Steve M. Blog Post

[vendsale]

Steve has just put up an awesome blog post about some upcoming features. The futures looking bright for iRacing!

http://www.iracingworld.com/_A-day-i...715/57752.html

[davidan]

Wow awesome Post and Private Leagues on the WAY sooner than we thought!!! I definitely plan to get one going for the CMS community!
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Here is the update portion of his post worth reading, defintely good stuff.

Now for some updates on development which is what you probably hoping for anyways and are now irked at me for having to read everything I have written so far!

We have a few massive projects we are currently working on that will not be ready for the next major build, but one is worth mentioning now. We are deep into development on bringing private leagues to our service in a way that will hopefully maintain the integrity of the overall service. I will focus a blog post on this topic further down the road when we are prepared to reveal more details on how this will work, but I think we are well on the way to adding an exciting new feature to our service.

It has been our intention all along to remove resets once we have the damage repair and towing features complete. It does look unlikely at this point that these two items will be finished for this next season but I can confirm that we will have the ability to make resets available by series. Starting next season we will be eliminating resets in Class C series and up. Patience and respect for your fellow driver will be very important next season…

We really have not had a chance to touch our netcode in some time so we have started exploring several ways to improve it. We have mentioned this before but we are making great progress on implementing the Akamai IP acceleration technology and hope to have this in the next major build. We have a larger announcement coming soon that will touch on this and other latency related topics.

I am happy to announce that we have hired another Vehicle Dynamics Engineer and we have immediately thrown him into the fire and have him working on the Spec Racer Ford. Eric Hudec joins us from what was formerly known as Petty Enterprises where he was a Race Engineer. We are obviously excited to be adding someone with Eric’s experience to our team and he should bring a lot to the table, particularly on the oval side of the service. We hope to have the SRF ready for the start of next season and we are doing everything we can to also try and get the Nationwide version of the Impala SS ready as well. We are also making great progress on the Corvette C6.R and the Lotus 79 as well, but I don’t expect those to be completed until this summer.

We have also hired a new software engineer to try and speed up the rate that we are turning out features for you and his name is David Tucker. David is already churning out work and has completed a project already that will hopefully be of great use to real world race engineers in being able to use our track data in their simulation tools. David is currently taking a look at our replay cameras to try and make some improvements in how we show you the action.

One of the most popular requests we have received and something I know I have told you we are working on is the addition of Paypal to our service. At this time we are in testing stages of this code and it does look like it will be ready to be incorporated for the start of next season. We do apologize in the delay for getting this feature to you but unfortunately this is not a plug and play item with the way our service works.

I am sure everyone has already seen the news that we are adding a club logo option to the cars for next season. We are also trying to get work done at the same time to add sponsor packages. These will be sponsors that we supply for you to choose from, but this will start to give you more options to make your cars look more like they are in the real world. You will also be able to choose different fonts for the car number on certain vehicles.

Last but not least, I expect that Road Atlanta will be joining our track lineup at or near the start of next season with 5 more oval tracks coming between now and July. We are also set to begin scanning Mosport this spring to get into production as soon as possible.

Now for a very cryptic licensing update.

I told you that I had been working on a contract that would net you three new tin tops and that contract was officially signed last week. I will now torture you by telling you we have the announcement of these cars planned to go out this spring in conjunction with other announcements. Sorry about that, you probably are angry with me for even mentioning it now. I am also so very close to signing a very unique agreement that will involve a popular entry level tin top series with a significant marketing campaign. So those that have been asking for more sports cars, they are in the development pipeline along with the C6.R.

We have signed a MAJOR track that we will be scanning in the next few weeks that everyone should be excited for. Once again I will tease you but not telling you what it is but I will give you a hint that the announcement will come in May…

We have a few very high profile agreements we are working on that should garner us attention from everyone out there that has not already heard of iRacing. I hope to have more information on these projects in the coming months. I will also tell you that we have been working incredibly hard in trying to secure tracks outside of North America and we are making some great progress. I hope to have some announcements about some signings here in the next few months as well.

I know the licensing update portion of this really does not tell you much, but there is a significant amount of work that goes on here that is difficult to communicate about until the dotted line is signed. We are also trying to do our best in trying to pace out announcements so not to overwhelm you and our marketing staff who are tasked with these communications.

Speaking of marketing, the guys have been pounding the pavement to try and bring more awareness to our product and company and have been doing a terrific job as we have seen a nice spike in our membership numbers. I hope everyone will check out Sean Siff‘s blog to try and find a date when our Mobile Marketing Unit will be in their area to stop by and say hello.

That’s it for now. I hope you have enjoyed reading this and will do my best to not let two months go by again before my next post.

Steve