Introducing iRacing Setup Sync

  

iRacing Setup Sync

We all know that setups can become an important part of your official iRacing races. And let’s admit it, most of us don’t have a clue where to start when it comes to building or tweaking a car setup. So the majority out there is counting on the goodwill of those who do master the art of setup creation. But even then, it can become a tiresome quest trying to hunt for the right setup file. So now a creative iRacing member has created a very interesting tool to help us all find de preferred setup file for your car of choice.

iRacing member Nick Thissen introduces the first official version of “iRacing Setup Sync (iRSS)”  This is an application dedicated to iRacing setup sharing and downloading.

iRacing Setup Sync (or iRSS for short) is a Windows application that attempts to automate most of the tedious work around storing and managing your setups. It operates on a large database of setups, which is synced to most of the popular Setup Shops on the forum and therefore always contains the latest setups, even those shared on the forums. It allows you to browse setups by car, track or team and automates downloading the setups into the correct folder, and it can even automatically download setups for the car / track you are driving right now!

iRacing members can follow the development of Sync Setup or provide feedback to Nick at the iRacing forum thread.

 

Download!

 

This version contains a normal installer which will install an iRacing Setup Sync Launcher application. The Launcher application will automatically update to the latest version and then launch iRacing Setup Sync. You can just use the Launcher application to start the application, if there is no update available it will just launch iRacing Setup Sync.

Official iRacing Setup Sync website – http://iracingsetups.nickthissen.nl/

Important features:

• Automatically download recent setups for your current car / track, as soon as you start iRacing. Similar to Trading Paints – except for setups!
• Search setups by car, track or team and download the ones you don’t have yet.
• Compares your local setups with the online database setups to determine which setups you already own – there is no point in downloading duplicates!
• Subscribe to cars, tracks and teams and quickly search setups that match any of your subscribed items.
• Completely customizable directory and setup naming convention with macros like the setup author, car, track, season and many more.
• Operates on a vast database of over 1,000 setups which is continuously updated by setups added to the various Setup Shops around the forums, and by user uploads.
• (Soon) Upload the setups you used in a recent session (if you want to share them) with the click of a button.

Setup database website & account

The setups in the application come from an online database that can also be accessed via : http://iracingsetups.nickthissen.nl/

You will need to create an account on this website and use that to login to iRacing Setup Sync.
Do not login with your iRacing credentials, you need to login with the iRacing Setups website credentials. I will make that more clear in the next version.

Where do the setups come from and how up to date is the database?

The setups come from the online database also available at http://iracingsetups.nickthissen.nl/. You will need an account to use iRacing Setup Sync, which you can create by registering at the website. You don’t need an account to download setups from the website however.

The database also contains setups manually uploaded by many different users, but mostly consists of all the setups available in the Setup Shops in the iRacing forums. Since a few months ago, most of these setup shops are being generated with another application I wrote, which automatically syncs the setup shops with the online database. That means that (at least for the cars that have an active setup shop thread) the database will always immediately contain every setup shared on the forum!

How does it work?

iRacing Setup Sync takes a snapshot of the setups on your computer. When you search for setups, the setups in the online database are quickly compared to your local setups (this is done by hashing their contents – I cannot read your setups), and you will see which setups you are still missing.

Automatically downloading setups when you are racing

If enabled in the options, iRacing Setup Sync will monitor for iRacing activity. When you start iRacing while iRacing Setup Sync is active (either visible or minimized to the background as a system tray application) it will detect which car and track you are driving and automatically search (and download) matching setups from the current season. As soon as you are connected you can go to your Garage and find the most recent setups in your download folder, ready to go.

The application only very briefly checks for iRacing activity every 5 seconds so that it has a negligible impact on your racing experience. You can turn it off by closing it from the system tray when you start racing to be absolutely sure, but it should not be necessary. In a future update I will add automatic support for this.
Finding setups by Subscribed items

Once you have subscribed to cars, tracks, teams or groups (see below), visit the Subscribed tab to quickly search for setups that match your subscriptions. Click the ‘Find subscribed setups’ button to start searching. For example: if you are subscribed to the Ford GT – this will find any setups (that you do not yet own) for the Ford GT. Subscribe to your favorite cars and tracks to quickly get all of the new setups available.

Finding setups by car, track, team or group

If you want to look for setups manually by car, track, team or group simply visit the corresponding tab on the left side of the application. Use the dropdown to select your car, track, team or group and the setup list will be refreshed with matching setups. Use the Season dropdown at the top-right to filter by season.

Setups that appear gray have already been detected on your computer, you don’t need to download them again. You can also see their location if you want to find them. You can still check the checkbox for these setups and download them again if you wish.

Downloading the found setups

Once you found some setups via your subscribed items or by searching for cars, tracks, teams or groups, you can hit the ‘Download selected setups’ button to add the selected (checked) setups to your current download list. Visit the Downloads tab to view your download list, and click Start to start automatically downloading the setups in the list.

Options, setup location and naming

Downloaded setups will be placed in the correct directory for each car, possibly under a further sub-directory if specified in the Options, with a name that follows the naming convention you specified in the Options.

You can choose your directory under the Download Options tab, relative to the directory of the car that the setups are for. The default is ‘SetupSync’, so setups for (for example) the BMW Z4 GT3 would be placed under ‘iRacing/setups/bmwz4gt3/SetupSync/…”

The name of the setup can be specified in the Setup Naming tab. You can use many different ‘tags’ or macros like {car}, {track}, {madeby} that will be replaced with the relevant values for each setup. For example, I like to call my setups by the person who made them, then the season and then whether it’s a race or qualify setup (eg “NickThissen_14S2_Q”), and I want a separate directory for each track: so I use the format “{track}/{madeby}_{season}_{type}”. You can select your favorite format from the list, or specify a custom format.

What are teams and groups?

A Team is a private team consisting of members and administrators. You can upload setups for your private team on the http://iracingsetups.nickthissen.nl/ website, those setups will only be visible to your team members. Create and configure your teams on the website.

A Group can be used to group setups together. The setups in a group are publically accessible (if you want to control who has access to them, use a team instead). You can add multiple contributors to a group who can add setups to that group. Group support might be removed in a later update because it is almost never used.

Updates

Version 2.1
– Added support for automatic updates.
– Added donate button by popular request (see Options page).
– Added support for grouping setups.
– Fixed setup naming convention save bug.

Troubleshooting 

If there is a crash when running the new launcher, try running it as an administrator. Running as admin should not be required to just run iRacing Setup Sync, but it may be required when it needs to update.

Known issues

– Window shadow remains for a few seconds when you close it (click it to make it disappear).
– Subscribing to teams is broken.
– Nick has a very cheap shared webserver which may not be able to cope with a large demand.

 

Official Webpage – www.iRacing.com