I think it is for everyone, mate. I've really been thinking about differences between the two. Do we think the lack of irating & Safety Rating play a role? I've seen that liveracers has tried to build in an irating-type system in to their website. What I would love to see is a plugin which tracks incidents and results in online races. Then somehow this interacting with the server when a driver joins to check they're of suitable rating for that server. This isn't to alienate anyone. My thoughts are the open nature would continue but as an aside I could have five or ten servers dedicated to running this "performance tracked" system. Not sure if this makes sense. I hope so.
It could help I think, and it had been discussed and requested many times. Imo its one of the nice things about iracing, not so much the technicality of it all, because anything is debatable, but the way everyone is pushed to focus on ratings/safety automatically. Its already build-in I think, even in rf1 we could pull the numbers and figures for stewarding and multiple livetiming plugins had configurable ratings build-in as well (mainly targeted on incident reports) Liveracers is doing the same but sadly their pro-version is not out (yet?) so we can't use it for personal gains. But this discussion is going to open yet another can of worms as it always has and will see as many opinions as their are people. ISI wont do much on the subject themselves but they can give us the tools or clarify a bit more on how the use it. I would love to setup our league server and its continuous public events to a certain rating tbh, just to show we would like to see a certain degree of driving standards. Of course it would rule out others and that's contradicting to our need of more drivers online but i feel better driving standards can also help push the envelope because in a way its forcing people to behave and be more aware, which would increase then fun-factor allot. much like you will see in properly regulated leagues. The problem with using plugins etc though is that it will be hard to let people see whats going on on-the-spot. it requires finding a website and the server-ratings. something drivers in the public domain are unlikely to do?
Our league had been hosting in this manner for many years now, starting back with RF1 and now RF2.* We run a certain car/track combo each week - weekdays it's set up for "PRACTICE" - no password, long practice sessions, quick races, lower damage but otherwise set up as per our official league race events [no aids, etc]. These practice races cycle openly through the week and voting is allowed. Twice a week we run what we call our "CLUB" events - still open to the public, but damage and session formats are set to replicate what our official races would be. Both Practice and Club are set to allow for content downloading and skin swapping. Finally is race day and that session is passworded. All of this was automated [sessions starting, ending, switching, etc]. Although not officially supported by ISI, and I agree it would be nice if they did create a GUI for doing so, it's not all that difficult to set up if you run your own server. PM me if you want to learn more. I must say, I'm not a big fan of "ranking" systems myself. Then again, I don't think I've raced on a "true" open server since the GPL days! [gee, I wonder why??] [* sadly with the release of build 880 we have lost our server - build 880 killed use of server2003 - but we're now in the process of finding a new host]
The thing about iRacing is that it tries to enforce behavior. This is a good read: http://www.ukgpl.com/rec_dvr_beh/rec_driver_beh.htm
The biggest reason I race offline is that no one is hosting combos I am interested in. I like historic vehicles but until more technical period tracks are released I am driving whatever high quality technical tracks are available such as Loch Drummond, Neva Ring, Motorsport Ranch and Zandvoort. I also like the Skip Barber so maybe I'll have better luck finding technical tracks hosted with that vehicle or the NSX. Makes me wonder if demand side resource allocation could work where people post what they are interested in racing and admins could host combos that are in demand. If anyone in U.S. Eastern time zone (or weekend international time periods) is hosting the NSX, 60s F3, 60s F2, Skip Barber, Lada or Miata at Motorsports Ranch, Neva Ring, Zandvoort, Melbourne, Loch Drummond, Atlanta Motorsports Park, Tres Millas, Mid-OH or Oran Park (or anywhere OTHER than historic tracks or LeMans with T280) please IM me and I will be there.
Pretty much spot on TA. Bryan(F3 fanatics) hosted the Skip a few weekends ago and it was amazing. Awesome racing and feeling. To be honest, I'd dismissed the car because I only ran it at LRP and Mid-Ohio and it didn't gel with me. Took it round Zandvoort and wow, such an incredible sim experience. Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk
I used to race on a simbin title, the nordschleife, and it was more like a social event. All cars were available and if you wanted to match someone on the server, pick same series and go after his time. I would love to see a nordschleife server with most common and popular available veichles! It was fun back then, should be fun now for some casual chatting and driving!
I had a look at the internals plugin and it does in fact emit the following info: info.mLastImpactET, info.mLastImpactMagnitude, info.mLastImpactPos.x, info.mLastImpactPos.y, info.mLastImpactPos.z info.mDentSeverity[0-7] This could very well be used to detect collisions and maybe build a rating engine. However, when I added these in my plugin and went online crashing everywhere, the values were always zero :/ So it seems that the plugin is not sending any data regarding these. Have any of you tried reading these properties and got any values??? Then I also checked the XML log file and there is some Incident data there, but if ISI sends data in the plugin it would be real time and so much more info..... Cheers
Plugins (or a plugin... the comment in the example plugin still says only one can access it, I haven't tested) can read the results stream live. It's in ScoringInfoV01. You're right though, it's not as much info as you'd want.
Yeah, I'm reading all the data coming from ScoringInfoV01 but the collision properties are in the TelemInfoV01 object (mentioned above). These would be perfect to detect a collision in real time. Having said that, in ScoringInfoV01, there is also VehicleScoringInfoV01 which contains mPos (x, y, z coordinates). So another option would be to check if more than 1 car overlap each others coordinates and detect a collision but at this stage not sure how accurate/possible this can be. I'll do some tests....
OK, so I wrote an algorithm and I did some tests with the internals plugin and managed to detect the collision between two cars. In this video, when the cars collide I'm writing to the screen (on the right, not very clear due to video quality) The detection is not 100% accurate as its treating the car as circle, but I can defo fine tune this. So, it seems it can be done. But I wish ISI can fix that collision data...
The XML incidents are exposed in UpdateScoring. mResultsStream (recalling from memory). The problem I have seen in rF2 is one contact with a wall results in literally hundreds of events in the results stream. So lots of filtering of duplicate events would be needed. Another thing you can do with a plugin is detect when people go off the track. The problem is its heavily dependent on the AIW file. There are often parts of the legitimate racing surface that would end up showing as off track. When I used to run a league we left the server open to the public during the week. I would always see random people jump on the server and then say "I've never raced this track before". Then rather then going out slowly a learning the layout, they would go out 100% and go off at T1.... Then T2.. And so on. After 10 mins of this they would leave without even saying bye. If there was some sort of rating system it would keep people from driving like idiots and actually build up slowly. In the end people actually learn a layout properly and then actually stick around and do some real racing. I was on the fence about rating systems too. But it works well in iRacing. It has some flaws but for the most part it works.
Yeah, very true about people doing that. I'd love to see a community with some serious people. But not just for leagues. ..also for quick racing. I myself hated the iracing rating system but at the same time I am also hating the crashers I am finding on AC. So hopefully a balanced one might work. For example, I won't include the off track into the rating. I like pushing to the limits and at times I do go a bit off track. The 5 sec penalty at AC is totally killing my fun at times. Having said that one can cut corners to gain time. That's why its important to be part of a serious community. They would know one went off track cause he was pushing and not to gain time. Then the balanced rating system will also help to "judge" a driver. Maybe a combination of incident events and my calculation from the car positions might bring out some interesting data. Im gonna do further tests with this as see where it goes Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk
Just pointing out that penalties all the way up to exclusion from the results happen for exceeding the track limits in real life. I know of a caterham event that had 40 drivers times rejected in qualifying for putting a couple of wheels on the grass. https://www.msauk.org/assets/2014judicialprocedures.pdf
Totally agree Rich but the off track calculation needs to be accurate. Btw, I had one of the best races with the clio on Sat on your server! Very pro...that's the kind of thing I'm talking about ;-) Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk
Ah, fair enough and agree. Thanks a lot, nice of you to say. Very under rated vehicle in my opinion. Since we started our Saturday nights with it there has been some wickedly close racing!!! Alas I couldn't make it. I'd already been on iRacing for about 7 hours yesterday driving for UK&I in the world cup over there. I was done in! lol
Haha I understand having said that the first corner was totally abused. ..even by myself especially when the tires were gone and we top 5 were fighting to the limits! Maybe some checks could have been done there when an overtake was done if a proper system is in place Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk
No no it was totally awesome and everyone was fair but we all abused of the first corner Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk
