League Admins: League essential features

Hello League Admins...

I know we have the wish list forum, but I've been asked to get together a defined list of features that LEAGUE ADMINS say are essential at this point for using rF2 for YOUR league.

If you haven't switched yet: What are you waiting for? If you have, what else do you need?

If you can, please split your list into:
- Essential/required (explain why essential, why would it be REQUIRED for your league)
- Useful/nice to have (things that would make your life easier, your league more successful, etc)
- Basics (what you consider fairly basic features that you would have expected us to have implemented, but haven't yet seen)

There's obviously some features in development, that we know about and you don't. but I'm probably not going to be answering questions here, just reading. We don't mind if you tell us about things we know about, or that have been said before.

Thank you for your time,

Tim

 

Hi Tim,

Many thanks for setting up this post, it's great to see the support to Leagues.

1. Admin Commands - Basics/Useful
I think it goes to say that most of us still use the rF1 dedicated server guide as to what commands can be run as a admin. I have not seen a current up to date version for rF2. It would be useful at this point of updating to see what essential commands are required but not yet implemented. I think this may help others get to know the server platform controls. I've seen some 3rd party tools that provide functionality like reverse grid, reverse top 5 etc. Things that would come in handy for non endurance leagues. Something that comes to mind at this time, could be a button/command that simply prints a .txt file with results (nothing fancy just 1. user1, 2. user2 etc). Very simply session results, i know the xml contains all the information but that takes a little digging through. When we are running race/break/race etc it would be nice to capture that information quickly to be able to adjust grids for multiple races.

2. TV Hud/UI - Useful
I was actually working on this idea (initial concept/planning) on another gmotor product a short time ago, but the concept was a alternative hud/ui that simply is selectable in options for those of us who stream events to provide a simple view of positions, lap count, basic session information etc. Basically useful information without the rev dials etc. This is sort of in response to rfdynhud being non continued but it could with the right knowledge be easily implemented out the box to everyone without the requirement for plugins and faffing about. Again making it easier for people to "get involved". (If you want to speak further privately, please do pm/mail).

Those are all i can think of at this hour.

Many thanks

Rob

 

- Race Result posting.
-Standings feature will be awesome.
- Facebook sharing of stuff.

Thanks Tim

 

Hey Tim, I messaged a few of our VOR league admins, so they should speak up sometime soon. I will say a lot of what we need is in this thread: http://isiforums.net/f/showthread.php/9070-Endurance-Racing-Support

We have two main leagues, one is ALMS Sprint races on Monday nights - We have licenses, stewards, Qual then 75min race. The other is once a month Endurance race...from 4 to 12 hours, teams have as many as 4 drivers per car.

Currently we are starting our last RF1 season of Sprint races. Endurance is on hold (though they have started an iRacing league for those that use that) We are trying the BES mod but it needs help. But check out the thread, and I expect Chris, Jimmi and my Son JT will show up sometime. Thanks buddy! (John Tami)

 

Rob, for results, check out simresults.net. Not saying that ISI should not support. Just thought might be a stop gap in the meantime as it has worked for me.

 

Essential

1. A damage system that is atleast as good as rF1 (trying to explain why a car goes 400 metres in the air from a 10kmh hit is hard to say the least)

2. Turn the smoke down (its totally overkill and causes more collisions)

3. Safety car red pit light bug (although has been reported and hopefully fixed)

Nice To Have

1. Multiple knockout style qualification sessions (running an F1 league this would help a lot to get our series as close to real as possible...although we make do using practice sessions)

2. K.E.R.S ...(running an F1 league this would help a lot to get our series as close to real as possible..we had it working correctly in rF1 via plugin for years but rF2 wont allow us to do this...it was also in the original rF2 plugin docs and then disappeared)

3. a results file that reports atleast as good as rF1... (for example when a safety car comes out the results file does some very weird things during those laps)

4. some parts taken out of the vmod so racers are free to customize (example sounds)

 

I guess we should call it basic, but also quite essential.

BASIC/ESSENTIAL:
More defined pit boxes. Even bring out the static pit crew. Most league races we set up has some sort of pitting involved, and it is hard to find you spot at times, specially if there are more people piiting at the same time that has a pitbox near your own.

NICE TO HAVE:
Also regarding pitting. A way to set up forced pits. I have looked but can not find anything about this in the PLR settings.
You probably know what I mean, but will elaborate.
Settings, possibly in the dedicated menu, but the PLR will do nicely. A way to set forced pits, and define when pits are open and when they close. Defined by laps, or time, depending on what you have the race set to. OPEN by lap 6, closed by lap 10 or open after 30 minutes, closed after 45.

Also nice to have would be to have the .MAS tool operating via in-game menu for VMOD creation. I know this would be a possibly difficult or even impossible task. But it could work very good if it could happen.

 

Hi, great idea!

Can I connect Rjames. That would also have been my points.

It would be helpful if you could set mandatory pit stop and window boxes.
Would be nice for leagues weights easier to give a driver on console. Weights would be a better system which recognizes the driver and weight autimatisch connect with awards.

greeting

Mike

 

Hi, I'm one of the league admin/organizer of the Gentlemen Racers and today we have not switch from rFactor1 to rFacto2 because:

+ FPS are too low to play with more than 10 players
Essential : Because we race at around 40 drivers each week. And because when you deactivate the HDR and the Reflection Environment the game is haw full compared to rF1 (because the fake Cube are not working yet in rF2 and the ambient light is strange and worse than rF1 without HDR)

+ The mandatory association between track and cars that need a vmod for each new car/track avoid us to race in one click as for rF1 (and the fact today we are not able to register server with our home made vmod (not working since long time from Europe)
Basic : This avoid us to change track between races and integrate a new track for quick test as it was easy in rF1. In addition, we regularly add track to our championship and if we have to make every week the vmod to add a track is a pain for nothing. It's a pain for the administrators, now we need Modders as administrators, and modders have no time to loose to do this kind on thing.

- Collision part not active (No deformation in collisions and so behaviour strange online (and offline)
Basic : It's the main good feature of rF1, so it's basic and mandatory to have collision with deformation and detachable parts in online.

- Driver reconnection to allow drivers to continue to race after disconnect (without impacting the other drivers). Restarting from the Garage.
Essential : Because we make Endurance Race, and it's sad to race 4 hours and be disconnected just before the end of race

- Tire physics frozen
Basic : we know the tire is not finished, so we need stable feature on this point to get a reliable behaviour to plan each race strategy and have the right feeling in wheel.

+ Rain rendering in car finished
Essential : Because to race with the new rain feature, we need a complete/realistic graphic feature. Today, missing the rain drop/wiper render in cockpit view, and the rain render is far to be realistic.

+ Smoke rendering
Basic : This is not realistic and usable today, the smoke is too easy to get and it's too dense/opaque when arrives

In addition, I don't list all the current active feature in rF1, but all the rF1 feature are mandatory (so Basic in your classification). I list some we use for each race.
- Admin chat commands to change grid pos, add lest, put penalties ...
- Batch chat command to allow the grid editing with files from server
- Results same as rF1 with driver change information and pits, tire compound used at the pit out, weather information change too now for rF2 ...
- Protocol description/allowance to get live information without plug-in on server (to know the connected drivers and make live timing to follow the race out of the game for non player users)

If you need more details, please ask, I can complete for each point to help.

 

Essential: server admins set the Special FX setting for the server so it's locked, otherwise turning this off on the user side is essentially cheating as you don't see the spray/smoke effects when others will.

 

Currently I'm not administrator in any rFactor League, but I've been in the past and would like to contribute with my ideas.

My focus is oriented to F1 leagues, since it is what I best know and where I have more experience.


Essential/required:

- The first and fundamental, a system is needed to control the tyre compounds. In the time information screen you should see at the same time what tyre compound use each driver.

- Used compounds should also be displayed in the resulting XML, it is very useful information.

- Automatic penalties for crossing the out line of pit lane.

- Configurable system to prevent the output to track of a driver that uses the ESC key outside the pit lane during qualifying.

- Configurable qualifying sessions (you know, Q1, Q2, Q3)


Useful/nice to have:

- A (configurable) system requiring the driver to automatically use two different tyre compounds without its being necessary to revise this information by administrators.

- Automatic penalties for overtaking under a yellow flag.

- Number of tyres limited per session (configurable).

- Exits off the track identified in XML. Very interesting for fast review purposes and possible penalties.

- Number of motors limited for a season, where each motor can be reused and "remember" the % usage. More usage = to more odds of damage, logically. I don't really know how you could do this but it is interesting.
Perhaps engines information could be stored in the server and "recharged" automatically at every official event, or controlled by the administrator. I am aware that it would not be easy to do something like this.

- Anti-cheat system.

Basics:
- In this moment, I think is basic to improve the FISI wet tyres or explain us how we can do it, because actually it's very hard to drive in wet conditions with this tyres (Increase the overall grip does not work, it should be only for wet conditions, perhaps with DampnessEffects command?)

- Random weather conditions.

Thanks.

 

Totally agree with this point. As an admin for a F1 championship the control of the tyre compounds should be a top priority.

 

YES!!!...very very good suggestion

 

I am a driver, engineer and administrator of a rFactor league and I got to suggest this:

Somewhere between required and nice-to-have:

I'd really like to see engineer-support. I am not necessarily talking about telemetry like you can check with tools like MoTec - it's more about the possibility to let your engineer compare data like:

- sector times (already implemented)
- number of pit stops, as well as used compounds
- topspeeds, maybe for each sector of the track

The engineer should also be able to check your tire/brake wear and be allowed to set up your next pit stop.


required:

We also need a dynamic/random weather system. A weather forecast tool would be awesome as well (kind of rain radar for example)

 

One thing haven't been said, the possibility to limit the numbers of tires allowed for an event.
Very important on rF2 to me.

 

Oh, yeah! This would be awesome!

edit: For a F1 league it might be helpful to limit the numbers of engines you are allowed to use in a season - but I have no clue if this would/could work

 

First off all I want to remind you that mas2.exe currently (after server-dns changes) has a bug when creating vmod. “Register Package” window comes up without e-mail and password fields filled and I must re-enter them manually for each start of mas2.exe. After each start of mas2.exe my rF2 launcher also comes up not logged in and I must reenter e-mail and password there. So this does take my time and nerves every time. Please fix it. Several people and I reported this in “Launcher EXE for those affected by 7/18-7/20 DNS change” thread, but got no response. New launcher does not help with this.

Essential/required:
1. Ability to easily set fixed upgrades for dedicated server! F3.5 and F2 has 3 and 2 different downforce packages each. There is no way in real life some F2 car will be allowed run at Monza with High DF wing and others with Low DF. They all will run Low DF as mandated by rules. In rF2 I, as admin, can not enforce this. We ended our F3.5 championship just last week, and it was not realistic in this aspect, since I can not control drivers wings for each track, everybody run what they want. Not realistic. This is required.

2. More admin friendly UI in online race session screen. rFactor2 has no menu on right click in UI and I fear it would be hard to add. But it would be nice for admin to just click on a name in players list during session and perform this actions:
- add X kg ballast (ballast for every player should also be displayed here, in live session results table)
- move to the end of the grid (very useful for grid penalties)
- move to X position on the grid (same)
- ban
- boot
- add drive-through or stop-n-go (for real-time penalties)
- remove drive-through or stop-n-go

Batch actions for ballast and grid-positions would be good also. I suspect they are working as in rF1? I didn`t try them with rF2 yet.

Also button somewhere for admin to Reverse Grid with one click. There is several ways to do this. How about this. This is how we usually run 2 race weekend: Practice-Qual-WarmUp-Race1-/restartwarmup-Warmup-Race2. So I want to press a button during second warmup and have reverse grid (reverse first X places would be even better). Since after /restartwarmup command .xml results file from Race1 appears in log directory, you can take order from there and rearrange it. So “Reverse Grid” searches for last race .xml file for this track, takes finishing order, rearranges it and makes changes to grid. New players connected only at second warmup go to the end of the grid.
Since this is frequently used actions for admin, I think its required to be implemented. Will make usability much higher.

3. Option for players to set somewhere boolean parameter to “see only admin chat when in car online in qualy and race sessions”. There are always people, that no matter how much you tell them “no chat in Qual/Race” write their frustrations to chat after they retire from race prematurely, etc. And we can not turn off chat completely, since every player must see admin chat during the race for race-control purpose. This eliminates big problem easily. Essential feature, required for league.

4. Since I`m parsing rF1-2 .xml files (http://isiforums.net/f/showthread.php/8001-rFactor2-Log-Analyzer) I want to express my opinion that it would be good if .xml format does not change much. There was a talk in some interview about migrating to JSON in future, but maybe that is not needed, as it will make 3rd party log-reading software like mine obsolete and in need for parser rewrite (now really an undertakable task, but a big task).

Saying that, some additions to log files would be welcome. Tire data I think is required:
Compound name and percentage wear can be added like this:

Code:

<Lap num="1" p="1" et="209.9225" s1="45.4255" ... s3="38.2585" fuel="0.663" [B]tire_compound=”soft soft soft soft” tire_wear=”0.950 0.930 0.850 0.850”[/B]>112.4813</Lap>

If its not CPU time consuming, brake and engine wear percentage can be output also.

Lower in priority, but would be good:
- if its possible boolean “4 wheels offtrack”:

Code:

<Stream>
<Offtrack et="102.1">Driver Name(0)</Offtrack>

But many tracks are defined by white lines and not asphalt, so I do not know if its possible to catch leaving white lines with 4 wheels...

- may be it is possible to better output installed upgrades info in .xml since <UpgradeCode>1e000000 00000000 00000000 00000000</UpgradeCode> in rF2 is impossible to translate to something meaningful, because car files are closed if I understand correctly.

- in rF2 there is no <Incident> info output, like in rF1. May be its turned off for development?

Useful:
1. Manual creation of vmod for every race was discussed many times. In those threads someone from ISI wrote, that with time its possible to convert this to an automatic process, where admins/users just select number of cars and tracks in dedicated server interface and start the server. Server creates vmod in background and racers receive vmod on server join like it is now. I want this feature. Because it saves huge amount of time and is convenient.

2. Better online interface. I wrote this several times. In rF1 ontrack “TV” window was already the smallest acceptable size. In rF2 its tiny, I can not see anything, and as admin I must see live-timing list on the left and live action on the right at the same time, but I can not. Chat window on other hand do not need to be such big width, especially as it could use smaller font.
Talking about live-timing, live sector info like at F1.com or LeMans live-timing would be so welcome. I`d like to see smaller fonts overall and the more information, the better.

3. Reserved color for admin lines in chat window. It may be always red or always orange color, but admin lines must differ in color from other peoples lines consistently. May be bold text also.

Basic:
1. More options in dedicated server UI. For practice between races I need to start sever with Test Day="1", for races I need to switch to Test Day="0". There are other useful options only available in ini files but not in GUI. Going to ini file every time for this and searching between lines is time consuming. I even made extra GUI app for myself , which looks like this:
View attachment 9557
Many of this options must be in dedicated server GUI by default, IMO.

2. While on topic of dedicates server parameters. I never understood why by default dedicated server has such unrealistic values for Helps, Race time scale and Mech failures. rF2 can be reinstalled frequently to shake off some bugs or problems from update to update and with every new install I`m correcting this default values which no one ever will use. Look:
View attachment 9558
All Helps are ON? It must be all OFF by default.
“Race time scale x5” – why? It should be “normal” by default.
“Mech failures – time scaled” - is wrong, it should be “normal” by default, because “time scaled” will just end peoples race with random failures, this is not used by any league or fun race which cares for level playing field.

3. Dedicated server weather setup is almost impossible with current UI. Its 3 sessions with 5 slots each, and if I want set every one of them to needed parameters it will take huge amount of time. At very least it must have buttons to “Copy current values from this slot to all in this session” and “Copy current values from this slot to all slots in all sessions”. So that it was easy to set some base params and then tweak them.
But actually this weather interface needs complete redesign. I`m planning to make weather tool with graphic interface myself, since as far as I understand all parameters are read from and written to .wet files in track folder. I do not know if I will succeed with this, but I will try...

4. GUI with race information for spectator. For live race streaming. With live-timing, dynamic track map with car positions etc.

 

Some things are already listed, but here's my Input

Basic
- Penalty for crossing pit lane while exit
- Qualifing Sessions (Q1, Q2, Q3, etc)
- Force to use two different tire compounds
- Fixed Setups
- Ballast System
- Edit Grid
- Reverse Grid after qualy
- Setup up Sprint-Races (even multiple Races) with Reversed Grid (Also, only reverse grid for Top10)

Essential

- Parc Fermé Rules
- Limit tires over a weekend
- Force to use the same tires for race start that were used for quali (Top 10 Qualifiers)
- Disable DRS / Future KERS

Useful / nice to have

- Configurable Fast Repairs
- Real Time Stats publishing System
- After Race Stats publishing System

 

What about a spectator client? Valve did it for DotA2 and people who don't own rFactor 2 would be able to watch a race. This client could also include helpful features (timing monitors, statistics etc.) for a commentator.
I also recognized some issues with streaming software like XSplit or OBS - rFactor is always crashing, does not matter if I run it in fullscreen or window mode. Broadcasting is a huge plus for everybody in sim racing!

 

Great thread!

For me a few points worth corrected in the simplicity of configuration, because after reading some do not know that it is already possible:

- Qualifing sessions: Already set, but should be via the options when creating the server, not through the text editor in the file. Plr

Code:

MULTI Num Qual Sessions="0"

-Parc ferme Rules: The problem come from the fact that between Q and R, parc ferme works well, but for the tires, the driver will be well on its Qualifing tires, but can not change compounds in the race,if he starts with soft it will use soft throughout the race. It must release the parc ferme when the race is begin.

I think it would be good to put ALL the options possible in the host sartup, to facilitate the work of admins, who must each change lines of code in some file "risk of error" and "unknowing "I think this is the big party to work for the moment.