Work in progress blog

In light of recent requests for blog posts, I'll be making this a more regular occurrence. Admittedly, we haven't been very good at keeping you in the loop. That's mostly because over the last year or two we encountered a lot of setbacks behind the scenes. Setbacks which made it hard for us to make accurate predictions or announcements. I won't go in to detail here, but if you want to read a more detailed history I made several posts in the forum thread linked here. Rather than rehashing any of that in this blog post I'll just move on to what we are working on.

Tyre updates (coming June - July)

We have a couple of tyre updates in the works which will spice up race strategy a lot.

Two new dry tyre compounds are coming to iGP (Super Soft and Medium). Once complete, the available dry tyre compounds will be: Super Soft, Soft, Medium and Hard. The balance and attributes of the tyres will all be adjusted to offer the maximum range of potential strategies. The compounds are currently in testing and being refined on test races, though as with all updates of this nature we expect to find further improvements even after releasing it to the live site. So the final balance will be pending your feedback after release.

The other feature currently in development is tyre warmers, an entirely new element to race strategy. Tyre warmers will enable managers to set the starting temperature of each tyre compound for each of their drivers. This will allow innovative strategies at all tracks, but should be particularly noticeable at circuits like Monaco, which previously were quite static. For example, it will be possible to run a compound that is too soft and likely ot overheat, but start it well below its ideal operating temperature, and vice versa. It is our hope that this will unlock the possibility of running almost any tyre compound at almost any track and finding a way of making it competitive.

New tyre compounds will introduce a lot of complexity on their own, strategically speaking. So the tyre warmers are likely to come in the update following the new compounds, so that everyone has time to familiarise themselves with the new tyres first.

Patches

I spent time this week collecting glitches encountered by managers relating to the simulator. This list has been passed on to our new lead simulator developer who will be going through them over the next 2-3 weeks addressing as many of them as he can. Our aim is to include as many of these with the tyre updates as possible. Long-standing glitches that may affect race outcomes have been prioritised at the top of the list (priority 1 being the Monaco pit lane).