Post by naish on Apr 28, 2011 6:49:54 GMT 1
If all goes well, tomorrow (Wednesday 27th April) will be the day we roll out Season 2's update. Here are the release notes detailing what's new in this upcoming update.
Website:
Hosted Sessions
- Added the ability to purchase a session based on number of hours. The options are 2, 4 and 6 hours.
- Changed it so you can limit the race portion of your hosted session by laps, minutes or both (laps or minutes). If you select both, the race will conclude when X laps have completed or Y minutes have passed, whichever happens first.
- Added the ability to schedule hosted sessions to launch at some time in the future. The default is "now" but you can use a date picker to select a date in the future (up to 1 year) and specify a time. You should specify the date and time in your local time. You have to pick a time at least 15 minutes in the future.
- When you schedule a hosted session you will see it appear in the top part of the hosted sessions page. You'll see a new icon to the right that has a cancel link to cancel the session. You aren't charged until the session launches. At this time it isn't possible to edit a session once you have scheduled it. You will have to cancel and recreate.
Series Stats
- Fix to properly display PRO/WC licenses.
Mixed-Class Scoring
- If only a single driver registers for a mixed-class race in a particular class of car, that driver may only receive 50% of the full championship points that are available to drivers in that car class.
Facebook
- Fix to include series name and season name rather than just season name when the user is registered for a race.
Series and Driver Stats CSV Exports
- Added custid to csv exports for series stats and driver stats.
Event Results CSV Exports
- The csv export functionality has been enhanced to allow you to export each individual portion of a race session. For example, if you have a hosted session with a qualifier and race component you can now export the race and qualifier results as separate csv files. You will notice that rather than having a single "OUTPUT CSV" button there is now a button in each results table.
- There is also a new session summary that will appear at the top of the csv file by default. This provides some useful information that had been missing from the export.
- The feature was designed to be backward compatible with existing automated scripts. Your existing scripts should work the same way. You will only need to make a change if you want to include the new summary information in your export. To do so you need to append "&includeSummary=1" to your GetEventResultsAsCSV request.
Forum Private Message Notifications
- Added a new section to the site footer that displays how many unread private messages you have.
- Added a new section to the site footer that notifies you if your private message box is full.
- Added a forum profile link added to the helmet pop-ups throughout the site. This will provide a way to search for a member and then easily jump to their forum profile for watching/ignoring.
Practice Sessions
- Open Practice sessions for the majority of series have been opened up for all license levels.
Awards/Certificates
- The personal stats page has been reworked to now have 3 tabs (Career, Awards and Certificates). The Certificates tab will contain all of your earned certificates (Driving School Completion, First Road Win, Season Race Overall, etc). The Awards tab will contain all of the NEW "Achievement" type awards (Hard Charger, iLetYouWin, Picasso, etc). Achievements are not retroactive, so get out there and start earning them!
General
- Updated code to facilitate the moving of clubs between regions on a per quarter basis.
Forums
- It is now possible to "watch" a member's forum activity. From a member's forum profile you can select to watch/unwatch a member. Every time a member you are watching makes a forum post you will receive an email with a link to the post.
- It is now possible to ignore a member's forum activity. This choice is available in the member's profile and from the profile section to the left of each post. If you choose to ignore a member all of that member's posts will be hidden to you in the threads and replace by a subdued message "You are ignoring <Member Name>". To stop ignoring a member, you need to visit that member's forum profile and choose to stop ignoring them. You can get to the member's forum profile by clicking on their name in the subdued message or by selecting the "Forum Profile" link from that member's helmet pop-up anywhere on the member site. Ignoring a member does not block Private Messages from that user.
- Private Message inbox full indicator added. This message will be displayed in a black message bubble at the top of the forums.
- "Edit" and "Quote" text has been added to the icons for each post.
IE9
- IE9 has been added to the list of allowed browsers.
Reference Documents Page
- This has been rewritten to better organize the documents and make it much easier to find what you are looking for.
Live Broadcast Bar
- There is a new live broadcast bar that appears at the top of the member's site to notify you that a live broadcast is happening on iracing.com. It will appear 5 minutes prior to a broadcast and links out to the live broadcasts page on iracing.com.
Driving School
- There are a few known issues with the youtube video player. The popup resolution menu doesn't work properly. You should be able to change your resolution by clicking on the resolution icon itself rather than mousing over it. Similar issue with the volume control. To change your volume you should click on the volume icon but rather than using your mouse to change the volume use your keyboard's up/down arrows.
Car Number Preference
- You may choose a "preferred" car number for each car that you have purchased. Visit the My Racing/Customise Car(s) page and enter your preferred car number for each car. You may choose any 1- or 2-digit car number, with or without leading zeros, except that car number "0" is disallowed.
- Your preferred car number will be considered in all sessions except Races within Official iRacing series, where car numbers will be assigned by iRating, as before. With thousands of members on the service, it is inevitable that two or more people that have chosen the same preferred car number will join the same session.
- For sessions that can be registered for while in progress (open practices, and hosted sessions), you will be assigned your preferred number if no other driver that has previously joined the session was given that number. Otherwise, the server will assign an unused number to you. Your car number for a session can not be changed once one has been assigned to you. Withdrawing from the session, selecting a different number on the Customise Car(s) page, and rejoining the session will not change the car number that you were previously assigned.
- For sessions that require registration before the event starts (qualify, time trial, unofficial race), the service will prioritize requests for car numbers as follows:
1) A driver with a higher license has higher priority.
2) For drivers with the same license, the driver with the higher Safety Rating has higher priority.
3) If both license and SR are the same, the driver with the higher Corners Per Incident rating has higher priority.
4) In the unlikely even that all of those measures are the same, the system will prioritize the conflicting drivers.
- The preferred car number selection for a driver will be ignored if a higher priority driver has the same preference.
- Drivers that have no preference (or whose preference is being ignored) will be ordered by iRating and assigned car numbers counting from "1", but skipping any preferred car numbers that were allowed.
Simulation:
Misc
- Added app.ini option [view] DriverHeadNoPitch to lock head to horizon in pitch. This may be useful for people with motion platforms and static displays (such as a motion seats)
- Limited effect of pitch/roll lock to horizon to only ~25 deg.
- File dialog now supports pressing enter key as click/double click when file/folder selected in list.
- File dialog now handles partial path in filename properly.
- SoftTH 2.05 is now allowed to proxy D3D9.dll.
- Added keyboard support for focus on pace car and focus on most interesting using the *<driver><enter> keyboard shortcut (0 - pacecar, -1 to -3 focus on)
Graphics Engine
- A change was made to the shadow map system such that only one dynamic shadow map render target will update per frame. Previously, going around a turn might cause several to update all in the same frame resulting in a noticeable stutter on some PCs.
- Let windowed display grow to maximum size of desktop, not just primary display (the window can now span multiple monitors). On some systems spanning monitors may cause a significant drop in frame rate.
- A new option "PixelRatioWindowed" has been added to app.ini. In conjunction with the existing "pixelRatio", you may now specify different pixel ratios for windowed and full-screen modes.
Headlights At Night Tracks
- A preliminary version of headlight support for night racing at road courses has been added. Of course, only cars that actually have headlights will light up the track in front. You may drive cars without headlights in the dark, but you won't be able to see very well at all! Our current cars that have headlights are the Chevrolet Corvette C6R, Ford Falcon FG01 V8, Ford Mustang FR500S, Volkswagen Jetta TDI Cup, Mazda MX-5 Cup and Roadster, Riley MkXX DP, and Pontiac Solstice. (Note: our Radical SR8 does not have headlights at this time - the one we scanned did not have headlights installed)
- In the advanced graphics options there is a new option labeled "Headlight Detail." This has four settings, which allows you to adjust the headlight quality vs. performance tradeoff to match your PC's capabilities. If you have pixel shaders disabled, you may only select DISABLED or LOW.
- Headlights Detail options:
LOW - This is the fastest version of the headlights support. It works very well from in car. The main issue is that headlights illuminate both sides of walls and all sides of trackside objects, rather than just the side the headlight is located on. It also suffers from banding and aliasing in the headlight effects. If you have pixels shaders disabled, this mode provides even higher performance than with pixel shaders enabled. If having frame rate issues at Sebring night, try setting headlight detail to low, unchecking headlights on track in mirrors, turning off pixel shaders, and restarting the session. If this doesn't help see the info about the DISABLED option below.
MED - This version makes it so that headlights don't show up on the backsides of walls and objects, and reduces aliasing a bit. The main issue is that colored headlights (such as the yellow headlights of the C6R) only work on the track surface, and show up as white light on walls, trackside objects, and reflectors.
HIGH - This version provides the best quality by far, with colored headlights working on the track surfaces, walls, reflectors and trackside objects, and it also virtually eliminates all of the banding in the illumination of the track surface.
DISABLED - If after testing some night tracks on LOW, your system cannot provide acceptable frame rates, you may choose this option as a last resort, which will disable nearly all of the headlight effects. This may allow you to still run at the well lit night ovals (Richmond/Bristol) where headlights aren't needed. If you only ever run ovals, this is the best setting for you. WARNING: Don't try to drive at Sebring night without headlights if you value your safety rating.
- A related setting in the advanced graphics options is the "Headlights on track in mirrors" checkbox. When enabled the simulation will render the headlight illumination onto the track surface in each of your mirrors. This will affect your frame rate to some extent, so you might want to test it both ways in an open practice session with lots of cars around to check the difference in quality/performance of the racing experience. It may provide useful, when racing, to see the headlights coming up in your mirrors on the track surface however.
- In addition to the above options there are two options hidden in renderer.ini:
ProceduralHeadlights=0
MonochromeHeadlights = 0
Enabling procedural headlights will cause your car's headlights (and only yours), to be generated procedurally using a shader, so that bumps affect the light cone somewhat. This is an experimental feature, but it is a neat effect. It's not quite done yet, but it is cool already.
Enabling monochrome headlights will cause all car's headlights to render as white light, providing a bit less banding, and a bit higher performance in some cases.
Sound
- A new app.ini setting may fix crackles on some sound cards when using fmod. Add a new line containing overrideFmodFormat=1 to the
Website:
Hosted Sessions
- Added the ability to purchase a session based on number of hours. The options are 2, 4 and 6 hours.
- Changed it so you can limit the race portion of your hosted session by laps, minutes or both (laps or minutes). If you select both, the race will conclude when X laps have completed or Y minutes have passed, whichever happens first.
- Added the ability to schedule hosted sessions to launch at some time in the future. The default is "now" but you can use a date picker to select a date in the future (up to 1 year) and specify a time. You should specify the date and time in your local time. You have to pick a time at least 15 minutes in the future.
- When you schedule a hosted session you will see it appear in the top part of the hosted sessions page. You'll see a new icon to the right that has a cancel link to cancel the session. You aren't charged until the session launches. At this time it isn't possible to edit a session once you have scheduled it. You will have to cancel and recreate.
Series Stats
- Fix to properly display PRO/WC licenses.
Mixed-Class Scoring
- If only a single driver registers for a mixed-class race in a particular class of car, that driver may only receive 50% of the full championship points that are available to drivers in that car class.
- Fix to include series name and season name rather than just season name when the user is registered for a race.
Series and Driver Stats CSV Exports
- Added custid to csv exports for series stats and driver stats.
Event Results CSV Exports
- The csv export functionality has been enhanced to allow you to export each individual portion of a race session. For example, if you have a hosted session with a qualifier and race component you can now export the race and qualifier results as separate csv files. You will notice that rather than having a single "OUTPUT CSV" button there is now a button in each results table.
- There is also a new session summary that will appear at the top of the csv file by default. This provides some useful information that had been missing from the export.
- The feature was designed to be backward compatible with existing automated scripts. Your existing scripts should work the same way. You will only need to make a change if you want to include the new summary information in your export. To do so you need to append "&includeSummary=1" to your GetEventResultsAsCSV request.
Forum Private Message Notifications
- Added a new section to the site footer that displays how many unread private messages you have.
- Added a new section to the site footer that notifies you if your private message box is full.
- Added a forum profile link added to the helmet pop-ups throughout the site. This will provide a way to search for a member and then easily jump to their forum profile for watching/ignoring.
Practice Sessions
- Open Practice sessions for the majority of series have been opened up for all license levels.
Awards/Certificates
- The personal stats page has been reworked to now have 3 tabs (Career, Awards and Certificates). The Certificates tab will contain all of your earned certificates (Driving School Completion, First Road Win, Season Race Overall, etc). The Awards tab will contain all of the NEW "Achievement" type awards (Hard Charger, iLetYouWin, Picasso, etc). Achievements are not retroactive, so get out there and start earning them!
General
- Updated code to facilitate the moving of clubs between regions on a per quarter basis.
Forums
- It is now possible to "watch" a member's forum activity. From a member's forum profile you can select to watch/unwatch a member. Every time a member you are watching makes a forum post you will receive an email with a link to the post.
- It is now possible to ignore a member's forum activity. This choice is available in the member's profile and from the profile section to the left of each post. If you choose to ignore a member all of that member's posts will be hidden to you in the threads and replace by a subdued message "You are ignoring <Member Name>". To stop ignoring a member, you need to visit that member's forum profile and choose to stop ignoring them. You can get to the member's forum profile by clicking on their name in the subdued message or by selecting the "Forum Profile" link from that member's helmet pop-up anywhere on the member site. Ignoring a member does not block Private Messages from that user.
- Private Message inbox full indicator added. This message will be displayed in a black message bubble at the top of the forums.
- "Edit" and "Quote" text has been added to the icons for each post.
IE9
- IE9 has been added to the list of allowed browsers.
Reference Documents Page
- This has been rewritten to better organize the documents and make it much easier to find what you are looking for.
Live Broadcast Bar
- There is a new live broadcast bar that appears at the top of the member's site to notify you that a live broadcast is happening on iracing.com. It will appear 5 minutes prior to a broadcast and links out to the live broadcasts page on iracing.com.
Driving School
- There are a few known issues with the youtube video player. The popup resolution menu doesn't work properly. You should be able to change your resolution by clicking on the resolution icon itself rather than mousing over it. Similar issue with the volume control. To change your volume you should click on the volume icon but rather than using your mouse to change the volume use your keyboard's up/down arrows.
Car Number Preference
- You may choose a "preferred" car number for each car that you have purchased. Visit the My Racing/Customise Car(s) page and enter your preferred car number for each car. You may choose any 1- or 2-digit car number, with or without leading zeros, except that car number "0" is disallowed.
- Your preferred car number will be considered in all sessions except Races within Official iRacing series, where car numbers will be assigned by iRating, as before. With thousands of members on the service, it is inevitable that two or more people that have chosen the same preferred car number will join the same session.
- For sessions that can be registered for while in progress (open practices, and hosted sessions), you will be assigned your preferred number if no other driver that has previously joined the session was given that number. Otherwise, the server will assign an unused number to you. Your car number for a session can not be changed once one has been assigned to you. Withdrawing from the session, selecting a different number on the Customise Car(s) page, and rejoining the session will not change the car number that you were previously assigned.
- For sessions that require registration before the event starts (qualify, time trial, unofficial race), the service will prioritize requests for car numbers as follows:
1) A driver with a higher license has higher priority.
2) For drivers with the same license, the driver with the higher Safety Rating has higher priority.
3) If both license and SR are the same, the driver with the higher Corners Per Incident rating has higher priority.
4) In the unlikely even that all of those measures are the same, the system will prioritize the conflicting drivers.
- The preferred car number selection for a driver will be ignored if a higher priority driver has the same preference.
- Drivers that have no preference (or whose preference is being ignored) will be ordered by iRating and assigned car numbers counting from "1", but skipping any preferred car numbers that were allowed.
Simulation:
Misc
- Added app.ini option [view] DriverHeadNoPitch to lock head to horizon in pitch. This may be useful for people with motion platforms and static displays (such as a motion seats)
- Limited effect of pitch/roll lock to horizon to only ~25 deg.
- File dialog now supports pressing enter key as click/double click when file/folder selected in list.
- File dialog now handles partial path in filename properly.
- SoftTH 2.05 is now allowed to proxy D3D9.dll.
- Added keyboard support for focus on pace car and focus on most interesting using the *<driver><enter> keyboard shortcut (0 - pacecar, -1 to -3 focus on)
Graphics Engine
- A change was made to the shadow map system such that only one dynamic shadow map render target will update per frame. Previously, going around a turn might cause several to update all in the same frame resulting in a noticeable stutter on some PCs.
- Let windowed display grow to maximum size of desktop, not just primary display (the window can now span multiple monitors). On some systems spanning monitors may cause a significant drop in frame rate.
- A new option "PixelRatioWindowed" has been added to app.ini. In conjunction with the existing "pixelRatio", you may now specify different pixel ratios for windowed and full-screen modes.
Headlights At Night Tracks
- A preliminary version of headlight support for night racing at road courses has been added. Of course, only cars that actually have headlights will light up the track in front. You may drive cars without headlights in the dark, but you won't be able to see very well at all! Our current cars that have headlights are the Chevrolet Corvette C6R, Ford Falcon FG01 V8, Ford Mustang FR500S, Volkswagen Jetta TDI Cup, Mazda MX-5 Cup and Roadster, Riley MkXX DP, and Pontiac Solstice. (Note: our Radical SR8 does not have headlights at this time - the one we scanned did not have headlights installed)
- In the advanced graphics options there is a new option labeled "Headlight Detail." This has four settings, which allows you to adjust the headlight quality vs. performance tradeoff to match your PC's capabilities. If you have pixel shaders disabled, you may only select DISABLED or LOW.
- Headlights Detail options:
LOW - This is the fastest version of the headlights support. It works very well from in car. The main issue is that headlights illuminate both sides of walls and all sides of trackside objects, rather than just the side the headlight is located on. It also suffers from banding and aliasing in the headlight effects. If you have pixels shaders disabled, this mode provides even higher performance than with pixel shaders enabled. If having frame rate issues at Sebring night, try setting headlight detail to low, unchecking headlights on track in mirrors, turning off pixel shaders, and restarting the session. If this doesn't help see the info about the DISABLED option below.
MED - This version makes it so that headlights don't show up on the backsides of walls and objects, and reduces aliasing a bit. The main issue is that colored headlights (such as the yellow headlights of the C6R) only work on the track surface, and show up as white light on walls, trackside objects, and reflectors.
HIGH - This version provides the best quality by far, with colored headlights working on the track surfaces, walls, reflectors and trackside objects, and it also virtually eliminates all of the banding in the illumination of the track surface.
DISABLED - If after testing some night tracks on LOW, your system cannot provide acceptable frame rates, you may choose this option as a last resort, which will disable nearly all of the headlight effects. This may allow you to still run at the well lit night ovals (Richmond/Bristol) where headlights aren't needed. If you only ever run ovals, this is the best setting for you. WARNING: Don't try to drive at Sebring night without headlights if you value your safety rating.
- A related setting in the advanced graphics options is the "Headlights on track in mirrors" checkbox. When enabled the simulation will render the headlight illumination onto the track surface in each of your mirrors. This will affect your frame rate to some extent, so you might want to test it both ways in an open practice session with lots of cars around to check the difference in quality/performance of the racing experience. It may provide useful, when racing, to see the headlights coming up in your mirrors on the track surface however.
- In addition to the above options there are two options hidden in renderer.ini:
ProceduralHeadlights=0
MonochromeHeadlights = 0
Enabling procedural headlights will cause your car's headlights (and only yours), to be generated procedurally using a shader, so that bumps affect the light cone somewhat. This is an experimental feature, but it is a neat effect. It's not quite done yet, but it is cool already.
Enabling monochrome headlights will cause all car's headlights to render as white light, providing a bit less banding, and a bit higher performance in some cases.
Sound
- A new app.ini setting may fix crackles on some sound cards when using fmod. Add a new line containing overrideFmodFormat=1 to the
. De skippy rijdt niet erg anders vind'k, wel meer grip. Ook leuk is bij het in hoog toerental gaan, hij onderstuurt bij het opschakelen. Het voelt algemeen anders aan, dat wel, maar er is nog werk te doen hoor. FFB is niet in orde zowel bij de lmp als de Ford. Op het rechte stuk gaat mijn stuur van links naar rechts heel de tijd :s. Ook onbreekt ik gevoel! 
