Beta of version 5.20 available

Guy... how can I send you a screen shot of my settings
I sniped it but cant figure out how to post it to the forum for you to see

Theslotcarguy: When creating a reply there should be a "Host an image" button on the tool bar. Clicking it will allow you to upload the picture. You then copy and paste the code to the full image that it provides you.

Thanks Denney here are the settings I have. hope this works


Sorry I sent so much info, but I hope it helps and you don't think this problem is in my mind THANKS...rick

No problem, it's better to give more information than less information

Your print screen and video help me a lot and i think i found the reason of your problem:
as you know in version 5.20 the pacer speed setting is in the car setting window and for Pacer4 i have seen that you set the speed to 65 which is too much for a SSD track , in the car setting window just change the speed of Pacer4 to a value less then 63 and i think it will solve your problem.

Edit: what a nice long track, 21 second to make a lap

Edit2: maybe during a long race Pc Lap Counter set the speed of pacer4 to 65 to reach the target lap time and this cause the car to stop, i need to check my code to avoid value bigger then 63

ok i found the problem of Rick, during the race Pc Lap Counter always try to reach the target lap time and on Rick track it happen then Pc Lap Counter have to set the speed up to 63 to reach the target lap time and when the speed value is bigger than 63 then the car stop , i'am preparing version 5.20e to avoid value bigger than 63 but at this moment i can't release it because i need to made other modifications for Denney , so in summary stay tunned

Damm Guy how did you ever get so smart? raised the target lap 1 second and lowered the car speed to 55. Ran 100 laps with no problem at all. To test it out and make sure everything was ok I purposely made the target time really low and increased the speed to force the car over 63
as soon as the throttle reached 64 BANG the car stopped. great job !!! glad you didn't think I was crazy.
good luck with denneys problem
whenever you get a chance I would like to find out how to get cars to take 100% fuel after a save. As of now if the race is saved and a car only has 23 gal out of 100 aftyer the race is resume you can only fill back up to the 23 gallon mark not 100 THANKS AGAIN....RICK

Hi guys,

Version 5.20e available at www.pclapcounter.be, version 5.20e should solve all the problems.

Rick:
PCLC now avoid value > 63.
Fix the bug of load race and tank limit.
Denney:
Point 1 should be fixed.
Point 2 is OK (no more LC when ghost car is in the pit lane).
Point 3 is OK, PCLC no more overwrite the speed specified in the car settings.
Point 4 is OK (If car is SLOWER than MAX gap time, DECREASE speed).

New problem with fuel fix
it's very complicated to explain
here's a video, hope it helps.......rick

Awesome work guy! Will test it out later tonight after dinner.

I'll also see if I can confirm Theslotcarguy's problem with the fuel (although I just pull into pits, don't have to press buttons).

Rick, that's very strange and i don't think it's linked to version 5.20e as i didn't change anything in the refueling part since a long time.
On my side i test it with LC button and on my track all is working good, did you always have the problem or it's random ?
When you have the problem it's good to check the throttle window, good be that your hand controller send bad throttle level and therefore it burn fuel even you don't ask throttle.

Hi Guy. Phew... spent about 5 hours testing tonight. It was great fun and we're almost there! There's just one more bug I have found...

When the pace cars run through the pit, they randomly cause other cars to pit. Even if a car isn't on the track or in the race the pit checkbox on the throttle data window gets checked and the car gets slowed. This only seems to happen when they "miss" the first pit sensor. I don't think they are actually "missing" the sensor though because this bug only happens when they don't register the first pit sensor. No human cars have missed the pit sensor before so I don't think the actual sensor is the issue.

There are 4 scenarios that happened tonight:

1. Pace car hits first pit sensor, is slowed in pit lane, pit checkbox is checked. Car then hits second pit sensor and resumes racing. Perfect!
2. Pace car misses first pit sensor, is slowed in pit lane, pit checkbox is UNchecked. Car then hits second pit sensor, is slowed and pit checkbox is checked. Other cars will randomly be pitted at this point.
3. Pace car misses first pit sensor, is NOT slowed in pit lane, pit checkbox is UNchecked. Car then hits second pit sensor, is slowed and pit checkbox is checked. Other cars will randomly be pitted at this point.
4. Scenario 2 and 3 happen but no other cars are randomly pitted.

Manually putting the pace car back in pit lane so it can run over the second sensor again will cause the car to resume racing but won't clear the pit status of other cars. It's also interesting to note that none of the pace cars missed the second pit sensor. I am going to try one more thing tomorrow and swap the 2 sensor track pieces around but as no human car has missed the sensor, I don't think it's going to do anything (but would be useful to rule out).

Also, some cars will still change lane in the pits randomly. I'm not sure if it's the program or not because I wasn't able to catch the lane change number in the throttle data window at the same time as they changed lanes and it seems very rare. I need to investigate this more. It's very random and only happened 3 times in 5 hours.

Other than that problem, pace cars seem to work perfectly now! Thank you very much for your support in adding these features so quickly. It's greatly appreciated.

As for Theslotcarguy's problem, we've tried with and without using buttons and couldn't reproduce the problem. All cars we tested pitted fine and re-fueled fine.

OK here we go. thought it might be computer, so i downloaded the demo version to my laptop and hooked up APB same problem downloaded ver.5.19 and now the problem is there also thought it might be APB, but didnt have spare so I ran SSDC software to see if it was sending the right signals fueling worked fine. in your answer it appeared that you thought I was burning fuel when not using the throttle. not the case. when refueling the fuel bar doesn't change and it never lets you know when fueling is complete by the way I also installed 2 new calibrated controllers and still no difference.......rick

p.s. in your post you said you haven't changed refueling in a long time, but maybe when you change the loasd race or tank limit it was something in there?

P.S.S. reloaded the program. started as administrator (which I never had to do before) and is running much better with the refueling BUT I did notice this I have my fuel tank size as 100. if I only let the fuel go down to 60 fueling is evenly spread out over time.
If I let the fuel run down to let's say 3 and refuel it will immediately jump to 55 then smooth out after that
I have a 3 hour race session planned for tonight will let you know how it goes...thanks for your patience.....RICK

Confirming my suspicion's, I swapped the sensors around and the problem still exists. Pace cars don't "register" the first sensor but then register the second sensor and causing other cars to pit.

Theslotcarguy: I've tested everything you posted about and can't reproduce it. It must be something else that's different between the configuration of your track and mine. I know it seems obvious but have you checked your refuel rate for the cars and the burn rate for the cars?

Denney,
i don't think the problem is in PCLC , i think sometime the pit-pro sensor send double messages, you should check the message part of the SSDA6 interface of Pc Lap Counter.
If "double messages" is the cause of the problem then i will check if i can avoid this kind of bad message from the pit-pro.
To help you i made some change in the visual aspect of the throttle window , when there is LC PCLC display it in green and when there is a pit stop PCLC display it in red, here is a example:

For LC:


For Pitstop:


Just redownload version 5.20e to have this changes (SSDA6 interface should be at version 1.2.2)
Also i think it's better to avoid pacer cars to go in the pitlane, on my track the "PrPit and PoPit" feature is working fine since version 5.20d and so i think it should also work on your track.

Rick,
ok , i wait for your "tonight race report" because at this moment i don't have any idea.
for your information according to your previous print screen you set PCLC to pause the race during track call and therefore during the pause the refueling stop, that's normal.
If you set the track call to "stop the cars" or call "yellow flag" and you ticked "stop refueling" then it will also stop the refueling.

Ok guy, I'll check the messages section next time I test it. The reason I thought it was the program is that it is ONLY a problem with the pace cars and never happens with human cars. If it was PitPro sending "double messages", it would also be a problem for human cars as well, would it not?

Thanks for the colour coding on the window. Will make looking for these things much quicker and easier. I did try the PrPit and PoPit options and yes, they worked, but we have some pace cars that do 8 second laps and others that do 12. It's very hard to allow the 8 second cars to make the most use of the lane changers while stopping the 12 second cars from entering the pit.

The pace cars entering the pitlane actually works brilliantly except for this one last issue so please, don't stop developing this feature. I have a feeling the rare lane changing in the pits is due to the chips in the cars because we had a couple of instances tonight with the same cars changing lanes when the button on the controller isn't pressed. Sorry, I forgot to mention that in my last post.

Raced for over 3 hours last night and no significant problems everything worked as it should
I never changed any of the settings the only difference I did was to run the program as ADMINISTRATOR don't know why that would have made a difference. But so far everything is perfect Thanks again Rick
Denney thanks for your help also!

Thanks to the little changes to the throttle window and watching the message box I have been able to work out what is happening.

It's completely random but, unlike what I first thought, the cars are never missing the sensor at all. What is happening is that the pace cars are not always registering the correct car ID.

The reason it looked like it was pitting multiple cars at once is because on hitting the first sensor, it would pit, say, car 2. Then, when it hit the second sensor, it would pit, say, car 3. The pace car, say, car 1, never actually registers as being in the pit (hence why it isn't slowed down).

You'll be happy to know that PitPro never sent a double message. It just seems that PCLC isn't always registering the correct car ID for pace cars hitting the pit sensors. For human controlled cars, it registered the correct ID every time (which makes me think it's a PCLC issue and not PitPro).

I haven't been able to reproduce the lane changing problem in pit lane though (over another 4 hours of testing) so it's not a critical issue. If it happens again, I'll try and work out what's happening but at the moment, it's nothing to worry about.

One thing I want to check though... Now that the lane change indicates green, is it meant to constantly flicker. By constant, I mean when it wants to change lanes, it flickers green constantly for a second or two before turning off. It's never on full green. It also seems to only count 0, 1, 2... yet your screen shot shows 582 and 164. This might just be because it's moving to fast and giving the effect of 0, 1, 2?

Denney,
I made another test today and i had the problem only one time, the reason was a double message of the pit-out sensor , first pit message was treated by PCLC as a Pit-out event and of course the second pit message as a Pit-in event and therefore the cars was running at pit lane speed, so on my side i think the problem come from the Pit-Pro but i will add code to avoid double Pit-out message and we will see if it solve the problem.

Rick,
Happy that you didn't had any problems, i don't think running PCLC as administrator change something

Hi guy. When you said double message, I thought you meant PCLC would show 2 messages with the same timestamp in the message window, which didn't happen.

One thing to mention though is that the old way, where pace cars would STOP in pit lane, worked perfectly. It always stopped the correct pace car and always detected the correct car ID. I don't know if that helps but it's something I noticed.

I'll run another test today and actually attach the log file from the race so you can see what I mean by it detecting the wrong car ID. I hope the double message fix will solve the problem but it seems strange that a double message would cause the wrong car ID to be detected.

Hi guy. This will probably be my last update on this issue, just because if you're upcoming fix doesn't fix it, I have no idea what to look for. I spent almost 5 hours today just testing lap after lap the pace car issue to see if I could nut out exactly where the issue lies. Unfortunately, it appears completely random. I've created a spreadsheet of most of my testing if you want to take a look at it.

I never had a pace car double trigger a pit sensor according to the message log. The only issues in the message log were that it was picking up the wrong car ID when passing over the sensors. Anyway, here is a link to the Google spreadsheet (I may update it tomorrow if I feel like doing more testing):

PCLC Pace Car Pit Issues

It doesn't seem to matter which car, which chip or which lane (ID) the car was defined as. A pace car would end up triggering a pit event for another car, even if that car was not being used on the track. A normal human car have NEVER triggered the wrong ID. The makes me think it isn't a double message issue.

The green squares in the spreadsheet are the cars that physically touched the track during that specific test, otherwise they were just part of the race in PCLC. Also, every incorrect pit event happened on the FIRST pit sensor (even after swapping sensors, it was still always the first).

There were a few other edge cases that we've experienced (like pitting multiple cars and triggering incorrectly on the second sensor) that I wasn't able to reproduce today. Hope you can find something that I missed because I may just have to go back to the PrPit and PoPit options.

Hi Denney,

Version 5.20f published, you can download it at www.pclapcounter.be
On my side my Pit-Pro or PCLC never pick up a wrong car ID and the pit-pro decoding part of the SSDA6 interface of PCLC don't make difference between Human and Ghost cars and so i really don't see why you received a wrong car ID with ghost cars .

Hey Guy, thanks for the update. Unfortunately it didn't fix the issue. I ran more tests tonight by making an oval of track with just the pit sensors in it (no powerbase in circuit) and ran the following:

Same car and chip for every ID.
Pace car on one ID, human cars on other 5.
Only pace car physically touched the track.
Laps: 200

I ran this test once on each ID with the following results:

ID1: No issues
ID2: No issues
ID3: Pitted ID2
ID4: No issues
ID5: No issues
ID6: Pitted ID5

Pitting was entirely random and, once pitted, the cars were fine. Un-pitting the pitted car would cause the problem to happen again eventually.

Based on these results, I've decided I just won't run pace cars on ID3 or ID6 (seems coincidental that it was only 3 and 6 causing the problem). Is there any way to view the raw data coming from the PitPro so we can see if it is the PitPro causing the problem. Other than that, I consider this issue finished with because it's just to random for me to pin down.

Oh, and I did saw the rejected pit messages (double message) twice out of the 1200 laps I ran!

I will add a Pit-pro debug function in the SSDA6 interface of Pc Lap Counter so we will definitively know where is the problem

Debug of pit-pro available now in version 5.20f (just redownload from www.pclapcounter.be to have the modification):