Hi guys, welcome back with a new development post.
It’s May, and on the 21st gRally will have its second birthday.
A birthday it’s an important day for everyone and for gRally it’s not different so we’ll show you something that we hope you’ll appreciate.
We’re really happy and excited to finally share with you what we’re cooking for one year but, before we go deeper with details, please, let me recap a bit the background of our choices for everyone that haven’t read the post we published one year ago.
When we started thinking about gRally, one of the first target of the project was to try to catch the spirit of rally racing and, for us, one of the more fascinating thing is the talent to drive a car, with the help of a codriver, on a semi-unknown road path trying to be the fastest.
Discussing about this we faced immediately the difficulty to recreate the same real rally situation mainly due to these:
- we’re a very small team and we’ll not be able to prepare a huge amount of stages in a very short time to support different rallies
- following the first point, thinking to release few stages and try to combine them in some rally championships will give an advantage to the simdriver that will have time to memorize the stage path
It looked like we were in a dead loop but, as we’re not so remissive, we continued to study a solution and finally we’re ready to release our INFINITY system.
What’s INFINITY ?
INFINITY is our system to create stages procedurally.
This will give us the opportunity to create several stages with unique layouts. You’ll never find a layout that it’s the same of another one. Due to this, we’ll be able to create several rallies and championships and we can offer you the opportunity to race against the other with the same starting chances: just your driving talent and attention to the codriver notes. We’re very eager to see you race on the next Live rallies we’re preparing.
Just INFINITY ? No!
We haven’t just develop INIFINITY during the last months but we worked hard to improve the overall experience.
We know that gRally is not perfect and there are some small but important aspects that need polishing and fixing so, in the last months , we fixed some bugs and added some featues. Improvements concerns the controls configuration management, the Live rally and the Roadbook interface, the rendering performance and the road surface visual and physic feedback.
About the controllers configuration management we added a load/save option so you could customized file for every different peripheral you want to use with gRally. For example now you can switch from keyboard to wheel loading a “keyboard” configuration file that you saved previously.
Live rally and the Roadbook interface needed a little refreshing because the previous layout was missing some stage information and it was not so clear. Now we think that it’s better for everyone to understand what’s going on the screen.
Writing about rendering performance we’re happy that we added some visual improvements without loosing FPS, some of these are already visible, some will be visible when we’ll add some simulation improvements.
The improvement on the road surface behaviour is another target we had from the start: now we can change the grip for “hard” surfaces like tarmac and modify the 3d shape of “soft” ones like dirt, mud, snow and so on. At the moment, this feature is static in the meaning that the “usage” value of the road is fixed at a specific value (that we can change for every stage) and every simdriver will race at the same conditions. In the future, when we’ll introduce some championship management, the starting roster will influence the “usage” value as in the real rallies.
What you’ve read it’s not the only news.
With the next official update we’ll increase the price of gRally.
We took this decision because we think that, with these last updates, and in particular with the procedural stages, the value of gRally is increased because now you’re not stuck with the same stages we released until now and you can race against the others in new championship showing to the other your speed.
This price change will be applied just for the new clients.
For the people that support us from the day 1, nothing change.They’ll receive this new update as free update.They were great to support us when gRally moves its first steps and give them free updates it’s our way to reward them.
Let see you again for the official announce will do in the next days and we hope to see you racing with us for an “infinite fun” .
Happy second birthday gRally!!! 
