Should we have a sim racing omnibus thread?

[Kchrpm]

Virtual 24 hour teams announced, but not the drivers. They have said that it will be a mix of pro and eSports drivers, though.

https://sportscar365.com/lemans/wec/...list-revealed/

[Rare White Ape]

Yeah I read somewhere it was to be at least one pro driver per car or something, so there should be at least 50 real-world drivers on that grid. Hopefully this will be a good race.

I am very curious however: the ACO has a deal with Microsoft in which Forza Motorsport is the 'official' esports racing game of Le Mans, and Forza logos adorn the track at Tetre Rouge.

Yet, this esports event is being held in rFactor 2, which is unquestionably a better game for this sort of thing.

But on top of this, I've heard from a few sources that rFactor 2's server-side software has been notoriously unreliable in the past, leading to bad connections and aborted races. Jimmy Broadbent spoke about it a little while ago and his buddies gave up on rF2 to focus on competing in the LM24H in iRacing instead.

In all of this I wonder why they don't just go to iRacing to host this instead.

[Kchrpm]

Forza 7 is not prepared to do this kind of race. It would not fair well under direct comparison to the rest of the sims being used.

The rFactor 2 choice might be related to the car list. iRacing doesn't have an LMP2 car or similar. The closest thing to a high speed, non-factory prototype is the Riley Daytona Prototype, which I doubt would have been of much interest to the LMP teams.

Hopefully rF2 doesn't let them down, but I know so little about it, I'm not even sure that I knew it existed before this news dropped.

[Kchrpm]

Checking their latest build updates, they posted on Thursday that their latest build includes broadcast overlays as well as a system to resume a race on the same or a different server if there are networking problems:

Especially for long races, we have now implemented a way to resume a race on the same or a different server in case of networking problems. At the end of every lap, the current standings and order are backed up and these script files can be run on a new server to resume the race after all drivers have rejoined. We’ll explain this system in more detail in the upcoming weeks.

Edit: and it looks like a German website did an LMP2 + GTE 24LM race this weekend:

[Cam]

Bryan's racing Mt. Panorama this week.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7hjFSX8Qgc

Edit: Uh-oh, he's having trouble connecting.

Edit 2: Race postponed due to ACC system-wide technical issues.

[Kchrpm]

They're postponing the race because about a dozen drivers and the race stewards are not able to join due to game-wide issues.

[Kchrpm]

Actually it's going now, maybe they got it all fixed, but they haven't said if it's back to being official.

[Cam]

Oh, damn!

[Tom Servo]

Oops, missed the first half of the race after I turned it off when they said it was being postponed until mid-week.

[Tom Servo]

BTW, I know that the black numbers on white mean real driver and white numbers on grey mean sim racer, but what do the black numbers on red signify?