2013 Season 1 Build Notes

Website: Hosted/Leagues/Tournaments – The number of cars that can be used in a hosted, league or Tournament multi-car session has been changed from 3 to 4. The frame rate and performance in a session with this many cars will depend upon your pc and hardware. – You no longer need to own all of the cars in a hosted multi-car session to participate. You now only need to own the Track where the event is being held and one of the Cars in the session. You will only be able to drive in a car that you own and you still must meet all of the other criteria of the session. You will need to download the cars you do not own. This update applies to Hosted, League and Tournament sessions – Please Note: The “League Sessions” page and the “Hosted Racing – Join a Race” page are the only places on the site that support this functionality at this time. We are still working hard on implementing this functionality for helmet pop-ups and the “Spectator Sessions” area of the site. Downloads – The downloads page has been updated to support the downloading of cars that you have not purchased, that may be required to participate in a multi-car hosted events where you only own one of the cars. Cars that you do not own, that you do not have installed on your machine will appear in a new section of the download page call “Optional Unowned”. New Awards Nine new awards have been added. – Young Star – win official races in four different cars – Honorable – win official races in eight different cars – The Feared – win official races in sixteen different cars – The Alien – win official races in all cars – Runnin’ Down a Dream – win official races on four different tracks – On the Road Again – win official races on eight different tracks – The Long and Winding Road – win official races on sixteen different tracks – I’ve Been Everywhere – win official races on all tracks – Photo Finish – win an official race with a margin of one twentieth of a second or less; this award is not granted retroactively License Banner Update The License Banner has been completely redesigned for clarity and visibility. – The color of your license will change to reflect your License Level. – You can toggle between road and oval licenses by clicking “Road” or “Oval” in the top -left area. – You can toggle between iRating and ttRating by clicking “iRating” or “ttRating” below your name. – Calendar, MPR and Credit maintain their existing functions, but have been restyled. – Ping has been moved to the sub-navigation next to “Support”. Payments with PayPal Billing Agreements ** This section is awaiting a configuration change from our payment partner – we expect within the week. – The iRacing Member’s site now supports PayPal Billing Agreements. Once you have a billing agreement in place you can renew your account automatically, purchase content and recharge your account without logging into the PayPal site. A billing agreement is setup automatically whenever a member purchases a subscription using PayPal. You can also configure a billing agreement without purchasing a subscription by going to the “My Account” page on the Member’s site (look for the link inside the “PayPal Billing Option” section of the page). – From the “My Account” page you can remove an existing billing agreement (look for the link inside the “PayPal Billing Option” section of the page). – If you have both a PayPal Billing Agreement and a credit card on file you should visit the “My Account” page and select your preferred payment method for auto-renewals and instant recharges. The link for this is located in the “Billing & Shipping Information” section of the page. – Additional enhancements to this page are links to remove your credit card on file and to cancel auto-renewal (this was moved from the Cancel / Renew Membership page). The following areas of the site have had a visual redesign – “My Account” – “Account Recharge” – “Gift Card” – “Promotions” Bug Fixes – Spotter passwords can no longer be blank. You must uncheck “Require a spotter password” if you decide not to have a password. Simulation: Tilt / Touch Driving – Added tilt sensor support to the existing touch driving controls. Now you can choose to use a tilt sensor to control steering or gas/brake or both. The sensor auto calibrates based on your device orientation at startup, but there is a ‘recenter’ button on the driving screen (also mapped to the ‘y’ key) that will let you change your orientation at any time. The tilt sensitivity can be adjusted in the black box along with the FFB sensitivity and touch sensitivity. And the throttle and brake can be inverted with an option in the setting tab. – Fixed a bug in touch that caused touch up events to get lost if you released your finger over another control. Text Chat Macros – Added in an ‘auto chat’ feature that lets users hit 10 different hotkeys to auto transmit a chat message. By default the keys are mapped to the 0-9 keys above your keyboard, but that can be remapped as needed. The default messages can also be edited in the sound settings tab. Adding a ‘$’ symbol to the end of a line will automatically send the chat message for you, without it the message will be left waiting for you to edit or send as you wish. Spectating – No longer report connecting admins as being admins, or show Join/Leave announcements for spectators that are admins. – Spectators don’t need to do tech inspections in a fixed setup session. Options – Gray out driving controls and aids that are not used in the current session. But still let the user set their preferences for future sessions. This includes indicating if the h-pattern shifter will be active or not, based on your car type. – Remove a lot of text from the controls page and push it into mouse over tool tips in order to improve visual clutter. Spotting – Change to not do tech inspections on spotters’ machines. – When you use the [Start Spotting] button, you will now see the live action, instead of the slightly delayed replay tape. You can still use the replay controls to rewind and review action from the past. To get back to the live action, use the “fast forward to end” button (>>|), or simply fast forward and the replay will stop and switch to live action when the end of the tape is reached. While spotting, you can tell that you’re seeing the live action when the playback state says “Live”. Camera Tool – Allow the camera tool hotkey to be remapped (ctrl-f12) to provide better compatibility with laptops and Mac devices. – Fixed a bug where you could not edit the camera shot aim type if your custom camera file ended in ‘track.cam’ Telemetry – Add lap information to telemetry. (LapBestLap, LapBestLapTime, LapCurrentLapTime, LapLastLapTime) – Add delta time information to telemetry. (LapDeltaToBestLap, LapDeltaToBestLap_DD, LapDeltaToBestLap_OK, LapDeltaToOptimalLap, LapDeltaToOptimalLap_DD, LapDeltaToOptimalLap_OK, LapDeltaToSessionBestLap, LapDeltaToSessionBestLap_DD, LapDeltaToSessionBestLap_OK, LapDeltaToSessionOptimalLap, LapDeltaToSessionOptimalLap_DD, LapDeltaToSessionOptimalLap_OK) – Add radio channel information to telemetry, see the “RadioInfo:” section in the session string, and RadioTransmitCarIdx in the telemetry data. – Add pit service time to telemetry. (PitRepairLeft, PitOptRepairLeft) Race Control – Qualifying laps will now be invalidated if any 0x or 2x car contact occurs during the lap. – Many non-significant race control rules are no longer active once you finish your race. This could confusingly penalize people after they finished their race and cause their finishing position to drop as the post-race penalty was applied. Graphics – We have updated how we draw extra track surface details so they conform correctly to the road surface better and render more efficiently. This gets rid of our good old “floating skid marks” that we’ve come to know and love/hate. – As part of the track detail improvements the race track’s surface is now always converted into a set of static meshes and stored in video memory. The old option to convert it on the fly, which had the benefit of utilizing slightly less video memory at the cost of performance, has been removed from the graphics options screen. – Every car has had its paint adjusted to improve how paint will reflect more at low incident angles than when directly facing the viewer. – Windshield glare at night is much reduced down to a reasonable level. – Fixed a bug that was preventing the brake rotor glow effect from being visible. – The sim can now reload custom car textures with the ctrl-r hotkey. This is useful if you like painting your own cars by being able to quickly load and see your work in progress paint scheme without having to reload the sim many times. When reloading is triggered, all of the existing paint jobs are immediately unloaded and will default to white. They will then begin automatically reloading one at a time. Reloading happens in the background. If the loading causes performance issues while you are driving on track you may disable from loading while you are in car via the “LoadTexturesWhenDriving” setting in the renderer.ini configuration file. – Also, it is possible for an external application such as Trading Paints to tell the sim to reload car textures by sending irsdk_BroadcastReloadTextures using the SDK. – Shut off the auto rotate display feature in Windows 8, and force orientation to landscape. Use app.ini [Graphics] displayRotateMode=1 to override the default screen orientation. Sponsors – DSD and Lionel Racing sponsors added. Sound – Cold brakes now squeal until they warm up, unless the car has carbon brakes, which don’t squeal. Note: the sim still does not model any brake performance changes with temperature at this time. – Engine sound power now continues to get louder as rpm nears max. – Fixed a bug in the opponent cars that would make them sound like they were driving around at full throttle even while coasting or hard braking. Flexible Drivetrains – All cars now have flex modeled in their drivetrain math, instead of being perfectly rigid. This gives all kinds of subtle and interesting audible and physical engine rpm wobble effects. Note: our model of the detroit locker differential that many of the oval cars use can cause some pretty rough sounding off throttle rpm bouncing as the locker and drivetrain get into a oscillation as the locker clatters between driving the left or right wheels. We’re looking into that. New Tire Model – There have been improvements to the modeling of the tire carcass motion, which improves the handling on all the cars. All our NTM cars feel much better with this tire model update, and have had some amount (anywhere from a little to a lot) of re-tuning, so even if a car doesn’t have its own release note does not mean that you shouldn’t try it out to find out how it drives now! – Tweak skid widths, smoke and skid amounts. New Steering Model – All the cars have better constrained steering systems to go with the tire carcass improvements, giving more precise feel. Drafting – Road course and oval drafting have been reworked to improve the racing experience. Chevrolet Impala – New rules limit track bar split left to right to a maximum of 3″ at all tracks. – Right rear underbody collision surfaces have been lowered to hit the ground after the proper amount of compression. Chevrolet Impala Class B – New rules limit track bar split left to right to a maximum of 3″ at all tracks. Chevrolet Monte Carlo SS – Fixed cockpit view windshield duplication when the car was damaged which caused double darkening and reflection issues. Chevrolet National Impala – New rules limit track bar split left to right to a maximum of 3″ at all tracks. Chevrolet Silverado – New rules limit track bar split left to right to a maximum of 3″ at all tracks. – Right rear underbody collision surfaces have been lowered to hit the ground after the proper amount of compression. – Logitech sponsorship on the windshield has been removed. Ford GT – This car has had a physics overhaul to improve how it drives. Ford Falcon V8 Supercar – Added new exterior engine sounds that better capture listening at a distance. The previous exterior sounds are now only for the on-car sounds. Mazda MX-5 Cup and Roadster – Nvidia sponsorship has been removed. McLaren MP4-12C GT3 – In-car ABS controls are now available to be assigned, in addition to the usual black box method of adjustment. – Updated the rpm mapping for Logitech G27 shift lights. Radical SR8 – Updated the rpm mapping for Logitech G27 shift lights. Autódromo José Carlos Pace – This classic Brazilian race track, also known by its former name Interlagos, is now available! Bristol Motor Speedway – Update GPS position. It was off by 10 meters or so, and had been 30 meters too low. Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps – Improved the Endurance configuration surface types near La Source to try and avoid accidental black flags. Lime Rock Park – The first pit stall has been moved back one to make it easier to exit the pits past the armco wall. Oran Park Raceway – Added a checkpoint so turns 7-10 can no longer be shortcut. – North B pit lane speed reduced to 20mph to make it so that driving through the pit lane takes more time than staying out on track. Sebring International Raceway – New track surface shaders have been added. Virginia International Raceway – The last 10 pit stalls have been moved away from the pit wall to make pitting easier.