Video game development is rarely about one man, but if it was, then Terence Groening should certainly get a mention for his contributions to the genre as the man responsible for the physics of Sportscar GT, EA’s PC F1 and NASCAR games of the early 2000’s, rFactor, rFactor 2 and every title and rFpro simulator that spawned from ISI’s engine.
This interview with RSC details his early life and career, through to him joining iRacing in 2021.
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.
Scawen, the lead-developer of LFS, today posted their progress report on updates to South City. Expected updates to Fern Bay aren’t available simple because they decided to put more work into South City.
Here is their post in full:
You can now continue straight on over the bridge near the pit lane exit and join a dual carriageway that goes all the way round the old South City and meets the existing dual carriageway, past the multi-storey car park, over the old roundabout and out of town. At the end you can turn right and follow another big road that goes around the old unfinished industrial area and encloses a new park which has its own internal road.
From there you can drive back round to more new roads linking up with the older part of South City where a lot more roads have been made driveable. It’s hard to describe but here are some more screenshots and a video.
All this takes a long time and there are still holes to fill and buildings to complete in the new areas. But Scawen has also had a lot to do on the programming side. Since the public update 0.6V in February, he has tried to finish things in the lighting system. As one example, we now have a new lightmap for cars, other moving objects and layout objects. It makes use of the occlusion octree, described in our previous report, that covers all the driveable areas. Now it has been extended to provide directional lighting information for the sky and artificial lights.
We want the community to have the new version so we are trying to get to that point as quickly as possible. To do that, some things we want to do can wait until after the release. For the first version, Eric plans to focus on finishing South City and Kyoto while Scawen works on the tyre physics. Fern Bay and further graphical improvements can be done after the big update.
We hope you like the pictures and video!
Please check out our earlier reports which show the changes on the other tracks.
– LFS Developers
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