Update on Release 4

No sorry I don’t have a release date yet, but I do have a screenshot of the manage races screen to show you. I outlined the sections that have changed in red and orange below.

In red, it used to only allow you to specify a number of laps. Now we have the ability to define the length of a race as either a distance or a time. Time is recorded in hours and minutes and you also have the option to define what the unit of measure will be in the results. As people who run endurance races know, if you race for 2-3 hours you would record your results in feet or meters traveled over the course of that 2-3 hours. You can choose between laps, miles, feet, kilometers, and meters for units of measure and can record up to 3 decimal places for accuracy.

In the orange, I have added new fields to the results capture area. You can now record each racers best lap time and depending on whether your race is based on distance or time, you can record the total time taken to complete the distance or the total distance traveled in the amount of race time.

It seems we might be running out of room in the results capture area, so when we eventually add more fields we might have to change our user interface to allow more room and ease of use.

I still need to work on the race details and series details screens, as well as the club home pages to implement showing the data that can now be captured. We are still probably a few weeks away from release but I will update everyone on a more stable time frame soon.

Thanks for reading this and for choosing Racing Club Manager to assist you in your digital racing lives. As always any feedback or suggestions on how to make this site work better for you is greatly appreciated, so contact me ASAP.

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.

Livery Contest 2015

The first official Racing Club Manager livery contest. Here are the details.

Submissions must be posted as an image to twitter and @RacingClubMgr must be tagged in the post, or we won’t see it to count it.

Anything sent after May 1st will not be counted as the prize will be given on May 2nd.

The livery needs to be a Racing Club Manager themed racing livery and can be painted onto ANY CAR from ANY racing game that supports custom liveries.

We will share any submissions via twitter using #RCMLivery and here on wordpress under the category LiveryContest.

The winner will be chosen by me with the help of the Forza club I belong to, RDT3.

I will be using PayPal to send the $10 USD prize to the winner, so make sure you have your PayPal account set-up. If PayPal doesn’t work for you, I can make an exception to send the prize in Bitcoins.

I can’t wait to see all the entries! Good luck!

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.

Gran Turismo

I have added all tracks and variations(that I could find online) for Gran Turismo 5 and 6 to the Racing Club Manager. The site now supports 9 games and 660 tracks including 70 from GT5 and 100 from GT6.

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.