Let me start off by apologizing for the long delay since my last blog post. Things have been very busy over here for me the last two months and I have been traveling more than I usually do so my writing time has been limited. I hope I can make up for this by telling you a few stories from my travels, share a few pictures and give you some updates on development and other projects I have been working on.
As you are all aware by this time I am not a fan of our cold winters up here in the Northeast so I was thrilled to head south for the Daytona 500 weekend in February. I was lucky to get a chance to spend some time with some of our professional iRacing drivers such as Dale Jr, Marcos Ambrose and Brad Keselowski while I was there which is always a treat. The 5 and 88 Nationwide cars will be running an iRacing sticker on their B-pillars for the entire season as a kind gift from Jr so I hope everyone will be rooting for both machines. Jr was kind enough to send along some extras to me so the first 5 people to comment on my blog will get one, so make sure your address is correct in our system. If you would like to see what it looks like I have posted a picture of it in my media section.
The icing on the cake for my Daytona weekend happened quite unexpectedly. After the race ended I got a text message from iRacing employee Dave Moulthrop (who moonlights as a credentialed photographer at NASCAR events) that the boss was in victory lane celebrating Matt Kenseth’s victory. I headed over to victory lane and after Dave used his muscle to get me over with him in the press section we got John’s attention to congratulate him. Much to my surprise John said, “come on, lets get your picture taken with the trophy”, to which I responded to by jumping the fence and joining him and his fiancé for the latest picture to go on my personal wall of fame. It is also in my media section.
My next journey took me to Las Vegas for another NASCAR weekend. This trip was intended to be one last fun weekend with the boys before my bundle of joy arrives in May and it turned out to be a little fun and a little work. We did a great demo on Saturday night at the Stratosphere where we had the sim running on two motion simulators brought by the CXC guys. I brought a third machine which I used to broadcast the racing action to the Stratosphere’s massive marquee display on the side of the building. I did not have high expectations on how the screen would look considering I had to output the software at a 632x312 resolution but surprisingly it looked great. You could see this marquee from miles away so I am sure it must have looked very cool and I have also posted a picture of this.
All in all it was a fun trip with some great memories from a very much sleep deprived weekend. I need to thank my wonderful wife for being so kind in letting me have fun with my friends and never complaining when we got 12 inches of snow while I was gone leaving her to shovel and unbury our cars all the while being very pregnant.
Now for some updates on development which is what you probably hoping for anyways and are now irked at me for having to read everything I have written so far!
We have a few massive projects we are currently working on that will not be ready for the next major build, but one is worth mentioning now. We are deep into development on bringing private leagues to our service in a way that will hopefully maintain the integrity of the overall service. I will focus a blog post on this topic further down the road when we are prepared to reveal more details on how this will work, but I think we are well on the way to adding an exciting new feature to our service.
It has been our intention all along to remove resets once we have the damage repair and towing features complete. It does look unlikely at this point that these two items will be finished for this next season but I can confirm that we will have the ability to make resets available by series. Starting next season we will be eliminating resets in Class C series and up. Patience and respect for your fellow driver will be very important next season…
We really have not had a chance to touch our netcode in some time so we have started exploring several ways to improve it.We have mentioned this before but we are making great progress on implementing the Akamai IP acceleration technology and hope to have this in the next major build. We have a larger announcement coming soon that will touch on this and other latency related topics.
I am happy to announce that we have hired another Vehicle Dynamics Engineer and we have immediately thrown him into the fire and have him working on the Spec Racer Ford. Eric Hudec joins us from what was formerly known as Petty Enterprises where he was a Race Engineer. We are obviously excited to be adding someone with Eric’s experience to our team and he should bring a lot to the table, particularly on the oval side of the service. We hope to have the SRF ready for the start of next season and we are doing everything we can to also try and get the Nationwide version of the Impala SS ready as well. We are also making great progress on the Corvette C6.R and the Lotus 79 as well, but I don’t expect those to be completed until this summer.
We have also hired a new software engineer to try and speed up the rate that we are turning out features for you and his name is David Tucker. David is already churning out work and has completed a project already that will hopefully be of great use to real world race engineers in being able to use our track data in their simulation tools. David is currently taking a look at our replay cameras to try and make some improvements in how we show you the action.
One of the most popular requests we have received and something I know I have told you we are working on is the addition of Paypal to our service. At this time we are in testing stages of this code and it does look like it will be ready to be incorporated for the start of next season. We do apologize in the delay for getting this feature to you but unfortunately this is not a plug and play item with the way our service works.
I am sure everyone has already seen the news that we are adding a club logo option to the cars for next season. We are also trying to get work done at the same time to add sponsor packages. These will be sponsors that we supply for you to choose from, but this will start to give you more options to make your cars look more like they are in the real world. You will also be able to choose different fonts for the car number on certain vehicles.
Last but not least, I expect that Road Atlanta will be joining our track lineup at or near the start of next season with 5 more oval tracks coming between now and July. We are also set to begin scanning Mosport this spring to get into production as soon as possible.
Now for a very cryptic licensing update.
I told you that I had been working on a contract that would net you three new tin tops and that contract was officially signed last week. I will now torture you by telling you we have the announcement of these cars planned to go out this spring in conjunction with other announcements. Sorry about that, you probably are angry with me for even mentioning it now. I am also so very close to signing a very unique agreement that will involve a popular entry level tin top series with a significant marketing campaign. So those that have been asking for more sports cars, they are in the development pipeline along with the C6.R.
We have signed a MAJOR track that we will be scanning in the next few weeks that everyone should be excited for. Once again I will tease you but not telling you what it is but I will give you a hint that the announcement will come in May…
We have a few very high profile agreements we are working on that should garner us attention from everyone out there that has not already heard of iRacing. I hope to have more information on these projects in the coming months. I will also tell you that we have been working incredibly hard in trying to secure tracks outside of North America and we are making some great progress. I hope to have some announcements about some signings here in the next few months as well.
I know the licensing update portion of this really does not tell you much, but there is a significant amount of work that goes on here that is difficult to communicate about until the dotted line is signed. We are also trying to do our best in trying to pace out announcements so not to overwhelm you and our marketing staff who are tasked with these communications.
Speaking of marketing, the guys have been pounding the pavement to try and bring more awareness to our product and company and have been doing a terrific job as we have seen a nice spike in our membership numbers. I hope everyone will check out Sean Siff‘s blog to try and find a date when our Mobile Marketing Unit will be in their area to stop by and say hello.
That’s it for now. I hope you have enjoyed reading this and will do my best to not let two months go by again before my next post.
Well no, not me. I honestly can't remember the last time that I was wrecked. It had to be in the spring or something. And I race Silver Crowns, Skip Barbers, Formula Mazdas, Road Legends, SK Modifieds, and a little Adv Solstices. So it's not like I'm avoiding people the less-iRacing-experienced crowd.
But I routinely read on the forums about someone getting wrecked. People getting frustrated because they've been wrecked (x) times in the last (x) races. In order to go to the trouble of posting about it, it has to be a pretty routine occurrence.
But how come this doesn't happen to me? I'm going to expound on a little secret. It takes 2 for there to be a wreck. Sounds too simple to be true, but it is.
I've been in a lot of races, I've seen a lot of wrecks, and outside of the "no where to go's," and the "going for the same piece of track," almost all of them could have been avoided. From my experience and observations, there are three primary reasons why people get wrecked. 1) They don't use their heads. 2) They think they're professionals. 3) They think the guy who wrecked him is a professional. All of which puts themselves into a position to get wrecked. They pretty much ask for it, then get surprised and steamed when it actually happens.
1) There are many good places and situations to try passes, but more bad places and situations to try passes. If you don't try to pass people in bad places, I guarantee that you won't get wrecked there. Be smart. And this relates to #2.
2) Just because you watch a race on TV doesn't mean that you can drive like they do. They got skill, and a whole lot of it. They make it look easy, so you try to emulate them by attempting 2-wides in hairpins, esses, or basically in any place on the track. Or on the oval side, running 2-wide with a foot of room between you... or even 3-wide... after all, they do it like that on TV. You know what? The vast majority of us in the sim world aren't good enough to do that consistently. And that's the keyword: consistently. Sure, a lot of us are capable, but the longer that risky condition persists, the clock keeps ticking on when the wreck will happen. You're fluffing your pillows, pulling the sheets tight, basically making your own bed. Count on it. And this relates to #3.
3) You might be able to hold your line and be relatively safe in the above situations, but is the guy that you're dragging into the situation just as capable as you think you are? If you give him a foot of room and he slides up and puts you in the fence, whose fault is it really? His for not holding a line, or yours for not giving him room to error? Yours, because you're the one who created the situation to begin with.
In closing, wrecks are going to happen. Some can't be avoided because there's no where to go, or you never even see it coming. That isn't what my little diatribe is about. It's simply about giving adequate room, not forcing others into high risk situations that, in turn, put yourself in high risk situations, and just driving smart. Don't put yourself in a position to get wrecked, it's as easy as that. If someone puts you in said position, swallow your pride and get out of it, even if it means [gasp] giving up a spot without a feirce fight. Otherwise, don't complain if it results in you getting wrecked, you invited it.
I mean, what's better... a solid finish with a clean car, or getting in a wreck when you think that you weren't the one who screwed up? Seems like common sense to me.
As I alluded to in my last blog post I will touch on the content creation process in this week’s blog. I am going to be going over this at a fairly high level as I would have to write a novel to explain exactly how it all works. We are also in the last stage of readying what will hopefully be a release candidate build for final testing so things are hopping around here.
I think the best place to start on how we create content is how we license it. We have signed many agreements with a wide range of partners through the years and I can tell you that is a time consuming and often frustrating task. Some agreements happen in a matter of weeks and some take years. Our wonderful Divina Galica (who I need to convince to start a blog to talk about all the incredible experiences she has had in her life) does most of the heavy work on acquiring our partners and I will tell you that she is focusing her energy on international properties right now (cough, cough, Spa). Tony Gardner and I also have a few other projects that we are working on domestically that will have a significant impact on our service if we can make them happen. Nothing surprises me anymore with this whole process and the bottom line is literally nothing happens with content until the bottom line is signed.
Once we have a signed agreement in hand we evaluate what is in the content development pipeline already and where this particular partner may fit in our racing schedule. The issue that takes the most precedence right now is trying to fill out our racing ladder to keep pace with the license level progression of our customers. I know that some of you are frustrated by us announcing the signing of wonderful partners that you still have not seen in our service, but our content takes a significant amount of time to create and we need to fill out the license ladders first. I think it’s probably fair to say that once an agreement is signed it will generally take three to six months before it actually starts its path down the development pipeline.
The development pipeline is constituted by many different steps. The first step is obviously the laser scanning process done by a team which is headed by Dave Moulthrop and includes our scanner operators Reed Rundell and Kevin Iannarelli. Scanning cars is pretty straight forward as they can generally be done in a day. It really is only a matter of finding a car and an owner who does not mind it smelling like baby powder for a few days. Yes that’s right, baby powder. We use the baby powder on the cars to dull the finish as it is too reflective for the scanner. Scanning a track is a much different animal and is often an extreme undertaking. We generally try and book scan trips to do three or four tracks at a time so the guys may be on the road for a month or more straight. They often work at night as this is the only time that the tracks are not rented for racing events or testing and cannot work in the rain. These guys are the unsung heroes of this company and the next time you take a lap around the Jefferson circuit you can thank this terrific team for dealing with a night of cows getting loose and making “deposits” on the track to bring this circuit to your PC.
Once the track scanning is complete the data makes its way to Greg Hill. Greg is our VP of Art and Production and is responsible for managing the car and track content creation process. Three specialized teams contribute towards making an iRacing racetrack. The track geometry itself (the area you can drive on) is created by a member of the production staff who builds the racing surface from the laser scanned data with our proprietary tools. The objects that surround the racetrack, such as the buildings, flag stands, and grandstands are created by one our object art teams. The textures that cover the track, such as the grasses, asphalts, dirt, and concretes are worked on by yet another art team who specialize in these types of materials. At any given time we are usually working on four to five tracks.
Our car creation process is a little different than tracks because there is quite a bit more data collection required and obviously engineering support needed. We still have multiple art teams that will take the scan and sometimes CAD data and begin the process of building and texturing the models. The difficult part of creating the cars is getting access to all the data we need to build the actual physics models. When we are working with a major manufacturer we generally can get everything we can dream of for data. Unfortunately this is often not the case and we have to send Ian Berwick who is our Vehicle Dynamics Engineer to the race shop that houses the car and he goes through an extensive process of weighing and measuring everything he can get his hands on. He also works with the manufacturers or teams to get tire and aero data if they have it but we also gather data ourselves by going to Calspan and the tire manufacturers which has given us a ton of data that we have barely scratched the surface on to begin implementing. One of the last steps we do in creating a car is to take it to a dyno or track to record the engine sound. We use the Aussie Greg Hill (we have two Greg Hill’s) at Soundwave Concepts to do the actual processing of the sound data and he really does a wonderful job of giving us terrific samples to plug into our sound engine. Generally, cars take us about three months to create but this is entirely dependent on how long it takes us to collect the data we need. For instance, we have had three data collection trips canceled or abruptly ended for the Daytona Prototype car because the car we planned on using was destroyed in testing or a race. We actually had our equipment on a car once when it was wrecked…
Again, I just described an incredibly detailed and difficult process in 5 paragraphs which is really not doing any of the topics much justice. Maybe down the road I can talk some of the people who actually do some of these tasks into writing their own blog on what they do.
I thought for this week’s blog I would do a development update and some insight on how software updates get deployed to our customers.
A few weeks ago we announced that a new build is going to be released during the 13th week of the current season. We do our best to try and pick the best windows of opportunity to roll out major updates to the software so we don’t disturb the racing and points battles going on. There are certainly going to be times that we do a software update during the season when we have found an issue that needs to be corrected immediately but for the most part we will be shooting for the break between seasons.
Creating and timing these software updates is not an easy task. We have two major engineering teams here at iRacing, the Website and Infrastructure team and the Software Development team, who for the most part work independently from each other. For instance, the recently released iRacingWorld was developed and implemented entirely by the Web team with no involvement from the Software team. Where this changes is when we get closer to rolling out a software update. A number of our software systems require significant use of an Oracle database which in essence is a “middle man” for how the Web team feeds you information about things like sessions you are signing up for or just completed and many other mostly invisible functions our website serves. Any time we make database changes for the software we will more than likely need to roll out significant changes to the website. This is one of the reasons why we have lengthy maintenance mode periods when we are rolling out new builds.
Being able to roll out software updates whenever we choose is a nice luxury we have here at iRacing which we did not have at Papyrus. We used to have a date in January that whatever we wanted to have in our product for that year had to be completed and tested or it was not going out. With four planned software updates scheduled here at iRacing we have essentially four three month windows to try and make as many improvement or additions we can. In reality these quarterly development windows are really only about two months each because we try and do about a month of testing on each major build.
For the most part each software engineer works independently from each other on given tasks for their two months of development time. In this development window we have been working on sound and UI improvements, Yellow flags and race control, improvements to tires and aero, incorporating the first stage of pitting, open practice servers, backend stuff nobody but Randy understands, the Silverado and Daytona Prototype along with many other projects. Once we get towards the end of that two month development period we assess the open projects and make an evaluation on if they will make the next build. (Just to stop the speculation, this next build will not have the Daytona Prototype in it because it is pretty far from complete and open practice servers are a much longer term project.There will also be tasks like tire and aero that will never be complete.) The Web team has the ability to roll out updates much more often which is why you see us put the service in maintenance mode for five minutes to a few hours every few weeks. I will tell you that one of the big projects the Web team is working on and hope to roll out before the end of the year is incorporating Paypal into our service.
Once we have reached the end of our two month development period we start the process of making a build. Creating a build and all the associated packages and uploading them to our servers and distribution partner takes us an entire day to complete. We have an entirely separate testing environment that we roll out any changes we want to make to the service before they make it to the environment you use. We do extensive testing on these updates and find many, many problems that we take the entire month to try and correct. We generally end up doing three to four builds and updates over the last month to try and correct issues we find during testing with the goal for each one to not break anything else. If an engineer has fixed all the open issues on their plate they may try and sneak a last minute addition into the build but only if it is deemed to be at low risk to break the build.
Testing is actually going pretty well at the moment and I feel pretty confident about the build we are targeting for the next release. I know that it is difficult to be on the outside trying to figure out what is going on in the inside, but nothing is as easy as it appears even for guys that have been doing this for two decades now. We all do our very best to try and make improvements as quickly as possibly but we absolutely do not want to roll out something or promise you something until we know it will work the way we want it to.
One major piece of the build puzzle that I did not really touch on is how content is created and this is worthy of a blog post all its own. I will likely tackle this topic next week.
Simple question here, just wondering if their are others who get more of a thrill after doing a new PB lap time or getting down close to those alien times. Well, that`s how I am. for example; I feel more pleased when I run the quickest lap during a race more than if I would have won. Do not get me totally wrong here, I still want to win. I have always been this way in sim racing. Another example I have is back from my league days. I would figure out what the aliens were running for that weeks race, and i would practice and practice untill i was as close as i could get to those times and that would be enough for me, I usally wouldnt even do the race if i was satisfied with my practice lap times, That would be enough self accomplishment for me. again do not get me wrong here, im no sim race alien, I just have a somewhat differnt goal in sim racing.
To further clarify, Im not saying im not going to stop racing... I just can tell I enjoy the whole quicklap title more than I do, first place finisher.
Im pretty sure all this has to do with my real life racing where I am a time attack driver, which i have been doing longer than sim racing.
In my last blog entry I had talked about how I’m not too fond of the cold weather.To prove to all of you that I’m a man of my word, I was on a beach in the Pacific for the last 10 days.At least this is what I told my boss as the reason I had to be gone last week, but let’s keep that between you and me…I’ve been thinking about blogging this week on why it is acceptable to have a beer at any hour when on vacation, but I was reminded that I had also promised to give you an update on development, which, because I am a man of my word, I will do instead.As a silent protest, I will be consuming an adult beverage as I write this…
We have made a lot of progress on the spotter and the testing on this has gone extremely well so far.I have not heard any complaints at all about listening to the Aussie Greg Hill as the spotter and crew chief, but as I mentioned in my previous blog you will be able to create your own samples to use instead.We will eventually have a more elegant way to change between spotter and crew chief packages, but for now this is how it will work...
First, your files need to be saved in the following format:PCM, Mono, 5.512Khz, 8 bits per sample.Second, there is a specific list of files that the sim looks for; you can replace some or all of these, but you cannot (yet) add additional files.Once you have placed your new samples in the directory the sim will use your samples instead of the ones we supply.Don’t worry; we will have a well documented process on how to do this when the new build is released.
I can also confirm that the open practice functionality will be done for the start of next season.It’s really slick and I hope it will become the place that people “hang out” now instead of on the forums or in chat.This is basically how it will work…
Each open practice session has a limit of how many drivers can be on track at the same time. When the track is full, nobody else will be able to join the session until someone else withdraws. Also, each open practice session’s entry list is currently limited to a total of 64 unique drivers. Once the entry list has become full, only drivers who were previously in the session, and therefore already in the entry list, can re-join it.
Whenever a new driver enters the session, your computer will generate the several textures and helmet images that make up that driver’s paint selections. When this new entry comes out on track you might see him for several seconds in a white car or with gray helmet images in the user interface. Once your system finishes creating their textures and helmet images, their proper paint schemes should appear.
One very cool feature the web team has developed for the open practice servers is a new popup window that shows the current drivers that are registered for the selected open practice session. The popup can be seen on the home page’s new “What's Hot” open practice widget as well as on the session selection page and it is deployed by mousing over a helmet icon that is displayed to the right of each open practice session.
I mentioned that we will have a new “What’s Hot” for the open practice sessions but we will also have a new design for the “What’s Hot” section that will now be a widget that includes more useful information such as the starting time, the track, and the type of session.
Grant has made a lot of progress on race control since my last blog, but as always, I will neither confirm nor deny that this work will be done in fear of suffering the wrath of the mostly evil Mr. Reeve.
I will tell you that as of right now local yellows AND blue flags are in limited testing.I am sure this will be a hotly debated topic in the forums but the blue flags are informational only.In qualifying if you are on your out lap and someone who has finished their out lap is close behind you, a blue flag will appear in the top left corner of the screen. In a race session if anyone who is about to lap you or is multiple laps up on you is close behind you, you will see the blue flag.
We have made terrific progress on the replay system and this will definitely be in our next rollout.The web site is used to filter, sort and otherwise navigate the saved replays, as well as to play them. Replays are saved within your My Documents\iRacing\replay folder. You may create subdirectories within there either from within the sim, or from Windows itself, and save/load replays from those directories as well.
You will be able to add saved replays from other users to this folder, and the web site will see display them and allow you to play them. You must own and be up-to-date on all of the content used by a replay file in order to watch that replay. For example, if a replay contains a Radical being driven at Sebring, you must own and have up-to-date versions of the Radical and Sebring.
We have done some physics work and have a lot more we would like to get wrapped up for the final build.The Silverado's suspension has been markedly improved, but this means old setups are only marginally useful now.The main difference is the perch heights--they are all always 0" or negative. If you load an old setup, be sure to change the 4 perch offsets or you won't be able to leave the garage. The motion ratios are a bit different as well, so spring and bar rates will have to change. Coil bind setups can be made (and they work!) The ride height minimums have been raised to 5", as that is more in keeping with real-life rules (and it helps keep the truck off the ground).
We have also started testing the Impala SS which we are getting a lot of positive feedback on.I put up a 200 lap race at Vegas for the guys to test the other night and our lead testing coordinator Chris Weidner told me it was the best race he has ever participated in and many other of the guys said the same thing.As always what we have complete when it’s time to ship this car will never be a finished product.Dave is already thinking about a significant update to his tire model that should be a dramatic improvement on what is already a great model.
Dave and Ian have also done quite a bit of work improving the Late Model (and eventually the Silverado and Impala) for use on the road courses.The Late Model now has an option to attach the left side of the sway bar which makes it possible to create a roadable setup. No ballast changes are implemented yet, however, so it is still fairly spooky turning to the right.
For what may be a cruel tease on the licensing side of things, we are getting very close to being able to announce a handful of SIGNIFICANT deals we are working on that I think will be incredible for all of us.For those who have been asking for more tin-tops, I will tell you that I expect to be signing one of those significant contracts that will put at least three in the development queue.
One contract that we have signed on the technical side of things that we plan on implementing this year is the Akamai IP Acceleration technology.Akamai is a very big partner with us in that they handle all of our data distribution which is why our content is delivered very efficiently whenever you download a new build or package from us.We have used Akamai from day one for this, but the new piece of technology we are going to incorporate should make everyone’s connections to our race servers even better than they are now.The general idea is that Akamai is going to figure out what the optimum path through the internet for you to connect to our race servers is so you will always have the best connection possible.We hope this will especially help improve all of our international customer’s online experiences.Chris Page is going to do a blog post on this in the next few weeks that will go into more detail on how it will work.
Okay, my adult beverage is empty and my hands are cramping… I think I have written enough for this blog.As always, we will be doing everything we can to add as much as we can into the next build.I expect that we will be releasing this build during the 13th week of the current season which is the last week of January.
Good luck to everyone in the final weeks of your championship battles.
I am the Executive Vice President and Executive Producer at iRacing.com and I have been here since the company started. I was previously employed at Papyrus Racing games were I started in QA in 2000 and ended when the doors closed in 2004 as the Producer.I figure I will start this blog and put some thoughts I have in here from time to time for those that would like to read them.
I figure I will just ramble off some random memories I have from Papyrus that people may find interesting.I figure this stuff can come out now because it can’t hurt that company any longer!
I was driving Jeff Burton’s car on the box cover art screenshot for NASCAR 4 and current iRacing employees Jay Taylor, Greg Hill and Kevin Iannarelli are all also driving cars in the image.The NR2002 and 2003 box cover art was done by an artist.If you look very closely at the NR2003 cover you can see the Winston Cup Logo on the car which was mistakenly included by a mix-up in artwork by the marketing manager at VUG.There is also something else wrong with the car which I can’t remember right now.
We did in fact begin to port the PC code to the consoles and we planned on using this project to get GPL 2 made. I believe that we had settled on the 1972 year to base that product on before it got canned by the publisher. Greg Hill actually had the Nurburgring, Monza, Monoco, Zandvoort, Kyalami, Spa and Mexico converted and the code was running on the xbox before it was canceled. Our great Shawn Nash was the one that actually did all this work.That man is probably the smartest guy I know and has yet to be stumped by any project we have thrown at him.
I created all the Darrell Waltrip track tours in NR2002 along with the driving guides by Dave Kaemmer.This project took me 8 months to complete which required me listening to Waltrip and Dave for 8+ hours a day.I have a very difficult time listening to the Fox broadcasts of NASCAR and occasionally have to be restrained from going after Dave if he talks too long…..
When we created NR2003 we pretty much knew that it was going to be our last NASCAR product at Papyrus.My primary mission was to get Dave the tire data from Goodyear that he always wanted to have to implement into his models.We got very lucky that Mike Stackpole and Greg Stucker at Goodyear decided to help us out.We actually had to prove to Mike that we would not be wasting his time by going into great detail on how our model worked.Only after he knew that we had a proper model did he decide to give us data.I won’t name names, but he rejected another company looking for data for this exact reason.
When word came down that we had an opportunity to do one last patch for NR2003 I was able to convince the late Rich Reilly (Papyrus GM and one of the kindest and most genuine guys I have known in my life) to let me secretly sneak the additional three physics models into NR2003.Grant Reeve literally had a week to create these physics models with whatever data we could get our hands on.The PTA physics model is actually loosely based on the red GT1 Corvette which I have posted a picture of.
Rich also let me start the infamous Project Wildfire group as a final thank you to all our loyal customers.I started this group and had these physics models made because I wanted the community to have a legal way to create something for themselves to contribute to the community.This group was entirely on their own after I put them together and we told them how to find the physics models.I knew most of the guys as they had been former employees, contractors or testers for us. The two guys I did not know were John Hughes and Kevin Combs.I had seen their work on a truck mod they did for NASCAR Heat that was impressive so I emailed John and started a conversation with him.John told me he would only want to join the team if he could bring along Kevin. So basically, Kevin should be buying beers for John every time they get together because he along with Brian Simpson, Jay Taylor and John have been happily employed with iRacing for the past 4+ years!
My last little nugget of information is going to be out of left field.In the year after we released the final patch for NR2003 we started developing console design concepts and actual technology demos.One concept that actually went pretty far down the design road was a title called Black Ice.We had a pretty detailed design document created and it got far enough that I actually got to pitch it to the marketing people in Paris.We also had a cross platform technology demo for a Karting game that was actually a lot of fun.I am not talking about shifter carts, I am talking about a Crash Bandicoot and Simpsons arcade like karting game.The final demo ended up being a Simpsons version that had incredibly fun physics.Our goal with this demo was to show VUG that we could do other projects outside of pure simulations even though this is really what we wanted to do.We knew that we had to do both if we were going to survive but felt we could make a console game fun by making a decent physics model.The demo was presented to VUG who ultimately rejected it because they had another studio doing karting games at the time but they did admit our demo was more fun than the actual approved project.It was not long after this that the doors closed at Papyrus which ultimately proved to be a blessing in disguise.
If more Papyrus memories come to me I will post them or if anyone has any question about those days I will try and answer them.I also have some interesting ideas for some posts in the future.
The cards have been dealt, the chips are in, now it's time to show the cards.
I've finally rewritten the login and multi-user functionality of the iStats software. Before I tell you where to sign-up, I want to be sure to establish some basic expectations. When I released the first version, I had such a flood of responses that I had a difficult time keeping up. Finally things subsided, and everything went pretty smooth. I wasn't really expecting the response I got, to be honest, because there hadn't been much of a response in here. Add that to the fact that everything had been working perfectly on my local machine, and I didn't realize that it could work differently in other places, and I was swamped. And that doesn't even take into account that I had very little programming ability when I started this whole thing. I've come along way, and even if it doesn't look like it on the public-facing side, so has the software.
I'd originally wanted to release this about 2 weeks ago, but I ran into a lot of problems with the login and validation components. Again, they worked on my local server, but didn't even come close to working when uploaded to my hosting site. So, I must be honest, I went out looking for some prewritten login code to help me speed this up. I found a good system, but it was written as a sample, and I needed it to integrate into my site. I also wanted some additional functionality that the system didn't provide. So, I built upon its framework, which first meant I had to learn how object-oriented PHP programming was done. It seems like everytime I try to make something easier, I have to learn a whole new language. Luckily, it didn't take too long to understand, although there are some aspects I still need to figure out (I think there is some good stuff to learn from it). Anyways, I've got things going how I want them, and everything seems to be tested.
In order to manage expectations here, I want you all to be aware that at the moment, the site looks almost exact the same as the personal sites that are out there. I haven't yet started working on additional functionality, although I believe that will be coming shortly. I wanted to get the site functional and being used before I started on that. So, if you have a personal site up and running, and you want to stick with that, you won't be missing anything on the immediate side, however, if you're paying the approximately $6/month for your hosting, you may want to consider dropping that.
I wish I would have kept track of my hours on this. Maybe I should ask my wife, she would probably have a number in her mind somewhere. I do know that it's quite a lot. I also know that I'll be putting in a lot more to continue to add more and more functionality to this.
I've got some really great ideas, and depending on what iRacing adds in this next update, I may be able to add even more. For those of you that like statistics, this will be the place to find them. And you'll be able to build your own custom stats pages, very easily, in the near future. Also, you'll be able to see average times per car/track, track records, average times of people in your iRating range, group your friends together, etc.
All of this additional functionality will only be available on this central site. The site has seen a major transformation behind the scenes, and it wouldn't be feasible to update the personal iStats packages. With all this additional functionality will, undoubtedly, require hundreds of hours. Because of this, I will likely need to start charging a small fee for this site. My initial thoughts are $2 US/month. This is less that the hosting fee of a personal iStats site, but it allows me the justification to spend the time that I plan on spending. I've been in contact with the iRacing staff to let them know if my intentions. As of yet, I haven't heard that there would be a problem with this, but if there is, the chances are that the site will stay as is, and there won't be much more development on it. I need to race and be sure my family gets attention too. :) It's hard to do all three well.
Oh, but the first 4 weeks are going to be free. Come see if you like it. :)
It's without question that iRacing.com will constantly upgrade their stats, but it seems that I can upgrade them much quicker since they have a much larger workload and focus. If you like stats, I'm confident you'll like what I have going here. There are quite a lot of people that already have the personal iStats sites, and they love them.
The upside with this site is that there is no maintainence on your part, and if something needs upgrading, it's done for you. You only have one thing to install. With that, let's look at the process to get up and running.
The first thing you do is go to the site: www.irstats.com. Notice that it's no longer iStats, it's irStats. This will bring you to the login page. Since you are not yet a member, you'll click on where it says 'Sign-up'. Fill in the 4 boxes of information.
Choose a username for the irStats.com site
Fill in your iRacing.com drivername EXACTLY as it's shown on iRacing
Type in a password for the irStats.com site
Give me a valid email address for you
Click the JOIN button
You will then get a message stating that an email has been sent to you. You need to get your email (be sure to check your spam folder in case you have filters on) and follow the link in the email. This will verify you have a valid email address. It will also send me an email letting me know you're awaiting account activation.
After I activate your account, you'll receive a final email with a link to retrieve your custom Greasemonkey script. It will also give you instructions on how to install Greasemonkey if you don't have it or don't know what it is. Remember, you need to be running Firefox in order for this all to work. I believe it's only critical when you view your iRacing session results.
After you follow the instructions in the email, you'll be up and running. The last thing you need to do is to start importing your session results. You do this by simply going to your iRacing stats page and viewing all your results pages. It does take a bit of time, but when you're done, you'll be able to start using irStats.com to its fullest.
I will release this blog post into the general forums tomorrow, but for now, I don't want to overload myself too much. Let me iron out the bugs with you guys. Thanks for following this guys. I appreciate your support.
If you have any problems, there is an email address in the emails that get sent to you during the registration process. Feel free to contact me there.
I'm excited and nervous to post this....it's like opening Pandora's box. :)
I guess I will take this time to introduce myself and maybe share a little inside info into my past and present work. During the day I work as an artist with iRacing primarily doing the modeling of cars and track side objects. At night I transform into somewhat of a super hero where I continue to work on modeling cars and track side objects. This blog will probably be of little use to you mortals, but I’m required to do what I can to make iRacing World a better place to be. It’s a tough job, but someone has to do it.
My humble beginning starts somewhere around 1999 when I started making some skins for NASCAR RACING 3. The sim painting community was much smaller then it is today with only a few sites braving the 100+ colors we could use to paint those cars, but with much lower resolution skins, the standards weren’t near as high as they are today. You were lucky to be able to read the contingencies so we were able to cheat quite a bit. (Ah, the good ole days)
Next for me came NASCAR HEAT by MGI. I would say this is where my story made its first big turn. By this time I had my own website called HCMotorsports.com I contacted Ed Martin who was the producer of that game and was able to do some beta testing as well as set up a good working relationship with both him and Dan McJilton. Soon after release of the game I began looking for others to help with my site. While doing so I came across another site which had some good work on it and I thought I would ask this person if he wanted to join forces in the fight for truth, justice and the American way. This was when I met Kevin Combs. He soon joined with me and we began producing more and more work for NASCAR HEAT. With some encouragement from Kevin, I approached Ed Martin and was able to secure tools in order to start "modding" NASCAR HEAT with the intent that we release them with tutorials and such for the community to be able to use. HCMotorsports became quite popular and we had more members join and help us with mods and tracks. Many of these people have since been hired by game developers such as EA and Microsoft.
Well, Kevin soon tired (lost his mind) and left to work on mods for some train simulator. While he did his thing, I started learning to do some 3d modeling myself as it was time for me to step up and be what I was always destined to be. (Sadly, I’m still trying to figure out just what that is)
In 2003, shortly after NASCAR SIM RACING 2003 was released, I was contacted by Steve Myers from Papyrus. He had seen some of the work that we had done at HCMotorsports and was wondering if I would be interested in doing some mod work on that sim. This was surprising to say the least as Papyrus sims had always been pretty much locked. Well, it didn’t take much thought on my part (thankfully) and I eagerly agreed to do it on the condition that they let me bring Kevin along. (Batman needs Robin)They agreed and soon ProjectWildfire was born. Not only did I get to work with Kevin on some new projects, but I got to meet a lot of other great people and work with one of the best mod teams I’ve ever had the privilege to be part of.
During this time, my paying job was in construction and had been for 18 years. I did drywall, metal stud framing and pretty much everything it took to build McDonalds all across the south. Thankfully, Dave Kaemmer and John Henry saw something in our little team and I was offered a job at what is now known as iRacing. I can never thank them enough for letting me be a part of this awesome team.
Well, for now that’s going to have to do. In future blogs I hope to be able to give you guys an inside look into how a model can go from the laser scan to the finished product you see on the screen. In the mean time, I will try and work on my grammar. I’ve been called a lot of things, but an english scholar isn’t one of them.
N2k3 had a better prediction code than iRacing currently does. Anyone who says otherwise never pushed N2k3's prediction code to its limits because they weren't good enough to do so. Therefore, anyone who says otherwise is wrong! On the flip side, if I am just watching someone drive around the track, there car "looks" and "acts" way more realistic in iRacing than it did in N2k3. The suspension and tires looks very much more life like for example. I'm able to tell how someone's car is handling by just watching them. As far as actually racing in a field of others goes, N2k3 still leads!
So it’s starting to get cold up here. Having lived in the Northeast pretty much my entire life I can honestly say there are very few things I enjoy doing when it’s cold anymore. One thing I do enjoy about winter is that there are a lot of occasions to see family and friends and catch up on what’s new in our lives. So let’s pretend we are all sitting around a fire sipping some hot coco (or maybe something stronger) and how about I catch you up on what we are working on?
Let me start by saying this is always the most difficult milestone of the year. Typically this is the time of the year that we take the shackles off the engineers that bind them to their desk and actually let them see what the bright yellow thing in the sky is or meet the people that live in their houses. Let’s be honest, as much as we love our jobs, our product and community, taking some time off around the holidays to spend with family and friends is nice. Don’t get the wrong idea though; we have a lot of very cool things we are working on, so here is what’s cooking.
One of the things I am most excited about is that we are finally getting the spotter and crew chief working. I don’t think anyone will be very surprised to hear that it is looking like it will work very much like it did in the Papyrus products. We have recorded all new samples using our favorite Australian, Greg Hill of Soundwave Concepts for the spotter. Yes, that’s right; our spotter is going to be Australian. This is a little shout out to our loyal customers down under and a personal tribute to Greg for all the hard work he does in creating our sounds. As of right now he is the voice for the crew chief also but we may have time to make that some one else. For those of you that are dreading the thought of listening to Greg drone on as I do, we are going to do our best to make it so you can use your own samples that you create instead.
Here is a random yet somewhat related Papyrus fact brought to you by Clip’em Lawn Service, the industry leader in lawn care repair for victory donuts. The voice actor for the spotter and crew chief for NASCAR 4 on was the same guy that did the voice for Duke Nukem, Jon St. John.
Another big project that I honestly thought was not looking like it would make the next big build was open practice servers. As of today we actually have a very, very, early development version of this working. It still has a long way to go, but it is looking very promising that this will be here sooner rather than later. Basically, once this is completed, you will be able to go to the sessions screen for each series and join a practice session that is already in progress. We know you have been asking for this and we are doing our very best to bring it to you for next season.
One item that has already been rolled out that you will notice if you join our 24 Heures du Fun series is unofficial series server allocation is now most heavily weighted by your friends list.I encourage those that are looking to get on track with your friends to make sure you all have each other on your friends list.I know that many of you have requested more opportunities to race with your friends and this is a good first step in that direction.
Another feature that you have been asking for is local yellow flags on the road courses. I can confirm that this is being worked on and will tell you in the same sentence that race control is the last thing I will ever promise you a completion date for. Our loveable Kiwi Grant Reeve never gets too excited or too mad, but if you told him that race control coding was easy or HAD to be done on a certain date he may actually raise his voice at you. Just trying to test and uncover every potential issue in race control is a very difficult task and as you can see from the number of “emergency” releases we have done this season to fix problems that popped up. Trust me when I say that Grant is working as hard as he possibly can to finish this up because he desperately wants to work on something else!
Replays are in fact on the horizon. This is a much more daunting task than what it may appear because of all the different pieces of the service and software that actually interact when the software launches. We have a few more tasks left to complete like compressing the data and the interface in how you select and play a replay from the website, but it is looking promising that this will be complete for the next major build. A related task that is much further down the road is figuring out a way to broadcast live events to the internet, but it’s on our list to do especially with our desire to launch a professional series.
I have seen a few threads in the forums as we head into this holiday season asking about gift cards. Our elves are furiously working in their workshop to try and get these completed for this holiday season but it will be close. These will be electronic gift cards that can be emailed or printed and can be purchased by someone that does not have an iRacing account. These gift cards will only be good for use on the member site and cannot be used on our merchandise site.
What is probably the most obvious announcement in this entire blog is that the Daytona Prototype and Impala SS will be the next two cars released. These two vehicles are slated to be in our Class A road and oval series. I would like to publicly thank our good friend Dale Jr for all the work he has done in collecting data for us, especially for the Impala SS. We consider ourselves very lucky to have him helping us in so many ways. I am very excited for the launch of both of these cars. I have driven the DP car some and even in its very early state it is probably my favorite road car right now. I am very much looking forward to the Impala SS also because I think it will obviously be a true benchmark for how far we have come from NR2003.
I have seen a number of posts in the forums asking about the development status of the Spec Racer Ford and Lotus 79.The SRF’s graphics model is complete as is the sounds, but unfortunately we have not had any time to work on its physics model.The Lotus 79 3D model is almost complete and is heading to the texture guys, but we have not had a chance yet to get our hands on a car in a state that we can take the necessary measurements we need.I expect the SRF development will move very quickly once we get a chance to work on it and could be out early next year.The Lotus 79 will be a much longer project due to the fact that there is just not many of these cars around and very limited hard data that exists that we can use.We will build a fantastic car, it’s just going to take longer than anyone will like including us.
There will be a number of other features and fixes that will go into this next build that I have not listed here. All of the items that I have listed are “cooking in the kitchen” so to speak and when these dishes are served and the next order is up I will plan to do another blog on what’s next for your table. In the mean time I hope you enjoyed our little chat around the fire and I wish all of you a very happy holiday season.
I’m having a little problem and I wonder if you guys can help me?
All I want to do is race. My girlfriend, bless her cute bum, has other ideas. I suggested racing by candlelight but, judging by her reaction, I’d guess she had a bad experience with candles. What can I say? I love the girl so I’m trying to keep her happy but I think she can be a little unreasonable at times.
Here’s an example:
This past Friday I managed to sneak away from work a little early, get home and hit the track. I’d been racing the Skippy a lot lately and my Solstice skills had become a little rusty.
I was happily sitting in the command chair when I heard my girlfriend arrive home. She must have had a bad day at the office because she became a little unreasonable soon after. Even after I took the time to lift early going into turn one on Lime Rock Park (LRP) and yell a very cheerful hello from the command chair in the study while she unpacked the groceries in the kitchen, fed my spaniel Poochy and put a load of washing into the machine.
I was in the middle of what looked like a really hot lap for me – in the 1:03 region – when she decided to take out her bad day on me. I’m a considerate guy, which is probably why it annoyed me that she couldn’t wait until after I’d finished my session. But I’m gradually learning patience thanks to iRacing and so I turned some of my attention to her right away and figured I could pick up the pace when we had finished spending some quality time together.
She told me, as I took the uphill turn at a slow 120km/h because I was so focused on her, that she missed me, that she doesn’t see me anymore and that she first fell in love with me because I was such a sensitive guy who really focused on her needs like nobody had before. I had gone through the turn slowly but still tried to hit the correct turn-in point and carry some speed all the way through the corner. She then accused me, as I tried desperately to maintain some momentum through the final turn and onto the long straight, of becoming “like every other guy out there” by ignoring her lately and focusing only on myself and no longer listening to her complaints or requests.
My lap times went from the low 1:04s to high 1:05s because of all her nattering. What was inconsiderate about that? And where did I ignore her? Didn’t she see my lap times? Maybe I should give her the benefit of the doubt, like the guy who nearly turned into me from the outside going into turn one at LRP in the race on Saturday night. And I have to say that, since I got iRacing, I’ve been home every night the past couple of weeks sitting in the chair instead of being at the pub with my mates and the barmaid who my girlfriend claims flirts with me – she doesn’t, honestly, she’s just a really sweet girl who’s trying to please her customers.
I have to admit that this whole thing seems just a little unfair to me. I mentioned in the opening that I need some help so I guess my question for you guys is: do you think I’ll hit a 1:02 if I can take and consistently hold the outside line through the final turn at LRP or should I stick to the inside there and look to make up my time elsewhere?
My name is Sean Siff and I work for iRacing as the iRacing US Spring Tour event manager. The entire department at iRacing have heard your requests for a major marketing project and we are officially kicking off our iRacing US Spring Tour 2009 in Sebring FL at the ALMS Mobile 1 12 Hours of Sebring. It is time we share this simulator software with the world and our plan is to bring it to you, one racing event at a time.
To warm up for our first big event at Sebring, we set up our display at the Speedway Expo, located near our Boston head quarters in Springfield MA. The Expo was a really fun event for all of us as we debuted the Hot Seat iRacing Cup challenge. We gave drivers and fans the opportunity to qualify for the Hot Seat iRacing Cup by driving the SK Modified at Stafford Speedway. The fastest drivers were narrowed down into three finalists who competed against a slew of actual pro drivers from all different professional Motorsports disciplines.
Our pro drivers included F1 driver Justin Wilson, truck series driver Willie Allen, drag racer Ron Capps, Koni Challenge driver Barry Waddell, and SCCA World Challenge driver Eric Curran.
Other guest appearances made the event a lot of fun. Former Winston Cup driver Ricky Craven stopped by our simulator as well as Truck Series driver Steve Park, along with SK Mod driver Renee Dupuis, who helped out as a guest driver coach. Whelen Modified driver Ted Christopher, Koni Challenge driver Nick Leverone, and Formula Drift champion Von Gitten Jr each tried our software for the first time.
Our display won top honors as 1st Place Best In Show. When we bring our sim on tour, we like to go all out and the judges noticed. Unfortunately, there was no podium to spray champagne from.
This, my fellow readers brings us to the 12 hours at Sebring; our first stop on our iRacing US Spring Tour. Please come introduce yourself and check out our display and put in a few laps behind the wheel.
After Sebring, we head to Martinsville VA for the Nascar Sprint Cup race. And from there we travel to Mazda Laguna Seca in Monterey CA and on down to the streets of Long Beach CA for the Indy and World Challenge Race.Next we head back across the country to VIRaceway for the Grand Am Rolex race and the NASCAR race in Richmond VA.
Thank you for checking out my blog and I hope you stay tuned for more info as I will be updating this post with more tour dates and a re-cap after each stop.
PS:Do you have an interesting mid-week racing related event happening near our weekend event stops?If so, please write me an email with your event and we could be stopping in your backyard...literally!We have set the majority of weekend events, but let us know what is going on near you!
I don't like the physics. I'm pretty sure that there is no getting around it. We are going to have to live with the physics as is, but we can do some things to address the limitations.
In this case, I'm not referring to the sim physics but instead, real physics. Still, you might be surprised to know that you should care. It has a real impact on your experience in the sim. I'm going to tell you how, and what we at iRacing.com are doing to improve the situation.
Bear with me through this paragraph, but there happens to be a drop or two of geek blood in me. The second postulate of Einstein's special theory of relativity is that the speed of light is constant. The Lorentz transformation, which is key to quantifying Einstein's theory, breaks down when considering anything moving faster than the speed of light. The operating assumption is that nothing can move faster than the speed of light. This includes your vehicle, even downhill with the pedal to the metal. Although this is a sim... and I know that the Lorentz transformation, where spacetime warps as the speed approaches the speed of light, well, that is coming to the sim..."soon" - I can't say as much for v >= c. I actually have no idea if any of this paragraph is correct, but I think it is close. I hope it sounded good. I can watch educational TV with the best of them.
The bottom line is that an electron, which is our medium for communication, isn't going to move faster than the speed of light. The speed of light is pretty fast, but even so, Michael Flatley could probably get in a few toe taps in the 130 milliseconds or so that an object would take to travel the circumference of the globe. Or put another way, it could circle the globe 7 times per second. Ever notice those time delays on TV when a question is asked over a satellite link and there is a measurable delay before the answer? That's the same issue. Stuff can move only so fast.
Why do we care? What has to happen for a driver in New Zealand to race a driver in Finland? They've got to pack their things and jump on a plane to meet at an agreed upon track, and... or sign up for iRacing.com. But even with iRacing, for these two racers to share the same virtual track, the two client computers need regular updates about the position and status of the other driver. All racers interact with not a shared physical track, but instead a shared server. And sometimes that server and the other driver are on the other side of the globe. We want to minimize the time it takes for information to get to the server and back.
The time delay between when that information is sent and when it is received is called latency. Latency is not our friend when we are talking about having a great racing experience. If everyone is at a LAN party in a conference room, then there are no problems, but what happens for those drivers that are far apart? We don't have the option of exchanging information as the crow flies. The latency you experience is probably more greatly impacted by your local Internet service provider than by the underlying physics. Luckily for us, the engineering team has experience dealing these issues and also with artificial intelligence (AI) to predict where vehicles will be in the absence of, or in gaps in, information. Not only is the information slow to get to where it is needed, but sometimes the information is sent, but never makes it. This is not a simple problem to address. The easiest answer is to shorten the distance that the information must travel, and to minimize data loss. My proposal to limit membership to those within 50 miles of the central servers didn't get too far. I feel another one of those headaches coming on.
We've already done some things to address latency and network performance, but we are far from done. We have active projects in this area that extend beyond what is happening in the sim "netcode".
One approach is to shorten the distance between the racer and the nearest race server. Yes, there are going to be more servers, and closer to your part of the world. How much closer is a great question. We're trying to maximize member coverage with each installation of a new farm of race servers. We have laptops literally being flown around the world from one data center to the next. With each stop we collect data that reflects not only the quality of the local infrastructure but also how locating a race farm in that data center would impact you - literally you, our existing member. When you race, we can characterize the network performance that you are experiencing between your computer and the race server. We also capture this information for between you and a data center under consideration. This is specific to each of you. We want to make sure that the experience gets better for our existing members as well as for future members.
A second approach is to optmize the network traffic from your computer to the server. We currently leverage a network of computers that spans the globe. When you are accessing our content, you aren't necessarily accessing a computer in our primary data center. More likely, you are accessing data from a computer that is local to your region. This is why downloads can seem quite fast! All of these edge servers are connected and understand the different routes from one server to another and the associated realtime performance, which varies over time. The default Internet routing isn't always the smartest or more efficient. There are often better ways. What we are trying to do is to discard the default Internat routes that everyone is using and instead use routes for which recent performance data indicate are the best performing. Sending the information along these routes, while simultaneously directing duplicate traffic along one or two other high performing routes seems like a win. Not only will the fastest route always minimize latency, but if there is data loss along one route, the information will still make it via another.
A third approach to shortening the distance is all about direction. Rather than traveling the circumference of the globe, we can take a more direct route. We can tunnel through the center of the earth. As each member will have his or her own direct route beginning directly under his or her computer, we'll have to plan to meet up at the center. However, if you end up at the Land of the Lost, we can bear no responsibility.
In college, physics classes were always so brutal. I'd think, when am I am ever going to need this stuff? For my first job, I found myself creating simulated RADAR returns to test an air traffic control system, which of course, relied heavilly upon a knowledge of physics. Now, years later, my job is very different, but the physics remains. Some things never change.
Next week, I hope to write about what happens when quantum entanglement meets the childhood game of telephone, and how it proves that garbage in equals garbage out, but at least I won't see it from my house. Or maybe I'll write more about the infrastructure instead.
I am going to have to try and do a relatively quick blog post this week as my day is pretty hectic as it is build day. I mentioned in my first blog that I would try and go back in time and tell some stories about how we got here today. For this week’s blog I thought I might tell the story about how we met John Henry and how the seed was planted to start this company. I am going to stick with our initial meeting for now and document further down the road how this company was started.
I think the best place to start this story is by bringing up a book you should read if you are a baseball fan. The book is called Feeding the Monster and it is written by a guy named Seth Mnookin. This book goes into great detail about how John and his ownership group were able to acquire the Boston Red Sox and start a run of playoff success that life long Sox fans like myself could never have believed would happen. The reason I bring this book up is because it documents a sequence of events that transpired in the bidding process for the Sox which ultimately led to John owning the team when it appeared very unlikely he would. I really don’t have much doubt that if these events had played out differently iRacing would not exist.
So the story begins with us at Papyrus working diligently on NASCAR Racing 2003 Season. The date is September 25th, 2002. I get a call from the front desk that there is someone on the phone that has questions about setting up a server for NR 2002 and, oh, by the way, he is the IT guy for John Henry. As I mention in the previous paragraph I am a life long Sox fan having lived in Massachusetts for almost my entire life, so needless to say I was pretty excited to help out. I talked with Jon (his IT guy) for about an hour and gave him all the information he needed to get a server running for John. At the end of the conversation I threw it out there that we were basically right down the street (really, about half an hour) from Fenway and if he ever had any interest in seeing what we do to give me a ring. I really did not think anything more would come of it and went out to lunch for about an hour. When I got back to my desk after lunch, much to my surprise, I had a voicemail waiting for me from John saying he would be out the next morning.
Thursday morning September 26th arrives and I have pretty much not slept because I am so excited about our guest for the day. Pretty much everyone is the office is excited, except maybe Grant, who is never excited about anything. John arrives mid-morning and we start our tour through the studio. I have given many office tours in my time here at iRacing and at Papyrus and nobody has ever taken the time and asked as many questions as John did that day. He made a point to talk to every single person in the studio to find out about them and what they did for the company. What was really amazing to watch during the day was that John became more and more excited about the product and company as the day went on. The tour ended at a cubicle we had setup with a computer running a Matrox video card that could output the cockpit on three screens. John sat there and drove on the system for close to an hour. It’s a pretty gratifying experience to watch someone who could be doing anything else in the world at that moment thoroughly enjoying something you helped create. After literally spending 6 hours with us that day, John left with the promise that he would be in touch because he wanted to help with beta testing NR2003. As it turns out, John was one of the most active participants in testing going forward and was instrumental in developing a lot of the aids that allowed new comers to get up to speed with the software for NR2003.
A few years ago I was talking with John about his visit. He told me that he gets many invitations like mine and he rarely accepts, but something told him to visit Papyrus that day. I know that personally it was probably one of the most significant days in my life, ranking right behind my wedding and just recently finding out I am going to be a dad. I consider myself to be pretty lucky in that I have gotten to do my dream job now for almost a decade because of John and Dave, and one could argue that I need to thank Charles Dolan as well.
As some of you know I have not been racing for the last couple months. I'm in the process of selling my mom's condo, selling my house and building a new house and bringing her in with us. My mom has the beginning stages of alzheimers.
She has forgot that the car was running in the garage with it closed for over 1.5 hours... she's lucky I stopped by and noticed it. She forgot/lost her check book at the grocery store and we had to close those accts. and start over.... sooo she is having issues.
She is also very fearful of ppl screwing her over and that unfortunately seems to somewhat include me to a slight degree. We have had several conversations of this whole plan and at times when her so called friends get involved it comes back on a bad light for me. So I'm battling something that shouldn't even be there. I'm staying calm and trying to reinforce to her that I'm not someone she needs to worry about.
I should be signing the papers this coming week on the new house. It will be approx. 1.5 weeks after I sign the papers that we should have a nice hole in the ground.. :) Her condo will be listed next week and my house which the realtor has given me a guarantee will prolly be listed the week after that.
I really miss racing right now with all the great competition I was having with the racers. I hope in the next season I will be far enough in the process that it will free up some time for me to join all you guys on the track.
Thanks for listening... just wanted to let some of you guys know what has taken me away from racing lately.
Just letting you know I'll be attempting to post the stat monkey stuff here as well as on the forums. There doesn't seem to be a preview button here though, and I can't see a list of what html tags are allowed so formatting it could be a bit hit and miss.
This week I got my act together and created some greasemonkey scripts to fetch the data properly (and much more quickly). I can now reliably link the series results with the driver stats which will enable me to generate active member stats based on license, country, SR, iRating etc. I'll be adding those as I think of them, but if you have any suggestions feel free to let me know.
I've also done some more work on the formatting of the posts, so hopefully there will be a lot less scrolling required :)
For the trucks being released at the end of the month. I was really loosing interest on the oval side of things in iRacing. The late models were fun to race and I learn't a lot of things racing them, but it was insanely hard to pass anybody if you were near the same speed in the race. Now let's just hope the races with the trucks aren't total borefests at speedways and there's a high line at superspeedways
Thank you for making Sebring such a great experience for us. To recap; it was our first stop on the Spring leg of our tour and we all had a great week supporting the 12 hour race! I am pleased to report that over 575 people tried out iRacing, and over 95% were for the first time.
I want to begin with a special thank you to fellow iRacing member Gary Borkenhagen. Besides being an enthusiastic supporter of iRacing, he was able to convince the Peugeot 908 team to come over and test on our simulator chassis. Current Peugeot/former CART driver Nic Minassian posted the weekend's fastest time around Sebring. With co-drivers Stephane Sarrazin, Christian Klien and Franck Montagny not far behind. Nic told me that he used to use rFactor, but was very impressed with iRacing. I hope that he might join our community soon. All of the Peugeot team were a lot of fun to work with and very impressed with the accuracy of our track modeling (Sebring).
Many of you also came out to Sebring to watch the race and see our mobile iRacing display. I tried to speak with all of you, but I am sure the list is incomplete. Here are the iRacing members who stopped by to drive a few hot laps in the simulator: Gary Borkenhagen, Al Delemo, Robert Turner, Court Vernon, Justin Piscitell, Joseph Piscitell, Michael Lliteras, Jonathan Pierson, Bob Sietz, Kevin Hill, Alexander Motola, Ian Costa, Courtenay Smith, Aldo Villamil, Rene Babia Jr., and Russell Baker.
We also had a some exciting visits from current drivers including David Murry (IMSA GT2), Frankie Muinez (Formula Atlantic), Billy Johnson (Koni Challenge ST), Shane Lewis (Grand Am DP), Brett Smrz (Skip Barber Nat. Series), Adam Burrows (iRacing driver coach/Koni Challenge ST), Simona De Silvestre (Formula Atlantic), Darrell Carlisle (IMSA GT3), and Andrew Davis (Grand Am GT).
Brian Till and Calvin Fish also came over to check out our simulators and within a few laps were feeling very comfortable and posting some impressive lap times. The crew from Speed TV Latin America came by to test out Bristol in our COT. They liked iRacing as well, and Speed TV Latin America viewers should expect to see a short special on iRacing in the near future.
Thank you again for coming out to see us on the road. If you are in the Martinsville VA area, we will be setting up our mobile unit for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Race on this Thursday near turn 4. Come check us out!
The following week we are headed out to California to visit one of our favorite tracks; Mazda Laguna Seca. By April 14th, we will be headed down to Long Beach for the exciting week of racing events. It should be a great Spring.
If you are coming to Martinsville, come introduce yourself and I will make sure to put you into the blog next week! This will be our first NASCAR event and our entire crew, myself included, are looking forward to it... Boogity Boogity Boogity!
Having fully recovered from the 24-hours of Daytona demo event and from watching the rain shortened 500 from the comfort of my couch, I thought now was a good time to get everyone up to speed on iRacing’s marketing plans for the near future. First I should probably introduce myself -I’m Kevin Bobbitt, Director of Marketing for iRacing. I have been working for iRacing for more than two years now and have loved every minute of it. I’m a true motorsports enthusiast – I follow F1, NASCAR, IRL, ALSM, Grand Am and anything else I can watch on Speed Channel. I also have a track car that I autocross and take to club track days.
Enough about me, after all, you are reading this because you want to know more about what iRacing will be doing on the marketing side of things. You probably saw some of our coverage in the car magazines this past fall, as well as our ads in Autosport and AutoWeek. In the near future you’ll see some banner ads on some familiar websites.
Next up is our Mobile Marketing Tour that will be launching next month. We’re outfitting a 24’ trailer with multiple chassis’ and will be visiting race tracks all across the US. As you guys know, there is no better way to introduce someone to iRacing than to let them take a test drive. We’re planning to be in Sebring for the big race in the middle of the month.
As we get a little closer to launching the tour I’ll post a schedule of where we’ll be as well as some pictures of the trailer all decked out in iRacing livery. If you’re attending one of the events make sure you stop by and say hi, it is always great to meet fellow iRacers.
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A day in the life of a cat her A day in the life of a cat herder....#8
Let me start off by apologizing for the long delay since my last blog post. Things have been very busy over here for me the last two months and I have been traveling more than I usually do so my writing time has been limited. I hope I can make up for this by telling you a few stories from my travels, share a few pictures and give you some updates on development and other projects I have been working on.
As you are all aware by this time I am not a fan of our cold winters up here in the Northeast so I was thrilled to head south for the Daytona 500 weekend in February. I was lucky to get a chance to spend some time with some of our professional iRacing drivers such as Dale Jr, Marcos Ambrose and Brad Keselowski while I was there which is always a treat. The 5 and 88 Nationwide cars will be running an iRacing sticker on their B-pillars for the entire season as a kind gift from Jr so I hope everyone will be rooting for both machines. Jr was kind enough to send along some extras to me so the first 5 people to comment on my blog will get one, so make sure your address is correct in our system. If you would like to see what it looks like I have posted a picture of it in my media section.
The icing on the cake for my Daytona weekend happened quite unexpectedly. After the race ended I got a text message from iRacing employee Dave Moulthrop (who moonlights as a credentialed photographer at NASCAR events) that the boss was in victory lane celebrating Matt Kenseth’s victory. I headed over to victory lane and after Dave used his muscle to get me over with him in the press section we got John’s attention to congratulate him. Much to my surprise John said, “come on, lets get your picture taken with the trophy”, to which I responded to by jumping the fence and joining him and his fiancé for the latest picture to go on my personal wall of fame. It is also in my media section.
My next journey took me to Las Vegas for another NASCAR weekend. This trip was intended to be one last fun weekend with the boys before my bundle of joy arrives in May and it turned out to be a little fun and a little work. We did a great demo on Saturday night at the Stratosphere where we had the sim running on two motion simulators brought by the CXC guys. I brought a third machine which I used to broadcast the racing action to the Stratosphere’s massive marquee display on the side of the building. I did not have high expectations on how the screen would look considering I had to output the software at a 632x312 resolution but surprisingly it looked great. You could see this marquee from miles away so I am sure it must have looked very cool and I have also posted a picture of this.
All in all it was a fun trip with some great memories from a very much sleep deprived weekend. I need to thank my wonderful wife for being so kind in letting me have fun with my friends and never complaining when we got 12 inches of snow while I was gone leaving her to shovel and unbury our cars all the while being very pregnant.
Now for some updates on development which is what you probably hoping for anyways and are now irked at me for having to read everything I have written so far!
We have a few massive projects we are currently working on that will not be ready for the next major build, but one is worth mentioning now. We are deep into development on bringing private leagues to our service in a way that will hopefully maintain the integrity of the overall service. I will focus a blog post on this topic further down the road when we are prepared to reveal more details on how this will work, but I think we are well on the way to adding an exciting new feature to our service.
It has been our intention all along to remove resets once we have the damage repair and towing features complete. It does look unlikely at this point that these two items will be finished for this next season but I can confirm that we will have the ability to make resets available by series. Starting next season we will be eliminating resets in Class C series and up. Patience and respect for your fellow driver will be very important next season…
We really have not had a chance to touch our netcode in some time so we have started exploring several ways to improve it. We have mentioned this before but we are making great progress on implementing the Akamai IP acceleration technology and hope to have this in the next major build. We have a larger announcement coming soon that will touch on this and other latency related topics.
I am happy to announce that we have hired another Vehicle Dynamics Engineer and we have immediately thrown him into the fire and have him working on the Spec Racer Ford. Eric Hudec joins us from what was formerly known as Petty Enterprises where he was a Race Engineer. We are obviously excited to be adding someone with Eric’s experience to our team and he should bring a lot to the table, particularly on the oval side of the service. We hope to have the SRF ready for the start of next season and we are doing everything we can to also try and get the Nationwide version of the Impala SS ready as well. We are also making great progress on the Corvette C6.R and the Lotus 79 as well, but I don’t expect those to be completed until this summer.
We have also hired a new software engineer to try and speed up the rate that we are turning out features for you and his name is David Tucker. David is already churning out work and has completed a project already that will hopefully be of great use to real world race engineers in being able to use our track data in their simulation tools. David is currently taking a look at our replay cameras to try and make some improvements in how we show you the action.
One of the most popular requests we have received and something I know I have told you we are working on is the addition of Paypal to our service. At this time we are in testing stages of this code and it does look like it will be ready to be incorporated for the start of next season. We do apologize in the delay for getting this feature to you but unfortunately this is not a plug and play item with the way our service works.
I am sure everyone has already seen the news that we are adding a club logo option to the cars for next season. We are also trying to get work done at the same time to add sponsor packages. These will be sponsors that we supply for you to choose from, but this will start to give you more options to make your cars look more like they are in the real world. You will also be able to choose different fonts for the car number on certain vehicles.
Last but not least, I expect that Road Atlanta will be joining our track lineup at or near the start of next season with 5 more oval tracks coming between now and July. We are also set to begin scanning Mosport this spring to get into production as soon as possible.
Now for a very cryptic licensing update.
I told you that I had been working on a contract that would net you three new tin tops and that contract was officially signed last week. I will now torture you by telling you we have the announcement of these cars planned to go out this spring in conjunction with other announcements. Sorry about that, you probably are angry with me for even mentioning it now. I am also so very close to signing a very unique agreement that will involve a popular entry level tin top series with a significant marketing campaign. So those that have been asking for more sports cars, they are in the development pipeline along with the C6.R.
We have signed a MAJOR track that we will be scanning in the next few weeks that everyone should be excited for. Once again I will tease you but not telling you what it is but I will give you a hint that the announcement will come in May…
We have a few very high profile agreements we are working on that should garner us attention from everyone out there that has not already heard of iRacing. I hope to have more information on these projects in the coming months. I will also tell you that we have been working incredibly hard in trying to secure tracks outside of North America and we are making some great progress. I hope to have some announcements about some signings here in the next few months as well.
I know the licensing update portion of this really does not tell you much, but there is a significant amount of work that goes on here that is difficult to communicate about until the dotted line is signed. We are also trying to do our best in trying to pace out announcements so not to overwhelm you and our marketing staff who are tasked with these communications.
Speaking of marketing, the guys have been pounding the pavement to try and bring more awareness to our product and company and have been doing a terrific job as we have seen a nice spike in our membership numbers. I hope everyone will check out Sean Siff‘s blog to try and find a date when our Mobile Marketing Unit will be in their area to stop by and say hello.
That’s it for now. I hope you have enjoyed reading this and will do my best to not let two months go by again before my next post.
Steve
Tired of Getting Wrecked! Tired of Getting Wrecked!
Well no, not me. I honestly can't remember the last time that I was wrecked. It had to be in the spring or something. And I race Silver Crowns, Skip Barbers, Formula Mazdas, Road Legends, SK Modifieds, and a little Adv Solstices. So it's not like I'm avoiding people the less-iRacing-experienced crowd.
But I routinely read on the forums about someone getting wrecked. People getting frustrated because they've been wrecked (x) times in the last (x) races. In order to go to the trouble of posting about it, it has to be a pretty routine occurrence.
But how come this doesn't happen to me? I'm going to expound on a little secret. It takes 2 for there to be a wreck. Sounds too simple to be true, but it is.
I've been in a lot of races, I've seen a lot of wrecks, and outside of the "no where to go's," and the "going for the same piece of track," almost all of them could have been avoided. From my experience and observations, there are three primary reasons why people get wrecked. 1) They don't use their heads. 2) They think they're professionals. 3) They think the guy who wrecked him is a professional. All of which puts themselves into a position to get wrecked. They pretty much ask for it, then get surprised and steamed when it actually happens.
1) There are many good places and situations to try passes, but more bad places and situations to try passes. If you don't try to pass people in bad places, I guarantee that you won't get wrecked there. Be smart. And this relates to #2.
2) Just because you watch a race on TV doesn't mean that you can drive like they do. They got skill, and a whole lot of it. They make it look easy, so you try to emulate them by attempting 2-wides in hairpins, esses, or basically in any place on the track. Or on the oval side, running 2-wide with a foot of room between you... or even 3-wide... after all, they do it like that on TV. You know what? The vast majority of us in the sim world aren't good enough to do that consistently. And that's the keyword: consistently. Sure, a lot of us are capable, but the longer that risky condition persists, the clock keeps ticking on when the wreck will happen. You're fluffing your pillows, pulling the sheets tight, basically making your own bed. Count on it. And this relates to #3.
3) You might be able to hold your line and be relatively safe in the above situations, but is the guy that you're dragging into the situation just as capable as you think you are? If you give him a foot of room and he slides up and puts you in the fence, whose fault is it really? His for not holding a line, or yours for not giving him room to error? Yours, because you're the one who created the situation to begin with.
In closing, wrecks are going to happen. Some can't be avoided because there's no where to go, or you never even see it coming. That isn't what my little diatribe is about. It's simply about giving adequate room, not forcing others into high risk situations that, in turn, put yourself in high risk situations, and just driving smart. Don't put yourself in a position to get wrecked, it's as easy as that. If someone puts you in said position, swallow your pride and get out of it, even if it means [gasp] giving up a spot without a feirce fight. Otherwise, don't complain if it results in you getting wrecked, you invited it.
I mean, what's better... a solid finish with a clean car, or getting in a wreck when you think that you weren't the one who screwed up? Seems like common sense to me.
Be safe :)
A day in the life of a cat her A day in the life of a cat herder....#3
As I alluded to in my last blog post I will touch on the content creation process in this week’s blog. I am going to be going over this at a fairly high level as I would have to write a novel to explain exactly how it all works. We are also in the last stage of readying what will hopefully be a release candidate build for final testing so things are hopping around here.
I think the best place to start on how we create content is how we license it. We have signed many agreements with a wide range of partners through the years and I can tell you that is a time consuming and often frustrating task. Some agreements happen in a matter of weeks and some take years. Our wonderful Divina Galica (who I need to convince to start a blog to talk about all the incredible experiences she has had in her life) does most of the heavy work on acquiring our partners and I will tell you that she is focusing her energy on international properties right now (cough, cough, Spa). Tony Gardner and I also have a few other projects that we are working on domestically that will have a significant impact on our service if we can make them happen. Nothing surprises me anymore with this whole process and the bottom line is literally nothing happens with content until the bottom line is signed.
Once we have a signed agreement in hand we evaluate what is in the content development pipeline already and where this particular partner may fit in our racing schedule. The issue that takes the most precedence right now is trying to fill out our racing ladder to keep pace with the license level progression of our customers. I know that some of you are frustrated by us announcing the signing of wonderful partners that you still have not seen in our service, but our content takes a significant amount of time to create and we need to fill out the license ladders first. I think it’s probably fair to say that once an agreement is signed it will generally take three to six months before it actually starts its path down the development pipeline.
The development pipeline is constituted by many different steps. The first step is obviously the laser scanning process done by a team which is headed by Dave Moulthrop and includes our scanner operators Reed Rundell and Kevin Iannarelli. Scanning cars is pretty straight forward as they can generally be done in a day. It really is only a matter of finding a car and an owner who does not mind it smelling like baby powder for a few days. Yes that’s right, baby powder. We use the baby powder on the cars to dull the finish as it is too reflective for the scanner. Scanning a track is a much different animal and is often an extreme undertaking. We generally try and book scan trips to do three or four tracks at a time so the guys may be on the road for a month or more straight. They often work at night as this is the only time that the tracks are not rented for racing events or testing and cannot work in the rain. These guys are the unsung heroes of this company and the next time you take a lap around the Jefferson circuit you can thank this terrific team for dealing with a night of cows getting loose and making “deposits” on the track to bring this circuit to your PC.
Once the track scanning is complete the data makes its way to Greg Hill. Greg is our VP of Art and Production and is responsible for managing the car and track content creation process. Three specialized teams contribute towards making an iRacing racetrack. The track geometry itself (the area you can drive on) is created by a member of the production staff who builds the racing surface from the laser scanned data with our proprietary tools. The objects that surround the racetrack, such as the buildings, flag stands, and grandstands are created by one our object art teams. The textures that cover the track, such as the grasses, asphalts, dirt, and concretes are worked on by yet another art team who specialize in these types of materials. At any given time we are usually working on four to five tracks.
Our car creation process is a little different than tracks because there is quite a bit more data collection required and obviously engineering support needed. We still have multiple art teams that will take the scan and sometimes CAD data and begin the process of building and texturing the models. The difficult part of creating the cars is getting access to all the data we need to build the actual physics models. When we are working with a major manufacturer we generally can get everything we can dream of for data. Unfortunately this is often not the case and we have to send Ian Berwick who is our Vehicle Dynamics Engineer to the race shop that houses the car and he goes through an extensive process of weighing and measuring everything he can get his hands on. He also works with the manufacturers or teams to get tire and aero data if they have it but we also gather data ourselves by going to Calspan and the tire manufacturers which has given us a ton of data that we have barely scratched the surface on to begin implementing. One of the last steps we do in creating a car is to take it to a dyno or track to record the engine sound. We use the Aussie Greg Hill (we have two Greg Hill’s) at Soundwave Concepts to do the actual processing of the sound data and he really does a wonderful job of giving us terrific samples to plug into our sound engine. Generally, cars take us about three months to create but this is entirely dependent on how long it takes us to collect the data we need. For instance, we have had three data collection trips canceled or abruptly ended for the Daytona Prototype car because the car we planned on using was destroyed in testing or a race. We actually had our equipment on a car once when it was wrecked…
Again, I just described an incredibly detailed and difficult process in 5 paragraphs which is really not doing any of the topics much justice. Maybe down the road I can talk some of the people who actually do some of these tasks into writing their own blog on what they do.
Steve
A day in the life of a cat her A day in the life of a cat herder....#2
I thought for this week’s blog I would do a development update and some insight on how software updates get deployed to our customers.
A few weeks ago we announced that a new build is going to be released during the 13th week of the current season. We do our best to try and pick the best windows of opportunity to roll out major updates to the software so we don’t disturb the racing and points battles going on. There are certainly going to be times that we do a software update during the season when we have found an issue that needs to be corrected immediately but for the most part we will be shooting for the break between seasons.
Creating and timing these software updates is not an easy task. We have two major engineering teams here at iRacing, the Website and Infrastructure team and the Software Development team, who for the most part work independently from each other. For instance, the recently released iRacingWorld was developed and implemented entirely by the Web team with no involvement from the Software team. Where this changes is when we get closer to rolling out a software update. A number of our software systems require significant use of an Oracle database which in essence is a “middle man” for how the Web team feeds you information about things like sessions you are signing up for or just completed and many other mostly invisible functions our website serves. Any time we make database changes for the software we will more than likely need to roll out significant changes to the website. This is one of the reasons why we have lengthy maintenance mode periods when we are rolling out new builds.
Being able to roll out software updates whenever we choose is a nice luxury we have here at iRacing which we did not have at Papyrus. We used to have a date in January that whatever we wanted to have in our product for that year had to be completed and tested or it was not going out. With four planned software updates scheduled here at iRacing we have essentially four three month windows to try and make as many improvement or additions we can. In reality these quarterly development windows are really only about two months each because we try and do about a month of testing on each major build.
For the most part each software engineer works independently from each other on given tasks for their two months of development time. In this development window we have been working on sound and UI improvements, Yellow flags and race control, improvements to tires and aero, incorporating the first stage of pitting, open practice servers, backend stuff nobody but Randy understands, the Silverado and Daytona Prototype along with many other projects. Once we get towards the end of that two month development period we assess the open projects and make an evaluation on if they will make the next build. (Just to stop the speculation, this next build will not have the Daytona Prototype in it because it is pretty far from complete and open practice servers are a much longer term project. There will also be tasks like tire and aero that will never be complete.) The Web team has the ability to roll out updates much more often which is why you see us put the service in maintenance mode for five minutes to a few hours every few weeks. I will tell you that one of the big projects the Web team is working on and hope to roll out before the end of the year is incorporating Paypal into our service.
Once we have reached the end of our two month development period we start the process of making a build. Creating a build and all the associated packages and uploading them to our servers and distribution partner takes us an entire day to complete. We have an entirely separate testing environment that we roll out any changes we want to make to the service before they make it to the environment you use. We do extensive testing on these updates and find many, many problems that we take the entire month to try and correct. We generally end up doing three to four builds and updates over the last month to try and correct issues we find during testing with the goal for each one to not break anything else. If an engineer has fixed all the open issues on their plate they may try and sneak a last minute addition into the build but only if it is deemed to be at low risk to break the build.
Testing is actually going pretty well at the moment and I feel pretty confident about the build we are targeting for the next release. I know that it is difficult to be on the outside trying to figure out what is going on in the inside, but nothing is as easy as it appears even for guys that have been doing this for two decades now. We all do our very best to try and make improvements as quickly as possibly but we absolutely do not want to roll out something or promise you something until we know it will work the way we want it to.
One major piece of the build puzzle that I did not really touch on is how content is created and this is worthy of a blog post all its own. I will likely tackle this topic next week.
Steve
Are their others like me? Are their others like me?
Simple question here, just wondering if their are others who get more of a thrill after doing a new PB lap time or getting down close to those alien times. Well, that`s how I am. for example; I feel more pleased when I run the quickest lap during a race more than if I would have won. Do not get me totally wrong here, I still want to win. I have always been this way in sim racing. Another example I have is back from my league days. I would figure out what the aliens were running for that weeks race, and i would practice and practice untill i was as close as i could get to those times and that would be enough for me, I usally wouldnt even do the race if i was satisfied with my practice lap times, That would be enough self accomplishment for me. again do not get me wrong here, im no sim race alien, I just have a somewhat differnt goal in sim racing.
To further clarify, Im not saying im not going to stop racing... I just can tell I enjoy the whole quicklap title more than I do, first place finisher.
Im pretty sure all this has to do with my real life racing where I am a time attack driver, which i have been doing longer than sim racing.
Kind of odd.... yes i know..
LOL
A day in the life of a cat her A day in the life of a cat herder....#7
In my last blog entry I had talked about how I’m not too fond of the cold weather. To prove to all of you that I’m a man of my word, I was on a beach in the Pacific for the last 10 days. At least this is what I told my boss as the reason I had to be gone last week, but let’s keep that between you and me… I’ve been thinking about blogging this week on why it is acceptable to have a beer at any hour when on vacation, but I was reminded that I had also promised to give you an update on development, which, because I am a man of my word, I will do instead. As a silent protest, I will be consuming an adult beverage as I write this…
We have made a lot of progress on the spotter and the testing on this has gone extremely well so far. I have not heard any complaints at all about listening to the Aussie Greg Hill as the spotter and crew chief, but as I mentioned in my previous blog you will be able to create your own samples to use instead. We will eventually have a more elegant way to change between spotter and crew chief packages, but for now this is how it will work...
First, your files need to be saved in the following format: PCM, Mono, 5.512Khz, 8 bits per sample. Second, there is a specific list of files that the sim looks for; you can replace some or all of these, but you cannot (yet) add additional files. Once you have placed your new samples in the directory the sim will use your samples instead of the ones we supply. Don’t worry; we will have a well documented process on how to do this when the new build is released.
I can also confirm that the open practice functionality will be done for the start of next season. It’s really slick and I hope it will become the place that people “hang out” now instead of on the forums or in chat. This is basically how it will work…
Each open practice session has a limit of how many drivers can be on track at the same time. When the track is full, nobody else will be able to join the session until someone else withdraws. Also, each open practice session’s entry list is currently limited to a total of 64 unique drivers. Once the entry list has become full, only drivers who were previously in the session, and therefore already in the entry list, can re-join it.
Whenever a new driver enters the session, your computer will generate the several textures and helmet images that make up that driver’s paint selections. When this new entry comes out on track you might see him for several seconds in a white car or with gray helmet images in the user interface. Once your system finishes creating their textures and helmet images, their proper paint schemes should appear.
One very cool feature the web team has developed for the open practice servers is a new popup window that shows the current drivers that are registered for the selected open practice session. The popup can be seen on the home page’s new “What's Hot” open practice widget as well as on the session selection page and it is deployed by mousing over a helmet icon that is displayed to the right of each open practice session.
I mentioned that we will have a new “What’s Hot” for the open practice sessions but we will also have a new design for the “What’s Hot” section that will now be a widget that includes more useful information such as the starting time, the track, and the type of session.
Grant has made a lot of progress on race control since my last blog, but as always, I will neither confirm nor deny that this work will be done in fear of suffering the wrath of the mostly evil Mr. Reeve.
I will tell you that as of right now local yellows AND blue flags are in limited testing. I am sure this will be a hotly debated topic in the forums but the blue flags are informational only. In qualifying if you are on your out lap and someone who has finished their out lap is close behind you, a blue flag will appear in the top left corner of the screen. In a race session if anyone who is about to lap you or is multiple laps up on you is close behind you, you will see the blue flag.
We have made terrific progress on the replay system and this will definitely be in our next rollout. The web site is used to filter, sort and otherwise navigate the saved replays, as well as to play them. Replays are saved within your My Documents\iRacing\replay folder. You may create subdirectories within there either from within the sim, or from Windows itself, and save/load replays from those directories as well.
You will be able to add saved replays from other users to this folder, and the web site will see display them and allow you to play them. You must own and be up-to-date on all of the content used by a replay file in order to watch that replay. For example, if a replay contains a Radical being driven at Sebring, you must own and have up-to-date versions of the Radical and Sebring.
We have done some physics work and have a lot more we would like to get wrapped up for the final build. The Silverado's suspension has been markedly improved, but this means old setups are only marginally useful now. The main difference is the perch heights--they are all always 0" or negative. If you load an old setup, be sure to change the 4 perch offsets or you won't be able to leave the garage. The motion ratios are a bit different as well, so spring and bar rates will have to change. Coil bind setups can be made (and they work!) The ride height minimums have been raised to 5", as that is more in keeping with real-life rules (and it helps keep the truck off the ground).
We have also started testing the Impala SS which we are getting a lot of positive feedback on. I put up a 200 lap race at Vegas for the guys to test the other night and our lead testing coordinator Chris Weidner told me it was the best race he has ever participated in and many other of the guys said the same thing. As always what we have complete when it’s time to ship this car will never be a finished product. Dave is already thinking about a significant update to his tire model that should be a dramatic improvement on what is already a great model.
Dave and Ian have also done quite a bit of work improving the Late Model (and eventually the Silverado and Impala) for use on the road courses. The Late Model now has an option to attach the left side of the sway bar which makes it possible to create a roadable setup. No ballast changes are implemented yet, however, so it is still fairly spooky turning to the right.
For what may be a cruel tease on the licensing side of things, we are getting very close to being able to announce a handful of SIGNIFICANT deals we are working on that I think will be incredible for all of us. For those who have been asking for more tin-tops, I will tell you that I expect to be signing one of those significant contracts that will put at least three in the development queue.
One contract that we have signed on the technical side of things that we plan on implementing this year is the Akamai IP Acceleration technology. Akamai is a very big partner with us in that they handle all of our data distribution which is why our content is delivered very efficiently whenever you download a new build or package from us. We have used Akamai from day one for this, but the new piece of technology we are going to incorporate should make everyone’s connections to our race servers even better than they are now. The general idea is that Akamai is going to figure out what the optimum path through the internet for you to connect to our race servers is so you will always have the best connection possible. We hope this will especially help improve all of our international customer’s online experiences. Chris Page is going to do a blog post on this in the next few weeks that will go into more detail on how it will work.
Okay, my adult beverage is empty and my hands are cramping… I think I have written enough for this blog. As always, we will be doing everything we can to add as much as we can into the next build. I expect that we will be releasing this build during the 13th week of the current season which is the last week of January.
Good luck to everyone in the final weeks of your championship battles.
Steve
A day in the life of a cat her A day in the life of a cat herder....
I am the Executive Vice President and Executive Producer at iRacing.com and I have been here since the company started. I was previously employed at Papyrus Racing games were I started in QA in 2000 and ended when the doors closed in 2004 as the Producer. I figure I will start this blog and put some thoughts I have in here from time to time for those that would like to read them.
I figure I will just ramble off some random memories I have from Papyrus that people may find interesting. I figure this stuff can come out now because it can’t hurt that company any longer!
I was driving Jeff Burton’s car on the box cover art screenshot for NASCAR 4 and current iRacing employees Jay Taylor, Greg Hill and Kevin Iannarelli are all also driving cars in the image. The NR2002 and 2003 box cover art was done by an artist. If you look very closely at the NR2003 cover you can see the Winston Cup Logo on the car which was mistakenly included by a mix-up in artwork by the marketing manager at VUG. There is also something else wrong with the car which I can’t remember right now.
We did in fact begin to port the PC code to the consoles and we planned on using this project to get GPL 2 made. I believe that we had settled on the 1972 year to base that product on before it got canned by the publisher. Greg Hill actually had the Nurburgring, Monza, Monoco, Zandvoort, Kyalami, Spa and Mexico converted and the code was running on the xbox before it was canceled. Our great Shawn Nash was the one that actually did all this work. That man is probably the smartest guy I know and has yet to be stumped by any project we have thrown at him.
I created all the Darrell Waltrip track tours in NR2002 along with the driving guides by Dave Kaemmer. This project took me 8 months to complete which required me listening to Waltrip and Dave for 8+ hours a day. I have a very difficult time listening to the Fox broadcasts of NASCAR and occasionally have to be restrained from going after Dave if he talks too long…..
When we created NR2003 we pretty much knew that it was going to be our last NASCAR product at Papyrus. My primary mission was to get Dave the tire data from Goodyear that he always wanted to have to implement into his models. We got very lucky that Mike Stackpole and Greg Stucker at Goodyear decided to help us out. We actually had to prove to Mike that we would not be wasting his time by going into great detail on how our model worked. Only after he knew that we had a proper model did he decide to give us data. I won’t name names, but he rejected another company looking for data for this exact reason.
When word came down that we had an opportunity to do one last patch for NR2003 I was able to convince the late Rich Reilly (Papyrus GM and one of the kindest and most genuine guys I have known in my life) to let me secretly sneak the additional three physics models into NR2003. Grant Reeve literally had a week to create these physics models with whatever data we could get our hands on. The PTA physics model is actually loosely based on the red GT1 Corvette which I have posted a picture of.
Rich also let me start the infamous Project Wildfire group as a final thank you to all our loyal customers. I started this group and had these physics models made because I wanted the community to have a legal way to create something for themselves to contribute to the community. This group was entirely on their own after I put them together and we told them how to find the physics models. I knew most of the guys as they had been former employees, contractors or testers for us. The two guys I did not know were John Hughes and Kevin Combs. I had seen their work on a truck mod they did for NASCAR Heat that was impressive so I emailed John and started a conversation with him. John told me he would only want to join the team if he could bring along Kevin. So basically, Kevin should be buying beers for John every time they get together because he along with Brian Simpson, Jay Taylor and John have been happily employed with iRacing for the past 4+ years!
My last little nugget of information is going to be out of left field. In the year after we released the final patch for NR2003 we started developing console design concepts and actual technology demos. One concept that actually went pretty far down the design road was a title called Black Ice. We had a pretty detailed design document created and it got far enough that I actually got to pitch it to the marketing people in Paris. We also had a cross platform technology demo for a Karting game that was actually a lot of fun. I am not talking about shifter carts, I am talking about a Crash Bandicoot and Simpsons arcade like karting game. The final demo ended up being a Simpsons version that had incredibly fun physics. Our goal with this demo was to show VUG that we could do other projects outside of pure simulations even though this is really what we wanted to do. We knew that we had to do both if we were going to survive but felt we could make a console game fun by making a decent physics model. The demo was presented to VUG who ultimately rejected it because they had another studio doing karting games at the time but they did admit our demo was more fun than the actual approved project. It was not long after this that the doors closed at Papyrus which ultimately proved to be a blessing in disguise.
If more Papyrus memories come to me I will post them or if anyone has any question about those days I will try and answer them. I also have some interesting ideas for some posts in the future.
Steve
irStats Multi-User Available irStats Multi-User Available
Ok, here we go! :)
The cards have been dealt, the chips are in, now it's time to show the cards.
I've finally rewritten the login and multi-user functionality of the iStats software. Before I tell you where to sign-up, I want to be sure to establish some basic expectations. When I released the first version, I had such a flood of responses that I had a difficult time keeping up. Finally things subsided, and everything went pretty smooth. I wasn't really expecting the response I got, to be honest, because there hadn't been much of a response in here. Add that to the fact that everything had been working perfectly on my local machine, and I didn't realize that it could work differently in other places, and I was swamped. And that doesn't even take into account that I had very little programming ability when I started this whole thing. I've come along way, and even if it doesn't look like it on the public-facing side, so has the software.
I'd originally wanted to release this about 2 weeks ago, but I ran into a lot of problems with the login and validation components. Again, they worked on my local server, but didn't even come close to working when uploaded to my hosting site. So, I must be honest, I went out looking for some prewritten login code to help me speed this up. I found a good system, but it was written as a sample, and I needed it to integrate into my site. I also wanted some additional functionality that the system didn't provide. So, I built upon its framework, which first meant I had to learn how object-oriented PHP programming was done. It seems like everytime I try to make something easier, I have to learn a whole new language. Luckily, it didn't take too long to understand, although there are some aspects I still need to figure out (I think there is some good stuff to learn from it). Anyways, I've got things going how I want them, and everything seems to be tested.
In order to manage expectations here, I want you all to be aware that at the moment, the site looks almost exact the same as the personal sites that are out there. I haven't yet started working on additional functionality, although I believe that will be coming shortly. I wanted to get the site functional and being used before I started on that. So, if you have a personal site up and running, and you want to stick with that, you won't be missing anything on the immediate side, however, if you're paying the approximately $6/month for your hosting, you may want to consider dropping that.
I wish I would have kept track of my hours on this. Maybe I should ask my wife, she would probably have a number in her mind somewhere. I do know that it's quite a lot. I also know that I'll be putting in a lot more to continue to add more and more functionality to this.
I've got some really great ideas, and depending on what iRacing adds in this next update, I may be able to add even more. For those of you that like statistics, this will be the place to find them. And you'll be able to build your own custom stats pages, very easily, in the near future. Also, you'll be able to see average times per car/track, track records, average times of people in your iRating range, group your friends together, etc.
All of this additional functionality will only be available on this central site. The site has seen a major transformation behind the scenes, and it wouldn't be feasible to update the personal iStats packages. With all this additional functionality will, undoubtedly, require hundreds of hours. Because of this, I will likely need to start charging a small fee for this site. My initial thoughts are $2 US/month. This is less that the hosting fee of a personal iStats site, but it allows me the justification to spend the time that I plan on spending. I've been in contact with the iRacing staff to let them know if my intentions. As of yet, I haven't heard that there would be a problem with this, but if there is, the chances are that the site will stay as is, and there won't be much more development on it. I need to race and be sure my family gets attention too. :) It's hard to do all three well.
Oh, but the first 4 weeks are going to be free. Come see if you like it. :)
It's without question that iRacing.com will constantly upgrade their stats, but it seems that I can upgrade them much quicker since they have a much larger workload and focus. If you like stats, I'm confident you'll like what I have going here. There are quite a lot of people that already have the personal iStats sites, and they love them.
The upside with this site is that there is no maintainence on your part, and if something needs upgrading, it's done for you. You only have one thing to install. With that, let's look at the process to get up and running.
The first thing you do is go to the site: www.irstats.com. Notice that it's no longer iStats, it's irStats. This will bring you to the login page. Since you are not yet a member, you'll click on where it says 'Sign-up'. Fill in the 4 boxes of information.
You will then get a message stating that an email has been sent to you. You need to get your email (be sure to check your spam folder in case you have filters on) and follow the link in the email. This will verify you have a valid email address. It will also send me an email letting me know you're awaiting account activation.
After I activate your account, you'll receive a final email with a link to retrieve your custom Greasemonkey script. It will also give you instructions on how to install Greasemonkey if you don't have it or don't know what it is. Remember, you need to be running Firefox in order for this all to work. I believe it's only critical when you view your iRacing session results.
After you follow the instructions in the email, you'll be up and running. The last thing you need to do is to start importing your session results. You do this by simply going to your iRacing stats page and viewing all your results pages. It does take a bit of time, but when you're done, you'll be able to start using irStats.com to its fullest.
I will release this blog post into the general forums tomorrow, but for now, I don't want to overload myself too much. Let me iron out the bugs with you guys. Thanks for following this guys. I appreciate your support.
If you have any problems, there is an email address in the emails that get sent to you during the registration process. Feel free to contact me there.
I'm excited and nervous to post this....it's like opening Pandora's box. :)
Houston, We Have a Problem... Houston, We Have a Problem...
Hi,
I guess I will take this time to introduce myself and maybe share a little inside info into my past and present work. During the day I work as an artist with iRacing primarily doing the modeling of cars and track side objects. At night I transform into somewhat of a super hero where I continue to work on modeling cars and track side objects. This blog will probably be of little use to you mortals, but I’m required to do what I can to make iRacing World a better place to be. It’s a tough job, but someone has to do it.
My humble beginning starts somewhere around 1999 when I started making some skins for NASCAR RACING 3. The sim painting community was much smaller then it is today with only a few sites braving the 100+ colors we could use to paint those cars, but with much lower resolution skins, the standards weren’t near as high as they are today. You were lucky to be able to read the contingencies so we were able to cheat quite a bit. (Ah, the good ole days)
Next for me came NASCAR HEAT by MGI. I would say this is where my story made its first big turn. By this time I had my own website called HCMotorsports.com I contacted Ed Martin who was the producer of that game and was able to do some beta testing as well as set up a good working relationship with both him and Dan McJilton. Soon after release of the game I began looking for others to help with my site. While doing so I came across another site which had some good work on it and I thought I would ask this person if he wanted to join forces in the fight for truth, justice and the American way. This was when I met Kevin Combs. He soon joined with me and we began producing more and more work for NASCAR HEAT. With some encouragement from Kevin, I approached Ed Martin and was able to secure tools in order to start "modding" NASCAR HEAT with the intent that we release them with tutorials and such for the community to be able to use. HCMotorsports became quite popular and we had more members join and help us with mods and tracks. Many of these people have since been hired by game developers such as EA and Microsoft.
Well, Kevin soon tired (lost his mind) and left to work on mods for some train simulator. While he did his thing, I started learning to do some 3d modeling myself as it was time for me to step up and be what I was always destined to be. (Sadly, I’m still trying to figure out just what that is)
In 2003, shortly after NASCAR SIM RACING 2003 was released, I was contacted by Steve Myers from Papyrus. He had seen some of the work that we had done at HCMotorsports and was wondering if I would be interested in doing some mod work on that sim. This was surprising to say the least as Papyrus sims had always been pretty much locked. Well, it didn’t take much thought on my part (thankfully) and I eagerly agreed to do it on the condition that they let me bring Kevin along. (Batman needs Robin) They agreed and soon ProjectWildfire was born. Not only did I get to work with Kevin on some new projects, but I got to meet a lot of other great people and work with one of the best mod teams I’ve ever had the privilege to be part of.
During this time, my paying job was in construction and had been for 18 years. I did drywall, metal stud framing and pretty much everything it took to build McDonalds all across the south. Thankfully, Dave Kaemmer and John Henry saw something in our little team and I was offered a job at what is now known as iRacing. I can never thank them enough for letting me be a part of this awesome team.
Well, for now that’s going to have to do. In future blogs I hope to be able to give you guys an inside look into how a model can go from the laser scan to the finished product you see on the screen. In the mean time, I will try and work on my grammar. I’ve been called a lot of things, but an english scholar isn’t one of them.
John Hughes
Prediction Code Prediction Code
N2k3 had a better prediction code than iRacing currently does. Anyone who says otherwise never pushed N2k3's prediction code to its limits because they weren't good enough to do so. Therefore, anyone who says otherwise is wrong! On the flip side, if I am just watching someone drive around the track, there car "looks" and "acts" way more realistic in iRacing than it did in N2k3. The suspension and tires looks very much more life like for example. I'm able to tell how someone's car is handling by just watching them. As far as actually racing in a field of others goes, N2k3 still leads!
A day in the life of a cat her A day in the life of a cat herder....#6
So it’s starting to get cold up here. Having lived in the Northeast pretty much my entire life I can honestly say there are very few things I enjoy doing when it’s cold anymore. One thing I do enjoy about winter is that there are a lot of occasions to see family and friends and catch up on what’s new in our lives. So let’s pretend we are all sitting around a fire sipping some hot coco (or maybe something stronger) and how about I catch you up on what we are working on?
Let me start by saying this is always the most difficult milestone of the year. Typically this is the time of the year that we take the shackles off the engineers that bind them to their desk and actually let them see what the bright yellow thing in the sky is or meet the people that live in their houses. Let’s be honest, as much as we love our jobs, our product and community, taking some time off around the holidays to spend with family and friends is nice. Don’t get the wrong idea though; we have a lot of very cool things we are working on, so here is what’s cooking.
One of the things I am most excited about is that we are finally getting the spotter and crew chief working. I don’t think anyone will be very surprised to hear that it is looking like it will work very much like it did in the Papyrus products. We have recorded all new samples using our favorite Australian, Greg Hill of Soundwave Concepts for the spotter. Yes, that’s right; our spotter is going to be Australian. This is a little shout out to our loyal customers down under and a personal tribute to Greg for all the hard work he does in creating our sounds. As of right now he is the voice for the crew chief also but we may have time to make that some one else. For those of you that are dreading the thought of listening to Greg drone on as I do, we are going to do our best to make it so you can use your own samples that you create instead.
Here is a random yet somewhat related Papyrus fact brought to you by Clip’em Lawn Service, the industry leader in lawn care repair for victory donuts. The voice actor for the spotter and crew chief for NASCAR 4 on was the same guy that did the voice for Duke Nukem, Jon St. John.
Another big project that I honestly thought was not looking like it would make the next big build was open practice servers. As of today we actually have a very, very, early development version of this working. It still has a long way to go, but it is looking very promising that this will be here sooner rather than later. Basically, once this is completed, you will be able to go to the sessions screen for each series and join a practice session that is already in progress. We know you have been asking for this and we are doing our very best to bring it to you for next season.
One item that has already been rolled out that you will notice if you join our 24 Heures du Fun series is unofficial series server allocation is now most heavily weighted by your friends list. I encourage those that are looking to get on track with your friends to make sure you all have each other on your friends list. I know that many of you have requested more opportunities to race with your friends and this is a good first step in that direction.
Another feature that you have been asking for is local yellow flags on the road courses. I can confirm that this is being worked on and will tell you in the same sentence that race control is the last thing I will ever promise you a completion date for. Our loveable Kiwi Grant Reeve never gets too excited or too mad, but if you told him that race control coding was easy or HAD to be done on a certain date he may actually raise his voice at you. Just trying to test and uncover every potential issue in race control is a very difficult task and as you can see from the number of “emergency” releases we have done this season to fix problems that popped up. Trust me when I say that Grant is working as hard as he possibly can to finish this up because he desperately wants to work on something else!
Replays are in fact on the horizon. This is a much more daunting task than what it may appear because of all the different pieces of the service and software that actually interact when the software launches. We have a few more tasks left to complete like compressing the data and the interface in how you select and play a replay from the website, but it is looking promising that this will be complete for the next major build. A related task that is much further down the road is figuring out a way to broadcast live events to the internet, but it’s on our list to do especially with our desire to launch a professional series.
I have seen a few threads in the forums as we head into this holiday season asking about gift cards. Our elves are furiously working in their workshop to try and get these completed for this holiday season but it will be close. These will be electronic gift cards that can be emailed or printed and can be purchased by someone that does not have an iRacing account. These gift cards will only be good for use on the member site and cannot be used on our merchandise site.
What is probably the most obvious announcement in this entire blog is that the Daytona Prototype and Impala SS will be the next two cars released. These two vehicles are slated to be in our Class A road and oval series. I would like to publicly thank our good friend Dale Jr for all the work he has done in collecting data for us, especially for the Impala SS. We consider ourselves very lucky to have him helping us in so many ways. I am very excited for the launch of both of these cars. I have driven the DP car some and even in its very early state it is probably my favorite road car right now. I am very much looking forward to the Impala SS also because I think it will obviously be a true benchmark for how far we have come from NR2003.
I have seen a number of posts in the forums asking about the development status of the Spec Racer Ford and Lotus 79. The SRF’s graphics model is complete as is the sounds, but unfortunately we have not had any time to work on its physics model. The Lotus 79 3D model is almost complete and is heading to the texture guys, but we have not had a chance yet to get our hands on a car in a state that we can take the necessary measurements we need. I expect the SRF development will move very quickly once we get a chance to work on it and could be out early next year. The Lotus 79 will be a much longer project due to the fact that there is just not many of these cars around and very limited hard data that exists that we can use. We will build a fantastic car, it’s just going to take longer than anyone will like including us.
There will be a number of other features and fixes that will go into this next build that I have not listed here. All of the items that I have listed are “cooking in the kitchen” so to speak and when these dishes are served and the next order is up I will plan to do another blog on what’s next for your table. In the mean time I hope you enjoyed our little chat around the fire and I wish all of you a very happy holiday season.
Steve
Is this unfair or what? Is this unfair or what?
I’m having a little problem and I wonder if you guys can help me?
All I want to do is race. My girlfriend, bless her cute bum, has other ideas. I suggested racing by candlelight but, judging by her reaction, I’d guess she had a bad experience with candles. What can I say? I love the girl so I’m trying to keep her happy but I think she can be a little unreasonable at times.
Here’s an example:
This past Friday I managed to sneak away from work a little early, get home and hit the track. I’d been racing the Skippy a lot lately and my Solstice skills had become a little rusty.
I was happily sitting in the command chair when I heard my girlfriend arrive home. She must have had a bad day at the office because she became a little unreasonable soon after. Even after I took the time to lift early going into turn one on Lime Rock Park (LRP) and yell a very cheerful hello from the command chair in the study while she unpacked the groceries in the kitchen, fed my spaniel Poochy and put a load of washing into the machine.
I was in the middle of what looked like a really hot lap for me – in the 1:03 region – when she decided to take out her bad day on me. I’m a considerate guy, which is probably why it annoyed me that she couldn’t wait until after I’d finished my session. But I’m gradually learning patience thanks to iRacing and so I turned some of my attention to her right away and figured I could pick up the pace when we had finished spending some quality time together.
She told me, as I took the uphill turn at a slow 120km/h because I was so focused on her, that she missed me, that she doesn’t see me anymore and that she first fell in love with me because I was such a sensitive guy who really focused on her needs like nobody had before. I had gone through the turn slowly but still tried to hit the correct turn-in point and carry some speed all the way through the corner. She then accused me, as I tried desperately to maintain some momentum through the final turn and onto the long straight, of becoming “like every other guy out there” by ignoring her lately and focusing only on myself and no longer listening to her complaints or requests.
My lap times went from the low 1:04s to high 1:05s because of all her nattering. What was inconsiderate about that? And where did I ignore her? Didn’t she see my lap times? Maybe I should give her the benefit of the doubt, like the guy who nearly turned into me from the outside going into turn one at LRP in the race on Saturday night. And I have to say that, since I got iRacing, I’ve been home every night the past couple of weeks sitting in the chair instead of being at the pub with my mates and the barmaid who my girlfriend claims flirts with me – she doesn’t, honestly, she’s just a really sweet girl who’s trying to please her customers.
I have to admit that this whole thing seems just a little unfair to me. I mentioned in the opening that I need some help so I guess my question for you guys is: do you think I’ll hit a 1:02 if I can take and consistently hold the outside line through the final turn at LRP or should I stick to the inside there and look to make up my time elsewhere?
iRacing US Spring Tour 2009 iRacing US Spring Tour 2009
Hello iRacers!
My name is Sean Siff and I work for iRacing as the iRacing US Spring Tour event manager. The entire department at iRacing have heard your requests for a major marketing project and we are officially kicking off our iRacing US Spring Tour 2009 in Sebring FL at the ALMS Mobile 1 12 Hours of Sebring. It is time we share this simulator software with the world and our plan is to bring it to you, one racing event at a time.
To warm up for our first big event at Sebring, we set up our display at the Speedway Expo, located near our Boston head quarters in Springfield MA. The Expo was a really fun event for all of us as we debuted the Hot Seat iRacing Cup challenge. We gave drivers and fans the opportunity to qualify for the Hot Seat iRacing Cup by driving the SK Modified at Stafford Speedway. The fastest drivers were narrowed down into three finalists who competed against a slew of actual pro drivers from all different professional Motorsports disciplines.Our pro drivers included F1 driver Justin Wilson, truck series driver Willie Allen, drag racer Ron Capps, Koni Challenge driver Barry Waddell, and SCCA World Challenge driver Eric Curran.
Other guest appearances made the event a lot of fun. Former Winston Cup driver Ricky Craven stopped by our simulator as well as Truck Series driver Steve Park, along with SK Mod driver Renee Dupuis, who helped out as a guest driver coach. Whelen Modified driver Ted Christopher, Koni Challenge driver Nick Leverone, and Formula Drift champion Von Gitten Jr each tried our software for the first time.
Our display won top honors as 1st Place Best In Show. When we bring our sim on tour, we like to go all out and the judges noticed. Unfortunately, there was no podium to spray champagne from.
This, my fellow readers brings us to the 12 hours at Sebring; our first stop on our iRacing US Spring Tour. Please come introduce yourself and check out our display and put in a few laps behind the wheel.
After Sebring, we head to Martinsville VA for the Nascar Sprint Cup race. And from there we travel to Mazda Laguna Seca in Monterey CA and on down to the streets of Long Beach CA for the Indy and World Challenge Race. Next we head back across the country to VIRaceway for the Grand Am Rolex race and the NASCAR race in Richmond VA.
Thank you for checking out my blog and I hope you stay tuned for more info as I will be updating this post with more tour dates and a re-cap after each stop.
PS: Do you have an interesting mid-week racing related event happening near our weekend event stops? If so, please write me an email with your event and we could be stopping in your backyard... literally! We have set the majority of weekend events, but let us know what is going on near you!
PHRIGGIN' FHYSICS PHRIGGIN' FHYSICS
A day in the life of a cat her A day in the life of a cat herder....#4
I am going to have to try and do a relatively quick blog post this week as my day is pretty hectic as it is build day. I mentioned in my first blog that I would try and go back in time and tell some stories about how we got here today. For this week’s blog I thought I might tell the story about how we met John Henry and how the seed was planted to start this company. I am going to stick with our initial meeting for now and document further down the road how this company was started.
I think the best place to start this story is by bringing up a book you should read if you are a baseball fan. The book is called Feeding the Monster and it is written by a guy named Seth Mnookin. This book goes into great detail about how John and his ownership group were able to acquire the Boston Red Sox and start a run of playoff success that life long Sox fans like myself could never have believed would happen. The reason I bring this book up is because it documents a sequence of events that transpired in the bidding process for the Sox which ultimately led to John owning the team when it appeared very unlikely he would. I really don’t have much doubt that if these events had played out differently iRacing would not exist.
So the story begins with us at Papyrus working diligently on NASCAR Racing 2003 Season. The date is September 25th, 2002. I get a call from the front desk that there is someone on the phone that has questions about setting up a server for NR 2002 and, oh, by the way, he is the IT guy for John Henry. As I mention in the previous paragraph I am a life long Sox fan having lived in Massachusetts for almost my entire life, so needless to say I was pretty excited to help out. I talked with Jon (his IT guy) for about an hour and gave him all the information he needed to get a server running for John. At the end of the conversation I threw it out there that we were basically right down the street (really, about half an hour) from Fenway and if he ever had any interest in seeing what we do to give me a ring. I really did not think anything more would come of it and went out to lunch for about an hour. When I got back to my desk after lunch, much to my surprise, I had a voicemail waiting for me from John saying he would be out the next morning.
Thursday morning September 26th arrives and I have pretty much not slept because I am so excited about our guest for the day. Pretty much everyone is the office is excited, except maybe Grant, who is never excited about anything. John arrives mid-morning and we start our tour through the studio. I have given many office tours in my time here at iRacing and at Papyrus and nobody has ever taken the time and asked as many questions as John did that day. He made a point to talk to every single person in the studio to find out about them and what they did for the company. What was really amazing to watch during the day was that John became more and more excited about the product and company as the day went on. The tour ended at a cubicle we had setup with a computer running a Matrox video card that could output the cockpit on three screens. John sat there and drove on the system for close to an hour. It’s a pretty gratifying experience to watch someone who could be doing anything else in the world at that moment thoroughly enjoying something you helped create. After literally spending 6 hours with us that day, John left with the promise that he would be in touch because he wanted to help with beta testing NR2003. As it turns out, John was one of the most active participants in testing going forward and was instrumental in developing a lot of the aids that allowed new comers to get up to speed with the software for NR2003.
A few years ago I was talking with John about his visit. He told me that he gets many invitations like mine and he rarely accepts, but something told him to visit Papyrus that day. I know that personally it was probably one of the most significant days in my life, ranking right behind my wedding and just recently finding out I am going to be a dad. I consider myself to be pretty lucky in that I have gotten to do my dream job now for almost a decade because of John and Dave, and one could argue that I need to thank Charles Dolan as well.
Steve
Update on my situation .... Update on my situation ....
Hi guys,
As some of you know I have not been racing for the last couple months. I'm in the process of selling my mom's condo, selling my house and building a new house and bringing her in with us. My mom has the beginning stages of alzheimers.
She has forgot that the car was running in the garage with it closed for over 1.5 hours... she's lucky I stopped by and noticed it. She forgot/lost her check book at the grocery store and we had to close those accts. and start over.... sooo she is having issues.
She is also very fearful of ppl screwing her over and that unfortunately seems to somewhat include me to a slight degree. We have had several conversations of this whole plan and at times when her so called friends get involved it comes back on a bad light for me. So I'm battling something that shouldn't even be there. I'm staying calm and trying to reinforce to her that I'm not someone she needs to worry about.
I should be signing the papers this coming week on the new house. It will be approx. 1.5 weeks after I sign the papers that we should have a nice hole in the ground.. :) Her condo will be listed next week and my house which the realtor has given me a guarantee will prolly be listed the week after that.
I really miss racing right now with all the great competition I was having with the racers. I hope in the next season I will be far enough in the process that it will free up some time for me to join all you guys on the track.
Thanks for listening... just wanted to let some of you guys know what has taken me away from racing lately.
I'll post more when we get the next step handled.
Tony
Stat monkey signing in Stat monkey signing in
Just letting you know I'll be attempting to post the stat monkey stuff here as well as on the forums. There doesn't seem to be a preview button here though, and I can't see a list of what html tags are allowed so formatting it could be a bit hit and miss.
This week I got my act together and created some greasemonkey scripts to fetch the data properly (and much more quickly). I can now reliably link the series results with the driver stats which will enable me to generate active member stats based on license, country, SR, iRating etc. I'll be adding those as I think of them, but if you have any suggestions feel free to let me know.
I've also done some more work on the formatting of the posts, so hopefully there will be a lot less scrolling required :)
Darren
Thank god.. Thank god..
For the trucks being released at the end of the month. I was really loosing interest on the oval side of things in iRacing. The late models were fun to race and I learn't a lot of things racing them, but it was insanely hard to pass anybody if you were near the same speed in the race. Now let's just hope the races with the trucks aren't total borefests at speedways and there's a high line at superspeedways
Sebring 2009 - iRacing US Spri Sebring 2009 - iRacing US Spring Tour
Hello Fellow iRacers!
Thank you for making Sebring such a great experience for us. To recap; it was our first stop on the Spring leg of our tour and we all had a great week supporting the 12 hour race! I am pleased to report that over 575 people tried out iRacing, and over 95% were for the first time.
I want to begin with a special thank you to fellow iRacing member Gary Borkenhagen. Besides being an enthusiastic supporter of iRacing, he was able to convince the Peugeot 908 team to come over and test on our simulator chassis. Current Peugeot/former CART driver Nic Minassian posted the weekend's fastest time around Sebring. With co-drivers Stephane Sarrazin, Christian Klien and Franck Montagny not far behind. Nic told me that he used to use rFactor, but was very impressed with iRacing. I hope that he might join our community soon. All of the Peugeot team were a lot of fun to work with and very impressed with the accuracy of our track modeling (Sebring).
Many of you also came out to Sebring to watch the race and see our mobile iRacing display. I tried to speak with all of you, but I am sure the list is incomplete. Here are the iRacing members who stopped by to drive a few hot laps in the simulator: Gary Borkenhagen, Al Delemo, Robert Turner, Court Vernon, Justin Piscitell, Joseph Piscitell, Michael Lliteras, Jonathan Pierson, Bob Sietz, Kevin Hill, Alexander Motola, Ian Costa, Courtenay Smith, Aldo Villamil, Rene Babia Jr., and Russell Baker.
We also had a some exciting visits from current drivers including David Murry (IMSA GT2), Frankie Muinez (Formula Atlantic), Billy Johnson (Koni Challenge ST), Shane Lewis (Grand Am DP), Brett Smrz (Skip Barber Nat. Series), Adam Burrows (iRacing driver coach/Koni Challenge ST), Simona De Silvestre (Formula Atlantic), Darrell Carlisle (IMSA GT3), and Andrew Davis (Grand Am GT).
Brian Till and Calvin Fish also came over to check out our simulators and within a few laps were feeling very comfortable and posting some impressive lap times. The crew from Speed TV Latin America came by to test out Bristol in our COT. They liked iRacing as well, and Speed TV Latin America viewers should expect to see a short special on iRacing in the near future.
Thank you again for coming out to see us on the road. If you are in the Martinsville VA area, we will be setting up our mobile unit for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Race on this Thursday near turn 4. Come check us out!
The following week we are headed out to California to visit one of our favorite tracks; Mazda Laguna Seca. By April 14th, we will be headed down to Long Beach for the exciting week of racing events. It should be a great Spring.
If you are coming to Martinsville, come introduce yourself and I will make sure to put you into the blog next week! This will be our first NASCAR event and our entire crew, myself included, are looking forward to it... Boogity Boogity Boogity!
OBJECTS are CLOSER than they A OBJECTS are CLOSER than they APPEAR
Having fully recovered from the 24-hours of Daytona demo event and from watching the rain shortened 500 from the comfort of my couch, I thought now was a good time to get everyone up to speed on iRacing’s marketing plans for the near future. First I should probably introduce myself -I’m Kevin Bobbitt, Director of Marketing for iRacing. I have been working for iRacing for more than two years now and have loved every minute of it. I’m a true motorsports enthusiast – I follow F1, NASCAR, IRL, ALSM, Grand Am and anything else I can watch on Speed Channel. I also have a track car that I autocross and take to club track days.
Enough about me, after all, you are reading this because you want to know more about what iRacing will be doing on the marketing side of things. You probably saw some of our coverage in the car magazines this past fall, as well as our ads in Autosport and AutoWeek. In the near future you’ll see some banner ads on some familiar websites.
Next up is our Mobile Marketing Tour that will be launching next month. We’re outfitting a 24’ trailer with multiple chassis’ and will be visiting race tracks all across the US. As you guys know, there is no better way to introduce someone to iRacing than to let them take a test drive. We’re planning to be in Sebring for the big race in the middle of the month.
As we get a little closer to launching the tour I’ll post a schedule of where we’ll be as well as some pictures of the trailer all decked out in iRacing livery. If you’re attending one of the events make sure you stop by and say hi, it is always great to meet fellow iRacers.
See you on the track.
Kevin