What’s in Development at iRacing

Here are a few things I’ve found in development for iRacing. Some of this may be rumor, but most of it is backed up by someone at iRacing.

• Five Flags Speedway – Many already know that Five Flags Speedway is set for release in the next build (2015 Season 3). All of us short oval guys look forward to this one. 🙂
• Montgomery Motor Speedway – Word is that the track has been scanned, but there is no additional information.
• Southern National Motorsports Park – During the summer of 2014, an eye witness saw the iRacing scan van leaving and had a discussion with track workers.
• Dynamic Track Surface Model will be released soon. How soon? Your guess is as good as mine. I actually don’t look forward to this. It’s only going to make iRacing more difficult because the track conditions will change during the race. Expect realistic (dynamic) weather along with this, or at least at some point, as the capability is already there, it just isn’t being used in official races at this time.
• User Interface – It could be good. It could be very bad. We’ll only know when it’s too late. Good, bad, or ugly, iRacing is now blatantly copying Assetto Corsa. Here’s a video about the new user interface — an interface that we may see sooner rather than later.
  I have a few concerns about this new interface.First of all, Jay Scullin, “web engineer.” Does he drive trains in an online train driving simulator? How old is he? Nineteen? Could we get somebody with more experience in on this? At least now we know who to blame for iRacing’s POS website. Also, meet Randy Cassidy. Thank you for having someone who looks like he’s been an adult for more than a few minutes.Let me summarize what these two guys are trying to say: They’re going to move all of the features of the website into the simulator itself. You launch the sim, find a race/practice/whatever, then go right into that session.

  In comes Jeff Rubin, another train driver. Also meet “Coherent UI.” More Javascript. Oh boy. That’s just great. So they’re going to take the one thing that causes more problems on the member site now than anything else, and use it to build the new user interface? I’m interested to see how that works out for them. It sounds like a lot of hope and change to me.

  There is a lot of talk here about modal windows. These are windows that appear over the interface. These are known to have intermittent problems of various kinds: buttons that won’t activate when pressed, elements that can’t be clicked for one reason or another, etc. This is an inherent Javascript problem, and I’ll be pleasantly surprised if this UI is anything but a total piece of quasi-radioactive crap.

  All the UI talk sounds nice on the surface, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that there are going to be big problems with this kind of programming.

That’s all the interesting stuff in development. Let’s hope it helps the game.