I owe you all an update on the FISA World Stock Car Championship

Posted on 18 December 2023 in Programming, Media, Events Related to Potential, FISA World Stock Car Championship

I originally announced my new project Events Related to Potential and the FISA World Stock Car Championship on 19 March 2022. I followed that announcement up with a trailer of the championship on 22 August, but since then, it’s gone awfully quiet on this front.
What’s going on?

You might easily think I’ve simply quietly given up on this project. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth (besides, if I had, it wouldn’t be featured so prominently on my website).
Rather, what happened was that creating this whole thing turned out to be a lot more work than I first assumed. In fact, this happened several times. Combine that with the fact that I’ve been working on several other projects simultaneously, plus some occasional difficulties on the personal side of things (such as not having an income for a whole year), and, well, you get the picture.

Every year since 2020, I’ve resolved to get at least the first race of the season (the Daytona 500) out before the end of the year. To assuage my own frustration more than anything (but also to ensure the continued participation of Holden in motor racing every year), I've now finally put out this:

This is called the “Holden VF Commodore Shootout” and it’s a very short race (3 laps) with just 3 cars (all Holden cars who qualified for the Daytona 500, which happens to also be all Holden cars on the entry list), just to show off what the broadcasts will look like.
In fact, the whole first season was supposed to be a proof of concept (to entice people into joining the roleplaying part of the thing, which will start in season 2), but I suppose you can think of this as the proof of concept of the proof of concept.

So before you ask “what, it took you three years to create a 6-minute video?”, let me break down a rough timeline of what I've been doing:

• • July 2020: Got the initial idea, decided to use rFactor as the simulator, created Events Related to Potential, set up the FISA Universe, worked on entry lists, and so on.
• • around November 2020: Started working on a track (this was a lot of work, since I didn’t have any 3D modelling experience).
• • October 2021: Got a rough version of the track I was working on ready, switched to car modelling.
• • February 2022: Started working on painting car liveries.
• • June 2022: Started working on driver files, did a lot of testing to get AI settings for drivers and track right.
• • August 2022: Started setting up some things for editing video and creating the broadcasts. Switched from DaVinci Resolve to Shotcut, as it runs better on my (relatively weak) computer.
• • March 2023: Started working on on-screen graphics widgets using a program called rfDynHUD, by Marvin Fröhlich. This involves programming the widgets in Java, which is also difficult because I'm not very good at Java.

This list is probably not 100% accurate, since I don’t really keep track of what exactly I do when (I probably should do that, come to think of it). As you can see, the process consists of a lot of steps, and ALL of those steps have turned out to be more difficult than I initially thought.

There is not that much to do anymore before the first (Daytona) broadcast can get underway, but I’m wary of predicting or announcing anything, since it always takes so much longer to do things than I expect (i.e. this project has been suffering from a bad case of Hofstadter's law). It would be nice, sure, to get it out before the end of the year, but I’d rather not rush it and instead make sure that when it does come out, it’s good. So it’ll most likely have to wait until 2024. Besides, I’ve recently adopted a new “calm development” approach, which means I won’t announce the release of anything anymore until it’s actually ready.
So, I ask you for a little more patience, and in the meantime, enjoy this tiny little exhibition race. I’d appreciate it if you let me knew what you thought of it, through the usual channels: email, Locals, Twitter (or should I say X), or you can join my official Discord server.

See you next time (for the start of the season) at Daytona!