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 To Do List

Release 7 just went out today and it pleases me very much to be able to put out those updates and I think it adds a lot of value to the site. Release 8 isn’t going to be as spectacular, but it includes some stepping stones that will allow us to build a better advanced search.

In Release 8 I need to allow clubs to specify the platform on which the club is based. Games like Forza and Gran Turismo won’t have any options to choose from, but Project CARS and the Formula 1 games will.

Right now the advanced search is useful for finding a club that has an upcoming race, but if you are searching for a Project CARS race there is no way to filter by PC, XBOX One, or PS4 and there needs to be. Updating the advanced search is not going to happen as part of Release 8 but as part of Release 9. The advanced search is going to be completely overhauled and will take a while to complete.

Another addition for Release 8 is to show the game and platform on the club home page. I haven’t figured out the exact placement for this yet. I’ll provide screenshots when the release date approaches.

Release 8 will also allow clubs to apply penalty points to racers in each race. Right now clubs can give out bonus points, but not take any away. These points will be taken into account for series and race standings and in all leaderboards.

The last item for Release 8 is to add number of races attended to the series leaderboard on the series details page.

To recap, Release 8 will include:

• # races attended column on series details leaderboard
• support for penalty points per race
• ability to specify the platform your club uses
• show game and platform on club home page
• show platform on club search and view all clubs(not advanced search, yet)

This is a fairly straight forward release and shouldn’t take too long to complete. I can’t give a hard release date yet, but I can estimate it should be ready before the end of August.

Thanks for reading and please share any feedback you have on the site. If you are ever clicking through the site and say to yourself, “I wish this site did this, it would be so much better,” then please contact me.

Release 7 Details

Release 7 is all about individual racer statistics. Until now we have had the leaderboards page and the racers pages, and they do provide some good data to pour over, but it doesn’t really let you evaluate a racer’s performance at-a-glance. The following post will detail all of the features of the new “Racer Detail” page.

The Racer Detail Page

Here is the racer detail page viewed in a dialog box. At the top left of the dialog you can see an icon with 4 arrows pointing outwards. Clicking that icon will break the page out of its dialog and open in a full web page. The full page view is good when studying the Average Finish chart which we will discuss later.

At the top of the page you can see the racer’s name or gamer ID and their status in the club they belong to.

Below that we have 3 dark blue boxes, Series Won, Races Won, and Attendance.

Series Won will show how many series this racer has won, rapidbushnell has never won a series 😦 In parenthesis you can see what the series winning percentage is. If rapidbushnell had won 5 series out of 10 that he attended, the percentage would be 50%.

Races Won is the same as Series Won, but showing data for individual races. rapidbushnell has won 2 races, which is only 2% of all the races he has attended.

The Attendance box is divided by Series and Races. Shown here, rapidbushnell attended at least 1 race in 23 distinct series held by this club, which is 85% of all series this club had scheduled. rapidbushnell has attended 85 races, which is 67% of all races ever held by this club. These numbers do not take into account races or series that are scheduled but have not yet been completed.

Graphs

The Winners Circle pie graph allows anyone to see how often this racer gets Gold, Silver, Bronze, DNF, and Non-Podium finishes. The large dark blue slice above represents the non-podium finishes. The tiny black slice represents DNFs. Each slice in the graph can be clicked and a list of races will populate in the table on the left. You can click into any of those races and see the full results of that race and the series standings up to that point. This graph really highlights the at-a-glance evaluation that we are striving for with this release. You can immediately  tell that rapidbushnell rarely podiums, but consistently finishes races to completion.

The Average Finish line graph shows the change in the racer’s overall average finish position after each race. The Y-axis shows the range of finish positions that this racer falls within. On average rapidbushnell finishes between 5th and 6th place, but closer to 6th. The X-axis shows the date MM/DD of each race and the actual position achieved. While studying this graph you can see that before his race on 6/1 his average finish position was around 5.85 and that on 6/1 he finished in 9th place which brought his average up to 5.9. This graph currently only looks at the past 60 days, but we have plans to expand the capabilities of this graph in the near future. Although rapidbushnell doesn’t finish low enough to really affect this graph in a major way, you can at-a-glance see where he is most likely to finish during a given race.

The racer detail page is built so that we can add new graphs when we find that they could be useful, or upon request. Thank you for reading this post and I hope it helps explain some things if they weren’t obvious. If you have further questions or suggestions just leave a comment or contact us: rcm@racingclubmanager.com

Release 6 Details

Details about Release 6 are here! This release contains some useful functionality for admins as well as non-admin users. I’ll tell you about the changes we are implementing for non-admin users first.

I have been using Racing Club Manager to track Forza 5 data since before the site had even launched. In that 8 months or so I have recorded quite a bit of data and I noticed that the Series page was loading slowly. My club only has 3 or 4 active series in a given month so the sluggishness had to be coming from trying to load up all of the inactive series at the same time as the active ones. The quickest fix I could think of was to only load the active series first and to wait until the viewer actually wanted to see the inactive series before starting to load them. I added a button labeled “Show Inactive Series…” at the bottom of the active series rows. This is only a temporary fix for this issue and I will address the loading times at another time in the near future. Honestly the Series page could use some renovations.

The admins are getting some functionality tweaks on the Manage Races screen. First off, I am replacing the “Available Racers,” mutli-select control with a scroll-able div element. The reason for this is that multi-select controls do not work on some(all?) mobile devices therefore eliminating the ability to record results from your phone/tablet. Recording results from your phone/tablet is going to be a pain no matter what interface I come up with, but at least now admins will have the choice. As a side-effect of the user interface change, there is a bonus feature. Admins can select multiple available racers without holding control or shift(shift now doesn’t work) and the order you select the racers in, will be their assigned finish position. Before this change you could select, for example: 5 racers and move them all over to the results, but they wouldn’t necessarily be assigned a finish position in the order that you selected them. This cool new side-effect should make recording results just a little bit easier on the admins.

I’m going to schedule this release for Friday July 10th at 11:00am Eastern US. It should be complete and tested before then, but July 4th weekend and the days leading up to it are always hectic, so better safe than sorry. I would hate to tell you the earlier and then have to push it back a week.

Thanks for reading and using the site! Just wait until I reveal what I have planned for Release 7. STATS! STATS! STATS!

Release 4 Endurance Support

Release 4 is finally out and I got all of the details for the changes that are included and there are quite a few.

Manage Races Screen

This screen shot of the updated Manage Races Screen is divided by a yellow vertical line.

On the left side I circled the 2 sections of interest. The larger circle shows two expanded drop-down lists. One list shows options for “Time” and “Distance”. If you choose Time, you get to specify how many hours and minutes the race should last. In the other drop-down list labeled “Results” you get to specify if the results should record how many laps, kilometers, meters, miles, or feet each racer competed during the race’s time span. The smaller circle on the left side of the screen shot shows where you record each racer’s distance and just left of the circle is a new field Best Lap.

On the right side of the screenshot you can see what it looks like if you choose Distance for race length. You cannot see it in this screen shot, but if you were to choose Distance for length of race, you would be able to record the Best Lap and Overall Time for each racer in the results table.

Race Details Screen

The race details screen now reflects the length of race in the header of the page. The left screen is 20 Laps and the right is a 1 hour 30 minute timed race.

Both sides show columns for Best Lap, while the Distance race shows a column for Overall time and the Timed race shows a column for Distance traveled.

Another small detail you may have noticed is the presence of the 2 buttons just below the orange Results bar. The button on the left, when clicked, will show you the results for this race. The button on the right will show you the series standings after this race. This page needed the horizontal space because of the new columns, so this is the current solution. This may evolve over time.

Leaderboard Screen

I was able to add a new stat to the Leaderboard screen. Podium % shows you how often a racer finishes 3rd or better within the given leaderboard parameters. This screenshot shows just February 2015, but could be expanded to show all of 2015 or any other month a race result had been recorded. If you have a lot of results recorded over the course of a year, you would be able to see if a racer’s podium % was getting better, worse or staying about the same.

Racers Screen

The Racers screen is like a leaderboard for the entire lifespan of the club, so it is a good place to determine overall podium % and another new stat called “Rival.” Rival shows you which other racer finishes 1 spot ahead of you the most. In the screenshot the first racer “Buddy7085” has a rival “B1G5TIG”. Imagine that B1G5TIG has finished just ahead of Buddy7085 on 6 races so far and other racers have only done it 3 or 4 times. Since B1G5TIG has done it the most he becomes the rival. The club I race with finds this stat really fun because it gives you someone to try your hardest against in-race. Whether you are trying to get rid of your current rival or trying to stay as someone else’s I feel like this is the first time an online statistic has impacted in-game play in a meaningful way, at least for our club.

I am really excited to be able to deliver these new enhancements and hopefully it adds to your game play experience. I will be prioritizing what small updates should go out next and also what bigger features should make it into Release 5. I will let everyone know as soon as I figure it out.

Thanks for reading!

Release #3 Qualifying/Starting Position Support

I’m about to go into detail about why this release took me so long to complete, so if you’re just looking for a quick update on what is included in release #3, then go to the Release History Page.  Although you will miss the sweet screen shots and boring explanations.

Initially I was working on a more intense implementation of qualifying, but after contemplating the ideas and doing some proof of concept work, I decided it would take too long and not be very useful for enough clubs to make it worth it. After scrapping that idea I was trying to think of the most straight-forward implementation for qualifying and decided that allowing admins to record starting position would be best for now.

There is a new button at the series level of the Manage Races Screen that allows you to turn being able to record the starting position on or off. It looks like a starting grid, next to the [+] button. Clicking the button will either show or hide the “Start” column in the race results.

If you turn ON the Start column for a series, you will now see each racer’s start position in the results. This extends to multi-class and team enabled series as you can see in the above screenshots.

I also added some new data columns on the Racers Screen. In the screenshot below you’ll see that I rearranged the columns to show Points Earned first, then the number of Races Attended. The new columns are Podiums and Average Start. Then the last column is Average Finish. This will allow you to see how well you perform by comparing your Average Start to you Average Finish. In the example below Buddy7085 qualifies in the 4th grid position on average, but is actually better during races and on average he finishes just outside of 3rd place.

In the future I would like to expand on this and create entire racer profiles that include charts and graphs that help to see how good a racer is at a glance.

Support for F1 2014

Racing Club Manager now supports F1 2014!

I actually had to ask someone who owned the game for the list of tracks because after a ton of Google searches I came up with no definitive list. Regardless of the method I used to acquire the tracks, we now support F1 2014 and we hope to get some F1 clubs using the site soon.

rFactor 2, Assetto Corsa, simraceway

I got carried away and added the tracks(that I could find) to rFactor 2, Assetto Corsa, and simraceway. The Racing Club Manager now supports 7 games with more to come. The full list is as follows:

• Forza 4 – 132 tracks including variations
• Forza 5 – 53 tracks including variations
• Project CARS – 52 tracks including variations
• iRacing – 99 tracks including variations
• rFactor 2 – 26 tracks including variations
• simraceway – 111 tracks including variations
• Assetto Corsa – 16 tracks including variations

The games I still need to support are GranTurismo 5 & 6, F1 2014, rFactor 1, and maybe others if anyone shows interest.