From iRacing forums - new blog post:
On to some of the highlights of the things we are working on…..
Tires, yeah, instead of me regurgitating the same stuff I always say Mr. Kaemmer himself is going to write an entire blog post on what he is working on. After being tied to a chair and forced to watch me trying to solve quadratic equations on the whiteboard he finally broke and said he would do it.
Grant is back working on his new transmission model. He made my eyes glaze over yesterday by telling me he had just added in the mass of a hand into his model in trying to determine the velocity needed to get the dog tooth gears to engage. There is still quite a bit of work to be done on this, most importantly that there are aids available that make this new model usable by all of our customers.
One of the most complained about “features” in the sim is that a damaged car is just as fast as an undamaged car. We just figured what fun would it be if you lost the front wing on your IndyCar and it actually required you to slow down? Okay, seriously, we are working on improving the damage model.
I read a hotly debated thread yesterday on what exactly we are doing with the very general statement of “we are working on night racing”. (On a side note, if you ever want to see an engineer melt down describe a project they are working on in the most general description possible and say it’s a piece of cake to complete.) To elevate the suspense we are working on turning Richmond into a track that can be run at night. This may seem like a trivial task but we are modeling a light source from each light at the track. This will be over 100 lights. Kevin Combs will be doing a blog post specifically on this topic in the near future.
This project is just the first step in the long term project of finally getting back to work on improving our graphics engine. Now that Shawn is finally done working on the HoF project he is being set loose on all kinds of goodies to make the product sexier.
Fixed setup racing for hosted and official racing is also being worked on again. This is pretty self explanatory really. The real debate for this feature is what official series to make fixed setup. We have not had serious discussions about this internally yet but my first thought on this is that to start maybe D and under series are fixed setup? What do you guys think we should do for fixed setup series while trying not to add any redundant series?
I am pretty sure I have mentioned this in one of my previous blogs but we have started the process of transitioning to a third party sound engine called FMod. The feature set for this product should allow us to add some cool effects into the model and hopefully increase performance in general. At this time the goal is to have the old system in place as well so if there are any problems for a particular user you can continue to use the old sound engine.
We have heard quite a bit of feedback from our league operators that having more control over a hosted session would make their lives easier and we have listened. We have begun the process of trying to get back into hosted racing the extended admin functionality that we had in our previous products at Papyrus. As we have said many times before just because we did it at Papyrus does not mean we can copy and paste the code into iRacing so I don’t know the exact feature set we will have yet.
Tony “loose lips” Gardner has made a few posts recently about a few cars we are working on. We plan on trying to get the Tour Modified out in June around the same time that Thompson Speedway will be finished up. We also plan on trying to get the Mustang done in June or early July for when Mid Ohio is released.
On the topic of cars we have received a ton of feedback on our aero model and we have started to look at trying to model the draft effects on aerodynamic side force on the car. We think this will improve the side by side oval racing and being able to pass cars a little easier on the outside.
One of the larger projects that we will be working on is being able to find your friends on the service. We hope to be able to allow members to see if their friends are already in a running race, qual or TT, and can allow them to join an open practice and possibly a hosted session with them. We also are going to try and allow you to join an actual race they are competing in to watch it as a spectator.
I got to see some of the videos the other day that are going into the driving school and I must say I came away incredibly impressed with what they have accomplished. It’s going to be a seriously comprehensive training package that I believe everyone from novice to experienced sim racers will find useful. I am really looking forward to that getting launched.
And lastly, the cheerful backbone of our community, the iRacing forums, will be getting an overhaul. I have told Scott that if we don’t see a serious increase of positive thoughts and discussion in the forums you will be stuck with this same outdated piece of software that you have now. So let this be your warning!
Seriously though, we are incredibly excited to get these projects we are working on out to you guys as soon as possible. I think they encompass many of the things you have been asking for and yet only scratch the surface on what we want to accomplish. I hope everyone has a great summer (or winter for you guys down under) and now I am off to try and get this damn song out of my head!
I'm sure i must be the only guy who has had an iRacing sub for a total of over 6 months and never once raced online with it 
) to race all the ones I want to.