A new home for all your setups
Hello people,
For the last couple of months I have been working hard with Jussi (whose OEM setups many have requested) and my great friend Niklas on building a website to handle setups. Some of you may have heard about it. It's been under wraps. It's been through WMD testing the past couple of weeks to iron out bugs and get a little more meat on it. It has been teased here by some WMD members. It has been leaked once by others before it was ready. Well, I think it is ready now. I'm not done with everything I want to have on it yet and more features are planned and coming, but it is in great shape as it is now and working smoothly. It's time to open it up to the rest of the world.
So, what exactly is it I am giving you here? Well, this is a place for the community to create, store, edit and share setups outside the game (no direct integration currently, sorry). Anyone can browse setups by car or by user, but you need an account to create setups of your own (private or public) and to do all sorts of fancy stuff, such as rate other people's setups, favorite them and follow their creators. We have also built in a reporting tool for you, so you can alert the user and the administration if their setups are bad/wrong - for instance if they have used foul language to describe their setups or have made purposedly silly setups. Trolls will be dealt a ban of increasing longevity depending on amount and gravity of infractions.
While we have spent weeks filling out each choice of each slider and to make things as good and accurate as possible, you guys will probably find faults somewhere with the default setups or with the choices you have available for each option. If not now, then at some point when SMS updates things, something will be out of sync. Fear not - the reporting tool allows you to tell us about any faults you find with the setup creation/editing process as well. Just let us know where there is an incongruence and we will fix it.
Beyond this, there are stats for all brands, cars and setups, rankings for users/contributors and a nice overview over how your setups are doing under your profile. There is also a handy shortcut to go straight to the setups you have made or the ones you have favored. If you wish to use any setup for any car as a baseline to make a new setup from it, you can. If you want to compare any two given setups - or a setup to the ingame default setup - at any point of setup viewing, editing or creation, you can. There is a comparer built in, which will put the two setups side by side and highlight the differences for you. There are also bars underneath each setting that fill out according to which choice you have currently selected, giving you a quick at-a-glance visual of what a setup is like (comparing gives you blue bars underneath the white ones for the setup you are comparing to) and give you a quick indication of where the ingame caret would be on the slider.
Want to increase the visibility and searchability of your setups? Searches are performed on authors, titles, descriptions and tags - give your setup a meaningful (short!) title and a longer description, then mark it up with tags, like #leaderboardTime, #spa, #wheel, #controller. Tags are a great way to describe your setup with searchable keywords and I encourage everyone to use them freely (space and enter keys create a new tag). Want to share your setup on a forum or anywhere else? View the setup in question and share the deep link to it (the url in your browser window). Anyone with a valid link can see a setup, private or otherwise. But, can't someone then see my private setups without me wanting them to? In theory yes, but setup id's are numeric and go up to 10 digits, with no indication of which car or brand they belong to - this is security by obscurity, so good luck guessing it and brute forcing it.
This is all accessible on screen sizes down to 960px (half of a 1080p screen for handy snapping in place in windows). It should be fine on tablets as well, though it has only been tested with an iPad 3 and a Lenovo thing one of us has. Any Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera is welcome. IE10 or above, anything below 10 breaks the site - you have been warned. Mobile not yet supported, but I have plans to get it there in the future.
Some of you might know about a tool that has been going around - Jussi's Calculator. For the uninitiated, this is a very technical spreadsheet with a bunch of maths producing fancy diagrams and spitting out suggestions to damper adjustments and similar as well as giving you meaningful data such as harmonic frequencies and the like. We are porting it to this website and making it available to all (coming soon!). Once implemented it will be available on any and all setups except for karts. View any setup and toggle the calculator to get the same fancy graphs and suggestions/information you would get in the spreadsheet.
No more documents. No more spreadsheets. No more (obscure) screenshots. No more manually writing down your setups on paper to store them - if you want to print out any setup from the website or save a copy locally on disk, you can print freely or save setups as pdf, if you are so inclined.
Questions, suggestions, bug reports are all welcome. The doors are open. Go crazy.
http://projectcarssetups.eu/
Special thanks to the multitude of WMD members, who had my back throughout the project and helped tremendously with bughunting and idea pitching! =)
FAQ
For all the stuff that keeps coming up again and again and again and again...
On mobile
The site has just been updated with a first pass for mobile support. Currently the layout has been reworked across the whole site to maintain the look and feel you have come to expect, but in a much more flexible manner, which allows the site to be responsive to the environment it is viewed in. All pages have been reworked to be able to display nicely and in a working manner down to 320px width - the width of the original iPhone in portrait mode. This will probably not be the last word on mobile and performance has not been addressed at this point in time. Only layout, as layout constraints made content inaccessible before and hence was by far the most important issue. Mobile support can thus currently be viewed as being in an alpha stage of development - workable, but not optimized yet. Refer to update notes below (21/07/2015) for more information.
On translations
Localisation (translating the site) is a huge project, which requires far more time, energy, coordination and resources than most people think. Unless you have actively worked with localisation on a website, most likely you don't have a clue. English is a very brief, concise language. Pretty much every other language on the planet is longer and more articulate. This means that for a site to accomodate multiple languages, its layout needs to be extremely flexible and responsive. Right now, our layout is neither. Even if translations rained down from the heavens into my lap the next minute, it would most likely still take a complete revision of the code to integrate them without any layout breakage. As such, for the moment, there are no plans to support localisation. I'm not saying it is off the table completely, but right now it is not something we are looking into.
On comments
It has frequently been asked of us to add a comments section to the setups. While we have many reservations against comments for very practical reasons, we have implemented the functionality and put it at the community's disposal. The concerns remain and we reserve the right to withdraw the functionality at any point in time in the future, in which we feel comments adversely affect us - the administration -, the site or its users. "Adversely affects" is wilfully vaguely stated and open to interpretation, because it is going to be a judgment call on our behalf. Our concerns range from how much data mobile users have to download by visiting our site, all the way to potential trolling and turning the site into spam-heaven or bot-central.
The feature is implemented. The ball is in the consumers' court. Let's see how it goes.
On deep linking
Since there seems to be a little confusion surrounding deeplinks, here is a quick guide about all the sorts of deeplinks you can provide into the site =)
You can deeplink into a specific setup: http://projectcarssetups.eu/#/viewsetup/236734581. Whenever you view an actual setup and not just the default on a car, the url changes to #/viewsetup/:setupid. That full link is a deeplink to the setup =).
You can also deeplink into a specific user's page, like I do in my signature. Just make sure to get the username just right. Example: http://projectcarssetups.eu/#/byuser/RimanDk
You can deeplink to a user's setups for a specific car as well. Example: http://projectcarssetups.eu/#/byuser...ontinental-gt3
You can deeplink to the car selection on a brand. Example: http://projectcarssetups.eu/#/bycar/bentley
Finally you can also deeplink to a specific car's landing page with its default setup and all of its setups. Example: http://projectcarssetups.eu/#/bycar/...ontinental-gt3
Here is a list of all the id's that we use on the site:
Manufacturers: alpine, ariel, astonmartin, audi, bac, bentley, bmw, caper, caterham, ford, ginetta, gulfsport, gumpert, lotus, marek, mclaren, mercedes, mitsubishi, oreca, pagani, palmerjaguar, radical, renault, ruf, rwd, sms, wmotors
Car models: a450, atom-3-300, atom-500-v8, atom-mugen, rapide-s-hydrogen-hybrid, v12-vantage-gt3, v8-vantage-gt4, r18-tdi, r8-lms-ultra, r8-v10-plus-road, mono, continental-gt3, speed-8, 1m-coupe-e82-road, 320-turbo-grp5, m1-procar, m3-e30-grp-a, m3-e92-gte, m3-e92-gt4, v12-lmr, z4-gt3, monterey-stockcar, sp-300-r, 7-classic, superlight-r500, escort-rs1600, focus-rs-road, mk4, mustang-boss-302r1, mustang-cobra-scca-trans-am, sierra-rs500-cosworth-grp-a, capri-zakspeed-grp5, g40-junior, g55-gt3, g55-gt4, formula-gulf-1000, apollo-sport-road, 49-cosworth, 72d-cosworth, 78-cosworth, 98t-renault-turbo, rp-219d, rp-339h, 12c-road, 12c-gt3, f1-road, f1-gtr-long-tail, p1-road, 190e-2.5-16-dtm, 300sel-amg, a45-amg-road, c-class-coupe-dtm, clk-lm, sls-amg-road, sls-amg-gt3, c9, lancer-evo-10-fq400-road, 03-lmp2, huayra-road, zonda-cinque-roadster-road, zonda-r, jp-lm, sr3-rs, sr8-rx, clio-4-rs-cup, megane-rs-265-road, ctr3-road, ctr3-sms-r, rgt8-road, rgt8-gt3, p20, p30, shifter-kart-125cc, shifter-kart-250cc, fa, fb, fc, frookie, lykan-hypersport-road
Updates
Major feature releases will be listed here
Feature Update 27/06/2015
Expanded bycar/create pages with robust, fully flexible filtering. All users can now drill down to the car they want to view or create setups for in the traditional manner - by clicking a brand and then a car - or doing away with the brands altogether and filtering the list of cars directly. Simply click the blue button at the top named Toggle Categories to push in an off-screen control panel from the left including all the main categories of motorsports available currently ingame. This is a multi-select, so users can have as many categories on at the same time as they like. Each category button acts as an on/off toggle. The All toggle resets the selection. Once a category is selected, all classes for that category appear, the brands go away and the car models belonging to that category are shown instead. Selecting one or more classes further allows users to drill down and narrow the amount of search results. Combined with the info cards, this is a great way to compare cars across different categories and classes of motorsports!
Feature Update 01/07/2015
Added toggler to switch between presenting setups with the standard format or with the summary format. Logged in users can now get setup data presented to them in the bycar, view, edit and create pages in either of two formats: the summary format we have had on the site until now (which is mostly pc-user friendly) or the pure pane, standard format, which you land on when you go make/edit a setup ingame (which is more console friendly). Logged in users will find a button below the Calculator button, which, when pressed, toggles between these two formats and presents the same data again in the new format. Changes in format are persisted in the user's account automatically upon changing the desired format.
Hope you enjoy it guys, and that it helps out both console users as well as people in need of translations!
Feature update 21/07/2015
Added first pass of mobile support. Layout is now responsive down to 320px width and should be able to fold itself neatly to fit any and all devices. This does not equal per-device support. Nothing has been done to tune or tweak the experience for any browser or device in particular and I will look further into doing that if and when te need arises. This is a first pass, which should make all content on the website available on any and all devices. Not saying it will be 100% everywhere and in all occasions - you might want to try flipping your phone or tablet from landscape to portrait or the other way around depending on the page to see if a different layout suits that page better.
Also added an automated setup analyzing tool, which looks for incongruences/inconsistencies in the loaded setup. What does this mean? In short, it will compare the values of a given loaded setup to the available range of choices for that setting. For instance I might have a ride height of 112 and the range of choices might be something like [112, 120, 135]. If the setting value (112) is included in the range (112, 120, 135), all is good. If it is not included in the range for whatever reason, then the setting/value is highlighted in red and a note is displayed to the user looking at the setup, warning them that one or more settings (in red) of the setup cannot currently be selected ingame. Hopefully this should help you guys out, detecting old setups that have fallen out of sync with the game.
Also performed a styling update/facelift on the setup screen. The setup meta (title, description, etc) are now better spaced to reduce the effect of "wall of text" that used to hit users before. Disabled settings are now entirely in grey, rather than only the value being greyed out. Improved positioning and size of all fields/values and measures for far better consistency and harmonics across the entire form. Added text overflow on the setting labels, which now truncate and resolve to ... in situations in which they do not have the screen real estate to display fully.
Feature update 30/07/2015
Added the ability to make comments on setups. The comments section sits on the right of a setup on /viewsetup and /editsetup pages if your browser window is large enough. If there is not enough space to the right of a setup, you can find comments down below the setup. Comments are free to all, visible to all. No restrictions. No distinctions. If you are logged in, you can comment. This is a beta feature. You guys asked for it, here you have it. Play nice and you get to keep it. Start throwing mud and we'll take it away again.
Added ability for setup authors (and admins) to view a list of ratings for setups that belong to them. Click on the rating on your setup to expand the list of ratings for your setup and see who gave you what rating.
Implemented functionality to skip unreachable (disabled) fields on a setup. What does this mean? Well, basically that you, as a setup author, do not have to worry about settings you cannot reach - because they are disabled - being out of with the ingame reality. An example - Jussi has a setup for the P1. At some point SMS changed the default setup. We changed the default setup on the website as well. Jussi updated the settings that he could through the website, but there were still mismatches in settings he had no access to through the website. The newly implemented setup analyzer flagged the setup as being erraneous because it used settings that could not be selected ingame, even though they were unchangeable in the UI. With this change, that is no longer the case. Basically with this change, we only use the settings of your setup, which can be changed, and defer to the default setup for all the values that cannot be changed.
Feature update 28/08/2015
Notifications are now in the website. Users will be notified in these situations:
- As an author I want to be notified when there are new comments on one of my setups
- As an author I want to be notified when someone favores one of my setups
- As an author I want to be notified when someone rates one of my setups
- As an author I want to be notified when someone starts following me
- As a consumer I want to be notified when someone I follow authors a new setup
- As a consumer I want to be notified when someone I follow changes a setup they have made
- As a consumer I want to be notified when a setup that I have favorited changes
- As a consumer I want to be notified when a setup I have commented on changes
- As a consumer I want to be notified when when someone comments on a setup that I have commented on
- As a consumer I want to be notified when someone comments on a setup that I have favorited
Notifications are displayed in a side panel that comes out from the right edge of the screen when triggered by the notification "chat bubble" icon in the top bar. A handy counter lets you know how many pending notifications you have at all times. Clicking a notification fulfils the action attached to the notification and dismisses that notification as well.
Feature update 02/12/2015
Added slim version of Jussi's calculator. Currently it displays suspension frequencies, roll bias and damper critical rates. Damper suggestions and graphs are still planned, but not yet implemented. Use the Toggle Calculator button on any applicable setup (defaults included) to gain access to these valuable readouts. The stats are directly linked to the setup values currently in use, so if the values change, so do the readouts - instantly. This is great to give setup authors real-time feedback on the choices they make for their setups, so they can better appreciate the effect of their choices and gauge the expected behavior of the car. Also great for people browsing setups to get an immediate idea for the balance of any given setup, leading to the likelihood that the setup will be to their liking.
More in-depth explanations and screenshots here
If you are having trouble after an update
If the site is not acting as advertised or you have come to expect, you are most likely experiencing caching issues. A lot of browsers cache very aggressively nowadays - Chrome being one of the worst offenders of this kind - and the active cachebusting on the site might not always be enough. The first thing you want to try in this situation is to try reloading it with a fresh cache. To do so on a pc, hold down shift while you reload the page. This will clear your cache, but keep your cookies, settings etc. In my experience that cures most of the post-update issues I have come across. Should your problem persist, post it here or shoot me a pm =). I will do everything I can to help you work it out!
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Originally Posted by JeyD02
