT3 2020 | Purchase HERE.
Also on the topic of cars, October would see us release a new build for the often overlooked Stock Car 2018 content. We are delighted to see that the new update seems to have done a great job of bringing these powerful and entertaining cars back into the consciousness of the sim racing community – and hopefully exposing some players to a new and enjoyable driving experience that they perhaps overlooked earlier in their rFactor 2 adventures.
Stock Car 2018 | Download HERE.
In terms of competitions, this month marked the start of our two premium Esport racing series – as the very best of the rFactor 2 racing community took to the circuit for the opening rounds of our returning GT Pro and GT Challenge Powered by VCO championships – taking in the bumps and twists of Sebring and Portland in two incredibly entertaining encounters out on the virtual track.
GT Pro and Challenge Series | Catch all the action again HERE.
While those championships kicked off in fine style, another popular series would come to its dramatic conclusion this month too – with the BMW M2 CS Racing Cup hosting its final round at the daunting Nordschleife – another fantastic series that really showcased some virtual driving heroics amongst our Esport drivers. We thoroughly enjoyed seeing how the drivers adapted to the BMW M2 CS Racing machine, and look forward to hosting more action with this car in the future.
Now, before we get onto the subject of future goodies within the world of rFactor 2, we wanted to take this opportunity to highlight a very insightful interview our Managing Director Marcel Offermans recently undertook with sim racing YouTuber Ermin Hamidovic… be warned, it’s a long watch but well worth an hour of your time…
So, let’s talk about the future. We are continuously working hard behind the scenes to bring as much development and improvement to rFactor 2 as we possibly can, whilst juggling that difficult tightrope of ensuring the base software remains stable, and any unexpected issues are identified and resolved as quickly as possible.
Often we hear the community asking for certain improvements within the simulation, and of course we see and hear as many of these comments as we possibly can. Rest assured, we as just as keen as the community to bring all of these suggestions and more into the title in the future.
One such item is our Competition System – something we believe will add considerable enrichment to the online multiplayer experience of our players. Before we talk about that though, let’s examine the state of the new UI.
As we explained in some earlier roadmaps, the new UI should be seen as a new beginning, its initial version offering most if not all of the features that were in the old UI, and quite a few tweaks and improvements. It integrates the old launcher with its multiplayer and package management features as well as the workshop and store interfaces. For quite a while we have developed both versions side by side, which allowed us to get a lot of feedback from the community. Ultimately though, maintaining both versions is slowing us down… so before the end of the year we are switching!
We are also taking that opportunity to cease updates to the 32 bits version of rFactor 2. Steam hardware surveys for our simulation have shown us that everybody is on 64 bits operating systems right now, so this move should be completely transparent.
While we are on the subject of compatibility, for a while now we have been shipping updated versions of our 3D Studio Max plugins, originally for 2021, and more recently both for 2017 and 2021 versions of their software. Our new policy when it comes to these tools is that we will support the latest version of 3D Studio Max as neither 2012 nor 2017 can be bought anymore.
So with the new UI in place, we have a solid basis for the competition system. Our primary goal is to ensure that the system provides everybody with something to race, every day and at every level. That requires an integration that makes participating in competitions as painless as possible.
We do that by making sure that once you’ve decided on the competition you want to join, we automatically subscribe you to any content you might need. If the competition uses content you need to buy, we will list that too and figure out the best deal for you to get the missing content. With the content in place, joining a session becomes painless. You just show up and register and as soon as it starts we automatically connect you to the server for your split. When you are done, the standings so far can be reviewed in the competition overview.
The first public beta should be released in time for the holiday season. The focus is on running a variety of competitions, trying out different formats and gathering feedback from the community about the direction they would like this to go in. Some parts of the system will not be immediately available, such as the rating system, a way to submit protests and endurance racing. Those are planned in the first half of 2021.
In other developments, we’ve also been working hard prototyping a new way of rendering the UI – these are very much still in development but results have been very encouraging behind the scenes and we can’t wait to share our hard work with you as part of the next update. The old UI, and until now the new UI, used the graphics thread to render as well as do everything else that a user could command. This included loading new cars, tracks and series, responding to questions from the operating system, and just about anything else you can think of. Needless to say some of these things take time, and during that time the UI basically was “frozen”. That was easily visible in some of the UI transitions we have in the new UI, that would sometimes animate inconsistently or even freeze up completely, and if you looked for it, you could see similar things in the old UI. What we have now done is leverage the fact that modern CPUs have four or more cores and put the rendering of the UI on a separate thread. This means that no matter what the code is doing in the background, the UI will remain responsive, and going forward we will leverage and extend this design to make as many things that take time load incrementally.
To take us back to the topic of content, as we released a nice update for the Stock Car 2018 cars this month, we’ve also resolved to bring a new Stock Car Rules Plugin and some userguide instructions to support better use of these powerful cars. We didn’t want to hold back the car update while we finish off developing these tools however, but we still have a little way to go in order to get these finalised and pushed out to the wider community. Fear not, we are close to the finish line getting the userguide and plugin ready to go, and we will of course keep you updated as to when these can be expected to release for the simulation.
Still on the subject of content, we did speak about some new licence agreements secured by our licencing team recently, and of these new cars we just couldn’t resist sharing some very early development screenshots…
Can you tell what it is? Yes, those of you with a good knowledge of Prototype cars will have spotted this is the exceptional Cadillac DPi-V.R that has competed in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship in North America since 2017.
We’ve been working exceptionally closely with JDC-Miller MotorSports on this new car, and the relationship with the team has proven to be an outstanding collaboration that is really helping us to go that extra step in terms of access and data, resulting it what is turning out to be a very detailed and realistic new addition to the car content portfolio within rFactor 2. As you may know, JDC-Miller Motorsports are a long established racing team that have taken part in numerious series across the world, from F2000 and Star Mazda to top tier international prototype racing. The team are responsible for running a two-car Cadillac Prototype DPi program in the US IMSA WeatherTech Sportscar Championship, allowing Studio 397 some incredible access to the inner workings of how these amazing machines are put together, and run out on the race track.
The Cadillac DPi-V.R prototype is a potent race car, a high speed and high downforce pure racer that represents the first official Cadillac involvement in top level motorsport since the Northstar LMP of 2002. We are absolutely delighted to be bringing this outstanding machine to rFactor 2, and what’s more it will form part of a wider car pack that we plan to release close to the holiday season… but more on that next month…
Regarding tracks, although not Nürburgring specific, we couldn’t resist popping in another image from the German venue to illustrate our next point… in recent weeks we’ve been working hard developing a feature that dropped out of rFactor 2 over the passage of time, but is set to come back strongly in the near future… god rays!
Previously this feature just didn’t quite work how we would have liked in rFactor 2, so we turned the functionality off a little while ago while our code and art team went to work understanding how we can make it better within the title, while not inducing a considerable impact on how the simulation performs. We feel like the time is right to start sharing some of the fruits of our labours with you all, and as you can see from the screenshot in this post, visually we feel the new god rays within rFactor 2 really bring another important layer of immersion to the playing experience – which is always the aim of the game within our current graphics engine updates. We remain hard at work testing and fine tuning these graphical improvements within the simulation, hopefully with a view to getting them back out into the title in the near future.
That pretty much wraps up most of what we can speak about for this month, rest assured we continue to put in the hours and hard work behind the scenes to continue developing, expanding, enhancing and improving rFactor 2 in the weeks, months and years ahead.
Pra quem tem o jogo, o Pack GT3 ainda está com 50% de Desconto!!
a imagem no pacote ainda é de 50%
Mas não lembro se era todo esse preço
Sim, é uma informação.
rFactor 2 on Steam
rFactor 2 is a realistic, easily extendable racing simulation that offers the latest in vehicle and race customization, great graphics, outstanding multiplayer and the height of racing realism. It features mixed class road racing with ultra realistic dynamics, an immersive sound environment and...
Final da DTM em Hockenheim
Hoje, 23/11, a partir das 22h, direto do Circuito de Hockenheim, a categoria VPG DTM
VPG DTM @ Hockenheim - Final T3/2020 - YouTube
Hoje, 23/11, a partir das 22h, direto do Circuito de Hockenheim, a categoria VPG DTM
VPG DTM @ Hockenheim - Final T3/2020 - YouTube
November Build Release Update
Today marks a new build deployment for rFactor 2 in anticipation of our upcoming Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps DLC, scheduled for release this Friday 20th November. This new update contains a number of important changes and marks the cessation of 32-bit support for rFactor 2. All players should ensure they migrate to the 64-bit build of the simulation going forward. Additionally, it is highly recommended players now transition to the ‘New UI’ within rFactor 2, in order to take the most advantage of the various new features and optimizations available within the software.
Another important new addition to this build is the inclusion of flat desktop mirror within VR mode. Important for players who use Virtual Reality Headsets but wish to navigate the game menus outside their device, the new VR flat desktop mirror mode has often been requested by our community, and should provide some useful functionality benefits for VR players. Please note, this is only available in the new UI on the public_beta branch.
Changelog
Old UI (opt-out)
https://store.steampowered.com/itemstore/365960/detail/1004/ - Endurance Bundle - 50% Off
https://store.steampowered.com/itemstore/365960/detail/1005/ - Track Expansion Bundle - 25% Off
https://store.steampowered.com/itemstore/365960/detail/1006/ - Reiza Pack - 50% Off
Today marks a new build deployment for rFactor 2 in anticipation of our upcoming Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps DLC, scheduled for release this Friday 20th November. This new update contains a number of important changes and marks the cessation of 32-bit support for rFactor 2. All players should ensure they migrate to the 64-bit build of the simulation going forward. Additionally, it is highly recommended players now transition to the ‘New UI’ within rFactor 2, in order to take the most advantage of the various new features and optimizations available within the software.
Another important new addition to this build is the inclusion of flat desktop mirror within VR mode. Important for players who use Virtual Reality Headsets but wish to navigate the game menus outside their device, the new VR flat desktop mirror mode has often been requested by our community, and should provide some useful functionality benefits for VR players. Please note, this is only available in the new UI on the public_beta branch.
Changelog
- Removed the 32 bits builds, we are now officially 64 bit only. To ease the transition, we have left some 32 bit utilities in their usual locations for this build only. Please migrate and report any issues you might have.
- Note: there is a known issue that the ModMgr.exe inside Bin64 folder on SteamCMD dedicated server distributions may crash when toggling certain settings. Please use ModMgr.exe inside Bin32 folder for now.
- Changed the way the new UI gets rendered, making it smooth even when the back-end is busy.
- Fixed several memory leaks and a possible crash on changing graphics settings in-game.
- Ensured that when a user is entering text in a text field, keys he/she presses don’t accidentally trigger other controls.
- Fixed the mouse cursor from going missing when pressing ESC in VR after driving the car.
- Fixed an issue where sometimes when restarting or forwarding sessions, the UI would not (re)appear after that transition.
- Fixed several aspect-ratio related rendering issues with the new UI.
- Fixed the new UI being one pixel too wide and too high on triples.
- Added new VR flat desktop mirror. Please note this is only available in the new UI on the public_beta branch.
- Controller profiles
- Simagic M10 new profile added.
- VRS Direct Force Pro corrected typo in controller profile.
- Re-enabled & Improved Sun God Rays / Light Flare settings (requires PostFX enabled, mostly only visible when the sun is occluded slightly)
- Tweaks to Air Pollution colour blending and params
- Corrected Moon Brightness
- Reviewed various lighting parameters
- Moved “Atmospherics” section for Track Weather file (.WET) to Track Game Database file (.GDB)
- Added option for static mappers to disable omni lights
- Fixed auto static mapper assignment, so Static01 mapper is auto assigned only. (prevent mappers for specific situations being auto assigned to assets)
- Fixes for issues with No Rain Zones including when falling back to bounding box, and sorting issues with the currently rendered no rain zones.
- Fixed an issue where reflections would stop updating after rejoining track
- Fix for track side cameras not always showing the correct number of objects
- Updated PBR track shaders to make use of new sampler methods to allow for more textures to be used.
- Fixed an issue where DXT1 and DXT5 textures would not sample sRGB when they should when using new sampler method (This was an issue on the Road Shader only previously)
- Fixed a rare issue causing texture animations to stop working
- IBL Road and IBL Curb:
- Added ability to use a second normal map (overlay on road, switch on curbs)
- Tweaked Groove Blending logic (This may result in more noticeable dust, you may wish to tone this down in your Road Details Map)
- Updated default settings for Groove & Dust IBL Standard
- Fixed some issues with the Detail Map
- IBL Standard & Blend
- Added option to use detail map as an alpha masked decal IBL Standard Blend
- Added the option to use a detail map with the same logic as IBL Standard
- Removed Multiply Square albedo blending mode, since this can be achieved by saving the texture in the correct format.
- IBL Terrain:
- Added the ability to set per Albedo strengths for Pattern map
- Added an optional splatter overlay map, which applies alpha to specular mask
- Added Albedo Tinting to Specular on Terrain Shaders
- IBL Vegetation
- Added a new Vegetation Specific shader, which contains only appropriate logic from IBL Standard
- Added Specular Tinting with a static colour in the Vegetation Shader.
Old UI (opt-out)
- Client build ID: 5842885
- Dedicated server build ID: 5842895
- Client build ID: 5842938
--- Post duplo é unido automaticamente: ---
https://store.steampowered.com/itemstore/365960/detail/1004/ - Endurance Bundle - 50% Off
https://store.steampowered.com/itemstore/365960/detail/1005/ - Track Expansion Bundle - 25% Off
https://store.steampowered.com/itemstore/365960/detail/1006/ - Reiza Pack - 50% Off
Roadmap Update November 2020
November has been another busy month here at Studio 397, with plenty of activity taking place back at base as we prepare for the run in to the festive season.
The nature of game development means we are constantly balancing our long and short term goals for rFactor 2, strengthening the core software and bringing new features whilst ensuring our content offer remains interesting and fresh for new and existing players alike.
Recapping quickly on November (can you believe it’s over already!?), we’ve certainly had a very enjoyable month checking out the reactions to our brand-new Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps DLC release – one of the tracks our team has been so keen to bring to rFactor 2 in all of its laserscanned glory, and it’s now finally available in for players to enjoy!
rFactor 2 | Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps Steam Store: Click HERE
To celebrate release of this new circuit, we’ve teamed up with the good people over at WTF1 to launch a very special selection of races on the new track. Headlining the action on December 4th will be our WTF1 3H Invitational endurance event for invited esports drivers, and a very nice selection of real world racing legends. Not content with keeping the action to the world of endurance racing, we’ve also lined up an exceptional collection of esport drivers from the community, who have taken the opportunity to qualify for not one, but two support races for the main action. Comprising two short and sharp 25-minute sprints in the Porsche Cup and Tatuus F3, we expect the action to be fast and frantic throughout – with plenty of overtaking and drama sure to unfold.
We are still firming up the full entry list for this special event, so stay tuned to the rFactor 2 social channels for some special guest announcements in the coming days.
rFactor 2 | WTF1 Spa 3 Hours and Support Races: More Details, Click HERE.
Still on the subject of the month of November, we also released a brand-new build update for rFactor 2. As part of that build release we were pleased to introduce our new VR flat desktop mirror mode for Virtual Reality users, something that has been requested by our community quite a lot recently, and also our latest lighting and graphic improvements have made their way into the simulation ahead of further refinements and upgrades scheduled for the coming weeks and months ahead.
As we are closing in on the festive holidays, for gamers this time of year is a wonderful one to snatch up a bargain or two in the many sales that occur during the Christmas period. If you missed out on some goodies during the Halloween Sale last month then worry not, the Steam Autumn Sale is here, and with it comes great discounts on some awesome rFactor 2 content!
In the Autumn Sale you can enjoy 50% off our Formula E, Endurance, Reiza and KartSim packs, and a 25% reduction in the rFactor 2 Track Expansion Pack – but act fast, the sale ends on December 1st!
Moving forward to the future, namely the festive month that is December, we continue to work hard behind the scenes to deliver some interesting improvements to the way competitions are handled within rFactor 2 – something we expect will really help players access the types of online racing and competitions we know you are keen to experience, but wrapped up in a much more sensible and user-friendly environment than is currently possible with the way the simulation is presently structured.
Last month we spoke briefly about our the competition system beta, and our hopes to get a first pass of the new system in the hands of players before the holiday season kicks into full swing, and then to build on this system in 2021. This very much remains our intention as we slide into December, and initial behind closed door testing seem to indicate the system is working much as anticipated. We’ve run a few races now internally with our Studio 397 staff and identified a few issues that have been quickly resolved, so before we put down our tools and exchange coding for mince pies and sherry we should be in a position to let you all finally get your hands on what will very much be a long and rewarding journey of expanding and improving the way players interact with rFactor 2 in an online environment.
COMPETITION SYSTEM BETA AND 2021 ROADMAP
FIRST BETA
The primary goal for the first beta is to get a system in place that is easy to use and allows everybody to jump into daily races that are part of competitions. We will support a format where each event in a competition has multiple slots, so you can choose the one(s) that suits your schedule. Standings will be based on a local rating system that compares drivers in all those time slots to figure out who was the best overall.
ROADMAP FOR 2021
So what’s in store after the holidays? Let’s start by saying we will probably revise this roadmap as we go, also based on user feedback as we deploy each update.
Ratings — are probably one of the most anticipated features, and one of the reasons for not having them active right from the start is that we want to test our algorithms on real-world data before publishing anything. Our current philosophy is to have a single rating system that encapsulates both your skill and safety record.
Protests and decisions — are also high on our roadmap list as we will no doubt have situations where an incident will need to be reported and evaluated by our stewards. Our goal here is definitely to let the in-game systems do a lot of the (easy) work here, monitoring when you cut the track or commit other offenses and directly handing out penalties. At the same time we are aware that not everything can be decided by robots.
More competition formats — are things we will probably gradually introduce but as a feature they certainly need to be mentioned on any roadmap. We intend to run our GT championship, various hotlap styles, some completely new formats as well as more “league style” competitions in the system.
Roles and team based driving — will be added to allow multiple drivers to share an “entry”, or car, in a competition. Roles can be defined so teams can also have a manager or race engineer. Other roles are stewards, race control, and cameramen to facilitate broadcasts.
Broadcast integration — is probably another feature that will be gradually introduced, but obviously when broadcasting sessions that belong to a competition, we want to make sure that overlays showing standings, points, participants and calendars accurately reflect the competition they’re a part of.
Offline Championships — will be added once the online part is running smoothly. We will leverage the features we use online to also facilitate offline championships, where you can race against our AI.
These features will take us well into 2021 and we will revise and update them as the year progresses.
As per our November Development Roadmap post, it should be noted that the transition build to our Competition System will also mandate the use of our new UI within rFactor 2. Following the upcoming December update, continued support of the legacy UI within the simulation will come to a close, and any future builds and updates to rFactor 2 will only occur on the new default branch of the sim. We appreciate that for many players this will bring with it a number of changes to how you are used to experiencing rFactor 2, however we remain confident that the latest iterations of the ‘new’ UI will provide players with a much more streamlined and enjoyable experience, with many benefits to using rFactor 2 both now and more importantly in the future as we continue to make strides towards ongoing development of the title.
Closer to release we will be publishing a much more detailed guide on the benefits (and known issues) with the new UI and Competition System, and we strongly advise players to migrate to the UI sooner rather than later in order to become comfortable with the layout and features presented, and to help us with feedback as we drive towards maximising the potential of the system.
So, why should you be excited about the new UI, both now and in the future? Apart from the fact the whole UI system is based on technology that allows us to add, change and improve features over time – something that wasn’t possible with the current integration, we’ve also worked hard to ensure that anything you’ve become used to with the current UI has at the very least been transported to the new design, as well as plenty of new features and improvements that will only be expanded upon in the weeks, months and years ahead.
To give you a brief idea about some of the advantages of the soon to be default ‘new UI’ (we are really going to have to find a new way of describing it soon…), we’ve put together a brief list of some of the benefits of the new system – however keep in mind we will be updating and improving this over time, so this list is far from final and any community feedback about useability and features are always welcomed…
Of late we’ve given the refresh treatment to both Silverstone and more recently the Nürburgring track and its various configurations, and now we are delighted to confirm the next two venues on the list to be brought in line with the current standards are the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and Portland International Raceway.
Both of these American circuits are under review at the moment by the track team here at Studio 397, with Indianapolis set to be updated to the latest PBR graphics and materials, whilst Portland is due to be given a patch to fix and tweak some key areas within the circuit – both updates of which we plan to deploy within the month of December as we look to breathe new life into these great circuits within rFactor 2. As well as these improvements, we are also onto the final stages of testing for a further Nurburgring patch, bringing back those missing curbstones and a few other small tweaks and changes that should improve things nicely.
Moving on to cars, last month we showed you some WIP preview shots of the Cadillac DPi-V.R prototype we’ve been working on at the studio. In order to bring the very best possible level of detail and simulation to this potent prototype racer, we have been working very closely with the JDC-Miller MotorSports team over in the United States. Having access and support from one of the top endurance racing outfits in the IMSA WeatherTec Sportscar Championship, a unit that ran a two-car programme in the top American endurance racing series no less, has been an incredibly exciting experience for us at the studio, and no doubt has helped our development team to recreate one of our most detailed and realistic cars yet for rFactor 2. Currently the Cadillac DPi-V.R is undergoing that all important track testing on the virtual tarmac within the simulation, and I’m sure you will agree with us when we say the digital recreation looks just as stunning as the car in real life – we can’t wait to let you get your hands on this one in the not too distant future.
rFactor 2 | Endurance Bundle DLC Steam Store: Click HERE
Also on the subject of cars, next month will also see a brand-new vehicle and style of racing arrive in rFactor 2. Over the last few months we’ve been working closely with DTM champion Mike Rockenfeller to bring to life in rFactor 2 a unique concept – a high performance, tin top electric racing car that produces incredible amounts of power through its four-wheel-drive system, yet offers up an exciting and often rather spectacular driving experience. The car has been dubbed the RCCO eX_ZERO_2020, and will be released as DLC within rFactor 2 during December.
What makes this car rather unique is the fact it will only exist within the sim, but despite having no real world counterpart this is by no means a fantasy piece of content. Several months ago we were presented with an initial spec to develop the car, and using real world parameters and physics the RCCO eX_ZERO_2020 was born – with behaviour and characteristics exactly like those that would be displayed should this crazy machine ever make it out into the real world.
Having been heavily guided in the design and realisation of this project by Mike Rockenfeller and his team, we’ve found the experience of building the RCCO eX_ZERO_2020 exceptionally enjoyable at the studio, and while the car is certainly something rather different that the normal selection of machinery we develop for the simulation, we feel confident that our drivers will very much enjoy trying to tame this 1000hp beast! Intended for use in some interesting upcoming esports competitions by the RCCO team, as well as providing a very different (and dare we say it, brave) experience for our rFactor 2 players, this is certainly a departure from our usual content style here at rFactor 2!
While we are talking about esports competitions, you may have seen a few messages on the rFactor 2 social channels in recent weeks about the upcoming Sim Formula Europe series taking place next January, well, the second running of this annual competition is starting to kick into gear, and aside from the fantastic racing the series is sure to produce, we’ve got quite the selection of sim racing hardware to giveaway to competitors too…
Returning for the third year in a row, Sim Formula Europe is back once again for players to come together and race for the opportunity to win some incredible prizes. With 60 drivers set to move forward from the hotlap qualifications to semi-final race events, we should see plenty of action out on the circuit as esports stars new and established look to fight for the opportunity to win a percentage of our 10,000 EU prize pool, and some exceptional hardware from SimTag, SimLab, Heusinkveld Engineering and Cooler Master. The hotlap qualifications are set to run from December 3rd – 13th. Stay tuned to the rFactor 2 website and social media channels in the coming days for details on how to get involved yourself and be in with a chance of taking home some fantastic prizes.
That about covers everything we can talk about for this month, onwards to December and the festive season as living rooms around the world get turned into a sea of festive lights and strange stuffed toys of fat guys in red suits and scarily menacing reindeers in coats and hats – stay safe everyone, and see you all again next month!
November has been another busy month here at Studio 397, with plenty of activity taking place back at base as we prepare for the run in to the festive season.
The nature of game development means we are constantly balancing our long and short term goals for rFactor 2, strengthening the core software and bringing new features whilst ensuring our content offer remains interesting and fresh for new and existing players alike.
Recapping quickly on November (can you believe it’s over already!?), we’ve certainly had a very enjoyable month checking out the reactions to our brand-new Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps DLC release – one of the tracks our team has been so keen to bring to rFactor 2 in all of its laserscanned glory, and it’s now finally available in for players to enjoy!
rFactor 2 | Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps Steam Store: Click HERE
To celebrate release of this new circuit, we’ve teamed up with the good people over at WTF1 to launch a very special selection of races on the new track. Headlining the action on December 4th will be our WTF1 3H Invitational endurance event for invited esports drivers, and a very nice selection of real world racing legends. Not content with keeping the action to the world of endurance racing, we’ve also lined up an exceptional collection of esport drivers from the community, who have taken the opportunity to qualify for not one, but two support races for the main action. Comprising two short and sharp 25-minute sprints in the Porsche Cup and Tatuus F3, we expect the action to be fast and frantic throughout – with plenty of overtaking and drama sure to unfold.
We are still firming up the full entry list for this special event, so stay tuned to the rFactor 2 social channels for some special guest announcements in the coming days.
rFactor 2 | WTF1 Spa 3 Hours and Support Races: More Details, Click HERE.
Still on the subject of the month of November, we also released a brand-new build update for rFactor 2. As part of that build release we were pleased to introduce our new VR flat desktop mirror mode for Virtual Reality users, something that has been requested by our community quite a lot recently, and also our latest lighting and graphic improvements have made their way into the simulation ahead of further refinements and upgrades scheduled for the coming weeks and months ahead.
As we are closing in on the festive holidays, for gamers this time of year is a wonderful one to snatch up a bargain or two in the many sales that occur during the Christmas period. If you missed out on some goodies during the Halloween Sale last month then worry not, the Steam Autumn Sale is here, and with it comes great discounts on some awesome rFactor 2 content!
In the Autumn Sale you can enjoy 50% off our Formula E, Endurance, Reiza and KartSim packs, and a 25% reduction in the rFactor 2 Track Expansion Pack – but act fast, the sale ends on December 1st!
Moving forward to the future, namely the festive month that is December, we continue to work hard behind the scenes to deliver some interesting improvements to the way competitions are handled within rFactor 2 – something we expect will really help players access the types of online racing and competitions we know you are keen to experience, but wrapped up in a much more sensible and user-friendly environment than is currently possible with the way the simulation is presently structured.
Last month we spoke briefly about our the competition system beta, and our hopes to get a first pass of the new system in the hands of players before the holiday season kicks into full swing, and then to build on this system in 2021. This very much remains our intention as we slide into December, and initial behind closed door testing seem to indicate the system is working much as anticipated. We’ve run a few races now internally with our Studio 397 staff and identified a few issues that have been quickly resolved, so before we put down our tools and exchange coding for mince pies and sherry we should be in a position to let you all finally get your hands on what will very much be a long and rewarding journey of expanding and improving the way players interact with rFactor 2 in an online environment.
COMPETITION SYSTEM BETA AND 2021 ROADMAP
FIRST BETA
The primary goal for the first beta is to get a system in place that is easy to use and allows everybody to jump into daily races that are part of competitions. We will support a format where each event in a competition has multiple slots, so you can choose the one(s) that suits your schedule. Standings will be based on a local rating system that compares drivers in all those time slots to figure out who was the best overall.
ROADMAP FOR 2021
So what’s in store after the holidays? Let’s start by saying we will probably revise this roadmap as we go, also based on user feedback as we deploy each update.
Ratings — are probably one of the most anticipated features, and one of the reasons for not having them active right from the start is that we want to test our algorithms on real-world data before publishing anything. Our current philosophy is to have a single rating system that encapsulates both your skill and safety record.
Protests and decisions — are also high on our roadmap list as we will no doubt have situations where an incident will need to be reported and evaluated by our stewards. Our goal here is definitely to let the in-game systems do a lot of the (easy) work here, monitoring when you cut the track or commit other offenses and directly handing out penalties. At the same time we are aware that not everything can be decided by robots.
More competition formats — are things we will probably gradually introduce but as a feature they certainly need to be mentioned on any roadmap. We intend to run our GT championship, various hotlap styles, some completely new formats as well as more “league style” competitions in the system.
Roles and team based driving — will be added to allow multiple drivers to share an “entry”, or car, in a competition. Roles can be defined so teams can also have a manager or race engineer. Other roles are stewards, race control, and cameramen to facilitate broadcasts.
Broadcast integration — is probably another feature that will be gradually introduced, but obviously when broadcasting sessions that belong to a competition, we want to make sure that overlays showing standings, points, participants and calendars accurately reflect the competition they’re a part of.
Offline Championships — will be added once the online part is running smoothly. We will leverage the features we use online to also facilitate offline championships, where you can race against our AI.
These features will take us well into 2021 and we will revise and update them as the year progresses.
As per our November Development Roadmap post, it should be noted that the transition build to our Competition System will also mandate the use of our new UI within rFactor 2. Following the upcoming December update, continued support of the legacy UI within the simulation will come to a close, and any future builds and updates to rFactor 2 will only occur on the new default branch of the sim. We appreciate that for many players this will bring with it a number of changes to how you are used to experiencing rFactor 2, however we remain confident that the latest iterations of the ‘new’ UI will provide players with a much more streamlined and enjoyable experience, with many benefits to using rFactor 2 both now and more importantly in the future as we continue to make strides towards ongoing development of the title.
Closer to release we will be publishing a much more detailed guide on the benefits (and known issues) with the new UI and Competition System, and we strongly advise players to migrate to the UI sooner rather than later in order to become comfortable with the layout and features presented, and to help us with feedback as we drive towards maximising the potential of the system.
So, why should you be excited about the new UI, both now and in the future? Apart from the fact the whole UI system is based on technology that allows us to add, change and improve features over time – something that wasn’t possible with the current integration, we’ve also worked hard to ensure that anything you’ve become used to with the current UI has at the very least been transported to the new design, as well as plenty of new features and improvements that will only be expanded upon in the weeks, months and years ahead.
To give you a brief idea about some of the advantages of the soon to be default ‘new UI’ (we are really going to have to find a new way of describing it soon…), we’ve put together a brief list of some of the benefits of the new system – however keep in mind we will be updating and improving this over time, so this list is far from final and any community feedback about useability and features are always welcomed…
- Trackmap now included on monitor screen with live position data of drivers.
- Camera control buttons added in replay screen and monitor.
- Added full screen replay ticker on top.
- Driver selection in replay screen and monitor.
- Statistics and best lap times/sectors.
- Track selection trackmap icons drawn from track data (no need to include icons).
- Car selection list fully transparent icons.
- Race Monitor screen.
- Graph showing race progression.
- Trackmap data on monitor page.
- Integrated Competition System.
- Tuning menu that contains material editor.
- Flat VR mirror screen.
- Triple screen widget in the UI.
- Dedicated front page news section and forum feed.
- Integrated matchmaker and favourites shortcut.
- More intuitive summary overview pages in both general settings and setup screen.
- All admin controls now available as UI controls, (avoids having to use command line if you don’t want to).
Of late we’ve given the refresh treatment to both Silverstone and more recently the Nürburgring track and its various configurations, and now we are delighted to confirm the next two venues on the list to be brought in line with the current standards are the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and Portland International Raceway.
Both of these American circuits are under review at the moment by the track team here at Studio 397, with Indianapolis set to be updated to the latest PBR graphics and materials, whilst Portland is due to be given a patch to fix and tweak some key areas within the circuit – both updates of which we plan to deploy within the month of December as we look to breathe new life into these great circuits within rFactor 2. As well as these improvements, we are also onto the final stages of testing for a further Nurburgring patch, bringing back those missing curbstones and a few other small tweaks and changes that should improve things nicely.
Moving on to cars, last month we showed you some WIP preview shots of the Cadillac DPi-V.R prototype we’ve been working on at the studio. In order to bring the very best possible level of detail and simulation to this potent prototype racer, we have been working very closely with the JDC-Miller MotorSports team over in the United States. Having access and support from one of the top endurance racing outfits in the IMSA WeatherTec Sportscar Championship, a unit that ran a two-car programme in the top American endurance racing series no less, has been an incredibly exciting experience for us at the studio, and no doubt has helped our development team to recreate one of our most detailed and realistic cars yet for rFactor 2. Currently the Cadillac DPi-V.R is undergoing that all important track testing on the virtual tarmac within the simulation, and I’m sure you will agree with us when we say the digital recreation looks just as stunning as the car in real life – we can’t wait to let you get your hands on this one in the not too distant future.
rFactor 2 | Endurance Bundle DLC Steam Store: Click HERE
Also on the subject of cars, next month will also see a brand-new vehicle and style of racing arrive in rFactor 2. Over the last few months we’ve been working closely with DTM champion Mike Rockenfeller to bring to life in rFactor 2 a unique concept – a high performance, tin top electric racing car that produces incredible amounts of power through its four-wheel-drive system, yet offers up an exciting and often rather spectacular driving experience. The car has been dubbed the RCCO eX_ZERO_2020, and will be released as DLC within rFactor 2 during December.
What makes this car rather unique is the fact it will only exist within the sim, but despite having no real world counterpart this is by no means a fantasy piece of content. Several months ago we were presented with an initial spec to develop the car, and using real world parameters and physics the RCCO eX_ZERO_2020 was born – with behaviour and characteristics exactly like those that would be displayed should this crazy machine ever make it out into the real world.
Having been heavily guided in the design and realisation of this project by Mike Rockenfeller and his team, we’ve found the experience of building the RCCO eX_ZERO_2020 exceptionally enjoyable at the studio, and while the car is certainly something rather different that the normal selection of machinery we develop for the simulation, we feel confident that our drivers will very much enjoy trying to tame this 1000hp beast! Intended for use in some interesting upcoming esports competitions by the RCCO team, as well as providing a very different (and dare we say it, brave) experience for our rFactor 2 players, this is certainly a departure from our usual content style here at rFactor 2!
While we are talking about esports competitions, you may have seen a few messages on the rFactor 2 social channels in recent weeks about the upcoming Sim Formula Europe series taking place next January, well, the second running of this annual competition is starting to kick into gear, and aside from the fantastic racing the series is sure to produce, we’ve got quite the selection of sim racing hardware to giveaway to competitors too…
Returning for the third year in a row, Sim Formula Europe is back once again for players to come together and race for the opportunity to win some incredible prizes. With 60 drivers set to move forward from the hotlap qualifications to semi-final race events, we should see plenty of action out on the circuit as esports stars new and established look to fight for the opportunity to win a percentage of our 10,000 EU prize pool, and some exceptional hardware from SimTag, SimLab, Heusinkveld Engineering and Cooler Master. The hotlap qualifications are set to run from December 3rd – 13th. Stay tuned to the rFactor 2 website and social media channels in the coming days for details on how to get involved yourself and be in with a chance of taking home some fantastic prizes.
That about covers everything we can talk about for this month, onwards to December and the festive season as living rooms around the world get turned into a sea of festive lights and strange stuffed toys of fat guys in red suits and scarily menacing reindeers in coats and hats – stay safe everyone, and see you all again next month!
December 2020 Track Updates
Ahead of the festive holidays, the team here at Studio 397 have been working hard to bring a few improvements to some of our official tracks within rFactor 2 – with updates available now for Spa-Francorchamps, Nürburgring Nordschliefe, Portland International Raceway, Hong Kong E-Prix and Botniaring.
Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps v1.15
Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps | Steam Store: Click Here
Our flagship European circuit and the latest ribbon of (virtual) tarmac to arrive in rFactor 2. Home of the Belgian Grand Prix, one of the most highly regarded racetracks in motorsport, and put simply an incredible venue for taking out the wide and wonderful selection of cars within rFactor 2 for some adrenaline fuelled action against either the AI or your fellow sim racers.
We released the 7km Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps Circuit back on November 20th to plenty of acclaim from the sim racing community here at rFactor 2 (and quite a bit of pride behind the scenes as well), and now it’s been out in the wild for a little while, it feels like a good time ahead of the holidays to revisit the track and add a few updates, details of which you can find below;
Nürburgring Nordschliefe | Steam Store: Click Here
Moving on to another universally loved European track, and arguably the largest and most complex circuit in the entire library of venues within rFactor 2, it’s time for our epic Nürburgring Nordschliefe to receive another sprinkle of development gold dust to improve your driving enjoyment. Returning curbstones are one of the key areas of improvement in this latest 2.17 build update, however we’ve also taken the opportunity to sweep over the full 21km of racing tarmac to balance, tweak and improve whole experience of driving on one of the most daunting roads anywhere in motorsport.
Portland International Raceway | Steam Workshop: Subscribe Here
One of our array of US based circuits and something of an undiscovered gem is the Portland International Raceway circuit in Oregon, USA. Opened in 1960 and host to many top level American motorsport series throughout the years, Portland is a short, sharp and challenging circuit at only 3.2km in length, and with a pleasing mix of high speed sections and clear overtaking opportunities throughout its 12 corners, the track offers an interesting challenge for both high performance and more junior style race cars within the simulation.
Following up on a recent update we deployed back in early December, the track team have again spent some time improving the AI within both layouts of the circuit, details of which can be seen below:
Hong Kong E-Prix | Steam Store: Click Here
The all-electric Formula E series is highly unique in a number of ways, one of which is that the championship runs exclusively on city street circuits throughout the world. Taking to the city allows the possibility for the category to visit many spectacular locations that are simply unavailable to more traditional types of motorized sport. With demanding and tight tracks set against some incredibly dramatic backdrops at key destination cities, the possibilities for visually spectacular racing within rFactor 2 are near endless, as well as offering a very, very different experience for our sim racers to adapt to out on circuit.
We are delighted to have a number of key Formula E tracks within the simulation, and one of our more recent editions, Hong Kong, has been treated to a little review and update today – as some users have been experiencing issues with loading the track in the latest build of rFactor 2. We have identified where these issues exist, and updated the circuit to resolve this problem for the users who have been experiencing the error.
Botniaring | Steam Workshop: Subscribe Here
One of our older circuits within rFactor 2 is the Finnish venue of Botniaring. Probably one of the best circuits you’ve never heard of, Botniaring is a bit sparse on trackside furniture, but high on entertainment value when out on the circuit. Fast, open, technical in places and presenting plenty of interesting racing opportunities for a variety of different car types, this track certainly packs plenty of interest within its 2.6km layout.
In this update we have added a cut track exploit deterrent, and a collision mesh update.
Ahead of the festive holidays, the team here at Studio 397 have been working hard to bring a few improvements to some of our official tracks within rFactor 2 – with updates available now for Spa-Francorchamps, Nürburgring Nordschliefe, Portland International Raceway, Hong Kong E-Prix and Botniaring.
Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps v1.15
Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps | Steam Store: Click Here
Our flagship European circuit and the latest ribbon of (virtual) tarmac to arrive in rFactor 2. Home of the Belgian Grand Prix, one of the most highly regarded racetracks in motorsport, and put simply an incredible venue for taking out the wide and wonderful selection of cars within rFactor 2 for some adrenaline fuelled action against either the AI or your fellow sim racers.
We released the 7km Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps Circuit back on November 20th to plenty of acclaim from the sim racing community here at rFactor 2 (and quite a bit of pride behind the scenes as well), and now it’s been out in the wild for a little while, it feels like a good time ahead of the holidays to revisit the track and add a few updates, details of which you can find below;
- Minor Adjustment to Cut Detection to be more Lenient if you don’t gain time
- Fixed Marshal and Digital Flag Sequencing
- Safety Workers visible on all level details to fix flags online
- Fixed minor terrain gaps
- Fixed Pit Entry to match on screen assets
- Reverted Endurance Standing start to GP Grid (Rolling start will begin on Endurance layout and go green over GP start line)
- Adjustments to Grass Materials
- Fixed a few minor Tree placement issues
- Reviewed AIW behaviour into Les Coombes
- Made AI slightly more cautious when running side by side
- Readjusted Endurance Pit Layout so that there are 50 pit spots for the 80 garages.
- Fixed collision mesh on temporary wall on Endurance layout pits
Nürburgring Nordschliefe | Steam Store: Click Here
Moving on to another universally loved European track, and arguably the largest and most complex circuit in the entire library of venues within rFactor 2, it’s time for our epic Nürburgring Nordschliefe to receive another sprinkle of development gold dust to improve your driving enjoyment. Returning curbstones are one of the key areas of improvement in this latest 2.17 build update, however we’ve also taken the opportunity to sweep over the full 21km of racing tarmac to balance, tweak and improve whole experience of driving on one of the most daunting roads anywhere in motorsport.
- Added missing curbs on Nordschliefe
- Rebalanced & improvements to all road, terrains & trees materials
- Added decals to gravel traps
- Optimized trackside terrain meshes
- Optimized tyre stack meshes behind tyre canvas
- Fixed collision issues on some layouts
- Fixed some issues with camping tent placements
- Added atmospherics values to GDB files
- Some general object lodding optimization
- Reviewed some nightlight omni colours
- Added default RRBIN settings to WET files
- Various minor fixes and tweaks
Portland International Raceway | Steam Workshop: Subscribe Here
One of our array of US based circuits and something of an undiscovered gem is the Portland International Raceway circuit in Oregon, USA. Opened in 1960 and host to many top level American motorsport series throughout the years, Portland is a short, sharp and challenging circuit at only 3.2km in length, and with a pleasing mix of high speed sections and clear overtaking opportunities throughout its 12 corners, the track offers an interesting challenge for both high performance and more junior style race cars within the simulation.
Following up on a recent update we deployed back in early December, the track team have again spent some time improving the AI within both layouts of the circuit, details of which can be seen below:
- Improved AI lines at final sector in both layouts
- Reduced bumpiness of inside fast chicane anti-cut to help reduce AI issues
Hong Kong E-Prix | Steam Store: Click Here
The all-electric Formula E series is highly unique in a number of ways, one of which is that the championship runs exclusively on city street circuits throughout the world. Taking to the city allows the possibility for the category to visit many spectacular locations that are simply unavailable to more traditional types of motorized sport. With demanding and tight tracks set against some incredibly dramatic backdrops at key destination cities, the possibilities for visually spectacular racing within rFactor 2 are near endless, as well as offering a very, very different experience for our sim racers to adapt to out on circuit.
We are delighted to have a number of key Formula E tracks within the simulation, and one of our more recent editions, Hong Kong, has been treated to a little review and update today – as some users have been experiencing issues with loading the track in the latest build of rFactor 2. We have identified where these issues exist, and updated the circuit to resolve this problem for the users who have been experiencing the error.
- Fixed material errors which will prevent track loading in the latest build
Botniaring | Steam Workshop: Subscribe Here
One of our older circuits within rFactor 2 is the Finnish venue of Botniaring. Probably one of the best circuits you’ve never heard of, Botniaring is a bit sparse on trackside furniture, but high on entertainment value when out on the circuit. Fast, open, technical in places and presenting plenty of interesting racing opportunities for a variety of different car types, this track certainly packs plenty of interest within its 2.6km layout.
In this update we have added a cut track exploit deterrent, and a collision mesh update.
- Collision mesh update.
- Last corner hay bale wall and corresponding collision was extended a little, as a countermeasure of cutting exploit.
rFactor 2 | December Build Release
Today is a good day. Today is a new build day. You may have heard on the sim racing grapevine something about a new competition system within rFactor 2 that is under development..? Yes, that’s right, our December build update is here and a very first pass at organizing rFactor 2 multiplayer action has come with it, marking a very important line in the sand for us here at Studio 397 as we continue working incredibly hard to ensure the simulation delivers an experience our users demand.
The Competition System is now live as part of this build update, with the first racing events due to be uploaded and set to begin on Thursday December 24th.
November Roadmap | More Details On Competition Roadmap: Click Here.
Before we talk about the changes that have come as part of this new build release, let us remind you a little about why we want to include a competition system within the software in the first place.
Online racing, from a local level all the way up to organized and professional esport activities are an important aspect of the rFactor 2 journey, and have for a long time been very well represented by the many numerous community created sim racing leagues throughout the world.
Whilst these leagues are doing an incredible job of offering sim racers outstanding opportunities to race their favourite cars within the simulation, we realize that for the largest part of our user base racing in scheduled league events isn’t always the most convenient or accessible way for them to get involved in online multiplayer action, and finding servers that host content they want to race, at a time in which they would like to race it, has proven to be more difficult than it ideally needs to be.
Driven by a desire to offer quality racing for everyone, in a structured and organized way that increases the opportunities for our fantastic community to get involved, we have devised a new competition system within the software, one that offers up regularly scheduled racing in a variety of different car and track combinations within the sim and brings with it an element of matching together drivers of similar skill and ratings, to help streamline and improve the racing experience for our users, and put the emphasis back on what is important – getting on track and having fun.
Of course, this new system has been developed with expansion in mind, so what you will see as part of the new build today is certainly going to grow and expand over time – with so much obvious potential to enhance our multiplayer experience, we have taken the decision to adopt a cautious and regimented approach to deployment. What this means in reality is that we intend to spend time at each phase of development taking onboard community feedback in regard to how the system is working, and what features and behaviours the community would like to see brought to the system in future builds. By adopting this approach, we aim to maximize the potential of the system based on how it is used, and how the vast majority of people would like to use it going forward, to collectively develop something that adds genuine value to your sim racing experience within rFactor 2.
Before we take a look at the system in its current initial release status, it may be useful for those of you who missed it within the November Development Roadmap to have another look at our planned ‘mini’ roadmap of development over the coming months:
Ratings — are probably one of the most anticipated features, and one of the reasons for not having them active right from the start is that we want to test our algorithms on real-world data before publishing anything. Our current philosophy is to have a single rating system that encapsulates both your skill and safety record.
Protests and decisions — are also high on our roadmap list as we will no doubt have situations where an incident will need to be reported and evaluated by our stewards. Our goal here is definitely to let the in-game systems do a lot of the (easy) work here, monitoring when you cut the track or commit other offences and directly handing out penalties. At the same time we are aware that not everything can be decided by robots.
More competition formats — are things we will probably gradually introduce but as a feature they certainly need to be mentioned on any roadmap. We intend to run our GT championship, various hotlap styles, some completely new formats as well as more “league style” competitions in the system.
Roles and team based driving — will be added to allow multiple drivers to share an “entry”, or car, in a competition. Roles can be defined so teams can also have a manager or race engineer. Other roles are stewards, race control, and cameramen to facilitate broadcasts.
Broadcast integration — is probably another feature that will be gradually introduced, but obviously when broadcasting sessions that belong to a competition, we want to make sure that overlays showing standings, points, participants and calendars accurately reflect the competition they’re a part of.
Offline Championships — will be added once the online part is running smoothly. We will leverage the features we use online to also facilitate offline championships, where you can race against our AI.
These features will take us well into 2021, and we will revise and update them as the year progresses.
These features and developments will largely be driven by how the system is adopted by the current and future rFactor 2 racing community of course, and should be taken as a broad guideline as to our development intentions rather than a set of absolutes. We are exceptionally keen to ensure this development phase is driven by the wants and desires of our community racers, as we look to build something together than improves and enhances the overall experience of racing within rFactor 2.
With that all said, let us take a look at what has changed as part of the new build today.
So that’s it for the new build update, but it certainly isn’t the end of the rFactor 2 story this month. Tomorrow afternoon we plan to release our new Endurance Pack 2 DLC, adding three pretty fantastic new cars in the form of the Cadillac DPi-V.R, the LMP2 specification Ligier JS P217 and the brand new GTE Chevrolet Corvette C8.R… three cars we are sure you will enjoy racing just as much as we have enjoyed developing over the last few months.
From all at the studio, enjoy the new build and have a great Christmas and New Year!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Endurance Bundle 2 DLC | Now Available
Christmas has come early for sim racing fans today – please give up a very warm rFactor 2 welcome for our latest addition to the family … the Endurance Bundle 2 DLC!
This the season to be jolly… a time for giving, a time for receiving, festive merriment, a glass of something nice and more mince pies than is either reasonable or healthy. Rather than putting that much-needed pair of new socks or a thickly lined winter jumper under the tree this year, give the gift of endurance racing to your nearest and dearest (or treat yourself!) – why not take out some rather awesome endurance cars for a spin in rFactor 2?
Yes dear sim racers, we’ve gone and put together our latest car pack DLC for the simulation – and I must say we feel pretty pleased with the outcome – three epic endurance machines that include some of the most beautiful, iconic and potent race cars in modern motorsport.
Endurance Bundle 2 | Steam Store: Click HERE.
It’s hard to argue against the fun of multi-class endurance racing. That feeling of slicing a Prototype through slower traffic in the fight at the head of the field, or powering your GT racer within a crowded pack of cars while keeping half an eye on the mirrors and blue flags ready to let faster cars to pass – it’s something that just cannot be replicated in any other form of motorsport, and with rFactor 2 now containing four of the best endurance tracks in the world (Le Mans, Sebring, Silverstone and Spa), these cars never had a better place to be put through their paces against your rivals.
Endurance Bundle 1 | Steam Store: Click HERE.
With this new Endurance Bundle DLC, we at Studio 397 have tried to keep an eye on our existing content to both bring something new to the simulation, and add further depth to the popular car classes already available within rFactor2.
Endurance Bundle 2 DLC Contents:
Built in close collaboration with top North American sportscar team JDC-Miller Motorsports, the Cadillac DPi-V.R represents the very finest in American endurance racing engineering, having taken the IMSA WeatherTech Sportscar Championship by storm since an incredible debut in 2017, winning no less than the first seven events it contested in the category, including the prestigious Rolex Daytona 24 Hours. Wayne Taylor Racing pairing Ricky and Jordan Taylor would dominate the drivers’ standings in the new machine, securing the title convincingly from sister entry Whelen Engineering, themselves taking a victory at the demanding Mobil 1 SportsCar Grand Prix at the Canadian Tire Motorsport circuit in Ontario, Canada.
2018 would be just as successful for the popular return of the Cadillac brand, with a further four wins courtesy of Mustang Sampling Racing (2), Wayne Taylor Racing (1) and Whelen Engineering (1) enough to secure a clean sweep of drivers and teams’ championships for the iconic American manufacturer.
A further four wins in 2019 would again see the Cadillac DPi-V.R at the sharp end of the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship despite increased competition from the likes of American powerhouse outfit Penske and Mazda, although championship success would elude the manufacturer for the first time, with the Brazilian driving duo of former Formula One driver Filipe Nasr and SportsCar star Pipo Derani narrowly missing out on top spot in what was generally considered to be the most competitive championships in the recent history of the IMSA series.
Fast-forward to a truncated 2020 season and again Cadillac would prove to be force to be reckoned with, this time with JDC running two cars under the JDC-Miller Motorsports and JDC Mustang Sampling banner alongside entries from Konica Minolta and Whelen Engineering. Despite having to perform in front of mostly closed door audiences and with a hastily amended calendar, the American teams would put up another determined fight against racing royalty in the form of Acura Team Penske, with the manufacturer taking a total of three race wins and runners up position in the championship for the #10 Konica Minolta car of Australian Ryan Briscoe and Dutchman Renger van der Zande.
With JDC in the unique position of being the only team to run two Cadillac DPi-V.R entries this season, we found them to be the perfect partner to team up with as we looked to maximise the available data and resources when creating this new car. Our collaboration with JDC has been nothing short of sensational these past months, and working alongside our colleagues at the team has opened up some exceptional opportunities to really get under the skin of this outstanding car, and most importantly for the players at home, recreate what we consider to be one of our most accurate and detailed vehicles for rFactor 2 so far.
Key Performance Stats
Engine: 5.5L V8
Power: 580HP
Weight: 930kg
Top speed: 360km/h
2020 Ligier JS P217
As costs continued to spiral during the previous generation of endurance racing regulations, many teams and drivers found themselves migrating to the much more financially friendly and increasingly competitive LMP2 category of racing – high downforce prototype machines that don’t quite reach the ultimate lap pace of the table topping LMP1 / LMdH / LMH group, but offer seasoned professionals and up and coming drivers multiple opportunities to race in championships throughout the world.
With the recent influx of professional teams and drivers to the category, the popularity of LMP2 has exploded over the last few years. Offering arguably the most competitive and sizeable grids week in, week out in endurance prototype racing, LMP2 has become what the original Le Mans Prototype class never quite managed to achieve – the peak competitive proposition for prospective drivers looking to carve out a reputation and career in endurance prototype racing.
With such popularity and the sheer volume of cars produced, many championships throughout the world have been quick to adopt LMP2 regulations within their own series, either as a standalone category, or as part of a wider multi-class structure, such as can be found in the World Endurance Championship, IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship and European Le Mans Series.
We already have the Oreca 07 LMP2 car within the simulation, and keen as we are to ensure rFactor 2 has a wide range of vehicles suitable for close and competitive racing as possible, we felt the time was right to introduce another mighty LMP2 car. With the technical knowledge of a former Formula One race winning outfit in the form of Ligier, the French marque partnered up with Onroak Engineering to produce an exceptionally efficient and competitive vehicle, one that competes with some success in national and international endurance racing events.
Debuting in time for the 2017 racing season, the car immediately proved to be competitive in the hands of numerous racing teams, with a debut fourth place finish (and fifth overall) at the 2017 Le Mans 24 Hours in the hands of United Autosports proving without doubt that the new JS P217 is a car to be reckoned with. That form would be carried forward in the European Le Mans Series by the US squad, the team snapping up an impressive three outright race victories for the new car en route to second overall in the teams standings.
Further Le Mans LMP2 success would come the way of this attractive closed top prototype, despite the numerical dominance of Oreca within the category, with United Autosports once again carrying the flag for Ligier with a exceptional class podium in 2018, following up with a further top four finish within the series the following season.
Having released in 2017, the JS P217 immediately showed promise on the circuit, and the following years have seen the car wrap up wins in various categories throughout the world. A mainstay in series such as WEC and stateside with the IMSA WeatherTech Sportscar Championship – we are sure you will agree that this is a great car to add to our ever growing collection of official content within rFactor 2.
Key Performance Stats
Engine: 4.2L V8
Power: 600HP
Weight: 930kg
Top speed: 330km/h
2020 Chevrolet Corvette C8.R
Replacing the venerable Corvette C7.R was never going to be an easy task for Chevrolet, however the new Pratt & Miller developed machine has immediately picked up the baton dropped by its predecessor and proceeded to firmly establish itself as a competitive force to be reckoned with in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship. Straight off the bat following its debut at the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona the two car entry proved to be quick in the hands of the works Corvette Racing Team, going on to secure wins in over half the rounds of the 2020 season, unsurprisingly culminating with titles in both the team and drivers championship at the conclusion of its debut year of competition.
The eighth-generation Corvette represents something of a departure from expected norms from the American brand. Gone is the traditional front engine concept so revered by the partisan fanbase of the car, and in its place comes a move to the somewhat divisive modern mid-engine design, Still kicking out in excess of 500hp to the rear wheels and a top speed of just under 200 mph from the fire breathing 5.5 litre V8 engine, the car is very much a Chevrolet under the skin, but with significantly different handling characteristics than those that have traditionally been associated with the bright yellow machines of years gone by.
According to Corvette Racing driver and sportscar ace Antonio Garcia, the new C8.R is “very agile” compared to its elderly predecessor, allowing the driver to “fight it harder and push pretty hard”, which should translate into a very popular choice of car for our online players to select in the white hot heat of battle!
The C8.R should stick to the road better than the C7.R as well, with an estimated additional 10% downforce possible from the new model thanks in part to the aggressive styling characteristics and complex aerodynamic details, coupled with a flat floor design as per the IMSA series regulations, These design touches, and plenty of ingenious work creating a much more use friendly and driver focussed interior layout have all contributed to the incredible success of the car on the world stage, right from its very introduction into racing at the beginning of 2020. With fierce competition from the likes of both Porsche and BMW chomping at the bit to recover lost ground to their American rivals, the race for GTE honours looks set to be another glorious one next year, and you can recreate it at home in rFactor 2 from the comfort of your own racing rigs!
Key Performance Stats
Engine: 5.5L V8
Power: 500HP
Weight: 1260kg
Top Speed: 300km/h
Don’t forget, as it is the Holiday season we’ve also got our Steam Winter Sale in full swing, with some exceptional offers on content for rFactor 2. If you’ve been missing a few key items, want to complete that collection or just fancy taking a look at something a bit different, head over to the rFactor 2 Steam Store page now and check out some brilliant new deals – the Steam Winter Sale ends on January 5th, so act fast!
These new cars represent the pinnacle of modern endurance racing as we head into 2021, and coupled with the already rich array of Prototype and sports car machinery within rFactor 2 (with more to come next year), we feel pretty confident that the Endurance Bundle 2 is a great way to say goodbye to what has been a fantastic year for rFactor 2, and set the tone nicely for what should be an even better 2021…
Enjoy the cars, enjoy the festivities and see you out on track soon.
Today is a good day. Today is a new build day. You may have heard on the sim racing grapevine something about a new competition system within rFactor 2 that is under development..? Yes, that’s right, our December build update is here and a very first pass at organizing rFactor 2 multiplayer action has come with it, marking a very important line in the sand for us here at Studio 397 as we continue working incredibly hard to ensure the simulation delivers an experience our users demand.
The Competition System is now live as part of this build update, with the first racing events due to be uploaded and set to begin on Thursday December 24th.
November Roadmap | More Details On Competition Roadmap: Click Here.
Before we talk about the changes that have come as part of this new build release, let us remind you a little about why we want to include a competition system within the software in the first place.
Online racing, from a local level all the way up to organized and professional esport activities are an important aspect of the rFactor 2 journey, and have for a long time been very well represented by the many numerous community created sim racing leagues throughout the world.
Whilst these leagues are doing an incredible job of offering sim racers outstanding opportunities to race their favourite cars within the simulation, we realize that for the largest part of our user base racing in scheduled league events isn’t always the most convenient or accessible way for them to get involved in online multiplayer action, and finding servers that host content they want to race, at a time in which they would like to race it, has proven to be more difficult than it ideally needs to be.
Driven by a desire to offer quality racing for everyone, in a structured and organized way that increases the opportunities for our fantastic community to get involved, we have devised a new competition system within the software, one that offers up regularly scheduled racing in a variety of different car and track combinations within the sim and brings with it an element of matching together drivers of similar skill and ratings, to help streamline and improve the racing experience for our users, and put the emphasis back on what is important – getting on track and having fun.
Of course, this new system has been developed with expansion in mind, so what you will see as part of the new build today is certainly going to grow and expand over time – with so much obvious potential to enhance our multiplayer experience, we have taken the decision to adopt a cautious and regimented approach to deployment. What this means in reality is that we intend to spend time at each phase of development taking onboard community feedback in regard to how the system is working, and what features and behaviours the community would like to see brought to the system in future builds. By adopting this approach, we aim to maximize the potential of the system based on how it is used, and how the vast majority of people would like to use it going forward, to collectively develop something that adds genuine value to your sim racing experience within rFactor 2.
Before we take a look at the system in its current initial release status, it may be useful for those of you who missed it within the November Development Roadmap to have another look at our planned ‘mini’ roadmap of development over the coming months:
Ratings — are probably one of the most anticipated features, and one of the reasons for not having them active right from the start is that we want to test our algorithms on real-world data before publishing anything. Our current philosophy is to have a single rating system that encapsulates both your skill and safety record.
Protests and decisions — are also high on our roadmap list as we will no doubt have situations where an incident will need to be reported and evaluated by our stewards. Our goal here is definitely to let the in-game systems do a lot of the (easy) work here, monitoring when you cut the track or commit other offences and directly handing out penalties. At the same time we are aware that not everything can be decided by robots.
More competition formats — are things we will probably gradually introduce but as a feature they certainly need to be mentioned on any roadmap. We intend to run our GT championship, various hotlap styles, some completely new formats as well as more “league style” competitions in the system.
Roles and team based driving — will be added to allow multiple drivers to share an “entry”, or car, in a competition. Roles can be defined so teams can also have a manager or race engineer. Other roles are stewards, race control, and cameramen to facilitate broadcasts.
Broadcast integration — is probably another feature that will be gradually introduced, but obviously when broadcasting sessions that belong to a competition, we want to make sure that overlays showing standings, points, participants and calendars accurately reflect the competition they’re a part of.
Offline Championships — will be added once the online part is running smoothly. We will leverage the features we use online to also facilitate offline championships, where you can race against our AI.
These features will take us well into 2021, and we will revise and update them as the year progresses.
These features and developments will largely be driven by how the system is adopted by the current and future rFactor 2 racing community of course, and should be taken as a broad guideline as to our development intentions rather than a set of absolutes. We are exceptionally keen to ensure this development phase is driven by the wants and desires of our community racers, as we look to build something together than improves and enhances the overall experience of racing within rFactor 2.
With that all said, let us take a look at what has changed as part of the new build today.
- Fixed v-sync not working
- Fixed an issue where certain car classes would not show in a session
- Various minor graphical bug fixes
- Fixed issues with aspect ratio
- Added competition system
So that’s it for the new build update, but it certainly isn’t the end of the rFactor 2 story this month. Tomorrow afternoon we plan to release our new Endurance Pack 2 DLC, adding three pretty fantastic new cars in the form of the Cadillac DPi-V.R, the LMP2 specification Ligier JS P217 and the brand new GTE Chevrolet Corvette C8.R… three cars we are sure you will enjoy racing just as much as we have enjoyed developing over the last few months.
From all at the studio, enjoy the new build and have a great Christmas and New Year!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Endurance Bundle 2 DLC | Now Available
Christmas has come early for sim racing fans today – please give up a very warm rFactor 2 welcome for our latest addition to the family … the Endurance Bundle 2 DLC!
This the season to be jolly… a time for giving, a time for receiving, festive merriment, a glass of something nice and more mince pies than is either reasonable or healthy. Rather than putting that much-needed pair of new socks or a thickly lined winter jumper under the tree this year, give the gift of endurance racing to your nearest and dearest (or treat yourself!) – why not take out some rather awesome endurance cars for a spin in rFactor 2?
Yes dear sim racers, we’ve gone and put together our latest car pack DLC for the simulation – and I must say we feel pretty pleased with the outcome – three epic endurance machines that include some of the most beautiful, iconic and potent race cars in modern motorsport.
Endurance Bundle 2 | Steam Store: Click HERE.
It’s hard to argue against the fun of multi-class endurance racing. That feeling of slicing a Prototype through slower traffic in the fight at the head of the field, or powering your GT racer within a crowded pack of cars while keeping half an eye on the mirrors and blue flags ready to let faster cars to pass – it’s something that just cannot be replicated in any other form of motorsport, and with rFactor 2 now containing four of the best endurance tracks in the world (Le Mans, Sebring, Silverstone and Spa), these cars never had a better place to be put through their paces against your rivals.
Endurance Bundle 1 | Steam Store: Click HERE.
With this new Endurance Bundle DLC, we at Studio 397 have tried to keep an eye on our existing content to both bring something new to the simulation, and add further depth to the popular car classes already available within rFactor2.
Endurance Bundle 2 DLC Contents:
- Cadillac DPi-V.R
- Ligier JS P217 LMP2
- Corvette C8.R GTE
Built in close collaboration with top North American sportscar team JDC-Miller Motorsports, the Cadillac DPi-V.R represents the very finest in American endurance racing engineering, having taken the IMSA WeatherTech Sportscar Championship by storm since an incredible debut in 2017, winning no less than the first seven events it contested in the category, including the prestigious Rolex Daytona 24 Hours. Wayne Taylor Racing pairing Ricky and Jordan Taylor would dominate the drivers’ standings in the new machine, securing the title convincingly from sister entry Whelen Engineering, themselves taking a victory at the demanding Mobil 1 SportsCar Grand Prix at the Canadian Tire Motorsport circuit in Ontario, Canada.
2018 would be just as successful for the popular return of the Cadillac brand, with a further four wins courtesy of Mustang Sampling Racing (2), Wayne Taylor Racing (1) and Whelen Engineering (1) enough to secure a clean sweep of drivers and teams’ championships for the iconic American manufacturer.
A further four wins in 2019 would again see the Cadillac DPi-V.R at the sharp end of the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship despite increased competition from the likes of American powerhouse outfit Penske and Mazda, although championship success would elude the manufacturer for the first time, with the Brazilian driving duo of former Formula One driver Filipe Nasr and SportsCar star Pipo Derani narrowly missing out on top spot in what was generally considered to be the most competitive championships in the recent history of the IMSA series.
Fast-forward to a truncated 2020 season and again Cadillac would prove to be force to be reckoned with, this time with JDC running two cars under the JDC-Miller Motorsports and JDC Mustang Sampling banner alongside entries from Konica Minolta and Whelen Engineering. Despite having to perform in front of mostly closed door audiences and with a hastily amended calendar, the American teams would put up another determined fight against racing royalty in the form of Acura Team Penske, with the manufacturer taking a total of three race wins and runners up position in the championship for the #10 Konica Minolta car of Australian Ryan Briscoe and Dutchman Renger van der Zande.
With JDC in the unique position of being the only team to run two Cadillac DPi-V.R entries this season, we found them to be the perfect partner to team up with as we looked to maximise the available data and resources when creating this new car. Our collaboration with JDC has been nothing short of sensational these past months, and working alongside our colleagues at the team has opened up some exceptional opportunities to really get under the skin of this outstanding car, and most importantly for the players at home, recreate what we consider to be one of our most accurate and detailed vehicles for rFactor 2 so far.
Key Performance Stats
Engine: 5.5L V8
Power: 580HP
Weight: 930kg
Top speed: 360km/h
2020 Ligier JS P217
As costs continued to spiral during the previous generation of endurance racing regulations, many teams and drivers found themselves migrating to the much more financially friendly and increasingly competitive LMP2 category of racing – high downforce prototype machines that don’t quite reach the ultimate lap pace of the table topping LMP1 / LMdH / LMH group, but offer seasoned professionals and up and coming drivers multiple opportunities to race in championships throughout the world.
With the recent influx of professional teams and drivers to the category, the popularity of LMP2 has exploded over the last few years. Offering arguably the most competitive and sizeable grids week in, week out in endurance prototype racing, LMP2 has become what the original Le Mans Prototype class never quite managed to achieve – the peak competitive proposition for prospective drivers looking to carve out a reputation and career in endurance prototype racing.
With such popularity and the sheer volume of cars produced, many championships throughout the world have been quick to adopt LMP2 regulations within their own series, either as a standalone category, or as part of a wider multi-class structure, such as can be found in the World Endurance Championship, IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship and European Le Mans Series.
We already have the Oreca 07 LMP2 car within the simulation, and keen as we are to ensure rFactor 2 has a wide range of vehicles suitable for close and competitive racing as possible, we felt the time was right to introduce another mighty LMP2 car. With the technical knowledge of a former Formula One race winning outfit in the form of Ligier, the French marque partnered up with Onroak Engineering to produce an exceptionally efficient and competitive vehicle, one that competes with some success in national and international endurance racing events.
Debuting in time for the 2017 racing season, the car immediately proved to be competitive in the hands of numerous racing teams, with a debut fourth place finish (and fifth overall) at the 2017 Le Mans 24 Hours in the hands of United Autosports proving without doubt that the new JS P217 is a car to be reckoned with. That form would be carried forward in the European Le Mans Series by the US squad, the team snapping up an impressive three outright race victories for the new car en route to second overall in the teams standings.
Further Le Mans LMP2 success would come the way of this attractive closed top prototype, despite the numerical dominance of Oreca within the category, with United Autosports once again carrying the flag for Ligier with a exceptional class podium in 2018, following up with a further top four finish within the series the following season.
Having released in 2017, the JS P217 immediately showed promise on the circuit, and the following years have seen the car wrap up wins in various categories throughout the world. A mainstay in series such as WEC and stateside with the IMSA WeatherTech Sportscar Championship – we are sure you will agree that this is a great car to add to our ever growing collection of official content within rFactor 2.
Key Performance Stats
Engine: 4.2L V8
Power: 600HP
Weight: 930kg
Top speed: 330km/h
2020 Chevrolet Corvette C8.R
Replacing the venerable Corvette C7.R was never going to be an easy task for Chevrolet, however the new Pratt & Miller developed machine has immediately picked up the baton dropped by its predecessor and proceeded to firmly establish itself as a competitive force to be reckoned with in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship. Straight off the bat following its debut at the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona the two car entry proved to be quick in the hands of the works Corvette Racing Team, going on to secure wins in over half the rounds of the 2020 season, unsurprisingly culminating with titles in both the team and drivers championship at the conclusion of its debut year of competition.
The eighth-generation Corvette represents something of a departure from expected norms from the American brand. Gone is the traditional front engine concept so revered by the partisan fanbase of the car, and in its place comes a move to the somewhat divisive modern mid-engine design, Still kicking out in excess of 500hp to the rear wheels and a top speed of just under 200 mph from the fire breathing 5.5 litre V8 engine, the car is very much a Chevrolet under the skin, but with significantly different handling characteristics than those that have traditionally been associated with the bright yellow machines of years gone by.
According to Corvette Racing driver and sportscar ace Antonio Garcia, the new C8.R is “very agile” compared to its elderly predecessor, allowing the driver to “fight it harder and push pretty hard”, which should translate into a very popular choice of car for our online players to select in the white hot heat of battle!
The C8.R should stick to the road better than the C7.R as well, with an estimated additional 10% downforce possible from the new model thanks in part to the aggressive styling characteristics and complex aerodynamic details, coupled with a flat floor design as per the IMSA series regulations, These design touches, and plenty of ingenious work creating a much more use friendly and driver focussed interior layout have all contributed to the incredible success of the car on the world stage, right from its very introduction into racing at the beginning of 2020. With fierce competition from the likes of both Porsche and BMW chomping at the bit to recover lost ground to their American rivals, the race for GTE honours looks set to be another glorious one next year, and you can recreate it at home in rFactor 2 from the comfort of your own racing rigs!
Key Performance Stats
Engine: 5.5L V8
Power: 500HP
Weight: 1260kg
Top Speed: 300km/h
Don’t forget, as it is the Holiday season we’ve also got our Steam Winter Sale in full swing, with some exceptional offers on content for rFactor 2. If you’ve been missing a few key items, want to complete that collection or just fancy taking a look at something a bit different, head over to the rFactor 2 Steam Store page now and check out some brilliant new deals – the Steam Winter Sale ends on January 5th, so act fast!
These new cars represent the pinnacle of modern endurance racing as we head into 2021, and coupled with the already rich array of Prototype and sports car machinery within rFactor 2 (with more to come next year), we feel pretty confident that the Endurance Bundle 2 is a great way to say goodbye to what has been a fantastic year for rFactor 2, and set the tone nicely for what should be an even better 2021…
Enjoy the cars, enjoy the festivities and see you out on track soon.
Alguém sabe se os preços dos carros e pistas oficiais (aqueles que você compra separado) do rFactor 2 são regionalizados também? Queria ver quais seriam os valores na Argentina e na Rússia, mas não consigo verificar pelo steamdb.