Latest Roadmap Update - February 2018!!!

Back onto AC again, lol only took 2 posts.

 

ac is a fine racing simulator, I have no problem racing this and rf2! Shame people can't like more than one sim eh?

 

Indeed. The developers don't hate each other or their products so I see no reason why the customser should.

Each sim has its merits; play what you like and ignore what you don't. No need to denigrate the work of others.

 

even as much as, ive seen devs praise other sims. I don't mind if someone is being constructive with something, but just plain this is simcade blah blah. Just spouts ignorance.

anyway back to being ill in bed

 

Without saying that the other simulations are much less realistic, but have of course many good ratings that are often lacking in Rfactor 2.


Seriously guys, how do you find time to play in good conditions for all these simulations?

Just the official content in RF2 is ~ 50 cars of which 95% are either good or excellent, or "exceptional".

High quality modded content includes at least ~ 50 cars.

In my rfactor 2, I have more than 420 layouts.

Unless playing 2 minutes by car and never set anything before each race.

I have never played so much at rf2 (I play in excess at this time = 3-4 hours/day): and yet, impossible to drive all cars that I consider very realistic during 1 week, even less the +420 layouts.

Under these conditions, even though I was OK to a less realistic simulation, which is not the case, I would not do it.

To say that other simulations are less realistic is just a fact.
Guys, there is no problem to say the truth.

On the other hand, it is out of the question to judge a simracer because he appreciates the other simulations: they are much less realistic, yes, but they have a lot of assets compared to rf2.

The thing is, if all goes well, in 4 months, RF2 will have "erased" these main flaws, and this will normally be very close to other simulations in areas where RF2 has always been bad.

This is where we hope that users of less realistic simulations come to RF2, exclusively.

But again, out of the question to stigmatize the simracers because they choose this or that simulation.

 

I'm still priasing studio 397 for bringing VR support

Brill !!! & thanks !!!

 

Same as I don't understand people forcing their mind down everyones throat I don't understand people saying, that other people can't have one single prefered sim and leave the rest aside. If one just likes AC so be it. If one only likes rF2 and thinks that other sims are crap ... so be it. I don't find that AC all that compelling and stopped buying DLCs, but that's another topic. Where were we at? ... Ah right. Roadmaps and what's comming up for rF2. Still hoping that we have a long road ahead with this sim and what it might offer

 

Yes, I do too!

There was a time I gave up hope that rF2 will ever get VR support. That time I knew VR will be a big thing for simracers but ISI always told us they won't support VR. Because of that I already was about to give up my loved hobby. I was so convinced in rF2 physics and tyre model i could not simply change the simulation.

Now we have VR support and I'm so happy to still be part of the rF2 community (and will be for a long time). But to be honest my Intel Core i7-3820 + Nvidia 780Ti (both overclocked a lot) have a hard time to achieve 90 FPS. Whenever I race in rF2 it always ends in FPS optimization sessions.

So I'm very happy that S397 announced performance improvements! I'm very happy with that Roadmap. Hopefully my next racing session doesn't end again in an optimization sessions!

 

VR has been for sure the best feature for simracing in the last 5 years. I yesterday had to go back to regular screen to use AIW editor for some tests. It felt unnatural. I cant imagine how it will be in another 5 years.

 

VR and simracing are clearly a brilliant match. I can't wait to be able to turn up some graphics on my system with the coming optimization. Hopefully soon.

 

Two follow up topics seem to be in order. First is on performance v PC capability, second on development of 'core sim' physics and AI.

I've been struggling a bit on performance on several games for a while. On some, like iRacing I can run 280fps alone on 'simple' track sections but when I get cars around me in a race, I'm at 70fps and sometimes get tearing. I'm running an AMD R9 290, single screen 1920x1200. For rF2, with a near equivalent setup, I'm running at 90fps on some tracks and below 60fps on others, which feels awful frankly. At present time, I think you'd have to have a really modern CPU+GPU to stand a chance at running VR, and especially at 90fps constantly, or even 4K. I don't doubt VR is a gamechanger for those who run it, and one day in the future, I'll be there with you. But it isn't yet ready for primetime with the hardware we have at our disposal. I wear glasses and getting older, my eyesight has deteriorated a lot and I'm worried VR will do it more damage. The other more recent development is adaptive framerate. Given what I have described above about the wild differences in fps in different scenarios in the same game, this is also really becoming a necessity for anyone running regular screens. My own challenge is, my monitor is not adaptive synch capable and neither is my graphics card. I'd do one more update of an AMD card (say, a Vega) to get adaptive synch, and buy a new 1440 (QHD) monitor to go with it. But with graphics card prices and availability where they are at the moment, and the relative lack of even 1440 high-refresh (120-144Hz) monitors available, even this isn't viable. Let alone what you'd have to do for 4K. So I'm about to perform an upgrade to the base CPU/motherboard because at least that positions me for the future. The future includes 4K, HDR and maybe VR (at 2K or 4K per eye). At one point, the software was ahead of where the hardware standards were going - rF2 was arguably the first that wasn't. It's capable of 4K, of course, and its recently added VR support at a basic level but with very poor performance. I see no mention of HDR anywhere. So, there's still quite a lot to do to get this app in readiness for an extended future in the graphics department - so far, they are barely at current capability and there's little or no future proofing. This is and should be on the 'immediate dev' path.

Many comments on developments of the core physics and especially AI. The core physics lacks some capabilities/modeling of key areas, like tire interaction with track surface, heat transfer etc. that whatever tire contact patch tweaks have been alluded to don't come close to covering. Because we are using a simulation, they have throughout time always relied on certain 'simplifications' when the hardware at our disposal just wasn't capable of supporting some of the more advanced concepts. iRacing has a decent stab at a track surface model with full heat transfer (albeit it isn't right) and PC2 with more complex rain/puddling. There's clearly scope for more here, just not sure where this stands on the priority list as what we have now isn't bad or wildly inaccurate, just not as advanced as it could be. This can probably be developed incrementally and should probably be on a 'shorter term' dev path.

For AI, of course this is vital for offline racers; and none of the competition do it especially well. The rF2 version hasn't evolved too much in recent years, so there's scope to do more with this as well, but I'm not sure this lends itself to incremental development. Possibly, a completely different approach is needed. Again, there is debate about how much simplification is required to get it to work at all (rF2 has simpler physics model, AC attempts to use full car physics for the AI etc.). To me its not about following a pre-defined path or 'relative preferred paths', but how you account for people trying different maneuvers during passing attempts, faking an attempt for over-under etc. or simply pressuring into a mistake, which are all things human drivers do and on top of simulated believable mistakes by our virtual opponents. I'm convinced there is a lot more can be done here, but its going to need a lot of computing power and possibly a different way of tackling the problem. What we have now is viable, and can be fun regardless of your level of experience, but not 'creative' enough. Of course changes to this might render existing tracks/AIW paths as an approach outdated, meaning we need all new tracks. So this is all definitely on the 'long term backburner' path in my opinion.

 

Me and my fellow gamer run the same type card, a Sapphire AMD R9 290 and I agree with the present prices, upgrading is not an option.
However last year I designed and built a new i7-6700k/16GB DDR4/ system for my fellow gamer friend.
I re-used the R9 290 in his new system but was surprised to see only a small improvement in graphics capability.
After researching this, it turns this is because most R9 290's were supplied with a badly designed cooler that maxes the card out quite quicky at 94C and causes throttling when running rF2.
We will be now replacing the cooler with a Arctic Accelero Hybrid III-120 soon which hopefully should drop the temp to 55C (if one can go by the reviews and tests).
Expensive upgrade but a lot cheaper then replacing with an overpriced (atm) new card.
If you are interested, be careful because there are three versions of this cooler, and the specific one for the R9 290 is not too easy to locate.
https://www.arctic.ac/eu_en/accelero-hybrid-iii-120.html

 

Just curious, why would you consider another AMD card?
4k is a breeze on my system but VR still needs more work from S397 which they have said is coming, so hopefully that will soon run as well as 4k.

 

Whilst without a doubt NVidia produce the better cards, and game devs optimize for them, there is a significant cost factor. First, their cards are more expensive than AMD by a couple of hundred dollars in some cases. Second, and more importantly, the GSync monitors have upwards of $300 premium added to them over FreeSync equivalents. I've tended to follow what is happening on HDR and such on FreeSync2 and I've seen no equivalent announcements from NVidia, so I'm not sure what they support now or what their future plans are and who might produce such hardware. And I just don't like supporting proprietary tech over open source standards. Finally, although AMD are significantly worse on power draw, that isn't something I'm worried about. And AMD seem to universally perform much better under DX12, which will eventually come and is especially needed because it allows much more parallelism and multithreading in the rendering than DX11 does. Shawn Nash at iRacing has stated that key parts of DX11 suffer from being single threaded.

 

rF2 needs to be able to run on more than 2 cores.

 

Would be nice not to have to check each time that the sim has selected my graphic card and not returned back to Auto.

 

Would also be nice if the sim would stop changing degrees of rotation on the steering wheel profiler. Pretty annoying behavior...

 

@Mibrandt Would also be nice if it remembered the last wheel profile loaded instead of having to load it every time.

 

my friend i can race 150 sims i have no problem BUT i have problem play AC cause it feels very strange to me.
i always go back to RF2-automobilista-raceroom.
i play a bit of iracing but it is really expensive.

 

Yes that is slightly annoying but I think it's more important for people with Laptops or better integrated GPUs, personally on mine I see no difference between Auto & GTX970, but yes an amendment to that would be good.

What wheel do you have? Don't think I've ever had to load a wheel profile every time, always remembers the last one I used.