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.

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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 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.

Update for Review Join Requests

Hello all,

We released an update to the Review Join Requests screen for admins. This update allows an admin that is approving or denying a request to join whether or not they wish to use their e-mail address when notifying the requestor of the admins decision.

Before this update, we always sent from rcm@racingclubmanager.com and when the requestor hit reply, the e-mail got sent back to us. Now when you send your decision, you decide if you want the reply to go back to us(gets deleted) or comes back to you(open dialog, yay!)

Mostly this was implemented so that when you approve a request, you can share a dialog with the requestor. I could also see where admins might want their e-mail address to stay private and would want the requestor to go through other channels to communicate. I hope this is helpful!

By the way, we are still working on Release #3 – Ability to define a racers starting/qualifying position. The release is coming along well. The admin functions are complete, but the UI for the general public is still being worked on. This release should lead to some really cool future releases for “racer profiles.”

If you have questions or comments, we would love to hear them.

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.

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.