The much anticipated CTRA X-System has just launched.
Whilst you've all been sunning it up in other servers we've been beavering away making our migration to the latest LFS technologies not just a rehash of our existing system - but something far and beyond even our own imaginations of what might be possible.
I would like to personally thank Sam Hopkinson for his drive on this project, and giving me the motivation to carry on and the whole of the UKCT team for putting up with our endless technical and concept discussions in team speak. Thanks are also due to the army of testers who helped flesh out all[/most] of the bugs before the system went live.
With great trepidation of the thought that it will fall over and be patched no less than 20 times before I get to bed tonight, I can now formally announce that X-Hour has arrived, and the first server is open.
If all goes well then we will be opening 2 more servers tonight, at 2 hourly intervals, and we'll open 2 more tomorrow.
Introducing X-Web
Sam has spent endless days putting together a comprehensive web site that says far more than I will bore you with here, be sure to check it out if the servers fill up and you cant connect. Also once you've been in and set your $password dont forget to check out the MyCTRA section.
www.RaceAuthority.com
Revamped X-Lookup
Licence lookups have been radically redesigned, they are designed to be printable too (although not from IE5 or 6). Here's what my licence page now looks like: My CTRA Licence. You can upload your own images from the web page from within the MyCTRA section. The system will automatically resize and crop the image for you.
The X-System
LFS servers connected to our X-System are currently the most technologically advanced race servers in any sim, anywhere. All the technology behind the new system of course is completely irrelevent, what matters is what it does...
There is so much that is new, so much that I could talk endlessly about, that you'd have finaly managed to connect to a server and seen it for yourself by the time that you finish reading this thread, so i'll stick to talking about some of our key features.
The CTRA is currently the worlds largest sim motorsports licence issuing authority to be modelled on real world racing organisations. Some have pointed out that we dont have a real world licence affiliation, I wont comment on that further at this time, but as a sim racing authority we dwarf everybody and there's a reason for that: It's FREE. (I happen to think it's also the best - but thats a moot point and i'm completely biased of course
). There is no signup, no compulsory email registration, and it runs 24/7**We've looked at all LFS has to offer with our new system, and tried to make use of all of it. We've looked at the problems that besset online play and where possible we have streamlined the process. We sum-up our core system as 'Advanced Race Management' and this encompasses such things as auto race restarting, track cycling and enhanced blue flag notifications for practicing [mid race joining] drivers. Anyone who saw our previous STCC servers will be pleased to see that most of these core features have been enhanced.
We're not a league, but we do have race licencing. Some people call this a carear mode for LFS, but we think of it simply as licencing. Our race licences are hard to attain, and can be lost easily by loosing respect for your fellow racers. To this end we've streamlined the reporting process - which you can now do from within server. We've imposed just one limitation on reporting another driver, you have to wait until the next race begins. If an offence is worth reporting, it's worth skipping a race for. We've done this so that we're not overwhelmed with reports for our MSA experienced marshalls and clerks.
All of our race and single seater servers feature something we call concurrent qualifying. Whilst racing you are also qualifying, with your best lap time being remembered until you change car or leave the server. This means your qualifying position is remembered if you take a break for a couple of races, provided that you stay in the same car. You must finish a race to register your time so dont fear the hotlappers messing up the racing.
Also, we are now introducing to LFS for the first time on a public server true multiclass racing. Cars from different classes can race together on certain servers and are seperated both on the grid (with the faster class infront) and in the final results, with truly independent position and licence scoring.
It doesnt end there either, as we've introduced some new car classes on both the key racing tiers, on the GTR server you will find a new GT2 class - now dont get too excited, we're not allowed to deliver new car models and physics to you ... what we have done is make use of engine restrictions and weight ballast to slow up the 3 big GTR's to the pace of the XFR and UFR in a new class we call GT2. These cars set comparable lap times to each other in our tests, although some circuits suite some cars better than others, we found them hugely entertaining to drive and having cars with such drastically different performance characteristics makes for some challenging and exciting overtaking battles. We run these GT2's alongside the GTR's as one of our multiclass servers.
On our single seater tier we realise that most of the community races the FOX because it is easy, but we didnt want 3 FOX servers. So on the second server we've introduced the Formula Junior. This engine and ballast restricted FO8 serves as an easy to drive introduction to the excillerating FO8. We've had some brilliant racing in FJR's in the beta testing, they're very setup dependant but once you get the car settled down (tip: move the ballast weight to the right) you'll find it steps out just like an FO8 - but is extremely forgiving when it does step out, providing the perfect training tool to move up without frustrating us drivers. These run alongside FOX's on our second tier and are considered a higher class, they run a few seconds a lap faster.
At the top of the single seater tier we have a mixed server of FO8's and BF1's, again using our multi class system. You can't normally always find enough FO8 drivers for a good race, and you cant always find enough BF1 drivers for a good race ... so race together - and change cars as you please - all with fully independent grid and results for when both classes are on track at once.
One of the first things you will notice are our new sector flag indicators which are visible in the centre bottom of the screen. These give a clear indication of any problems on the circuit once you learn how to read them. Each symbol represents a sector of the race track with green indicating a clear sector, yellow indicating 1 yellow flag in that sector, and red indicating that 2 or more cars are crashed in that sector.
These sector flag indicators (SFI) give you more notice of impending accidents and make avoiding getting yourself involved much easier. I've also found that they help me stay alert in longer and more tiring races by giving me fresh information to process.
Finaly i'd like to spare a few paragraphs for our Bump & Jump server (you can imagine the inhouse abbreviation for it
). This runs a variety of AutoX layouts, typically ones that involve cars coming into conflict with each other whilst trying to occupy the same piece of race track. The car selection varies every race, and we are open to layout submissions ( no we wont give you art space to grafitti your name in chalk lines - but you can grafitti ours 
). We've put some real evil layouts online to start with.One of the problems with AutoX racing is you never know what position you are in or who is ahead or behind you. Well this is because positions in LFS are calculated by your progress down the route or path of the track, and AutoX doesnt have that. Anyway that's all bye the bye, of course this isn't a problem on the X-System.
X-Future
Well the truth is, we scaled back. In order to deliver these servers and the supporting web site we missed out private messages and group chat channels, yeah right who cares? Well, they will be coming and I think they will prove useful.
More importantly though we also dropped the event system, this aspect of the CTRA is one that I personally believe is going to impact the way we play sim racing when it arrives. For now though we're going to focus on our core product the public servers, and i'm going to go back to making STCC race broadcasts.
In the future however, maybe one that is not too far away, a whole revolution is going to arrive
.PS: You're all banned.
*not all of our server admins have experience as MSA marshalls/clerks, half do, the others are at least widely experienced sim and real world racers.
**We make no uptime guarantee, UKCT operate 1 server for use with the CTRA in the Blue Square datacentre.
JOIN LINKS FOR SERVERS OPENING FRIDAY:
[url="lfs://%7CCTRA+Race+1%7C0%7CS1%7C/"]CTRA Race 1[/url]
[url="lfs://%7CCTRA+Race+2%7C0%7CS2%7C/"]CTRA Race 2[/url]
[url="lfs://%7CCTRA+Race+3%7C0%7CS2%7C/"]CTRA Race 3[/url]
JOIN LINKS FOR SERVERS OPENING SATURDAY:
[url="lfs://%7CCTRA+Single+Seater+1%7C0%7CS2%7C/"]CTRA Single Seater 1[/url]
[url="lfs://%7CCTRA+Bump+%26+Jump%7C0%7CS1%7C/"]CTRA Bump & Jump[/url]
Single Seater 2 & Single Seater 3 to follow.
