iRacing’s February Development Update: Future Projects

iRacing has published a very exhaustive development note and there are many things we already talked about. To finish, more projects that are growing behind the curtain to show up in the next months.

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We’re also beginning work on a project that is long overdue and will be of benefit both to the iRacing sim and the future NASCAR ‘25 console title.  We were fortunate to have NASCAR as one of our first partners, and they are tremendous partners.  As a result, much of our early track content on the service was NASCAR content.  We’ve done our best over the years to update this content and keep the tracks up to date, but there are many opportunities for us to improve these tracks further, both in terms of the accuracy of the facility (new buildings, stands, etc.) and the condition of the graphics.  These efforts are internally being called the “NASCAR Remaster” project, and again, the results will be enjoyed in both the sim and in NASCAR ‘25; it’s great to have such synergies possible between our products.

As for race cars, we’ve been focusing on expanding our awesome endurance classes, and the GT3 class will see a significant boost in 2024 and into 2025.  Our currently-11-car series will #soon be bursting at the seams as we climb to 12, 13, 14, 15, and more cars.  We’re well prepared for this with the work the optimization team has invested in improving performance, memory utilization, and multithreading.  We’re also working hard on some updates to our Supercars and other exciting possibilities in Australia.  There’s also potentially a bit of a shocker coming on the racing vehicle front, but we’ll not spoil the surprise too early on that…

Outside of content, of course, we’re working on a great number of future improvements and new features for the UI and the simulation.

As mentioned in past updates, we are working on a complete rebuild of our in-sim UI system.  This rebuild utilizes the Noesis UI framework, which is a technology we have licensed and integrated within the sim.  The key work is complete, and the data model has been designed and implemented.  The remaining work does not present the same level of engineering challenge, but it does require time and effort to re-do, expand, and improve 20 years of UI screens and interfaces one by one. Expect to enjoy this long-overdue new UI late this year.

Career mode is going great, and our design team has not only completed the full spec, but they have been working extensively with our backend engineering teams to build out the data model required to service such a complex and advanced set of systems.  We anticipate that truly delivering “Career Mode” will take us into 2025, but along the way, we will be making incremental and targeted improvements to Career-mode-adjacent areas of the UI and associated systems.

The rain project provided an opportunity for our VFX team to look into new tools and methods to create and render dynamic effects, and for some artists to step up to take on new challenges, learn new skills, and flourish.  We intend to use this momentum and take a fresh look at existing effects like smoke and freshen them up with more modern artwork and rendering techniques.

Oval Refresh Phase 2 is moving along, and we’re really looking forward to this future follow-up to the improvements made in Phase 1.  More information will be shared closer to the release.

Thanks for your patience in working through this lengthy update.  Really I could go on for a great deal longer, and I haven’t even touched on some major things (our Graphics and Rendering team and the future iRacing rendering engine, for one!).  We’ll have plenty of opportunities soon to share a lot more, and we look forward to keeping you all up to date.  For now, we are just so excited about this Season 2 build, and for you all to get your hands on Tempest and rain. This has been one of the most extensive projects in iRacing history.  As iRacing developers, we all feel fortunate that this company provides us with the framework to actually do a project like this, the iRacing way, rather than something that is kind of cool… kind of rain-like… but would never reach this level of sophistication and ultimately, this level of quality for you the user.