On the community side, Steam comes with a friends system, and
naturally rFactor integrates with that. You can see when a friend
playing rFactor, and if he or she is in a multiplayer race, you can even
directly join the same event. Chat and voice chat features allow you to
easily get in touch and the new broadcast features even allow you to
watch your friends drive. Screenshots and videos, as well as guides
explaining certain aspects of the game can also be shared on the
community hub.
The rFactor multiplayer server was extended to also connect to the
Steam matchmaker, so directly within your Steam client you can see a
list of all dedicated and non-dedicated servers and join them. The
servers also show up in the traditional rFactor matchmaker, so even your
friends who have not switched to Steam yet can join. They will even be
listed in Steam but obviously you cannot use some of the other features
to interact with them.
Now apart from all those Steam-related features, doing an update to rFactor also allowed me to address some other issues.
Over the years, as computers and 3D graphics cards became more
powerful and on-line leagues bigger, some mods have managed to break the
2GB memory limit that rFactor as a 32 bit application has. The Steam
version of rFactor now supports 4GB out of the box.
I’ve mentioned cockpits before, and another area where rFactor could
use an update is in its support for multiple controllers. Up til now,
rFactor supported up to 3 controllers, with up to 32 buttons per
controller. Some current cockpits, including mine, had more, so I
updated the code to support up to 6 controllers and 64 buttons per
controller. Also we included more controller profiles for common
hardware, to get you started quickly.
The last aspect is better support for cockpits that feature triple
screen setups. In such setups, you can run realistic Field Of View
settings (with a single screen you usually end up compromising the FOV
to get better visibility) and rFactor now supports both setting lower
vertical FOV angles, down to 10 degrees, and mapping controls to buttons
to change the FOV in-car.
