Release #2 Teams and Multi-Class Support

Release #2 is LIVE! and I’m here to update you on the changes that were made. I posted an update on January 30th, that explains the admin side of creating teams. You can find that post here. Since that part was covered I’ll be covering Multi-Class and output.

Above is an image of the Manage Races screen. You can see that we are editing a race in a multi-class series. I have added to the results 2 racers from the Prototype 1 class and 1 racer from the GTS class. If I add the selected racer from the left who is in class GT3, he should automatically be assigned position 1 for that class. This functionality should help reduce time when entering multi-class results. Just be careful when removing racers because when you add again it may not have the correct default position. I plan on improving that issue in the future, but it seems like a fringe case to me.

This image is the Race Details screen, on the left are results from a team-enabled race and on the right are results from a multi-class race. For team results you’ll see normal race results, but we’ve added a way to see your bonus points and the real finish position. You can also see your individual series standings and the change since the previous race. Below that are the team race results and team series standings. For multi-class results we break up the individual results into the classes and to the right of that we calculate the overall series standings.

On a side note, in the above-left image you can see that I re-labeled the Series Description and Race Description sections to better reflect what you should see when you click to expand those areas.

There are some things I know I need to work on soon and I would like to list them here to hopefully head off some questions.

• Right now the teams do not span multiple series. Once a series ends, the data aggregation for the team ends. I would like to be able to make teams persist as long as the club wants, and make that happen in a dynamic way. It’s kind of a tall order but I have some ideas and will come up with the best way before I start coding.
• The team leaderboard that I have implemented is useful, but I would like to expand on the data output. I’m thinking of adding a stats page or maybe a special area to the club home page. We could be showing stats like, most successful team, and it could link to the series that team raced in. Also, on the Racers screen it would be cool to show the teams that each racer is or had been a member of, or which class they participated in the most.

What is Next?

Funny you should ask… The next release will involve adding support for qualifying. I haven’t worked out all the details yet, but will be working with a GranTurismo racing league to nail down the particulars. At a minimum you will be able to define where a racer qualified for each race and it will show their qualifying position in the results. This release will probably expand and depending on what actually goes into the release it could be released as early as the first weekend in March or as late as April 4th.

After that I would like to work on an update to allow gathering of additional stats for endurance racing. Once that gets published there won’t be too many other vital pieces of data to be collected and more work can go into output, reports, searches, etc.

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Support for Teams Update

Wow it’s been a while since I posted anything, but I just haven’t had any major site updates since launch. I have fixed and tweaked a few things here and there, but nothing major to report. If you don’t follow me on twitter and you want more contact about the site and what we’re up to, follow @RacingClubMgr. We post almost every day.

I have been working on and off to get support for teams and multi-class racing into the site and I now finally have something to show you guys.

This first image is the dialog that you are going to get when you click “Add New Series” on the manage races screen. You will now be able to name the series and give the series a type before creating it. The types are Standard, Multi-Class, and Teams. I think the types are pretty self explanatory, so I won’t go through them. Once you click the Add button, the dialog will close and the Manage Races screen will refresh the list and you should see your new series.
The second image shows the Manage Races screen with some new features added. Next to the Points drop-down, you can see a link “Edit Type/Edit Teams” Teams need to be defined for each series, because teams can change from series to series, but should remain the same for each race in a given series. If your club does things differently, CONTACT ME and we’ll come up with a solution together.

The third image is what you would see when you click the “Edit Type/Edit Teams” link. On this dialog you can change your series type or edit teams.

Clicking “Edit Teams” gets you to this screen. This screen allows you to add new teams, remove teams or edit the name and members of existing teams. Right now this screen is set-up so that a racer can only be a part of 1 team per series. I couldn’t think of a reason to allow anyone to be on multiple teams for a given series.

I am about 75% done with the team support and will be moving on to multi-class support next. Apart from a few things left to do on the screens I am showing you here, I still need to come up with the results output for team races and series before I can move onto mutli-class support.

LAUNCH!

It’s official, head over to www.racingclubmanager.com to create your club and start recording data. I can import your old data if you provide it to me, free of charge!

Release #2 Features

I have started developing what is going to be in release #2 and have some updates for everyone. First of all, I will be publishing the Racing Club Manager site by the end of next week. January 16th at the latest.

The features that will be in release #2 include the ability to enter results for multi-class and team enabled races. Enabling that will impact the results outputs for each race, series, and the leader boards so work will need to be done to display results correctly.

A minor change that I have already developed and will be available in Release #1 is seeing ties in the series standings and leader boards. Obviously it’s possible to end up with the same amount of points as another racer by the conclusion of a series so I needed to be able to show those ties. Below is a screenshot of the series standings on a race detail screen showing that the final standings ended with racers having the same result.

Advanced Search

I worked on the Advanced Search screen the past couple of days and this is what I came up with.

This is the Advanced Search Screen

There is much more that I would like to do with this screen and the functionality but this will work for now. Right now you can say that you want to find a club that plays <Select a Game> that is holding a race between <# o’clock> and <# o’clock> within the next <# of days>. This is already a pretty powerful tool once clubs start joining and adding races. This will only show clubs that are available to join, so if you search a club that plays your game and you are available to race between 8PM and 11PM, you will be able to see if any clubs exist and ask them if you can join.

In the future I would like to set up something called “Club  Match” and we will guide a user through the process of finding a club. We will ask you what days and times you are available and for which games. You will be able to select the club personalities that most resonate with your style of racing. You will be able to filters by average number of racers that show up to races. Experienced racers might want to race with a club that usually has a full field, while beginners might want a more relaxed open field. I’m sure there are other metrics that will present themselves to me by the time I implement that new functionality, but those are the ones that I am thinking of right now.

I believe that this will improve the value of the site exponentially. I don’t know of any other site that does what I am planning to do and just think of what it will do for being able to find clean races in new games and getting connected right away. Finding clubs that play when you do and have a similar personality as you has to be the hardest part about getting into and staying into games.

Thanks for reading!