2011-06-04 05:24:03
Hi Folks,
Sorry there hasn't been much update on ORC recently, my 11 week old son has been in and out of hospital twice with meningitis so very little has been done.
I hope to get back to it when he gets out (which I hope is soon!)
Thanks!
Ash
2011-03-03 06:47:17
Tyre and Brake Temperature
Gregor has done some great work with the Tyre and Brake temperature. The temperature of the tyre is dependent on quite a number of factors.
- Air Temperature
- Ground Temperature
- Tyre Slip
- Tyre Force
- Rolling Resistance Torque
- Tyre Velocity (linear and angular)
- Tyre thermal properties
All of this is calculated using proper Thermodynamic principles, taking into account radiative and conductive heat transfer, as well as aerodynamic cooling, meaning the tyres will heat up and importantly cool down realistically.
Another interesting feature is the interaction between components. It is possible with ORC's system to
conduct heat from one component to another. For example hot brakes may heat up the wheel rim and in turn warm up the tyres.
Also there has been provision made to allow cooling of tyres by travelling through patches of water. *NOTE* weather will not be available for the initial releases.
We will be tweaking the tyre properties to get realistic tyre temps and grip levels at those temps.
Component Shop
We have created a shop to allow drivers to browse and buy Car Components. Drivers can upgrade their cars one component at a time or fully upgrade a single car for a discount. We will also offer an ORC premium licence that entitles the driver to unlimited upgrades (including any new upgrades that are made available). We understand some people will want to dip their toe into the water, some will want to dive straight in! We are hoping when you try ORC you will want to stay 
.
.Other Progress
Nick has been making some great progress on the new purpose built track. He is researching ways to create a track which has fantastic detail, but can still keep up a reasonable frame rate.
On the coding side of things we have been trying to make ORC more solid by removing quite a few bugs. We have started some logic around pitlanes to allow checks for speeding, performing pitstops and stop-go style penalties.
On the coding side of things we have been trying to make ORC more solid by removing quite a few bugs. We have started some logic around pitlanes to allow checks for speeding, performing pitstops and stop-go style penalties.
2011-01-28 11:54:40
We have made some updates to the website.
We have also added a few more wallpapers to the screenshots page.
As always if you would like to contact us, please use email, twitter or facebook. Let us know what you think about the new site and ORC in general. Please spread the word about ORC, the more racers get involved, the better ORC will be!
2011-01-28 05:15:38
A lot of progress has been made since the last update. Hundreds of bugs have been tracked down and squashed.
Installation
We have also been working on making installation and the first run as easy as possible. We have added an installer that will install all that is necessary to get ORC up and running. We have also implemented uPnP which is a way to allow hosting very easily (for routers that support uPnP).Force Feedback
We have made some tweaks to force feedback which should increase the realism and reduce the input lag.Screenshots / Wallpapers
The screenshots section and heading have been redone without flash. This will allow them to be viewable on any browser (including iPad / iPhone). We have also updated the screenshots to be more up to date.Dave Ellis has kindly made some sample liveries to show off Nick Ovey's fantastic Formula Sirocco model. Here are a couple of examples. More are available from the screenshots page. If you click on them you can see the image at full resolution
If your company would like to sponsor a car please let us know : - ashley@siroccoracing.com
2011-01-28 05:14:36
Nick has been hard at work creating the first purpose built car for ORC. It is a work in progress, but it is coming along very nicely. Nick will write a full developers report showing the process involved in more detail.
For now here are a few screenshots of the new Formula Sirocco
2010-11-21 04:30:19
We have made some progress getting the Formula Sirocco FS01 into the simulator. There is still some work to do including level of detail (reducing the complexity of the model as it gets further away in order to increase performance), but the results so far are very good!
Here is a 360 degree view of the car showing self-shadowing and dynamic reflections
...and here is a lap in the car. A list of excuses: - I was using a xbox 360 controller; The car setup hasn't been tweeked and I am a bit of a rubbish driver :)
If you have any comments, please let us know on ashley@siroccoracing.com or on twitter or if you want to comment directly to our main developer follow http://twitter.com/AshMcConnell
2010-09-15 04:33:21
Quite a lot of news since the last update. In summary : Surround Sound, New Artist, Graphics Improvements and a working Dash.
Surround Sound
We have tested ORC on a 5.1 surround setup. We used Fmod for full positional sound and it works great. Doppler (the weeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaawwwww sound when a car drives past) sounds fantastic on a proper surround setup.
New Artist
Nick Ovey has joined us and will be making a few cars purpose-built for ORC. He made the test car in the new videos (a 1998 Lola indycar). He is currently making a fantasy openwheeler purpose built for ORC. He has also helped test the graphical shaders, we have added Specular and Reflection maps to more accurately control how the car reacts to light.
Dashboard
We have used Betajaen's Gorilla library for ogre to make a working dashboard. The dash can be seen in the video below. It is currently just using test textures on the test car, the new car that Nick is creating will have a more consistent and realistic set of textures. A proper dashboard also means that we can remove some "head's up display" items from the screen making it a little more realistic.
2010-07-17 08:53:36
We have created quite a thorough video that walks through the menus showing the features that have been implemented. It also shows what we hope will be the final design for the menus (barring a few tweaks here and there).
If you have any comments, please let us know on ashley@siroccoracing.com or on twitter or if you want to comment directly to our main developer follow http://twitter.com/AshMcConnell
2010-07-05 08:51:49
Oh ok, well menus aren't actually that fun* and even less fun to code, but they are very important and fairly useful when you get to know them!
Just doing a quick update to ensure people we are still about and still working as hard as ever.
We have been working hard on the menus in order to make them as easy and intuitive to use as possible while still trying to keep them looking stylish. There is nothing worse than a game that shows great potential, but you can't actually figure out how to select the controls or start the engine!
We have also converted the menus from Hikari (a flash based menu system) to MyGUI, a native C++ menu system. This was mostly to avoid having to have flash installed, but also to allow cross-platform versions of ORC at a later stage.
Trying to get a good user experience will be an ongoing process and hopefully our beta testers will be able to shout at us if we don't make it easy to use.
We did a little work on the spectator mode, allowing drivers to spectate either using trackside or car cameras
We have also been looking around for people that are interested in doing sounds for the sim. We have someone who is interested, but as always with these talented artists, it's hard to get much of their time. Hopefully we can report some progress in the next update.
One of the next areas we are looking at next is to use fmod sound library to add the track as geometry in order to have stuff that can block and muffle sounds.
*A possible exception is Alain Menu (I've never met him, but I wouldn't like to brand him as unfunny)
2010-04-20 10:30:47
Lots of progress from the ORC team since the last update, mostly concentrating on making things work faster.
Speed!
We have tamed the mighty multi-core processors. This has led to a big bump in performance. We have also been optimizing quite a lot of the code in order to get it running faster on slower PCs. For example we have a 4 year old PC ( pentium D 2.66Ghz dual core and a 7900GT ). Impressive for 4 years ago, but starting to feel it's age now. It is running ORC at around 200FPS with 21 cars. Of course, the “real” graphics haven't been added yet, but it's a good start. If you want to see the gory details, visit Ash's blog
Networking
We have also been battling to get the network bandwidth down as low as possible while still having smooth movement from the cars. We have started to get good results. 800Kbits/sec for 20 cars at the moment (LFS is around 1200Kbits/sec for 20 cars). Of course we will probably add more data as we add more features, but it's heading in the right direction. Hopefully this will allow users to host 20 cars from a 1Mbit upload connection (like Ash's O2 broadband!)
Car Handling
Gregor has been doing some of his physics wizardry with the physics params. He has been using values from a real-world car in order to create a very realistic experience. The results are feeling good, it's fun and challenging to drive. A couple of bugs with Aerodynamics and anti-rollbars were also squashed.
Menus
Lynsay has been working hard on skinning the remaining parts of the menus. This was mostly the garage menus where you can choose your car components and setups. This is pretty much finished and looking good. We just need to put it into the game.
More Shadows
We have made some faster shadows in order for slower machines to keep high framerates. It is a more static way of doing it, but it works fairly well. Here is a video of it in action!
If anyone is interested in the day to day ugly details of the game follow AshMcConnell on twitter. For just the big news notifications follow RacingChamp on twitter or join the facebook group