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.