Automobilista 2 June 2022 Development Update

Another track from Indy that goes to rfactor2. Too bad. I no longer have the hope that a Indy car game will have life. Just like the btcc cars and tracks all that has been promised is going to flood rfactor2.
Sorry for the long text on ams2 forum.

 

Gateway is coming also in AMS2 apparently. Thay they license the track does not mean the license is exclusive. Gateway is already also in iRacing.

 

It's true. AMS2 must advance in a lot of ways. The online driver ratio, racing penalties, a functional replay mode (that cover the full race and allow us to do the basic, like rewind and pick a specific spot on bar, so racing leagues can better evaluate incidents... a auto tag with all incidents in the time bar would be immensely helpful also)... or at least Reiza can make AMS2 friendly to third party apps, sites, launchers and let the community handle this, as happened with AC.

I understood what you mean about offline racers because it's a no brainer how different is online and offline gamming. Even rich studios must, sometimes, choose between directing their game into one or another, not both. Reiza have a lot to deal with as they choose to support both things.

You know that the day I quitted iRacing was exactly when two A-Ranking (don't remember how the A level is called) a-holes joined an open race (one of the entry level oval events) and started to do exactly that? And they never got any punishment.

At the time I was racing a league of rFactor and Race07 that was free, had much more drivers than spots at the current championships, a great fairplay level and an outstanding level (I mean: it had space for every level of drivers, that is the more important, IMHO). I never had any kind of problem with this league and far better races than anything I experienced with iRacing.

The paywall is just an illusion. It don't make people more engaged, just force folks to waste money with underdeveloped content. It's the perfect portrayal of "gourmet" (in the worst meaning). Almost a scam.

 

I also think the ridiculous pay-wall is one of the big reason why the community can be so toxic. When you spent hundreds of dollars on already overpriced products it gets hard to admit you could have got as good or better for 10% of the price. They can get very desperate to justify their spending.

Just look at how they would violently deny the sim's tire simulation inaccuracy and would pretty much exile players for pointing it out until covid and they had no choice to accept the truth when real life drivers started destroying iRacing's tires sim.

Also forces players to stay because the moment you stop paying the fortune you spent gets completely nullified, you have nothing anymore. So you have to keep spending to justify your previous spending, the more you do the harder it gets to stop. I'm sorry but at this point I think it is a bit of a scam..

 

so back on topic .. any news on the 1.4 release ?

 

Delayed for bugfixing but probably coming sometime this month

 

The dev update should come out this week, game update probably end of month

 

Will never happen due to a technical limitation in how the Madness Engine record replays.
Replay recording would probably have to be rewritten from scratch for these limitations to be fixed and I'm not seeing Reiza doing it ever (assuming it is even technically possible).

 

maybe dev update next week, rel update 8.28.

 

Not necessarily. While I don't know the technical details, a common solution for these kind of problems is to implement snapshot functionality on top of the current replay code. In theory that should not have to require a complete rewrite, but it does have a resource cost. I speculate that one drawback could be that the game needs to pre-render the replay in order to generate the snapshots.

Will most users accept having to wait significantly longer for the replay to be rendered, in order to be able to skip to specific snapshots, such as at each lap start? That's an open question.

 

Sorry to burst your bubble, but that's not even close to how replays are made, the replays are not videos, there is no pre-rendering. There's 2 ways replays are usually done:

A) save the position, rotation, statuses (damage, RPM for sound playback etc) and events (locking brakes, tires slipping etc - to generate visual FXs) of every car at every small interval of time, which leads to some amount of data, which might not be necessarily small.

B) save the inputs for each vehicle, when an input change is detected. Re-playing the inputs for each car will let the game engine reproduce everything that happened during the race.
Considering this is a racing sim, inputs are almost continuous, though, so im not sure this solution has major advantage over the first one.

Or it could be a mix of the two, like using the inputs, but every once in a while, reset the vehicles to some saved positions, not to let the physics engine deviate too much from what actually happened during the race if the inputs were not saved exactly at a 1:1 ratio as they happened. The most precise way would be to save positions or inputs at every frame (at least if they are different from the frame before), but that would lead to a significant amount of data that needs to be stored.

Because we cannot set a place to skip on the replay progress bar most likely means solution (A) is not what they are using, because that would easily let you do that.
The fact that we can watch only the last couple of minutes of the race or so might be a limitation of exactly what i described above. Too much info needed to be stored, even if saving only the inputs. The steering wheel and pedals are inputs that are modulated, they're not simple on / off switches. If they were, saving replays would be a lot simpler.

 

Dev update should be this week according to Renato

 

AFAIK, it's the LiveTrack that's only saved in the beginning of the replay and then the track state is computed starting from that point so no skipping is possible. The same reason why there is a bug where if the weather is changing rapidly and you watch a replay, the track state in-game reverts to a previous track state when you leave the replay.

 

& here's part 2, same race, same settings, same A.I., totally different outcome, gotta love certain things about these A.I.!

 

Exactly: the way things work in ME is like a blockchain. Things are linked to the previous step only and you can't jump to a point without losing the whole handle on things.
This is why replay is like that and this is why you can't save your progress in a race.
It's not at all a simple problem that Reiza will not solve because they are lazy and was already pointed out in the forum more than once.
Changing this means changing quite a pillar of the whole architecture, so it's not easy stuff..

 

Maybe my mind still stays on the night of July 31

 

You never know

 

Strongly agreed. I really hope the career mode isn't like pcars2. I hated that so much. Something like gran turismo but less grindy would be amazing. Even the f1 games approach to career would be cool

 

This is a good example of how some of these things are like one person preferring chocolate over vanilla ice cream and vice-versa. I loved the career mode in PC2. I especially liked some of the invitational events. I liked how it made you feel like you were just starting out in a motorsports career.

But to each his own. You do you.

 

after the Racin' USA pack is fully released, we will see the Adrenaline - Pack featuring several off-road & Extreme Motorsports cars and tracks. Reiza keeps me hyped since early access better than any other sim or game. You can replay it millions and millions of times and you get never bored! try to play another game or sim and you will get sick hahahahaahah. Thanks for everything Reiza. Take my money if you release another season pass like 2023 - 2026