Goals
Because I am dissatisfied with most of the modern racing simulators that are available, I've decided to make my own racing simulator. I know this is a lot of work, so for now, I'm making a prototype using the Unity Engine. This game will be taking inspiration from NASCAR Racing 2003 Season, rFactor 1, NASCAR Thunder 2004 (PS2 edition), NASCAR SimRacing, X-Plane 11, and a few other games and simulators for what type of features I want this simulator to have.
The following is a partial list of goals that I have for this project. Some goals will be kept secret and you'll have to buy the game for yourself to see them.
Garage Area
rFactor starts your car in a garage stall during the testing, practice, qualifying, and warmup sessions. Most modern simulators start you on pit road, which is a bit disappointing, and is my primary complaint about most modern simulators. However, I want to take things a step further and allow the player to drive the car back to the garage stall, and allow for garage repairs during the race. Some racing series, like Formula-E, use the garage to literally swap cars during a race. Can't do that with a game that doesn't use a garage!
Day/Night Cycle
Believe it or not, I already have a working day/night cycle simulation that works for any latitude and longitude, and varies with time of year. Some modern simulators don't even have a basic day/night cycle. Currently, the simulation just approximates the Earth's orbit as being a circular 365-day orbit for most years and a circular 366-day orbit for leap years, but that'll eventually be replaced with a 2-body orbital simulation.
Moddability
One of the primary goals of this game is moddability. This includes, but is not limited to, your own vehicles, race tracks, racing series, and even special event rules. I will be providing the tools needed to make all these mods.
Score Towers
One of the things I noticed in rFactor was the fact that the score towers weren't just static textures like in games such as NR2003 or NSR. These score towers show the position of each car on the track (assuming that there's enough rows for all of them). It is my impression that working score towers in racing simulators are a standard feature these days. And my game will not be the exception to that rule. In fact, this is currently the highest-priority item for this project.
Spotters
As much as I like rFactor, the one thing that bugged me about it was the lack of spotters on road courses. So I'll be taking inspiration from NR2003 for this. Also, don't you just love how the spotter will say things like "3-wide" when you're actually 4 or more cars wide? This is a recipe for disaster and simply won't happen in this game.
Career Mode
I'm thinking of a mix between NASCAR SimRacing, NASCAR Thunder 2004 (PS2 edition), NASCAR 07, and NASCAR 09 (PS2 edition) along with my own personal touches.