Archive for the ‘AT&T Williams FW31’ Category

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A Slew of New iRacing Information

Monday, October 18th, 2010

Last week iRacing held an open day at their office, inviting members the chance to see where the majority of iRacing staff work and a rare insight into how the service is managed. The lucky visitors were treated to a great tour of the office and had the opportunity to sit with key iRacing staff as they discussed future developments on the horizon.

A huge quantity of media (both video and still photos) came out in the days following the open day and here is a selection of some of the footage that made it out.

Dave Kaemmer explains the highly anticipated tyre model

Video footage of the forthcoming tyre model in action

A general overview of the day with key insights from Dave Kaemmer & Ian Berwick, previews of the new shadow rendering methods and Spa track progress!

Race footage from the forthcoming F1 and MX5 vehicles

More footage from the Williams F1

Finally, an official iRacing preview video of the MX5 cup and roadster vehicles, arriving in time for season 4 (just a few weeks away)

Quite enough video footage for one post – season 4 can’t come soon enough!

Posted in AT&T Williams FW31, iRacing, Mazda MX5, New Build, Spa-Francorchamps, Technical, Video Footage | Comments Off

Williams F1 getting ever closer…

Sunday, September 26th, 2010

A second iRacing Williams FW31 teaser video has been released with some exciting footage from a race at Road America. We can see what a typical race might look like with some cars using the official Williams livery and other cars in basic solid colour form. Subscribers will be able to design their own liveries too, so with time there should be enough creativity in the car skins to make the field look more interesting. I think I’ll be attempting to recreate an official Williams livery with alternative sponsors (to add a little bit of individuality).

Another interesting aspect of this teaser is that it showcases the new shadow effects that will be included in the next build. The start of the video shows the ‘soft shadows’ from the Road America trees and I’ll be looking forward to enabling them, as apparently they are very low cost (FPS-wise) to switch on.

Posted in AT&T Williams FW31, iRacing, New Build, Road America, Video Footage | Comments Off

Next Build Hints

Monday, September 6th, 2010

Steve Myers recently described some of the features that are currently scheduled to appear in the next build of iRacing, deploying sometime in November. The list is pretty large, here are some of the features mentioned :

  • Sound updates. iRacing is moving to a new sound model which should allow for more realistic effects. This should improve the immersion of the sim by a good margin.
  • Graphical updates. Work is being done on the shadows and texture lighting in the next build. I’d love to be able to enable some level of shadows as currently I run without them due to performance issues.
  • Pit repair. Basic pit repair functionality should be available. I’m not really bothered about this personally. My feelings are that if someone damages their car they should accept the severity of the damage and retire if necessary, and not try to salvage their race by nursing their damaged car to the end, even with minor damage repair.
  • Spectator mode driving. This is quite an interesting one. When you are spectating a session you will have the ability to drive your car on the same track with all the competitors – except you are a ghost car and they will not see you. Effectively you can race against people and compare pace. It’s an intriguing feature; my only concern is that without safety rating being a factor it might actually pull people away from official races, as crazy as that sounds.

On the content side of things we have :

  • Williams F1 FW31 will be available. A very anticipated car!
  • The Mazda MX5 will become to rookie road car next season and both left and right hand variants are going to be available – both for free. I’ll definitely miss the Solstice – hopefully there’ll be some way they’ll keep that car in general use.
  • Looking further afield the street stock will most likely be ready before the end of the year and is penned to become to advanced rookie oval car, replacing the advanced legends.
  • More Japanese tracks are in the pipeline – perhaps Suzuka? To be confirmed…
  • Pocono will be out this week, Dover will be ready towards the end of September and Spa may be released towards the end of 2010. If there’s one track I don’t want rushed it’s Spa.

So, quite a long list of features and the possibility of further features sneaking in. I’m probably most interested in the spectator ghost driving mode, and I really hope there’ll be a way to drive against saved replays too. It could turn out to be a useful training tool.

The build will be available end of October/beginning of November.

Posted in AT&T Williams FW31, Dover, iRacing, Mazda MX5, New Build, Pocono Raceway, Spa-Francorchamps | Comments Off

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