Give me a few days and I will get back with you all about this.

:edit:I am going to have to change this to a few weeks. I will be offline for a few weeks(moving house) and won't be able to do much. I do have some ideas and will be putting them to computer screen while I am offline.

Last edited by Viper93, Thu, 6 Sep 2007 14:23.

Quote from Becky Rose :

Thank you all for your kind comments.

I'll look into the lower resolution issue mentioned later today with Sam.

Indeed the STCC is getting serious now, there is still a very long way to go and so i'm fully preparing myself for that moment when I fall flat on my face!

Don't worry we at UKCT have our hands ready to hold you up if that happens =) Personally it's always been serious, it's just now raising up to the next level that it was intended for =P Wishing you all the best Becky with this, and not only because I am a driver! If anyone can make this happen it's you.

Entry Fee is fine by me considering your reputation Vykos I would not be worried about the money walking away. IMO this is the next step for league racing.

For me I enjoy the Tintops over the single seaters. I don't mind if someone rubs me when we are side-by-side, rubbin's racin' and with Single Seaters that really isnt possible. The season for me would be driven with 1 car over different tracks, excluding most of the really big open tracks in hopes of getting more racing in, I get bored with long straits. For the actual racing I would like to see multiple short heats with a quali to start and a feature at the end.

Prizes, they are always nice and IMO they push people that bit farther. Sure sometimes people go overboard, but thats what a complaint proceedure is in place for, to prevent these. Exactly what, depends =P

It would definatly partially help. Conducting a driving school would definatly take more time on the flipside though too. We would still have to have do go over reports with drivers already in the system so the extra added by these new drivers wouldn't be that much more.

I have mulled over this idea, but the problem is that we are seeing 30 plus new drivers a day. To get a decent training session in you would need a 1on1 session, and there just isn't enough people to run a training ground like that. Then it's another problem of format, from the training sessions I have seen come out I haven't really seen anything worthwhile or lasting very long. The best training is hopping online and racing against everyone and learning as you go. 99% of the drivers causing little problems are just having teething issues, like all of us had. The really bad ones end up getting multiple reports done on them. There will not be a fast fix for problem drivers, there has to be a trend of bad driving for us to ban them, unless they breach some of the basic rules.

Quote from mtrein :

Blimey! Such a high number. I had no idea.

Yeah, and over 100 races run each day just on Race 1 by my calcs, with over 500 across the board=) Each day we are seeing a good 20-30 more NEW drivers registering by joining a tier 1 server.

Quote from Rick. :

you know, it's too bad this sim is in the category of amazed users discovering it instead of it being well known!

I sure would like to see the product be "boxed" on a retail shelf, it would help the popularity enormously. Plus it would have to be a bit cheaper to get no so serious simmers to try it.

Then if that's done, for sure you need servers for different levels, because with retail boxing you'll get crazy driving.

Bit OT, but I thought they were thinking maybe of doing this when S3 is finalized.

Quote from Bean0 :

I was on Race1 again last night, didn't notice anything untoward apart from maybe a couple of speculative overtakes.

Im my experience with reports/actions, it took about 3 days from submitting to the report being closed. I suppose they have to give the reported at least a chance to explain themselves, and some things would be more clear cut than others.

Not to mention we do have more pressing things to do than sit and wait for a report to drop =P

They do get looked at every day, but usually it's a different admin each day. So it does take a few days for the report to process, especially when we are discussing incidents.

Other than having an active admin on 24/7 there is not a better way to do this. There is the possibility of having it all automated, but then you would still need people to make sure the automation is working correctly and not banning the wrong people, which would probably make more work.

I wish it could be faster, but I know I am not going to spend every waking minute checking for replays to watch of poor driving =P

I have been racing on R1 for the last few weeks off and on. I have not noticed anything really bad. Sure there is that odd driver or two a race that shouldn't be on the track, but it's an entry level server and all skill levels are going to be present.

This has been said before but I will say it again, we, as admins, can only prevent these drivers from racing on the CTRA servers if YOU the driver makes a report. The report process is not intended to be a one click process. In order for us to get accurate and proper reports it needs to be a bit more involved than that. Submitting a report is easy, there is a how-to at the bottom of the CTRA help page.

http://www.raceauthority.com/help.asp

We cannot change people's driving behavior, if you think it stinks the only way to change it is to make a report. This is an excellent system and works great, but only if everyone uses it. Read through the help file, if you still cannot find a way to get rid of the problem racers then come back here and we can talk about it It's not difficult to make a report, take the time to learn the system and it works great. We cannot have a single click reporting proceedure, if we did chances are we would have to review every race if there was a way to do it with one click and most of them would be dismissed. As it is now we dismiss roughly 1/2 the reports already.

This may be seeming to sound harsh, it's not intended if it is. Basically I am saying that your answer to your problem with bad racers is already in place, we can't help that people are not willing to take the time to learn how to operate the system. It's not difficult, you can have a report done up and submitted within 30seconds.

Quote from james12s :

i must admit last night i was on there and thanks to everyone at ukct i improve alot and started to really enjoy it

UKCT FTW =P

If you did not submit the report you should be able to delete it using the CTRA management software in-game.

They hand out tickets for free at the gate on raceday.

I'll be going with my wife to meet up with UKCT =)

Well for the wet your pulling significantly less lateral G's. If it was me I would want to use that little bit of extra "soft" springrate which would make the car "float" a bit more when under a strait line? Maybe? I would think it would.

focusing just on the preload, if you had a spring preloaded at 100lbs and had one at none, the one with none would vary between 0-100, with the load changes while the preloaded one would prevent the suspension from moving, thus giving the tire the job of absorbing all those forces.

I don't know if it would make it handle better though

:Edit:

Quote from xaotik :

I wouldn't know really apart from following the logic that apparently less preload makes the suspension more "active/sensitive" which would be good for a less twitchy car I suppose.

haha you beat me to it =P

Quote from tristancliffe :

Which I say is tosh. The cars can be made safer, the drivers wear HANS, belts etc. The walls are becoming SAFER (pun intended). Drivers don't HAVE to drive at 220mph. In F1 the speeds reduce in the wet, yet the racing continues.

If the primary aim of oval racing is to please rednecks then I suppose that's a fair reason, as long as the spectators do not then try to claim that skill, bravery or technology are world-leading. It's a dumbed down sport for dumbed down fans. The same sort of thing as World Wrestling, but with engines. I have even less respect if it's that critical for spectators to be able to see...

Well the way it's carried out with it's "chase for the cup" I can't disagree about having a bit of showmanship. I have hated that from the second they started it.

I guess if you can't see it after 4 pages, then you won't and there is no need to discuss this further

The engines are still carburetored. I have never heard of NASCAR being phrased as world leading in terms of technology. As for HANS most drivers wear them now after Earnhart died a few years ago hitting the wall at about 190 or so I thought it was manditory now, but I am not sure, I don't really watch it anymore.

Quote from axus :

Is America not busy "saving the Middle East" while it hasn't actually helped its own people, the victims of hurricane Katrina?

Sorry, still not seeing it. Billions are being spent and there are people from across the states down there rebuilding. Would love to see you try to rebuild a whole city in two years when everything was under twenty feet of stagnant, disease, crocodile infested waters. If you think they need so much help I am sure they could use another person to add to the millions already down there helping rebuild, albeit a bit farther away from that swamp, sinking every year.

Quote from Gil07 :

So the reason is safety after all, even though you said it wasn't?

Anyway, I understand all of that, but don't say it isn't because of safety when it clearly is

Well if you read early on it was one of the first reasons for not running in the rain, least I remember saying it. =)

Quote from Bob Smith :

At least packers are easy to understand...

Huh, what are those?

Quote from axus :

Yeah? Am I wrong to assume that America is actually doing all these things that the show claims it is doing? That's what matters here.

It's a satire, they take facts and twist them around to make them funny. Not even 1/2 those things are close, and the other half are in space. It's a comedy show, don't make it into a news broadcast because of his background.

I could cut and paste anything to make it sound like something it's not, which is one thing a satire does. They omit critical bits of the puzzle to make the story sound so crazy that it makes it funny.

Quote from tristancliffe :

I shall test it, with a valve spring.

Let me get this straight.

1. The first load is the preload. Call it 100lbs causing 1 inch compression
2. The preload absorbs the first part of any subsequent load. So 100lbs preload plus 50lb load does not move the spring further than 1.
3. But if I apply a 150lb load to an unloaded spring, it will compress 1.5 inches.

How does the spring 'know' the 100lb is preload, and use it to absorb further load rather than being further load in the first place?

I don't think your way can work!

I thought of this last night and again some more today.

When I used preload on my bike it was used to make it that, when static, including the rider, the suspension didn't move.

If you preloaded a spring with 100lbs. It would take more than 100lbs for the spring to compress any more than it already is.

By your explanation are you meaning total compression or changes in compression after the preload?

LOL thats a link to a satire show.

wheel4hummer, RacerY, and Jayhawk hit it on the head.

the governor is the one that calls evacuations for their own State. Considering that parts of the City are more than 20 feet below sea level and sinking daily I too am suprised how few people died. At first there was soo many people helping. I know that in Wisconsin I had several friends go down there for the first year to help rebuild. The vast majority of them don't want help and were offended that some white people were helping them out.

The City was built on a sandbar, it shouldn't have been there. Every year the whole city is sinking into the Gulf by a couple inches, every year going down faster and faster with larger and larger buildings being built.

Quote from tristancliffe :

Yes, that's what I thought too. On the bike (and to an extent on a car as well) there is an 'optimum' ride height that everything works best at. As rider weight is such a large proportion of a bikes weight, it's fairly critical to get it right. Small tweaks can then be achieved by using the preload to change the static ride height.

This is how I used my preload on my bike.

Quote from tristancliffe :

It seems that most learned people (or at least people who are willing to think for themselves, which is VASTLY more important than any silly qualification, and often VASTLY more useful than experience too) seem to agree with my understanding of how preload works.

Sounds sound to me =P Preload doesn't change the springrate, but I am curious as to exactly what it does for a car.

Quote from SamH :

Hey Rick..
I understand your frustrations. As long as you know there's nothing that the admins can do about it until someone raises a report... it's in your hands

We can only do our job as well as people can make reports

Helmet's here, race pads installed, and tickets are in my hands. Not going to get many laps( I am guessing 5 laps a session) but hey still thrashing my car around. Just hopefully not enough that I need new tires. These KDW's are not really meant for trackdays. Great wet/dry performance but they tend to chunk when driven hard.

I am going with a car club called Autophoria, hopefully see at least one person here this weekend =P

Quote from thisnameistaken :

What happened to Chris Redman BTW? I haven't seen him around here in ages either.

As for the STCC you would have to talk to him. He had his reasons =P

As for LFS he took a break, he got his VX220 and is/was playing around with that. On top of other things he just didn't have the time really or the motivation. I have seen him online last week and he says he's coming back to LFS, for STCC though I think he will have to grovel very hard to get his seat back. He would have to go through the quali procedure now if he wants to run season two, but he doesn't care for how the FXO has been handed a bad hand this time around and probably won't want to run.