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.
RSC contains a database of 155 developers, 471 software titles, 374 cars, 42 bikes, 242 tracks and more...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 Episode 8 – Richard Burns Rally SpecialJoin Jon Denton, Tim Wheatley, Simon Croft and guest(s) as they discuss sim racing and racing games past, present and future.
RSC contains a database of news items. Our #OnThisDay page shows current day and current week of years past...
RSC contains a database of videos back to the 1980s catalogued as intros, laps, trailers, unboxings and more...
RSC contains a database of emulated software you can play in your browser...
I can’t say any of this any better than the developers did. So, to quote them:
We would like to talk a bit about progress and show you some work-in-progress screenshots of the updated Kyoto track.
2024 has been an unusual year for LFS development. The mods system was a little out of control around the start of the year. Our programmer (Scawen) had to work quite a bit on the system to help improve the quality of mods and make sure they could be sustainable. Also for the mods, various updates were needed in Live for Speed and the Vehicle Editor to tie up some remaining loose ends. Fixes and updates were also needed in our hosting system. Eventually we were able to release version 0.7F at the end of July.
Outside of LFS, Scawen has been involved in a home project for a few months. This has taken away some development time but he will be developing again in the new year.
As regular LFS community members know, we have been working for some years on a new version of Live for Speed using Direct3D 11. It has a lighting system that positions the sun according to the date, time and geographical location. The physics system now runs at 1000Hz and this has been enabled by multithreading. The graphics and physics systems run in separate threads so they can use more CPU cores, allowing the greater demand in graphics (e.g. shadow mapping) and greater demand on physics due to running at 1000Hz. This has been discussed in detail in previous progress reports. All our tracks have been updated to take advantage of the new graphical features and to enable the use of dynamic shadow mapping.
We also have a new tyre model in development, that works well in some ways but is not ready for release. To complete it, Scawen needs to focus for some weeks or months without too many distractions. It is unpredictable how much time this would take, so he has recently reproduced the tyre model from the current public version, in our new version of LFS. We are currently calling this the ‘Retro’ version. It’s the same tyre physics that has entertained us for all these years, but now running at 1000Hz and multithreaded with a few minor fixes. This was done as a way to enable the release of the new graphical version with all the updated tracks more quickly.
Eric, our artist, has spent most of this year working on the Kyoto Ring environment and has expanded the driveable areas in a similar way to the Westhill track. In open configurations, you can drive around all the access roads and a new high speed karting track has been added. He has also been through the other tracks, fixing some remaining issues to make sure they are ready for testing.
We cannot give an estimate for when the new version will be ready to release. There is still work to be done by Eric on Kyoto and by Scawen on the programming side.
We hope you like the screenshots and we wish you a happy and relaxing winter break!
Here are some screenshots:
LFS is a racing simulation developed by a three man indie team and is considered to be one of the most realistic sims of all time despite it’s age.
