GT Pre-qual event for the 6 Hour Race Sign-up thread

First of all, a big thank you to the organizers, this was a great event and everyone drove safely and clean.

Right from the beginning as I entered in spectator mode, required of the 2nd driver, I was unable to load the saved setups. Wiz (driver 1) gave me the information and I manually changed my settings to match his.

When it was time for the mandatory driver swap, Wiz came in and the timer started. As we were waiting, another car came in in front of us and was moved by the Pit AI back to our spot pushing us out. Wiz saw a "Stop And Go" penalty flash, even though it didn't on my screen we decided to play it safe and execute one. However, as I took over the car it became very clear this was not our setup, nor the default setup. It was a mess! I pitted for the penalty, which apparently was not applicable to me, and got on my way. I hope the other participants here did well and had fun.

Obviously some bugs still exist in rF2 and the driver swap procedures need clarification. The issue with the car setup was a big problem for me (us). In the end it was a blast! Let's hope the bugs are fixed and look forward to the 6 Hour race!!!

PS: I think the Vette is a viable car to race, it will require a lot of pit stops for tires however. The track may be a more critical choice in order to avoid the problems we encountered when pitting.

 

Thanks to all of you who participated in our little "experiment"!

While there were some warts and issues, I thought it worked better than anticipated.

Please add your "post mortem" comments on what worked and what didn't work. Your feedback is really important so we can tune for the 6 hour (which is scheduled for Sunday, 9 June starting at 11 AM EDT).

The Poznan Pre-Qual Podium







Next will be a test race on Sunday, 19 May at 11 AM EDT to test the Pumbaa / Alex Coutie energized LMPs. As with the Poznan Corvette race, everyone is welcome and more the merrier (presuming we can get past the current 30 driver limit in rFactor 2).

Mark your calendars! The 6 Hours of Mid-Ohio is planned for Sunday, 9 June at 11 AM EDT.

Sign-up threads for both these events to follow.

 

I think I should share my view on the race with others cause not everyone was on ts after the race when we talked about it and exchanged ideas.

We encountered some issues but we managed to fix them so the race took place and without any major problems. No disconnects as far as we heard so everything was fine. Some guys report issues with setups changing during the driver swaps but I don't know if that happened to us (me and Hector) because Hector didn't say a word about the car feeling different to what he tried before the race. So don't know what causes the problem for the others we need to look it up and find a fix for that. Some other things were disscused but I don't feel I'm authorised to talk about it.

The race was very nice though. No glitches at all. No lags whatsoever. Thankfully we did only 1 driver swap because after driver swap the marked box that you need to stop in disappears after that swap so another swap would be a guessing game where to stop . It can be fixed with auto pitlane aid but maybe ISI can fix this issue before the 6h race. Fingers crossed.

I want to thank all the guys that participated for being there and giving a lot of us great entertainment. It was cool. I would like to thank all the people for the clean race and gratz to everyone not only guys on the podium. It was tough. Thanks CoNa for the thrilling battle.

 

Fair question! The idea was to post the rfmod that Guy created only in this thread and in the SimHQ Motorsports event thread. That way we would get the most number of drivers who were interested. What happened was, thought I had set the server so it would not allow downloads of the rfmod, but would allow the custom skins to work. Well either I did something wrong or there is a problem with that idea because post-race I found out some (but not all) drivers could download the control rfmod from the race listing. Yikes! So we had a huge amount of walk-by drivers who hadn't signed-up. I dropped the password idea because we thought the server was not going to be available to the world unless they saw the threads.

One of the items to sort before the LMP test race on Sunday, 19 May.

 

Yeah, this race showed us a few things that need to be changed- but that's what it was for! The race on the 19th will go more smoothly.

-We are going to find out how to allow the server to run more than 30 drivers. That was one issue we had and we are working to find an answer. Also some of the settings we'll tweak and set up a password to avoid the constant join messages. I don't know what to do about setup issues at swaps, Lem and I suffered the same issue.

 

There was another issue after the driver swap, though I'm not sure how fair it is to complain about it.

Me and Guy had our skin set up so it removed the reflection inside the windshield, as we found it difficult to work with and quite distracting. After I picked up the car, the reflection was back. My guess is when I pick up the car, I'm not using the skin on my PC, but instead the skin as it's transferred to me and everyone else on the server, which doesn't include the windshield? Not sure, just a guess.

I quite enjoyed the race, it's been an interesting experience having someone outside the car consulting you as you go and doing the same for someone else. Most of the drama for us took place during the first half while Guy was at the wheel, and so when I took over, it was just a case of drive it home and manage lapped traffic. I made a few mistakes, but that was pretty much all my fault. We got a good result we're happy with, going from 10th to 6th, and we're optimistic about next time.

 

Exactly, finding issues and working out stuff is what this test races are for. I think after all, it went rather well!

My Idea about the Setup issues some people had.. when i first joined the server, i was not able to load the setup my team wanted to race. It was not set as default as well. All i could do as a spectator was set a setup as default, but not load one.

I exited the game, loaded single player mode, went to poznan. Loaded the race setup, set it as default, and left again. Then i logged back onto the server as spectator, and the proper setup was loaded and set as default.

Maybe that was a problem for some as well.

About the LMP Test race, what exactly is the mod we will be using? What aids will be allowed?

Also, for the main 6h Event - since it is a Sunday and alot of folks will have to get up early for work on the following monday, Time Zone differences could keep people from Europe from racing.. me and my teammate are in the GMT+2 Zone, so race would start at 7pm and run until 1am. ( If 11am is the actual race start, or is it the start of practice? )

Maybe you could consider starting the event earlier? If the actual race start would be 10am EDT, it would end at midnight for Europeans, which would be perfectly acceptable i think.

I would also suggest shortening the amount of practice time for the race day. I think all of the drivers will have had enough time to practice the track and setup work. A 20 or 30 Minute Practice Session should be more than enough time in my opinion

 

Interesting. I wish I had done as you did with the race setup.

Another possibility to help those in different time zones; what if we did the qualifying on Saturday? Not that the qualifying itself is that long, but we could have another pre-qualifying practice session. We could then have a 1 hour practice starting at 0900 US-EST, the race at 1000.

 

guod has suggested starting at 15.00 GMT for the 6 hour race on June 9th. It's going to be P1 and GT classes.

The P1 race on May 19 is going to start at 15.00 GMT as well. That race will be in the Saulnier Racing P1 car- but fixed up. SimHQ has been working on that car and has made it a lot better.

 

That would be much better particularly since monday is a work day

 

You have to set the connection type to LAN and then add +maxplayers=60 to the command line options to get the max over 30.

For example:

Code:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\rFactor2\Core\rFactor2 Dedicated.exe" +maxplayers=60 +path=".."

You can also add +oneclick once you have it setup the way you want. Then it will start the server minimized without asking any questions.

 

If I had to guess you got the "transferred" skin and it most likely only xfers the car skin and not the windshield and other random DDS files you may have customized. A fix for that may be to package your skin in a MAS file so it transfers all of the DDS files. Just create a MAS with all your DDS files and then name it the same as you DDS files. For example. Say your base skin is named Noel18_alt.dds. Then name your MAS Noel18_alt.mas.

 

I wish I could have made this race but on Saturday I had an 8 hour event and I felt like I would be pushing it (with the fam) if I spent even more time racing on Sunday. Not only that but I didn't have a team mate. I will definitely make it to the 6 hour race though. Still need to find someone to race with though.

BTW, at the end of our 8 hour race, the commentators in our broadcast put in a plug for the SimHQ series. Our league plans to stop doing endurance races for a while and move to iRacing until a good endurance mod surfaces for rF2. So I suspect SimHQ will get some refugees from our league. I know I will be one of them. I am not interested in single driver races in iRacing. Nothing against iRacing, it just isn't an endurance racing platform and endurance is where my interest has been for the past 3 years.

Here is the broadcast from our race on Saturday:
http://www.twitch.tv/vlmserl/b/399396189

Speaking of broadcasts guod, do you have any plans for this? I would like to develop an rF2 plugin for automating the cameras for a broadcast. Similar to what we have at VOR only rF2 has a bunch of plugin API improvements which will let me do it better in rF2 than I did in rF1. I just need to get a better GPU in the broadcast machine because I doubt the Integrated Intel GPU will handle rF2. Hehe.

 

We both had the windscreen and skin .dds files installed. We'll have to try that .mas trick, Noel thanks!

 

In a few tests I did it looks like the game transfers skins and appends some random number on the front of them even if you already have the skin installed by hand. So I am thinking that you have to package them together in a MAS to get all the DDS's associated with your skin to transfer. I may be completely wrong though. Another thing I noticed when testing is sometimes you can join a server and wait for it to transfer all the skins. Then exit and rejoin and it doesn't xfer again. It just reuses the ones it xfered last time. So then you exit and rejoin again and one of them will randomly xfer again for no apparent reason. I also finally figure out what the colored blocks are to the left of each driver. Red means they have a custom skin that hasn't xfered yet. Green means they have a custom skin and the skin xfer is complete.

 

Sounds great! I think that Timeframe should work for everybody.

Do you have a download link for the fixed up Saulnier Racing P1 Car?

 

Unfortunately, none of the SpeedinLive* teams could in the race.

We are very interested in endurance racing, and we will endeavor to be present in the future.

We have not have problems in the exchange of pilots. Nor have with skin changes. We will complete tutorial.

In SpeedinLive have compromised the Sunday nights.

 

the mod is not released yet. Still working on it. The graphical probs will be fixed and the physics fixed up a bit too.

 

Do you know if this means we should hold off on making skins until this update is released?