Crew Chief - an alternative race engineer for console & PC

[mr_belowski]

Still working my way through getting it running properly in PCars.

The spotter calculations and basic logic are working nicely but I still need to record the voice messages for it and add some delay to the 'clear' messages so it doesn't bounce. This spotter knows its left from its right (unlike the R3E one ) so is quite similar to the iRacing one (car left... your in the middle, 3 wide.... clear left.... etc).

I've also been looking at driver names. PCars has a lot of AI names (3000ish I think) and it picks randomly for each race or championship, so recording all of these is clearly impossible. But I'm building the framework to pull the names out of the shared memory block, map them to a phonetic spelling and corresponding wave file, load them into the voice recognition system, and use them during the race. This means the app will be able to read the name ("smith is closing on you"), as well as recognise it when you ask about it (when it's working you'll be able to ask "where's smith?" and the app will respond with "4 seconds in front, P4" or whatever). There's still work to be done here but nothing difficult (just a bit time consuming).

I expect to have a folder with some name recordings in it initially and this will expand. To make the whole name recordings stuff worthwhile I may offer to record driver names for online championships (again, there are too many players out there to expect to make recordings of all the names that might be encountered in pickup races). I guess I'd need a list of the entrant names as they appear in PCars, along with corresponding phonetic spellings where appropriate. This also means that people would have to race with their real names (no "super_awesome_killer" or other silly handles). Can this be done? I know my PCars uses my steam name (mr_belowski) - is it possible to change this to my real name?

[Le_Poilu]

Little question: are you going for single app for each game ore will you release a unique app that can handle both (or more) games ?

[mr_belowski]

One app with a 'select game' list

[Le_Poilu]

ok.

If you do so, can you please have something like command line parameter to allow the selection of the game automatically ?

I Use SimCommander / Simvibe to launch my games, it launch 3rd party apps and while loading the game, the less user action is needed the better it is

[mr_belowski]

My plan is to have it remember the last used game. Then when you start Crew Chief, if it's set to start running and launch the game automatically it'll fire up PCars for you and start listening for the shared memory. So, like it is with Race Room now, it should be a single click to have it start up and launch the game.

This means that, if you want to stop playing PCars and start playing RaceRoom, you'll need to reconfigure Crew Chief between sessions

[mr_belowski]

Actually, that's daft

I'll add an input parameter, something like
-gameDefinition PCars64bit

this will pre-select the value in that list box, so you can have 1 shortcut for PCars and one for Raceroom

[Le_Poilu]

Actually, that's daft

I'll add an input parameter, something like
-gameDefinition PCars64bit

this will pre-select the value in that list box, so you can have 1 shortcut for PCars and one for Raceroom

That's fantastic !

[mr_belowski]

Phew... lots of updates last night and this morning....

The spotter is now working properly with left / right / 3 wide warnings. The basic voice recognition for opponent driver names is in ("where's smith?" will result in a "he's in P4" or whatever). This can recognise all the driver names in the session provided they have a spelling that voice recogniser can make sense of, or they have a mapping to a phonetic spelling. The recognition hit-rate for driver names can be a bit low, as you might imagine - you need to speak them as clearly as you can.

The first cut of reading driver names is in too. Currently this is only in response to a direct question (you ask "who's in front" or "who's behind", and app says "Smith"). This obviously only works when I've actually made a recording of that driver's name - the set of driver name recordings currently has only 10 drivers in it. Aside from recording loads of driver names, there's still lots to do to wire the available driver names into other events.

[pargiNOS]

Love your app for R3E, im waiting to test it at Pcars!!!
Thx for your hard work!!!

[mr_belowski]

Will try and make an early test version available tomorrow for feedback