Last week, the new superspeedway-esque version of Atlanta Motor Speedway‘s oval has been added to the iRacing service just in time for this weekend’s real-world NASCAR races.
After a week or so in hosted and official races, a hotfix for the 2022 Season 3 Patch 2 was dropped on Thursday (July 7, 2022), updating some of the footage on the new Atlanta runway.
First, the virtual sun will now be in the right place for the entire virtual day, as north is now well on the orbit. This should prevent late-day darkness from crossing the finish line in the shadows on the front stretch. The pavement will also appear darker, just like in the real world.
Unfortunately, night lighting is still not included with this hotfix, so that’s still something to hopefully look forward to. As for other updated content, some vehicles with the New damage modellike the Dirt Sprint Car and the new Radical SR10, have also been updated today. NDM vehicles on dirt should also be more accurate in general.
There are also some iRacing UI updates and one of the included additions is OpenXR support. Those using OpenXR can now expand well with native Oculus VR and OpenVR support. Virtual Reality racing is growing in popularity and having extra support continues to empower those who use it.
The entirety of today’s iRacing hotfix comments is listed below, courtesy of the iRacing forums and support pages. What do you think of 2022 iRacing Season 3 so far? Let us know in the comments below!
iRACING user interface:
Display mode:
- OpenXR is now a selectable option in the View Mode drop-down menu.
Profile widget
- Awards that have been awarded multiple times now show additional tooltip information that sets each one apart.
Profile
- Fixed an issue where profile information updates would not appear after they were saved until the page was refreshed.
Time Attack
- Fixed an issue where some Time Attack competitions were displayed as “Multiclass” when they only had multiple cars in the same class.
iRacing Awards
- Fixed an issue where the “First Win” Award only found asphalt oval data.
SIMULATION:
New damage model
- The algorithm for handling tires colliding with dirty surfaces has been updated for greater accuracy, especially for surface normals and bumps.
Virtual Reality Devices
- Native OpenXR support has been added to extend our native Oculus VR and OpenVR support.
- – – You can select OpenXR in the display mode selector in the iRacingUI before starting the simulator. The OpenXR option will only show as available if the currently “active” OpenXR runtime selected on your PC reports that it is compatible with your HMD. To do this, first make sure that you have set the best OpenXR runtime on your PC as “active”. There are several OpenXR runtimes available, but only one is “running” on your PC at a time. And you want to make sure the “active” one is the best one for your HMD.
- – – – – NOTE: Depending on your HMD, more than one runtime may be compatible, but only one is best. For example:
- – – – – – – If you are using an Oculus HMD you will need to use the Oculus OpenXR runtime directly, but you still have the option to try the SteamVR OpenXR runtime (not worth trying).
- – – – – – – For Windows Mixed Reality-compatible HMDs, you should try using the Windows WMR OpenXR runtime (over SteamVR) first, but often these HMDs can also fall back to SteamVR’s OpenXR runtime.
- – – – – – – For other HMDs, such as the Valve Index, the SteamVR OpenXR runtime is what you’re looking for.
- – – – – – – And there are also other OpenXR runtimes from some other HMD manufacturers.
- – – In general, you must use the VR application software for the HMD to select the OpenXR runtime as “active”. For example:
- – – – – To select Oculus as active, run the Oculus app and in the settings there is a button to make Oculus the active runtime (if it is already active it says so and the button is disabled).
- – – – – To select SteamVR’s OpenXR runtime as active, start SteamVR and there is a similar button in the steamVR settings to make it active.
- – – – – To select the Windows WMR OpenXR runtime as active, one method is to install the Microsoft application “OpenXR Tools for Mixed Reality” and use its settings to set the WMR runtime as “active” to select.
- – – NOTE: There is a compatibility issue with the OpenXR third-party toolkit application. The developer is aware of the issue. If you installed that third-party tool and the simulator crashes on startup when using OpenXR, you can go to that toolkit application and temporarily disable it while iRacing is running using the settings. The Simulator uses an OpenXR feature correctly, but the Toolkit does not support that feature yet.
CARS:
Dirty Sprint Car
- (ALL) – For the new damage model, the broken actuator models have been updated to better reflect damage when the wing is lifted.
Radical SR10
- For the new damage model, some damage forms have been improved.
- Fixed an issue for the old damage model where the mirror stems were not removed when the nose was detached.
TRACKS:
Atlanta Motor Speedway
- (Oval) – North is now North.
- (Oval) – Environment occlusion for messages has been updated.
- (Oval) – Sidewalk textures have been darkened.
- (Oval) – Fixed an issue with some dark lines in the grass.
