on the Internet for setups and begging people to send you their setups
are over."
Someone responded:
"Marketing hype for sure.
"This is a tool to assist in the development of a setup.
Better than the game itself, but it doesn't bring Ron Ayton
to the states to live in your computer.
"What it does mean is that the setups you poke around for and
beg for will be better."
Ok, I concede the point that I can't say for sure that GRE will make
everyone capable of creating fantastic setups. I'm not sure I want some
Australian lout living in my computer anyway (just kidding, Ron!) So
I've added the qualifier "We believe" to my page.
However, I know for sure that GRE makes creating setups vastly easier
than it was before. Since Nate sent me the first workable version in
January, I've been using it to create a new setup before every race I
run.
I'm in a bunch of racing series and have scheduled races every day
except Monday. I use any of three different cars in either GP or F2
depending on the series. I don't have time to prepare setups in
advance.
When it's time to race, I run GRE on my old computer and connect across
the LAN to the players folder on my racing computer. I join the
practice session, and then using GRE (and sometimes Windows Find) I poke
around among my existing setups for something recent for any car from
that track, and something recent from any track for that car. I display
these setups on GRE, and then mix and match various settings to create a
new setup for today's car and track.
Usually this takes me three or four minutes. Then I'm on the track and
trying the setup. If it needs tweaking, I swivel on my chair back to
the computer with GRE and tweak, then reload the tweaked setup into GPL.
This is really fun, and adds to the challenge of the event. But the
point is that I could never have done that before. Without GRE, it
simply isn't practical to rummage through a zillion existing setups to
find something relevant to work from.
Now we come to the point of this posting (you were hoping I'd get there
someday, weren't you?)
Last night, Nate called me up and told me that for the last few days,
he'd been developing setups in GRE during practice sessions for races.
He got a real kick out of being able to develop setups so quickly. He
didn't know I'd been doing it too.
One difference between Nate and I is that Nate has done very little
setup development, while I've been hacking GPL setups for two years.
One reason he wrote GRE was to give himself a handle on creating setups.
He hasn't got that handle yet, so he's using GRE's context-sensitive
Help to give him the information he needs. He just right-clicks on a
given setup parameter (say, "Tire Pressures") in GRE's Setup window, and
a context-sensitive Help menu pops up. This leads him to the Quick
Reference item on that parameter, where he can read about what the item
does and what I suggest as a starting value.
In a very few minutes, using GRE and its context-sensitive Help, Nate
can produce a baseline setup to start with at any track for any car. He
says these setups are better than his old setups, which he'd adapted
from setups I sent him before we started developing GRE and GRE Help.
So, before you start trolling the Internet for setups for those new CART
and NASCAR conversion tracks, try right-clicking on GRE's setup
parameters.
And really poke around in the GRE Help. It contains almost everything I
know about setups and could write down, and there's not much in there
that's superfluous. I know it's big, but I think it's worth it.
Alison
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http://www.racesimcentral.net/