Dirt SR and iRacing development notes

Tony Gardner opened a thread in General forums to announce how SR would be implemented in the future Dirt mode. To be brief, Dirt mode will be out before new SR is available and we would be racing Dirt mode races using our existing oval and road values. For this temporary situation, Dirt SR incident points would be lighter than the existing one for the pavement.

My two cents: I am seeing a lot of low rating people these days claiming for changes in the way SR works. Some asks for stricter one, others asks for more permissive. Well, after 5 years here I can say, at least for me, it works as it should. Top splits are usually incidents free whenever is possible and people doesn’t have to think continuously in DQ if something goes slightly wrong.

We are planning on adding new license types as previously mentioned, dirt oval and dirt road. However, the actual initial in-sim feature of dirt racing may finish before we get all the work done on the web and data side to have the new licenses ready. The last thing we want to do is roll out the new feature but have the web and data side be clumsy and slow just because of the licensing. We need to change a significant chunk of web code to do it properly. That is just the way things look now but things can change quickly as projects move along. There is a backlog of web work right now even though we just hired two more web engineers, hopefully they get up to speed quickly. Rather than wait and be sitting on a completed feature for possibly months, in this scenario we would probably roll dirt racing out under the existing licenses oval and road. Then when we have the new licenses a couple or a few months later reset under those. That way people could also “dirt race” in hosted sooner than later as well.

However that said we would have adjusted Incident Points for dirt racing with the initial feature release. In fact with the work we are doing we would be able to apply different incident points to any series in theory for example low, medium and high. For the record we plan on keeping our standard pavement series on high. We could have something like this below, just place holders at this point. You could use these settings in hosted as well. What we can’t do is change the overall incident/contact system and the way it works so save those thoughts for another time or forum. That is a whole different thing. This is just some flexibility in the incident points. Opinions welcome.

Full Incident Points: (Current/Existing way it works)
Intended Use: Standard official series on pavement & Hosted

Light Contact with another driver 0X
Wheels off the racing surface 1X
Loss of control 2X
Contact with other objects (walls, etc) 2X
Heavy contact with another driver 4X

Medium Incident Points:
Possible Intended Use: Dirt Racing and Special Events & Hosted

Light Contact with another driver 0X
Wheels off the racing surface 1X
Loss of control 0X
Contact with other objects (walls, etc) 1X
Heavy contact with another driver 4X

Low Incident Points:
Possible Intended Use: Special Events and select Official Fun Series possibly & Hosted

Light Contact with another driver 0X
Wheels off the racing surface 1X
Loss of control 1X
Contact with other objects (walls, etc) 1X
Heavy contact with another driver 3X

Moreover, Steve Myers published a huge note a few days ago with a lot of information about general  development status. He is very satisfied with some of the current achievements and how the company is doing in these last years. Le Mans, Dirt, new UI, more animations, Time attack modes and much more explained below. Thanks Alberto for the list.

• We have yet another breakthrough on the dynamic track surface that we learned from the dirt project and that will be in the September build!
• It looks like we will be creating a V7 version of the tire model when this work is complete
• We will plan to include three versions of the car when it goes up for sale: a Super Late Model, Limited Late Model, and a Late Model Stock.
• We will also include in our base package a version of our Street Stock that will be prepared for dirt sim racing.
• Well you will be happy to know that we are sending poor Kevin Iannarelli on the road again next week to go scan build a winged dirt sprint car.
• Eldora and Williams Grove are obviously the first two purpose-built dirt tracks that we will release
• We are likely going to create a dirt surface version of one of our base content ovals, most likely USA Speedway.
• We are also making great progress on the Ford Fiesta GRC car. On the physics side we’ve already modeled a handbrake.
• As for tracks we will initially be building iRacing rally cross tracks on existing tracks using fun track layouts that rarely get used.
• The next track we will be releasing is of course Le Mans. Greg is riding the art team hard to try and get Le Mans ready for the September build.
• Another project is finally getting close to an initial release, namely the new UI project. With this update you will have the ability to join official sessions from inside the sim using our new user interface
• Time Attack competition. We will do a more in depth preview of this new racing mode when it gets closer to completion but the basic idea is to create a competition for the “hot lappers” out there much like GPL Rank
• Time of day transitions? Yes, it’s still on the list of things to do. No, it’s not going to be done in time for the release of Le Mans.
• We have two engineers and Aussie Greg working on sounds right now, so you will continue to see, check that – hear improvements in nearly every build going forward.
• The animation project is also moving along very nicely. This has required significant work on a new driver model which will now be used for the pit crew and track side engineers. We are hoping the new driver model will be in the September build and we will also now have more animation in general in the environment. The first area you will see this will be with the crew members that are next to the war wagons on pit road.
• Flags blowing in the wind, you can stop beating that drum, we are working on it.

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