Racing Career Manager (For all Sims, not just AC) 0.2.1 - Used Car Store Added

TLDR: App not dead, stuff to do, world's collapsing. Will probably create better, modern, beautiful and easier to use version in different framework, but that'll take a while depending on my future schedule. Expected to release as alpha before 2033 (maybe)!

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I'm going to try not to imitate some racing sims by posting more announcements than content, but as some people asked, I felt like giving a nice, little update on what the current (and past) plans are.

So, well, I don't know about you, but my past year has been... historically interesting! Busy with other stuff, like finishing my Master's thesis, I had no time to actually work on this software, not a lot at least.

But just to emphasize: This whole "Racing Career Management" idea has been an aspect that I've developed for over 5 years now, beginning with excel sheets and currently ending up with this neat software, so even if I drop out for months, or even a year, this is never "dead"!

Where we stand

In the last dev-update I teased an integration with some of the racing sims. This has partially been implemented, but isn't fully functional. There were also some other small changes that I'm not going into, but suffice to say: None of it is really worth an update for now. But keep this in mind for the next section
Another surprising and amazing aspect to mention is that multiple third party addons like the AC Career, 23 games, Dahn's Mod or anibalrodriguez mod were uploaded, which I did not anticipate! I'm happy to see that people seem to be interested in this piece of software and it motivates me to pick up the work again!

Where to go? (Announcing RCM2?)

As is apparent from the visuals, the Software Development Kit (So... the way I wrote this software) can be considered... outdated. And limited. It is quite a lot of work to keep the app feeling modern or adjust the functionality in the way I want it to. This can be seen in the app being... ugly and sometimes comparably slow and unintuitive.

For my thesis project, I've been writing an app in a different framework(Flutter). While this was a smartphone app, it is a much more modern and versatile development kit. I've also become a better coder since then. This leads to a simple conclusion:

- I might re-write the whole app!

This has multiple purposes.

1. The old code has a lot of uncommon and problematic practices, which hinder further development. I'd have to re-write significant parts of code anyway. By switching to a different framework, I can easily improve the code while taking advantage of the framework itself.
2. The new framework would allow me more easily to publish the app either as normal Desktop software, as website or even as Android app.
3. Better, modern visuals, as the out of the box visuals are simply better.
4. Better layout management
5. More external libraries can be used, which means that I can easily put in graphs for the presentation of results or other statistics, with a lot less to code and layout myself. The whole process would just be streamlined.

Besides this, I'd have multiple goals myself for the new App version (which then would be Racing Career Manager 2, I guess?):

1. Keep the modding easy! The file formats would probably not change, I would even like to add some easier tools to mod files, but that requires the app to be finished, first
2. Make the app more intuitive to use. RCM was never supposed to be a mainstream app, rather focusing on lots of functionality than an ease to use, but it would be nice to have proper explanations inside the app, some kind of tutorial maybe and a help-tool.
3. Provide a full experience out of the box. Which probably just means: Finish the app and add enough content to be motivating. This will probably just be provided for one sim though, which at this point is likely to be Assetto Corsa, however the app will, still, function with all other sims as well.
4. Visuals! Satisfying visuals! You can see in the screenshots from my thesis app, that I've shown the user statistics and rewards. These are appealing and motivating and will, of course, be transferred over to RCM. Especially the achievements would add a new dimension, but also statistical feedback in form of graphs which show you the position in your championship, or your career progress. It's just something that is fully missing from the current app and would probably lift RCM from a nerd-niche-app to a more widely used mainstream app!

Just to give you an impression of the looks of the thesis app(not RCM!), so you can see some of the very simple visuals in action. Of course, this is laid out for phones, not Desktop applications, but you still get some impression here!:

Hello everyone!

I felt like sending out a short plan of what I'm aspiring to do over the next months.

First of all, expect development to be a bit on-and-off. I'm working on my Master's thesis at the moment, which takes up time, but also involves data science and therefore lots of coding, so my motivation to work on additional coding projects obviously fluctuates.

As has been requested multiple times, I have looked at the ways different games manage results and championships. My main next goal will be to actually create an interface between some games and the RCM-app, so it sets up seasons by itself(at least for AC and AMS) and can read in results of racing weekends. The extend to which this will go will be interesting to see, I'm generally expecting this to take quite a while! The games I've been looking so far are "Assetto Corsa" and both "Automobilista" as well as "rFactor2", albeit it turns out that basically all rFactor-based games spit out the same, or at least similarly structured result-files!

Besides this, I will push some fixes soon and maybe some smaller updates with some more windows regarding looking at your stats etc. But my main focus will be on the implementation mentioned above.

Warning: In this update, changes have been made to the carstore-csv-files. They should be obvious from the files itself. Again, old savegames are not compatible with this!

- A Used Car Store has been added! Every 3 months, new cars arrive and old offers expire. Every car has its own likeliness of popping up and the price might fluctuate. This is your chance to pick up a cheap car, as long as still available!
- Game identification added to the car stores and garage. A list with colors for the most common games has been implemented, giving each game its unique background color. In the car store, you can identify whether the car is available in certain games based on whether the background is grey (not available) or in the identifier-color!
- Some other small changes

Important: Savegames and Files from previous versions are not compatible with this!

Finally, you can setup new seasons, meaning that your app does not "stop" after season 1!

As part of this, from all the games that are represented in your files, you can pick and choose the ones you want to use for the season! Additionally, if, lets say, Formula 1 has been both implemented for AC and rFactor2, each season, you can pick which one you want to show up in your app!

Some other stuff has been changed and added as well, including a lot of background stuff relevant for the season changes, but also some new vehicles and series have been added.

Information for modders: The folder and file-structure has changed. Most of this is more or less as intuitive as before and there's no documentation on this yet, anyway. However, regarding the vehicles: If you want to define whether a vehicle is implemented or not in certain games, youre free to add as many columns as you like, as can be seen in the example. None of this is used yet, however, but will be in the future. You can add as many files to each of the folders in "File" as you like, making it possible to have a clear structure, for example one file per game or one file per "Championship construct" (So main class + support classes).

Finally a way to visualize all vehicles you've purchased! Also a way to sell them at heavy discounts, if you don't need them anymore. The value of your vehicle degrades over time (more specifically, over years).

For your convenience, you can now download the software directly off RaceDepartment. I've also added the documentation here