It would be nice as well to see some more instruction for specific use. As it stands now I have four 'catch basin' profiles that I am using for a variety of cars based on expected g-forces. Is the intent to create a profile for each individual car/track combo? A profile per car? Some more info on how the software is intended to be used would be welcome. Apologies if you have put this info out since I got everything configured and I missed it.
Hope this feedback helps and thank you again for your quick reply. I am not trying to attack you, just share my honest experience with the product for others to consider.
Our tuning story has evolved over the years in an effort to better serve our ever-changing customer base.
Iterative manual tuning by sliders, even though the sliders have real world units, are meaningless to users that either:
a.) - Don't know what the units mean (G, Nm, Degrees per second squared, etc...)
b.) - Understand the units but don't know the peaks a vehicle achieves (therefore their slider settings are just guesses)
c.) - Don't have the time to tune by feel, adjusting sliders with each run until they finally find the right magic combination.
This is the model that we started off with in 2007 and the model that most of our competitors use to this very day.
In 2007, most of our customers were vehicle engineers, team engineers, etc.. They knew the vehicle they wanted to simulate. Tuning by sliders wasn't iterative for them. They simply set the sliders to the known limits of the one vehicle they cared about. They understood that after doing so, the intensity settings would thereafter represent a percentage of actuator travel, transducer amplitude or steering force.
For some years to follow, we focused on providing them with greater tuning depth. For example, we added additional effects and provided the ability to apply filters at the individual effect level. This allowed us to stand out as the simplest yet most powerful software of the day.
However, over those very same years, our customer base began to transition from vehicle engineers to the larger sim racing community. We started seeing user confusion at all levels, which was initially perplexing. Eventually there started to be a unified cry for something we couldn't really provide. People wanted a manual that would make them fully understand the in-depth effects and filters that were originally intended for people who already understand things like what roll acceleration expressed in degrees per second squared means in the same way that most already understand what acceleration G force is.
Further, sim racing customers wanted to drive dozens, even hundreds of vehicles and have an easy, accurate experience. This was a big departure from the more narrow focus of team engineers.
As the years passed, it became clear that we needed to simplify the user experience for the broader sim racing market.
Somewhere around 2012-2013 we created the ability to "auto-tune" a profile from a lap recording. This gave end users the same advantages an engineer would have in that they now know the peaks of the vehicle and could have that automatically filled into their profile with just a few clicks after running a lap. In order to accommodate the large number of profiles this might generate, we added the ability to filter the list by game, car and track.
Despite our best efforts to push people toward the auto-tune feature, it never really got traction and it seemed that as the years went on, while we were miles ahead of competing systems that offered only a handful of sliders and iterative guesswork tuning, the public narrative was still one of confusion and a belief that the software was too difficult.
At that point we started thinking down the path of how we could provide a zero effort experience that made no assumptions about the end user. Doing so meant that we would need to have the same data on hand that a team engineer would have, but we would need it for every game, car and track on the market.
You only get one chance to make a first impression, so we knew that we would need to collect years worth of data in order to ensure that even edge case cloud tuning scenarios would be spot on. If we failed to get it right the first time, our name would be further smeared throughout public forums.
Fast forward to 2020, maybe, just maybe, we've finally cracked the nut of how to provide the masses with a zero-effort spot on experience without compromising the guru's ability to dig deeper.
Many of you have been receiving free software updates for over 12 years that have provided continual functional improvement. I would be surprised if there were more than a handful of other hardware vendors who can say the same.
My whole point here is to say that we're listening, we've been listening and we're still working for you.
Today's tuning narrative is truly simple. You just click to launch a cloud-designated profile and we take care of everything else. If you find after some time that you have a preference for an incorrectly configured profile, such as one that under-utilizes the hardware or one that clips, you can adjust the intensity sliders on a device level or on an effect level. Those settings are maintained across cloud-tuning sessions, as they are your preference. I do however encourage you to spend time with the cloud-tune values, as they will absolutely make the most of your hardware.
