Automobilista 2 November 2023 Development Update

Discussion in 'Automobilista 2 - News & Announcements' started by Renato Simioni, Nov 17, 2023.

  1. MarcG

    MarcG Well-Known Member AMS2 Club Member

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    Well the proof is already there to show that the recent new competition addition to RF2 is a genuine success and it's not even in the public build yet, agree with what you like but the participation numbers in that beta don't lie.
     
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  2. BrunoB

    BrunoB TT mode tifosi BANNED

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    Understandable focus.
    But as I and by garantee also our Mistar Simioni understand it the issue is basically the chosen network model.
    Easy to set up but not so easy to get functioning reliable when people does show up :whistle:
    1.png ClientServer vs PtoP.png
     
  3. TomLehockySVK

    TomLehockySVK Well-Known Member

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    For me a proper single player experience is a priority in every racing game, online is second fiddle and with many racing games i never touch it.
     
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  4. Grufty60

    Grufty60 New Member AMS2 Club Member

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    Can't wait for the historic Tracks.....
     
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  5. Joaquim Pereira

    Joaquim Pereira Well-Known Member

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    rF2 is my "main" sim.
    Yet... (numbers tell another story)
    upload_2023-11-19_16-42-13.png

    There's something about AMS2 that keeps me coming back...
    I can mention two important aspects that, go figure, have nothing to do with physics, cars or tracks:
    1. Weather
      Been able to simply jump into the sim and with no fuzz been able to race anywhere with real weather condition is incredible.
    2. FCY
      Yes, many avoid that entirely, but for me, it's a must - every little thing that emulates reality is an immersion factor. It's and implicit randomizer ;)
    I use AMS2 mainly to race offline but I've participated in online championships without problems. It's not an iRacing ecosystem, but we can race online!

    My own custom FFB file (see my signature) makes AMS2 a lot more interesting to me as do third party content and Reiza should support community efforts to create them.

    I'll say, Reiza kept going and don't reject or misinterpret our own wills, desires and dreams.
    Good companies are made by good/demanding customers - they provide companies targets, new ideas and more customers!

    Obrigado para o Renato e restante equipa.
     
    Last edited: Nov 19, 2023
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  6. Theodore Schultz

    Theodore Schultz Well-Known Member AMS2 Club Member

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    So I will throw my two cents in about MP in AMS2 and sims. For me the "bugs" and "reliability" for AMS2 MP are highly overblown. To me the issue is more about the UI and lack of "official events" directly through AMS2 and not an third party website (LFM being the exception) as well as a meaningful trophy/licence requirements to give players a sense of "leveling up".

    Not sure with the P2P Reiza is seemingly stuck with if official events can be done beyond a third party website or not but if not then I think Reiza really needs to push Just Race, Race Craft Online or hopefully LFM as "their" official events and promote them each week as they did with the TTOW. They need to create an official championship, daily races, weekly races with different license levels and allow players to "unlock" certain combos.

    Currently when you go into AMS2 multiplayer it is just a bunch of "random" lobbies with random car/track combos at random times. I don't think AMS2 should get rid the of easy and maybe best of all sims in creating your own lobbies and races but hopefully in the future we will have a section for "official AM2" events and then user created races and leagues.

    Everytime I log onto MP it is just a mess of unknown races and leagues with random rules, race lengths, aids and it is just a mess and a new UI could really make a big difference IMO.
     
    Last edited: Nov 19, 2023
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  7. Lucifer_sam

    Lucifer_sam Well-Known Member AMS2 Club Member

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    Absolutely. I don't blame people for wanting multiplayer to be better, but I think things should be put in perspective.

    For the better part of the last 15 years online multiplayer has been the biggest focus in sim-racing and gaming in general. It's both what most people want and where the money is it. A lot of good has come from that, but it didn't come without cost. Devs were (and still are) Incentivized to put more time and resources into multiplayer experiences than singlepleyer ones, and sadly that led to AI falling behind while everything else became more advanced. AI falling behind meant that most folks who open up a racing sim and wanted to try out an offline race were doomed to a frustrating experience and thus putting them off from offline racing. It isn't a shock that a lot of people hate offline racing when you realize that up until Iracing introduced AI the best offline simracing experiences you could have were from games made in 1995-2005.

    Simracing really needed devs who both have a focus on the offline experience and are given time to flesh it out. Both Iracing and Reiza stepped to the plate, showing what offline racing can be. I'm glad that the dark ages of offline simracing is finally coming to an end.
     
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  8. WhippyWhip

    WhippyWhip Active Member AMS2 Club Member

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    if you ever tried to run a league you wouldn't say this, the system is compltely unusable for leagues, with desync issues etc where different players have different levels of weather, abs and tc disappearing bugs, players getting booted out, other weird random stuff happens too, i had a few ppl one race just come up as "unknown" (i think that was what they showed as) before instead of their username,

    for organised multiplayer it's not usable, for quick casual random races it is
     
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  9. Renato Simioni

    Renato Simioni Administrator Staff Member

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    I´m going to reply to this somewhat obnoxious post one last time, because I´ve already replied to posts like it too many times before and unfortunately some of you just refuse to get it and just keep repeating it ad nauseaum as though foot-stomping is the thing that is going to leads us to finally doing what you want. Hopefully you, @Roy Niessink and others of similar attidude who keep posting this sort of reply on rotation get it this time because it really can´t be made any clearer, and won´t be attempted again.

    Please grasp this - whatever Multiplayer issues persist is not for lack of effort or attention, we are not going to fix anything by getting artists, audio and physics people looking really hard at it. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how development works. There are deep-rooted issues in what is a very complex 3rd party engine, and (at least up to now) it has been the achilles heel of an engine that is full of upsides. We don´t think it´s impossible to fix the issues or make enough improvements so that multiplayer in AMS2 is at least reliable and serviceable, but these take an unquantifable amount of info, time and effort which the devs who can actually move the needle in the area haven´t quite amassed yet.

    As stated in the dev update, we are aware of and need no lecturing on the value of Multiplayer, and we know a lot of our users badly want further development of it, and the reason we keep saying we are pushing to improve it it´s because we have been. Unfortunately this sort of development push doesn´t bring the same sort of tangible incremental improvements as say, physics development - we can and have fixed several bugs causing session transitions to stall, mass disconnections and other such reliability issues, but if 10 others persist you´ll still be running into unreliability every once in a while. It doesn´t mean these 10 other issues won´t be fixed or can´t be fixed, we just haven´t managed to debug them yet. We have added extra logging info precisely to try gather more info to try debug them, which we just haven´t managed from our own internal testing so far. If you think that´s just cheap talk that means nothing, I can´t really help you there.

    Now a bit of perspective for you and others who think they get the business just because they can see figures on Steamcharts - we´ve been at this for 14 years now, slowly but surely growing with every new product release. We developed pre-release AMS2 with an yearly budget that barely broke six figures, and have had revenue on the seven figures every year since, selling hundreds of thousands of copies with 2023 looking to be the strongest year in terms of both new sales AND revenue - three years after its original release. That revenue has proved enough for us to continue expanding the team, acquiring new premium licenses, paying regular bonuses to our developers and resisting buyout offers from two bigger companies, because we kinda like what we do on our own, and we do it well.

    The reason AMS2 has relatively low number of simultaneous players (the sole stat people who seem to think it´s failing keep pointing to) is because it´s a sim people play more casually and more sparsely - it´s the sim they go to have some fun every once in a while, be it because they don´t sim race all that much or because they have another primary sim to compete in, and use AMS2 to unwind every now and then. Doesn´t mean they aren´t happy with it - the fact AMS2 has a 91% rating on Steam just 1% short of the highest rated sim racing title would suggest the opposite.

    Now all that doesn´t mean we all need to be happy with AMS2 being just that and with its state right now, and we certainly haven´t been. We know many of our users aren ´t satisfied with it and they want further improvements (in Multiplayer or elsewhere) before they are, and we have been pushing to deliver those improvments month in and month out relentlessly. While I´m pretty confident we have the highest rate of development of any sim racing studio irrespective of size, there is still only so much we can deliver in any given cycle, and the fact there is one most sought-out area to be improved on does not make it the one we can more easily and readily improve on.

    If when all is said and done we fail or take too long to get it where you´d like it to be by all means give us the negative review we deserve and feel free to never buy our products again, both rights your have as customers. But you´re not entitled to continue posting repetitively when not obnoxiously on the same topic over and over again. Please understand this and let´s not get on a high horse about how "this is not the way to talk to your customers" because we´ve been trying to communicate with you in more constructive terms quite possibly every since the game was released to no avail. This is a small shop where we take pride on our work, and while we push to give our costumers all they want we do expect them to behave like grown-ups and respect that work and ourselves. If that´s asking too much don´t be surprised if you find yourself getting invited to leave.
     
    Last edited: Nov 19, 2023
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  10. rmagid1010

    rmagid1010 Well-Known Member AMS2 Club Member

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    I think this part is amazing, congrats!
     
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  11. Laulenture

    Laulenture The me of sim racing AMS2 Club Member

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    Now that's what I like to read
     
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  12. Pablo Abella

    Pablo Abella New Member

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    Maybe I'm a little limited, but I don't understand people who compare themselves. Because AMS2 does the same thing as iRacing, or Rf2 or ACC?? If you like iRacing, use iRacing. If you like RF2, use RF2...I think it's not exclusive to use one or the other. If I want a beer, I don't buy ice cream pretending it's beer. Like I said, I must be limited and can't understand the comparisons. We can use all of them or just one without pretending that they are similar.
     
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  13. DoomVergil

    DoomVergil Active Member

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    I think AMS2 is in great place now and it's getting better with every update.

    I have tried many racing games after AMS2 came in 2020. Examples being AC, ACC, RRE, rFactor 2, F1 23, GTR2 and many others. I always come back to AMS2.

    Well, AMS1 was my go to racing game before AMS2 and before AMS1 it was Stock Car Extreme. AMS1 gameplay hours is like over 1250, AMS2 about over 560 hours and Stock Car Extreme is 270 hours. It all started in 2015 when I tried SCE demo and I was sold...

    Still waiting patiently the update... :D
     
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  14. Oleg Kaban

    Oleg Kaban New Member

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    Boss, what a speech!:cool:

    Man, ^^^that's^^^ great to hear! Really really happy for you guys out there, keep em monies coming:rolleyes:
    God, ^^^that's^^^ SO OVERWHELMINGLY GOOD TO HEAR!:hurrayreiza: I was thinking the other day "there's no chance no one has or will approach them, what'd they do, hope they don't sell". And you don't sell. W. Just W.
    I was going to say, this is exactly the way people (maybe just me) would like to hear from the devs. There's already enough of AI-generated-copy-paste-bull****-corporate-speech from bigger companies, and in racing press, where most people are afraid of speaking from their heart because they're afraid of responsibility. Man I like to hear alive person talk like a human. Respect+++ definitely.
     
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  15. stealthradek

    stealthradek I know nothing. AMS2 Club Member

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    Or better, play all different titles you own there and then. There's no need to play solely that_one_title and nothing else. Nobody checks that ;)
     
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  16. BrunoB

    BrunoB TT mode tifosi BANNED

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    Does anybody here say that its impossible to use more sims than one?
    But beside of that I agree with you :whistle:
     
  17. Pablo Abella

    Pablo Abella New Member

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    What I'm trying to say is not that you can't use one or the other. Quite the opposite. In diversity the virtues of each one are appreciated. What I'm trying to say is that there's no point in trying to bring things from one to the other. Each sim has their own thing and we can enjoy them without trying to make them the same. Sorry for my bad English, I use a translator.
     
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  18. PocketsRJ

    PocketsRJ Hi from UK!

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    Your translation is fine :)
     
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  19. TacticalNuclearPingu

    TacticalNuclearPingu Active Member AMS2 Club Member

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    As someone who has been vocal about wanting to see MP improvements (not usually here), and who wrote a long post in the beta forums asking what the vision is on the MP side, I don’t see how anyone can dispute that this has been fundamentally well addressed by the dev update and Renato himself.

    I don’t think it’s wrong for the scope to not be to create the same systems we see with other sims. I feel this is a title which as a sandbox, gives us as users the freedom to create the experiences we want. It’s why I’ve only every really pressed for stability, and that’s likely to arrive with the update as outlined with the logging tool. Very excited about a more robust dedi in the pipeline. I think that once these are rolled out, MP usage in leagues will see an uptick as many have tried previously, even if they haven’t stuck at it.

    I also reject that the current state is unusable. We recently did a full length race FUSA23 champ with 20-26 drivers in each race in MP, and whilst there were some issues encountered (25 drivers running the full 500 miles at Indy is a huge stress test of any sim’s system, complete with FCYs), overall it was a positive experience for all involved. Issues found were reported in the desired threads.

    Obviously I can’t divulge anything from the beta change logs about the update but there’s a huge amount of fixes coming which will help improve the MP experience (and SP). Some appear to address directly issues we’ve encountered in our league, which is extremely nice to see.

    Fundamentally this is my favourite sim as it offers the most immersive feeling of “racing” out there, a testament to the passion of the developers and their deep appreciation for the sport itself. It’s very nice to be able to share that same passion with racers in our league. I look forward to the update and enjoying the sim even more.
     
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  20. morpwr

    morpwr Active Member AMS2 Club Member

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    ]Fundamentally this is my favourite sim as it offers the most immersive feeling of “racing” out there, a testament to the passion of the developers and their deep appreciation for the sport itself. It’s very nice to be able to share that same passion with racers in our league. I look forward to the update and enjoying the sim even more.[/QUOTE]

    This couldnt have been said any better.
     
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