Win Real Racing Promo Codes!

To celebrate Real Racing's update with the new exotic vehicle class and local WiFi multiplayer for 6 people, we have TWENTY promo codes for Real Racing to give away - 10 lots of 2 codes. That means you can win a code for you and one for a friend to race against! Simply tweet the entire text below before the end of Thursday 23 July (all timezones*) for a chance to win:

Firemint Real Racing now has exotic cars & local WiFi multiplayer for 6 - RT this for chance to win 2 promo codes http://ow.ly/hKsE

Please note - promo codes ONLY work in the US iTunes Store. Winners will be chosen at random from everyone who tweets, based on a unique list of Twitter accounts sourced via Twitter search RSS feed. Only one entry per Twitter account, please - duplicates will be removed before the draw and nobody likes a spammer ;)

* So when exactly will the competition end? When it's no longer Thrusday 23 July anywhere - so for us in Melbourne, Australia it will be after 9pm Friday, or if you're elsewhere it will be 3am Friday in San Francisco, 6am in New York, 11am in London and 7pm in Tokyo. Of course there are many more timezones than this, but hopefully that will be a good guide!

Real Racing update 1.10 available

The Real Racing v1.10 update is now rolling out across the App Store and the realracing.cloudcell.com website has been updated to support it. Here are the release notes:

• New vehicle class: listen to the distinct roar of a V12 engine and experience unsurpassed speed and control with 12 new exotic vehicles
• Support for up to 6 players in local WiFi multiplayer (up from 2 players)
• Select your favourite songs from your personal music library while racing (iPhone and iPod Touch OS 3.0)
• Completely new game soundtrack with 10 original music tracks composed specifically for Real Racing
• Even more content in Career Mode with an exotic vehicle qualifier and two new championships
• New control method: touch-wheel-to-steer, manual accelerate and manual brake
• Increased smoothing of the horizon tilt feature
• Various improvements, bug fixes and OS 3.0 compatibility updates
  

Real Racing v1.01 update available

After a few hiccups at our end, the Real Racing v1.01 update is now rolling out across the App Store! Here are the release notes:

• Choose from three AI collision impact levels: low, medium or high
• Smoother wheel and vehicle control across all devices
• Added dynamic environment shadows to all vehicles on screen
• Added Flight Control sponsorship to some of the unbranded vehicles
• Accelerometer is now turned off during menu screens to save power
• Device fades to power saving mode after 1 minute of inactivity
• Updated league splits are now based on best times through any given sector of a race
• Added accelerometer calibration option
• Added km/h speed display option
• Added relevant online results to the Time Trial race results screen
• Screen orientation and audio preferences are now saved
• Various improvements, bug fixes and OS 3.0 compatibility updates

Firemint 3GS Tech Demo

Since the release of the iPhone 3GS, Real Racing has repeatedly been named as the "must have" game to show off its insane power. IGN called Real Racing a "game you wag in front of others to prove that the iPhone is indeed a real-deal gaming platform" and "one of the best portable racing games across all three viable handheld gaming rigs: iPhone, DS, and PlayStation Portable". Pocket Gamer said "If you want something to show to your doubting-Thomas hardcore gaming friends in order to prove the iPhone's gaming viability, this is the game to show them. It's a technically peerless racing game that really pushes into the realms of the PSP racer." Touch Arcade called Real Racing "widely considered the most technically impressive iPhone racing game".

We're thrilled to be showered with such praise, and it got us wondering what we can do on the new hardware. Real Racing has up to six cars on the track at any one time. Since the game uses a high fidelity physics engine, adding cars is a good test for pushing the hardware. We started our tech demo with 8 cars on the track, then 10, 12, 16 and 20, and the 3GS still didn't break a sweat. We finally stopped when we got to 40 cars on the track at the same time, still with no perceptible drop in frame rate. We think the results are mind blowing.



Note - this video shows a TECH DEMO. We have no plans to release it as an app.

Real Racing Online Leagues

Leagues are probably the trickiest to understand, yet possibly the most exciting and rewarding component of Real Racing. They serve as a kind of massively multiplayer racing career meta game (or MMRCM!! ;) that we hope will add immensely to Real Racing's replay value.

So, what are Leagues?

Leagues are like playing out a real racing career against real people. You can join leagues on the Cloudcell site, and you can play in many leagues at once (see http://realracing.cloudcell.com/League.php) Each league can contain all the people playing Real Racing worldwide. If you sync with Cloudcell you will automatically be entered into the default league, but the other leagues will have varying size populations. Drivers compete in groups of 20 at a time.

Leagues are limited in time, with a season consisting of a group of races that must be completed by a set date or time. Once all races have been completed the season is over, and the next one begins after a brief rest period. You get points in a race if you place well, and at the end of a season the driver with the most points wins (points also determine who moves up and down between divisions - more about that later!)

You can complete each race in the season whenever you like (within the allowed timeframe) and you can continue to retry for a good result until the deadline is reached and the best time you have synced is automatically locked in. At the end of the race when you sync your result, you will see your own time as well as all other drivers in your group. You can also watch a TV footage-style replay from anyone else in your group right on your device.


Real Time vs Asynchronous Leagues

Our leagues are designed to support different modes of play and evolved out of the ways we have been playing the game in the studio.

- Real time leagues are fast paced, with perhaps 10 minutes to submit your best lap time for each track. These leagues are the most exciting when the submission time is ticking down and you frantically start another lap, hoping to finish and submit it before the round ends. See the Eldhert League for an example: http://realracing.cloudcell.com/League.php?nId=7 These leagues lead to intense 10 minute ranking competitions, as you can see what your opponents are doing. It feels a lot like real time multiplayer, except that you're racing against 20 people at once.

- Asynchronous leagues consist of multiple lap races and give you much longer to submit your best time. You can race in these leagues when you are not connected and submit your results next time you have a data connection. See the Brennstoff League for an example: http://realracing.cloudcell.com/League.php?nId=6


Divisions

To allow for potentially large numbers of competitors, leagues have a tree structure. Within a division, drivers are initially randomly assigned to a group of 20 people from around the world. Each group has a "parent" group in the next division up, and two "child" groups in the next division down (so there is 1 group in the first division, 2 in the second, 4 in the third, 8 in the fourth and so on). At the end of each season, the top 4 drivers in each group move up into the parent group, and the bottom 8 move down into the two child groups (4 into each). People in higher divisions have earnt their position, so the competition toughens up the higher you get, with Division 1 being the toughest. The groups within each division (AA, AB, AC etc) do not indicate any rank - that is, AA is not better than AB - they are simply different groups at the same level.

League position earns a driver CR, Real Racing's "ranking currency" - the more CR you have, the higher you are in the global driver ranking. The more leagues you play in and the higher you finish in them the more CR you earn. A 10 minute league can see you play a championship in 40 minutes, and you could work your way up to worldwide number 1 within a few hours. However when you leave it for a while, you will slowly lose your league position and your global ranking. This way the competitions will stay fresh. The longer leagues are more ongoing and you can maintain your position with just a small time commitment. Use these to build up your Rank.

Hopefully this has been a good introduction to leagues, look out for a post with more details on CR coming soon!

Update 1.01

We submitted the first update for Real Racing last week, to add some enhancements we couldn't get in prior to launch and in response to some early feedback. This update should fix the crash bug where the app would exit after racing for a while. While our programmers were coding, our artists were also busy as some of the previously unbranded cars have picked up sponsorship from "Team Flight Control"!


The release notes are:

• Added dynamic environment shadows to all vehicles on screen
• Added Flight Control sponsorship to some of the unbranded vehicles
  
• Accelerometer is now turned off during menu screens to save power
• Device fades to power saving mode after 1 minute of inactivity
• Updated league splits are now based on best times through any given sector of a race
• Various improvements and bug fixes

Why a blog for a game?

You might be wondering why we've set up a blog for Firemint Real Racing. Well, it's a pretty deep game and introduces some new features, so there are bound to be questions along the way. This blog gives us the perfect place to write about some of the content and functionality in the game and the community site, in as much detail as needed. It also gives us a great way to share news about the game.

We've set up a Customer Support Community Site over at getsatisfaction.com. If you do run into any problems, have any questions or ideas, or would like to leave any other kind of feedback, that site is the perfect place as it will allow us to respond to each topic and you can track progress. In fact, we'll be using this blog to answer any common questions that appear on that site. Of course if you just have a comment on what you read here, you can post on this blog too!