Richard Burns Rally super-mod Rallysimfans has just released a huge new update, adding two single-player championship modes to represent the 1985 and 2019 WRC seasons, plus increased MoTeC telemetry support and five new stages.
Arguably the most important feature of RSF’s October 2024 Update is the significant reduction in its installation size. Before, if players installed every single available stage, installation sizes could top 150 GB. Now, thanks to extensive optimisations, this figure is closer to 70 GB, representing an impressive reduction and with no apparent let-up in quality.
Rally historians will be intrigued by the new offline championship modes, with both the 1985 and 2019 WRC seasons represented in-game, featuring accurate cars, liveries and driver line-ups, with more years in the works.
Players can select offline series from RSF’s main menu but are limited to RBR’s default six-country championship format at the moment, with plans to include custom stage support in the future. AI has been re-created to reflect real-world driver attributes with their relative skill level adjustable to suit all abilities.
Extra MoTeC functionality has been implemented, with the telemetry analysing tool able to interpret NGP (Next Generation Physics) derived files, with five new stages joining RSF’s extensive environment roster.
One of these is a re-creation of a famous Rallylegend test appropriately called ‘The Legend’. Based in San Marino, Rallylegend is a rally festival featuring outlandish driving and incredible machines from the WRC’s long history.
The update includes several other bug fixes and updates – some of which were undertaken by legendary RBR modder WorkerBee – and is free to download. Check out the full changelog below.
For more information, visit the Rallysimfans Discord.
Have you tried out Rallysimfans’ latest update? Let us know in the comments below.
Rallysimfans October 2024 Update changelog
New
- New: Major overhaul of maps to minimize diskspace usage and fixing lighting bugs (flickering car interior) in old Wallaby created stages. See below for more details.
- New: NGP7 and RSF integrated RBR Rally Season with custom season themes (WRC-2019 and GroupB-1985 with real team, driver and car competence attributes and theme specific AI par times) and user adjustable difficulty level. See in-game RSF plugin and Rally Season racing menu. Now you can drive offline rally series against AI drivers. See below for more details.
- New: MoTeC telemetry analyzer support. A new ngp2MoTeC installation package to make it possible to use NGP generated telemetry files in MoTeC telemetry analyzer tool. Many real life drivers and race engineers use MoTeC and now it is possible to use it even with RBR/NGP telemetry files. NGP2MoTeC conversion tool created by Detegr and a ready-to-use MoTeC analyzer workspace created by Bisto. See ngp2MoTeC game folder after installing the NGP2MoTeC component. See below for more details.
- New: NGP7 plugin version (by WorkerBee). Now all you who like to crash can finally hear all kind of impact sound effects properly (this new version of NGP fixes several ancient RBR sound effect bugs). See below for more details.
- New: PaceNote plugin version (by WorkerBee). Make sure to check out the new telemetry saving option in PaceNote plugin in case you want to change on the fly what data is saved in telemetry data files. See below for more details.
- New: A new version of openRBRTriples (by Detegr/TorttuP). See below for more details.
- New: A new version of openRBRVR (by Detegr/TorttuP). See below for more details.
- New: A new or fixed RBRHUD gauges. See below for more details.
- New: RSFLauncher.Screen&Graphics has new OpenRBRVR options.
- New: RSFLauncher.Telemetry has new MoTeC compatibilty options.
- New and updated maps: Neubuz-Slusovice (by Marek Nesvadba), Kaczyce (by Dej Krzysztof), Vilaplana 2007 (by Trasky), Santa Lucia (by Lipe), Valstagna Gravel (by RALLY Guru), The Legend (David Hradil), Bikernieki SSS1 (Einars Berze).
Improved
- Improved: A stage and car randomization improved. Now you can see the randomized result before choosing the “Start Stage” menu command. Use left/right arrow key in “Start Stage” menu line in Practice racing.
- Improved: New improved stage load screen images for vanilla RBR stages (new splash images created by AestheticSofa).
- Improved: RSFLauncher has a new option “Minimize RSFLauncher on RBR bootup” option. When enabled RSFLauncher application is auto-hidden when RBR bootup is finished and the game shows a game menu.
- Improved: RallySimFans_Installer app knows how to cleanup old obsolete RSF installation files you no longer need after an update. If you still want to keep those unsupported obsolete installation package file versions then backup rsf_installer_files folder content in the RBR game folder. Most people don’t need those obsolete file versions.
Fixed
- Fixed: When all cars or stages had been randomized at least once then randomization no longer worked. This is now fixed.
- Fixed: MyPacenote auto-saving improvements. Under certain rare cases pacenote changes were not auto-saved. This is now fixed.
- Fixed: Fixes and improvements in RSFLauncher.PreventRepeatedShiftEvents behavior.
- Other bug fixes here and there as usual.
Detailed breakdown
Map overhaul:
- Many of the old stages created using Wallaby tool have an annoying lighting bug causing a car interior to flash (shadows flickering). This flickering bug is now minimized in all old stages.
- Some stages have several versions (normal, reverse, long version, short version, tarmac, gravel), but all these different versions usually have several identical texture files. A new “map subgroup” now makes it possible to share identical textures between these stages to minimize diskspace usage.
- One major flaw in BTB maps was diskspace usage and writing-reading hundreds of temporary disk files while loading a BTB stage. Now RSF supports zip compressed BTB Objects and Textures to minimize diskspace usage and improved BTB stage load time by eliminating the use of temporary files.
- Some maps had almost fatal “invisble collision” bugs (ie. a collision without any visible objects in the middle of the road line). Several of these map specific bugs have been now fixed.
- Reviewed and improved cutting rules in 400+ stages. AleksiP, Towerbrah and rest of the team did fantastic job there. But, this is not the end. Please report cutting shortcuts in RSF Discord channel. This is a community effort to close as much of these unfair shortcuts.
- This map overhaul drops the map diskspace usage by almost 50% while improving a map quality or map loading time. Nice!
- The overhaul was a massive work and does require updates in almost all maps. But, we think this one big bang is good for the future and had to be done at some point. This does mean you need the latest RSF Torrent to update even an existing RSF installation. Torrent is the fastest way to download several big files while hundreds of people are doing it at the same time.
Rally Season integration in RSF:**
- Have you ever wanted to drive a real rally season in offline mode against AI drivers? RBR has always had Rally Season feature, but not many people used it because it was created using vanilla RBR cars and a stage par times set by vanilla physics.
- Finally in RSF this wonderful Rally Season racing mode is more easily available using NGP7 cars and real life season themes and a stage par times (user adjustable difficulty level) are carefully chosen to be realistic for a specific NGP7 car group.
- At the moment you can choose WRC2019 and GroupB1985 seasons and experience those classic historical seasons with AI drivers and cars from the era.
- Stay tuned for more news in the future. At some point Rally Season is extended to support any custom stages also.
MoTeC telemetry analyzer support (by Detegr/TorttuP and Bisto):
- NGP7 plugin has a feature to send a racing telemetry data to 3rd party applications over UDP network traffic or to save a telemetry data as an offline file.
- In real life many drivers and racing engineers use MoTeC tool (www.motec.com.au) to analyze their real life racing telemetry data. MoTeC is The Real Thing for racing analyzing.
- Now you can use the professional grade “MoTeC i2 Pro 64” tool to analyze RBR/NGP telemetry files by using the new NGP2MoTeC tool and a pre-made MoTeC workspace. Detegr, Bisto and rest of the RSF team worked together to make RBR compatible with MoTeC telemetry analyzer.
- See RSFLauncher.Telemetry and “Record Telemetry data in a file” and “MoTeC telemetry files” options and “NGP2MoTeC/RSF Telemetry with MoTeC i2Pro.txt” document in the RBR game foldr how to install and get started with the MoTeC analyzer.
- Bisto has also created an easy-to-follow video tutorial how to get started with MoTeC and RBR. Please visit https://youtu.be/kTwcp7_kXkY to see the video.
NGP7 7.4.778 2024-09-15 plugin (by WorkerBee):
- 64-bit telemetry recorder (also used by PaceNote plugin 2.x).
- Fixed rally yard and stage trial in pre Rally Season mode.
- Fixed playing of impact speech sounds.
- Reduced memory footprint of FMOD and telemetry recording.
- Updated FMOD to version 2.2.20.
- 64-bit FMOD integration.
