iRacing News

[vobler]

New pricing structure and lower prices on content.

To read about that and more news check out:

http://www.inracingnews.com/iracing-news/iracing-announces-added-features-lower-prices/

[vobler]

Somebody posted the following question in the iRacing forums;

"Will iracing ever have modern F1?"


I think it came as a surprise when Tony Gardner from iRacing posted this answer;

We will have a modern F1 car at some point. Multiple discussions in the works.

Tony

[vobler]

Build 2009.10.26.01 Release Notes
--------------------------

Website updates

Series, Car, and Track pages

-Re-organized to make it easier to find the series, car, or track you are looking for. Series are grouped based on license; content is grouped based on status.

Stats

- Club scoring summary added to race results

-Driver stats have been expanded to include the driver's club and the driver's total Gross Club Points.

- In several areas of the site where club points are displayed, the information has been expanded to include Club Points, Club Points Multiplier, and Net club Points

-Results for sub-sessions are now easily viewable. If a session has been split, mousing over the result icon for that session will cause a pop-up to appear. The subsessions may each be selected within this pop-up.

Race Planner (to be released in the near future)

- A Dashboard gadget. Allows users to show their intent to participate in races for an entire season worth of racing. Races will become joinable 30 minutes prior to their scheduled start. This gadget will not auto-register drivers -- registration must be done manually.

Fast Track Licensing

- If your license is in the range Class C ... Pro, and at the end of a session your Safety Rating is less than 1.00, you will be immediately demoted as many license levels as are required to bring your SR back to or above 1.00, but in no case will you be demoted below Class D if you currently hold that license or higher.

- If your license is in the range Rookie ... Class B, at the end of a session you will be immediately promoted to the next higher license if (a) your Safety Rating is 4.00 or higher, and (b) you have met the Minimum Participation Requirements for your current license level.

- If you have a Class A license and you are a member of the current Pro class, at the end of a session you will be immediately promoted back into Pro if your Safety Rating is 4.00 or higher.

- The Rookie (thrice per Season) license promotions, and Standard (once per Season) license promotions/demotions will continue unchanged.

Hosted iRacing

- Hosted sessions enable you to create personalized race events at any time for a cost of $3.00.

- Hosted sessions can only be purchased with iRacing Dollars and/or iRacing Credits at this time.

- It is possible to load iRacing Dollars into your account by purchasing a gift certificate and redeeming it yourself. You can redeem a gift certificate without purchasing anything as follows:
***Click on the ââ,¬Å"View Cartââ,¬Â link at the top of the page
***Enter your gift certificate code into the box and click the ââ,¬Å"Applyââ,¬Â button
***Follow the instructions on the screen to complete your gift card redemption order

- All hosted sessions features are accessible from a new ââ,¬Å"HOSTEDââ,¬Â top level navigation menu selection.

- Hosted sessions cannot be scheduled for the future. They are launched at the time of purchase and are typically ready to join within 60 seconds of purchase.

- There is no charge to join a race and you can register to join a hosted session from the ââ,¬Å"join a raceââ,¬Â page. This page refreshes automatically.

- You can select the car and track, practice, qual and race length/duration as well as several other options such as number of racers, starting type (rolling vs. standing), number of fast tows allowed and full course cautions (on or off).

- The list of available tracks is a function of which tracks are loaded onto the selected server farm.

- It is not possible to configure hosted sessions with multiple car classes at this time.

- You can make your hosted sessions private by providing a session password and giving the password to your friends.

- Hosted sessions are not official races and do not impact your Safety Rating or iRating.

- The total duration of a hosted session should not exceed 4 hours. Race servers will enforce this limit by shortening a hosted session if it lasts too long.
- You can output hosted session race results to CSV. A button will appear on the hosted sessions event results page when appropriate. The button will not appear if the session didnââ,¬â,,¢t include a race component.

Cameras

- New group dialog tab gives the following functionality:
***double click on a camera to set it active
***add/remove cameras from group
***delete camera if not in any group
***view active camera and shot quality in real time
***sort by name or shot quality
***Camera groups can be added/deleted at will now (tv1 etc). You can remove all but the on car groups, and add up to 32 groups.
***New groups insert after the current one.
***Enable/disable automatic shot selection (ctrl-t is hot key). This effectively locks the current camera active until you manually switch to another shot using the group dialog or the 'b' and 'shift-b' buttons.

- Mouse aiming mode
***activated with ctrl-z.
***hit ctrl-z again to save new camera position (only for fixed cameras)
***hit esc to cancel edit.
***left mouse button flies forward, right flies backwards.
***moving the mouse modifies yaw and pitch.

- Cameras can be renamed

- static no longer shown when transitioning from practice to race

- Added overlap to start/end, should reduce 'flashing' in tv cameras

- key binding cancels when switching away from edit dialog

- Improved behavior of chopper when it can not keep up and improved reset of chopper position

- Blimp/chopper shots only last 10 seconds now

- fixed camtool ui so slider/text controls grey out when disabled

- Stop cameras from flashing at transitions

- Fixed pan to next focus car

- Separated driving FOV adjustment from camtool fov adjustment

- Added support for analog control of fov

- Increased dead zone to better support xbox 360 controller

- Cameras no longer flash when adjusting tape head in replay.

- Ctrl-F12 toggles cam_tool ui instead of only setting it active.

- Joystick does not interfere with key acceleration when using the keyboard and joystick at same time

- Added reset button on settings tab to reset key mappings in camtool to defaults

- New Joystick calibration dialog in the cam_tool setup tab

- Camera yaw/pitch movement is now proportional to FOV

- New file format supports any number of groups/cameras in groups

- removed "All TV" it is redundant when you can make your own

- push to talk works when camtool is up

- Key repeat works on frame step when using a mouse to click on the button
- you can see a visible camera when viewing the camera itself (alt-Q) in the camera tool. Makes it easy to place cameras exactly where you want them.

- can load/save car/track cameras at any time to any filename you want, so it's easier to have multiple sets of camera files available. (But does not yet remember which sets of cameras were selected.)

- Camera field of view gets wider on very wide aspect ratio displays (triple head) so TV cams don't zoom in too much and cut off detail. But by getting so much wider there may be artifacting from very close objects getting cut off in the wider views.

- Added scenic group that gets the shot when the focus car is lost. Useful for putting some cameras in that show the track itself.

- Oncar cameras go to static for 3 seconds when focus car is lost.

- Store last select camera group and cam file in cameras.ini and load at startup.

- Able to toggle view mode and use shot q when driving camera selected.

Setup Sharing

- In the Garage you can share your current setup with other people in the session by pressing the "Share" button. You can make a setup available to everyone, to members of your club, or to a specific person. Setups shared with everyone or with teammates are stored on the server and will be available for the entire session, even if you disconnect. Setups shared with an individual are available until they exit the sim and can only be shared while they are connected.

- You can load any setup that has been shared with you by clicking on the "Shared" button in the garage. Setups shared directly with you (eg, not to everyone or to clubmates) are available until you exit the sim.

- Shared setups can be loaded and then saved to disk for later use.

Garage

- All changes require the Apply button to be pressed before the garage can be exited. Some adjustments are still shown live, but must be applied to exit.

- The garage can be viewed during a race, but no changes to the setup are allowed.

Spotter

- Voice Packs can be selected from within the sim in Options / Sound. You'll need to restart the sim for a newly selected voice pack to take effect. For information on using and making spotter packs, see: http://members.iracing.com/iforum/thread.jspa?messageID=430723

- Added a "TJ Majors and Lance McGrew" spotter package. (to be released in the near future)

Graphics options

- A new graphics option "reduce Z-fighting" has been added, mainly to help reduce shadow flickering from the cockpit view. This option also helps prevent ground from drawing through the cockpit floor.

- removed triple buffering from options screen, it still exists in the render.ini file, but called "TwoBackBuffers". D3D does not support true triple buffering, the option was a hold over from OpenGL support.

- new option added, "Cap frame queue", which tells the sim not to queue up more than 1 frame at a time for rendering to reduce latency. Defaults to on (which is our usual behavior). Turning this option off may increase controller lag.

- The limit frame rate limit option was modified to improve its accuracy.

Replays

Replays have been changed so that they record the actually transmitted car positions for all the cars, instead of the locally extrapolated positions, which have errors due to latency. This means you are seeing what actually happened on each client computer, not what was "guessed" at on your computer in the few tenths of a second of transmission latency. This should make it more useful when examining another driver's line and braking points.

There are still some issues to be aware of when interpreting what you see in a replay. It is now possible that two cars can merge slightly without a collision occurring. This would happen if neither car "guessed" that a collision occurred during the latency period, but in fact one did, if it had been possible to know that. Count that as a lucky day, if that happens to you. It is also possible that it appears that two cars do not touch, and yet collision forces are applied to one car or the other, or both. That's the same issue in reverse, an unlucky day. There is no difference in lucky vs. unlucky days from what happens with the old code, but now it looks different in the replay (although not while you are driving in real-time; then you are still seeing the extrapolated "guesses", obviously).

For now, opponent smoke and skid marks appear at the extrapolated positions, so it may appear that skid marks are appearing a couple feet away from where the spinning car actually is. We are going to work on that. Also, the altitude of the cars will sometimes appear to jump up or down a little bit, as the altitude is not always transmitted, so it comes from the extrapolated guess at times. We are going to work on that, as well.

If you, like Grant Reeve, have your sensibilities offended by the fact that the replay no longer matches what you saw while driving, then you can change an entry in your "My Documents\iRacing\app.ini" file--

Under the [Replay] line change the line

replayPatchRemoteCars=1

to

replayPatchRemoteCars=0

and then your replays will be the same as before. Don't get unduly upset with other drivers for swerving, if you do that, though--they are probably just latency-induced swerves.

Remote cars

- Remote cars now generate skids, smoke, and dust.

- Remote cars should flash less

Race Control

- Gained-time warnings ("Slow Down") can now be carried across the start/finish line. Doing so will cause both laptimes to be invalid (---). But trying to carry it over the start/finish to finish your race will result in an instant black flag and post race penalty.

- Bumped the time allowed to obey a Slow Down warning to 40 seconds from 20.

- Bumped the base time for Fast Tows from 15 seconds to 30 seconds.

- Made improvements to how long a person who has missed the start waits before being allowed into their pit stall.

- When joining an in-progress server (eg: open practice) you should now see lap times for cars who were once connected but are not now.

- Blue flags will no longer be waved if you are still finishing your race and the leaders who have finished already are behind you.

- Green flags should fly a couple of secondââ,¬â,,¢s earlier on longer tracks.

- The delay for showing the pit entry pop-up is reduced.

Black Boxes

- F1 black box shows car ahead/behind during races.

- F2, F3 black boxes show your best lap time, laps remaining, and total laps during races.

- Any cars that have cockpit adjustable brake bias allowed now have it on F8 in the blackboxes.

Cars

- Wind noise has been reduced.

- Engine braking has been reduced by quite a lot on the Impala B non-plate motor, the Silverado Non-plate motor, the Spec racer and Jetta. Engine braking has been increased marginally on all three plate motors (Silverado, Impala and Impala B).

- Automatic throttle cut on upshift has been activated for the C6R, Dallara, Formula Mazda, Radical, and Riley DP.

- Silverado, Impala and Impala B diff ratios are restricted at certain tracks. The ratios are fixed at Loudon, Phoenix, and Milwaukee for all three vehicles and at Martinsville for the Impala.

- Star Mazda tire sizes and physics have been altered in physics to match this year's specs and front and rear wings are remodeled.

- Dallara IndyCar ( to be released in the near future)

- Corvette C6.R GT1 ( to be released in the near future)

Tracks

- Talladega has an update to fix a "slippery" seam in the tri-oval part of the track.

- At Road Atlanta a few curbs have been corrected, they were flat instead of having the correct profile to them.

- At Texas Oval the pit speed pop-up should now come out earlier.

- At Infineon some bumps and curbs have been fixed.

- Mosport (to be released in the near future)

Security

Unverifiable third party replacements of system DLLs (including D3D9.DLL and DINPUT8.DLL) utilized by the simulator will now result in loading errors. If you encounter a Loading Error #66, please remove any third party replacements of D3D9.DLL, DINPUT8.DLL or other imposter system DLLs from your iRacing installation.

[vobler]

Mosport International Raceway (aka Mosport Park) is one of the world's classic road racing circuits. Designed and built in the late 1950s on the rolling, wooded sandhill country about 50 miles east of Toronto, Mosport's ten-turn, 2.459 mile track is widely-regarded as one of the most daunting road courses on the planet owing to an abundance of ultra-fast, blind corners, many of which feature dramatic elevation changes. However, the track's signature turn is Moss Corner, a double apex hairpin named in honor of Stirling Moss, who re-designed the corner after seeing its originally-planned configuration.

Fittingly, Moss won the first major race held at Mosport (pronounced Moe-Sport as a contraction of the words "motor" and "sport") in a Lotus 19 in 1961. Mosport subsequently enjoyed tremendous popularity throughout the 1960s and became the traditional first round of the Can-Am Challenge Series. In 1967 Mosport staged the first true World Championship Canadian Grand Prix Formula One event, won by Jack Brabham. Together with Quebec's Circuit Mont Tremblant, Mosport hosted the Canadian Grand Prix on alternate years and, later, served as the event's permanent home from 1972 until the race moved to Montreal's Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in 1978

In addition to Formula One, Mosport also staged a couple of USAC Indy car races in the late '60s and, after losing the Canadian Grand Prix to Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, continued to host major motorcycle and sports car races including the IMSA Camel GT and, more recently, American Le Mans Series.

Originally a publically-owned venture, Mosport saw a succession of owners including Norm Namerow and Harvey Huddes before the Panoz Motor Sports Group acquired the facility in 1998. The PMSG widened and repaved the track in 2001 in order to meet FIA specifications although, in contrast to the vast majority of road courses built in the 1950s and '60s still being utilized, Mosport's basic layout (and character) remains intact.

In 1967, Jimmy Clark in his Lotus 49 Ford/Cosworth won the pole for the inaugural Canadian Grand Prix with a lap of 1:22.4. The current track record of 1:04.094 (138.116 mph) was established by Dindo Capello in an Audi R10 TDI in 2008.

[vobler]

Two exciting new cars -- the Dallara IndyCar and the Corvette C6.R GT1 -- join the iRacing service today.

Long the pinnacle of American motorsports and racing technology, the Indy car is synonymous with American racing.  And, for the past decade, Dallara has been the car to beat in Indy car racing as drivers like Dario Franchitti, Scott Dixon, Helio Castroneves, Ryan Briscoe, Danica Patrick, Marco Andretti and Sam Hornish, Jr. have driven Dallaras to fame and fortune from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway to Infineon Raceway. At long last, you too can experience the challenge of mastering a 230 mph open wheel car in the Dallara IndyCar, now available for $11.95.

Five straight American Le Mans Series GT1 titles and eight class wins at Sebring and Le Mans? Thatââ,¬â,,¢s the stuff of legends; the stuff of the Corvette C6.R, one of the most successful sports cars in racing history. Itââ,¬â,,¢s the stuff that helped Johnny Oââ,¬â,,¢Connell overtake no less than Phil Hill as Sebringââ,¬â,,¢s winningest driver and enabled Olivier Beretta to become the winningest driver in ALMS history. Itââ,¬â,,¢s the right stuff and itââ,¬â,,¢s now available in the Corvette C6.R for $11.95.

[vobler]

Nice iRacing coverage here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMn5FScd66k&feature=sub

Doorz!  iRacing gets skins!

[Doorman]

Jessica is a rotten presenter but she sure is stacked! :dribble:

[obsolum]

Jessica is a rotten presenter but she sure is stacked! :dribble:

She is indeed!

[vobler]

She is indeed!

Thats nothing new....

Skins are. Oh well. I guess Doors is fed up with both skins and iRacing anyway.
Thats nothing new either.

[Doorman]

Thats nothing new....

Skins are. Oh well. I guess Doors is fed up with both skins and iRacing anyway.
Thats nothing new either.

Wrong on first count, I still love skinning. Wrong on second count, at the moment I'm indifferent to iRacing.  

[vobler]

Two celebrated race tracks half a world apart are set to become a part of iRacing.com. Circuit Zolder, a home of the Belgian Grand Prix during the 1970s and ââ,¬â,,¢80s, will join Silverstone, Brands Hatch, Oulton Park, and Zandvoort among iRacingââ,¬â,,¢s first European circuits, while Oran Park Raceway will pair with Phillip Island as the first two Australian facilities on the service.
 
The addition of Oran Parkââ,¬â,,¢s distinctive figure-eight layout to the iRacing service is especially noteworthy given that the suburban Sydney facility is slated for demolition in early 2010 to make way for a housing development.
 
ââ,¬Å"Oran Park Raceway has played an important role in the history of Australian motorsport,ââ,¬Â noted Divina Galica, director of partner relations for iRacing.com. ââ,¬Å"Too many great race tracks have been lost forever; Iââ,¬â,,¢m pleased that weââ,¬â,,¢re able to preserve this digital version of Oran Park and make it available to racers all over the world.ââ,¬Â
 
Zolder is an integral part of iRacingââ,¬â,,¢s plans to incorporate the top European circuits into the service in the coming years. But for now, the combination of Zolder and Zandvoort at least gives iRacing.com a monopoly on major European circuits beginning with letter Z.
 
ââ,¬Å"Zolder is our second track on the continent of Europe, after Zandvoort,ââ,¬Â Galica continued. ââ,¬Å"In the fullness of time weââ,¬â,,¢ll have quite a few more, but itââ,¬â,,¢s exciting to have two such challenging driverââ,¬â,,¢s circuits to begin with.ââ,¬Â

[Gnomie]

ORAN PARK IS COMING!! :dribble::dribble::dribble:

Oran Park is probably one of my top 5 race tracks. Great to have it preserved in iRacing!

Fingers crossed that they get the V8 Supercars out by the end of next summer! :flirty:

EDIT: beaten by 1 minute! :doh:

[vobler]

The official name says it all: Mid-Ohio Sport Car Course. One of Americaââ,¬â,,¢s favorite race tracks snakes, twists and turns up hill and down dale through the lush countryside of central Ohio. Itââ,¬â,,¢s not part of a glitzy multi-purpose motorsports complex; thereââ,¬â,,¢s never been an oval or a drag strip here . . . and never will be. Mid-Ohio is 2.25 miles of pure, unadulterated sports car heaven (2.4 miles with the Keyhole chicane). No wonder the SCCA made it home to the National Runoffs from 1994 to 2005. And no wonder Mid-Ohio has been a fixture on every major American road racing series calendar for nearly forty years. Beginning in the summer of 2010, it can be a part of your iRacing calendar as well.

[Doorman]

He talks purdier than a twenny dollar whore. :lmfao:

[vobler]

He talks purdier than a twenny dollar whore. :lmfao:

So lets see;

Confirmed upcoming road tracks:
Brands Hatch
Oulton Park
Zandvoort
Phillip Island
Oran Park
Zolder
Mid-Ohio

Add that to these existing road tracks:
Silverstone
Watkins Glen
Mosport
Sebring
Road Atlanta
Road America
Laguna Seca
Infineon
VIR
Lime Rock
Barber
Summit Point

And Road on Ovals at (atleast):
Daytona
Indianapolis
Lowes
New Hampshire

Quite a collection of licensed and scanned tracks.
Don't you think?