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 🙂
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!
Release 11 has wrapped up its coding phase and is now moving into testing. I am ahead of schedule by 2 whole weeks, so I’m going to publish on Wednesday March 30th instead of April 8th. The two major features I announced were not as monstrous as I thought they could be and that’s always a good thing. Below are some screenshots and more detailed descriptions of all the changes I made for this release.
The admin screen for adding and editing series and races has changed a bit. I made the font slightly larger which is better for any mobile users. Still not perfect, I know, but better.
I removed those ambiguous buttons for deleting and editing the post race write-up. Mostly, I removed the buttons because I couldn’t find one that meant “exclude” that wouldn’t be confused for remove, delete or cancel. Also, I think this looks cleaner.
Each time you expand a race node, you will see the save icon and the options icon. Clicking the options icon allows you to exclude a race from being calculated in a series, delete this race from the series or you can edit the pre/post race write-up. You can hide the options menu by clicking the icon again or just leave it up and it will follow you around when you click on other race nodes. In a future release I will do the same options menu at the series node level.
When a race gets excluded from a series, your members will see this message if they bring up the race details screen. All of the data for that race will still show but when you view series standings the results from this race will not be calculated into the leaderboard.
Alternatively, on the series details screen your members will see a little warning icon next to any races that have been excluded. If they get curious and click the icon a dialog will pop up explaining that the results from that race will not be calculated into the series leaderboard.
Please, keep in mind that when you exclude a race we do not treat it like the race never happened. If you view your average finish position or your monthly/yearly standings, etc. you will still see all of the excluded races calculated into those statistics.
I made a point to overhaul the series list screen because it was really slow to load and really not mobile friendly. Now I only show the name of the series and when the next race is. I do this inside big blue boxes, perfect for mobile users.
Now, all of the active and inactive series show at the same time and it loads very quickly. The ordering of the boxes is different now too. A series with a race that is coming up soon will be ordered ahead of other series that have races further out. Your most recently races inactive series will show ahead of series that have been long forgotten. This design also leaves open the possibility of someday using images in place of the blocks. I do not know if or when I will implement that, but this at least sets the foundation.
Since I had some extra time, I worked on some little things that have always bugged me. Above is a screenshot from the club home page. The checkbox from the “before” side was hideous and was near impossible to click on mobile with my fat finger. I fixed it by using that bug green button. When on a club home page that is not your default it will appear red with the text: “Not My Default”. Clicking the red button will make this club your default and turn the button green.
I don’t have a screenshot for this but on the admin series/races screen when you would save a race, we would automatically reload all of the series nodes, but it would not expand and show the race node you were recently editing. Now it does! Just a minor convenience for the admins.
I use larger font sizes in the menus so that navigation will be slightly easier on mobile users. In addition, I shortened the text on the admin menus so that the larger font sizes would not stretch the menu too wide.
So that’s what I worked on over the past couple of weeks and it is almost ready to be published. I’d like to thank @jacall11 for suggesting the change where we can exclude races from a series. I know it will be a useful addition for clubs other than one he is associated with and I always appreciate feedback that benefits lots of potential users.
I will probably tease what I’m going to work on next after this release gets published so stay tuned on twitter and facebook AND DON’T FORGET TO ENTER THE LIVERY CONTEST FOR A CHANCE TO WIN $10 USD. Currently as of this writing there are 6 weeks left in the contest and no entries, so go paint me something and submit it.
Any Forza Game, Any Car, Fantasy, Realistic… It doesn’t matter. This year we want to encourage Forza painters to come up with their own versions of what a Racing Club Manager livery would look like. Our primary colors are dark blue, orange, white but that doesn’t mean you absolutely need to use those colors in your livery. Think, “What scheme will make my livery stand out from the rest?” and go from there. Last year‘s winner SCS Skreamies won because he had a super clean, realistic livery. Although we are encouraging you to think outside the box this year, that doesn’t mean that a really great clean racing livery cannot get the win.
This year’s livery contest is going to be Forza-based since every one of last year’s entries came from Forza painters and the top 9 clubs on racingclubmanager.com are Forza clubs. So you could consider this sort of a Forza appreciation event.
The winner of the contest will receive $10 USD via PayPal and will ultimately be judged by me, the creator of Racing Club Manager. I will however hold a fan vote and take the fan’s votes and comments into consideration before making my final decision.
Entries can be submitted to Twitter, Facebook, or Reddit by May 6th 2016. That gives everyone 8 weeks to come up with an idea and execute it. Monday May 9th I will declare a winner and send the money via PAYPAL so make sure you’re set up to receive money.
Below are the entries from last year and some other liveries I have made in Forza just to get the creative juices flowing.
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.
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
Forza 6 announced along with the Porsche expansion that they have added Virginia International Raceway. That means Racing Club Manager is also adding support for VIR and the 7 ribbons. VIR is only available along with the purchase of the Porsche expansion($19.99 USD) which is unfortunate but with 21 total possible configurations and a bunch of great cars, it is definitely worth the money.
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 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.
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!
You can now create clubs based on F1 2015 and schedule your races. The game will be released on July 10th 2015 for PS4, Xbox One and PC.
Racing Club Manager 