We are pleased to announce that we plan to release the new VW Scirocco in Live for Speed during the week ending Friday 19th December.

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.

We are pleased to announce that a new tyre physics model is currently in the testing and refinement stage.

Many community members have been wondering what happened to the release of the new VW Scirocco and why there was no news about it. Here are the reasons why :

While we were working on the Scirocco in December, we found that we could not make the LFS model handle as well as the real car. One of the reasons for this was that the LFS tyres had too much grip and this was causing the inside wheels to lose too much load while cornering. But simply reducing the grip would not have been a good approach... the result would have been just the same old LFS but at lower speeds.

We decided to look into a completely new core tyre model.

For several weeks it was just research and mathematics on paper, then the implementation started. A lot of old programming needed to be removed and refined in order to allow the new model to slot into its place. Next was the early refinement stage, at first seen only by the developers, while the main issues were sorted out. During this period we did not want to make any announcements about what we were working on, because it was possible that the new tyre model would not really work out. That did seem less likely as time went on, as more of the problems with the old tyre model came to the surface. The new LFS tyre model has a good mathematical basis for the way forces are produced from the physical state of the tyre, resulting in improved handling and feel with greater realism.

After some time we got to a stage where we felt the model was a clear improvement on the old physics. We updated all the default setups to use realistic values that would be found on similar real world cars and finally released it to our beta testers. Their verdict is unanimous : the new tyre physics model makes the cars much better and more realistic to drive.

There is quite a bit of refinement to be done and other aspects of car physics to update. Also the traction control and stability control of the VW Scirocco still need to be updated. So we cannot yet give a release date. This news item is intended as a progress report and to assure you that Live for Speed will be better when you do get the update!

A reminder :
- The new physics will be a free update for all LFS users
- The VW Scirocco will be available to S1 and S2 license holders