The Le Mans Project

A Introduction to a Track Project

"gMotor2 is our DX9 engine, all new and making its debut in rFactor. It took me almost a year of non-stop typing. There is support for a wide range of video hardware, from fixed function DX7 to shader-based Dx8/Dx9 GPUs. Some of the gM2 features you'll see in rFactor are lots of dynamic shadows, active lighting for accurate time-of-day, and night driving with dynamic track lights and real headlights."

"It's been a long time since I've been able to make this kind of foundation change, so I've been able to incorporate lots of new concepts and technology into the engine. The raw engine itself is amazingly fast, but making a real game engine is also about providing tools to asset builders, and exposing technology to game designers while keeping things accessible to mod makers. So compromises are necessary to make their world better, but even so, this engine is our best yet, and only getting better."

Joe Campana, ISI

The Beginning

The Name - "Virtua_LM" - includes the 2 suggestive letters - "LM". So one of our big dream was to bring those two letters to life and build our own - scratch made - Le Mans.

When starting in 2005, we didn't know which engine or game will be the target. Our goal was simply to find the best engine to realize our dream. When rFactor came out with the power - and the open architecture - of its engine, the answer was easy.

The Work

One of the main issue we met is that many the manufacturers logos or banners from the 1972 to 1986 era are not available anymore. So, every logo was a new challenge for our painting team.

Beside the moddeling work, getting a good feeling for a simracing track need a lot of inputs. As it was impossible for us to retrieve some satellite data about the old layout (neither the new one), our archivists collected tons of photos and videos. Not a so easy task, especially when thinking to the age of such archives.

To conclude, the gMotor2 engine was unbelievable to work with. We're able to modelize a huge amount of polys without any framerate loss. This feature gave us new ideas every days to improve quality and optimize the final result.

Another nice new feature of the gMotor2 engine is the dynamic lighting, providing realistic day to night transitions. For us, it means that simulating an accurate Le Mans 24 hour race is now possible.

The Result

...See download section...

New version (Le Mans 1972-1986 V1.10) available in the Download 1972-1986 section