Интервью с Тони Гарднером

[HEI]

Тони Гарднер говорит:

В июне (возможно) появится динамический трэк, полотно будет нагреваться, будут "червячки".

Изменено 26 апреля, 2015 пользователем HEI

[VeTeR]

 

Под спойлером какие вопросы задавались и временные отметки в видео.

 

[spoiler=Tony Gardener Q&A]

 

Q1, Transitions for racetrack, skybox, new damage model (parts coming off); is there any time frame on when this stuff will be coming?

A: They could have done this 5 years ago from a look perspective, but they are not half-assing it. Road surface looking to come out in June-ish. But the time table is not definite at all.

 

Q2, Are you ever going to have individual iRating for the cars/classes?

A: Not right now, if there was a way to snap his fingers and do it, he would lean in that direction but it would be very confusing for new members. They know.

 

Q3, Why would McLaren tell you anything (related to F1 car data)? (5:01)

A: Good question. They are about probably about a year behind data wise but it's mostly due to the relationship they have with Macc

 

Q4, Hosted multiclass races - how can we group different cars into a single class? (6:00)

A: It's a project. On the list. Significant project. Involves at least 3 dev teams. They know about it.

 

Q5, Aston Martin. This build? Next build?

A: Wont be in this one, maybe next one. It's GT1, cool car.

 

Q6, What is the potential to add an LMP1 car?

A: Would be nice but not right now.

 

Q7, How is the Steam release going? (8:00)

A: Still not featured with Steam, it's going well. About 15 members a day joining via steam. Steam is fairly slow on their end getting stuff through. More integration needed. Steam needs to do some work, because Iracing is ready to go.

 

Q8, Are there any plans to host a server farm in Brazil? (9:25)

A: In the plans, homework done, company picked out, hosted racing only initial plan.

 

Q9, Why can't we share setups in the server between different cars with the same geometry/physics, such as the Gen6 or V8SCs? (10:20)

A: Problem is naming convention. Thats a project. Would like to make it easier short answer.

 

Q10, Have you thought about adding the Mini?

A: YES and the answer is NO. (Laughter). Erm. Would like to get more production cars, it's definitely fun racing.

 

Q11, Leagues - We haven't had any updates in the league part of the sim in quite a long time. The whole points system is useless for most league systems. The ability to communicate is really cumbersome. Stats.

A: it's a big project. Issues with storing and caching data. Top priority is website as fast and consistently up. Want to be a one stop shop, don't want to loose customers... But it's a project

 

Q12, Is that the same thing as being able to host tournaments within the league thing.

A: Pretty complicated functionality. It's too large, complicated, lot of work. Doing our best.

 

Q13, Any plans to add individual driver weights in hosted (14:10)

A: Theres plans for that. It's an engineering project, need to utilize certain engineers who know how it works. It's on the radar, would def like to do that. On the list

 

Q14, ??More BOP options in hosted?? (I think that's what was asked) (15:00)

A: Have a list of things like that. To give admin more power, to balance race, add Horsepower, diff ways to go about that. Talked about opening that up in general to people but we'll see where we go with that.

 

Q15, Any plans to update the new V8SCs? Any plans to add the other manufactures?

A: Yeah, always looking to update and put it in the queue. Actually do have licenses with both those groups, haven't come up with a car. Probably won't be first merc to be released.

 

Q16, Where is iRacing going to be in 3, 5 & 10 years? (16:35)

A: I dunno hopefully we're here. It's not a good venue to talk about a 5 year plan. There IS one. Have multiple platforms out there, all sorts of different racing. it's all part of the plan in the long one.

 

Q17, As loyal members, will be be able to buy into the IPO? (17:10)

A: No plan for that

 

Q18, Everybody is asking we want this, we want that etc. How many software engineers does iRacing have? That might help us to understand timescales on projects. (17:30)

A: We have 45 full time employees, almost all of them are technical, probably have another full time 10 contractors in art side. 12 software engineers, 4-5 web engineers, couple database engineers, production people artist etc etc. More resources than we've ever had. Hired 4 in the last year, some of these projects last 2-3-4 years unfortunately, that's the nature unfortunately. Reality we live in.

 

Q19, Are we going to see DX11 this year? (19:03)

A: Yeah you should see that this year. Shouldn't promise anything, but if I had to bet, we should have DX11 this year.

 

Q20, Have you figured out what the Daytona 500 issue was? (19:32)

A: We did figure out what THAT problem was, had nothing to do with Daytona 500. Had to do with hosted, had 8 admins in a hosted session. All on the web side. They were doing all sorts of weird commands and it basically crashed the web site. Had nothing to do with Daytona 500. They would love for it to cache data rather than live data. Working very hard to make all data cache. Always small things that catch you. Just really bad timing.

 

Q21, Was that related to the Indy 500 issue last year? (21:23)

A: Unrelated, that was fixed. Hard to simulate 55,000 people. This is why Netflix doesn't do an 8'o'Clock movie. If iRacing could just throw money at it, they would. It's technical

 

Q22, You've had issues in the past finishing tracks due to size/complexity i.e. Long Beach. You're now bringing out the Nordschleife. What makes that different? (22:30)

A: Long Beach, has to do with the amount of work. Trackside objects slow us way down, haven't gotten to it. Nothing to do with performance.

 

Q23, Any way to implement separate rules for separate series (IndyCar vs NASCAR)? (23:16)

A: Oh no an indycar guy. (laughter). Different things like apron riding and what not. Track surface project will effectively fix it. You go down there you hit dirt and gravel which will not be good for your car. They've gone back and forth. They want to stop black flagging people. It's a race control project which shouldn't be a big deal.

 

Q24, Anyway to limit the gas in qualifying?

A: Right now we can't have the Q gas be different than R gas. moved session down to 5 minutes to try and help that.

 

Q25, Black flag issues in oval. Can they be rectified? (26:35)

A: There are bugs, very hard to reproduce. We can't figure out why they are happening. Try and provide us with as much information. Some bugs only happen once in a great while, and when it's very hard to reproduce. Provide us the replay, the log, send it to me. There are like 2 bugs they just can't recreate, but they're working on it.

 

Q26, Are there plans to differentiate cars on tracks, stationary cars in pits, cars exiting pits etc on the F3? (28:00)

(Cam note, once upon a time F3 had no differential between in pits and out of pits sheesh you want it to drive for you too!? D:!)

A: Theres things we can do to help with that. It's tricky, it's netcode. More things we can do there.

 

Q27, With the McLaren F1 coming, are there plans to make a fixed F1 series? (29:00)

A: A fixed F1 series. Sure we'll do whatever people want... I think a lot of the open wheelers are really hard. 30-40 people can actually dial this thing in. Most people don't have time to dial these cars in, I think we should, but the 30-40 people are extremely vocal about fixed. I'm with you, you have to be an engineer to set the thing up.

 

Q28, How do you think the Nordschleife will be utilised? (29:50)

A: European community is really stoked. It's an F1 circuit too. lots of racing on it, going to be used in a lot of ways. Lot of configurations available.

 

Q29, How many staff are involved in the 13 week upgrade cycle, and could bigger projects be finished more quickly if you moved resources away from the new builds to the longer term projects? (31:00)

A: Would you guys like us to do that? (loud no's from crowd) There's your answer. It does kind of waste time, getting builds ready, pulling away from R&D, they're stopping to do the build. Probably wastes abit of dev time to do builds. But stuff coming every 4 months, could argue we make back those 4 weeks with releasing stuff and fixing stuff.

 

Q30, What stage is the tyre model at? Is it nearly finished? (32:20)

A: Don't know if it'll ever be finished. Getting close though. (talked about suspension model from last build) Hopefully something in june, he's working 10 hours a day and it's literally all he's doing. 3-4 things he would like to fix. not going to talk to him, but the things people are talking about are the things he's working on. 95% there, but the final 5% is going to make a big difference.

 

Q31, How do you view the racecentre concept? Do you see it as something that promotes iRacing? (33:52)

A: We could take it off line... It's great there are race centers, there are a business and a market that do well. some would go well, some would not. We want to support people doing it, but we have no business interest in opening race centers. We fully encourage anyone else that wants to do it. Seems in Europe race centers do well, here (US) it's sort of a mixed bag.

 

Q32, Can you give us more details about what we can expect from DX11? Have you seen it? (35:21)

A: I have seen it. If you do a side by side... You look at a track it definitly looks prettier. About all I can say. It's a performance thing. It's a thing to get out of the way, allows us to move on to graphical projects. When we roll out DX11 we're not expecting everyone to start going crazy you probably wont notice much. It's a new engine, it's step one. DX12 is releasing with the next version... That's not a big a chance from DX11 to DX12. DX9 to DX11 is a huge change. OpenGL upgrade too. That is another graphics engine.

 

Q33, Will we get in-car track bar adjustments? (37:05)

A: the track bar is seen in the sim as one unit, lots of other stuff in the backround I couldn't hear. Tony said we couldn't do it right now

 

Q34, Are new audio improvements going to be added to all cars?

A: Think there might be some additional sounds in this build. Another project's main focus is to come up with a whole new sound engine. They tried twice with a sound engine, worked on it for a couple of months, and stopped. This is a renewed effort but it's a big project. No idea when.

 

Q35, Are you actively trying to get a Ferrari in the sim? GT2, GT3 cars? (39:15)

A: been out of our price range to be blunt. Some things we haven't announced yet that are pretty cool. We've sat across from them, great relationship, decided to not sign the dotted line. Maybe someday. It's expensive.

 

Q36, What about Le Mans?

Good relationship with them too, thats about it

 

Q37, Any plans to improve the GUI? (40:45)

A: We don't like our interface. It's dated, doesn't look modern. another project that's been going on for quite some time. Talking about stability we want to separate website from sim. Sim will be application that will just launch. Website is why we crash not the sim. We want to separate the sim from the website. Sim will launch as a standalone program. User will not notice it. All else fails you're going to get into your race. Doing whole new UI. in build next week (Last build for us) big push for us to be conscious to someone new in sim-racing. Good first experience, first 15 minutes is a big push. Making things more modern, more visual. Designs all done, doing the work. Picked their program to help them do that, well under what. no timetable.

 

Q38, How's the progress on animated pit crews? (43:11)

A: Someone probable saw some screenshots of that. Kind of got the animation done. Gotta do the racecontrol thing. it's a process going between teams. Alot of the animation is done. NASCAR is fully animated right now, but it's a huge challenge. They gotta worry about what a pit crew does with all sorts of other cars. No timetable, NASCAR crew looks cool.

 

Q39, Is membership continuing to increase? (I think - tough to hear)

A: Growing about 8-10K on average a year. We say 55K, we're not lying. We're profitable. Have been for 3 years now (Only 3 years!) Thats why we're hiring new engineers, investing into the project. We want to move faster. We're moving faster than we ever have, and you'll notice it as time goes on.

 

Q40, 55,000 - is that current members or total? (45:20)

A: 130,000 people have ever joined iRacing. It's incredible that in 7 years 130K have joined and 55K are still active subscribers. You're going to lose 20% of whoever joins every year due to a number of reasons, but to have 80% of yearly joiners stay is really good

 

Q41, Do you do side projects? Working with manufactures for example (GM). (46:30)

A: We do projects that people don't know about. Most times we get paid. We do these things they are more apt to share things with us. Just invested in this thing called CFD, laymans terms it's a simulation for Aero, computational fluid dynamics. Basically invested in a simulated aero pack. Gotta build the car very precisely now to ensure no holes. Going to be running windtunnels simulated, paid a lot of money for it. Tested the indycar as a first thing for the CFD. Simulated Windtunnel will be good, not many other people do it. We're investing back into it.

 

Q42, Any thoughts about qualifying. One hot lap for each official race. (Audio drop-out - think that's what was asked)

We can do that, we should probalby do that for oval. 5 series have Q built into right before the race, the road guys already know about that. Other thing we're doing we're talking about why we went down to Daytona 500, another thing we're doing is a project where you'll join a race and now it'll join a practice. A practice session for that race, rather than having people joining last minute. You can join a race and go into open practice. We're doing that to make the site more stable. It'll be better, more fun.

 

Q43, Will we be able to have official sessions incorporating practise, quali & race without leaving the sim?

A: We can do that right now. Right now we can do all of that. for any series. 5 series this build, would make a lot of sense to do that for oval, to be honest with you. The future thing is joining a race 30 minutes before, it'll dump you into a practice. Then dumping you into the race. You'll be in open practice, but then right when the race starts, it'll split you, nothing will change. You can still join right before, but for people wanting to be there early will be able.

 

Q44, Aston Martin?

A: We hope, never promise, it'll be in June build. Racing against corvette.

 

 

 

[spoiler=И более точный ответ на все вопросы "когда все это будет?"]