The RBR-Online.it team has released new previews and a development update of their ambitious gRally project.

Many people are asking if the project is still alive or if the beta testing phase is going to start soon… We have one good and one bad news for you. The good news is that the project is more than alive and running. The problem is that it’s running too fast and the things that we’re adding, revising, recoding are so many that we’ve not reached yet the moment in which we say “ok, now let’s see what the other think about gRally.” And this is, at the end, the bad news. We are not able to open the beta testing phase yet because we need more time to make gRally usable in your pc, but we’re not far from this point 🙂

Yes, we know. We were saying that a beta version should have been ready by the end of last year but you’re not testing everything but your patience. But, as we were saying, in the past months we worked hard on several aspect of the graphical engine improving the shaders and the lights to allow the best yield to the great work due by the 3d artists. You will be surprised by the impressing level of details of the special stage Baitoni Bondone, for example.

In all these months we’ve not worked only on this, but also – as maybe some of you have already noticed – on testing gRally with the new Ogre 2.1 as graphics rendering engine, with 64 bits compiled, DirectX 11 and the PBS shaders. The video you can find on the web, that made a lot of noise with people complaining for the graphical quality, was really and literally a “drag & drop” of one early version of the Baitoni Bondone inside the new Ogre. Despite the critics, we were more than happy because it worked properly with no specific coding! Of course, to use all the potential of the new Ogre, there are a lot of things to do, but the first attempt is a great starting point!

Last but not least, thanks to the squirrel team we’ve started to manage the mods (the mod is actually a new track or a new car…), so that it will be extremely simple to create, distribuite and mostly to update your mods! And to allow you to do so, a very detailed wiki is as well in progress…

Keep following us and we will not disappoint you!