WEBSITE AND FEATURES
With the new website launch the first veil fell revealing the "basic" features of nKpro. Of these, the most important one is of course, cars. And, as you can read on the new website, we're going to feature 2 cars. Let's see some details, we haven't got any licences so we are sort of designing the car looking for "what would be good" for an online racer to drive.
The first car is going to be available with 2 different engines on the same chassis, plus the possibility to use slick or grooved tyres, virtually making it a 4 "series" car. It is going to be a very light (<500Kg) chassis and the engines will be a 1600 (4 gears manual) and 1800 (5 gears manual) flat 4. The car will have no wings, no ground effect and it is pretty much designed as an "entry point" into the online racing as it would resemble the first "real car" a young race driver would race after karts. Having no aerodynamics we believe the car will proove a good place to start learing the art of racing car setup purely from what is known as "mechanical grip". These cars will provide great close races online, they will teach online racers patience and risk management allowing short distant fights on a twichy car with very short braking distances and relatively high cornering acceleration.
The second car will be just the "next step" in the ideal ladder from karting to Formula One racing ad it will be a winged single seater sitting in the middle of old netKar 0.9.9 favourites Formula Renault and F3000. Think about it as a Formula Renault with more engine but not as much downforce and raw power as the F3000.
Again, the idea is to "guide" the online drivers into the world of online racing with cars they can handle without going mad and get into the mind state of respecting racing and opponents, and that's much easier if you don't have to fight the car all the time.

But reading my dev reports you might know what I've not been working only on open wheelers but on many things from AWD to gravel simulation to 6 wheelers, turbos and so on. This can give you a clue that nKpro will be heavily moddable but the way we'll enable people to do it is going to be pretty revolutionary.

Considering this situation I thought that, for the "basic" version I should really do what I believe into, and that was this approach to small formulas. It is essential that, to maximise the experience I work on something I believe is missing in the racing sim market, then people, with time and necessary skills will fill the gaps they might find using nKpro's modding potential. So I won't be able to stop drifters and street racers and there's no point in doing it, but that actually frees me and gives me the possibility to work on something I would actually love to race online.

SOUNDS
I've been doing a lot of work on sounds these last weeks. The main crossfading code was finished months ago but I needed to actually build the necessary tools to assemble those and to connect the inputs of the "sound objects" to the output of the game.
The result is nothing more than exciting but I am using samples coming from other sources at the moment, so I will release my joy only when fully "netKar PRO " engine samples will be used.
Anyway the feeling of power coming out from the new sound engine is amazing, it really adds a new dimension to the entire experience. I think sound is definetelly the single most striking new feature that a user used to nK099 will notice when loading nKpro for the first time.

BASIC AERODYNAMICS
I am almost done with basic aereodynamics too. Now thought a custom editor it is possible to define frontal area of the car (automatically from the shape), basic Cl for the axles, body Cd plus an infinite serie of wings each own with different Cl and Cd caracteristics dependent on angle of attack, yaw and ground proximity. The editor itself it is quite a scary piece of software :-D

PERFORMANCE
I am starting to get a bit nervous about the physic engine; I've set up a car with 6 wheels and I get a pretty big frame rate drop. It is because the number of physical object connected together goes up quite a bit and now the physic engine has a big central object connected to a lot of small object and each one of them is influencing all the others. 6 wheels is still pretty much playable on my system but I think I will need an optimization session very soon.

Physics is pretty much done, the following weeks will be dedicated to home in the cars scheduled for nKpro before my departure date set for October 31st. From then on, nKpro will be my only occupation during the day and I will be working mainly on the multiplayer's side of the game.

Ayu always rulez

Stefano