The new Trading Paints is here

Trading Paints just dropped some new features.

We totally redesigned the way you find paints in the Showroom. In addition to the Showroom becoming the front-facing portion of Trading Paints, we’re also highlighting trending, popular paints. There are a ton more new features in the Showroom?—?more than we can list. Liking comments, replies to comments, bigger photos, more photo uploads, paint booth notes?—?we could keep going. You’ll have to check it out for yourself. There’s now a Painters section, which is a comprehensive guide of paint scheme designers. If you’re a Trading Paints Pro member, you can mark yourself as accepting work if you’re interested in taking paint requests from other racers. We decided to get rid of ads entirely so we could focus on providing racers and designers with the best possible experience. We want Trading Paints to be a destination for all things painting, and banner ads were nothing but noise that detracted from the experience (not to mention ad revenue has turned to next to nothing due to the prevalence of ad blockers). We felt the pain, and now banner ads are gone. There should no longer be a delay from when you upload a paint to when it’s shown in iRacing. Previously, it would take up to 10 minutes to process files. Now they’re processed as you upload. We’ve totally revamped the My Paints section when you’re logged in to Trading Paints so you get a better picture of what you’re racing right now?—?especially if you’re a Trading Paints Pro user managing your paints for night, league, and team events. More good news if you’re a Trading Paints Pro member: from My Paints,you can now race paints from the Showroom for your night, league, and team events. We’ll be working on extending this functionality in future updates. Pro users can upload decal layers (32-bit TGAs with a transparent alpha channel) for day, night, league, and team races, too. The best news of all to many is that Team Paints functionality is restored. iRacing is working through some kinks in delivering team data, so if your team isn’t listed, that’s the culprit. The great folks at iRacing are working on improving their infrastructure and delivery. The site is now usable on mobile devices. Even though most racers access Trading Paints and iRacing on a traditional computer, we want everyone to be able to enjoy Trading Paints on the go. Sometimes it’s fun to check out paint schemes that are hot right now. We’ll be working on making this even better. You can also upload paints as JPG and PNG files. We’ll convert them to the traditional TGA format iRacing requires. This will be a particularly useful feature if you’ve got paints on your phone or tablet you want to upload. Profiles got a makeover, too?—?you can upload a cover photo in your settings. Plus, the pages do a way better job of showing off your paints. We’ve also added the Handbook to share best practices and quality standards for using Trading Paints and the Showroom. If you’re a painter or looking for success in the Showroom, check it out.

UPDATE: Forgot to mention we also added the ability for Pro painters to upload unlisted paints to the Showroom. If you’re fulfilling requests or need to send a paint to a teammate or somebody else, you can send them a private link to the paint that won’t show up in any search results or your profile page?—?only the person with the link will see it.

This was a huge project that we’ve been working on since we launched the previous generation of Trading Paints two years ago. We were very close to a launch in November until we lost all our work, so we had to rebuild a lot in the past two months.

This update is going to lay the groundwork for a lot of exciting new things for the painting community. We plan to begin following a seasonal update roadmap similar to iRacing, so we’ll have new features and fixes to share every few weeks.

A special thank you, as always, to Shawn Brant, our Technical Director. I really can’t express what it means to be releasing these updates six years after our first launch in 2010, and just two months after we started over from basically nothing. We’ve come a long way in a short time thanks to Shawn’s tireless efforts.

Thank you?—?one of our nearly 50,000 racers?—?for making this possible. When the odds were against us in November, instead of becoming frustrated and demanding, you rallied behind us. You kept us going; you gave us support when you didn’t have to. That support and motivation pushed us to this point. We truly hope you enjoy the new generation of Trading Paints as much as we did building it.