Pitwall news

At this moment a lot of focus has been going in improving the UI and making the learning step a little smaller for new members. In that light I will be adding content to the help section in the next days, and I will also add new blue tutorial boxes to the pages for new members.

I've also recently decided what gameplay changes should be made, and I will share some information on what changes are coming up. Today I will talk about person contract negotiations changes that are coming up. These changes will be implemented in the game straight away once they're developed and tested. All other gameplay changes that I will talk about in the next few days will only be implemented at a season change.

As discussed in the forum, I will be making changes in the contract negotiations with persons. The biggest change here is that the persons will use their power position much more than with the current system. It will be similar to the sponsor negotiations, where the sponsor knows his power position and use it. It means that if a driver knows he's wanted (or if he still has some time on his contract), he will be much harder to negotiate with. This also allows us to have more flexibility in negotiations. The fact that you're a division 2 team might be a big negative for the highest ranked designer (for example) in the game, but then you might be able to persuade him much more (than the current system) with other interesting options (such as money, good length, good bonus, etc.).

Another feature that will be introduced in person negotiations is minimum number of races. To prevent teams from hiring many drivers, those drivers will now require a minimum number of races that they can do or it will be considered a breach of contract. This also allows other teams to negotiate with drivers who are stuck with an inactive team. This is also true for staff (such as designer, mechanics, ...).

The feedback that a person gives you when negotiating will also be changed, as it's a bit of a mix of feedback right now. It will be channeled more into an overall feedback, but still keeping the information of happiness regarding the salary, bonus, etc.

A final change that is coming up is based on feedback from some new members that I received. It's quite annoying for new members that they have to wait quite some time for new persons to join the team. To improve this, persons will join straight away when they are happy with a contract. This done to reduce the waiting time for members, and to allow them to actually start playing the game.

That's all for the contract changes. The next days I will be releasing more info in regards with staff, development, drivers and sponsor gameplay changes.

The layout has been updated to an updated, more flat, design. The layout that we launched the game with was still the same layout that was used when the game was re-started from scratch, which is already quite a while ago.
Therefore an update was needed which allowed me to standardize the layout, as some pages had a different layout than older pages (because I was experimenting with different designs during initial development).
If the layout looks very messy, then please reload the cache by pressing CTRL F5 on Windows computers, or command R on Mac computers.

Also some tweaks were incorporated in the layout to make the game more easy to use, such as the left and top bar are fixed (an often requested feature), and the top bar is also slightly transparent.
There are many other slight changes, with the biggest one being the order sets from suppliers has been moved to the cars page, so that they can be mounted to the cars straight away.

The menu now groups multiple pages together. I feel that those pages are rightly linked together, but if you feel that certain pages should deserve their own category, please share that feedback. As always I'm open to constructive feedback, and I'm willing to add more top level menu items if it makes sense.

Monday when the season update ran there were two issues: the prize money added was not shown in the finances page, and the wrong manager was fired when the objectives were not met. The first one was not a blocker, but the second bug was. On top of that it became apparent that there was a bug (exploit) that allowed people do to multiple presentations at once. This meant that sponsors were very impressed with the team, which is not fair to managers who didn't found out about that bug.

Because of this it was necessary to reset the game back to before the season update, fix the bugs and run it again. Due to bad timing in my personal life (Monday I was moving back to Belgium) it has taken some longer than it usual will, and I apologize for that. I don't intend to move around too much anymore, and I will be focusing on Pitwall a lot from now on so the quality of support provided will improve a lot.

Everything has been rolled back, fixed and the season update has correctly been executed. Because it's Wednesday already we are missing 2 day updates, and 67 hour updates (because 1 was already launched before the season update). These will be caught up in the following pattern:
- 2 day updates: to be launched both in a couple of hours (around the Wed-Thu day update)
- 67 hour updates: as it wouldn't be fair to those who are not online right now, the hour updates will gradually be caught up. I have set up additional hour updates to be run automatically at xx:30 until we've caught up with all of them (in less than 3 days).

Based on some of the feedback that I got from several people, I decided to make some changes to the menu. It has now been removed from the center position, and is now shown on the left completely extended.
This makes it much easier and faster to navigate the game, and also allowed me to save some space both on the top of the header and on the left.

This is the first step in many steps that are to be taken to make the game easier to use. Also I will be updating many graphical elements on the site in order to make it a bit more polished.

The center bar that used to host the menu will now show the live races if there are any. In the future this will otherwise (when there's no live action) show the newspaper entries.

A brand new version of the strategy panel has been released. It should address some of the annoyances with the old strategy panel, namely requiring a refresh for every change.

All of the changes are now automatically saved without requiring a page reload, and you will never have to reload the page for any action. Once you make a change, all the values are automatically reloaded without a refresh.
Another change is that both drivers are combined on each lap, which should make it easier to set your strategy.

On the outsides of each driver (on the left and on the right respectively) panel per lap a gray bar can be seen. These are actually 2 bars that represent the driver orders and engine management (in that order). Changing the driver orders will change the color of the bar, and changing the engine management (depending on the value) will also change the color from red to gray to green.

Finally I'm aware that this new panel makes the race screen longer than before, and I'm working on it to improve that. I will be moving some information around and hide the pitstop details by default to save space. But I felt that this update was already worth replacing the old strategy page which was a thorn in my eye. Any other feedback is always welcome in the comments.

Update: I've now made the page more compact by hiding the pitstop details (as described above).