I've been playing around with using VoiceAttack (similar to GlovePie) for voice recognition to be able to replace most of the keyboard and mouse interaction with simple voice commands. For the most part, it is fairly easy to do. The commands are fairly straighforward. You can also combine actions and create fairly complicated scripts with feedback / Text to Speech responses etc. It really is quite incredible. But this got me thinking. There are a bunch of chat commands that are used by server admins to do various things, restart races, call for votes, change grids, etc. What about chat commands for the driver, to be able to do things like change fuel strategy or tyre strategy? For example, /fuel +50, or /tires fl fr no-change or /damage no-repair, or /rearwing +1. This can be extended to include most of the controls, eg /fov +1 or /fov 28, or even /view tv-cockpit or /view cockpit, or /headlights on, and so on. Obviously these are not feasible to use on their own using a keyboard in a race situation, but would be incredible to use with tools like VoiceAttack or GlovePie, or even scripting and mapping tools like Roccat Powergrid, or even AutoHotKey, AutoIT or Joy2Key. Effectively it makes it a lot easier to map very specific actions to voice commands, as opposed to mucking around with complicated sequences (that could possibly vary depending on the mod) like down, down, down, down, left, left, up, up, up, up to change a pit setting for the next pit stop. Thoughts? Am I looking at it the wrong way? Are their other ways I might be able to achieve this? Are there maybe plugns that have something like this already?
Very interesting approach you are looking at. Just controlling the rFactor user interface would, from my point of view, not really make a huge difference for the driver (you would still have to look at the menu). But having some chat commands like your examples would be really something I would be interested in. To avoid wrong commands I could envision that the driver needs to press a button (which he can configure) when he is giving the commands - afterwards the driver should get an audio feedback what the "race-engineer" (voice recognition software + plugin) understood - with a subsequent "copy that" at the end. After confirming by pressing the same button again the change of the settings will be done. So far so good, but now I have bad news. So far I know there is no way to set e.g. tires, fuel capacity etc. via the API interface. Therefore a plugin doing all that would require an extended API interface with some Set-Functions. I did already a post in the wish-list subforum – you are welcome to further add Ideas where an extended API interface would make sense. http://isiforums.net/f/showthread.p...Interface-Procedures-to-set-values?highlight=
This is exactly what iRacing has so your request is dead on. It's quite useful to map a few common pit strategies to buttons. And you're right... up/up/select type macros don't work for this.
I didn't know that, I only tried iRacing for a trial 3 months and then didn't use it much. I was thinking about it some more, and it basically boils down to having controls (that can be mapped) for specific actions, like fuel or tyres or pressures. If, for example, rF2 had a control for selecting the next tyre in the pit strategy, then I wouldn't be here asking for the functionality. I would be able to map a voice command like "Next Tyre" to that control. The same applies to tyre pressure adjustments for example. A chat command like "pressure lr 160" or "Pressure lr +10" would be easy (or easier) to map to a voice command if these controls were exposed by direct controls. Speaking of controls, I notice that we don't have an option in rF2 for secondary mappings to controls. Having said that, if the control doesn't exist in the first place then it's essentially moot. A lot of good work has been done with the rF2 Spotter plugin. And then the Race Engineer plugin combines feedback with voice commands and uses FreePie to add the voice recognition elements. And it is absolutely awesome! When you go through the Race Engineer thread, you see that there are a lot of macros written coding a messy sequence of ups and downs and left and right keys. Through no choice of the developer's, and which works, there isn't really an alternative at the moment. Specific chat commands would simplify that and enhance and streamline the process significantly I believe. I basically want to achieve the same, but with Voice Attack. I think it is a simply amazing product (costs only $8). I sound like I wrote it , but I'm only plugging it a little since I really really like it.
Absolutely yes. An extended plugin to set these values would be perfect. I think there are some that have done this to one degree or another. In rF1 XD at one point had a way you could change your fuel strat in the plugin (iirc). With regards the confirmations, I haven't really seen a need to be very strenuous when it comes to confirming commands and actions. For the most part voice recognition has matured to the point where it can be incredibly accurate (under the right conditions). What both VoiceAttack and FreePie can do is voice feedback to confirm that the command has in fact been actioned. And in VoiceAttack someone recently scripted a confirmation sequence where a user can confirm/accept or deny/disregard/cancel a voice command. It's quite awesomely clever.
One other comment I feel I need to make: Strictly speaking this (VoiceAttack) is not a plugin, neither is freepie. These are simply voice command processors that run concurrently with rF2, processing voice/keyboard/controller button presses, and then take certain actions based on that.
