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:
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.
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.
To support The Assetto Corsa Dream Pack 1, which is available to pre-order now, we have added the 3 Nurburgring track variations. Start scheduling your races now!
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.
Here’s the story… I was working on the site and I noticed that I need some delete functions for series and races. It is possible that you could accidentally create a series or a race and want to delete it, so I proceeded to provide this feature because I knew it would be useful and quick to implement. After I coded it, I wanted to test it and I did and it seemed to work great. Little did I know I was deleting results for EVERY CLUB!!!
This is the part where you shouldn’t panic. I take backups regularly so I had a recent one I could pull the results from and add back to my current database that has no results now. I knew I wouldn’t have every piece of data from the results, but most would be there and I could just cycle through my races and see which ones were missing data.
I take pictures of all the Forza finish screens, so I have a second form of backup to pull from. This would have been a lot bigger SNAFU if it wasn’t just my club’s data, but even then I would have backups taken more often, so maybe I would lose data for 24 hours or so. 24 hours of data shouldn’t be a lot of data per club. Say I lose all the results for all clubs and there are 1,000 clubs but I restore all the data except the race those 1,000 clubs ran last night. 1,000 clubs will have to enter 1 nights worth of data. It’s a free site, I’m one guy, I think it’s a pretty fair deal.
Honestly I don’t expect this to happen to the production environment anyways. These things will be caught by me in development. I hope no one is panicking, because I’m not.
Yesterday I finished up removing links to features that won’t go in Release #1 and I also re-factored the Contact screen because it was too ambitious. Now the contact page is just a simple form, fill out your name, e-mail address and a message, that’s it.
This is the contact page.
To the left is the Contact screen. See? Super simple, all it needs to be.
After working on this contact page, I started mocking up the Club Profile screen.
The club profile is going to change almost immediately after the 1st release because I need to make sure that when a club goes from game to game to game that their club doesn’t get segmented and it should be easy to just say let me see everything that this club has ever done, no matter what game. So in the near future the Club Profile will need to include things like a list of racing games that this club is involved in with links to their stats pages. There will be charts/graphs that layer the game data on it so you can compare. For instance, this version of the Club Profile that will be released in Release #1, is going to have a graph for “Attendance Trends.” It is a line graph that plots how many racers showed up for the last 5-10 races, so you can easily see how your attendance is. With the new Club Profile, we will want to see how the club’s attendance is across all active racing games. That means changing the graph to have 2 or more different colored lines plotted so it will be easy to compare.
This is the mock-up for the Club Profile
To the right is the mock-up for the Release #1 version of the Club Profile. Featured prominently at the top left is the club’s name.(possibly logo in the future) Directly under that is a check box where you can say that this is your default club, which lets you skip right to this page when you go to the Racing Club Manager. Hooray for less clicks! Under the check box is an Ask to Join link, where interested racers can ask you to join the club.
On the right side of the screen is the date and time of the next race and a link to it’s details. The races screen shows more of the upcoming races so you can plan accordingly, this is just for quick checking.
Below all of that is a line where we want to show some quick information that non-members might want to see before asking to join. The Club Personality says a lot about how you operate your club. The personalities that you can choose from right now are Hardcore, Casual, Fun, Serious, Private, Open, New, Creative, Drifting, Weird. Scroll to the bottom for explanations of these personalities…
Next to personality is the date you last held a race. This is important to potential joiners because maybe this club hasn’t raced for 6 months but is still listed as Open or New. I am going to try and deactivate clubs like that, but just in-case it hasn’t been deactivated, you will want to know.
To the right is the number of members, or should I say active members. At a glance it would be nice to know if there are 5 or 100 members. If there are 100 active members maybe you’ll get lost in the shuffle or maybe that’s exactly what you’re looking for. Some people might think I don’t want to be in a club with only 5 members because I want to race in full lobbies so the club I am looking for needs to have around 20-30 members. Active members doesn’t mean active every race. It’s best used for a situation like RacerX only shows up in the winter because he/she is away every summer. You would want to deactivate RacerX until they are ready to race again.
Beneath that row are 2 collapse-able rows. The top row is the Club Description or welcome message. You want to tell potential joiners what you club is all about and what your restrictions or schedule is typically like. You can include images as well.
The second collapse-able row is the Attendance Trends for this club, which I explain above. It’s a line graph that shows how many racers were recorded as showing up to the past few racers. I haven’t actually tried making this graph yet, but I am intrigued by Chart.js and I want to attempt to implement it here and maybe a few other places in the future. It seems pretty straight forward so I’m going for it.
Is 1100+ words a long read? Thanks for reading!
Personality Descriptions
Hardcore would be for clubs that keep meticulous stats and have very specific restrictions and use bonus points.
Casual just means that you organize and schedule races on the fly and maybe you don’t have a very strict schedule, or the races aren’t tense.
Fun is just that, fun. Maybe you schedule races with SUVs or vans and the point is to not tip over or something. Maybe you play a lot of games like soccer or tag.
Serious is for not messing around, maybe it’s redundant and Hardcore is what you’re looking for but it’s an option.
Private means that you are not looking for new members and your Club Profile will not include an Ask to Join link.
Open means that you are actively looking for new members. You can be Hardcore, but then maybe your attendance is dropping and you need new members, you would want to switch to Open.
New is for first time club racers or for a club that is just starting out and hasn’t found their footing. When racers want to find a club they would typically either search for Open or New.
Creative could mean that your club is for trying to take cool pictures, or you are all trying to collaborate on a design. Also, it could mean that the races you run are creative.
Drifting is for designating a drifting club. You don’t have to ONLY drift, but if you do a lot of those this is the club for you. We don’t currently have a way of tracking drift points specifically, but you could just use bonus points with a custom points template. Say you have 3 drifters in the lobby and maybe 1st,2nd,3rd get 0 points for finish position, but you enter their final drift scores into the bonus area when filling out results.
Weird is for clubs that have races like “set all suspension to maximum softness” or “turn down the grip setting” I’m not sure how often this will get used but it’s an option for day 1.
I was without internet access last night, so I had to wait until this morning to work on some things.
I fixed my issues with query strings, but while looking at those few pages I realized I moved all of my dialogs into include files and did not reference those includes across the site. These dialogs are for the club search, the loading and error messages that we show, etc.
This is the Club Search Dialog
To the left is the Club Search dialog. All it is, is a box with the search control on it. After the first release, I will need to upgrade the search functionality. Right now it’s hard to use because you would need to know what club you are looking for to find anything or you can click View All Clubs, but then it could show you 1000 results that aren’t useful to you. What we really need is a way for users to say, “I want to see clubs that race at this time or on these days that have this personality or run these kinds of races.” A name doesn’t tell you much, if anything, about a club or when they race or what their intentions are.
Yeah, I’m kind of side-tracking here but these things bother me. So for the remainder of today I’m going to focus on hiding links to features that will not be going in the first release. After that, CLUB PROFILE! I really want this club profile to be awesome, so like I said, I’m going to take my time on it and get it right. I’ll make a post about the layout once I figure out what it should be.
Racing Club Manager 