Race Coordinator, RMS Options

[Top Down]

Yes

[Race Coordinator]

Yeah the beta line has the better way of handling the Drop N heats option. Hopefully everybody using that feature likes it. My head use to spin testing those races. Now my little brain can understand what's going on...

[Race Coordinator]

New beta release is up. This release fixes a critical problem with false starting in which a driver who false started would not count laps for the entire heat. This release also fixes some export/save/load issues when trying to work with files created by older versions of RC. This is a minor thing, but if you're using the old alpha builds or the newer betas, I strongly recommend updating to this release.

-Dave

[montoya1]

Pleased to report the fix works.

Furthermore, we have determined it is possible to have the penalty for a false start be less than a whole lap.

It is a little counter-intuitive, but you basically set the penalty to a minus number.

For example, to create a penalty of 0.75 laps enter -0.25 as the penalty. In effect RC will dock you a lap, less the penalty you set if you use a minus number.

On the massive HONK track, this was crucial, and the final step to being able to have live starts tomorrow....

[Race Coordinator]

New beta release is up. I fixed a crash bug if you use the "restart on false start" option you'll want this beta. The good news is that in the cases that cause the RMS to crash wiht this option, the auto save restores the race and nothing is lost... but still, no crash is better than falling back to the auto save.

There's also a new feature in this release. If you use the "Allow single lap finish" option there's a new option that allows each driver to finish their lap, but instead of counting the lap the RMS will use timing information to estimate the section total the driver was on when they were "allowed to finish". It's of course not 100% accurate but if you hate the add sections dialog like I do, this might be the ticket for you...

There's a few other minor fixes in this release as well.
-Dave

[Race Coordinator]

I have a few announcements I wanted to share:

First and most important, I can't thank the all the people who have sent kind words and generous donations to my charity. The charity has become the biggest reason for me to keep spending so much time on RC. As such, I realized that for awhile now I've been negligent in thanking people directly for donations. While I can assure you that every penny (and then some because I match a lot of the donations) has gone to charity, I got too busy and lost sight of the fact that I should make sure those who donate know how much it's appreciated. With that said, I'm re-prioritizing from here on out and my number one priority regarding Race Coordinator is the charity and proper gratitude for donations. Considering how much the charity means to me and my wife I'm a bit embarrassed I lost site something so important as saying thank you.

So I will once again say thank you to those who have contributed. Many have contributed more than I'd ask if I were selling the software and some have even donated more than once. Every penny is appreciated as much for the sentiment as anything else. It's been what seems like forever since my life got turned upside down. My wife and I still struggle every day and we look for anything to hold on to and make us even just a little happy. It's odd but more often than not a donation comes in when we need it the most. So thank you.

With all that said, I want to make another call for donations. I've been looking over numbers and based on website data (and all the support emails I get), if every RC user donated even $25 we'd really have something. I know the world economy is tough, and I'd never ask for anything more than you can afford, but if you can manage it, and you are moved by my story or just think RC is the best thing ever, please give what you can. Even $5 from everybody would still be something. As always 100% goes to charity and depending on my situation I match what I can. Please do not feel obligated in anyway to donate, especially if you already have. My support for RC will continue regardless, and donations in no way gets you better support because frankly I believe in supporting my software, no questions asked.

Moving on I have two more things I'd like to say. The first is that the live web race update feature is coming very soon. We have something good enough to go with now (special thanks to SlingShotX and Sy for doing the bulk of the work). I'm currently debating releasing what we have and continuing to work on it as we go. So if anybody wants to check it out, I'll open it up to anybody. Just email me for now. I suspect in the next week or two a first release will be posted on my site. So get your smart phone and tablets out. And start thinking about what you'd do if you could pull up basically any information you wanted about a race from anywhere... I think this feature may take some time for the community to embrace, but if you look at what it is, and what it means, it will eventually become a mainstay for at very least club races. I may be wrong, but I don't know of any other RMS that can do what RC can do in this regard. I for one think it's the best feature I've added since the RMS was first released...

Lastly, I've been reviewing how many users I have and the numbers appear to be larger than I ever thought I'd see. Thank you all for choosing RC. I'm grateful that I could give a little back to the community. I find I need things to take my mind off my life and more often than not it's slot cars. So whether you know it or not, you've all done more for me than I could ever do for you. I was thinking about putting something up on my website to identify RC users. I haven't figured all this out yet, and I don't know if I have enough users/people who would participate to make it worthwhile, but I was thinking that my users (clubs and or individuals) could send me a banner image representing themselves, and some simple information like a website URL, maybe a geographic location, and anything else you wanted to. Once I figure it out and have enough to make it worth doing, I'd post everything up on my website. Maybe a collage of RC users. If done well you guys could use it to identify other RC users and maybe get help if need be. The images need to be usable for a website so they need to be smallish, but I can mostly handle dealing with that. I'd link your image to the URL you provide so it would be free publicity for your site (assuming your site is appropriate) and I'd possibly do something with the other information provided (like organize the collage by geography). I'm open to ideas, but I thought something like this would be neat to see for the "RC community"... Anyway, if you're interested shoot me an email "contact@racecoordintor.net" with the information and any ideas you have for it. There's no timeline on this but as soon as I have "enough" information the sooner I can seriously consider doing something with it. Of course I'll add to it as we go once it's up as well.

I've rambled long enough for now...
As always, thank you.
-Dave

[Top Down]

No problem Dave. It's a privilege and great fun working with you and RC. Slot racing is a great hobby and distraction - and you and RC have made a good thing even better. I'll pm you some info for your user listing asap.

Regards,
Doug
Chesterfield
ENGLAND

[Lasp]

Very good text in your post.
Please correct the epost.
And I will take some action says Lasp

There are a good readingin the book of John Green

. The Fault in our Stars

[-Sy-]

Hi Dave, I'm away on family holiday ATM, back home next Tuesday, send me an update email when ou have time, on where you are. I've been doing some more work with the graphs for another project, one of the things that has recently come up is inverting the y axis.

[eAddict]

Broken link on your page: http://www.racecoordinator.net/formats.html

"And lots more... See the [Race Formats] section for more details including video tutorials on how to setup various race formats. "

Selecting [Race Formats] gives me a 404

Also,
does the software have the ability to add a late racer? Sometimes we have a racer show up after the race starts but before the first round is done. The new version of TrakMate supports this BUT I am seriously looking at your offering.

Thanks!
Vince
http://www.mgpmrc.org

[Race Coordinator]

Yeap, sorry about that. I'll fix it tonight. That link should have pointed here:
Formats/Tutorials

[Race Coordinator]

Exciting news. Well, maybe I'm the only one excited, but still... I just updated RC, RCD, and the SRMS with full live web update support. I also posted the current state of the live web update HTML/JS code to my download section. This means anybody that wants to can now make their RC run races available to any device with a web browser.

A very long (17 minute) video can be seen here. It's shaky because I'm using a hand held camera and I get long winded, but I wanted to show off the mobile devices. The video shows the live web updates on a PC browser, iPad, and an iPod Touch (which is smaller than today's smart phones).

Long Winded Demo

To use live web updates you need the latest version of the RC, RCD, SRMS software and you need HTML/JS files. Our very complete sample can be pulled down from the download section of my website. The readme contains all the information you need to both write your own HTML/JS as well as how to enable live web updates for your users. Please consult the readme and if there are any questions afterwords don't hesitate to ask.

To illustrate how big a feature this is, you could actually write your own RMS on top of this technology. I don't think you'd want to, but you absolutely could. Anyway, at least for techies, I don't think it's possible to have a cooler feature in an RMS .

I need to thank Sy, Slingshot, and Dieter once again for all the hard work they put into those. With out those guys this feature doesn't happen, at least it doesn't come out nearly as good as it is.

-Dave

[montoya1]

Epic stuff.