iRacing.com

[Gabriele Bosi]

Bella bella!
Ovviamente sarà un bel regalo di natale che mi farò!!

[Simone]

iRacing.com | Rilasciata la Mclaren MP4-12C GT3



Il team di iRacing ha rilasciato la McLaren MP4-12C GT3 al prezzo di $11,95.
Spinto da un V8 da 3,8 litri bi-turbo, la MP4-12C è basata sulle norme FIA GT3.

[Gabriele Bosi]

Ieri sera, come un bambino che aspetta Natale, mi sono gustato un'oretta la nuova vettura.
Che dire, veramente fatta bene.
Facile guidarla, ottimo feeling sin da subito. Il comparto sonoro sembra veramente fatto bene (alcune macchine di iRacing fanno ridere da quel punto di vista).
L'unico neo, per ora, è la visibilità dei dati nel cruscotto: un po' troppo piccoli...a meno che non si abbia un 42 pollici eh eh

Comunque credo che siano 10€ spesi bene. Ora bisogna vedere che serie inventeranno per questa macchina.
Aspettiamo e vediamo!

[Simone]

iRacing | Partnership BMW e Prima immagine scan di Bathurst

Con un tweet Steve Myers ha annunciato una nuova partership con la cava bavarese BMW.

Finishing my last work week of the year strong. Bayerische Motoren Werke Aktiengesellschaft = @iRacing official partner.

----
Prima immagine scan della pista di Bathurst.

[Simone]

iRacing | Nuove immagini del tracciato di Interlagos

[Simone]

iRacing | Novità Kia Optima e NASCAR stock car



Il team di iRacing ha annunciato due nuove novità. La prima, la potete vedere quì sopra, si tratta della Kia Optima touring car, mentre la seconda riguarda gli appassionati degli ovali. Difatti il team è al lavoro su una versione virtuale del titolo NASCAR, la Gen6 Sprint Cup Car in versione 2013.

[Simone]

iRacing | Primo render della Chevrolet G6 Sprint Cup Car

[Simone]

iRacing | Video Interlagos e data di rilascio



Il team di iRacing ha comunicato che il tracciato verrà rilasciato domani, nel frattempo potete godervi il video che ci mostra la qualità della pista.

[Simone]

iRacing | Nuova Build e pista di Interlagos




Il team di iRacing ha rilasciato una nuova build per il loro simulatore. Frà i vari miglioramenti, fra cui spicca il miglioramento di alcuni suoni per il motore di alcune vetture, troviamo anche la nuova pista di Interlagos.

Changelog:

Spoiler: show

Website:

Hosted/Leagues/Tournaments

- The number of cars that can be used in a hosted, league or Tournament multi-car session has been changed from 3 to 4. The frame rate and performance in a session with this many cars will depend upon your pc and hardware.

- You no longer need to own all of the cars in a hosted multi-car session to participate. You now only need to own the Track where the event is being held and one of the Cars in the session. You will only be able to drive in a car that you own and you still must meet all of the other criteria of the session. You will need to download the cars you do not own. This update applies to Hosted, League and Tournament sessions

- Please Note: The “League Sessions” page and the “Hosted Racing – Join a Race” page are the only places on the site that support this functionality at this time. We are still working hard on implementing this functionality for helmet pop-ups and the “Spectator Sessions” area of the site.

Downloads

- The downloads page has been updated to support the downloading of cars that you have not purchased, that may be required to participate in a multi-car hosted events where you only own one of the cars. Cars that you do not own, that you do not have installed on your machine will appear in a new section of the download page call “Optional Unowned”.

New Awards

Nine new awards have been added.

- Young Star – win official races in four different cars
- Honorable – win official races in eight different cars
- The Feared – win official races in sixteen different cars
- The Alien – win official races in all cars

- Runnin’ Down a Dream – win official races on four different tracks
- On the Road Again – win official races on eight different tracks
- The Long and Winding Road – win official races on sixteen different tracks
- I’ve Been Everywhere – win official races on all tracks

- Photo Finish – win an official race with a margin of one twentieth of a second or less; this award is not granted retroactively

License Banner Update

The License Banner has been completely redesigned for clarity and visibility.

- The color of your license will change to reflect your License Level.

- You can toggle between road and oval licenses by clicking “Road” or “Oval” in the top -left area.

- You can toggle between iRating and ttRating by clicking “iRating” or “ttRating” below your name.

- Calendar, MPR and Credit maintain their existing functions, but have been restyled.

- Ping has been moved to the sub-navigation next to “Support”.

Payments with PayPal Billing Agreements

** This section is awaiting a configuration change from our payment partner – we expect within the week.

- The iRacing Member’s site now supports PayPal Billing Agreements. Once you have a billing agreement in place you can renew your account automatically, purchase content and recharge your account without logging into the PayPal site. A billing agreement is setup automatically whenever a member purchases a subscription using PayPal. You can also configure a billing agreement without purchasing a subscription by going to the “My Account” page on the Member’s site (look for the link inside the “PayPal Billing Option” section of the page).

- From the “My Account” page you can remove an existing billing agreement (look for the link inside the “PayPal Billing Option” section of the page).

- If you have both a PayPal Billing Agreement and a credit card on file you should visit the “My Account” page and select your preferred payment method for auto-renewals and instant recharges. The link for this is located in the “Billing & Shipping Information” section of the page.

- Additional enhancements to this page are links to remove your credit card on file and to cancel auto-renewal (this was moved from the Cancel / Renew Membership page).

The following areas of the site have had a visual redesign

- “My Account”

- “Account Recharge”

- “Gift Card”

- “Promotions”

Bug Fixes

- Spotter passwords can no longer be blank. You must uncheck “Require a spotter password” if you decide not to have a password.

Simulation:

Tilt / Touch Driving

- Added tilt sensor support to the existing touch driving controls. Now you can choose to use a tilt sensor to control steering or gas/brake or both. The sensor auto calibrates based on your device orientation at startup, but there is a ‘recenter’ button on the driving screen (also mapped to the ‘y’ key) that will let you change your orientation at any time. The tilt sensitivity can be adjusted in the black box along with the FFB sensitivity and touch sensitivity. And the throttle and brake can be inverted with an option in the setting tab.

- Fixed a bug in touch that caused touch up events to get lost if you released your finger over another control.

Text Chat Macros

- Added in an ‘auto chat’ feature that lets users hit 10 different hotkeys to auto transmit a chat message. By default the keys are mapped to the 0-9 keys above your keyboard, but that can be remapped as needed. The default messages can also be edited in the sound settings tab. Adding a ‘$’ symbol to the end of a line will automatically send the chat message for you, without it the message will be left waiting for you to edit or send as you wish.

Spectating

- No longer report connecting admins as being admins, or show Join/Leave announcements for spectators that are admins.

- Spectators don’t need to do tech inspections in a fixed setup session.

Options

- Gray out driving controls and aids that are not used in the current session. But still let the user set their preferences for future sessions. This includes indicating if the h-pattern shifter will be active or not, based on your car type.

- Remove a lot of text from the controls page and push it into mouse over tool tips in order to improve visual clutter.

Spotting

- Change to not do tech inspections on spotters’ machines.

- When you use the [Start Spotting] button, you will now see the live action, instead of the slightly delayed replay tape. You can still use the replay controls to rewind and review action from the past. To get back to the live action, use the “fast forward to end” button (>>|), or simply fast forward and the replay will stop and switch to live action when the end of the tape is reached. While spotting, you can tell that you’re seeing the live action when the playback state says “Live”.

Camera Tool

- Allow the camera tool hotkey to be remapped (ctrl-f12) to provide better compatibility with laptops and Mac devices.

- Fixed a bug where you could not edit the camera shot aim type if your custom camera file ended in ‘track.cam’

Telemetry

- Add lap information to telemetry. (LapBestLap, LapBestLapTime, LapCurrentLapTime, LapLastLapTime)

- Add delta time information to telemetry. (LapDeltaToBestLap, LapDeltaToBestLap_DD, LapDeltaToBestLap_OK, LapDeltaToOptimalLap, LapDeltaToOptimalLap_DD, LapDeltaToOptimalLap_OK, LapDeltaToSessionBestLap, LapDeltaToSessionBestLap_DD, LapDeltaToSessionBestLap_OK, LapDeltaToSessionOptimalLap, LapDeltaToSessionOptimalLap_DD, LapDeltaToSessionOptimalLap_OK)

- Add radio channel information to telemetry, see the “RadioInfo:” section in the session string, and RadioTransmitCarIdx in the telemetry data.

- Add pit service time to telemetry. (PitRepairLeft, PitOptRepairLeft)

Race Control

- Qualifying laps will now be invalidated if any 0x or 2x car contact occurs during the lap.

- Many non-significant race control rules are no longer active once you finish your race. This could confusingly penalize people after they finished their race and cause their finishing position to drop as the post-race penalty was applied.

Graphics

- We have updated how we draw extra track surface details so they conform correctly to the road surface better and render more efficiently. This gets rid of our good old “floating skid marks” that we’ve come to know and love/hate.

- As part of the track detail improvements the race track’s surface is now always converted into a set of static meshes and stored in video memory. The old option to convert it on the fly, which had the benefit of utilizing slightly less video memory at the cost of performance, has been removed from the graphics options screen.

- Every car has had its paint adjusted to improve how paint will reflect more at low incident angles than when directly facing the viewer.

- Windshield glare at night is much reduced down to a reasonable level.

- Fixed a bug that was preventing the brake rotor glow effect from being visible.

- The sim can now reload custom car textures with the ctrl-r hotkey. This is useful if you like painting your own cars by being able to quickly load and see your work in progress paint scheme without having to reload the sim many times. When reloading is triggered, all of the existing paint jobs are immediately unloaded and will default to white. They will then begin automatically reloading one at a time. Reloading happens in the background. If the loading causes performance issues while you are driving on track you may disable from loading while you are in car via the “LoadTexturesWhenDriving” setting in the renderer.ini configuration file.

- Also, it is possible for an external application such as Trading Paints to tell the sim to reload car textures by sending irsdk_BroadcastReloadTextures using the SDK.

- Shut off the auto rotate display feature in Windows 8, and force orientation to landscape. Use app.ini [Graphics] displayRotateMode=1 to override the default screen orientation.

Sponsors

- DSD and Lionel Racing sponsors added.

Sound

- Cold brakes now squeal until they warm up, unless the car has carbon brakes, which don’t squeal. Note: the sim still does not model any brake performance changes with temperature at this time.

- Engine sound power now continues to get louder as rpm nears max.

- Fixed a bug in the opponent cars that would make them sound like they were driving around at full throttle even while coasting or hard braking.

Flexible Drivetrains

- All cars now have flex modeled in their drivetrain math, instead of being perfectly rigid. This gives all kinds of subtle and interesting audible and physical engine rpm wobble effects. Note: our model of the detroit locker differential that many of the oval cars use can cause some pretty rough sounding off throttle rpm bouncing as the locker and drivetrain get into a oscillation as the locker clatters between driving the left or right wheels. We’re looking into that.

New Tire Model

- There have been improvements to the modeling of the tire carcass motion, which improves the handling on all the cars. All our NTM cars feel much better with this tire model update, and have had some amount (anywhere from a little to a lot) of re-tuning, so even if a car doesn’t have its own release note does not mean that you shouldn’t try it out to find out how it drives now!

- Tweak skid widths, smoke and skid amounts.

New Steering Model

- All the cars have better constrained steering systems to go with the tire carcass improvements, giving more precise feel.

Drafting

- Road course and oval drafting have been reworked to improve the racing experience.

Chevrolet Impala

- New rules limit track bar split left to right to a maximum of 3″ at all tracks.

- Right rear underbody collision surfaces have been lowered to hit the ground after the proper amount of compression.

Chevrolet Impala Class B

- New rules limit track bar split left to right to a maximum of 3″ at all tracks.

Chevrolet Monte Carlo SS

- Fixed cockpit view windshield duplication when the car was damaged which caused double darkening and reflection issues.

Chevrolet National Impala

- New rules limit track bar split left to right to a maximum of 3″ at all tracks.

Chevrolet Silverado

- New rules limit track bar split left to right to a maximum of 3″ at all tracks.

- Right rear underbody collision surfaces have been lowered to hit the ground after the proper amount of compression.

- Logitech sponsorship on the windshield has been removed.

Ford GT

- This car has had a physics overhaul to improve how it drives.

Ford Falcon V8 Supercar

- Added new exterior engine sounds that better capture listening at a distance. The previous exterior sounds are now only for the on-car sounds.

Mazda MX-5 Cup and Roadster

- Nvidia sponsorship has been removed.

McLaren MP4-12C GT3

- In-car ABS controls are now available to be assigned, in addition to the usual black box method of adjustment.

- Updated the rpm mapping for Logitech G27 shift lights.

Radical SR8

- Updated the rpm mapping for Logitech G27 shift lights.

Autódromo José Carlos Pace

- This classic Brazilian race track, also known by its former name Interlagos, is now available!

Bristol Motor Speedway

- Update GPS position. It was off by 10 meters or so, and had been 30 meters too low.

Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps

- Improved the Endurance configuration surface types near La Source to try and avoid accidental black flags.

Lime Rock Park

- The first pit stall has been moved back one to make it easier to exit the pits past the armco wall.

Oran Park Raceway

- Added a checkpoint so turns 7-10 can no longer be shortcut.

- North B pit lane speed reduced to 20mph to make it so that driving through the pit lane takes more time than staying out on track.

Sebring International Raceway

- New track surface shaders have been added.

Virginia International Raceway

- The last 10 pit stalls have been moved away from the pit wall to make pitting easier.

[Simone]

iRacing | Dev Blog e nuove immagini



Steve Myers ha pubblicato un nuovo dev blog sui cambiamenti previsti nei prossimi mesi:

Monday morning after the Super Bowl is always an interesting day. I always kind of feel like I fought someone and I didn’t come out the winner. All the crappy food I ate all night comes back to haunt me like 12 rounds of solid body shots from a heavy weight fighter. The beer doesn’t help either but it’s Oh so delicious…..

If I am lucky to have my hometown team in the game (Patriots) every muscle in my body is stiff from feeling like a compressed spring ready to explode all night. Unfortunately the Pats choked two weeks ago so I only feel like I fought a middle weight boxer today instead of a heavy weight…

As I sit here on this Monday morning trying to nurse my “injuries” I have started the mental transition from football season to racing season. Yes the Rolex 24 was last weekend and really is the start of the racing season but let’s be honest: until the merger of the ALMS and GRAND AM happens the race really feels like a minor league baseball game with a handful of Major Leaguers getting in some rehab work.

In my opinion the racing season starts in three weeks when the beautiful Gen6 NASCAR cars take to the high banks at Daytona. I am legitimately excited that NASCAR has finally gone back to its roots with the concept of “win on Sunday, sell onMonday” and brought back cars that at least resemble vehicles we can drive ourselves.

Okay, so technically that phrase was coined by Bob Tasca, Sr. who had a Ford dealership up here in Providence, Rhode Island along with an NHRA team, but you get my point.

The good news for you and me though is that we don’t have to shell out tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to drive a new street Chevy SS or NASCAR SS Cup car. We are going to get to drive the NASCAR version in about four weeks on iRacing and for only “pocket change” compared to the real world versions.

The Chevy SS will come first and the Fusion should be released a few weeks later. Yes, I have been working on trying to get the Toyota signed and hope to accomplish that “soon.” I have been working on it since last summer but working with the big corporations means the “soon” clock runs on months instead of hours….

I have been asked quite a bit whether we will have driver names on the windshields of the Gen6 cars and I can confirm we are working on it. We may not be able to get this done for the new car’s release in a few weeks, so it may need to go out with the next 13th week build.

The next car in the development pipeline will be the Ruf Rt 12 R which I can say has personally given me more heartburn than any car to date for a number of reasons I care not to divulge. I do not anticipate this car being in the next build but there is a very good chance that the Kia Optima SX race car will be in the Season 2 build.

I have to admit that I was not super enthusiastic when this Kia deal came together and then I drove the car…….and it was fun…..and I kept driving it……..for hours. It actually makes me even more excited to get the BTCC Honda Civic done which we are currently working on trying to scan.

The art and production team continues to impress me with the work they do in building our tracks, and our recently released Autodromo Jose Carlos Pace is no exception. The track better known as Interlagos has long been a favorite of mine from my very early days of sim racing and running Geoff Crammond’s GP games. The flowing uphill, double apex Laranjinha corner has always been one of my favorite sections of track in the world to “drive” — even if only virtually in my case.

With the release of Interlagos, the guys have turned their considerable talents to Kansas Speedway while as continuing work on Montreal and Bathurst. When we finish-up Kansas and California Speedway this year we will have finally completed building all of the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series tracks on the schedule.

At this point it is likely that Kansas will be the next “new” track completed but probably not for the next 13th week deployment. However, we should have a fresh coat of paint on Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca and USA International Speedway to bring them closer to our current standard of new tracks. The art guys staged a pixel protest and demanded that we stop shaming them by flaunting their early work to the masses . . . and we caved.

Keeping on the visual topic, we have a bunch of projects in the works to add some depth to our in-sim world. We almost had the new shadow map work done for the last build so it is almost certain that it will be done for the next build. We are also in the process of changing the way that shadows are cast from trees. This project is pretty much the first required step to be able to get dynamic skies into the sim which is another project on the horizon. Pun intended.

Our newest engineer, Richard Jobling, whom you met in our last episode of iRacing TV, is working on the first project to improve our collision and crash models. This may sound silly but starting with something simple like making cones “collideable” is a significant step forward in making the environment more alive. This is a big, hairy, monster of a project but when interviewing him for the job he made it clear he was perfectly comfortable wrestling big hairy monsters.

I think the question I get asked most often in the forums and on my twitter account is when the Lotus 49 will be completed. The good news is that it’s done….well except that it needs NTMv5 which isn’t done yet. I know I sound like a broken record but Dave really is making great progress on the tire model and feels that he is getting closer to getting NTMv5 released. He made a significant advance in this last build which really is NTMv4.5. We are hoping the remaining 0.5 is in this next build.

We are finally getting to a point in our development life here at iRacing that, not only can we can start looking at things that just are not working the way we like, but we can do something about it! We have a number of projects we are starting work on in this department.

One area of the service that has been neglected has been our UI. I don’t think we have really changed anything since we launched the service. We have taken a fresh new look at what we can do not only with the in-game interface but also with the loading screen and post-race. This is a significant project requiring work from both the sim and web engineering teams, so a release schedule for this is still hard to predict.

Also, we are going to try and kill two birds with one stone by introducing an exciting new feature and at the same time try and give the time trial session some TLC. We are starting work on adding the ability to integrate a ghost car into the session that will allow you to select the best lap of the session, your best lap ever or even a loaded lap from someone else. We have a lot of exciting longer term ideas as well but in the short term you should be able to work on improving your performance while you spruce up your safety rating!

Yet another project that we are coming back to is our paint kit. We want to evolve the paint kit, both in terms of its design and layout as well as the introduction of new features such as a new color picker and increased font options. We have even kicked around the idea of adding the ability to download the templates directly from this page. Brian Simpson actually paid me in peanut butter pattie girl scout cookies to write that last sentence and this is the first time the engineers will hear about it…..

The web team has a number of different projects they are working on in support of features like team racing and our UI re-design. They really are the unsung heroes of the development team. These poor guys often are crunching right down to the wire trying to tie-up a feature that literally can’t be deployed without their interface.

One exciting project they are working on right now is a re-design of how you view and join race sessions. Imagine your TV guide view of nightly television and you get the general idea of where we are going with this. Soon you will actually have a visual depiction of the racing schedule that you can complain to me about!

I think the second most asked question I receive is the status of team racing. I can confirm for you that I was sitting in Randy’s office the other day and I watched him make in-race setup adjustments on one iRacing account and machine — and it changed on a second iRacing account and machine. This is a significant step forward on this project, and although there is still quite a bit of work to be done both in-sim and on the website, I am cautiously optimistic that it will be in the next build. Once we get the crew chief portion of team racing done actual driver changes are not far off.

I think one of the most significant advances we made in our last build was the improvement Grant made to the drive-train model. It is amazing how this change has not only transformed the immersion factor in the cockpit but also how the cars actually feel. The funny thing about it is that this is the end result of us having him work on improving the sounds! Long term he is still heading towards converting our software to use X-Audio but our lovable Kiwi does have plans to try and make some advances in the near term as well.

For those of you that have not done so, I would highly recommend taking the Ford Falcon V8 Supercar for a spin and then watch the replay from one of the TV cameras. Aussie Greg Hill has made a huge breakthrough on these external sounds and, coupled with Grant’s work on our sound engine, I think we have the best sound EVER in a racing game or sim. Expect this same treatment with as many cars as we can get samples for in the service but this new technique will require new recordings so, realistically, this will be a long project. We are doing our best to launch the Gen6 Cup cars with these new sounds and the Cadillac and Corvette will have them in the next seasons build as of now.

As always there is much more going on behind the scenes then what I have spelled out here. I make no promises on when any of this will make it on to the membersite but at least you get a little glimpse into what we are working on! I would encourage those who have joined us in the twenty-first century to follow me on twitter at @iRacingMyers because I often send out some charming 140 character updates on what’s going on in the iRacing universe. For those of you leery of being sucked into the social media blackhole — don’t worry! It will be on the forums in thirty seconds.

Now I am off to get some Tums…

[MRK37]

iRacing.com | Prime immagini Scan di Montreal

[MRK37]

iRacing.com | Prima immagine della Ruf RT 12R

[Simone]

iRacing | Nuovo render della NASCAR Sprint CUP Gen6 stock car

[Mandingo]

Raga ho fatto l'abbonamento trimestrale ma non ci posso fare nulla mi sembra troppo una americana troppo onerosa e troppo chiusa.

Voi cosa ne pensate ?

[Simone]

iRacing | Video della NASCAR Sprint CUP Gen6 stock car