All Racing Club Manager is concerned about is the addition of a new track and the different layouts, of which there are 12 total. Although along with the new track, Forza Motorsport 6 includes some cool new race-inspired functionality and NASCAR vehicles. Hopefully some NASCAR themed leagues will start cropping up on Racing Club Manager and maybe I can participate 🙂
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 10 was successful and so now we look to Release 11 which is based around a user requested feature. Let’s dive in!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 5 is already in development and now it is time to share what I have in store for you guys. This release will be purely for helping admins manage club members more efficiently, there will be no updates that a casual club member could see.
Right now the only way to get to manage your members is by clicking a small icon when you are recording your results. Release 5 will add a new admins menu option. The manage club members page is completely renovated and matches the look of most other pages on the site.
This newly renovated page gives you some new features that will allow you to manage your members better. You can filter your members by active and non-active, by default non-active members will appear at the bottom of the list so they are out of the way. You can sort the list of members by the date they last showed up for a race. This is my favorite new feature because I always have a hard time figuring out who hasn’t shown up for a race in a while. When recording results you have to sift through a list of available racers and sometimes that list can become overwhelming. When a member hasn’t shown up for a long time, you can mark them inactive which will get them out of the way and make recording results quicker.
Removing a member is only available if that member has never recorded a result before. If we were to remove a member that had results it would alter the outcome of every race they attended.
This release is fairly easy to implement and should be ready to deploy by next week. If you’re following me on twitter you’ll get even more up-to-date information on this release. Thanks for reading!
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.
So if you read Race Details Screen Part 1 you would know I was having issues about what this screen would ultimately look like. I figured out a solution and am sharing the image below.
The issue I was having was with how I should show the results. When it was just the race results, it looked to left-heavy. I decided to put the race results and the current series standings to the right of the race results. This evens up the page and gives some more useful information. Racers usually know where they placed in any given race but they don’t always know where they stand in the current series. Doing it this ways eliminates having to resort to using a completely separate page or using a dialog.
I still have some work to do on this page before I call it “done.” I still need to add code so that it can be used as a dialog for other screens. I plan on using it as a dialog on the main Races screen. When you click a race name either under Upcoming Races or Recent Results, this Race Details screen will pop up in a dialog. Obviously for upcoming races there won’t be any results, so I could hide that tab altogether for those situations.
I have a few hours to go on this screen, but when it’s done and implemented everywhere then I can call the Club Profile page done. While playing around with the site I noticed that there is no way to add a new series via the manage series/races screen. I’m not sure how I overlooked that, but that is what I am working on after the club profile. Then as long as I don’t find anything else vital in my final round of testing, I should be able to publish Release #1 🙂
Thanks for reading!
First thing I want to say is regarding the weekend. I don’t do a lot of work on the site on weekends because I have a lot going on. I have a wife, 2 kids, and American Football that keep me super busy through the weekend. The point is, I don’t really make a lot of time to post blog entries and work on things for the Racing Club Manager site.
Now that that’s out of the way I can update everyone what I DID work on. I found some time yesterday to mess with Chart.js and it is fairly simple to implement and I created a test page that will ultimately become the Club Attendance graph.
Above is a screen shot of the attendance chart sample. It shows 2 lines where each line represents a different game that this club has racers attending. The first implementation of this chart will only include 1 line, but in a later release I will implement multiple lines.
Some good first impressions of Chart.js are that it is beautiful, fast and easy to work with. I did notice some negative things like labeling each axis isn’t included so I’ll have to do that myself. They let you label the data like 10/15-10/21 and from 0-20 and it may be obvious what those values represent, but what if it isn’t obvious. I would want to label the X-axis “Race Dates” and the Y-axis “Attendees.” Another negative, is that this chart will not work with browsers that don’t support <canvas>. Hopefully no one is using a browser that old.(<= IE 8) And the last negative thing is that when you hover over a data point, there is a key that pops up and tells you the exact numbers, but no where can you write that blue = “Forza 4” and gray = “Forza 5” or whatever game it may be.
Overall I think that Chart,js is the way to go and the negative things are things I can implement myself anyways, so it’s not a deal breaker.
It only took me around an hour to download, install, and implement this sample which is amazing. Now all I have to do is make it dynamic to each club and base it off the data.
Thanks for reading!
I’m getting to the point where I’m close to deploying the first release for the Racing Club Manager. I thought I should inform anyone that is actually paying attention what my release plans are. Instead of releasing the ENTIRE site at once in a completed state, I am going to deploy multiple releases over time. This approach allows me to get features of the site out faster with less bugs. The first release contains the following features:
Race Management
Race management includes things like setting up series, scheduling races, inputting results, managing racers, and points templates.
Club Profile
Your club profile includes the name of your club, your club personality, whether or not you are currently accepting requests to join, and the ability to write a description or any information people should know about your club.
This release is like the bare bones of the site. It includes everything you would need to start your club, schedule races and record the results.
Right now we don’t support a club having more than 1 game associated, so future releases will get us to the point where just because say Forza 6 comes out, you won’t have to start a whole new club to track those results. It will be a seamless transition with no extra set-up required.
Another future release will be the ability to track results where your racing series requires racers to be on a team. I know team racing and team scoring should be a point of emphasis and we will be working toward implementing the best solution possible. We just don’t know what that is yet and will be working on it in the near future.
I’m sure lots of feedback will be coming in and we will be able to create a FAQ that is easily searchable.
Another release is going to have to be filtering for a lot of features. Searching for a club will become impossible after a while unless we implement some filtering options. Also, the all races completed view can become unruly after just a few months of racing.
If you are reading this and think of anything else that I might be missing, be sure to contact me or leave a comment and I’ll prioritize it and get it done.
Thanks for reading!
Racing Club Manager 