Tomorrow (Wednesday March 11th 2015) we will be deploying the 2015 Season 2 build. Here are the release notes for that build.
New Content Highlights
- New track: Autodromo Nazionale Monza. Further details in the Tracks section of these release notes.
- New vehicles: NASCAR Camping World Chevrolet Silverado and NASCAR Camping World Toyota Tundra. Further details in the Cars section of these release notes.
Website:
Navigation and Site Organization
- Member Site global wrapper has been cleaned up, navigation has been reorganized to help new and old users find things more intuitively.
- The News Room, Race Guide, and Hosted Races pages now contain friendly buttons to help you jump to most main activities (Practice, Popular Races & Practices, Official Races, and Hosted Races).
- Many redundant dashboard widgets have been removed due to redundancy. The only ones that are being left in are the Race Planner and the Service Status widgets, which can be reordered, but not removed.
- The What's Hot widget has been removed and replaced with a full-page Popular Races guide - same data, more useful.
- The Settings panel has only one pane of settings, because there are no widgets to configure, and no tickers.
- There's an Store Overview page now, that lets you see all that iRacing has for sale at-a-glance.
Documentation
- The Quick Start guide has been revamped, and is actually quick now.
- Paint Policy and Unofficial policies have been updated (new pdfs).
Leagues
- On the page for Ignored League Applications, clicking the red X will now delete the correct entry.
- Leagues now can track & edit Team Standings for individual League Seasons.
- League Session tooltips are now consolidated, and grow to the left to stay within the global wrapper.
- League Seasons are now sorted by the most recent races that have occurred.
- League Members may now opt out of receiving league mail.
- Fixed an issue where parsing fixed setups for league races would sometimes lead to a page not loading fully.
- Added an error state for max-lengths of League Member nicknames.
Teams
- Added a button within My Teams to allow people to willingly leave a team.
- Transfer of Team Ownership now works as intended.
- Fixed a bug in the Team Registration dialogue where selecting a car in a multiclass session would sometimes load the car image either in a huge form, or would never let the loading indicator go away.
- Fixed Team Session Details rollover tooltips to properly show GMT dates/times & local times.
- On "My Profile", a link in "my last 10 races" will now link to a team's page, where applicable.
General
- Racepanel tooltips now expand upwards to keep them within the global wrapper.
- Repaired the spotters page so that it loads in all situations correctly, and will display errors that were being lost in some operations.
- Earned Credits and MPR statistics have been moved to the "My Profile" page.
- 11 sets of Series assets have been updated to prevent the issue where the fixed, teams, and multiclass banners won't overlap.
- We fixed an issue where sometimes on results, you wouldn't be able to see your fastest lap.
- The log in page now has a different internal structure, so that certain password keepers won't incorrectly send users to the wrong place.
- Some results show relevant data where "- - -" was displaying.
- Fixed an issue where track configs sometimes would disappear from the testing panel.
- If a series is active, but doesn't have any scheduled sessions, it now reports that there aren't any, instead of showing "purchase required."
- Fixed an issue with joining a friend's race from the fixed footer where members could potentially get misregistered.
- Racepanel & Testpanel car forum links are removed.
- When editing "My Profile", a cancel button now shows if you want to cancel. Error messages are more robust if something goes wrong while editing.
Steam
- Existing iRacing users who didn't sign up using Steam may now generate a steam key to link their iRacing & Steam accounts. Here's how:
1) Go to "My Account", and at the bottom of the page there's a button to generate a Steam Key - click it.
2) Open Steam, and in the top-level menu, click Games, and then click Activate a Product on Steam...
3) Follow the steps on-screen until you're asked for a Steam Key. Type in your Steam Key, then submit it. If you already have iRacing installed on your system, you don't need to install it again via Steam in the steps following activation.
4) Finally, enable the Steam Overlay in iRacing by doing any one of these:
· Click the "Click here to enable it" button on account home once you've generated your key. This will automatically enable the Steam Overlay.
· Opening your settings dashboard on any page within the main membersite and turn Steam Overlay on under the section marked "Use Steam Overlay."
· Open or create "_use64bit.txt" in the iRacing installation directory, type the number 1 into it, and save it.
Simulation:
UI
- Add max percent fuel fill and weight penalty to the Info tab on the session screen.
- We now display the total number of available fast repairs that are available for a race on the Session screen's Info tab.
- Fix a bug where you could potentially get the Options screen to open up while you also entered the car at the same time.
Physics
- Improved the suspension modeling to account for flexibility of the suspension mounting points. This softens the resulting wheel rate of every car by 2-20% depending on the car. Car setups are likely to fail tech inspection and will need to have their ride heights adjusted to restore their previous levels, and also may need to have slightly stiffer springs selected to offset the extra flex and to regain desired handling characteristics. Most cars have had some degree of tuning to make sure there are no problems with suspension travel and to make sure enough range of adjustment is available.
- All of our cars have updated iRacing setups adjusted for these suspension changes.
- All cars now drop into the world with a warmed up motor, they start at about 170F / 77C now instead of ambient air temp.
- Official sessions can now have a per-car weight penalty and a per-car fuel-fill limit, similar to what is available when Hosted sessions are created. These settings are displayed on the Info tab on the Session screen inside the simulation. We will work on getting the values displayed in appropriate places on the web site. For the moment these values are not used in any series. But they are available to help tune the balance of performance in multi-car series as the season progresses.
Updating
- Made some changes to help repair the iRacing installation when a "Failed to verify signature on program executable" error occurs while trying to launch the simulator. This can happen when Windows is "restored" from a restore point, which unfortunately only restores some of our files and causes our installation to become corrupt.
Replay
- Add in a "video timer", for the broadcasters, that indicates on the display exactly where in the tape you are so you can easily synchronize videos between live driving and a replay tape.
- Added a keyboard macro to fast forward the replay based on session number and session time. Using the number pad, type +num+time<enter>, following the format of the new video timer display.
Telemetry
- Add in new iRSDK remote message to fast forward replay based on a session number and session time.
- Output shock velocity to telemetry.
Fast Repairs
- All cars now have a checkbox in the F4 Fuel black box to allow the driver to choose whether or not they want to use a fast repair in the upcoming pitstop. Also shown beside the checkbox is the number of remaining fast repairs. If a race is configured for unlimited fast repairs, that will show as 255 remaining. The checkbox will not check when no fast repairs are remaining (0 shown). Fast repairs are only available for use during races, so during testing or practice or qualifying you will see 0 fast repairs remaining.
Driver Swap
- Fixed a problem with the way the client notifies the server that pit service is complete. If that notification was generated very frequently (due to a bug), it would prevent other notifications from being sent to the server, such as requests to get out of the car.
- Fix a bug where getting out of your car while in your pit stall when the pit exit is closed during a caution period could cause an exit closed pits black flag.
Drafting
- Updated general drafting behavior a little to improve racing.
Clubs
- NE and Texas Club logos updated.