One iRacing member has posted weekly stats of subscribers who have done at least one race during the ongoing week. Based on those stats the weekly active numbers have grown only very little in recent months, and they are surely trying to get new drivers in.
The number of active weekly drivers is probably around 2,400 on average, monthly perhaps somewhere around 3,500-4,000 (monthly stats were posted only once as an example). And of course, not everyone using the service does races, and those will not show up on the unofficial stats. I think the staff mentioned that there were about 6,000 active subscriptions in the beginning of January.
The latest update with the open practice servers, NASCAR Sprint Cup car etc. will show a large increase in active members, but how many of those will actively participate as the season progresses remains to be seen.
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If the service catches on in a major way, I'm sure they will be rescanning tracks after major repavings. I think they have already talked about eventually rescanning Lime Rock.
iRacing gather much of the data themselves. The AutoSimSport Kaemmer-Berwick interview had quite a lot of stuff about developing the vehicles. I'd guess that for many cars the aerodynamics data will be incomplete, but things like weight distribution, suspension curves and inertia values should be accurate.
The aero models of the Mazda and Radical have changed since the 1.2.0.0 version included in the torrent, they feel a lot different now.
I think it's a pretty interesting subject. As far as racing team interests go, there are a lot of spec racing series these days, and in those cases providing customized models or the ability to use them for each team isn't necessary for a real life training software provider (think all the different spec Formula series, SCCA sports car series etc.).
For more open classes with big budget teams the rFactor-Pro type of deal will surely be more suitable than iRacing who are at least not yet planning to make customizations of their software (as far as I know). However, for the interests of spec series the financial model of iRacing (dividing the cost of accurate track and car scanning between thousands of hobbyist sim racers) could well result in a much more attractive deal than just using rFactor's user-created mods of varying standards. Even if the actual physics weren't that critical (as you say), there's a big difference between tracks done with laser scanning and those done without it, and I'm sure the users will appreciate car modeling based on real data, too.
At what level of racing do you estimate that teams have the financial means and other resources to build specialized simulators / special equipment and develop their own physics models? In the AutoSimSport article Chris Hoyle mentioned that "automotive manufacturers and high-budget teams" would have their own vehicle models, and it seemed like iR and rFactor-Pro are tapping into quite a bit different segments within the real world racing scene.
I've attached another, untouched screenshot of the Silverado truck taken with an ATI 4870 graphics card (not by me).
Basing criticism of graphics on a comparison between renders and resized 380px × 229px in-game screenshots is absolutely pointless.
Yeah, I wonder what people are thinking when they make those claims about reasons for the pricing structure. The safety rating system and the sporting code are there to prevent bad behavior. Besides, subscription to World of Warcraft costs just as much as iRacing and I don't think their plan has ever been to weed out little gamers...
At least the Pro series elements should be ready within a year. Financially they'll survive until then and probably a while longer no matter what. If it became apparent that there's not enough interest for the competition to work, then they'd have to rethink.
It's impossible to say what their exact plans were before the public launch and how much they've changed since. As far as diversifying the system goes, even before sending the first invites they had the line in their FAQ that says "One of our highest priorities is to develop ways to fulfill requests for individual races and leagues."
I don't think the open practice servers are a much of a change in direction, as you can still only practice with others on the weekly scheduled tracks. The weekly fun races, on the other, could well have been.
As long as they can sustain the number of weekly active racers at least in the 2500-3000 range, I don't think they'll be reviewing their pricing policy until they have all the elements in place for the "Pro" series, as well as possibly some kind of a league support.
True as far as audio compensation goes, but I don't think the more realistic games compensate in terms of FFB. I could be wrong there, of course. However, at least as far as I remember for example the iRacing Solstice feels very numb compared to all the other cars largely because of power steering.
It's a bit unfortunate that there's no public access, but identification and using real names has its benefits. I think Tim Wheatley from the iRacing staff has monitored and posted on external forums, probably as part of his job there.
No no, I don't mean it that way. It's more like a dream than a requirement.
I have a low-end system myself, it's just that with shifting feel (or brake feel) I'm not at all satisfied although the steering itself is pretty good. It doesn't mean I would buy a FFB shifter unit myself, it's just that the software fudging they have to do now as far as shifting goes is far from an optimal solution. I'd be surprised if BRD for example hadn't given thought to some kind of a feedback system for shifters. If and when such systems would be ready for mass-market products is a different matter. In the meantime, I won't put that much thought to it.
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I think I acknowledged that there are things to work on with the transmission model in my first reply about the subject a couple of pages ago. What I disagreed with, and continue to disagree, is the severity/importance of the weakness. Also, just to make sure you have at least something close to the correct idea of what the clutch issue with the Solstice in practice means: as far as the feel goes, either using or not using the auto-clutch results in more or less the same behavior if you're not clutching manually, so it's more like having an auto-clutch driving aid always on than not modeling a clutch, in my view. I find it a bit funny that they still haven't made a clear difference between the two options (forcing manual clutching if that's what one prefers), but as said, it probably hasn't been on the top of their list because it's not a big issue for the majority of racers.
I meant the official iRacing forums.
Sure they are. But based on the discussions on the forums, I'd say that the percentage of the more serious racers is much higher there than in most other sims, netKar Pro excluded.
I think current force feedback technology gives a very good presentation of the real life feel of steering. A bigger problem is the brake pedal feel which is far from real life, but that too depends on the quality of the pedals and apparently some setups out there do achieve a very good realistic feel. It would be nice to have "force feedback" shifter for clutchless shifting especially, but I'm not that interested in pondering about what kind of a fudged software representation would be optimal in the meantime.
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I checked the qualifying results for one week of the Skip Barber series, the most popular road racing car in the game currently. On a track with lap times in the 1:20 range, there were more than a hundred racers out of 582 total qualifiers within one second of the pole time. Roughly half of the qualifiers were within 2% of the pole.
I'd say the cars are probably more bunched in the higher level races. What you presume there is not a problem, and moving up to the higher level cars is not an issue for a reasonably careful driver, no matter at what iRating level he is. However, I'd guess that the quality of the races varies more in lower level grids, as there can be several reasons for a low rating: (relatively) slow speed, DNFs and being new to the service.
I agree with this, but I'm not sure why it would be a problem. They are different segments of their target group, which probably won't have that much overlap, but such overlap isn't really needed for the service to be successful, in my view.
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I think they did the right decision in releasing the sim as it was in June. For me the issues with the transmission were mostly non-issues (because of the reasons mentioned) and had very little effect on my view of the sim. If your opinion on that is different, feel free to think your way.
Everyone has noticed it. It has been discussed on the forums for ages. It's just not such a huge issue for the vast majority of sim racers, whether they race in real life or not, and again, I believe it's largely because of the reasons I mentioned in my last couple of posts.
I can't say for others, but in fact I treat the current iRacing system pretty much as pickup races with some added features that make it easier to get into and more exciting, as well as in general provide much cleaner racing in my experience. That's pretty much what I was looking for in a sim anyway in addition to a realistic physics model.
I'll give an example: I fired up the LFS demo, joined a server and quickly found out that compared to the guys racing there I sucked, badly, and would suck probably no matter how much I practiced. That kind of an experience raises the questions: how would I find a group that suited my skill level and would I be able to find such a group no matter when I felt like I wanted to have a race.
The iRacing rating system seems to give an easy answer to those questions for me, as long as there are enough racers registered. Others treat the system more seriously (probably at least many of those who have a chance of winning some championships...) and probably wouldn't compare it with pickup races the same way as I do, but frankly for a real championship or league feel I think it's far from optimal. There's too much chance involved. But as the basis of the service and as a ladder system for the upcoming Pro series the current championship system should work very well in any case.
I mostly agree with this, and currently iRacing is lacking in many of those aspects, which of course limits its appeal to many groups of racers.
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Yeah, the current numbers aren't exceptional by any measure, but the total number of registered users is 8000-9000, of which about 6000 with an active subscription according to John Henry.
Also, 2-3 years to pay off the initial investment would be an extremely short time, and I don't think many web-based businesses start with such plans. Henry has used a ten-year time span in some of his comments about the future. If they don't get enough people in the service, I believe as you say that they may well restructure it somewhat in the next couple of years (private leagues etc. are coming in any case), but financially iRacing is a special case, as it's also the hobby of its co-founder whose net worth is estimated at 860 million dollars. Of course that doesn't mean he's going to spend his fortune on if it would become apparent it didn't work financially.
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Again I fail to see how I sidestepped the argument. I admitted the flaw and cared to expand on the subject. It was your conclusions on the fact that were totally off the mark and excessive, and I'm not even gonna argue with the ridiculous "conclusion" that the realism of iRacing or the resources spent on developing it are fake. Based on that clutch fixation I guess you'll change your mind the day they add the mandatory auto-clutch to the Solstice. LFS surely has a more complex system implemented than there is in iRacing, but try for example the clutchless shifting sometime and tell me you could get away with anything like what that allows in a real car. Saying that LFS requires realistic shifting techniques is simply not the truth, and a transmission modeling would hardly be realistic without some form of damage modeling implemented.
And as I said, it's not even the fault of LFS but also the peripherals on the market. The clutch and transmission issues were discussed to some extent on the David Kaemmer interview on the latest issue of AutoSimSport, I suggest you go there next if you really are this interested in the subject: http://www.autosimsport.net/. It's a subject that has been discussed in several multi-page threads on iRacing forums for months, and there will hardly ever be a consensus on what the ideal solutions to the problems would be.
: wouldn't it be better skipping som cosmetic stuff (e.g. custom paintjobs), and make clutch work in a more realistic way (we're not talking in absolute terms)?
The same team doesn't work on those things, so the work on custom paintjobs has taken nothing away from the work on clutch modeling, and not working on either wouldn't make the other progress any faster.
As I said, I read the five rules. I've hardly broken any of them or crossed any lines of decency in any other way.
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I don't think I missed any point in this case. I simply pointed out a shortcoming in the transmission modeling of iRacing. The issue is of course much more complicated than simply requiring the use of clutch or not (which apparently only one car in iRacing, the Solstice, requires in real life).
I'm not sure if you were sarcastic here or not, but transmission damage would hardly be a cosmetic detail in my opinion, but a part of realistic transmission modeling.
I think you must mean "require shifting in a realistic way" instead of "allow", because of course you can shift in iRacing as realistically as you want. It should support the same clutches and shifters as LFS.
In my opinion both clutch and shifter peripherals are so far removed from how they operate and feel like in real life that requiring "shifting in a realistic way" is far from the truth in any sim on the market. Especially without transmission damage you can get away with pretty ridiculous shifting techniques without using the clutch in LFS, too. When shifting without clutch the demo cars do require that you lift off the gas or raise the revs before the game will engage the gear, but other than that it cannot do much to control what the user does with his pedals or shifter.
Well, posting is allowed for demo accounts, but you probably won't bump into my messages unless you're interested in iRacing affairs. I've hardly been one of the more active members even in this thread until this last flurry of discussion. And I did read the five forum rules before I made my first post.
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I agree with a lot of what you say concerning their business strategy. However, the LFS team surely do more development per employee, but in absolute terms 30-40 specialized members of staff working in small teams can do so much more, and there is no way around it.
On both the sim and service side they had features right from the start that are not present in any other sim. I won't bother to mention the number one selling point anymore.
Of the more recently rolled out stuff, I believe the yellow flag system on ovals is in a different league compared to any other sim. That doesn't mean that there aren't obvious omissions, too.I don't know about the clutch, since I don't have one and always use the automatic option. Transmission damage hasn't been implemented, so you can get away with not using the clutch even in cars that normally would require you to do so. Brake lights have been implemented since late July. Other things that you mentioned about the clunky interface, restricted race options etc. I recognize, but at least so far they haven't bothered me that much.
The reason why I didn't end up buying LFS was mainly that when S1 was released I didn't have a fast enough computer for it. I played around with the demo a bit, enjoyed the driving and the banter with the racers, but decided to wait for S2 to be released before upgrading my computer. It took two years to release the S2 alpha, much longer than was initially estimated, and my interest had already waned by that point, both in LFS and sim racing in general.
Yeah, I've been wondering why they allow to have such an extensive thread on a product that is after all competing with them. However, I didn't mean to imply that the devs are working at a snail pace at all. I'm sure the opposite has always been true, but the team has just been too small, and they have themselves admitted that there's been much more work with the sim than they anticipated.
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I wouldn't say the volumes of content are that different, actually, as the number of tracks in iRacing is pretty large.
Heh, it's pretty apparent from the demo, which at least as far as I know has the exact same quality as the registered product. I regret that I mentioned the cost in that sentence at all, as it makes no difference in the quality of a sim itself.
They did announce an award system a few weeks ago, which is in effect already this season. The top 3 of every division in every series receive a small sum of iR credit to use on future purchases. The news item was posted in this thread, too: http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?p=979428#post979428
What does that have to do with my point at all? I was talking about the development speed. It's from another planet on iRacing compared to LFS, and has been ever since they went public. That is a fact, and the end of that discussion for me.
For £24 LFS is a great sim, that's for sure.
The reason why I have been dwelling on the LFS forums is that years ago I used to be very excited by the promise of LFS, until it soon became apparent to me that the development speed was reduced to a snail's pace. I kept on checking out the progress every now and then, but when iRacing came out I saw it as a sim with true potential for progress (and delivering it, too) and decided to offer some alternative views to the sometimes irrational iR-negativism.
Hey, I actually agree with you on everything except the first point: with a top-end graphics card the game looks fantastic. Still, the things that matter most to me, the quality of non-league racing, realism and feel, are the best there is, so for me it was a very easy choice.
Also, there is a sense of continual, rather quick progress both with the sim and the service around it that is totally unique within the sim-racing scene. The monthly subscription model makes that possible.
No. It's just that $20 is nothing when it comes to the amount of money people spend on everyday entertainment. Based on that kind of logic everyone would judge cd's and movies etc. much higher because they had to pay $10-20 for them. And based on my experience, if anything it works just the other way around for the average working person.
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