F1® Delta Time: Development Blog #2 — Staking, Racing and Balancing

4 min readApr 16, 2020

This is the second in a series of articles that aim to share information on F1® Delta Time’s development, shed light on what’s in the pipeline, and a look at how we’re looking to improve existing features.

We also try to share info regularly on Discord, too. So if you’re not there, head on over and join in.

Time Trial — Balancing

In response to player requests, last week we pushed out the Personal Best lap time. This means that your time on a specific track in the Time Trial will always be retained. We’ll be looking to improve this further by making it a weather specific PB in the future.

A lot of the focus this week has been about the balancing. A new patch on our internal staging is in testing that we’ll look to push out soon.

The change: an additional, overriding modifier in the form of the tyre type. In the current version, the tyre type would still dictate statistics based on the weather, with the weighting being heavier (positive or negative) based on the combination — tyre + weather.

An example of this, would be that a wet tyre may see a x2.5 stat modifier on Grip on the right track/weather combination. This can create too much of a gap between upper and lower tyres types. Especially for capped Tiers.

The base modifier dictates the effectiveness of the tyre now, with the current, remaining modifiers being tuned down (as they don’t have to carry the burden of the weather match). So you’re still untimely rewarded for having the right type, but the advantages are far more consistent with the rest of the stats (car, driver, etc…).

Staking and REV — Progress

Staking and REV contracts are going for audit this week.

A couple of design points on Staking — It’s designed with a manual withdrawal. Meaning that the REV earned during any period needs to be manually withdrawn, rather than it being sent automatically, incrementally, to your account wallet.

Secondly, Staking works based on weekly payout periods. Meaning that you will only be able to withdraw at the end of a weekly cycle, opposed to being able to withdraw any day. You’ll be able to withdraw any REV accrued from previous weeks, just not from an in-progress week.

Next week, we will be sharing the larger details on how the weighting works. We’ve shared before how the rarity dictates the potential earn for a car, but next is how that earn potential alters by different rarities being Staked.

The Staking UI is currently being integrated right now, too. Here’s a look at the in-progress:

Car owners will use a dedicated interface to manage their Staked tokens and REV withdrawal

Racing Game — Playables

We have been playing the second playable build, now including Spa-Francorchamps.

The first implementation of Spa. The long uphill section is a good way to test the acceleration feel

The latest iteration added braking. Wanting to keep it approachable, the initial version was purely focused on acceleration, easing off opposed to direct braking. But there were sections on Monaco for example (the heavy cornering leading to the tunnel), that left the player with too little agency.

Since adding braking, it already feels much better as a player. More control does increase the skill cap (especially when it comes to looking to hit perfect acceleration windows exiting corners), but it remains approachable.

The tight corners leading into the tunnel felt lacking before player controlled braking

Another point of review right now is track scaling. The version that we’ve built so far has the tracks at a 1:3 scale, but we need to be sure the length of the straights allow for cars to stretch their legs.

Next Up

Once the Time Trial has the balance patch, we’ll look for more feedback from the community. If the balancing is in the right place, we’ll then be adding the third Tier.

Any questions, give us a shout!

Have any questions for us? Hit us up on social media at Twitter or Facebook, or join us on the official F1® Delta Time Discord.

Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/dFBprfN

Twitter: https://twitter.com/F1DeltaTime

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