Build Release Notes: Season 1-2011

Permanent Site Footer – We have added a new site footer that is always visible. We’ve moved some existing functionality from the top of the page down into the footer: – Number of iRacers online. – Number of myRacers online as well as the online status popup. – Links out to external sites (with YouTube addition). – This footer also features a new facebook icon. More on that below. Facebook Integration – The general idea is that you can easily post iRacing-related status information to facebook and your facebook friends can link back to the member’s site. Members will be taken directly to an appropriate page depending upon the status content. Non-members will be taken to a special facebook landing page. The integration points are: 1) Permanent site footer. You’ll notice a facebook icon on the right edge of the footer. When you click on this the system will update your facebook status with a post describing what you are currently doing on iRacing. This will be the same information that other iRacers see when they look at your status on the myRacers page or the myRacers popup. If you are simply logged into the member’s site it will say so. If you are registered to race in a session it will provide details of the session. This can be an effective way to notify your friends that you are running in a session. When members follow the link they will be taken to the myRacers page where they can easily join the session. 2) Event results. You’ll see a facebook icon on the event results window. This will publish a synopsis of your results in that specific race session. 3) Member awards. You’ll see a facebook icon next to each of your awards on the member awards page. This will publish details about your award. At this time iRacing does not automatically post status updates to facebook. Status updates will only happen when you click on a facebook icon on the site. Additionally, facebook status updates generated by iRacing do not include information about any iRacers other than yourself. If this position changes in the future you will be notified in advance and given opportunity to opt out. Security and privacy notes: When you click on the facebook icon, iRacing sends a message to facebook to see if you are already logged in. If you aren’t already logged in facebook will attempt to display a popup login window. If you have popups blocked and want to use this feature you may need to enable them for this purpose. The first time you go through this process you will see an additional facebook popup asking for security authorization for the members site to post data to your facebook feed. You will only need to go through this process once. This popup specifies that the “iRacing Member’s Site” is requesting permission to “Access my basic information” and “Post to my Wall”. This is the minimum level of authorization required in order for this feature to work. If you choose to do this you will be granting iRacing with programmatic access to your basic account information (e.g. friends list). However, iRacing does not query this information and has no plans to query this information from your facebook account. If this position changes in the future you will be notified in advance and given opportunity to opt out or revoke authorization. After granting authorization you can revoke it at any time from your privacy settings page at facebook. Look for the applications page and remove our application from your list. If you do this, the next time you click the facebook icon from the members site you will need to grant authorization again in order for the feature to work. Schedule PDF Generator – There is a new menu item under Events called “iRacing Race Schedule”. This will automatically generate a PDF containing the current season’s schedule across all series. Race Length Display – Race length / duration as well as rolling vs. standing start has been added to the race panel (look underneath the track) as well as the series schedule pages. No more searching for your session in what’s hot or the race planner. Series Race Results Page – A new page has been added to the series pages that displays all of the races that have occurred for a given series for a given week in the current season. You can access the feature from the race panel (look under the series pulldown) and from the links bar on the various series pages. This page works similar to the schedule page in that you can only view the results for the currently selected series. This page will default to display the races for the most recent day in the selected series. You can click on the header for the other days in the race week to see results for different days. – Also, a pulldown is provided to switch race weeks. Series Stats Page – Added a new club pulldown that will display results containing only members of the selected club. – Fixed driver links. – Fixed bug where invalid season could be displayed in pulldown if a series that doesn’t have stats was selected to the race panel when the series stats page is loaded. Subsessions Popup – The event results window now has a splits popup that will give you links out to other splits in the same session. Season Time Trial Page – Fixed dropped field. When you select a week it was displaying “undefined”. Member Profiles – Fix to allow dashes in URLs. Results Page – Fix to remove car class duplicates. Region Standings Page – Rounding fix for net and gross club points. Stats Navigation Menu – Under the Stats menu we combined the Personal, Friends and Studied picks into a single pick called Individual. The ability to switch between yourself and any of your friends or studied on that page eliminates the need for separate menu selections. Track Configuration Priority – The different configurations for each track now have a priority setting that determines their order in pulldowns such as on the test panel as well as on the tracks page. You should be able to find the configuration you want much easier now. Time Trial Laps Popup – Fixed a bug where the wrong laps were being highlighted in yellow as the best group of laps. Pulldown Behavior – Changed “—” to “ALL” in pulldowns on the drivers stats, replays and club stats pages. The issue is one of consistency. The “—” was being used to represent “ALL” in some places and to represent “NOTHING” in other places. It was confusing. Live Support Online – The support page now has a link to “Live Support Online”. If the icon is green it means that iRacing support staff are available for online chat. Clicking on the icon will open up a separate window to service your chat session. Driving School on YouTube – Our driving school videos are now hosted on YouTube. The user experience should largely be the same with a couple of minor exceptions: – Clicking on a video while it is playing will take you to YouTube rather than pausing it. – The video quality dropdown is gone. You can achieve the same result with the settings menu in the YouTube player. – You can now view the videos in full screen mode if you wish by clicking the button on the right edge of the YouTube player’s control bar. Internet Explorer 9 – The member’s site does NOT support IE9 at this time. We recommend that you avoid it as internal testing has shown some major performance issues and situations where pages load twice. Simulation: Replay – The replay system has been updated to allow creating and loading replays that are too large to fit in memory. By default (for now) this new feature is disabled. You can enable it by launching the sim, visiting the Options/Replay page, checking the “Enable replay spooling” checkbox, and exiting the sim. Like many graphics settings, this one does not take effect until you exit the sim. When this feature is enabled and the sim is launched in a session, the replay system is started with a (comparatively) small memory buffer. A temporary file is created in your replay folder, and the replay is spooled to the file as the session is run. When you exit the sim, the temporary file is deleted. If you want to save the replay (or a portion thereof), you must do so as you normally would (bring up the replay tool bar and click on the disk icon to save it). While watching the replay (either while in a session, or having loaded one off disk), all of the normal functionality exists. You can FF/REW/Play through the whole tape, search for laps and incidents, etc. The system will bring into memory sections of the tape as needed. If you do not have the spooling feature enabled, and you attempt to load a replay that is too large for your computer, the sim will make a second attempt to load the replay using spooling. By default, replay spooling while running a session will be disabled if the disk on which spooling occurs has less than 1GB of free space when the sim is launched. This amount can be changed by updating the following entry in app.ini. [Replay] spoolOnlyIfDiskFreeMB=1024 Setting it to 0 disables the free space check. Sound – Small adjustments may be made to adjust the balance between engine, tire, aero, and crash sounds. These can be adjusted on the Options / Sound screen. For technical reasons, you can only lower the volumes, so if you want to make one sound more prominent, turn down the others. – By default, more sounds will be played on systems with two or more cores for a subtle improvement in sound quality. – Preliminary support for using Fmod instead of DirectSound has been added. This is considered an experimental feature; it does not yet significantly change how the sim sounds. It’s current features are: – Surround sound works out of the box in Windows Vista and 7. – May reduce crackling on some systems. – Include an optional volume boost. – Uses an additional core on CPUs with three or more cores. For more information on enabling Fmod, see http://members.iracing.com/jforum/posts/list/1443216.page Fmod is a modern and powerful sound toolkit that we’re transitioning towards using. It provides many features that could be used to improve the sim’s soundscape, providing a more compelling, engrossing, and accurate experience. The capabilities will allow our sound designer to have more control over the sound models, will allow us to better model the interactions between sound, air, the track and objects around it, and will allow us to use more resources on modern multicore processors to model sound. Renderer Optimizations – Added graphical occlusion culling of trackside objects, which significantly improves frame rates at tracks such as Road America and Spa (for most systems). – Added graphical occlusion culling of the track surface when 3-monitor mode is enabled. This culling previously existed only when rendering a single viewport. – Added several optimizations targeted at reducing CPU overhead in the renderer for both cars and trackside objects. Shadow Map Improvements – Optimized the organization of track geometry that is used for rendering. Fixes the shadow map pop-in issues from T1 to T2 at Daytona, and improves shadow map coverage in general. – Enabled edge anti-aliasing in distant shadow maps for trackside objects, this helps reduce distant jaggies. – Made slight changes to the level of detail of the track surface to improve the quality of fence shadows on distant steeply banked curves. Garage / Tech Inspection – Tech inspection runs continuously in garage, and garage physics runs 4 times faster, so we don’t have to wait as long for it to pass or fail. Tech inspection can now pass in as little as 0.01 seconds and fails in 0.5 seconds. – Tech inspection no longer allows for a slight amount of being over the limits on settings, which may cause some previously valid setups to fail tech if the setup was pushing the very edge of allowed tolerances. – Changes in garage are automatically applied after 5 seconds of inactivity. An app.ini option [Misc] garageAutoApply=1 allows this feature to be turned off for those of you who don’t like it. – You can now exit the garage at any time, even if failing tech. Garage now supports the ‘esc’ key to exit, and has a close button like the other dialogs in the sim. – Can now load/save setups from/to subdirectories. Pit Crew – The pit crew will no longer attempt to service car as you first jump into your car in the pit lane. – If your car enters your pit stall via getting into the car, a reset or a tow, and your car is refreshed (non race sessions, or fast tows), then the black box pit checkboxes will default to off. If during a race you take a regular tow or exit/re-enter the car, the black box pit checkbox status is left as you had it set. Getting into your car on the grid will do the same thing as when you drive out of the pit lane, and turn on all the black box pit checkboxes. Misc – Flash G27 lights if pit speed limiter engaged. – Added a new app.ini option to lock the drivers head to the horizon to give you a motion cockpit view effect. There may not be much value in this, but could someone who actually likes motion cockpit view test it out and let us know how bad it is. [view] DriverHeadHorizon=0.0 to 1.0 All Cars – Improvements to tire damping/bouncing and to the physics subsystem means that all cars should feel a little better to drive. – All in-car adjustments have “set” controls in addition to “inc” and “dec”. “inc” and “dec” are for button controls to step an in-car adjustment up and down, while the “set” control is for an analog axis such as a dial that will vary the adjustment through it’s full range using the proper increment steps. – Fixed a bug where wheel camber was double what it should have been on opponent cars. – New and revised club logos have been implemented and will show up at the beginning of Season 1 when the three new clubs are added to the service. Sprint Car – The Sprint Car will be available for purchase and download later in the week after some final polishing and buffing. At 820 hp and 650 lb/ft of torque, the Sprint Car is one monster of a race car. Impala A – Improved how the truck arm mount position adjustment works. – 3D updates to its nose to match the 2011 season. An updated template file will be available in the paint section of the forum. – Real-world contingency decals have been added. – Aerodynamic force orientation adjustment. Impala B – Improved how the truck arm mount position adjustment works. – Real-world contingency decals have been added. – Aerodynamic force orientation adjustment. Truck – Improved how the truck arm mount position adjustment works. – Real-world contingency decals have been added. Late Model – Made steering ratio adjustable. – Real-world contingency decals have been added. SK Modified – Graphical gap between rim and spoke area fixed. Street Stock – Street Stock now has it’s proper synchromesh transmission instead of a dog teeth racing transmission. – Made steering ratio adjustable. – Baseline steering ratio is now 10:1. Solstice – Solstice tires have more grip fall-off with too much camber, which should minimize the car’s current roll-over tendencies. Mazda MX-5 Cup and Roadster – Nvidia logo added to car’s base decal layer and dash. – The Cup and Roadster have been tweaked to be more equal in performance. Draft effect is now equal for both, and difference in drag between the two cars is now half what it was. Ford Mustang FR500S – The Grand-AM iRacing.com Series logo is now selectable in the paintkit. Riley DP – The Grand-AM iRacing.com Series logo is now selectable in the paintkit. Dallara – All setups have been updated to be more stable, and a few more setups have been added. – Limit cross weight in garage from 30% to 60%. – Reduced draft effect by 50%. – Dallara has reduced grip at ovals and increased drag at large ovals (but not Indianapolis). Differential settings are now set to zeros at ovals. – Aero adjustments now have correct ranges for each type of race track. Williams FW31 – Edited drag and downforce modifiers to get aero packages closer together. – Reduced volume of transmission sound. Spa Francorchamps – Thanks to member feedback, Spa now has a new configuration: “Endurance Pits”. The Endurance Pits configuration combines the upper pit road with the lower pit road to make one single long pit road with one entrance point and exit point. The additional length has provided the space for 60 total pit stalls. The start/finish line and grid locations are the same as the “Classic Pits” configuration. – The rolling start grid for all configurations is now on the back straight. Thompson – Improved racing surface irregularities. Charlotte – Fixed a possible course cut in turn 2 of the Infield Road Course. 2011 Season 1 Fmod Notes The new build for 2011 Season 1 includes support for a new sound library, Fmod (as mentioned by the release notes,http://members.iracing.com/jforum/posts/list/1443220.page ). This is considered an experimental feature; it does not yet significantly change how the sim sounds. It has some useful features: – Surround sound works out of the box in Windows Vista and 7. – May reduce crackling on some systems. – Include an optional volume boost. – Uses an additional core on CPUs with three or more cores. However, it comes with caveats: – It’s stable on most of our tester’s systems, but it causes occasional crashes on a few tester’s systems. – It crackles on a few tester’s systems. We’re releasing this as a ‘work in progress’ feature for adventurous users. Your feedback is invaluable, so if you decide to use this, please take a moment to review our ‘how to file a crash report’ guide: http://www.answers-script.com/iracing/article.php?id=99 IF YOU USE THIS, TRY A FEW LARGE PRACTICE SESSIONS FIRST. BE AWARE THAT THIS MAY MAKE THE SIM CRASH TO DESKTOP. PLEASE REVIEW OUR ‘HOW TO FILE A CRASH REPORT’ GUIDE IF YOU USE THIS. If you are using Creative’s ALchemy software or equivalent to enable surround sound in Vista or 7, disable this for iRacing before trying Fmod. Fmod does not need this software, and using ALchemy can cause crashes when using Fmod. To enable Fmod-related options, edit My DocumentsiRacingapp.ini and add the line devSpeakerAllowFmod=1 to the [Audio] section. This will add Fmod options to the list of sound cards in the sim’s Options / Sound. Select one of those sound cards to start using Fmod. At any time, you can change your selection between Fmod and DirectSound devices. If you’re in an important race, consider changing to DirectSound for the duration of the race. When using a Fmod device, you can enable a volume boost by editing app.ini and adding compressor=1 to the [Audio] section. This will apply a small boost to the sim’s volume, raising it to a typical level for Windows programs. This distorts the relative volumes of sounds a little; quiet sounds are boosted more than loud sounds.