VW Scirocco postponed
Hello Racers.
We are sorry to have to announce that the VW Scirocco will not be released this week as planned. Unfortunately we are unable to continue working into the following week, and it has turned out impossible to reach the required standard in the time available.
This is for two reasons :
1) The compatible test patches had more bugs than expected. Although the recent graphical improvements had worked very well in private testing, when released to the public and tested by hundreds of people, it turned out that there were problems on some graphics cards. One of these has been solved completely and another has been partially fixed. There is also an issue where LFS sometimes causes a crash - this has not yet been resolved and there are some other minor bugs to sort out before we can release an official version.
2) Refining and finalising the Scirocco is taking longer than expected. Although we have made good improvements recently, up to the date of the previous announcement, there were still outstanding issues that proved harder to fix than expected. This is on the mechanical side and the electronic side. We are trying to make a good simulation of the traction control systems and the stability control systems, well known to be a very good feature of VW cars.
Our aim is to make the Scirocco our first car with very limited setup options. The plan is to make it have only the setup options that are readily available on a real road going Scirocco, for example tyre pressures and toe settings. This will mean that the racing should be closer than usual and rely on driver skill, without the need to search for the best setups. Of course this means we need to get the setup as good as possible so it is comparable with the real car.
We are confident that we can fix all the issues and make the car a really good one to drive in the near future, but as various things that need to be done will take an unknown amount of time, we had to make the decision to postpone the release until next year, rather than release something in a rush that is really not as good as it can be.
We know this will disappoint many of you who have waited a long time for the Scirocco, and we are sorry about that. We plan to fix the bugs and continue developing the Scirocco suspension and electronic control systems, to give you a good patch early in 2009.
