Some of you may have hoped for a Christmas present of some sort from the P&G team and most of you will probably be wondering by now why it is taking so long to produce the next installment of this mod (others will already have understood that IT projects are done 'when they are done' ...).

Without going into too much detail - which our 3D people who are making their work a jealously guarded secret until the finished product is ready to be  revealed in all its beauty would not allow anyway - we can say that getting things 100% correct is quite a time-consuming business. Getting things right obviously requires a lot of research and 3D modelling in the case of new cars created from scratch, but we are forced to do a lot of tinkering with existing models and car shapes as well.

There is an incorrect roofline to be remodelled on one car, wheel arches to be cut out on another one, and a third car may be too narrow and require widening and a fourth one be too wide. And then there are things like incorrect ride height, finding out whether this is a graphics issue only or whether it is physics related, and cars suddenly looking strange once they are set up with historically correct data.

In a later post, we may bore you with screenshots of our modellers' work showing these detailed improvements. But for now let's focus on the big picture - here's a preview of things to come, something you can definitely look forward to for the coming year (or whenever it's done  ):

Let's leave it at that for the moment ...

We all wish you a happy 2010 and we promise that you have some massive sim-racing duels to look forward to!

The P&G Team

For the people in our development team, beta-testing, editing and research often leave hardly any time at all for actually driving. Some claim even to prefer tinkering to driving, and to drive exclusively off-line, even when online ;) Others are active in leagues though, such as the Italian-based ROTW Championship:

RacingOnTheWeb website

If you are wondering where to make the most of your racing skills, check out the list of leagues on our official forum, where you can also find contact info of the league admins for any other questions or doubts you might have:

Official GTLWorkshop forums, "anyone needs a racer" section

On the other hand, if you're more into casual "pickup" racing, then we strongly recommend to try out the always online, always stable Gamers' Crib servers. Good racers, nice selection of cars, helpful administrator. Check them here:

Gamers' Crib server thread
Or, if you need more information, send a PM to the servers admin Mogget

Most of all, though, please let us know when and where you drive P&G! Are you in a league which isn't yet on our list, do you look for open servers, are you strictly racing offline? Hit the "comments" button and tell us about your experiences - as we are preparing for v3, we'd like to collect some information on where racers can meet and do what they want to do most - race!

Speaking of v3, work is progressing on many fronts simultaneously. That means that many more cars are much closer to completion than they were when we last updated this blog, but that none are completed. We will nevertheless show you some shots of Capris battling it out on an obscure Antipodean circuit, just in case you were getting the impression v3 would have nothing but Porsches.

Just a quick word to let you know that we continue working behind the scenes. The hacking attack season seems to be over, we have started beta-testing v3 cars which is a time-consuming and sometimes quite boring process, involving countless laps alone on a circuit, with regularity rather than outright speed the priority, and regularly taking readings of tyre temperature, tyre wear etc. - it is doing Luca Badoer's work rather than Felipe Massa's. Still one could think of worse ways to spend an evening ... ;)

As in v2, you will get many more versions of the original GTL cars. Quite a lot of them already have their physics and skins in an advanced beta stage, and you can expect to be treated to some screenshots and articles on these cars' evolution over the coming weeks.

Here are some shots from recent betatests at Spa. They are all Porsches, but we will start featuring other marques soon!

Of course, not everything is going to plan all the time ...