Marko R?s?nen

Not exactly a replacement for GRE, since it's missing still some of the functionalities, but a setup editing / creation tool that offers some graphs to aid in gearing.

Credits: all the math and car parameters were provided by Mark Stone by elaborous process of driving around the purpose-built flat oval, and analyzing the telemetry. Special thanks to Ihsan 'GeNiE' Gin, Ian Stanley, Mick Fisher and Dad Phillips for testing and suggestions for improvements all the way during the development.

Supports currently 1965F1, 1967F1 and 1967F2.

Installation: There isn't any really. Just extract the executable and the season (*.ecs) files into any (same) folder. That's it! No additional run-time libraries needed.

Changes to latest version:

1.00 : The first 'official' release. Added support for 1967F1&F2. Some additional gearing info shown. Comes with a readme

Download : Setup Assistant '65 (version 1.00)

Marko

BC45

I have two questions.

First, does your program include chassis settings in addition to the gearing settings ?

Second, what is a "gear ID" ?

Thanks

Marko R?s?nen

First: Yes it does.

Second: For each gear two things are stored in the setup file. 1) Gear ID that is used by GPL to identify gear ratios (such as 8/31). 2) The final gear ratio as a decimal number not including the effect of differential gearing, which is calculated directly from the ratio of gear teeth (31 divided by 8 in the case above).

Gear ID has no meaning by itself, it's just a code that tells GPL what to show in setup screen x/y field. The final gear ratio is what counts when you are driving. The set of used IDs are different between original GPL '67 and '65 mod. My guess is that some the setups were made when '65 mod still used the same set of IDs than the original. Such a setup is ok when you drive it, but if you try to change the ratios inside GPL you will get unexpected results.

SA'65 reads the IDs from the setup file, and calculates final gear ratios by itself. Therefore, if the ID is not a valid one, a default gear ratio for that gear will be substituted.

I've edited the link to point version 0.51. See 1st post edit comment.

Marko

BC45

Thanks Marko for your quick and comprehensive response.

May I assume that once SA65 corrects the gear ID's in any setup I load into it, and I save the "corrected" setup, the ratios withing the GPL setup screens will then operate correctly ?

Forgive me for asking all those questions, but I am not an expert on those things...

Since your program is identified as an "Alpha" version, should I wait for further upgrades or is it alright to use it right away ?

[So far I have used Strava's Gears 65 program for the gearing settings and it seems to be working fine]

I am sure that your setup program will be a great contribution to the 65 Mod.

Marko R?s?nen

You are correct. Anything it saves, will be read back in without problems. But, as I said, it will use default values for all the invalid gears, so you have to manually set the gear ratios back to what they were in the tool.



No problem, BC45. They are good questions Although it is marked as alpha, my personal feeling (and the guys' who helped me testing it) is that it is ready for release. My plans are to add some features in the future, such as gear box copying between setups, translating 5 gear setups to 6 gears and vice versa, optimizing gear ratios for speed ranges etc. Therefore I do not see it as a final product. Nevertheless, I'm sure it can be useful already as is.



The biggest difference between Strava's program and mine from user point of view is the chassis settings and acceleration curves. I suggest you try SA65 out, and decide which one you like better. Or use them both



Thank you! I hope so too.

Marko

BC45

I am sold !!! I am downloading right now and will use SA65 over the weekend.

Thanks again... I probably will be back soon to ask even more questions..

BC45

I am back...

Congratulations !!! SA65 looks great and works perfectly...

But...
I have loaded a variety of 65 setups from all chassis and the error report on invalid fields is always for "Reverse Gear" [!!]
I did not even know that there was such a setting. It certainly does not show up within the GPL setting screen. What is the relevance of that field ? The default ratio is always 12/43. Should I be concerned about this ?

Otherwise, all other data seem to be OK.
The graphs are excellent. Should I make sure that there is no "Red" at the end of each gear bar ?

I hope that everyone uses this wonderful utility...

I look forward to your response.

Marko R?s?nen

I'm glad you like it!

For some rationale about the reverse gear anomaly see thread:

http://forum.racesimcentral.com/showthread.php?t=152165&page=3 post #53.

I didn't know reverse gear could be altered until I first saw it in iGOR few weeks ago The relevance of it is just what it says, it's the gear ratio for the reverse gear. Surely nothing important, I just added it to the tool for the sake of completeness. I'm not sure how I ended up with the default ratio for that, but IMO it seems to work as well as any other ratio. Afterall, you only use it when your off track

I don't think you can get rid off the red part at the gear bar. You should at least make sure there is some overlap on the green parts of consequtive bars. It also gives you some indication when you should change gear upwards. The larger the red part, the sooner before reaching redline RPM you should change gear. For fine tuning the upper graph is more useful. There you should in general minimize the area between 100% and the graph.

Marko

BC45

Thanks. I am not going to worry about the reverse gear...

I now understand the meaning of the "red" portion of the gears bars.. I will watch it carefully to optimize my gearings. I will also pay attention to the curves on the upper part of the graph.

***Suggestion : It would be nice to have both the fractional and decimal representation of the final diff [ie: 10/31 3.100] as you have done for the individual gears. [I currently use a hand held calculator to check that all the ratios are what they should be!!]

Keep up the good work..

Marko R?s?nen

It would be easy to add, but I'm not sure I understand the reason you consider it important, as the final diff ratio is already included in the decimal representations of the individual gears?

Marko

zenracer

Thanks for this!

BC45

I agree that it is not a critical piece of data. I just prefer to be able to determine whether I am looking at a "long" or "short" gearing setup by looking at the decimal expression of the final diff, it is easier than from the fractional expression. But, I can certainly live without the decimal notation...[it is not shown in GPL either..]

The nice thing about your utility is that I will probably never again use the GPL setup screens to edit setups, although I might check once in a while the in game setup screens to make sure the data is correct..
From now on, it is GRE for 67 and Setup Assistant for 65...

BC45

I will try to explain what I discovered as clearly as possible.

It seems that the 2nd gear fractional ratio is not being computed correctly. It defaults to 12/43 [the same as for the reverse gear] in all setups, regardless of whether I get an invalid field error or not. However, the decimal ratio for second gear is correct.
It seems to happen in all chassis with 5 or 6 gears.

When I load the very same setups in Strava's Gears program, both the fractional and decimal data are correct...

Also, after loading several setups, I get the following message : "list index out of bounds".

I hope that the above explanations make sense to you. I am sure you will figure out what is going on.

Bernard

billcow

This may or may not be useful, but rather than simply using a default value when the gear ID in the file is invalid, wouldn't it make more sense to use the numerical ratio that's also stored and then search for the closest valid gear ratio?

Other than that, great work. I like the layout of the GPLRE interface a little bit better (everything is spaced the same, in your program some of the settings have more padding between them than others - I'd probably move the gearbox/diff stuff to the left side, shrink it vertically just a bit, and then move the load/save buttons down to have the top even with the top of the chassis setup section - hope that makes sense) but not by a whole lot. I like the way your program does the torque graphs a bit better than GPLRE's though - the only thing I would change is to leave just a little bit of space between the 100% and the top of the graph - just one or two pixels so you don't lose the top of the curve under the border. One last thing: it might look a little better if all the group-boxes (not sure if that's the right term) were the same style, as opposed to some being inset and some outset.

Nothing major, just a couple nit-picky things that most people probably wouldn't even notice.

Marko R?s?nen

Thanks for noticing this! I fixed it right away. The link has been updated.



It is possible that this is related to the same bug. Please try the updated version, and if you still get the error message, please post the setup causing it here (if it's specific to a setup).

Thank you!

Marko

Marko R?s?nen

You're right billcow, it would make more sense to seach for the closest ratio. It will definately be one of the next things to add. I didn't consider it a very high priority, as it's usually the reverse gear that has the wrong ID.



Like yourself, I too like when things are even and symmetrical, but this was the best compromise I could come up with while still keeping things where people are used to look for them. Also the toolbar is likely to grow when I'll add new functionalities. Thanks for the suggestion anyway




What you're seeing is the default behaviour of the graphic component I'm using. I'll try to find a setting to leave some margin.



As there is no colour in the main form, I thought having some inset, some outset would make it look less boring. I'll ask my testers' opinion about this. Thanks for the comments!

Marko

BC45

Marko,

Thanks for fixing the 2nd gear data, although it did not seem to affect the actual gearing setup.
So far, the only invalid field error I got were for the reverse gear only.
One thing you might consider is a "save yes-no" reminder when one changes data in a loaded setup and then loads another setup without first saving the changes in the previous setup !!!

Marko R?s?nen

No, it only affected the inital ratio shown in fractions after loading a setup.





Ok, will do that on the next release.

Marko

Strava

 

Good looking interface Marko
And very good info from the graphs

2 questions:
What does the red bit at the right end of some of the bars mean?
And
Would it be possible to combine the main window & the graphs window into 1?

I cannot stand to run resolutions over 800x600 due to very poor eyesight.
And at 800x600 I cannot keep the 2 windows from overlapping.
So part of the graph gets hidden everytime I change a gear value.
Makes it hard to watch the effect of the gear change on the graphs when they get hidden just as they get changed.

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Marko R?s?nen

Thanks for the feedback Strava! Each bar is divided into 3 three coloured sections. Yellow means that the car is producing less than 90% of it's maximum thrust/torque for that given gearing. Green is 90%-100%, and finally red is again less than 90%. The red bar ends at either 1) when the engine has reached its cutoff RPM / limiter, or 2) possibly sooner at the point where there will be no more of acceleration (drag owerpowers the engine thrust).




Unfortunately, I cannot see any way of doing this without making the graphs inpractically small. I tested the app with 1280x1024, small and large fonts, and 1024x768 small fonts.

How about defining a set of shortcut keys to inc/dec each gear when the graphs are active? That would work unless you want to see the ratios the whole time. Then there's of course separating chassis settings and gear settings (moving only gearing to the graph window). I would still rather stick with the current layout. Let me know if the key thing would work for you.

Marko

Marko R?s?nen

Top speeds might have been affected somewhat. Attached is the fixed ecs file. I'll include the file only with the next release. I will not change the existing one.

Marko

Attached Files

65F1.zip (4.2 KB, 164 views)

Guru

 

thanks for this Marko! And apologies for the +ve reverse gear ratio that iGOR leaves behind

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Darts

First off, thanks for making this program. I find it very useful.
I have two requests if it they are not too hard to do.

First:
Would it be possible to have an rpm next to the 90% 80% etc on the graph page for each car(of course not all cars at one time mind you). I really don't know how many rpm's for a given car is X percentage. A simple "11.3k" or "8.5k" next to the percentage would be perfect in my opinion and not take up a large amout of screen space.

Second:
When I click the open file button it always opens in "My Documents" folder is it possible to have it open in either the "GPL\player" folder or have a user option to open in "X" folder.

Again thanks for the program and all the work it takes to make it.

__________________
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67F1 rank -43.818
67F2 rank +57.778
65F1 rank +3.311

Marko R?s?nen

Does it then, LOL, so did SA until last Saturday when I noticed it. Never bothered to check the ratio values, just assumed the reverse ratio was +ve like everything else . I used iGOR to define the set of reverse gear IDs. Unfortunately most setups around use '67 default rev. gear ID (I think).