Enjoy All RaceRoom Content for Free Over the Weekend

RaceRoom Free Access Weekend September 2023.jpg
If you are on the fence about certain RaceRoom content, this weekend is your chance to try the simulation's entire roster of cars and tracks: Until September 4th, every circuit and vehcile will be free to access.

Image credit: KW Studios

The most recent free access period took place in June and lasted a full week. A month later, the Porsche Pack launched - so if you have not given the trio of Stuttgart-made racing cars that comprise the pack a try yet, this weekend is a good opportunity to do so.

Store Unavailable​

Interestingly, practical reasons are behind the free access weekend this time: RaceRoom will be performing maintenance to its store, which will be unavailable for the duration. Instead of just letting users race what they have bought so far without the alternative to expand their libraries, developer KW Studios decided to open up the vast content database to all users of the free-to-play simulation.

RaceRoom Porsche 944 Turbo Porsche Pack 2023 2.jpg

The Porsche Pack is the most recent release of RaceRoom content and includes the 944 Turbo Cup. Image credit: KW Studios

Should you fancy more inspiration on what to try over the weekend, we put together a list of 5 RaceRoom tracks to try during free access back in June - since no new tracks have been added ot the sim since and its selection of lesser-known but immensely fun tracks is still just as good, it should be a good starting point this time around as well.

Will you be firing up RaceRoom over the weekend? What content are you looking forward to try? Let us know in the comments below!
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About author
Yannik Haustein
Yannik Haustein
Lifelong motorsport enthusiast and sim racing aficionado, walking racing history encyclopedia.

Sim racing editor, streamer and one half of the SimRacing Buddies podcast (warning, German!).

Heel & Toe Gang 4 life :D

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Comments

RichardHessels
Large Style said:
From what I vaguely understand of Raceroom's life, it's been dragged through a lot of complications and / or restrictions - or you could just say that it's not been in the hands of one developer who's had full control of the IP throughout, (possibly) hence why it was being held back for so long(?) The dev team is also ridiculously small too, a skeleton crew if you will.

I don't really know the full story and in all honesty I don't really care that much as it's still my favourite racing title and IMO stands above the rest in terms of providing a very solid and equally fun racing experience. Considering the underdog circumstance, Raceroom is one hell of an achievement and perhaps deserves way more attention and praise than it generally doesn't get.

DX9 doesn't hold the graphics back anywhere near as much as people make out. What the game ideally needs in terms of graphical improvements are...

- Modern tone-mapping
- Optimised base-lighting to fit new tone-mapper
- Better consistency of lighting at different times of day (some times look good, some don't)
- Reworked colour correction (also to fit new TM)
- Eye adaption / Dynamic Exposure
- Better implementation of distance fogging
- New skydomes / skyboxes

...which alone are all possible with DX9 and would make for one heck of an upgrade. My Remaster mod touches on / demonstrates the potential that could be realised if they committed to an internal upgrade.

Ideally we'd also want more features & "advanced lighting" such as...

- More consistent quality car handling & FFB (a small few cars aren't that good really)
- 24 hour day / night cycle
- Dynamic weather & track system
- Better implementation of God/Sunrays
- Addition of volumetric lighting
- HDR support would be nice.

All of that (I believe) is also possible within DX9, or at least most of it anyway (I don't know if HDR can be retroactively applied to the older API). As a bit of an odd reference, I think back to my Skyrim ENB modding days, in which an ugly DX9 game can be "converted" into stunning visuals with the right treatment.

That's admittedly quite a big list and obviously would take a considerable amount of time and work to get in the title, but it's still possible, and if they could pull it all off then they'd reverse their position and status from being almost forgotten about to near or the top of everyone's list.

I sincerely hope they can turn this around as they already have a very strong foundation with great cars, FFB, tracks, and the AI is awesome fun to race against. They just need to modernise the game and give it a major fresh repolishing to make it fully "relevant" again.
Click to expand...
There are tons of DX9 titles that have great visuals compared to the gMotor 1.
I don't mind the static day times or god rays.
95% of the races are between 10.00 and 17.00 (otherwise the neighbors complain).
A better shadow shader that runs on the GPU would be great.
CPU shadows now are frame-hogs .
The DX9 version of rF2 had already a much better shader for the shadows.
Some more vibrant post processing would be great also.
The texture quality of the tracks could go up a notch too.

I always have the feeling i am playing a polished and quite finished game.
Some clicks and i can drive exotic racingcars on quality tracks that nobody offers.
The track atmosphere is also very good. lots of excitement going on around the tracks.
The cars handle pretty good, some really great (personal taste).

There is much to like.

A decent refresh, and i would probably play it more often.
 
R.Man
Few things bothering me. Why the sim stops displaying laptime when car go off track in race mode. Also they inversed the TC system 1 is full 6 is none, confusing for new users. The AI opponent selection UI is seriously outdated for example when you choose Gt3 cars it load old gt3 and new gt3 in the same race. There should be a smarter car generation and class selection system isntead of creating manual preset and loading them before each race. RRRE is too old and making all content free will do nothing but show how old is the sim.
 
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Large Style
RichardHessels said:
There are tons of DX9 titles that have great visuals compared to the gMotor 1.
I don't mind the static day times or god rays.
95% of the races are between 10.00 and 17.00 (otherwise the neighbors complain).
A better shadow shader that runs on the GPU would be great.
CPU shadows now are frame-hogs .
The DX9 version of rF2 had already a much better shader for the shadows.
Some more vibrant post processing would be great also.
The texture quality of the tracks could go up a notch too.

I always have the feeling i am playing a polished and quite finished game.
Some clicks and i can drive exotic racingcars on quality tracks that nobody offers.
The track atmosphere is also very good. lots of excitement going on around the tracks.
The cars handle pretty good, some really great (personal taste).

There is much to like.

A decent refresh, and i would probably play it more often.
Click to expand...
I agree with you on everything there. To clarify, I meant the polishing just in a visual sense - the game itself including menus are yeah already slick! I'm not trying to be just negative about Raceroom - just identifying areas for improvement. I have a great experience every time I play it and it's my favourite title by a long way, hence why I'd be so excited and mind-blown to see it get even better!
 
R
Large Style said:
I agree with you on everything there. To clarify, I meant the polishing just in a visual sense - the game itself including menus are yeah already slick! I'm not trying to be just negative about Raceroom - just identifying areas for improvement. I have a great experience every time I play it and it's my favourite title by a long way, hence why I'd be so excited and mind-blown to see it get even better!
Click to expand...
I agree on your pov, although I would not expect gameplay improvements like dynamic weather and D&N cycle. They were initially dropped by simbin because a too low minority of players were using them. I don't know whether it was true but, considering Assetto Corsa's sales and the low stable count of active players, compared to the (increasing) sales, and CSP's features not keeping players on the game (a stable active players number being a strong old player base or the result of a turnover phenomenon), it most probably was right. I don't see Raceroom implementing things that have already been considered as not crucial and which are still probably not crucial.

In terms of visuals, RRE's plan is to find a new graphic engine. It would make sense to wait for games properly using the UE5 to see what's possible, because other engines are still a generation (or 2) behind. That's not for tomorrow. And after the choice is made, the whole game content will have to be converted. That's another few years of waiting. So you are absolutely right about the necessity of adjustments in the current engine to give the game a more modern look. It would help current users to keep being immersed and potential users not to be repelled by outdating visuals.

I made some basic adjustments through reshade, adjusting the contrast, shadows and tone, and could already see some unconsistenty in the tracks visuals ; I managed to get realistic colors on one track and but they got bad on another track ; it seems the current tone of the game gives a homogeneous look to the tracks. There is some work to do on each track to get a realistic look but it would really help the game.

EDIT : what I would like to be fixed is the awkward latency in the mouse click in the main menus. It's been there since the fusion of RRE's UI with DTM experience UI. It's not unbearable, you get used to it, and the UI is good and effective and, by chance, the latency isn't present in the car setup menu (which would have been a real issue). There may be loading times not indicated in the game (except in the store but online related) to make you think it's a full smooth UI visually. I would rather see a loading time indicator, if there is really one, to wait for it to turn off before clicking.
 
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anthony monteil
Momperface said:
raceroom was good back in the day, now it's not, their graphics are crap, their sound on new cars is crap (older content was god tier, new content is rubbish on sound)

they are basically milking the sim racing scene for dlc now, no core updates to the game since the ffb update years ago, it's also pretty telling that their free weekends are getting more and more regular to try and attract players
Click to expand...
Well, soundwise, I'm doing my best with what is available to me. You might agree with me that some cars sound better than others in real life, and I can't do anything about some modern race cars sounding dull... They are what they are irl and in the game... In my opinion, the Porsche 944 Turbo Cup sounds glorious, and I think it's pretty close to the real car in the game too, but it's from 1986...
Same goes with the Crosslé cars which we could record in Charade in excellent conditions (I was inside the Crosslé 9s). Those probably can't be closer to the real life Crosslé sound
;)
 
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Peter Kerényi
I feel like there's a lot of DX9 this graphics that talk about R3E when there are - in my opinion - more striking problems with this sim.

For starters, the reason why R3E still kind of holds up is the art direction they chose, which is great.

DX9 wise, the problem isn't graphics, it's performance, stuttering. Being extremely single threaded. Now those of you wishing this was upgraded to UE5, we would gain absolutely nothing. From an unoptimized engine for modern hardware to another unoptimized extremely heavy engine for any hardware.

Now if all we wanted to improve was graphics via an engine upgrade, well, most of the content would need to be scrapped. Poly counts even for some of the newer cars are very low. When I can see the polys in the steering wheel, an engine upgrade is not going to help much.

I think the graphics are more or less acceptable, performance can be significantly improved by running it via DXVK (at least on my all AMD system), there are 2 reasons why I don't play R3E, and both are immersion related.

1. The dashboard displays - I have a certain viewpoint that I try to have with all sims, that includes having the in-game dash visible, and the ones they are reusing with all the cars are just not cutting it. It's one thing that they don't look like the real one, but they are also often changed in aspect ratio - including the proportions of the text.

2. The AI - just all over the place. Braking incredibly early, then taking the corners in a weird way, often having extreme grip in long corners, not caring about the player, unable to do multi-class. There's just... no positive I can think of.

I share the opinion that they are squeezing this platform with new content as long as they can. Hopefully because they are working on the sequel already in the background.
 

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