New “release candidate” update for rFactor2

Studio 397 have released a new build and for the first time it won’t be automatically pushed to your PC by steam.

As outlined in the recent January roadmap, the development team are asking you to become their guinea pigs to verify the work before it’s pushed out to the masses. To do this, you’ll need to right-click on rFactor2 in your Steam library, select “Properties”, then “Betas” and finally “Release Candidate”.

Last month saw some issues plague the sim during update times that weren’t caught by the internal Q&A team. This resulted in weird “exploded” visual glitches and clearly, this new system is to avoid issues like this becoming widespread.

In other news, Indianapolis Motor Speedway has been fully refreshed and re-released. It takes advantage of PBR shaders and also updates the layout from 2013 to 2020.

The updates in the changelog for the build itself are fairly short and minor. A number of UI and graphical issues are fixed, along with an attack mode exploit for Formula E cars. If you want to read the full notes on Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the new build you can visit the Studio 397 website or read below:

Changelog / Update Notes

• We’ve removed the Max 2012 plugins as they no longer work, and provided the last working Max 2017 plugins. We have no intention to upgrade them any longer as we can’t get these versions of Max any more to test. Furthermore, we urge the modding community to upgrade to current Max versions.
• Fixed: Reflection mapper in Scene Viewer, so it renders from the same point as the user sees.
• Fixed: Bind a mouse click to any input control.
• Fixed: Issues with showroom performance.
• Fixed: Missing error prompt when textures are missing from content.
• Fixed: Issue with a white screen you get when you try to assign a control.
• Fixed: Visible damage sometimes corrupting car bodies, to properly fix the hotfix that temporarily disabled the visible damage.
• Fixed: Issue where clouds could show similar corruption as car bodies.
• Fixed: Showroom Upgrades not displaying which require MAS Files.
• Fixed: Glitch where “the lights would suddenly go off” when transitioning from light to dark at dusk.
• Fixed: Exploit where you could still set the FE car to use 250kW in the setup in a race when that setting is reserved for “attack mode”.
• Fixed: Overlays would not correctly follow the attack mode countdown timing.
• AIW Editor: Added new line smoothing option, and added soft selection for manual adjustments.
• Added an internal option to the player.json to turn off multi-threading in the UI. Defaults to “on”.
• Added code support so we can detect a disabled Steam overlay, to warn you about why a shopping cart won’t show up.
• Changed how a dedicated server shuts down when asked so it no longer crashes with a non-zero return code.
• Pausing sessions in a dedicated server will now only pause the first one.
• Increased an internal timeout when talking to Steam to give it more time before we give up or retry.
• Scene Viewer Changes: Moved Web UI Port to 5396 by default and added support for up to 128 scenes in configuration file

2020 Indianapolis Motor Speedway | V1.00 | Update Notes:

• Update of 2013 Release to 2020.
• Replaced 2013 layout with the modern equivalent
• Full PBR Conversion of all assets
• Replaced Crowds with new assets
• Replaced Marshals with new assets
• Added Pitlane Props (Pit Stands, Fuelling Rigs, Pit Markers)
• Added accurate background night lighting
• Added Advertisements
• Added building at Road Course S1
• Improved various assets such as armco barriers
• AI Updates to 2007 GP and Modern GP layouts.
• Various other improvements and tweaks