More and more info is accumulating as RENNSPORT continues its development process. The second community talking session on the sim’s Discord server shed more light on the upcoming title – and especially the modding aspect, which is set to play a big role in RENNSPORT.
Thus far, the majority of cars that were shown to be available in the closed beta were GT3 race cars, as the ever-popular class is a staple of esports racing – one of the other main pillars of the upcoming sim. As a result, it is easy to view RENNSPORT as yet another GT3 simulator, but Competition Company CEO Morris Hebecker and lead developer Krzysztof Szczech revealed that the sim will be about much more than that.
Retro cars and tracks have not been much of a talking point thus far, but they might be in RENNSPORT in the future, enabling SimRacers to recreate their favorite seasons of the past just like in Assetto Corsa, for example – but in a much smoother way.
Modding implementation – which had been made clear to be on board in the initial announcement of the title already – was a big question in the talking session, and RENNSPORT’s aim is not just to make it possible, but to actively encourage it. “We want to provide the most powerful toolkit possible so you can easily add new cars and tracks – and other elements that we decide to open up to modding”, said Szczech. This tool is set to be integrated into the sim, “so you can practically do it like we do in Unreal Editor”, stated Szczech.
Hebecker revealed the process behind this idea: “We looked at what is out there and feel that there is potential to do it in a better way.” This led the team behind RENNSPORT to an important conclusion, as Hebecker explained: “We realized that we have to create a special team which is just focused on creating tools for modding and APIs. Currently, we are in the hiring process for that team. It is a big priority for us.”
It is obvious that the modding aspect is not just a “nice to have”, but rather an important element of RENNSPORT itself. “Our goal is to create a tool to give to the community which makes it super easy to create and implement new content”, underscored Hebecker. This is not without risks, which means even more thought is being poured into the topic. “If we don’t do it right, it can be a big problem on the esports side”, remarked Szczech. “If you can mod something, you can break something. Balance is crucial in esports.”
While details on how modding is going to be handled regarding the esports side of the sim are not available yet, Szczech remarked that “we need to make sure to provide a workflow so modders can create awesome stuff.” With the content modding studios like RSS or VRC have come up with recently, the potential is clear for this – and that makes the wait for the final result all the more exciting.