Nurburging . Nordschleife 4 FSX / FSX:SE coming soon !

I wanted to share a quick video as some exciting news - Although the date is to be announced, Nurburgring / Nordschleife for FSX / FSX:SE will be available soon - http://AutoSportsSimulations.com

Below is a quick graphics stress test lap using the Cobra GT Coupe Prototype No. 12 while having a lot of clouds and also some AI Balloons that like to float around the GP Track -

I don't feel that you can get more real than in FSX if not real itself. So I wanted to see about building Nurburgring 4 FSX.

With out having actually been there, everything had to be interpreted in what I could find about it -

They are not much for pictures, and sometimes you can catch a corner of a building in a photo's background, but in studying these and videos of the races things were about to take shape. That is with a little license, and with an understanding that the actual developers of Nurburgring want to make it a 365 day a year place to go.

In having a means to put Nurburgring's puzzle somewhat together, what had to come first was dealing with the terrain. Like Terra Forming in Sci-fi show's I nicked named what I had to do for about four months and called it Earth Forming in FSX.

Nurburgring and its NordSchleife track of 14.5 miles is located in the mountains and valleys of the Eifel Forest in Germany. In the 1920's it took about two years for Germany to carve the Nordschleife into these mountains and valleys.

To do this in FSX, there are over 1600 manually set altitude points that went for rendering the Nordschleife, another share for Nurburgring itself, and then others too for various roads, villages, and little towns that fill in the valleys. But this was only the beginning of the Earth Forming as, it seemed endlessly, that these points needed to be periodically adjusted when testing different classes of vehicles.

btw: Version 1.3 vehicles for Le Mans 4 FSX and Indy 4 FSX directly benefited, as their suspension tuning and braking were improved in order to meet the challenges of Nurburgring's GP track and its Nordschleife.

Originally I had no idea the number of buildings and things that eventually got built, as once the race track got sort of drivable, much more of the puzzle started to really take shape. The villages and towns as one example, and all that goes on immediately at the main or GP track, as another, suddenly were coming to life in the Virtual World that you can have in FSX.

It was then time to start sculpting a rendering of the Eifel forest which I was patiently waiting to do. In the video, there is about 4 miles left of the Nordschleife to complete in terms of guard rails and terrain painting, as yes that needs to be done too! Once this is done, then the Forest in the remaining part will be brought closer to the road.

I can't promise if it will be in about two months or not to have Nurburgring / NordSchleife 4 FSX available, but that is the actual hours I estimate.

But Le Mans 4 FSX and Indy 4 FSX are great racing circuits too, and are available. If you are only able to go with freeware, well, Lime Rock 4 FSX can be a lot of fun, but as the first track, and as a proof of vision, since vast improvements in design and build have occurred.

Nurburgring / Nordschleife 4 FSX is turning out to be an incredible pair of race tracks.

The video demonstrates 50 cars being road tested on the Main GP track, and the first 9 miles of the Nordschleife where in reaching the bridge at Adenau Germany.

The remaining 4 miles of the Nordschleife are under construction where hoping to complete it before the winter holidays.

On Youtube, you can watch the best of Nurburgring's laps and also accidents. In studying these, the most critical work for making Nurburgring / Nordschleife 4 FSX has been in the earth forming, or terrain sculpting of very smooth racing circuits in what is other wise very rugged FSX terrain where mountains and valleys also needed to be formed.

In fact, Google Earth helped somewhat but also not much – but between FSX’s notion of what it wants, what Google Earth say’s what things it thinks are correct, after studying a lot of Nurburgring / Nordschleife vidoes, the differences are displayed below for the same area as rendered for Nurburgring / Nordschleife 4 FSX.

Note the road in google earth above – where there are shadows it cannot provide an accurate rendering

The freeware cars from AutoSportsSimulations.com typically are tuned to be much faster than their actual counterparts. For example, one of the Maserati MC12's hit 275 mph in the video where the car it is based on has a top speed of 220 mph at Le Mans.

To support sudden acceleration to high speeds, significant testing enabled the fine tuning of the circuits as well as the car's suspensions. The cars suspensions have been well tuned at Le Mans 4 FSX, but then further improvements for the Nordschleife had to be accounted for. That is for each. When downloading these cars, look for Version 1.3 and up!

In the video there are 50 unique racing cars. This might sound like a lot of cars for FSX to handle at one time, but its actually a high performance simulator when it does not have to eat gobs of land and cloud tiles like in the case of panning the horizon while in flight.

There will actually be more cars as just getting the GT class of about its own 20 staged for their unique laps which are also critical for the areas which are still under construction.

Important: Although an incredible experience, driving these circuits does require a lot of practice. And that is before actually driving with other cars on these circuits.

Although Circuit de La Sarthe in Le Mans 4 FSX is a challenging circuit, I would highly recommend that this be mastered first before taking on the Nordschleife, or Nurburgring's GP track. And frankly, even before that, Indy 4 FSX is actually the best place to get started in Sim Racing!