Livery Contest 2016 Details

Any Forza Game, Any Car, Fantasy, Realistic… It doesn’t matter. This year we want to encourage Forza painters to come up with their own versions of what a Racing Club Manager livery would look like. Our primary colors are dark blue, orange, white but that doesn’t mean you absolutely need to use those colors in your livery. Think, “What scheme will make my livery stand out from the rest?” and go from there. Last year‘s winner SCS Skreamies won because he had a super clean, realistic livery. Although we are encouraging you to think outside the box this year, that doesn’t mean that a really great clean racing livery cannot get the win.

This year’s livery contest is going to be Forza-based since every one of last year’s entries came from Forza painters and the top 9 clubs on racingclubmanager.com are Forza clubs. So you could consider this sort of a Forza appreciation event.

Prize

The winner of the contest will receive $10 USD via PayPal and will ultimately be judged by me, the creator of Racing Club Manager. I will however hold a fan vote and take the fan’s votes and comments into consideration before making my final decision.

Entry Submission

Entries can be submitted to Twitter, Facebook, or Reddit by May 6th 2016. That gives everyone 8 weeks to come up with an idea and execute it. Monday May 9th I will declare a winner and send the money via PAYPAL so make sure you’re set up to receive money.

Past Entries & Other Samples

Below are the entries from last year and some other liveries I have made in Forza just to get the creative juices flowing.

Last year’s winner SCS Skreamies

Another really great one from last year by Forza_ElMutem

This one I made for the first RDUX Forza 6 series

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Release 11 To Do List

Release 10 was successful and so now we look to Release 11 which is based around a user requested feature. Let’s dive in!

• Ability to drop specific races from calculating final series results

As an admin you will be able to toggle each race on/off. If turned off those results will not be calculated into the series results leaderboard. Messages will be displayed to users that view the results of these races, notifying them that the results will not be counted.

This is an easy change but affects a lot of screens throughout the site and will take a significant amount of time to complete.

• Overhaul Series screen

I really hate the current series screen and it takes too long to load with the data that is shown.

I haven’t fully figured out what the end result will be, but I’m thinking tiles or some sort of large block that is mobile friendly.

Turnaround is typically a month so you can expect this release to be publish around April 8th. Obviously if I finish early or run into any trouble I’ll keep everyone updated on twitter.

Also, I am working on another Racing Club Manager livery contest and will have a blog post about that soon. CASH PRIZE! stay tuned everyone.

Project CARS Tracks I missed :(

Racing Club Manager supports a lot of racing games and it is certainly possible that an update gets missed here and there. If someone speaks up I’ll act immediately. Right now Forza is receiving a lot attention from current and new clubs so it makes sense for Forza updates to be heavily on the radar. That being said, here is support for 2 Project CARS tracks that I missed.

First up is a classic French track “Rouen Les Essarts” which has 2 configurations, GP and Short.

 

Lastly is “Bannochbrae” a Scottish fantasy track with a single layout that looks gorgeous.

Again, sorry for the misstep and if you notice I didn’t post about a track release send me an e-mail: rcm@racingclubmanager.com

Forza 6 VIR Track Support

Forza 6 announced along with the Porsche expansion that they have added Virginia International Raceway. That means Racing Club Manager is also adding support for VIR and the 7 ribbons. VIR is only available along with the purchase of the Porsche expansion($19.99 USD) which is unfortunate but with 21 total possible configurations and a bunch of great cars, it is definitely worth the money.

Release 10 Details

I know, I know…. it’s been over 2 months since my last release. I’d like to try and churn them out every month depending on the complexity of the change but my time has been divided a lot. Well Release 10 is ready to deploy, just finishing up some testing now.

The first update is the tabbed design on the Series Details screen. In Release 9 I added this feature for team enabled series which allowed drivers that aren’t on a team to be included in the results and to have their own tab in the results. In that release I only added the functionality to the Race Details screen and now it’s coming to the Series Details.

Another update in this release is to the Edit Series Type dialog. This dialog is where you select whether the series can use teams or contains more than 1 class of car. The dialog used to have a drop-down menu which is terrible for mobile users. Now that I’ve implemented these big buttons, mobile users will find it friendlier. Also when you click a button it automatically saves the type, thus eliminating an unneeded step in the process.

The last new feature in this release is related to the editing of points templates. Right now when you add a custom points template, save it, and close the dialog the template that is set for the series you are editing is visually cleared. That would make it so you could not pass validation on save of the series, until a points template was selected. That worked fine but it was not the best solution. Now with Release 10 when you add/edit a points template and close the dialog, the site will ask you if you want to use the template you just added/edited in the series you are editing. If you choose the yes response then the template will be set for that series and visually will be selected for you. I don’t think anyone had problems with this or at least nobody ever vocalized it but I knew I needed to improve that workflow. Spoiler Alert: a future release will include being able to set a default points template so when you create a new series the template will already be set for you.

I wanted to jam some more of these little tweaks into this release but I was already dragging it out too long. A feature request from a user came in and I decided it was important enough to cinch up this release and start working on the request. I’ll have another post soon after this release is published detailing what I’m working on for release 11.

As always, thanks so much for reading these posts and using the site.

Release 9 Details

Release 9 is finally ready to be deployed. Here is a rundown of the features/updates we are pushing out.

 

Team Enabled Series Output

This change was suggested by Corn Wolf Gaming and it’s a good one. For series that use teams, there are now 3 tabs in the results output.

• Individuals – This view is your basic race results table. Shows everyone in the position they finished.
• Privateers – This is the new view. Everyone that was in the race but is not on a team will show here.
• Teams – Here we list the teams that were in this race and how many points were earned by tallying each racer’s points that are on said team.

Besides the addition of the Privateers view, this was always available on the race results screen. Now it is displayed in a tabbed menu instead of shown all at the same time, which was clunky.

 

Leaderboard Highlighting

This change was something I thought up. After each month of racing I write up a summary and list some stats that aren’t compiled already by the web site. I like to go through the leaderboard and see a racer’s progress month to month. Since racer’s typically finish in a different spot each month it was difficult to make the comparison’s because I had to look hard to find where that racer was on each view. Now with just a click we highlight a specific racer’s row and when you change your leaderboard filter’s that racer stays highlighted as long as they are on the board for that view. Click the row again to make the highlight disappear. Simple change, potentially big impact for stat nerds like me.

 

Duplicate Member Prevention

This is one of those boring updates. All I added was a check to see if the racer already exists as part of your club before they can send a request to join. I ran into this issue a lot when Forza 6 came out. I created a new club for FM6 then added all of the club members I thought would be getting the game. Then a few of them put in a request to join the club even though I already added them. Not a huge problem, but one that I thought I could eliminate.

 

I didn’t have a chance to code an update I talked about in my post “Release 9 To Do List.” It was a feature that would cut down on the number of clicks between setting the type of a series(Teams/Multi-Class) and actually adding racers to their teams or classes. I’ll pick it up again for release 10.

 

Thanks for reading!

Release 9 To Do List

Release 8 looks to have been a success thus far, but I am always looking to improve on the site and have come up with a new list of “To Dos” for Release 9 which I hope to complete by mid November.

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Tweak to Avg Finish Chart on Racer Detail screen

Right now we look back 60 days and try to get the avg finish position and then start building the graph. Well with new clubs you won’t have 60 days worth of data, but you might still have enough data to show on the graph. This update will scale the graph based on how much data you have. As long as you have at least 4 result sets a graph will be drawn. The graph will only show up to 60 days worth of data starting from the date of your most recent race.

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Prevent admins from accidentally adding same member multiple times and Prevent members from asking to join if they are already a member

I don’t know about all the other clubs but I run into issues with this all of the time. It would be nice to get a message saying that this member already exists in the club so that I don’t accidentally add them twice. Sometimes you just forget if you’ve added the new guys yet or not.

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After series type has been selected(Teams, Multi-Class) allow admins to skip right to editing team/class members to save them a step in the process.

This issue was also brought up by me and I am finally deciding to address it. Right now when you have a Teams or Multi-class series, when you want to edit the members of the team/class you need to click through the Edit Series Type screen first. Although the ability to change the series type is needed, we don’t need to go through that step every time. After this update, if you have selected Teams or Multi-class as your series type, you will go straight to the edit team/class members screen and will have the option to change the series type from there if needed.

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Add ability to highlight a racer on club leaderboard, so that when you toggle through the months/years it is easier to spot a specific racer.

This should prove to be useful. Racing Club Manager can’t provide ALL the reports a club could ever want, so being able to highlight a racer’s row in the leaderboards will help you find that racer when changing the date range of the leaderboards. Sometimes I like to see how one specific person has been evolving over the life of the club and this will help me do that quicker.

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Although this seems like kind of a boring release, I do believe that it will help with the sites overall functionality and support the goal of being easy to use. A member of a club also had some suggestions that we will be implementing once we figure out the final requirements. That might push the release back further than mid November. If that’s the case then I will try to break up the releases and deploy anything I’ve already finished before starting things that might take a long time.

Release 8 Details

Hello all, it has been quite a while since I released a site update. In this blog post I am going to show some screen shots and take you through the details of Release 8.

The first thing to take notice of is the new login screen. I made it bigger to accommodate mobile users. it’s not often that I login on my phone, usually to review a join request, but this new UI should make it a little bit less annoying. 

The biggest focus of this release was to allow clubs to assign a platform so that people who are looking for a club to race with will know if you are on PC, Playstation or XBOX. Below you’ll see the Admin Club Profile screen where you can now assign a platform. The choices are PC, Playstation 3, Playstation 4, XBOX 360, XBOX One. As part of the release I am auto-assigning a platform where a game only exists on one platform. Forza Horizon 2 and Project CARS clubs will have to log in and assign it on their own since those games exist on multiple platforms.

Below, you can see some screen shots where I have implemented showing the platform your club uses. To save space on the screen I decided to use icons instead of text.

The second focus of this release was allowing clubs to record penalty points per race. Penalty points can be recorded when filling out the results for a race. Now, if there is a major incident or rules violation clubs can specify a number of points to remove from a player for a given race. In favor of full disclosure I encourage clubs to include why the penalty points were given in the post-race write-up.

In addition to the platform and penalty points changes there were updates made to leaderboards. I added a column that shows the number of races attended to the main club leaderboard and the leaderboards on the series detail screen. Since I am showing the final number of points a racer received in a series, it made sense to show how many races it took for the racer to get there.

Thank you all for taking the time to read this and if you ever have questions, comments, or suggestions on ways to improve the site, contact me any time on any of the social media platforms and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

Project CARS Aston Martin Track Expansion

Project CARS recently released an expansion pack including a few Aston Martins and a new race location. The new location is Mojave and includes 5 multiplayer layouts. The large testing oval is not a multiplayer layout but you do get to drive up the steep banks on a few of the maps. The layouts were added to racingclubmanager.com today, so schedule some future races now!

Spa 24 Hour Cancer Research Race

Corn Wolf Gaming

I have been banging on about this for a while so I will not take too long on this one, I will also post the video I have done at the end of this which says it all anyway and I have a little heart to heart with my subscribers.

So on the 5th September 2015 @ 1500 BST the chequered flag will drop on the first ever 24 Hour Race @ Spa on Forza 5 for Cancer research. The whole event will be shown on Twitch and you can donate there.

For lobby stability there will be 13 teams on track at once and up to 12 drivers per team with each driver doing 2 hour stints.

If you want to enter a team submit it here: http://forums.theultimateracingnetwork.com/viewforum.php?f=138&sid=f51aa833c4af4cc7075d49ee70ce46a7

If you wish to donate please donate here: https://www.justgiving.com/Stella-Stig

Thanks and enjoy the video.

Corn Wolf

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