Just got back into simracing after having been away for about ten years. Started out with GPL and Grand Prix (Geoff Crammonds), had a few years with iRacing. Offline racing has always been a big thing for me. It lets me drive championships without the stresses off online racing, it’s an immersive escape. Got into Raceroom after having tried out Assetto Corsa. What attracted me was the supposedly good and adaptive AI and also having built in functions for configuring championships without the need to download mods and having to fiddle around for ages with it. So far Raceroom has been a great experience, and looking back on the history of it, it has become a more complete platform, where you can easily go from offline racing to online (with a realky good ranking system). However, the offline experience fails on a few very important points: Lack of feedback on results. What do you get after having run a multiclass endurance race? Not even the complete results! You get the top eleven with nothing more than their race time. There is nothing there to tell me why the race unfolded the way it did. Nothing to tell me how I can adapt my pit strategy. And I can’t even retrieve the results once I have clicked continue. This ties in with the need to understand the AI’s pit stop strategy. Ran a one hour race yesterday, qualified midfield, held a reasonable pace all the way through. The AI made several pitstops, I made one. Why? It’s all a mystery and I have no means to figure out what happened since there is no info in the results on the number of pitstops the AI makes. This driving-in-blind kills the offline experience for me. Online, which I never expected to involve myself in has fortunately turned out to be a fun experience so I don’t in any way regret the investment in Raceroom but I do wish for a more complete and immersive offline experience. Edit: I stand corrected. I can see the results for,the whole field in a multiclass race. I just didn’t wait long enough for the screen to switch to the next page. However, that doesn’t invalidate the rest of my criticism. There’s a lack of information after the races.
You should be able to see the full results after the race by waiting for the view switching to the next page after a few seconds, or are you already using the new beta webmenus?
No, not using any beta webmenus. As for the results, in a multiclass race it only switches between the top eleven in each class. In single class, it does show the whole results but I’d like to see more information than total race time which gives me no clues of how the race unfolded and how I can adapt my strategies.
Try using SecondMonitor app. Might be able to provide what you want. https://forum.sector3studios.com/index.php?threads/secondmonitor-timing-status-app.9587/
Thanks, certainly looks like what I´m looking for. However, I think there is much to gain for Raceroom to make this a built in feature. The fiddle-overhead with mods is dragging down a lot of sims in my opinion where one solution creates new problems that needs to be solved. I would prefer the software studios to deliver a fiddle-free experience. Having said that, I will try the SecondMonitor app out.
Sure, though it's not always possible. Especially with a small dev team. You need to do thing that bring income. Sometimes it's better to leave the development of additional tools to skilled 3rd parties. That said, S3 does listen to community feedback. The new UI is being developed so maybe there will be changes to how results are displayed. For now you have to deal with helpful community creations.
What Raceroom has, the competitors don´t if done properly. I gather ACC and iRacing are the alternatives here. I haven´t tried ACC yet but they seem to deliver the offline experience I´m looking for, I´m not sure about the online thing where Raceroom´s and iRacing´s ranking system seems to be better. iRacing has the online market locked in, pretty much, but I don´t like the feeling of the cars and they don´t seem to have much of an offline thing going. Their AI seems to be terrible from what I´ve seen on YT. I believe Raceroom has an opportunity here to create a more complete experience for simracers with a few improvements, and I have to believe what I´m asking for is far from the most challenging tasks for a developer. I guess the devs done it before with Race07, GTR 2 et. al.
Even something as simple and basic as a list of drivers' laptimes in a txt/csv format would be helpful. They have something like that for online servers, but not for offline races.
Given Raceroom has a really good AI, it´s a pity the results system is so under-developed. For instance, in championship mode, only the result from the first race is available as a report, as soon as you run the second race it is gone and for the second race you get only the results screen immediately after the race. Once back into the menus, it´s gone.
I agree for the most-part, but every sim has it's features, and lack-thereof. For me, running Championships with adaptive AI is the best racing I've ever experienced offline (on the track), and for me, that trumps everything else, which keeps me coming back for more. I've ran countless championships and have missed actually winning one by 2 points. I've had multiple top 10's, but to win is tough, and I love that about this sim. To me, it's the closest representation of being in a real race (talking about ai). Sure, I hate that when I finish the last race of the Championship, the championship is gone (literally), without the ability to review stats for the season, or even warn you that the Championship is over. But as I said, the immersion with the ai, while on the track, trumps anything else I've ever experienced. I love it!
Technically, you can see the best lap times of each driver. The race results of your last offline race are stored in UserData\Log\Results\raceresults.txt
Well, one thing I wanted to avoid was the constant fiddling. First few days with Assetto Corsa was nothing but messing around with mods and getting them to work as I wanted them to. I know about the raceresults.txt file but to get into Excel in a readable and sortable manner is beyond me and to have to exit the game in order to view the results seem very awkward. It´s here that I think Raceroom is missing an opportunity. Having a really good AI is partly wasted when the context is missing for the player.