Feature preview: Wheel-to-wheel Racing

We're excited to share a preview of one of the most significant updates to iGP Manager in years. Wheel-to-wheel racing is currently under active development and in the internal testing phase.

For a long time, you've seen cars in iGP Manager overlapping or "ghosting" through each other, especially during busy race starts or heated battles on track. This was rooted in technical limitations dating back to the original pure 2D simulation from 2011. As iGP Manager evolved into a richer 3D experience years later, these earlier limitations presented serious challenges to improving the race simulation. As is often the case with maintaining such old designs, it grew increasingly complex and difficult for us to develop meaningful improvements.

The development of this new wheel-to-wheel racing system has been significantly accelerated by advancements in AI. I’ve been working tirelessly to keep iGP Games at the forefront of AI innovation. In January, I gave a talk at one of the UK's premier mobile games shows on exactly how we’re using AI to accelerate development of iGP Manager. We'll soon post highlights from that talk on our social media channels, so stay tuned and follow @iGPManager on Instagram, X, and Facebook for more behind-the-scenes insights.

Wheel-to-wheel Racing preview

The new approach uses sophisticated physics-based calculations to position cars realistically, enabling them to anticipate each other's movements in overtaking situations and when approaching corners. Here are some of the key features to expect:

• Accurate Collision Detection: Cars proactively identify and react to potential collisions.

• Enhanced Traffic Awareness: Drivers intelligently assess their surroundings and traffic conditions.

• Realistic Gap Management: Particularly noticeable at race starts and in tight corners, placing more outcomes in your control and not down to random chance.

• Improved Visual Realism: While some ghosting will remain in the first version, expect a significant reduction in overlap scenarios, leading to a more authentic racing experience.

To achieve this, we've had to refactor large portions of the old, complex codebase, built over a decade by multiple developers, spanning our journey from 2D to 3D and many generations of underlying technologies.

Our initial target is to reduce about 90% of ghosting scenarios when we roll out the first version of this update. We'll continue refining the system based on your feedback and real-world use. We anticipate launching sometime in late April, although this timeline will depend on our ongoing testing outcomes. Our initial internal tests look promising and we are still refining the system.

More than a visual improvement

These changes will significantly impact the dynamics of racing as a whole, including race starts. Eventually, I aim to turn my focus to pit lane issues, which have plagued the simulation for years. This work is laying the foundation for me to move in to that in the weeks ahead.

Boost Recharged?

As part of this update we are considering reintroducing recharge functionality to boost. If done correctly, we believe this will significantly spice up racing in Leagues and Sprint Races, enabling more dynamic strategies and removing the incentive to hang on to boost until the final lap. How fast do you think it should recharge? Let us know in the comments!

Leagues from level 6

We've listened to all your feedback and leagues are now available from Level 6. This means it will take as little as 10 races to unlock leagues, which after reviewing the UX and your feedback looks like the sweet spot. We hope this will go some way to encouraging more people into your Leagues.

Additionally, all managers can now level up outside of leagues using Sprint Races with no limits. All caps on level XP from sprint races are hereby removed. This will give managers in leagues some incentive to come and join Sprint Races, as we heard many complaining there was no point. Limits on parts, engines, tokens enforce a natural cap on participation.

Racing in the cloud for better pings, lower latency

Earlier this month we also migrated the entire race service to a new cloud-based system. This is in preparation for a coming marketing push enabling a whole new level of scalability for the entire service. The system has been performing well for weeks now with better uptime, performance and latency than the legacy system. We hope you have noticed an improvement in the response for boost and your commands during the live races. Whatever the case, be sure to let us know your experiences with the new system.

Work continues flat out on iGP Manager 2025. Be sure to read the monster changelog of fixes and improvements we've just published too. With your continued support we aim to make this our best year yet.