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NASCAR Racing 3: The Sim That Never Was

As a direct ancestor of iRacing, the ‘Grand Prix Legends engine’ had multiple stock car racing false starts, before eventually releasing as NASCAR Racing 4. The original NASCAR 3, cancelled and replaced by one that used NASCAR 2’s engine, is barely remembered.

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Originally known as Papyrus Design, the legendary Massachusetts-based software studio developed highly-regarded simulation titles and published with Electronic Arts, Virgin Interactive and Sierra before their shutdown by Vivendi, owners of Sierra, in 2004.

Co-founded by arguably the father of the modern racing simulation, David Kaemmer, the studio created NASCAR and IndyCar titles that consistently pushed the genre forwards.

Their groundbreaking Grand Prix Legends game engine was used in three NASCAR titles between 2001-2003, evolving to become iRacing after Kaemmer re-acquired former Papyrus assets for his new company.

RSC Podcast RSC Podcast Episode 8 – Richard Burns Rally Special

Join Jon Denton, Tim Wheatley, Simon Croft and guest(s) as they discuss sim racing and racing games past, present and future.

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Back from the ashes since July, 2019. First created in 2001 with the merger of Legends Central (founded 1999) and simracing.dk.

A site by a sort of sim racer, for sim racers, about racing sims. News and information on both modern and historic sim racing software titles.

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You can email Tim Wheatley directly at tim@racesimcentral.net or send a message on social media (response times on socials will vary).
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Tim Wheatley

Quoted in full from the forum post. Screenshots below text.

Hello Racers,

Since the September update we have kept working hard. Eric has continued with South City, which is now a very open town area with many connecting roads. There are car parks, squares, back streets and new roads. It has taken longer than any of us expected because of the size of the area and amount of detail. My work has also taken many turns, supporting the new open city area as described in previous reports. Eric will now be starting on Fern Bay although there are still things to be finished at South City and Kyoto. I decided to present this progress report as a cut down list of updates from a few development versions since September. It gives a little insight into the process without going into too much detail about many other minor changes that there are in each version. Be warned, although cut down it’s still a list of technical changes! It may be best to scroll down and look at the screenshots. Smile

23 Oct – Lighting updates

More accurate baked lighting render for artificial lights. Drawn at higher resolution which allows more accurate results from small, bright lights in the middle distance, but with changes that allow it to run faster. Other track editor improvements. Some changes so that the apparent brightness of lights corresponds exactly with their actual lighting effect. Improved automatic exposure quality by analysing a larger texture in the compute shader.

30 Oct – Turbine updates

Wind turbines now use static vertex buffers, similar to the way a car is drawn. This allows higher resolution turbine models. The turbine code was generalised to allow 3D clock hands for city buildings.

02 Nov – Editor updates

More editor updates to allow easier positioning and alignment of objects.

13 Nov – Updates for sections

Physics enabled for the triangles on sections. Sections are the cross-sectional objects between the segments which are used for most physical surfaces in LFS (e.g. road, fences, walls). Some sections have their own surfaces (e.g. at the end of a wall) but previously they were non-physical. Editor updates to allow easier selection of objects. Slight changes to ensure that triangles on some types of connected objects are in exactly the same place, to avoid light bleeding through cracks.

20 Nov – Various editor improvements and fixes

Doubled the speed of the offline occlusion render by use of batched rendering. Enabled lights on turbines and clocks. Shader optimisation, using 4×3 matrices instead of 4×4 where possible.

18 Dec – Updates for collision with unmovable objects

Updates to the physics of unmovable objects (e.g. buildings, grandstands, smaller objects). Previously, unmovable objects used the same system as as movable objects. Now they have a more compact mesh which saves memory and CPU usage. They are now stored in the same map square system as the sections and segments. The map square system has been upgraded, to reduce the CPU time for detecting nearby objects. A discontinuity in the trunk physics calculation has been removed.

A new visualisation for the track editor shows the physical world clearly, including the physics meshes and trunk objects. Objects now have a ‘surface type’ that was previously only available for segment surfaces. More surface types have been added, such as rubber (tyres and some barrier linings), wood (several fences) and plastic (various barrier signs and temporary barriers). An intermediate scrape sound effect has been added for wood and plastic, avoiding the soft impact sound and the metallic scrape. The calculation for the stereo effect of the scrape sound has been improved. The colour of dust kicked up by tyres is now either white or beige depending on the surface, instead of taking on the average colour of the surface.

Eric has sent some screenshots of the latest version of South City. We hope you like the pictures.

Remember to check out the LFS calendar for racing events and follow us on Twitter.

Have a good holiday!


















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