The Simucube team has been working hard to make the user experience outside the actual driving better. This time we want to offer you a sneak-peak at our latest software side project: Simucube Profile Online.
This feature will be made available to all Simucube 2 Drivers in steps. The first stage will be invited only -basis. Later, all the Simucube 2 R1 and Ultimate owners will be asked to participate in testing. We don’t have exact dates, but we are about to launch the first stage of testing in the next couple of weeks and public beta in about a month.
Simucube 1 is a bit more challenging because of device architecture and implementation. We will look into this but no promises.
What does the Simucube Profile Online offer?
The driver can save and load profiles to your own account – You can create a profile with one device and share it to all your devices and with your friends.
Official profiles from professional drivers, teams, etc.
A voting system for the community to determine proper good profiles from the mass
Profiles will be saved to a cloud service, and to be able to use this feature, one has to have an online connection.
There will be an Online Page to browse the profiles without True Drive, and Profile Online replaces the Profiles tab in True Drive software.
What are we dreaming about in the future?
Simucube Profile Online could cover the most important simulator and car combinations to enable ease of use for the driver
What else?
This is an important one; what would you want to see in upcoming updates? Profile Online 1.0 is just a start for this project!
This is just one of the more significant scale updates that we will release in the coming months. Stay tuned!
For initial release, it is planned that one can use the classic profile management system - there will be two versions of True Drive, and switching between them will be easy. However we are not planning on syncronizing online profiles <-> profiles on device.
After the new system is deemed to work well, we will drop support for the old profile management system altogether.
What an awesome idea and differentiator from other systems out there! This will make it much easier for people to jump in and try various settings without having to sift through hundreds of posts to see what other people’s settings might be.
What might be a useful feature is to have a additional comments box for the specific game profile that would allow a user to list their in-game settings for FFB, since that would also have quite a large impact on the overall experience of driving in that game.
edit: Never mind, I see that on one of the screenshots you have a box for in game settings
Exciting times for simucube owners! I can’t wait to start experimenting with this. This will make sharing setups so much easier and it will definitely be helpful for those of us that are less into messing around with FFB settings. Awesome!
Does that mean that online connection and cloud service up and running are always required to get own profile loaded?
And you completely disable storing profiles locally, on device or file system, or it’s only for community online profiles? Sorry if confused.
Yes, this is the case. We will have a fallback firmware and software version available that does not have this requirement. All new upcoming filters etc will be coming only to the latest software version.
Not everyone racing online and Steam works just fine in offline mode.
Cloud service, whatever provider you are going to choose, is not 24/7 up either, add to this maintenance windows for your service updates.
We already witnessed first hand always online problems with Dirt 2 Racenet and R3E locking users out of racing for a few days because of their servers issues.
I understand that it’s all done with the best intent, but it might and will create new problems for end users.
There is more critical stuff on SW side, like better recon and other filters, gamma, max ffb input gain management, better bumpstops, etc.
That online profile management is really not that important, if you ask me, but as always there could be different opinions on that matter.
Agreed. And in terms of being future proof, what happens if Granite all of the sudden closes up shop and their cloud service goes away? We end up with an expensive device that’s restricted to a limited set of features included in the fallback firmware?
If I’m correct, at present my profiles are stored locally on the device.
I assume that when we transfer over to this new system, these profiles get uploaded to the cloud and are then no longer available to me locally.
Correct me if I’m wrong but I thought some sims are available to play whilst offline. What happens if my connection goes down whilst driving in an offline game?
Do I still have a way to keep backups of my profiles locally?
Getting a local copy of the web app that somehow synchronizes with the online version (when there is internet connection) would be required to get offline mode working. Our first designs that would enable this were not pretty, very much bubble gum solutions, so we decided to save that development for later if required. We chose to take majority of users and use cases into account at first, and the majority (>95%) of world is constantly connected to the Internet these days.
No need to store the profiles in two places. Would result in synchronization and other issues.
Correct, but this system is much simpler than the Racenet etc.
Our service updates will be transparent.
More than 75% of the feedback during the last year have been about difficulties of finding profiles that feel good, or that some things are difficult to tune. Almost nobody is asking new filters that complicate things even more. However, we are developing new filters anyway, in the background.
That would require something really unexpected, and the fallback version does remain to downgrade to. Even if something drastic happens,I do not see any eventuality that would prevent us from releasing a version that does not have online system .
Yes.
No automated local->cloud syncing will be done. Instead you would need to create your profiles again to the online management system.
Nothing. Its not like the online version would turn off the device when Internet connection is lost or anything like that.
We are thinking about this, but in general I do not see why such feature would be needed as the cloud system has backups and your local harddrive likely does not.
Of course then can be, but that is not easy to implement and we will look into this in the future, if required. We do not want to slow down progress to take the once-in-a-million chances into account.
