I saw someone else making a post about "community" and how RFactor sort of has that feel about it. In some ways, I was thinking about how modding is and how it works and what could be done to increase the communal nature of the game. I'm not talking about just chatting in-game, as for the most part things like TeamSpeak and other alternatives like that provide that outlet and they're pretty much old hat. I got to thinking awhile back about the dirt oval racing community that I'm a part of. When you think about it, many of us started back in the Ratbag Games Dirt Track Racing game era. We're talking about an arcade game engine (used in the game Powerslide) with some dirt tracks and cars with arcade physics. The community was huge then, the contributions were less inclined than in the Heat and RFactor days, but things felt in some ways tightly knit even though there were 100's upon 100's of sites and various messageboards supporting sim racing, some even held on the same sites where the full-scale "real" racing that was closest to the online racing we were doing. With Heat, there wasn't a lot of people building for it but the few that did developed a sense of community because of how few people there were building stuff, and the fact they were generally cordial with one another. The delivery systems for Heat mods were hap-hazard and often required a tutorial grocery list of things you needed to do to make things work. For many, it put them off just trying to get things installed, and in the end... with some of the quirks and bugginess of trying to make a pavement-designed game engine allow the cars to slide like a dirt car... well, drivability wasn't the best quality to many and therefore it became a sort of "niche of a niche", that being a game with minor appeal amongst a portion of a grassroots motorsport discipline that itself isn't as "in the know" as other mainstream forms of racing. Flash forward to RFactor... what started on dirt with a handful of developers actually blossomed, for better or worse, until it was out of control with multiple mods and multiple mod groups producing a lot of the same thing. The drivability, while far better than Heat and far more realistic than DTR/DTR2, has it's compromises due to the limitations in tdf's, tire data models, suspension limitations and the adjustability limits that the game itself has for this (i.e. no J-bars or spring-loaded J-bars, no bar angle adjustments on a 4-bar, swingarm, or 4/z configuration, no torque arms or torque tubes, limited frontend geometry workings, etc.) to where you produce something that's more difficult or less difficult but hardly able to provide that band in the middle that is the sweet spot. As a result, people argue over what is real vs. what is arcade... you have multiple models by multiple people and yet, lines are drawn in the sand over one thing or another. Believe me, I was part of one of the mod development groups that got caught right in the whirlwind in the middle. It was no picnic. Awhile back I saw the thread on the dirt oval improvements... and many of those were things I'd been commenting on for eons. Rather than jump on and reiterate the known, I began to brainstorm on a number of facets and take them in a broader sense. What could be done to increase the appeal of racing for people outside of the dirt oval racing realm. What ideas could be applied to multiple disciplines. I saw someone post about how they'd like to run an endurance racing event where there's prototypes, exotic GT's, and lower powered GT's on the track at the same time. For that... I see a tremendous value that transcends that, that perhaps transcends leagues into running what *THEY* want to vs. what the mod developers originally intended. It all kind of hit me... I've done my share of web design in the past, have grown familiar with MVC (model view controller) with regards to programming of recent, and know very well the intents of CSS vs. HTML (i.e. separate the content from the window dressing). In thinking of this philosophy, I believe that a future idea for ISI going forward might be to separate the visual eye candy from the physics. To make models available that you can link physics files to. Obviously, I know this will literally cause a ton of developers eyes to glow red and shout "What?!?" but let's be real here. The end result is that you can always run what *YOU* prefer to run, but that anyone involved can jump in and run what *THEY* prefer to. It's the best of both worlds. I also feel it eliminates a lot of the "clique" feel of sim modding and raises the bar to people contributing content more on the time table of when they can complete it. Finish a car model? Submit it, if there's a usable physics file it can be paired in-game for races against other car models using similar physics until someone else contributes something that's better. This method in a sense continually rewards excellence based on appeal, the better it is the higher up the rankings it could appear. In as far as game delivery... I look at RFactorCentral and see a great potential, but I feel that in the future... gaming needs to be built around it's own delivery mechanism, esp. when we're talking about game mods. For that... I look at the success of stuff like The Android Market and iOS's App Store and I immediately get this feeling that an RFactor release down the road could suddenly have "The Mod Showcase" built in-game. This would be a great delivery system for not only game mods but for exclusive ISI-designed after release content that could either be purchasable or be a free download depending on what it is. Obviously, a decent balance here would be nice because nobody wants to feel like they're tied to an endless moneypit (yes I'm looking at you IRacing) but... I don't have a problem with ISI working tirelessly on a new platform and then finding newer and more innovative ways to profit/benefit from it. If it takes them 5 years of hard work to develop a game that's 5 years with less profitability while working hardcore during the twilight of their existing game franchise. Giving them an outlet to profit more and an outlet to deliver more to us... isn't something to deny or frown upon. Beyond that though and perhaps built on the same philosophy as a "Mod Marketplace", could be a "Developer's Workshop" in-game as well. This could tie into allowing modelers and designers to develop stuff on consignment. Prime example, you're a gifted modder and you just finished your great Can Am mod and have no decided that you don't really want to get hardcore into doing another mod, but... you still wouldn't mind tackling a new project. Let's say someone wants to commission for you to model up an asphalt late model stock car, posts a request on the board looking for one, you sit down and bust one out in a few weeks time... maybe even an entire group of ABC-bodied asphalt late models for the guy, you could submit them and he and others could create physics files (i.e. if that's their talents) and provide them as a potential pairing for end-users. Others could develop content built around what you submit, whether alternative physics or additional car models (let's say an Asphalt Super Late Model, maybe an ARBodies ASA Challenge Series Camaro/Mustang), or various tracks. It suddenly gets more of that open-source, communal feel that I think falls into what would make the game itself even better. Something that is more to more people. Something that eliminates some of the "us vs. them" personal rivalries and restores an overall sense of community to the platform. After all, many of us dirt oval fans love the same things, would benefit from having a huge body of race cars at our disposal vs. redundancies and in-fighting, and in the end... everyone will choose their favorite end product even if bits/pieces are shared across the board. Kind of an in-built open-source philosophy that permeates the game to the core. Bottomline... if you want to run an endurance race with 4 different classifications and let's say... 30 different car models (i.e. IMSA GTP, Camel Lights GTU, GTS from back in the day) and the models are all submitted from different people... you could literally download the various physics files and as one group create a pairing that suits your league members' tastes and resubmit. Some sort of provision scheme for anyone entering your league that *YOU* host to be beamed the new files upon connecting to their server prior to the race starting (i.e. to a temp folder with the option to save them permanently or delete when finished) or to obtain the files yourself in advance via a "MyLeague" page within the game interface. A lot of this is out there "cloud-based" stuff but I feel it's the type of stuff that will take things to the next level going forward. Just a bit of brainstorming I had and wanted to share and see how people build upon it. I think a lot of people could get used to and benefit heavily from some of these philosophies... and I think giving them to ISI for future use could turn this "IRacing" philosophy against itself when "WeRacing", developing and contributing together has the potential to be so much better.
