First, if you came running cause you thought you were going to see a whole pit crew changing tires, then I’m sorry for the clickbaity title. No, iRacing has not shown off an entirely new animated pit crew – although they’ve been talking/working on it for years – but the old lollipop guy, with new moves.
Steve – I’ve named him – has had a fairly uneventful life up to this point, lowering and raising a lollipop with the same mechanical indifference as the Queen’s guards. But that’s about to change.
You see, Steve is upgrading to DX11. In fact, iRacing confirmed today that DX11 is coming as an option in the March Season 2 build. So that means DX9 will still be default, but DX11 will be an option – and from the sounds of it – the option you want. In Season 3, the two will swap and DX11 will become default and DX9 will become the option. After that, expect DX9 to be phased out quickly to solely focus development on DX11.
Sounds good to me…and Steve too.
Update 2/13/16: Apparently his name is not Steve…it’s Dave. iRacing has released a new behind the scenes video featuring Senior Animator David Lovecchio’s digital work on himself…the lollipop guy.
[youtube]https://youtu.be/aaM7cRoaoX8[/youtube]
Cool
Thats great, one of the best games ever with graphics improvements
Nice move, I see that “Steve” can still levitate! 🙂 Must be a technical reason why they can’t fix the gap / shadow issue under his feet at some tracks.
Likely an issue with the physical vs visual rendering. The physical plane of the track is much more complex and nuanced than the visual plane to conserve rendering and improve performance. This is why on some sectors the cars lift above the track a bit. There’s a hill there, but it’s not visually noticeable so it’s not rendered. He’s likely placed at the plane of the physical part of the track (z:0) but visually looks above the track.
Personally, they do a good job of at least laying down rubber and marbles though. Project CARS suffers from this with their “racing line” appearing above the track (see: Some of the karting tracks)