Yesterday I did a forum post about the content coming in the next build and an overall brief update on content.
Here is an update on some significant features we have mentioned in the past that we are working on.
Damage: We just did a blog and a video about it. It is an all or nothing feature, and we highly doubt we will swap out our existing damage model for the new model in 2018. We are making great progress as you hopefully saw but still some things to do and then a whole lot of testing when we are talking about 80+ cars, car combinations and hundreds of circuits. That testing I’m sure will result in many rounds of tweaking, etc.
AI: Making really good progress on the AI itself and the related UI. We will start with both a one-off race option and the ability to build a whole season including loading rosters. We are excited about it but still work to do on both the AI and the UI. In fact, we plan on making the AI available in our booth at the sim expo in Germany for people to try. It is already very fun and quite good. More about that soon. It is one of those things we could probably keep working on forever; there is so much to it. I’m not sure when we are going to roll it out, but we are talking about months not years. We certainly want it to be very good and not rush it out. We are not sure if in our initial roll-out we will limit it to certain cars or not. That will be evaluated as we get closer. However right now working on everything at once.
Day to Night: The graphics engineers are on the home stretch of the project. We just finished up the cloud shadows for the dynamic track today which was one of the last challenges graphically. Now they are starting on hooking up to the current weather from the sim weather generator. (They also still want to take one more pass at improving the quality of the clouds and sky.) This puts us in position the for the final stages of involving more team members, for example for web, database, setting up sessions and saving the info in the DB, and getting it to the sim and then it all goes to testing. I know the engineers are still targeting December for release and they think a fighting chance to reach that goal, but it will be tight.
HDR (High Dynamic Rendering): This project is mainly done and the plan is to roll out with Day to Night. (The Sky etc. should be in HDR) The two projects need one last evaluation together however as we get in the final stages of day to night.
New Sound Engine (XAudio): We have not talked much about this recently, but we have been working hard on it, and we are fairly confident it will make the December build.
Tire Model V7: It is a shame but not going to be in September build. We are excited about it, but a couple issues/problem were discovered when we started to do more in-depth testing that we still need to correct to move forward with the new version overall. (FYI, we are also working on having multiple tire compounds, not to confused with tire versioning. That would hopefully come next.)
Beta UI: A big quality and speed improvement sitting on the “trunk” that we hope to roll out in September but it is going to be close. It also includes some improved usability and design. We also have other significant additions and design improvements underway which will not make September. It will be an on-going project to keep improving the UI.
Rain: Not a 2018 possibility. Still quite a ways to go but working on it. Main work being done now is on the dynamic surface aspects, water pooling, drying, etc. More resources will move to it after we finish the time of day project.
Graphics/Animation: Multiple projects underway. You should keep seeing new things roll out almost every build. The last build, for example, you saw the shadow improvements, skid marks, particles from tires etc.
Oval Dirt Surface: You should see a nice improvement coming in the September build.
There are a bunch more items big and small not discussed above but that is the brief update on the things we have talked about in the past and we receive the most questions about. On a side note, we are also building out a brand new data center which includes hundreds of thousands of dollars of new equipment. I mention it because that will go live this fall and you will be hearing more about that down the road as we switch over. The down-time should be minimal. Sorry, we don’t have more specific timing on many of the things above.
