Studio 397 reveal their October 2016 rFactor2 Dev. Roadmap. As reported earlier this month, and now being confirmed, Studio 397 has begun working on the DX11 game engine and VR support for rFactor2. The aim is to have both of these major features implemented in the title before the end of Q1 2017.
Included in the roadmap is the identity of the next circuit and car to be added to rFactor2, NOLA Motorsports Park in Louisiana. The New Orleans circuit was constructed at a cost of $62 million dollars and is used in three configurations, the full track length is 5.37 mi (8.64 km), the North track length is 2.75 mi (4.42 km) and finally the South track, with a length of 2.69 mi (4.33 km). It is not immediately clear from the roadmap if all three layouts will be available when it is released.
NOLA Motorsports Park
As for the new car, the USF2000 Prototype, this is a open-wheel class racing car which is already close to being released to the title. The USF2000 series which ran from 1990 through to 2006 and was considered to be a steppingstone class to INDYCAR, launching many careers from the current field of INDYCAR drivers. The USF2000 Van Diemens are powered by Mazda MZR 2-liter powerplants – a four-cylinder, double-overhead cam, fuel-injected engine generating approximately 170 horsepower and capable of powering cars to speeds of 150 mph.
USF2000 Prototype
Finally, Studio 397 has been granted a license to produce the Radical Sports car, perhaps one of the nicest handling racing cars in the world. The Studio has taken possession of technical drawings and data relating to the performance of the very popular British-built racing car. Hopefully we can look forward to an extremely accurate rendition of some of the models Radical produces. One of the most popular, the Radical SR8, is pictured here below!
Studio 397 Development Roadmap:
Hello everybody, and welcome to the first monthly roadmap update. A month ago, at the SimRacing Expo, we announced the Studio 397 partnership and since then we have talked to a lot of simracing websites about our plans. Thank you all for your positive and honest feedback. We’ll keep an open dialogue with the community.
Let’s start this update with some of the things we have been working on.
A car we’ve teased before is the USF2000 and we are happy to report that it is almost ready for release. We are particularly proud of this car as we were able to build it with a lot of support from the series and teams so we’ve ended up with a car that is extremely accurate in terms of both physics and car model. On top of that it is also a lot of fun to drive and has become a favourite of many people on the test team.
Our next track release is going to be NOLA Motorsports Park. Both the race and kart track will be available in different configurations. We’ve been working on it for the past couple of months. Most of the 3D objects are done and we’re currently assembling everything in preparation for further testing.
On the development side a lot has happened. In the background we have moved everything over to new infrastructure that allows us to work on new features in parallel, ensuring that they are only added to the next release when done and tested. We have also spent time automating our processes and intend to use those improvements to deliver updates more quickly.
Over the last year we have been working hard in close cooperation with the Stock Car community to improve the rules for oval racing. That work is still ongoing, and we feel we’re on the final stretch now!
Announced a month ago, the development of the DX11 engine with VR support is still ongoing. This is obviously a big project and apart from building and integrating the new engine we also need to make sure that we stay compatible with our existing content. Our current timeline for getting this integrated is by the end of Q1 2017.
We are also moving closer to the first public release that will be Steam only. It will definitely be released this year and is scheduled to contain a whole list of bug fixes and improvements to the codebase. I would like to take this opportunity to invite everybody that is still using the non-Steam version to take advantage of the free option to migrate to Steam. Future updates will start leveraging more Steam features so the only way to take advantage of those is to move to Steam.
Finally, we have an announcement to make. We have secured a license with Radical sports cars and will be bringing those into rFactor 2. With full access to CAD drawings and performance data we can deliver these cars with a very high amount of accuracy. Work on this has just started, but we are very excited as these are great cars to drive and race!
That’s all for this month. Happy Simracing!
