Project Cars Stoopid Challenges

[born2bslow]

My best just says "Error Sending" but it might be my internet because I'm also downloading the GT Sport Closed Beta on my PS4

[Ian_sUK]

I've not had any issues tonight

[rex]

Mine has been fine this evening Mark. My red crosses may have been due to TC being on. The General says no TC but it is available in the real settings. As you know I can toggle it on and off during the lap.

Hope this helps.

[xjay1337]

mark7389 said:

xjay1337 said:

Done some laps.

Have to admit, the handicap needs sorting to make it more even for the faster and slower 20%. I'm sure the 80% in the middle is fine.

It's kind of swings and roundabouts, if you have a bad race then you don't get many points for that race but your handicap goes up for the following race. I've tried to dampen out the oscillation (do you like that, sounds like I know what I'm talking about) by discounting the 2 worst results but there's always going to be the possibility of a freak result.

For example if someone turns up and just does a token lap or two in one race (might hate the car or the track) and then for the next race puts in 50 laps they may end up 5 seconds ahead of everyone.

Overall, to win the much-prized virtual gold championship cup, consistency is the key :-)

Technical terms, sign of a true techie

I just find it a bit of a hard pill to swallow when I set a good time but the "handicapped" time is totally unreachable - 3 or 4 seconds faster than the best time set!

Regarding the technical issues, I think looking at the PC Lap Updater it said that TC was available however it appears that it isn't?
I have no idea but my Updater has been working fine.
However I don't set the aids to real, due to my own racing preferences, I manually set everything to off.

[mark7389]

xjay1337 said:

Technical terms, sign of a true techie

I just find it a bit of a hard pill to swallow when I set a good time but the "handicapped" time is totally unreachable - 3 or 4 seconds faster than the best time set!

Regarding the technical issues, I think looking at the PC Lap Updater it said that TC was available however it appears that it isn't?
I have no idea but my Updater has been working fine.
However I don't set the aids to real, due to my own racing preferences, I manually set everything to off.

I know what you mean, it's a bit of a different approach with this. If everyone was putting 100% effort into every race then the maths says that everyone should be dead level (barring a small multiplier being applied to give a slight advantage to the faster drivers). However in real life that doesn't happen, people might hate a car, have a busy weekend and only be able to put in a couple of laps, etc, etc and that leads to pretty much every race there being at least one driver that's a bit out of whack.

Don't forget you can always toggle the handicap off to give you that warm, fuzzy feeling.

I might give some thought to having 2 parallel championships, one with handicap on and one with it off. My only concern, is that would devalue the handicap championship and from a personal point of view, I enjoy being in the mix for the championship even though I'm certainly not the quickest.

[Northern_Monkey]

I think my handicap will be more realistic now after this one - the fact I didn't get on with the Brno combo probably meant it was more generous for Monza that it should have been although I was also closer to the overall pace than I have been on any other circuit as well

[mark7389]

This is data for Matt S. You can see in the last race he way outperformed his average by a good 3%, and gave everyone a good kicking. However his handicap now drops from 3.6% to 2.6%, so he should be brought a bit more back into the fold

[Steve Campbell]

Bit of a surprise for me to be on the podium, but I think it was a function of having a difficult car/track combo followed by a relatively benign car on Monza which isn't that difficult in comparison. I think the better drivers will ease away with the difficult combos, but easier tracks with easier cars favours the back markers in terms of the system.

Overall, I think it's brilliant. Most of the time it gives me something to aim for being at the back or middle of the pack..... and the graphs are helpful if a little frustrating as sometimes I sit looking at them thinking "how the F do they do that !" ;-)

[Northern_Monkey]

Steve Campbell said:

Bit of a surprise for me to be on the podium, but I think it was a function of having a difficult car/track combo followed by a relatively benign car on Monza which isn't that difficult in comparison. I think the better drivers will ease away with the difficult combos, but easier tracks with easier cars favours the back markers in terms of the system.

Overall, I think it's brilliant. Most of the time it gives me something to aim for being at the back or middle of the pack..... and the graphs are helpful if a little frustrating as sometimes I sit looking at them thinking "how the F do they do that !" ;-)

I'd agree with that. I probably use the GT3 cars more than any others when I'm racing and Monza is a circuit that I also know so that helped more than Brno with a car that I could hardly keep on track.

To be honest, I feel a bit guilty when I 'win' - as at Bathurst with the DTM car - which is why I tend to just focus on trying to get as close to the quick guys as I can without the handicap on.

Quite happy to be the quickest driver using a controller...

[xjay1337]

mark7389 said:

I know what you mean, it's a bit of a different approach with this. If everyone was putting 100% effort into every race then the maths says that everyone should be dead level (barring a small multiplier being applied to give a slight advantage to the faster drivers). However in real life that doesn't happen, people might hate a car, have a busy weekend and only be able to put in a couple of laps, etc, etc and that leads to pretty much every race there being at least one driver that's a bit out of whack.

Don't forget you can always toggle the handicap off to give you that warm, fuzzy feeling.

I might give some thought to having 2 parallel championships, one with handicap on and one with it off. My only concern, is that would devalue the handicap championship and from a personal point of view, I enjoy being in the mix for the championship even though I'm certainly not the quickest.

Lets just keep the one championship, as you say, we can toggle times to see the "true" times, and it's just a bit of fun

[rex]

A suggestion really the handicaps. Can you set it so that the handicap gets rounded down to the nearest 0.5%. This way the drivers would have similar handicaps for their level of driving. You could also have it so that a handicap would not be able to increase by more than 0.5 per round which would even out wild swings in uplift of handicap if someone did not put in a great effort due to lack of time or hated a particular combo.

[mark7389]

I'm thinking that the problems we had over the last week with laps not sending were related to driver aids. I couldn't find anything specifically wrong with the code, but I've re-written it anyway. It may be to do with that in the past we have had people seeing different aids available under the real setting even though they're in the same car. Anyway in order to make it absolutely clear as to why a lap isn't being sent the aids that have been triggered can now be permanently seen on the screen, not just flashing up intermittently in the speedo area, and we'll have more info to go on if a lap isn't sent.

New version of PCLapUpdater should install when you next open it up.

[born2bslow]

I'm having my usual install issue, tried deleting deployment file and removing old version but no joy. It keeps saying the temp file that's unpacked is in use...anyone got any ideas?

If it helps, it's not extracting, the deployment folder is empty...

Edited by born2bslow on Thursday 13th April 21:56

[mark7389]

born2bslow said:

I'm having my usual install issue, tried deleting deployment file and removing old version but no joy. It keeps saying the temp file that's unpacked is in use...anyone got any ideas?

If it helps, it's not extracting, the deployment folder is empty...

Edited by born2bslow on Thursday 13th April 21:56

I've emailed you a zipped version of the whole program but if I remember rightly from previous times it's more of a windows profile issue and that doesn't help much, but anyway......

[mark7389]

Just for xjay1337, don't say I never do anything for you :-)

We now have a non-handicapped version of the site! Basically everything carries on just as before, but if you so wish you can turn handicapping off under the hamburger icon and it all changes to as if handicaps never existed. The championship becomes based on raw times and there's now 2 congratulatory winner tweets that go out at Wednesday at midnight one for handicap and one for non-handicap.

The setting you pick now sticks so you don't need to keep changing it on login.

Those of you, like me, who like the handicapping system, then it's just as you were.

I should make it clear, everyone is automatically in both championships, it's just 2 different views of the data.

Hope you like it, this should be the best of both worlds.

Edited by mark7389 on Friday 14th April 08:38

[xjay1337]

Very impressive Mark
Thanks! Haha :-) about to fire up this morning.

[mark7389]

xjay1337 said:

Very impressive Mark
Thanks! Haha :-) about to fire up this morning.

You don't get a virtual gold cup though, because to be honest it's going to be a pain in the arse to sort out, soz about that.......

[xjay1337]

mark7389 said:

You don't get a virtual gold cup though, because to be honest it's going to be a pain in the arse to sort out, soz about that.......

Oh, well in that case, I resign!!


Had some issues with the PC Lap Updater App not updating, it went to 100% and then sat there, had to force close, uninstall and re-install.

Also, currently shows my fastest lap in game as a 1.36.454, but on the portal, it's showing 1.36.455

[mark7389]

xjay1337 said:

Oh, well in that case, I resign!!


Had some issues with the PC Lap Updater App not updating, it went to 100% and then sat there, had to force close, uninstall and re-install.

Also, currently shows my fastest lap in game as a 1.36.454, but on the portal, it's showing 1.36.455

Most likely anti-virus quarantine, let's face it I wouldn't let you run some unheard of executable downloaded from the internet either.

FYI your actual time is 1.36.454590 which should be 1.36.455 to 3dp which is what is showing on the website

[mark7389]

Well 10 out of 10 for effort, 0 out of 10 for talent, 114 freaking laps and still bloody useless, aaaargh