As I said in the Board Tracker, I am considering running a GT Challenge in the future.
The potential for this series is huge. Unlike alot of challenge being run, the plan is to make a competition lasting on various seasons, starting on Season 1, and evolving through the season while keeping some part of your package.
Starting with a set amount of finances, you would build a car and take part on one, if not all the classes being run. Depending of the race calculator, you would be able to choose your tyre supplier every season for a certain price and be able to work with sponsors, in order to gain money. Race prizes would depend of your finish in various classes and taking care of your finances would be key, as you would be able to update some aspects of your car thanks to a set amount of tokens per season.
More is obviously to come, and it sure does sounds quite (overly) ambitious and time-consuming. That’s why it might take a few weeks to months to be able to run the first season, unless I find some people to help me taking care of the challenge.
I do believe in this project as it’s quite a different approach than the various challenge taking part in this, and the idea about starting from Season 1 to a few seasons, while taking care of your team, is probably an all-or-nothing challenge.
Feel free to discuss about the idea in this thread. If anyone is interested enough to take part into leading the project, feel free to PM me.
A word of warning: you may expect to see some skepticism from the veterans on this forum (myself included). Even simpler challenges can become quite time consuming. I can’t remember if you’ve run challenges before, but if you haven’t had a few under your belt successfully completed, I’d actually work my way up to an idea of this magnitude.
I believe that this kind of idea has actually been floated at least 3 times before within the last 18 months, and none of them ever got off the ground. Der Bayer’s projects are on an entirely different scale with an entirely different level of technical aptitude.
Break it up into components first to pilot the several ideas. That will also help you calibrate your systems and streamline your data processes, because keeping track of one’s suppliers and finances can be a real pain in the ass.
What Strop said. The “Break it up into components first to pilot the several ideas” part especially. If I had skipped running the Hoon Competition and gone straight to PCTC #1 - and PCTC #1 isn’t even as sophisticated as I want to do, mind - then I would have made an utter hash of it and probably not finished. Even having read all the information on the forums in advance and entered probably a dozen well-run competitions as a competitor in advance, I learned an enormous amount from each of these two competitions about writing rulesets, managing entries, communicating with entrants, and fine-tuning the rules that I want to use. Heck, I learned a lot from participating in VicVictory’s “Pay It Forward” game.
The only thing I would add to what Strop said is just general competition-running advice: test the stuffing out of your rules and iterate. Come up with an initial set of rules and build cars to test those rules. Are turbos balanced against NA engines? Is OHV (or modern OHV, in a recent-year challenge like yours) viable? Are there multiple base-game car bodies that are competitive? Are there modded bodies that are completely OP-broken? In fact, this is another reason to break the challenge up into pieces, first: I didn’t know until after I opened entries on PCTC #1 that I’d effectively restricted OHV out of the running with my low engineering time limit. If I was locked into an extended competition - if I wanted to do something where entrants had multiple generations of vehicles, with budgets for later years based on performance in earlier years - I would be flat out of luck, with no way to fix the problem.
I agree on the fact that you guys might be skeptical about that, and I can’t guarantee the fact that what I proposed is going to be included in tbe challenge, hence the ‘‘idea’’ bracket put in the title.
The racing part is fairly doable I think. However, the ‘‘tycoon’’ part is going to be more tricky. And I’ll need some time to get the first part done and gettng the season achieved.
If I were to be doing the challenge alone then it would likely be on by June due to studies involvement. However being alone shouldn’t be the case hopefully, as I’m keen on making a Judge Group, taking care of the various parts of the challenge.
Therefore this challenge is a concept where the ideas are being brought up, as I might have to drop it, in case I can’t just find the time if I’m alone. I’d advise anyone interesred to start building their cars once we enter yhe Building Phase and not before.
But you all have to know I don’t like ending up projects. I’ll do my best to get it done. I’ll drop a few PM to some people for which I think they’d make good people for a Judge Group, and getting the race calculations done.
I do except to make this project come true, if we get enough people interested for it.
Yeah, chances are I might start with the racing-part only. This will depend of the amount of participants, if I get to run it alone,etc.
Plenty of time to go though, will give me some time to think about how to do some things,etc.
The first ruleset is up, but I’m taking a day before eventually releasing it. I’d better have a look back tomorrow and see if anything doesn’t seem to be weird or so.
Some ideas are there. Implementing it is another thing though.
With the planned ideas, it would seem logical to see the first season starting in a while.
I’m happy to see some interest for this challenge. It sure is something quite ambitious, and probably a bit pretentious for a first timer, but there’s a reason if I’m looking forward getting a Judge Group.
I think it might be wiser sticking to one class only for the Beta Season as the number of players shouldn’t be high. It wouldn’t make sense to have a monet system with 10 people in 3 classes.
As stated, it should take alot of time for a Beta Season to be on, so don’t worry if you seem to find a lack of progress. I’m working on the Sponsor part but student life should be giving me a kick in the nuts from tomorrow onwards.
Adding to that, you also have a poll, in order to get to know more about the eventual interest from the players here : goo.gl/forms/Ns3PuhtwPq
Please feel free to give suggestions.
Hello guys. It’s been a month that I started to get inactive. No, I didn’t let Automation down. Same goes with the GT Series.
However, I don’t see the point in running it without being able to use BROBOT. Once something is sorted, I will get back into this project. But chances are it will take a lot of time before sorting the race calculations. I just don’t see the point in seeing cars being raced as raw calculus instead of seeing cars being raced around a proper racetrack
In that case I would suggest waiting several months, as you say, because BROBOT is too a work in progress. And the one thing I really want to see before committing further is that the behaviour differences between drivetrains gets sorted, because right now the handling characteristics are calculated at static velocity, hence understeer/oversteer balance is not accurately modelled. Currently, the BROBOT uses the circle test values to determine base handling which is affected by the drive/sport ratio, and those values can be misleading/inconsistent, which can, in a tight field, really bugger your chances.
This project is not the kind of project that is done in a few days or so. Implementing tyre suppliers, sponsors, a properly balanced finance model is doable. But I simply don’t see the point in getting that much hard work for something that will use Excel calculations and see absolutely no car-and-track interactions as done in the BRC
Some of the people in here are aware about what I’m looking forward to. And I will defo get back in it as soon as BROBOT gets released, if it fits into my timetable.
The project I have in mind is probably similar to some of the online games out there. Not saying that this would be like one of them though, it would be too optimistic and pretentious to brag about the GT Series being at the level of a game. It would be sort of simplified but with features inspired from some of them and unique in the Automation world. So once it hopefully gets finished, people who played on some of the rather known racing online management games should be recognising some similarities between that and these games.
Time-wise will be the more annoying of the two. I can always find some ways to make the ideas work or not, but I will need time. I’ll have a couple of months of holidays around July, but I’ve heard BROBOT won’t be available by then.
I would guess these issues would be fixed in a few months? Anyway we would be running Beta Seasons before running Season 1. Once BROBOT is released
cough killrob cough 
I just hope you can make it (project-wise and timewise )