Drivingitalia interview with marco massarutto

Well I really hope he is serious when he says that 10 hour endurance is going to be possible. Because right now albeit possible on a theoretical stand point, it's still far from being actually possible and/or enjoyable...

- Not possible to do time based races (only lap based...)
- No flags
- Unusable penalty system
- No manual pit limiter
- Not possible to false start (arcade race start)
- No gridding (afk players stay on the grid, yay avoiding people on the main straight for 10 hours...)
- Broken quali system (fade out at the end of the timer, seriously?)
- Broken pit stops (press ESC + go to pits if you don't want to wait...)
- Same for damage (press ESC + go to pits to get a brand new car instantly)
- No driver swap
- No server side admin tools

- and the list goes on and on and on...

So if RC means that AC is feature-complete as previously advertised, saying that 10 hour endurance races are possible is a lie. Right now AC is barely suitable for 5 lap pickup races.

 

Ok, AC2 is yet to be something, and Assetto Corsa Blood Dragon in progress. Stay tuned guys.

 

You call Marco a liar? Theoretical possible is more than enough, who would actually want to do a 10h sim race?

No seriously, I know I will now get a lot of responses from people who say that they have done or want to do 10h races in a sim, but if you guys think you are in a majority you are very very wrong... let the devs get the basic stuff right, then we can think about those things.

Btw. some of the things above are basic things, which I'm sure will get addressed, but not for the sake of 10h races

 

The worrying aspect of the interview is that they use the words "adding new features" when they should be saying "fix what we have".

Also I kind of agree with rain/night racing. I don't think night racing is important at all. It is just hotlapping in the dark. Rain on the other hand should be one of the basic features in any modern sim.

15$ per month is just incredibly silly. With those prices and with the state of the mp is today you would be probably be the only one to think that is a good idea. Even rf2 struggles with 10€ per year to keep people playing online!

 

Well, I can admit when I am off the mark. I see that iRacing boasts 50,000 members and charges $49/year. That's almost $250K annually + they get revenue from members buying all the content. I agree that AC multi-player isn't where it needs to be to start down a road like that, but wouldn't it be sweet if it happened?

 

No. You can't just start adding fees and microtransactions later on on a game that was designed to be one time purchase with dlcs. Iracing uses different business model and all their content has been finetuned for that approach. Rf2 has another way (one time purchase plus online fees, no dlc) and lfs has its own (development in three stages, each stage is sold as dlc on top of the previous one). It is just as incompatible for iracing to start selling their sim as single purchase item as it is for ac to start asking monthly or yearly fees for its basic features.

 

You misunderstand me. You buy the game and the DLC and can play it just like now. If you want to hook up with the on-line community that is an additional feature. Whatever. It's just a dream for me anyways. I would have guessed that the AC demographic would be just as much into it as the old NASCAR crowd that got iRacing off the ground. Maybe not.

 

What is an online community that you need to pay to access to? Race2play? Paywalls are not a great idea because everytime you add one you are splintering your community.

Also don't take me as an average ac player . Many people probably here like iracing's online system. I don't and I think I'm not in majority here.

 

Sorry to take this thread so far off topic. One of the main benefits of a community like that would be the underlying database of statistics. The added value there could allow us to be racked and stacked in any number of ways.

 

You don't need a monthly or yearly fee to do that. LFS has been recording all your online stats for years and years. Best laps, ALL race results from ALL your online races, skin downloading and sharing, world records, chat etc etc
http://www.lfsworld.net/
Take a look.

 

Yes! you can also set a time multiplier so you get an full day in 10 laps etc

 

During the LFS-Prime-time there were a few servers (Race-Authority) that were using such a system. You had to prove your skills with slower cars before you were allowed to enter the server with faster cars and got points and bronze, silver, ect. medals for your efforts...that was really great and motivating stuff in terms of developing your racing-skills and getting clean races

 

With a view to OP, here some freshest "small corrections" by Marco Massurutto" with a view to his interview in "Drivingitalia"

(source: schwarzbierbude.de: http://www.schwarzbierbude.de/compo...mid,99/func,view/catid,78/id,652/lang,de/#652)


"Marco Massarutto - 2 days ago

Hello everybody. I think it would be right to recognize that sometime, some sentences in a language cannot be reported directly in another without changing their sense, so I think it would have been better to ask me to confirm some passages before to post a news like this, instead to base it on an automatic translator. I'm sure the author is in good faith, anyway maybe my thoughts could have been reported more fairly.

Therefore, without any polemics, let me just clarify in english some sensible points:

rain: in future we might plan to introduce wet conditions in AC: the premise was that we know that wet conditions are very important for some people, but game statistics tell that aren't really used so much. Being a little studio (sometime people forget it), we must be focused on those features and contents that we are sure people really will use.

Out of records: about comments like "without rain AC is not a complete simulation", I answer: you're right. A 15-people studio can develop a good simulation. But not necessarily a complete simulation. Some racing simulations do not have rain, some do not have AI, some do not have a proper physics model, some have fictional or very few official contents, some do not have laserscan tracks. AC does not have wet conditions. For now. Because I haven't said that AC will not ever have wet conditions. The correct translation is "we might have plans to introduce wet conditions in future".

night conditions: the correct translation is "I doubt we'll have night race conditions". This feature would require a work-around, because the AC engine has not been designed to support this feature in a native way. AC will support endurance races on a 10-hours cycle, from early morning to sunset.

Assetto Corsa 2: the question was: average lifetime of a videogame is about 3 months, with very rare exceptions: does KUNOS want to support AC for long time with DLCs and future updates, or you are already thinking about an AC2?

My answer: we plan at least one year with updates and additional contents. We'll use next year also to evaluate the feedback and reaction of people on mid-long term. Assetto Corsa is going very well, and its success can evolve it by a successful game to a successful brand. If this will be the case, it would be natural to make some plans for an AC2 in future (with night and rain conditions - and this part was intended to be auto-ironic), but for now, we prefer to stay focused to finalize AC and its future updates.

So, AC2 is not in our plans, at today, and it would be a total nonsense. Because we are still working on AC.

Hoping to have been helpful, take care.

 

nooo i want night races soo bad please

 

I think the average lifetime for a console game is 3 months, for the PC its usually much longer. On console there is a AAA game released every quarter, plus the attention span of the (usually) younger audience is shorter, and want new games more often.

 

I think they could. Create some AI, package some of the officially sanctioned seasons as a single player career (ideally Nascar) and billy-bob's your uncle. All other content sold separately/multiplayer fees apply. I think iRacing is almost perfectly positioned for that right now and forever more, it's just missing AI. So similarly AC could take similar if opposing routes.

 

How many tracks and how many cars could they include so that it makes financially sense for them to sell it at normal game price? How many tracks do nascar do per season? 20? Then add the other lower level content so people can reach the higher lisence levels so they can race in the official series. I don't think you understand why it doesn't just make sense for iracing to do that. What's the price of one track nowadays? 10$? 20 tracks = 200$. Add couple of cars and it is something like 250$ worth of content.

If they put a product at that price point on the market nobody would those tracks at their iracing online price anymore. Even if you had 190$ worth of content it would still make more sense to buy that nascar package for 50$ than to buy the tracks separately. Well, put higher price then? 150$? Good luck selling that for anyone else than someone who has been already playing iracing. And imagine the ****storm on the forum when people who have bought content worth of 3 digits suddenly figure out they could have had it all for 50$? Massive backlash from their own community.

The whole business model is just plain incompatible to do that. The lisence system, the progression, sanctioned and scheduled online races, price of individual contents, the incentives where you can earn credits by racing online and the whole vision of iracing which is to be continously updated multiplayer game with monthly fees. It just doesn't work as boxed game without major changes. It is basically the same as ac killing modding and starting to sell official cars and tracks 10$/€ each. Ac can't do that either because it doesn't have scheduled online racing system to support such system

 

Papyrus Nascar Racing 2003 was just that. In fact it became what is now iRacing.

"At the end of March 2004, NR2003 was pulled from shelves when Electronic Arts acquired the exclusive NASCAR rights. In May 2004, Papyrus was shut down, and David Kaemmer bought the source code and assets a couple months later for his company FIRST, LLC where it became the base code for iRacing.com." http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASCAR_Racing_2003_Season

 

N2k3 was a game that was designed to be a boxed game you can buy from store. Iracing was designed to be online only subscription based game.

What you guys just don't seem to get. You can't make iracing a boxed copy. Just like you can't make world of warcraft boxed copy. Sure, both ac and iracing have cars and tracks, physics, online servers, people playing, driving cars and competiting to win races. Building setups, doing championships, controlling a car on the screen with steering wheel and pedals. Just like world of warcraft is controlled with keyboard and mouse, has maps, weapons and characters, items, trading etc etc. It is still very different than baldur's gate. There are lots of similarities in the actual gameplay but when you look at them from business model perspective they are very different.

 

Ford GT40