App AI-based Virtual Race Engineer incl. automated Pitstop Handling

The most important addition this week is the integration of a runtime for large language models like GPT 3/4 as part of Simulator Controller. You can configure the Driving Coach to use this runtime instead of the API services of OpenAI or Azure and alike. Unless you have a really High-End PC setup, you will not be able to interact with the Driving Coach, while you are running a simulation, though, and it will be much slower than using the OpenAI integration. But it is really exciting, what has become possible lately.

Other important changes and additions:

- You can set your preference for different pitstop strategies (early stop vs. late stop) for strategy simulations in “Strategy Workbench”.
- UI translation for the French language has been enhanced.
- The reliability of the automated pitstop setting for ACC has been further improved.

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With today's release, the assistants have mastered the French language - many thanks to @SlatMars for his work and dedication. Additionally, the Spotter no longer annoys you with proximity warnings during the formation lap and you can find further improvements in the release notes.

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This week we have some new stuff in the session info widgets in the "System Monitor" and the French translation has been alsmost completed. Only the setup wizard is left for translation. And a new version of the "Tactile Feedback" plugin reflects the latest changes in SimHub.

Beside that, I have moved the version repository for installation and updates to the Amazon cloud, since we had seen a couple of stability issues with DropBox recently. Nevertheless, this is really new stuff, therefore let me know immediately, if you have problems with install or updating Simulator Controller.

Next stop: Anniversary release on the 6th December...

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Today Simulator Controller celebrates its third birthday. The first commit on GitHub was on December 6, 2020, exactly three years ago, and a lot has happened since then. Some numbers:

7 supported games
23 applications
4 AI-Based Assistants

7 programming languages (C, C#, C++, JavaScript, AutoHotkey, Python, Rule Engine (self developed))
200.000 lines of code (roughly)
7000 and more commits on GitHub
400 pages of documention
25+ hours video tutorials

4-5 hours per day working on the project, roughly 5000 hours in total

As in previous years, this year there is also a very cool new feature with the Anniversary Release. A new switch has been added to the "Race Settings" that allows you to give the assistants full autonomy in terms of strategy and pit stop handling. This means that the Assistants will no longer ask the driver for confirmation when they want to change strategy, go for an undercut, prepare for a pit stop, etc. And they take action independently whenever necessary. This turns the Assistants into Agents and you can concentrate 100% on driving. This will work even in team races as long as at least one "Race Center" is connected to the session.



And there is another gift from a community member for today. @Jordan Moss has built a plugin for SimHub that allows all the data provided by the Assistants to be integrated into a dashboard in SimHub. For example, you can now see when the next pit stop is due and what service is planned for the stop, and much more. To get the plugin, all you have to do is register with us in Discord.

As you can see, the development of the Simulator Controller Assistants into a completely virtual, intelligent pit crew continues. And maybe you'll use the 3rd Anniversary as an opportunity to support the project if you haven't already done so. I don't drink coffee, but training AI Assistants is a very complex and expensive task...

IMPORTANT for R3E: A couple of bugs has been fixed for the Pitstop window handling. Still need the nasty search images, because the game API for the pitstop settings is broken. Maybe you can put some "pressure" at the developers

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Last feature release for 2023. It includes a couple of improvements in the "Race Center" and you can now change pitstop settings using the standard game controls after a pitstop has been planned and prepared by the Engineer. The changes will be reflected in the pitstop plan, at least in ACC, rF2 and iRacing.

I will be back in the next year with a new startup wizard that helps you preparing everything for your next session.

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Happy new year to all of you and welcome to the first release of 2024. After being quite diligent between the years, I can give you an interesting new feature in our first release of the year, the so-called startup profiles. Using these profiles you can manage in one place many interesting settings for a specific session type, for example a solo training session or a team-based endurance race, just to name two very different types of sessions. Startup profiles can be activated with one click, which makes things very easy.



And I would like to draw your attention to a few extensions that are available in the #share-your-mods area of our Discord. Using the SimHub plugin from @Jordan Moss, I built a few overlays for SimHub that show you important information about the strategy or the upcoming pit stop at a glance.



Another important change under the hood concerns the Driving Coach, which can now correlate information about lap and sector times with information about handling problems that have arisen and provide appropriate advice after the end of the session.

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Thanks to @SlatMars we now have also a French translation for "Simulator Setup", which completes the translation process for Simulator Controller for this language. Beside that, this release comes with many fixes and small improvements, incl. an optimized fuel calculation for races with formation laps in the "Strategy Workbench". Details can be found as always in the Release Notes.

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This week we have fixes and functional improvements in many areas. Most notably, the "Strategy Workbench" got a very cool and useful new feature to influence the pit strategy even for long endurance races, while running simulations for different strategies.

Example:

Normally, when you create a strategy for an endurance race, the strategy simulation tries to evenly distribute the last two stints, when not enough tyre degredation and fuel related lap time data is available in the database, like in this case:



If you now move the Pit Strategy slider completely to the right, the resulting strategy will create a splash n dash scenario, most likely without a driver change:



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@mirko_lesko and I worked hard this week to improve the "Setup Workbench". The tool now has a full understanding of hybrid cars with energy recovery, it can setup Heave suspensions and knows how to handle differentials with separate power and coast settings. All available cars have been adopted to the new settings and there are also a couple of new cars available.



Beside that and a number of other small improvements, a critical bug has been fixed, which prevented correct cold tyre pressure calculations for wet tyres in some circumstances.

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Another Friday, another Release. Lot's of fixes and improvements in different areas (please take a look at the Release Notes). Worth to mention:

1. New sttings allow you to customize, in which cases the Strategist will inform you about strategy changes.
2. The "Strategy Workbench" now includes detailed consumables charts in the strategy comaparison report. I have attached a typcial report to this post, if you want to have a look.
3. Again we have many improvements for the "Setup Workbench", which now can handle turbo cars with adjustable turbo boost.
4. Many car meta data has been added to the "Strategy Workbench" including the new cars of the GT2 DLC of Assetto Corsa Competizione.

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This week we once again have extensive expansions to the "Setup Workbench". A new mechanism for so-called DLCs allows metadata for vehicles from the community or from third parties (so-called mods) to be added to the vehicle inventory. These additional content downloads are available as a preset in "Simulator Setup". The list of these vehicles will be constantly expanded from now on and you are welcome to contact us in the Discord if you are looking for metadata for a specific vehicle.

There are also improvements for the "Practice Center" and the "Race Center", as well as some bug fixes. And there are some improvements in Team Server and data synchronization for Teams. If you run your own Team Server, an update is due.

So there's a lot to discover again. Never stop improving...

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The most important change for today is that the Push-To-Talk button no longer needs to be pressed twice when activating/calling one of the Assistants. And the Driving Coach learned some more tricks when discussing your performance and the handling of the car after a session. And last, but not least, the icons on the Stream Deck now shows you whether a given function is activated.

Thanks to @mirko_lesko, there are also a couple of new cars in the car meta data DLC. Don't miss that.

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Todays release 5.6.0 is packed with some ground-breaking new functionalities for strategy development. The strategy optimizer has seen a major rewrite and now offers several new options for you to set the preferences for the resulting strategy. Most notable is the possibility to optimize the car weight over the course of several stints or the ability to choose different strategies for the first and the last stint independently. Furthermore, the strategy simulation now keeps track of each tyre set and the number of laps a given tyre set already has on its rubber. The resulting strategy will always choose the tyre set with the best remaining tyre life, in cases, when a session with a restricted number of tyre sets is being simulated. Last, but not least, you can now fix one or more pitstops at an exact lap with predefined refuel amount and tyre change choices, if necessary. Additionaly, the "Strategy Workbench" now provide a direct view of a resulting strategy without the need to scroll down in the strategy report, which improves the workflow effectively.



I will conduct a live coaching session for all new features of the "Strategy Workbench" in our Discord on Monday evening @ 19:00 CET. I will be happy to meet you there.

Other changes apply to the "Session Database", where you now can export and import settings, for example, to share them with your team mates. And there are additional function configurations available in the Startup Profiles. Please see the Release Notes for more information.

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Nice idea, but way too complicated t set up for me

 

Hi, setup takes max. 10 minutes. Join our Discord, contact me and I can do it for you.

 

Beside several smaller fixes and improvements I can release the first integration for Le Mans Ultimate today. Not everything is working already, most notably the pitstop automation is not working at all, since the data API support of Le Mans Ultimate ist still incomplete and buggy, but most of the telemetry data is already available, the car positions on the track are correct, and so on.

Please take a look at the Release Notes for information on how to install and configure the shared memory plugin for Le Mans Ultimate.

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Many small, but nevertheless important changes are part of today's release. Opponnent pitstop information in the "Race Center" will be almost 100% reliable now and past pitstops will be taken into account when a strategy is re-calculated for a race with pitstop restrictions. The Le Mans Ultimate integration has been improved and the handling of sessions where drivers with duplicate race numbers are present in rFactor 2 is now handled correctly. Last, but not least, there is now support for team managers who want to create and share an initial configuration for all their team members.

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The Spotter has learned a new trick today. He can inform you about accidents ahead and also behind as well as about slow cars on the track ahead. Not everything is supported in every simulator (yet), therefore checkout the Release Notes as well.

And support for iRacing weather is here. You can manage tyre compounds and the Assistants have knowledge about the current weather. However, there are some open ends at the moment due to restrictions in the current iRacing API, so be sure to read the Release Notes.

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Today's release brings countless improvements for the iRacing support. The new weather model is now fully supported, the grip status of the track is recognized and the Engineer can now reliably choose between the available tyre compounds when preparing a pitstop.

For Assetto Corsa Competizione, warning of accidents and slow vehicles on the track is now also supported by the Spotter and the detection has been fundamentally revised for all simulations. However, incorrect warnings can still occur if an above-average number of accidents happened in the first laps during the learning phase. If these erroneous warnings are too disruptive, they can simply be stopped during a running session. This is described in the Release Notes.

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Two weeks since the last post here and we had two releases in this time. Many smaller improvements and a lot of tweaks for the accident detection. And the Spotter and the Strategist can now refer to a car using the race number and the current position at the same time. Additionally, Nordschleife has been added for ACC and Testdrives are now handled as practice sessions in iRacing.

Please see the release notes for the last two releases for more information.

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