rec.autos.simulators

Gentlemen, ladies, and all other life-forms.. <G>:

Well, the punch of my announcement has been somewhat taken by the
recent flood of "COOL NEW SITE" spams, so I'll just tell ya what's
going on.

Have you seen all these new sites that proclaim to be one-stop
shopping sites for racing simulators?  Have you noticed that when you
get there you basically see content grabbed from other sites and
bundled together like so many twigs in a pile of firewood?

Okay, skip that analogy.

Let's put it this way -- there are a LOT of sim racing websites out
there.  That's just common sense -- everyone wants to make some really
cool stuff available.  But be honest.  A lot of that content can be
traced back to about four or five websites.  Don't you get tired of
visiting eight hundred websites and finding basically the same stuff
in different packaging?

That's why SIMRACING ONLINE is under construction.  A few of us who
happen to administer those four or five websites (i.e. The Pits, Sim
Racing News, the IWCCCARS Project, F1GP2 Hall of Fame) decided that,
hey, it'd be easier to visit one site and either have what you need or
direct you to the source, and then put it within a mouse click of your
computer.  And we also figure, heck, if that's the way we're going to
do it, we might as well do it ourselves instead of relying on Web
scavengers.

So Jed, John, Mike, Gizmo, and I are working on building what we hope
is a comprehensive simulation racing Web "guild."  We're going to try
to cultivate the best ORIGINAL contributions to simulation racing and
put it in a centralized location.  We'll also collect URLs of sim
racing sites, and then go out, visit and rate them according to a set
of criteria such as originality, usefulness, etc., and then catalogue
them.  If they have a significant contribution to simulation racing,
we'll make them members of the guild.  Right now we have some big
names ready to take part: The Pits, Sim Racing News, Hall of Fame 2,
IWCCCARS Project, and AutoSim have all pledged support for this rather
daunting project.

We're not looking for hits.  We're just telling you what is on the
drawing board.  Throughout the next few weeks we'll update you on the
status of SRO.  Until then, you can visit our server at:

http://www.racesimcentral.net/ (hey, isn't that intuitive?)

...and test out your connection and maybe send us some mail with
suggestions and advice.

Thanks!  Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
--

IWCCCARS Project Coordinator
http://www.racesimcentral.net/
Hawaii: IWCCCARS

[snip]
[snip]

I applaud you guys for being willing to work together.  Now, I don't want to
see any clash of egos, okay?   :-)

There'll be no problem. They all agreed that I'm the best, and after
that everything went smoothly.... :) <ouch! No, guys stop it....!>

Cheers!
John

                     _________________________________
         __    _____|                                 |_____    __
________|  |__|    :|           John Wallace          |     |__|  |________

  \    :|  |::|    :|        Team WW Racing TSW       |     |::|  |     /
    >  :|  |::|    :|_________________________________|     |::|  |   <
  /    :|__|::|____/       * Sim Racing News *         \____|::|__|     \
/______:/  \::/ http://sneezy.dcn.ed.ac.uk/simnews/index.htm \::/  \._____\
               http://www.math.ohio-state.edu/~harmon/simnews

Alright! Lets hope it really happens!
1 thing though->PLEASE have a universal system for posting hotlaps
whereby
the controller is specified in the time.
In other words a hot lap of Interlagos would be named 123654W.csa
or 123654J.csa or 123654_K.CSA (where W is wheel/pedal and J is
joystick and K is keyboard)
All of us who spend hours tweaking their setups will appreciate the
level playing field,
best of luck on the project,

->->->->Mark Mann->->->->http://www.netrunner.net/~markmann
             **************************************
         !!Greg Moore in Elkhart Lake!!Jacques at SPA!!
             **************************************
        Go Jacques Villeneuve - #6 Williams-Renault
   Go Greg Moore - #99 Player's/Forsythe-Reynard-Mercedes

I think this may be a bad idea, don't get me wrong but having all the
sites on one server could make them almost impossible to access. I
have a hard enough time when the iwcccars is updated, but when word
gets around that the pits is updated, iwcccars is updated etc. it's
going ot be very hard to get into i think.

I'm not saying it's a bad idea, it's just a thought.

Thanks,
Keith Speroni
http://www.geocities.com/motorcity/2172