Rain around the corner for iRacing?

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While iRacing announced early in 2022 rain was being worked on, no ETA was given at the time, with the developer stating they wanted to "make sure it's right". But an accidental leak on their side during a maintenance period seems to indicate the feature's release is getting closer.

While the service was down, an UI box allowing you to select wet tyres was available in local practice sessions. It was however quickly removed through a hotfix right after. This is a positive sign showing progress is made, and backs up Anthony Gardner's declaration that the feature would be coming this year in an interview given to french paper magazine Les Légendes du Jeu Vidéo.

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While the perspective of rain in a sim that is known for being already quite sensitive to drive on dry surfaces might give the chills to some drivers, seeing how intense a race can turn out to be when the weather decides to damp the track should make the endurance events pretty exciting to race and watch, if the Gran Turismo World Finals are any indicator to go by.
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About author
GT-Alex
Alexandre Tonini
Global motorsports enjoyer, long time simracer, Gran Turismo veteran, I've been driving alongside top drivers since the dawn of online pro leagues on Gran Turismo, and qualified for the only cancelled FIA GTC World Tour. I've left aside competitive driving in 2020 to dedicate myself to IGTL, a simracing organisation hosting high quality events for pro racers and customers, to create with friends the kind of events we wished we could have had. We strive to provide the best events for drivers and the best content for viewers, and want to help the simracing scene grow and shine further in the global esports scene.

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Comments

L
I find this development amazing. If you have ever been in the first corner chaos of an iRacing road race and come out of it unscathed, just imagine a first corner in the wet!!! The people advocating rain racing are a vocal group but the reality is it will be largely ignored by those wishing to protect their safety rating.
 
Kurupt CDN
pullmehome said:
Will this mean they will be introducing race stoppages due to rain on the ovals
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Interesting question.....but I doubt they will even have rain for ranked online ovals.
It would be unrealistic to race in and pointless to just sit around....full course yellows take long enough.
 
Ole Marius Myrvold
Club Staff
Premium
Wayne Hutchison said:
Looking forward to the strategic side of managing races - will it rain? when? how much? what's the radar showing? :)
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Will it be random, will it be like AMS2 where you can use historical weather, or historical weather pattern, og will it be like rF2 where you can use real life weather in real time?
 
Johnr777
Ole Marius Myrvold said:
Will it be random, will it be like AMS2 where you can use historical weather, or historical weather pattern, og will it be like rF2 where you can use real life weather in real time?
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Doubt it, probably preset condition since the races are short in length, like 20-30 mins long. Maybe for the special endurance events though?
 
S
I feel iRacing are doing what basically all, or almost all, other sims do to try and make the driving better at the limit: rather than fundamentally improving the underlying physics engine and/or tyre model engine, they just update each individual vehicle to make them more grippy and/or add more slippage and sloppiness to the tyre (making it a more forgivable tyre design like a road car tyre compared to a race tyre), and/or just make the entire vehicle's behaviour traits more static, more stable. That's masking the problem to give the ILLUSION of better driver control and better vehicle behaviour at/over the limit.

It's kind of like in other sims were people complain about, let's say, bad oversteer control. Then someone else recommends softening the rear anti-roll bar or do this or do that and that then gives the car more grip making it easier to drive and more difficult to loose control. Well, that simply gave you more grip so that it's more difficult to go over the limit, that didn't fundamentally change the behaviour once you hit / go over that limit. It's a band-aid fix, an illusion of "better physics".

The Skippy is a perfect example. All sorts of different versions of it over the past 5, 10, 15 years are more realistic and therefore better than the current Skippy but because of the issues of at/over the limit vehicle behaviour, it caused unrealistic problems when trying to make the car drive and behave realistically. With all sorts of supposed core tyre engine and core physics engine updates, has the Skippy been improved to address those issues while also retaining all it's realistic qualities? No. Instead, the "shotgun" approach was applied where they simply just made the car overall much more stable, and much less dynamic. That's masking the problem, trying to give the illusion the problem doesn't exist rather than fundamentally addressing the problem.
 
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I
That's like the Russians celebrating the introduction of ABS in their cars...
Long, long overdue.
What is all this money used for really? I wonder bcs you got on one end a sim like AMS2 which is overdelivering and I bet their funding is quite small and on the other is iRacing with giant income introducing rain of all things!? Crazy...
 
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Tarmac Terrorist
Maybe, just maybe, with the addition or rain, they will have to once again improve the tire model (in general in all conditions) with the end result being we get a better Dry tire, new wet tires, and rain! Now would'nt that be nice!
 
Kurupt CDN
ivanalesi said:
That's like the Russians celebrating the introduction of ABS in their cars...
Long, long overdue.
What is all this money used for really? I wonder bcs you got on one end a sim like AMS2 which is overdelivering and I bet their funding is quite small and on the other is iRacing with giant income introducing rain of all things!? Crazy...
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Expanding World Wide servers, Licenses, Esport payouts and prizes, highering developers and purchasing dev teams to further improve the product.
Not to mention the expenses for staff and equipment to be flown around the world to scan tracks and vehicles.

I also can't think of any other sim racing developer that has added as much new code/features to there engine, along with new content every 3 months as iracing has the past few yrs.
 
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jgf
If implemented "realistically" this could be a plus to online racing. Most sport car series and F1 race in the rain so an occasional wet race is appropriate, NASCARE and modern "Indycar" are afraid of the rain so it would only be a "what if" scenario for those series. And would a wet race be programmed by the online stewards or a random event?
 
T
iRacing with 20 AI uses only 65% of my 4090....with triple 1440p...with rain I expect lower perfomance and more GPU power wasted.
 
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D
Rain might work well for iRacing because if you leave once it rains you will be hit hard in your ranking/points. This, and leagues in other racingsims you can't quit when it rains or beging raining. I often know in open lobby's people quit when they find out it's raining or going to be rain. People never learn how to drive when it's wet, and that's why all the crashes and all that are happening. Most people are seeking instant satisfaction anyway. Hope this will lead to more people experiencing wet/rain and how to adjust accordingly and build up their racing skills.
 
Mekonrider
Not an iracing user. Really surprised it has no weather, more so given the grief people give Raceroom. How come this gets a pass on wet weather? I just expected it to be more 'advanced' that it appears to be.
 
L
Nice to see further indications that the framework for it is being put into the sim
I've long been looking forward to rain both for endurance races and hopefully as an interesting addition to the regular seasons
 
wolftree
jgf said:
If implemented "realistically" this could be a plus to online racing. Most sport car series and F1 race in the rain so an occasional wet race is appropriate, NASCARE and modern "Indycar" are afraid of the rain so it would only be a "what if" scenario for those series. And would a wet race be programmed by the online stewards or a random event?
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NASCAR and Indycar both race road courses in the rain these days while the Belgian GP was cancelled recently. Try again.
 
jgf
wolftree said:
NASCAR and Indycar both race road courses in the rain these days while the Belgian GP was cancelled recently. Try again.
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I have never seen NASCARE run anything in the rain (not even practice sessions), though admittedly i rarely watch anymore; Indycar red flagged a Road America race when it started raining.
 

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