I'd like to keep you informed of the new system, in the perfect world i'd like to bore you silly with the design specs - but that would not be as much fun as teasing you.

Instead what i'm going to do is drop some small snippets of information as I reach each new milestone in the softwares development.

I'm already on record somewhere as saying something like, 'im building you up and getting you excited for a reason. I want to build up your expectations and STILL astound you.'.

The plans for the new system, as they are, I think are well beyond the wildest imagination of sim racers, so i'll start the speculation off with a small snippet on the thing that is perhaps closest to heart of all serious racers:

The reporting system is getting a complete overhaul. You will not need to upload replays of incidents/drivers you wish to report.

Let the speculation commence, i'll drop back in to this post to tease you further as the system developes. For now feel free to throw some wild ideas around as to what is coming: You never know, you might be right ... or better, we might like the idea...

That's hawt

You've secretly put CCTV in our rooms viewing our PC monitors, and once we do something wrong, the CCTV camera shoots a laser, blowing the monitor up

Or you've got some form of replay server-side

But hey, you did say WILD ideas

Are we talking about automatic hit detection here?

Quote :

Or you've got some form of replay server-side

Bingo, we developed a server side replay system and it's in the current CTRA manager - but before we could make the viewer for it Scawen introduced server side replays.

OK, now...

You dont have to type the name of the person you are reporting.

Old.

Well, I guess it's now enough to just say server & time the incident happened at? Or you can see an overview of races with participants and other misc detail, and you can click on the lap in question... or something?

Quote from Becky Rose :

Bingo, we developed a server side replay system and it's in the current CTRA manager - but before we could make the viewer for it Scawen introduced server side replays.

OK, now...

You dont have to type the name of the person you are reporting.

... because using the new in-sim buttons system, there is a 'report' button for each racer on the connections list - just press it and you reported the blighter... ?

Quote :

click on the lap in question

I like this one, I hadn't thought of that.

Quote from col :

... because using the new in-sim buttons system, there is a 'report' button for each racer on the connections list - just press it and you reported the blighter... ?

Heh, a good guess/idea. You could report from ingame, and it would of course automatically know the race in which the incident happened, if you don't wait half an hour till you click the button, that is.

This would probably greatly increase the amount of reports, but could end up in a few situations where the finger reacted quicker than the brain, and you report situations that would've been resolved with a short chat after the race...

I'm curious if the server-side replays will be downloadable for completely benevolent reasons, i.e. not in the interest of tattling on someone. For example, "WOW that was a great race we had last night, anybody get a replay?" "No, I thought YOU did?" "Doh." [clicky clicky ukct.net/replayDL] "Ok here it is."

And for the record, I guessed server-side replay recording before I read the thread!

Quote from Dumpy :

I'm curious if the server-side replays will be downloadable

Yep they will, but they will only be available for a couple of days max. After that, they'll be removed. Some of them to a permanent store (where they'll be linked to any licences for which notes have been stored), but the others will be deleted permanently. We did some maths and the server-side disk usage for storing ALL CTRA races is quite scary! LOL!

Quote from SamH :

Yep they will, but they will only be available for a couple of days max. After that, they'll be removed. Some of them to a permanent store (where they'll be linked to any licences for which notes have been stored), but the others will be deleted permanently. We did some maths and the server-side disk usage for storing ALL CTRA races is quite scary! LOL!

ok tell us how many terrabytes
2 a month?

Nice one becky new system can't wait to see.

Lets see, I guesstimate the average mpr size to be about 2.25MB, coupled by a race every 20 minutes (probably shorter, but lets account for low activity periods), makes 162MB a day per server, so multiplied by 4 servers (-2 because 3a, 3b and 2a are not that populated) makes 648MB per day.

Which in a month is 19440MB. Am I very far off?

seams quite small actually i thought at least 1tb

unless you got somthing wrong

Quote from AndroidXP :

Heh, a good guess/idea. You could report from ingame, and it would of course automatically know the race in which the incident happened, if you don't wait half an hour till you click the button, that is.

This would probably greatly increase the amount of reports, but could end up in a few situations where the finger reacted quicker than the brain, and you report situations that would've been resolved with a short chat after the race...

OK, you click, then after the race, you get a prompt:
Do you really want to send this report ?
| OK |---------------------| CANCEL |


This does highlight a potential problem with auto reporting:

In the past when I've considered sending reports I have always reviewed the replay first (If I'm not willing to put in the effort, then why the hell should some poor overworked unpaid CTRA grunt have to do it )
Fairly often, I see that it is just a simple racing incident and not worth wasting anyones time on... with auto-reporting all these would have to go to the CTRA mods... not to mention all the 'spam' reports that would start arriving from the same folks that do the barging, tap passing, braketesting, cutting, wrecking etc.

How are you going to deal with this? (assuming it happens - I see problems everywhere, comes from being a software developer)

cheers

Col

Quote from col :

OK, you click, then after the race, you get a prompt:
Do you really want to send this report ?
| OK |---------------------| CANCEL |


This does highlight a potential problem with auto reporting:

In the past when I've considered sending reports I have always reviewed the replay first (If I'm not willing to put in the effort, then why the hell should some poor overworked unpaid CTRA grunt have to do it )
Fairly often, I see that it is just a simple racing incident and not worth wasting anyones time on... with auto-reporting all these would have to go to the CTRA mods... not to mention all the 'spam' reports that would start arriving from the same folks that do the barging, tap passing, braketesting, cutting, wrecking etc.

How are you going to deal with this? (assuming it happens - I see problems everywhere, comes from being a software developer)

cheers

Col

well how about the ctra go on a recruitment drive


ide help!!!!!!!

Quote from Becky Rose :

Bingo, we developed a server side replay system and it's in the current CTRA manager - but before we could make the viewer for it Scawen introduced server side replays.

OK, now...

You dont have to type the name of the person you are reporting.

This makes me think you were trying to maybe have replays viewable on demand for a certain amount of time using some sort of version of your Racewatcher or possibly in a browser.

I calculated 250mb per server per day so we're more or less in agreement with the figures (more or less), we expect to increase the number of popular servers with some additions for some as yet unregulated car classes, and replay sizes being potentially larger on one or two hosts with bigger grids, so it works out at quite a lot over time.

Tbh, a permanent archive of races wouldn't be used for much anyway, we figured after a few days anyone who wants the replay already has it - any longer than that they've already forgotten and moved on.

We do anticipate an increase in reports, but drivers have their own archive of reports which they can accumulate during the racing, and decide whether to submit them later. I think this second step to the process will keep quantity down.

Whilst I would be much happier if all drivers reviewed their replays, the fact is that the vast majority do not - which has led to some rather amusing exchanges when drivers found themselves penalised for reports they had submitted! I'll never forget one driver, my God he was bad ... but of course, 'it was the other guys fault' lol...

However yes, reporting will be much easier and all possible in game - and also your reports will be viewable from the web where you can download the replays if you forgot to save them.

We do anticipate getting more reports, but this is a good thing as currently we seem to be getting a reputation for some poor driving and we're not getting any reports...

she means a whatcher that views the action and saves it, i knew what she meant, its probably were shes tired from all the programing

Quote :

This makes me think you were trying to maybe have replays viewable on demand for a certain amount of time using some sort of version of your Racewatcher or possibly in a browser.

This was the plan, I was trying to make Racewatcher work within a browser environment (albiet Windows PC's only). The inclusion of LFS' own server side replays though has made this obsolete.

Quote from Becky Rose :

This was the plan, I was trying to make Racewatcher work within a browser environment (albiet Windows PC's only). The inclusion of LFS' own server side replays though has made this obsolete.

hm maybe with your simple physics you could come up with a way to rewind making the race watcher idea more valuable than the lfs replays

It does seem like everyone will be reporting on everyone else with little thought involved. Give someone a button and they are sure to press it.

becky is right, i think all those with pending reports etc and license notes refering to those should be saved also on another note would a system that uses a secure confirmed login allow people to view the licence notes, so the ukct guys dont have to pm them to us, also even an email notificaten when you get a new licence note, not meaning for more work for you becky but i had the idea and thought id say bout it