Longford 1967 – Assetto Corsa

Tiago Lima added a stunning rendition of Longford 1967 to Assetto Corsa. Check out this video and see more screenshots on the Race Department page.

Assetto Corsa Tracks Added

These tracks are not new to Assetto Corsa, but they are newly supported by Racing Club Manager. I add to the list of Assetto Corsa tracks today by including:

• Aosta Grand Prix
• BRNO Circuit
• Cadwell Park Circuit
• Zolder 1967
• Eastern Creek(Gardner GP, Amaroo, Brabham, Druitt)

There haven’t been any consistent AC users on racingclubmanager.com up to this point but I was asked on twitter to add these mod tracks. As always I will add new tracks to games as they are released but a few of the sim racers out there allow mod tracks and there is no way that I’ll be able to keep tabs on all of the releases so I rely on you guys to inform me

I am entertaining the idea of allowing club/league admins to enter custom track names, but if I do implement that feature I want to do it in a way that all tracks added become consistent. We don’t want 10 different versions and spellings of “Nordschleife” out there and even if I allow the input tracks to only be seen by the club that entered it, that just increases the database size. I’m busy at the moment with #RCMRelease12 and that alone is a massive undertaking so this will need to take a back seat for now. I assure you that when I do implement this feature it will be spectacular.

Thanks for reading!

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New MXGP 2 Track DLC

Today I added support for the 2 new DLC tracks for the Motocross game MXGP 2. Currently no clubs exist for this game on Racing Club Manager but the game looks really cool and hopefully someone will want to start a league and RCM will be there for them.

Here is the DLC release trailer…

Update: Live Race Flags

This is not Release 12, however this is a substantial update that deserves it’s own post. I have been working with Forza Touring Association on implementing a Live Race Flags system. Basically this means that if you are racing, an admin will be throwing out caution flags that will update in about a second for everyone that is viewing the race flags screen on Racing Club Manager site. Racers can have their phones set up in view of their TV screen or have the page up on their computer screen if it is in view of their racing rig, and everyone will know to ease up at essentially the same time. Now let’s see how you can use race flags and where to go on the site to see everything…

Admins

Admins can get to the screen that allows you to set flags for a race by opening the options menu and clicking “Flags.” If this screen doesn’t look familiar to you, this is the screen where you setup scheduling and enter results for a race. I included an information button on the menu for users that may not read this and are wondering what this means for them.

After you click the “Flags” menu option you will redirect to the Admin Flags screen. Right now Racing Club Manager supports 5 flags. From left to right: Warmup, Green, Yellow, Red, Finish. By clicking a flag color, it changes what your racers are going to see. I know that most flag admins are probably going to be racing as well, so I added some keyboard controls to hopefully make someone’s life a little easier. A club can have as many people controlling the flags as they wish, but you have to have an admin account with permission(0 or 1) in order to have access to this screen. This screen could be a little more presentable, but I went with function over form for now.

Racers

Racers can easily get to the screen that shows them what flag is currently active. I do stress though that if you are on a mobile phone, make sure your WIFI is on and that your screen won’t dim or lock during the race or else you won’t see the flags. I mention WIFI because we are making a server request every 1000 milliseconds to check what the current flag is and that could eat up a lot of data. I wouldn’t worry about it if your ISP data caps your home line, but for mobile plans the data allowances and overages are sometimes outrageous. Just a fair warning 🙂

You can get to the Live Flags screen on your club home page near the “Next Race” area.

You can also get there by viewing the Race Details screen for any race.

This is what you will see on the Live Flags screen… I didn’t include the normal site navigation here so that the flag takes up more room on the screen, just use the back button on your browser to get out of Live Flags. In this example, we are in warmup.

Club Slug Update

I also pushed out an update that allows your club members to easily see what your club slug is. Now on the club home page next to the game and platform you will see the short URL for the club. In this example RDUX has a short URL “clbmgr.com/RDUX” but you could also use “racingclubmanager.com/RDUX”

That’s it for now, let me know what you think of this update or if you plan on using Live Race Flags. Don’t worry I haven’t forgot about or stopped working on Release 12, just needed to get this out there. Thanks for reading!

Now Supporting MXGP 2

MXGP 2, Motocross racing game was released in the UK today and is available on PC, Playstation 4 and Xbox One. America is seeing a delayed release but we are supporting the game and the 18 FIM Motocross World Championship circuits.

I haven’t seen a lot of the game yet, only trailers but it looks beautiful and I like that it seems down to earth, rather than having a bunch of insane fantasy tracks.

One potential league, MX Online Racing has already expressed interest in using Racing Club Manager to help schedule races and keep results. Hopefully it takes off and becomes a legendary game for motocross racing. Enjoy!

Support for Assetto Corsa’s Black Cat County

Although Racing Club Manager doesn’t have any currently active Assetto Corsa clubs, I still want to keep up with the track lists when I catch wind of a new release. With AC’s new massive update, v1.5 they included a new fantasy track called “Black Cat County.”

The new track has 3 variations: short, intermediate, and long. I’ll let the dev blog describe the environment…

…until now the simulation did not include a proper road environment, an ideal scenario for the simple pleasure of driving, something that people are especially looking for while driving road cars and grand-tourers.

One of the car manufacturers that use Assetto Corsa for promotional, training and R&D activities has noticed the same, and last winter requested our team to create a fictional road environment with the purpose of taking advantage of the driving feeling granted by the simulation, just for the sheer enjoyment of driving without the need to learn and practice on a track, aimed at people who are not yet familiar with driving on racing circuits.

I also added some tracks I missed: Barcelona, Zandvoort, and Brands Hatch.

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

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!