The do not understand UI design and modern software trends, it is the most crumpy old people that use the forums anyway.
LOL, okay. 
Hear this from time to time from interns I teach software design and coding.
Just to add, that āgame hallā mode, i.e. the lock/unlock of profile editing, will be enabled for online mode as well. This means that business operators can set up their systems using one account, and lock the profile management, and still have users able to switch between the profiles that this account has.
One important thing I forgot to ask:
The name for this system.
Now it is Simucube Profile Online
but other options can be suggested to us.
True Drive Community Profiles is one option. Any other suggestions?
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Mikaās on the loose. 
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One suggestion was not funny and could be taken very badly by those that have mental health or similar issues. User has been suspended for limited period.
We do not tolerate hate speech, racial discrimination nor making fun of any health issues including but not limited to mental health in the Simucube community.
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āAll your settings are belong to usā
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My thoughts are this is moving into the ārecurrent incomeā model arena. Once everyone is online and additional features are implemented, the software will become ārentedā initiating a recurrent income model for the business, which carries a lot more weight than a straight sales model. Even modest charges i.e. $99 a year for Microsoft office 360 or online etc when multiplied up to millions of users generated a much greater profit and interest from companies looking to purchase. Its a great move for Granite to improve the worth of the company and probable sale priceā¦ just thoughts!
The product was not sold on subscription based model and enforcing that on existing users will end up in a lawsuit against Granite Devices.
Forcing everyone online without opt out option and collecting user information is also might not be compliant with strict EU GDPR regulations.
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I have to agree. I dont want hardware that forces me to be online to use it. Just like my RiftS as much as i like it if they force me to have it linked to Facebook ill find a new one.
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i dont think you will be forced to do anything, like Apple, when a new product comes out the NEW features are only available to those that upgrade. Many software house offer a new version that you have to either buy or subscribe to utilize the newer capabilities, you can use your typewriter still to write letters, but you cannot complain if autocorrect is not available to youā¦
If it goes that way hopefully the bases will drop a lot in price or even be rented and the ones that paid high $ will get the service for free forever.
I hope this is not Graniteās too ācleverā business model maker/marketing wizard out-smarting and screwing non-ultimate owners yet again by some mental meltdown that provides this service for free forever ONLY for those Ultimate modelsā¦
Paranoid thinking and hopefully dismissed completely soon.
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Hmmā¦ I think that it is just best to read the first post by Mika. It is our sincere aim to improve the product in the sense that it is even easier to use than what it is now. For the Drivers and us, the competition does not end at the product launch, the product needs to be improved throughout its lifetime. Software is very important part of the product.
I donāt quite understand the problem having it connected to internet that it is a big issue, but I do understand the potential worry and actual problems that internet service providers may cause.
From the standpoint of improving usability, collecting data from the devices and for example countries and languages where those are used is pretty much the only way to go so that the data is as correct as possible. Getting the data also has to be done in some cost effective manner, I guess the Drivers donāt want to pay to us for processes that are outdated and ineffective as those do increase costs.
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Thanks Tommi,
I think we all pitch in the best we can, for your and our benefits, long term - we post our concerns & ālikesā to the above posted.
This will lead to feedback reg. priorities when it comes to āonline settingsā vs filters as an example. There is no clear priority list posted. Not on the filters and not on this online thing. I happen to be one actually wanting to sell my SC2 since the filters are not as good as they could be, they are restricted for non-Ultimate users & they are also not really expanded. On the contrary we hear beeps sometimes about going fully āsimplifiedā, a horrific thought.
So you obviously now have prioritized this online thing. To most of us the online thing seems like information that we are already happily sharing between us. We like the conversations about it even. Also the benefit from it will be far in the future. Until they are fully exploited all we get will be issues. Then in a year or 2, when it works great, based on much grief & feedback, will you turn the key in to the āpayā position? There are many pros and cons reg. this service & so you prob. should expect a lot of feedback on it 
Current concerns seem to be:
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Thereās a chance it will go to a paid model at some point. These kinds of services ALWAYS do. This might āpop upā on this forum just any day next year, as most other things seems to. PLEASE PROMISE US, OFFICIALLY, LEGALLY BINDING, in some way, that it either stays free or that current owners get it for free, forever. This should not be any problem to post, if there is nothing to worry about in the first place. But if you canāt then we also know there IS something to worry about & we get a fair chance to pick if we want to support that āgrindingā period or not.
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Adding yet an online-only piece to the equation is another link in the chain that can break at any point in our busy days. Why not make TrueDrive files work almost like they do now, so the local cache is what is always used(as suggested by @Andrew_WOT), then make the online part work separately to simply sync those files. No worries & people can opt-in as they please, not losing TrueDrive features bc they will otherwise have to be stuck on some old TD&FW version to be free of this online part.
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What is happening to the filters? If you lose the filters battle you will not be the top dog any longer. It is not the hardware or the software alone that does it. It is the feeling in the FFB. How much improvement on current filters & which new filters will be coming out over the next 6 months? Some of us are concerned & even annoyed by the current state of them already. Now youāre spending big amounts of dev time on online, and there is no real discussion on making them better. More an attitude of ānewcomers donāt notice they arenāt that great, so we see no need to improve themā¦ā, imho if this does not change fast, you are already dead in the water.
Meaning it constructive, fwiw.
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I donāt have a DD wheel at the moment but am about to buy one. I have been looking at the forum form information about the difference between the Sport & Pro models. However, this thread has me worried & may potentially make me buy an alternative product.
Cloud based computing is great, and can be a real liberator or time saver, however, it is not the best solution for everything. I can see 3 main reasons for cloud storage etc:
- To access your files etc on multiple devices.
This is great for working on a project at home, then at work, then when you are out and about. Or for viewing photos on multiple devices. It is great, especially with things like Appleās āhand-offā functionality.
This isnāt really applicable to a DD wheel & itās profiles - I have my rig attached to a single computer!
- Sharing information:
This could be collaborating on a project, using other peoples work or āprofilesā etc.
This always looks appealing. It has itās uses at work. I play guitar and lots of the amplifier apps use community sharing of profiles of sounds they have created. Want to sound like Slash, or Dave Gilmour etc. IMHO they are never that good and I end up creating my own. I then also end up with multiple similar versions etc.
I donāt think in reality they would be that useful for a sim wheel. A few people would make their profiles downloadable, you will then likely adapt them to your preference anyway.
- For backups:
Can be great, for large amounts of info - eg photos, word documents etc.
This is less of an issue for a DD wheel, but easy access to stored profiles may be useful, esp if you change computers etc.
There are lots of potential downsides too.
When the server goes down.
The cost of hosting - usually gets passed on to the consumer - will we have tiered payment system?
Free hosting of 3 profiles. Ā£5 ppm for 5 profiles; Ā£10 ppm for unlimited profiles?
Then people will start selling profiles, as per setups - ? included at a higher price. If I had a better profile Iād be more consistent, my profile isnāt quite right for the bumpy Sebring trackā¦
I am now not sure I want to buy a SC2 sport or pro, although I think the hardware is the best available. I may have to look at VRS - they have a simple, but apparently effective, tuning software.
What I would like is:
- Local storage of profiles on my computer
- Potential back up facility
- Potential sharing of profiles??
- Common pre-defined profiles for the major sims
- A simplified tuning screen with the option to delve deeper if you want & as you get more experienced - with helpful advice on what the filter or adjustment does.
I donāt really like the GD attitude that on-line is modern & the future & we have to implement it and this is what we are going to do & you users are wrong on thisā¦people on this forum may not necessarily the standard consumer, but there is probably less of a difference than with other consumer devices or other wheel basesā¦
Just my view from a potential customer.
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Thanks for the feedback, please note that the filters improve the actual feel of the wheel because sims (the software that runs on your computer and sends the ffb commands to the wheelbase) are not doing great enough work, therefore the signal itself has to be improved, smoothed out and gotten rid of some digital ānoiseā. Filters also allow the user to add certain effects, coulomb friction (friction) , viscous friction (damping) and inertia, and certain other things, all these effect to the actual feel of the wheel itself, (such as oscillation), but if one would dream of a perfect system, the errors that need to be gotten rid of would not be done at the sim itself (in the first place). Nevertheless, we do improve filters, but so does the game developers improve their force feedback output, hopefully, not it the sense that we would like to lose our competitive edge over our competitors, but because we want that the experience is as realistic as possible, best place to make it as realistic is āat the sourceā.
Now, the āprofile onlineā is meant to make it easier for several users to tune their system to their liking, also share their settings with each other. These may not bring value to you, to certain portion of the users, but we have concluded that it will bring benefits to very large amount of users that we got around using simucube systems.
Itās not very user friendly approach to get help for settings and the first thing you need to do (as a user) is to read couple of hundred of pages from online to get started with the settings, slightly caricatured example, but I guess you get my point.
Perhaps it is easier to evaluate the value once the software is actually available to users, then you can see that do you like it or that in where you would like to see improvements.
edit: to mention or if I may say, the competitive edge that you mentioned regarding the filters, that is only one part even though important, Currently, the competitive edge is not limited to the software / firmware. The electronics in the product, the motor and the parts in it are chosen and built with the mindset that only best is good enough. In my mind it is a bit hard to find similar approach in some other companies, especially if one inspects some products from competitors and are competent enough to evaluate the insides of the product. For typical user, this perhaps has no meaning, that what is inside, but the insides, all the pieces do have compounding effect towards the goal that our wheelbase gives very realistic & transparent force feedback. Software is not all, but very very important part of the product. If software / firmware developer has bad hardware to work with, no matter how much developer twiddles with the software/firmware or improve it, they have limitations that come from the hardware.
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Tommi, thanks to you a ton as well. I canāt stop applauding you guys for this forum work you are doing. Truly is great.
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Fully agree the sims need to get to the āDDā level of force feedback. This depends on their physics models as well & is not just around the corner, even for the biggest player, which has some of the worst ffb for most cars.
Until that day comes for ALL popular sims, those filters are a key differentiator. This is YEARS away. Not 1 or 2 or prob. even 3.
Currently some of the most important settings: āforceā & āreconstruction filterā are not so great. And it seems like the āsimplificationā mentality will prevent them from ever being remedied.
Can we discuss ways for you that would allow us, die hard geeks, to customize and provide new filters in an easy way if you donāt plan to maximize your efforts directly? This indirect approach might not take so much effort if these mods would only be running on the host. -
Can you promise us that current owners will never have to pay for this new online service, and that not paying will not lead us to having to run old TD/FW from that point, with no upgrades until joining such paid service?
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We will only be able to appreciate this new software when it is ready and has been grinded(by ourselves prob. for a while too). This prob. wonāt be fully happy-happy until 2022, I would think. Even in that case: You still will need deep integrations with each gameās in-game settings. Otherwise we are STILL left with sharing those settings visually. In which case this online thing is not that much of a relief.
Reg. the quality of the hardware, that is great and appreciate it. Would be nice if the force control did not act by limiting the current, but instead scaled the input signal down, so the ffb output quality would not suffer when lowering the force setting. Right now this software choice actively hinders the nice hardware in performing as it should.
Thanks again!
There is nothing in the world that bothers me more than coming home after a hard dayās work and finding Iracing in full maintenance or that the Steam game that I like so much has 1h of pending updates.
If after this shit I put RBR and I canāt play either because my steering wheel is connected to a server that has crashed or been hacked ā¦ I donāt know what I would do, but Finland is not more than 1 week away by car, and no, there is nothing in this world that I like more than driving.
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I agree 100% on the wrong priority.
What happened to the new recon filter, talks about it started like a year ago, when I get my SC2. I honestly canāt recall a single update in that period that actually did anything to improve FFB, except perhaps bug fix for grainy feel you accidentaly introduced in one FW update.
First there was misguided initiative to simplify everything and remove existing filters. Thanks to community backlash that nonsense had stopped.
But now we have another nobody asked for thing forced on us.
I really hope you would listen to your user base and put a stop to that.
Make online community profiles DB, if you have resources for that, whoever wants to use it can always download profiles from there. But please donāt shove it down everyoneās throat. This is anticonsumer and will not end up well for GD and the product.
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Although i think i understand GD intentions and appreciate their product and support, i have to agree with a lot of people here that complain about this. I just cannot find the usefulness of this online thing and the waste of resources in developing it. Yes it might be appealing to newcomers but at the end of the day who will be posting/sharing those settings, who will be voting for these settings, etc. I have tested most of the posted settings in this forum for most sim titles and i have found that the āgoodā setting are from only few people (5-6), the rest are more or useless (my opinion). On top of that these āgoodā settings can only be a baseline on which each and every one of us will have to make adjustments and fine tuning. To add on that, the whole automation thing will only apply on the TD settings. Well, from my experience with the SC2 pro, the TD settings play an important role, but in most sims (at least for me) each profile does not differentiate vastly. What matters greatly is the sim settings themselves which have to be combined with the TD ones. At the end of the day FFB is extremely subjective and depends also on the sim gear each and every one of us own. So, sorry but i just donāt see the point to all of this. I would prefer if GD had spent their time in developing the filters (although i cannot complain on the performance of the wheel, i love it). Or if they could have put some more effort in creating good base settings (TD and ingame). Perhaps they could seek for the feedback of pro racers and work with them to bring this thing as close to reality as possible. Most of us, i think, have not had the chance to drive a GT3 car (or whatever). So we only adjust the settings to what we think could be real and to what suits usā¦
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