Must ... resist ... posting ... roadmap ...
Too late.
At first glance, the roadmap looks informative. On deeper thinking, it shows the scale of the problem confronting S397, and in particular, its relationship with its new owners and therefore what it sets as priorities given very limited resources. And its only getting worse.
Consider now: there are two conflicting development models now in play. Those at S397 have been used to a continual development, no direct timeline or commitment to deliver content or features, slow grind that any and all priorities could be valid. By contrast, all the new MSG announcements are tightly date-constricted, specific content and features linked, and have to be done to HIT THE DATE. MSG is a publicly traded company and have published these titles and the timelines to Wall St and investors; its not a private company and do-what-you-like to stop the natives (us players) getting restless. There's profits, costs and revenues now. The devs - content or code - are now having to contribute to both development models and ethos. Yeah, yeah, its a different team doing the NASCAR NXT game; and sorry, but I call BS. There's not just those specific titles either; their parent has also committed them to run certain esports events as well. Such as another LM 24 Virtual, and also if they can (hint, hint), an IndyCar esports event/series this year. Both of those will use rF2. Now if LM Virtual is anything like the scale of event from last year (HUGE), then a lot of work has to go in to prep for that.
Which brings us to the roadmap, which I believe to be quite misleading. There's hints as to why. We've know for a long while that broadcast overlays for the streamers and esports events has gotten priority over lots of other things, given the absolutely miniscule number of users this positively impacts. For a new LM Virtual, there will be liveries at the very least; and I'll bet there's some thought to running some part of this as a rain event, which is why SSR is being done. And also more work on driver swaps online (since this failed several times last year, and I suspect on-going issues being reported by the bigger leagues/esports streamers now. This all points to work being done to support esports pretty much to the exclusion of all else. Hence no AI, no physics (cars already exist etc.), not much on the UI or CS either. In fact, the biggest problem with the roadmap is how obvious it is that the pace of development of the UI and especially the CS within it, is at a glacial pace. What they have now is sufficient with the couple of esports events (Challenge series etc.) require, and the truly big one-off events or series won't use that anyway. Let's see what they actually deliver in the next month on the CS historical results UI, but my bet is it will be utterly underwhelming.
As for the new car and any new tracks, they will likely be done to support said esports, or maybe its a holdover. My main bet would be for the BMW M4 GT3, replacing the M6, but that won't get used for the big events/MSG related esports stuff. Might be an IndyCar. Unlikely to be an LMH, since the obvious one would be a Toyota, but there's no sense in giving them their own class for the Virtual. Actually, given the feedback from Michelin on last years race, I'd have hoped to see tires they could triple stint (not wear out) but be changed solely for temperature (move to softs at night).
I'm sorry, but I need to see much more commitment to fixing the UI (still massive fps drops) and especially rapid improvement in the CS system. This roadmap gives us neither. And its because of priorities at MSG.
Too late.
At first glance, the roadmap looks informative. On deeper thinking, it shows the scale of the problem confronting S397, and in particular, its relationship with its new owners and therefore what it sets as priorities given very limited resources. And its only getting worse.
Consider now: there are two conflicting development models now in play. Those at S397 have been used to a continual development, no direct timeline or commitment to deliver content or features, slow grind that any and all priorities could be valid. By contrast, all the new MSG announcements are tightly date-constricted, specific content and features linked, and have to be done to HIT THE DATE. MSG is a publicly traded company and have published these titles and the timelines to Wall St and investors; its not a private company and do-what-you-like to stop the natives (us players) getting restless. There's profits, costs and revenues now. The devs - content or code - are now having to contribute to both development models and ethos. Yeah, yeah, its a different team doing the NASCAR NXT game; and sorry, but I call BS. There's not just those specific titles either; their parent has also committed them to run certain esports events as well. Such as another LM 24 Virtual, and also if they can (hint, hint), an IndyCar esports event/series this year. Both of those will use rF2. Now if LM Virtual is anything like the scale of event from last year (HUGE), then a lot of work has to go in to prep for that.
Which brings us to the roadmap, which I believe to be quite misleading. There's hints as to why. We've know for a long while that broadcast overlays for the streamers and esports events has gotten priority over lots of other things, given the absolutely miniscule number of users this positively impacts. For a new LM Virtual, there will be liveries at the very least; and I'll bet there's some thought to running some part of this as a rain event, which is why SSR is being done. And also more work on driver swaps online (since this failed several times last year, and I suspect on-going issues being reported by the bigger leagues/esports streamers now. This all points to work being done to support esports pretty much to the exclusion of all else. Hence no AI, no physics (cars already exist etc.), not much on the UI or CS either. In fact, the biggest problem with the roadmap is how obvious it is that the pace of development of the UI and especially the CS within it, is at a glacial pace. What they have now is sufficient with the couple of esports events (Challenge series etc.) require, and the truly big one-off events or series won't use that anyway. Let's see what they actually deliver in the next month on the CS historical results UI, but my bet is it will be utterly underwhelming.
As for the new car and any new tracks, they will likely be done to support said esports, or maybe its a holdover. My main bet would be for the BMW M4 GT3, replacing the M6, but that won't get used for the big events/MSG related esports stuff. Might be an IndyCar. Unlikely to be an LMH, since the obvious one would be a Toyota, but there's no sense in giving them their own class for the Virtual. Actually, given the feedback from Michelin on last years race, I'd have hoped to see tires they could triple stint (not wear out) but be changed solely for temperature (move to softs at night).
I'm sorry, but I need to see much more commitment to fixing the UI (still massive fps drops) and especially rapid improvement in the CS system. This roadmap gives us neither. And its because of priorities at MSG.
)
