DiRT Showdown 8 Ball Trailer

iRacing 2011 Pro Race of Champions Highlights Video

iRacing at Autosport International Show in January

iRacing will be making an appearance at the Birmingham NEC for the Autosport International show on January 14-15, 2012, with two state-of-the-art VRX simulators loaded with all the current cars for anyone to try out.

In addition to the full car list, the simulators will also offer the full range of 50 tracks, from Spa-Francorchamps to Brands Hatch. Kevin Bobbitt of iRacing.com said: “We are looking forward to showcasing our motorsport simulators at Autosport International and inviting visitors to drive a few laps.”

Autosport International is a motorsport show with live demonstrations and appearances from stars including F1′s Paul Di Resta, along with displays of a variety of motorsport vehicles. Tickets cost £30 for adults, with children £19.50 (Under fives go free). For more info contact 0844-5811420 or visit www.autosportinternational.com

F1 Online: The Game – Closed Beta Applications Open…

If you’re intrigued or eagerly awaiting the browser-based F1 management and racing game from Codemasters, F1 Online: The Game, then you’ll be pleased to know that you can now apply to be part of the closed beta.

Visit the F1 Online site to sign-up and be one of the first to try the free-to-play game which will let you create your own team and take part in multiplayer online races. And we already know the game will feature licensed drivers, cars and tracks, and that you’ll be able to take part in championships or individual events. You can see more details here.

Voting starts for iRacers of the Year 2011

Voting is now underway for the first ever iRacer of the Year Awards, with categories for Top Driver and Top Member. The voting continues until 23:59 GMT on December 31st, with the winners announced in early January.

The nominees for iRacing Driver of the Year are:

• Ray Alfalla – NASCAR iRacing.com Series World Championship winner with 3 wins and 8 more top fives; also scored two top fives en route to fifteenth place in the iRacing.com NVIDIA Grand Prix Series.
• Chris Hughson – iRacing’s winningest driver in 2011 hands down, with 1179 victories in inRacingNews Challenge (Solstice and SRF), Street Stocks and NASCAR iRacing.com Class C (among others).
• Greger Huttu – Beat many of the best iRacers to win the Intel GP Series; scored four wins and ten more top tens en route to finishing runner-up in iRacing.com NVIDIA Grand Prix Series.
• Hugo Luis – iRacing.com NVIDIA Grand Prix Series champion with five wins (including four straight with the title in the balance) and ten more top five finishes.
• Yang Ou – Dominated the IZOD INDYCAR Premier Series, taking both the Oval and Road racing crowns with a total of 16 wins and five more top fives.

And the nominees for iRacing Member of the Year are:

• John Bodin – One of iRacing’s “good guys,” Bodin has helped countless iRacers (particularly rookies) with chassis setups and driving tips, and is a regular contributor to iRacing’s official FAQs on the member site.
• Glenn Chalder – Worked tirelessly to create a setup guide for the Skip Barber F2000, and updates the Skippy Tuning Guides every new season.  Glenn also created the Periodic Table of iRacing Racetracks and Cars and is always a good source of creative ideas about the iRacing service.
• Rusty Greer – Another one of iRacing’s real “good guys,” Greer not only spends countless hours developing set-ups, he selflessly shares them with the sim racing community and is always ready, willing and able to offer a helping hand.
• Chris Hall (aka “Captain Obvious”) – Hall’s knowledgeable and entertaining articles are a staple of inRacingNews, and he’s a tireless booster of iRacing in paddocks across the UK and Europe.
• Steve Luvender  - The driving force behind the Trading Paints.com, which enables iRacers to download, upload and share their cars’ paint schemes with the iRacing community, Steve is a thoughtful and creative influence on the sport of sim racing.
• Nick Neben – An invaluable voice of reason in the sim racing community, Nick is a dedicated champion of Sprint Cars and Silver Crowns whose thoughtful Q&As with Tony Gardner and Dave Kaemmer (almost) single-handedly crashed inRacingNews.
• Pete Ness – Father of iSpeed, an application that creates both a digital dashboard and a real-time race analysis.
• Tim Terry – The Maritimes’ force of nature provides expert commentary on iRacing’s broadcasts, covers oodles of race series for inRacingNews and gives sim racing plenty of virtual ink on “Tim’s ‘Sim’ Corner” website.
• Stephane Turpin – Creator of the Motion Cockpit View, which enables drivers to bobble their head around the cockpit based on their cars’ physics.
• Jari Ylimainen – Developed the iRacing TV Overlay, a tool for creating TV style broadcast overlays from spectator sessions used by hundreds of league racers to post their races on the Internet.

So you can make your choices and vote on the iRacing site right now.

Custom VW Golf Mk1 GTI appears in Need for Speed World

Yet another new car has appeared in the Car Dealer for Need for Speed World, and this time it’s a particularly unusual custom VW Golf Mk1 GTI. It features gold deepdish polished wheels, a low ride height, and some custom grapics along with the offset racing stripe. And it also has a retro snowboard on the roof for some reason.

F1 2011 patch makes game playable online again

Despite being a fantastic game, F1 2011 has felt incomplete until now due to a bug that ruined the online racing. Thankfully though, it has now been fixed.

For the uninitiated, players could set up their cars’ springs at a certain stiffness (called the 11/11 bug, you can probably work out the ratio) and receive stupid levels of downforce, enabling them to dominate online races at the expense of those who were unaware of how to cheat. This video is an excellent demonstration of just how much advantage could be gained.

Thankfully Codemasters have now released the excitingly-titled ‘Patch 2‘ for the game, meaning players that previously joined a server only to think they were the worst player in the history of racing games were not so bad after all. They can now return to the online arena on a level playing field, and no longer will a player resisting the set-up cheating and not using driving aids be six seconds a lap off the pace. With leaderboards also being wiped in the coming week, it’s a new start for all – but it remains to be seen if players will flock back to playing an online mode which would have felt impossible for many to compete the first time they tried it.

Whilst some have made good progress through the career mode in the meantime, many have been put off and feel something should have been done sooner to remedy the issue. I am not a developer, but I would suggest something such as banning set-ups online in the interim might have helped. It is also still not possible for players wanting to play without driving aids (such as traction control which can be worth a regular 2-3 seconds per lap) to filter the online lobbies to find like-minded players – a potentially small fix that could make a huge difference to players’ enjoyment.

Codemasters have now released an effectively unfinished/untested product for two years in a row, which has detracted from the success of the award-winning and highly playable game engine. Fans will be hoping F1 2012 does not suffer a similar fate.

Codemasters have also fixed further issues in the game, such as the A.I being too fast in wet conditions, details of which are below:

 

F1 2011 Game Improvements for Patch 2:

o A connectivity rating display has now been implemented for each player in an online session lobby. This appears as coloured bars (red, amber, green) to indicate the expected online performance of the player in the game session.
o More network bandwidth is now reserved for game-critical systems in online sessions. This may result in low-bandwidth users having their voice chat restricted to fewer players, but should result in a smoother online experience.

Strategy & Setup:
o Fixed 11/11 car setup bug.
o Fixed issue where your race strategy uses the same tyre compound three times in a row & the final set are worn.
o Fixed issue where wear-based punctures would occur too often.
o Fixed various issues with the race engineer speech logic.

AI:
o Fixed an issue where the AI run on Intermediates for too long.
o Fixed issue where AI cars would be too fast in the wet.
o Fixed an issue where AI vehicles pitted too often during dry, online races .
o The AI has been tuned on several circuits to provide smoother and faster driving.
o Fixed issue where the AI’s sector 1 times in Malaysia were too slow

 

§ Co –op Championship:
o Fixed an issue with the save becoming corrupt / not able to invite the other player when playing long race weekends.
o Fixed an issue where AI difficulty was reset to “Amateur” level when resuming a Coop game.
o Fixed an issue with tyre wear in Practice/Qualifying not being carried over to Race.
o Fixed an issue with the penalties accrued in Practice/Qualifying not being applied to the Race.
o Fixed an issue with the Race Results where lapped AI are causing player to drop positions.

Online:
o Vote to Skip in Qualifying now requires 100% vote.
o Various Penalty system improvements have been made.
o Quick Race countdown timer is now set to 60 Seconds and no longer resets when a player joins the session.
o Fixed issue where host and client machines would report different qualification results during online games
o Fixed an issue where online players would sometimes see other players or AI cars using the wrong tyres.

Graphics & Performance:
o PS3 – Improved frame rate & performance.
o Xbox360 & PC – Numerous performance improvements have been made to increase frame rate and reduce stuttering.
o All Platforms – Numerous graphical improvements have been made.
o All Platforms – Fixed various issues to improve general game stability.

PC-specific:
o Fixed several functionality issues experienced when using DX11 cards.
o Fixed issue where users could hack specific files to increase car grip.

Other:
o Fixed a very infrequent issue where some sessions would be skipped over when progressing to the next session during a Long Race Weekend.
o Korea tyre compounds have been changed to those used in the 2011 race.
o Fixed an issue where in career where the “on the bounce” achievement was awarded after 11 race wins instead of 9.
o Fixed an issue where all users would be awarded the fastest lap XP and stat during some online races.
o Fixed an issue where driver’s hands & head popped in a few frames late when switching cameras.
o Fixed issue where players were able to post extremely quick Time Trial times
o Introduced option to have 30%, 40% & 75% races.

Safari Rally DLC now available for WRC 2

You can now download the WRC 2 “Safari Rally” DLC pack for 400 Microsoft Points on the Xbox 360 Marketplace or 4.99 Euros on Playstation Network.

The downloadable content pack includes one exclusive special stage which is set in Tanzania and Kenya, and is longer than any current stage on the WRC calendar. And if you want to tackle it in a classic Safari car, the options include legends such as the 1991 Lancia Delta Integrale HF, the Ford Escort RS 1600, the Peugeot 504, the Subaru Impreza, the 1992 Toyota Celica Turbo 4WD, and the 1996 Mitsubishi Lancer Evo 3. Perfect for emulating a rally raid although you can also compete in any of the existing WRC2 selection of cars from classics to the modern era.

The DLC has been timed to appear just before the start of the real Safari Rally, considered by many to be the toughest since it was first held in 1953. This year it runs from November 19-28.

WRC 2 Safari Rally DLC Screens:

Need for Speed: The Run UK Launch Trailer

ORD hits the Wales Rally GB

Despite playing almost every rally game ever released over the years, I have to confess that I’ve never actually been to watch rallying live – my experience of rally cars was the circuit-based Rallycross alternative when the legendary Group B cars needed an outlet after being banned from the world stage.

However, that changed last weekend, thanks to Black Bean and Milestone, the people behind WRC 2. They kindly invited me along to Wales to watch Day 2 of the Wales Rally GB and obviously it was an invitation I couldn’t turn down. Sadly I’d hoped to meet up with the winner of our WRC 2 competition who had won tickets but unfortunately had to pull out at the last minute. Add in some technical and transportation issues during the weekend, and you’ll have to forgive the slightly ropey nature of the photographs I grabbed, but that didn’t change the experience of seeing the world’s best rally drivers hurtling through the woods and along the dirt tracks.

That was after the very strange site of rally cars travelling to stages on public roads, which would later spell disaster for world champion Sebastien Loeb when some Spanish spectators collided with him on single track road. I did mention to Black Bean that travelling between stages would be an interesting extra challenge for any future games!

We arrived at the Hafren stage without incident, and made it in time to see the national drivers competing in a range of modern and classic cars – the sight of vintage Escorts and other unusual cars was an unexpected bonus.

It was definitely a good stage to have picked as the weather stayed dry, so although clambering along the side of the track was a bit muddy, it wasn’t cold, and the enthusiasm of rally fans made for an upbeat mood. And despite the strange experience of seeing cars flash by and disapear for the rest of the day, from the higher vantage points you could see glimpses of them winding through the valley in the distance.

What amazed me most, having ridden on similar terrain in Wales on two wheels was that hardly any of the drivers at any level seemed to lift off for what seemed like quite big corners. Luckily if you wanted a bit more of a look at the cars, a handy hairpin provided the chance to admire a variety of techniques, including an unusual approach by Ken Block which involved having his boot fly open.

As if that wasn’t enough, we also eventually made it along to the service area at the end of the day, where we were able to witness teams working long into the night to fix and prepare cars for the next day.

This particularly lovely 1971 Alpine Renault A110, the former works car of Jean-Pierre Nicholas and Jean de Alexandris was also on display.

And obviously after witnessing the heroics of the drivers and co-drivers throughout the day, many fans were grabbing the chance to try their hand at driving on the WRC 2 setups available at the service area. Certainly the response was pretty favourable amongst the most hardcore of racing fans, and competition to record the fastest time was hotting up.

By the time we finally crashed into bed at the end of the day, it was safe to say that my conversion to rally fan was pretty much complete. It’s a very different experience to circuit-based racing, and it’s an interesting atmosphere as fans appear to be competing to find the best and most inaccessible vantage point from which to watch almost as much as the drivers are competing for the fastest time. Certainly if you’ve wondered what kind of nutters stand inches away from the cars trying to get the best photographs, you’ll be able to understand why when you’ve caught up in the event – luckily at Wales there were a lot of very friendly and helpful marshals and safety volunteers ensuring that we got as close as was relatively safe without causing any problems.

 

I did suggest that given the success of the GT Academy and iRacing champ Gregor Huttu when he tried a real car, maybe I should be a test subject to see if playing rally games helps you in actually driving a rally car. Not sure I convinced anyone enough yet, but I’m going to keep working on it – anyone fancy being my co-driver?

If not, I guess it’s back to WRC2 for the time being… In the meantime, thanks to Black Bean, Milestone, and their PR agency for a great trip.

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