Needless to say having the racing season kick off is a welcome sight around here even if it is just a tease of warmer temperatures heading our way. It has been an exciting NASCAR season already with a terrific showing by our fellow iRacers in Daytona, and in particular Dale Jr and Landon Cassill in the Nationwide race and Trevor Bayne and Bobby Labonte in the cup race. You have to be happy for AJ Allmendinger now as well sitting 4th in the points after Phoenix in the Sprint Cup series after the turmoil that team went through last year.

Our virtual Championship seasons are off to an exciting start as well. I am a Greger Huttu fan but I have to admit I was thrilled to see Jesse Nieminen capture the win at Spa, not to mention all of the new names in the top 10. I shudder to think how much preparation Mr. Huttu will put in for round 2 after legitimately losing his first race from his home cockpit. It was also nice to see some new faces up at the front of the field in the NASCAR Daytona race as well. It appears the new drivers in both series are bringing something to the battle!

One exciting footnote to the start of our Championship seasons is that our broadcasts have set back-to-back records for the number of viewers. The PSRTV guys continue to put on great broadcasts and really have done a terrific job in helping to legitimize these series and allow us mere mortals a chance to enjoy them.

By this time I am sure most of you have seen the two new Premier Series we have launched with INDYCAR and GRAND AM. This is an exciting development for the community not only because this gives more members a chance to compete in a “Pro” level series but it also speaks to how far iRacing has come in the real racing world. It is becoming easier and easier to convince partners that what we are doing is relevant to them and the iRacing brand is starting to become a recognized name in the garages and shops across the world. I expect we will have more of these partnerships to announce in the future as well. You would be amazed at how many phone calls or emails I get now from tracks in particular who want to be included in our service. Trust me when I say that this is a complete change from when we started this process seven years ago when we had to pretty much beg people to work with us.

On the production side of things we will be releasing Okayama International in the next build with Suzuka to follow in a month or two after that. Okayama will be a FREE track included in the base package that every iRacing member receives. We plan on scanning Iowa as soon as the snow melts and have slotted that into the production queue to hopefully be completed before the August Nationwide race. We will be scanning Interlagos at the end of March so I expect it will be released by the end of the year. We are also already chipping away at Oulton Park and Mosport Oval with their release dates TBD. When we build the Mosport Oval you will get it FREE if you own the road course and they will be bundled together for new purchases.

I tell you all of this knowing full well that some of you will go to bed tonight cursing my name because Zolder, NJMP, Oran, Kentucky, etc are not listed for the near future. We are working as quickly as we can to produce these tracks and there are a lot of factors that go into when and why tracks get built when they do.

The next build will include the new JR Motorsports Nationwide car which we scanned last winter. This car will be FREE for those of you who currently own the Class B Impala and will be packaged with the old car for those that have yet to buy it. We have an exciting contest with this car planned for its release if everything comes together like we plan. The next car that will be completed after the Nationwide car is the Ford GT to be followed by the HPD LMP2 car.

I don’t have a time table for either car but I would make a guess that they’ll both be ready in time for Season 3.

Moving on to some of the ongoing engineering projects we are working on… I will remind everyone that just because I write about it in this blog does not mean it will be done anytime soon. Case in point, the first pass at damage repair… It was our intention to have this completed for the COT and FW31 for the start of the season but we obviously missed that. Testing and tuning took much longer then we anticipated and we also decided to do the damage for the rest of the “Premier” series vehicles. The first pass of damage repair for these vehicles will be released hopefully before this blog goes live or in the next week.

Our Mostly Evil Kiwi will continue to work on damage repair over the season for the remaining cars and on the communication systems for the damage repair process.

Eric and Ian have been busy at work applying the still unfinished tire model to a handful of our existing cars to get more feedback to Dave from the testers. The cars in testing right now are the class A Impala and Silverado and the new Nationwide car will go into testing this week. We have the new model on many more cars internally right now to test as new code is implemented by Dave and so far things look pretty good. There are still no guarantees that we will be able to have any of these cars in the next build but we are working hard on them. Dave has done a brief interview on the tire model development in the latest iRacing TV episode so you should make sure to watch it.

The cars in testing right now are the class A Impala and Silverado and the new Nationwide car will go into testing this week.

David Tucker has been hard at work on our telemetry API for an exciting project to integrate our data into a to-be-announced 3rd party telemetry application. We are going to be storing telemetry data in our replay files now which can then be loaded into this telemetry application. As of right now it looks like we won’t be able to sync the actual replay video with the application but we are working on that. There are some community projects out there though that look likely to be able to do this. At any rate it’s a pretty robust application which will allow you to see wheel speeds, corner ride heights, shock deflections, longitudinal and lateral G’s, and potentially much more.

David has also done work with the API to now allow you to have multiple connections simultaneously so those guys looking to have working gauges on the motion cockpits should be happy!

Our FMod development has also made some great strides. Our sound engineer just this week finally has a custom build that will allow him to start creating sound sets using the Fmod design tools for use in our sound engine. I am excited to see how this starts transforming what we hear in the sim. He will likely start with the tire samples and then move on to the cars’ engine sets. Aussie Greg Hill is relentless so he will be badgering us daily to give him more things to play with in the sound engine.

We have an exciting project started to add Heat Racing to our hosted racing functionality. The quick explanation of this is that an administrator of a “tournament” will be able to link multiple sessions together to be able to advance drivers to a new session based on the results from the previous sessions. These competitions can happen in a straight shot or over a matter of weeks if the administrator likes. The administrator will also have the flexibility to determine how many drivers advance and how they are gridded in the later rounds of the tournament.

Shawn has continued to plug away on graphics optimizations for our engine and also just completed a project that will allow us to build the tunnel/bridge at Suzuka. The next big project he is going to tackle is how to light the tracks with headlights from the cars. This will allow the art and production guys to work on a night track for road racing, most likely starting with Sebring. We have also begun work on animating the driver in remote cars and may have this implemented in a car or two by next season. Full in-cockpit animated arms being the next logical step in this process.

The web team has some interesting projects there are working on as well. We will finally have the first pass at an achievement system go live in the next build. This will reward members for things like, the “Hard Charger” award which will be awarded by starting in the bottom 10% of a race field and finish in the top 10%. Also a reward called “Classy” which is awarded if you participate in all car classes for 8 weeks each in a multi-class series. Another fun one is the “iLet You Win” award which you receive if you beat an iRacing employee in a race. Another award group is called the “Safe Driver” award which has three levels. Level one is for a single incident free race, level 2 is for 3 consecutive incident free races and level 3 is for 8 consecutive incident free races. There are many more on the list but the intention is to create some challenges for everyone in the service, not just the elite drivers.

One longer term project the web team is working on is an integrated chat system on the member site. This functionality will be very much like the system that Facebook uses on their site. We think this will be another exciting way for the community to interact with each other on the website and to further ruin work productivity around the world.

Another way we plan on trying to “open” up the service is to allow everyone to participate in practice sessions for official series regardless of license class. This will be something we can set by series so I don’t see us allowing this to happen in the Premier and World Championship level series.

This is just a sample of what we are working on at this time and as always things can move on and off this list over the next few months. I think all-in-all the next two seasons of builds are really going to add some terrific functionality to the sim and website.

And to sign off I want to thank all of our loyal customers for their continued support. You guys are the ones that allow us to do this for a living and we are thrilled to come to work every day to try and build a product that you are excited about and feel is worth your hard earned money.

We have finally gotten to the point in our development, at least on the software side, that we are thinking about “new” projects. It’s not exactly comparing apples and oranges, but I think it is fair to say that while we have far exceeded the quality of work that we had accomplished at Papyrus, it has taken us a while to meet the quantity of features.

I think its remarkable how much we have accomplished over this time period, but I also think we have just scratched the surface of what we can become.

It’s exciting to start thinking about new territories to explore in this code base now. We have a wish list that would blow your mind and we finally now get to start debating what to start checking off the list to build next. Sure, we still have some no brainer features that we want to work on but there are always more projects in development then what will be released in the next build. All I can say is that I think it will be an exciting few years in front of us!

We also have a lot of cool stuff going on right now of course. I will run down some of the projects we are working on. First I would like to thank two groups that have really done some terrific work over the last few months to help us “spread the word” about iRacing.

Ian Busching and the guys at PSRtv have done a terrific job on broadcasting our World Championship and special race events. We basically developed our tools for broadcasting on the fly and I think they have really done a great job in refining their process to turn out some quality broadcasts.

I want to also thank Florian Goddard and the group helping him put together the iRacingTV shows. This concept was his initial idea and I think he does a terrific job in his highlight recaps and putting together video that we shoot here in the office. We are very lucky to have passionate people interested in our product and wanting to not only see it succeed, but also figure out ways to help that happen.

Staying on the community side of things, we have something very cool planned for the world’s fastest sim racer. I don’t want to spoil it for you, but let’s just say Greger is going to be making a trip here to the States very soon and he’ll get to do some very cool things. We will be capturing all of it on film to be shown on 3 Wide Life and on our website, plus it will be covered in Top Gear magazine.

One last thank you shout out to my friends in the far east. Shuji Aratani, Toshi Deki, Toshinobu Shigemitsu, Teruaki Kato and Thomas O’Dowd have all been extremely helpful in creating some terrific partnerships in Japan. We are putting the finishing touches on a contract for a FOURTH Japanese track for our service joining Okayama International and two recently signed tracks. Once we ink this final deal we will plan to have a press release introducing all of them. Look for it around September 18th….

On to some of the development updates….

Produced by iRacing under license from Williams Grand Prix Engineering Ltd (WGPE). The Williams name and logo are trademarks owned by WGPE. Williams images © 2010 WGPE. All rights reserved.

On the content side of things we are obviously hard at work on the Williams FW31 car. It’s actually in testing already and it is getting rave reviews. Our friends over at Williams have done some driving with it and they already think it’s very good. We are kicking around some ideas here internally on how to make this car something everyone can use so stay tuned.

We are also making great progress on the Mazda MX-5 Cup car and Roadster. These cars will become the rookie road racing cars next season. You will be able to drive either car in the series with the primary difference between the two being one is left hand drive and the other is right hand drive.

We get a lot of questions about the Street Stock car and this will be the next car in development and we are hoping to have this released around the holidays. This will eventually become the Advanced Rookie oval car.

On the track side of things we are hoping to release Pocono next week. This will include five road course configurations! Dover will be the next track released and we are shooting to have that released by the end of September. With the way the art and production teams work we generally have multiple tracks in some state of development so the good news is that Spa is already under construction. The bad news is that this is probably our most ambitious build yet and we are hoping to have it also ready around the holiday season.

We are tentatively shooting to get our new forum software out to you next week as well.

One new feature that will be in our next build is actually an extension of the spectator functionality that we introduced in the last build. We are going to let you actually drive in a session that you are spectating. Essentially you will be a ghost in the world to the competitors (invisible from their perspective) but it will allow you to use the competitors to pace yourself. You obviously will not be scored in the race but maybe a ghost driver can stay with Huttu!

Our current pit crew system is not capable of doing all of the in-race functionality that we would like and needs an overhaul.  In our last build we extended our damage model and we are planning on being able to fix some of that damage in the pits for this build.  A much bigger project is going on to re-vamp the “pit crew/crew chief” system to allow us to expand its functionality.

We continue to work hard on integrating Fmod into our software and things are looking positive that it will be included in next seasons build. As with just about anything, things always look easier until you start getting your hands dirty with the project.

One cool project that the vehicle guys have been working on for a few months is incorporating better aero tables for our cars. We have been working with a computational fluid dynamics company to use our 3D models to create a new aero table for our IndyCar. This is kind of our “pilot” project and if it goes well we will expand it to other cars.

New tire model………………yes it’s being worked on. No, Dave won’t put a web cam in his office so you can watch.

We have essentially dedicated an engineer to work on upgrading our graphics engine for the entire year. Our product is going to really start to look “new” over the next few builds with the work Shawn is doing and the list of tasks he wants to accomplish are impressive.

In this next build we should have soft tree shadows are all collapsed and rendering as fast as the track surface lighting at Richmond night! Really there should be no need to turn off the tree shadows (which will be an option) and tracks like Road America are going to really benefit from this.

He is also working on proper light scaling on all track textures.  Basically all the tracks are going to look significantly better because Shawn has done a massive project to properly scale how bright each texture should be at a track.

Of course we have many other projects going on that may or may not make the next build, but those are the highlights on the development front for what I feel pretty confident about right now.

We have had a terrific year here at iRacing and we owe it all to you our customers. Keep the feedback coming on what you would like to see added or improved and we will continue to work hard to deliver it for you.

“Never had a doubt in the beginning
Never a doubt
Trusted you true in the beginning
I loved you right through

On and on we laughed like kids
At all the silly things we did

You made me promises, promises
Knowing I’d believe
Promises, promises
You knew you’d never keep

Second time around, I’m still believing
The words that you said”

“Promises Promises” by Naked Eyes – 1983

Sorry, maybe I have been reading too much Bill Simmons lately but for some reason this song (which I don’t even particularly like) popped into my head when I started the process of writing this.

It is kind of funny to read those lyrics though and think about this communication game we play as developers and customers. Maybe game is not the best word but it also could be the perfect word.

Here is why I think it may be the perfect word. Run for the hills, an iRacing employee is going to say it, we make a video GAME!!!! We make a hardcore racing video game. We make a racing simulation that for the most part is used for entertainment purposes. There may be fewer than a thousand of our customers that actually make a living from racing and they may get some practical use out of the software but the rest of us are using it for fun and to increase our enjoyment of the sport.

I have never really understood why “simracers” get upset when these hardcore products are called games. The reality is that they are, and there is nothing wrong with that, and quite frankly that’s the whole point for most of us.

Now I am sure the argument will be made then that why is our message always talking about the most authentic racing simulation ever made, or why we never call it a “game” in our press releases or announcements. The reason we do this is to create a brand called iRacing.com Motorsport Simulations, to differentiate ourselves from other products. I think it is a fair statement that we have gone much further then anyone else in the commercial space in trying to create as authentic an experience as possible, but we still are an entertainment product.

If you accept that iRacing.com is a hard core video game and therefore a product used for mostly entertainment purposes then lets figure out how we can communicate like we are having fun.

Coming back to the cheesy 80’s song I quoted lyrics from. I am about to write about a bunch of things we are working on, none of which I will promise you will be done. I write these blogs because some of you want to know what to expect next but if one of these features does not get completed it is not the end of the world. The sun is (hopefully) going to come up tomorrow and everything is going to be okay. Trust in us that there is a plan and we are doing our best to execute on it.

If you accept that iRacing.com is a hard core video game and therefore a product used for mostly entertainment purposes then lets figure out how we can communicate like we are having fun.

On to some of the highlights of the things we are working on…..

Tires, yeah, instead of me regurgitating the same stuff I always say Mr. Kaemmer himself is going to write an entire blog post on what he is working on. After being tied to a chair and forced to watch me trying to solve quadratic equations on the whiteboard he finally broke and said he would do it.

Grant is back working on his new transmission model. He made my eyes glaze over yesterday by telling me he had just added in the mass of a hand into his model in trying to determine the velocity needed to get the dog tooth gears to engage. There is still quite a bit of work to be done on this, most importantly that there are aids available that make this new model usable by all of our customers.

One of the most complained about “features” in the sim is that a damaged car is just as fast as an undamaged car. We just figured what fun would it be if you lost the front wing on your IndyCar and it actually required you to slow down? Okay, seriously, we are working on improving the damage model.

I read a hotly debated thread yesterday on what exactly we are doing with the very general statement of “we are working on night racing”. (On a side note, if you ever want to see an engineer melt down describe a project they are working on in the most general description possible and say it’s a piece of cake to complete.) To elevate the suspense we are working on turning Richmond into a track that can be run at night. This may seem like a trivial task but we are modeling a light source from each light at the track. This will be over 100 lights. Kevin Combs will be doing a blog post specifically on this topic in the near future.

This project is just the first step in the long term project of finally getting back to work on improving our graphics engine. Now that Shawn is finally done working on the HoF project he is being set loose on all kinds of goodies to make the product sexier.

Fixed setup racing for hosted and official racing is also being worked on again. This is pretty self explanatory really. The real debate for this feature is what official series to make fixed setup. We have not had serious discussions about this internally yet but my first thought on this is that to start maybe D and under series are fixed setup? What do you guys think we should do for fixed setup series while trying not to add any redundant series?

I am pretty sure I have mentioned this in one of my previous blogs but we have started the process of transitioning to a third party sound engine called FMod. The feature set for this product should allow us to add some cool effects into the model and hopefully increase performance in general. At this time the goal is to have the old system in place as well so if there are any problems for a particular user you can continue to use the old sound engine.

We have heard quite a bit of feedback from our league operators that having more control over a hosted session would make their lives easier and we have listened. We have begun the process of trying to get back into hosted racing the extended admin functionality that we had in our previous products at Papyrus. As we have said many times before just because we did it at Papyrus does not mean we can copy and paste the code into iRacing so I don’t know the exact feature set we will have yet.

Tony “loose lips” Gardner has made a few posts recently about a few cars we are working on. We plan on trying to get the Tour Modified out in June around the same time that Thompson Speedway will be finished up. We also plan on trying to get the Mustang done in June or early July for when Mid Ohio is released.

On the topic of cars we have received a ton of feedback on our aero model and we have started to look at trying to model the draft effects on aerodynamic side force on the car. We think this will improve the side by side oval racing and being able to pass cars a little easier on the outside.

One of the larger projects that we will be working on is being able to find your friends on the service. We hope to be able to allow members to see if their friends are already in a running race, qual or TT, and can allow them to join an open practice and possibly a hosted session with them. We also are going to try and allow you to join an actual race they are competing in to watch it as a spectator.

I got to see some of the videos the other day that are going into the driving school and I must say I came away incredibly impressed with what they have accomplished. It’s going to be a seriously comprehensive training package that I believe everyone from novice to experienced sim racers will find useful. I am really looking forward to that getting launched.

And lastly, the cheerful backbone of our community, the iRacing forums, will be getting an overhaul. I have told Scott that if we don’t see a serious increase of positive thoughts and discussion in the forums you will be stuck with this same outdated piece of software that you have now. So let this be your warning!

Seriously though, we are incredibly excited to get these projects we are working on out to you guys as soon as possible. I think they encompass many of the things you have been asking for and yet only scratch the surface on what we want to accomplish. I hope everyone has a great summer (or winter for you guys down under) and now I am off to try and get this damn song out of my head!

Brad Davies or Dax Shepard?

It was really terrific to get to catch-up with some friends and colleagues that I had not seen in quite some time, but I also got to meet and make some new friends from both real world and online racing. I met two of our NASCAR iRacing.com World Championship Series drivers, Brad Davies and John Gorlinsky. Brad looks like someone famous and it was killing me because I could not think of who it was until I saw a commercial last night for a new NBC show called “Parenthood” and I figured it out. Put some glasses on Dax Shepard and you have Brad Davies. I also ended-up getting quite inebriated with iRacing spokesperson Leigh Diffey who is an absolute riot and can regurgitate our infomercial almost word-for-word. If you ever run into Leigh ask him how he enjoyed the 199 laps of the 2010 Daytona 500.

It was a great trip though. It certainly is exciting to really see first-hand how our partnership with NASCAR has spread not only through the garages but into the media room and grandstands. I must have been stopped at least a dozen times in my two days at the track by people seeing my iRacing logos who either commented on how much fun they had with the service or asking questions on how to get started online racing as they had read or heard about it through a wide ranging collection of channels.

Speaking of new channels for exposure to iRacing . . . the NASCAR Hall of Fame project is coming along great. They have an early build of the commercial version of the software installed and operating at the Hall already and they did some initial testing on it last week. It sounds like everyone really enjoyed it and, although it’s still not finished, I believe this will be a terrific experience for the visitors to the Hall and a great way to reach new potential members.

Another avenue to expand our membership that we have been working quite hard on is broadcasting live events to the web. I am sure many of you tuned-in to our first test for the World Cup of iRacing event (congratulations again to Club DE-AT-CH for their impressive victory — Germany, Austria and Switzerland for those who are country acronym challenged like me) and saw that we still have some work to do before we are really ready for prime time. The good news is that we have made quite a bit of progress on the backend and on the client side of the software to make the actual mechanics of broadcasting easier. My hope is that we will have found a partner and be ready for live broadcasts of the DWC series in another month or so.

Yet another avenue to get eye balls on iRacing kicked-off this week with our sponsorship of the 3 Wide Life television show. There is a pretty scattered schedule of when the show is on in your area but you should definitely set your DVR to record the show. We will have more than a dozen segments based around iRacing throughout the season, so it should be pretty interesting to see how they turn out. A piece that we did down at VIR with the TDI Cup Series car will air next week I believe and there will be a piece with Dale Jr, Greg “the Hollywood Hammer” Hill scanning and building tracks, and Wyatt Gooden at the TDI Cup driver selection weekend coming in the next few months. If you miss the actual show we will have these segments up on our website in the near future.

I know that some of you have seen our announcement of a marketing relationship with a company called Interush specifically targeting new customers in Asia. It is obviously a very exciting proposition to gain some online racing/race simulation game market share in Asia. I have seen many forum posts asking about licensing content from this market and I will confirm to you that I have been working diligently to make that happen. I can’t say that I have anything that is close to signing, but we have made a lot of progress on a number of fronts and I feel confident that we will have some exciting news in this department this year.

Staying on the “regional” content topic, we are working very hard on the Ford Falcon V8 Supercar right now. It is our hope that we can line up the release of this car with Phillip Island which will be the next track to be released after Zandvoort comes-out next week. I expect that Phillip Island and the V8 will be ready sometime in May. More a global topic, but we will send Eric Hudec over to England this week for an onsite visit with the William FW31 and to spend time with the engineers to begin the process of building the virtual version of this fantastic car. I am just as eager as everyone else to find out what it will be like to drive a modern F1 car with an iRacing physics model.

Speaking of physics, Dave has made a lot of progress on his new tire model. I know some of you may be getting tired of hearing that this will come out soon, but I think it will be well worth the wait. Just from what I have seen so far on how the tires’ contact patch changes based on different track grades and bumps, I think it’s going to be incredible. Our hope is to get something at least into testing in the next month so we can see really how far (or close) we are to getting this out to the members site.

I also see a lot of discussion on the forums about split times and if/when we’ll see split times in iRacing. Although I never say something is 100% positive to be in the next build, I will say with 80% confidence that some form of split times or delta lap tracking will be in this next build. We have a lot of things we would love to do in this department but, like everything else, it’s important to start someplace and I think we have a good plan in place to do that.

We will have more than a dozen segments based around iRacing throughout the season, so it should be pretty interesting to see how they turn out.

Another item I will throw out there for now that we are working on is mixed class racing. This is actually a pretty significant task but I feel pretty confident that we will have something in place for the next build that will allow us to group multiple racing classes in one online racing series. I have to admit that I have wanted some type of racing game or racing simulator that accurately represented true multi-class racing myself. I can’t even remember if there were ever even any racing games on Nintendo/Xbox/Playstation that really had multi-class racing in the same event.

I think this is probably a pretty good place to stop for now on what is on the horizon for iRacing. I will try and do another blog post as we get closer to the end of this current season to update you on how development has progressed. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our loyal customers who have been with us for so long and helped us build this terrific product and community. We make great strides every day in improving our product, practices and procedures and a lot of the credit for this goes to your passion for this product and your desire for it to succeed.