Hi there!

I have made a little InSim addon in PRISM that places a pit crew around your car when doing a pit stop. Nothing really fancy, just a couple of marshalls appearing and disappearing, depending on the pit work being done. Here is a demonstration video showing the crew in action. It is still a work-in-progress stage, although it is quite usable at the moment.

When you drive through a marshall, you get a stop&go penalty by default. It can also be set not to give any penalties.

So far I’ve tested it with about 1–4 cars at a time. However I would like more people to test it thoroughly, so it can possibly be used in official events, if the event organisers would like to.

Therefore, I’m announcing a test session:

Date/time: Wednesday 19th February, ~19:00 UTC
Track/car: whatever comes up, the priority is to test all types of cars
Session format: short races for about 3 laps with a mandatory pit stop
Server: Pit crew addon test

No need to sign-up or anything, if you want to join, join.
NOTE: You can join whenever you want to test it. The app is running on my PC, so it can happen that it won't be running at some times, though.

And if you have any questions, ideas or comments about the addon, feel free to post them

Wow great job Martin

looks good , top job

I saw it, we can see others crew.

Nice job

Looks nice

Once had similiar idea with the marshalls, an autocross starter:
At start line have a marshall with arm up.
On start delete the marshall and spawn marshall with arm down.
Hopefully it would look like the marshall waved arm to give start signal.
Like this:

Would be good for autocross tracks where the start is not near the lights.
Similiar might work for the pit crew too? ("lolipop man")
Think you could even have the crew walk around? Lots of Spawn, delete, spawn, delete, spawn...
Or have marshalls wave their arm on yellow flag.
I think dynamically adding/removing objects has lots of potential...

Hey looks very cool, Was on the server but no ``marshalls`` Came up, Insim crashed?

It should be running now. I am not running the insim 24/7, it's from my local PC.

Really cool, Is the insim going to be downloadable in feuture?

It is basically a plugin for PRISM, so a server-side InSim app. I can possibly publish the source code at some point, if there is any interest. It is not very "user-friendly" I'd say, though.

That made my day! Awesome

i really like it )

Might test it tonight or tomorrow

Quote from Flame CZE :

Track/car: whatever comes up, the priority is to test all types of cars

Oval pls

Well done.

I have removed the server password for now, so more people can join. And also all cars are allowed at the moment, but I might restrict them to one car or one class if more people come.

Great job!!!

Alright, thanks to all who joined for testing! Here are some things I noted during the testing, and I would like to look into them at some point in the future (not sorted):

Quote :

- individual marshall positions for each car
- give a time penalty for driving through a marshall if there is not enough time to serve a stop&go penalty (e.g. 1 lap to go)
- make smoother animations of the pit crew (if possible)
- pit stop time depending on how precisely a car has stopped in the pit box
- solve situations when two or more people are in the same pit box
- remove lollipop man earlier in case of lag (maybe)
- pit crew appearing in a pre-selected pit box after a car enters the pit lane (?)

That sounds of very good ideas and imporvments! Keep it up!

A bit late on the bandwagon, but nice work. I really like that last item on the list of improvements. Though the "pre-stop" lolipop man needs to be only visible to each individual car that drives into the pit lane, otherwise someone ahead may stop in someone else's pit box.

Quote from legoflamb :

A bit late on the bandwagon, but nice work. I really like that last item on the list of improvements. Though the "pre-stop" lolipop man needs to be only visible to each individual car that drives into the pit lane, otherwise someone ahead may stop in someone else's pit box.

Thanks.

The layout objects can be only shown to all people connected to the server, so that is not possible I’m afraid.

Also, I think it will be tricky to implement those "semi-fixed" pit stalls when people enter pit lane. I can imagine someone entering pit lane with some heavy lag, which can delay the spawning of the pit marshalls a lot, and in the worst case it may not appear at all to them. That would be a problem if only those pit stalls occupied with marshalls would count as valid pit stops.

Basically all this pit crew spawning depends on a reliable connection between the server and the players. If the lag is significant, I can imagine the delays being quite long, which could affect the pit stop time. I haven’t seen anyone lagging so badly that it would actually happen, but it is not impossible in theory. I might need to do some more testing of this, probably when I will be trying to animate the pit crew more smoothly, where I expect lag/ping to be a bigger factor than now.

Also, the way packets informing about cars entering/leaving pit lane are sent with about a 3 s delay (I made a thread about it in the bugs section), which makes it impossible to detect them and prepare the pit crews on time, especially when more people would be in the pit lane at once. I would have to define pit entry/exit zones manually, which would not be optimal, when we have this packet.