I have never been able to come up with a creative enough story for Tony as to why I need to fly to Australia to network with the folks in the V8 Supercar Series.  So with the V8s making their first visit to the U.S. it gave me a perfect opportunity to meet face-to-face with our partners in the series, our terrific iRacing ambassadors, and hopefully some new partners.

Our trip started before the sun came up on Thursday so needless to say seeing Siff at the airport at 6 AM was not exactly a pleasant experience.  However, it was a wonderful treat to be greeted by the site of a black VW Passat with black leather interior upon our arrival in Austin.  I think I actually lived a nightmare of being trapped inside a microwave every time we got into the car.

What’s the saying? Everything is better in Texas?

We arrived at the track and where greeted by a great friend to iRacing, Vern Norrgard, who is in charge of all digital media for the V8 Supercar Series.  Vern has been a champion for iRacing with the series and is the one responsible for not only our partnership but also for the extensive coverage we get on the V8 website.  I request, no I demand, that any iRacer who meets Vern is immediately required to buy him a beer and some deep fried olives.

Vern spent the better part of the day talking with us and introducing Sean and me to many people inside the series, allowing me the chance to spread the iRacing gospel.  I am really optimistic that we will see our relationship grow with the series based on discussions we had during the trip.

One of the primary reasons we went to the race was the chance to sit down with iRacing members V8 Supercar rookie driver Scott McLaughlin and title contender Shane Van Gisbergen.  The two Kiwis have had a great start to their seasons with both having already won a race.  I won’t go into too much detail on our visit with the guys because we will have a terrific iRacing TV episode to share with you about it.

Scott McLaughlin smiling minutes before a turn 1 lap 1 exit….

I will say that both Scott and Shane could not have been nicer to us and spent a lot of time answering many ridiculous questions about their series and cars from two V8 novices.

Thursday night we headed into downtown Austin to have dinner with Vern.  The highlight of the night was trying to explain to Vern that the site of a grown man wearing only a thong riding a bicycle down the street is NOT a common site in the U.S. – that is unless you live in Sean Siff’s neighborhood or downtown Austin.

Friday we headed back to the track to do some more filming with the drivers and our partners at Kia who had their Pirelli World Challenge Optima at the track for their own race at COTA.  The Cadillac CTS-V race car also hit the track on Friday and my goodness does that thing sound glorious . . . why it sounds exactly like ours sounds on iRacing!  Try this:  Turn your speakers up to 10 and hug your subwoofer.  That’s what it feels like when the Caddy goes by you.

Sean Siff doing work. Garry Rogers not impressed….

Okay I will just come right out and admit it.  I have a BBQ problem.  So needless to say, it was a requirement for my trip to Austin to visit the Salt Lick which we did Friday night.  Anyone who travels within 100 miles of this place and enjoys good BBQ MUST make a stop here.  You know a place must be good when there are 300 people TAILGATING with coolers of beer waiting for dinner.  I will never forgive Sean for ordering TURKEY at quite possibly the best BBQ joint in the world…..

200 pounds of meat on the grill at the Salt Lick and 5 pounds of it Turkey…..

Saturday was the first day of racing on the track and I hate to admit we did not bring Scott and Shane very much luck on the track.  The good news is that we left after their first race and their weekend started going much better for them!  I also had a very productive meeting with the track and I am REALLY optimistic that we will get the track signed.  I also had a good conversation with Holden as well and we left the meeting with the promise that we would continue our discussion in the coming weeks.

The impressive Media Center at The Circuit of the Americas

One thing is certain: The Circuit of The Americas is quite frankly the most stunning track I have been to from a design and architectural perspective.  The layout and finish of the paddock, the breath taking media center and, of course, the iconic tower are highlights . . . but everything is really top shelf.  The elevation change of Turn One is really amazing and TV really does not do it justice.  It’s amazing what $400 million dollars gets you!

All around it was a great trip and I want to thank Vern, Scott, and Shane for all the time they spent with us.  Stay tuned for the upcoming iRacing TV episode featuring our trip and make sure to follow me on twitter @iRacingMyers as I tend to send-out photos like the ones in this blog while I travel on these great adventures.

If I am lucky to have my hometown team in the game (Patriots) every muscle in my body is stiff from feeling like a compressed spring ready to explode all night.  Unfortunately the Pats choked two weeks ago so I only feel like I fought a middle weight boxer today instead of a heavy weight…

As I sit here on this Monday morning trying to nurse my “injuries” I have started the mental transition from football season to racing season.  Yes the Rolex 24 was last weekend and really is the start of the racing season but let’s be honest: until the merger of the ALMS and GRAND AM happens the race really feels like a minor league baseball game with a handful of Major Leaguers getting in some rehab work.

In my opinion the racing season starts in three weeks when the beautiful Gen6 NASCAR cars take to the high banks at Daytona.  I am legitimately excited that NASCAR has finally gone back to its roots with the concept of “win on Sunday, sell onMonday” and brought back cars that at least resemble vehicles we can drive ourselves.

Okay, so technically that phrase was coined by Bob Tasca, Sr. who had a Ford dealership up here in Providence, Rhode Island along with an NHRA team, but you get my point.

Upcoming NASCAR Chevy SS Cup Car

The good news for you and me though is that we don’t have to shell out tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to drive a new street Chevy SS or NASCAR SS Cup car.  We are going to get to drive the NASCAR version in about four weeks on iRacing and for only “pocket change” compared to the real world versions.

The Chevy SS will come first and the Fusion should be released a few weeks later.  Yes, I have been working on trying to get the Toyota signed and hope to accomplish that “soon.”  I have been working on it since last summer but working with the big corporations means the “soon” clock runs on months instead of hours….

Upcoming NASCAR Chevy SS Cup Car Cockpit Shot

I have been asked quite a bit whether we will have driver names on the windshields of the Gen6 cars and I can confirm we are working on it.  We may not be able to get this done for the new car’s release in a few weeks, so it may need to go out with the next 13^th week build.

The next car in the development pipeline will be the Ruf Rt 12 R which I can say has personally given me more heartburn than any car to date for a number of reasons I care not to divulge.  I do not anticipate this car being in the next build but there is a very good chance that the Kia Optima SX race car will be in the Season 2 build.

I have to admit that I was not super enthusiastic when this Kia deal came together and then I drove the car…….and it was fun…..and I kept driving it……..for hours. It actually makes me even more excited to get the BTCC Honda Civic done which we are currently working on trying to scan.

The art and production team continues to impress me with the work they do in building our tracks, and our recently released Autodromo Jose Carlos Pace is no exception. The track better known as Interlagos has long been a favorite of mine from my very early days of sim racing and running Geoff Crammond’s GP games.  The flowing uphill, double apex Laranjinha corner has always been one of my favorite sections of track in the world to “drive” — even if only virtually in my case.

With the release of Interlagos, the guys have turned their considerable talents to Kansas Speedway while as continuing work on Montreal and Bathurst.  When we finish-up Kansas and California Speedway this year we will have finally completed building all of the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series tracks on the schedule.

At this point it is likely that Kansas will be the next “new” track completed but probably not for the next 13^th week deployment.  However, we should have a fresh coat of paint on Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca and USA International Speedway to bring them closer to our current standard of new tracks.  The art guys staged a pixel protest and demanded that we stop shaming them by flaunting their early work to the masses . . . and we caved.

A maxscript We Developed to Help Implement The New Tree Shadow System

Keeping on the visual topic, we have a bunch of projects in the works to add some depth to our in-sim world.  We almost had the new shadow map work done for the last build so it is almost certain that it will be done for the next build.  We are also in the process of changing the way that shadows are cast from trees. This project is pretty much the first required step to be able to get dynamic skies into the sim which is another project on the horizon. Pun intended.

Our newest engineer, Richard Jobling, whom you met in our last episode of iRacing TV, is working on the first project to improve our collision and crash models.  This may sound silly but starting with something simple like making cones “collideable” is a significant step forward in making the environment more alive.  This is a big, hairy, monster of a project but when interviewing him for the job he made it clear he was perfectly comfortable wrestling big hairy monsters.

I think the question I get asked most often in the forums and on my twitter account is when the Lotus 49 will be completed.  The good news is that it’s done….well except that it needs NTMv5 which isn’t done yet.  I know I sound like a broken record but Dave really is making great progress on the tire model and feels that he is getting closer to getting NTMv5 released.  He made a significant advance in this last build which really is NTMv4.5.  We are hoping the remaining 0.5 is in this next build.

We are finally getting to a point in our development life here at iRacing that, not only can we can start looking at things that just are not working the way we like, but we can do something about it!  We have a number of projects we are starting work on in this department.

Early UI Concept

One area of the service that has been neglected has been our UI.  I don’t think we have really changed anything since we launched the service.  We have taken a fresh new look at what we can do not only with the in-game interface but also with the loading screen and post-race.  This is a significant project requiring work from both the sim and web engineering teams, so a release schedule for this is still hard to predict.

Also, we are going to try and kill two birds with one stone by introducing an exciting new feature and at the same time try and give the time trial session some TLC.  We are starting work on adding the ability to integrate a ghost car into the session that will allow you to select the best lap of the session, your best lap ever or even a loaded lap from someone else.  We have a lot of exciting longer term ideas as well but in the short term you should be able to work on improving your performance while you spruce up your safety rating!

Yet another project that we are coming back to is our paint kit. We want to evolve the paint kit, both in terms of its design and layout as well as the introduction of new features such as a new color picker and increased font options.  We have even kicked around the idea of adding the ability to download the templates directly from this page.  Brian Simpson actually paid me in peanut butter pattie girl scout cookies to write that last sentence and this is the first time the engineers will hear about it…..

The web team has a number of different projects they are working on in support of features like team racing and our UI re-design.  They really are the unsung heroes of the development team.  These poor guys often are crunching right down to the wire trying to tie-up a feature that literally can’t be deployed without their interface.

One exciting project they are working on right now is a re-design of how you view and join race sessions.  Imagine your TV guide view of nightly television and you get the general idea of where we are going with this.  Soon you will actually have a visual depiction of the racing schedule that you can complain to me about!

I think the second most asked question I receive is the status of team racing.  I can confirm for you that I was sitting in Randy’s office the other day and I watched him make in-race setup adjustments on one iRacing account and machine — and it changed on a second iRacing account and machine.  This is a significant step forward on this project, and although there is still quite a bit of work to be done both in-sim and on the website, I am cautiously optimistic that it will be in the next build.  Once we get the crew chief portion of team racing done actual driver changes are not far off.

I think one of the most significant advances we made in our last build was the improvement Grant made to the drive-train model.  It is amazing how this change has not only transformed the immersion factor in the cockpit but also how the cars actually feel.  The funny thing about it is that this is the end result of us having him work on improving the sounds!  Long term he is still heading towards converting our software to use X-Audio but our lovable Kiwi does have plans to try and make some advances in the near term as well.

For those of you that have not done so, I would highly recommend taking the Ford Falcon V8 Supercar for a spin and then watch the replay from one of the TV cameras.  Aussie Greg Hill has made a huge breakthrough on these external sounds and, coupled with Grant’s work on our sound engine, I think we have the best sound EVER in a racing game or sim.  Expect this same treatment with as many cars as we can get samples for in the service but this new technique will require new recordings so, realistically, this will be a long project.  We are doing our best to launch the Gen6 Cup cars with these new sounds and the Cadillac and Corvette will have them in the next seasons build as of now.

As always there is much more going on behind the scenes then what I have spelled out here.  I make no promises on when any of this will make it on to the membersite but at least you get a little glimpse into what we are working on!  I would encourage those who have joined us in the twenty-first century to follow me on twitter at @iRacingMyers because I often send out some charming 140 character updates on what’s going on in the iRacing universe.  For those of you leery of being sucked into the social media blackhole — don’t worry!   It will be on the forums in thirty seconds.

Now I am off to get some Tums…

I should make it clear though that while I have not written a blog in a while I do send out quite a bit of news on my twitter account and often answer questions there as well.  If you are not already following me you should @iRacingMyers.  Sometimes I even give away random crap I steal out of the marketing closet or off people’s desks.

The good thing about going so long without talking is that there is so much to catch-up on.  It’s only been…..cough…cough….seventeen months since I last did one of these, so I will do my best to include some stories and updates here that you will find interesting enough to forgive my lack of a blog for so long.

Travis has also been working as a part-time interior decorator for iRacing and has donated some wonderful pieces of art for our walls with the help of our friends at Revolution Racing!

Let’s start by touching on some of the interesting developments on the partnership side of iRacing since my last last blog.

I am sure by now that everyone is aware of our partnership with Travis Pastrana.  If you haven’t seen the special episode of iRacingTV we shot down at Langley a few weeks ago I would recommend watching it.  We shot the entire interview in one 30 minute take and what you see is exactly what came out of his mouth, unscripted.

In the “I thought it was dead and buried and it came back to life” category, I am happy to announce that we have worked-out a deal for the scan data for Interlagos.  I don’t have it physically in my hands yet but I would not be writing this if I did not feel confident that it was happening.

We also have iRacing member Frederic Jay to thank for resurrecting the conversations with the city of Montreal to the point that I can now say we will be building Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve.  The fact that Frederic was able to do this for an office full of Bruin fans is to be commended, although he may not be able to go home now that this is out.

A question I get quite a bit is “When are we going to have more makes in the NASCAR world in the sim?’”  Well, I am happy to announce that I have signed the new Ford Fusion and Mustang, and am working on adding the SS and Camaro licenses as well.  I am also working on the Toyotas but can’t make any promises there yet because I don’t have an existing agreement to amend with them.  We are going to do everything we can to get two of these cars ready for the start (or shortly after the start) of the 2013 season but, quite frankly, the cars are still changing.  From what I hear the die-cast makers are on the verge of creating an international incident over this…..

Staying with the NASCAR theme, we will plan to head out to Kansas to scan the track this fall, now that the major renovations are complete.  We will probably bite the bullet and head out west to California to scan Auto Club Speedway as well, which would complete our roster of Cup series tracks on iRacing once both tracks are complete.  I am sure the day after we leave California with data in hand, the speedway will be bull-dozed and turned into a road course . . .

I am just going to put this next one out there so – hopefully — I’ll stop seeing threads regarding BMW in our forums about why we have our heads in places that are technically not possible to reach (as far as I know, anyway).  For awhile now we have had ongoing conversations with BMW about bringing some of their cars to the service and I actually have a first copy of the contract on my desk.  I am cautiously optimistic that this will happen but no promises will be made by any means.  Quite frankly I have indigestion just by typing that…

As has previously been announced we will be scanning Bathurst this fall.  I would like to scan at least one more track when we are there but you Aussies need to do a better job at giving me some direction as to what you want.  Every thread on this topic I have read turns into everyone wanting their favorite local track, so I am still confused as to what most think is the “next best thing to Bathurst.”

I would venture to guess that 80% of the questions we receive from iRacing members involve when certain cars or tracks will be released.  Here is the current schedule of what is in production:  Zolder will obviously be coming out next, followed by Oran Park and then Rockingham.  We are shooting to have both Oran and Rockingham ready for the Season 4 build that should go out the last week of October.

As for cars, we are working on getting the NTM on the Lotus 79, Sprint Car, and Silver Crown car for the next build.  We are also working on the McLaren MP-4 GT3 and Lotus 49 but I have no update on when those will actually be finished.  However, they should be the next two new cars to come out.

I get a lot of questions about the Ruf Rt 12 R and when it will be built, etc.   As of now we are still in the data collection process for the car.  Actually physically getting our hands on the Ruf is turning out to be quite a problem because they are so rare.  My plan is to win the $305,000,000 Poweball lottery on Wednesday, and I will buy one so we can dissect it for the good of the community.

Now that this blog is out, I’m sure the next round of questions will start as to when Montreal, Interlagos, and the Ruf will be done (not to mention the rest of the three year back log we have on content to build).  The only people happy about this backlog are the art and production staff who are feeling very comfortable with their job security right now….

Moving on to the engineering side, I am happy to announce that after an exhaustive search in which I personally interviewed over 30 candidates we have finally hired a new engineer.  He starts in two weeks and we are very excited about that.  We plan on throwing him into the fire by getting him up to speed with our collision model and starting to lay the ground work for improved damage modeling.  These will be longer term projects but are areas in which he has a lot of experience. (Digitally that is; he assures me his real world driving record is spotless.)

A long term project, longer then we had estimated by quite a bit, is team racing.  The best way to explain what has happened with this project is to compare it to rebuilding the foundation of an existing house, then redoing all the plumbing and electricity, all without the family that lives there knowing we did it.  There had been over 150 files changed already on this project which could not be checked-in until we are actually committed to getting them into a build.  We completed that last week and are shooting to get live spotters into the sim for the next build.  Hopefully, the driver changes and crew chief functionality should be in the Season 1 build but that could be optimistic.

The web team will have a lot of work to do to incorporate team racing but they do also plan on continuing work on the very popular league racing functionality.  We have received a lot of great feedback and feature requests which we will evaluate for inclusion in the sim and feel confident the next build will include some of those features.

Another one of our longer terms projects has been converting the sim to x64 which is nearing completion.  It will be a fun few weeks of testing with massive file check-ins for team racing and x64!  I will be wearing a referee jersey and whistle to break-up the fights over who broke the testing build today.

Converting the sim to run native on 64 bit processors opens-up a lot of options for us on the technology side of things, especially when combined with the upcoming planned port to DirectX 11.  However, since porting an entire graphics engine to DirectX 11 is a very large project, there is still one important piece of our current DirectX 9 based graphics engine that we’re already working on improving right away. We’re attempting to replace the shadow volume implementation with a version of shadow mapping, which should substantially out-perform shadow volumes on most systems.  If the shadow mapping conversion works-out as planned it will be a great graphics improvement.

Continuing with the theme of longer term projects, Dave continues to dive deeper and deeper into the abyss with his trusty copy of “Polymer Physics” by Michael Rubinstein and Ralph H. Colby, as well as countless other math-heavy works.  I think Dave is actually participating in some kind of social experiment on whether it’s possible to physically change a human into a quaternion equation.

In all seriousness, Dave continues to make progress with his next advancement of the tire model (or N⁵TM as he calls it) and, yes road course racers, he is aware the cold tires are too fast right now.  Based on the progress the model has made so far, there is optimism that N⁵TM is going to solve this issue.  As with previous iterations of the new tire model we will probably look to roll out a handful of cars at a time when it is ready to go.

One project undergoing a long term overhaul is the sound engine.  We have been doing an extensive revision of the entire sound engine in preparation for moving away from DirectSound towards the more modern XAudio2 framework available in Vista and Windows 7.  This work is continuing.  As an early part of this restructuring, FMod will be gone in the next build.  This project will lay the groundwork for us to add new features and sounds that we have not been able to include before.

We have a number of shorter term items we expect to address in the next few months as well.  These are by no means “easy” projects, but we don’t anticipate they will take a year to complete.

For example, we’ve started work on building a proper turbo model for our engines, a model which will be needed for the McLaren and the Ruf.  We have also been working on all-wheel drive, which will likely allow us to make both a rear wheel and all wheel driver version of the Ruf.  I have a feeling the rear wheel drive version of the car will be for fun and the all wheel drive for racing!

We have a wish list a mile long for things that we want to build IN the sim world to try and add more life to the sim.  These projects are often picked up at random times throughout the year when an engineer or the production staff has a window of availability open-up, typically because they are waiting for someone else to finish something they need done.

Projects falling into this category include continuing work on adding course flaggers to parts of the track other than start/finish, particularly on the road courses.  We want to also look at adding-in the accumulation of dirt and oil on the windshield, and backfires from the exhaust.  As well, we want to look at starting to add time of day changes into the sim, but that is probably a much longer term project, one we’ll tackle after moving to DirectX 11.

In our last build it seemed that adding hover-over-help in the garage for the oval vehicles was well received, so we are working on incorporating the same functionality in the road car garage as well.  This was my old excuse as to why I am no longer competitive in the sim, so it would seem I need to come up with a new one.

As you can see, our work here at iRacing is a balance between massive changes in the foundation of the service and smaller projects that produce tangible improvements immediately.  A lot of what we have planned for the future required these significant changes behind the scenes to position us for important developments in the years to come.  We appreciate the loyal support we have from our customers and we are excited about bringing these projects — and much more — to you over the next year.

I hope you all had enjoyable conclusion to your racing seasons.  Now I am heading to the bar for another drink!

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.