Pitwall news

At this moment the beta (beta.pitwall.org) is being restored to a copy of the main game of today. The beta will be merged with the main game tomorrow after the race if no problems arise tomorrow.

Some of the things that have been implemented in the beta:

Pitstop time calculation
The time to complete pitstops has been completely re-written. This should make the time for tyre changes more realistic, which is very visible this season.

Pitstop mistakes
For the first time in the game it's possible that the crew make mistakes when changing tyres. This will cause the pitstop to take longer than normal. The lower the pitcrew efficiency, the higher the chance of pitstop mistakes.

Pitstops in non-races
It's now possible to schedule a tyre change in a testing stint. This can be done from the scheduled laps section. Selecting a tyre at the end of a row will cause the driver to come in and change tyres. This will allow people to do race simulations.

Return to pitbox
During a stint it's now possible to tell the driver to box and cancel the stint. This will cause him to return to the pitbox as soon as possible and cancel all remaining laps.

Others
Several fixes such as tyres being double mounted, or medium tyres not selectable from the strategy page. Chat categories are now shown in buttons.

This is now available on the beta (once the restoring process is done). The race still needs to be tested since the pitstops have been re-done. If this is successful then it will be applied to the main game tomorrow.

Welcome to season 15 everyone! The season of the racescript you might say. This and the coming seasons will be focused on improving the race script as that hasn't received too much attention in the past as other areas required more attention.
There has been a lot of changes in the background already, and these have been integrated already in the current racescript as it was updated after the race last night. Many of these changes are technical and won't show up for the regular user, but it was a necessary thing to do.

Other things are more visible, one being the new medium tire compound. The tire wear values have been heavily tweaked, and softs should now give better grip but also wear much faster than before. This new compound should make things more interesting strategy wise. Do note however that it is not yet necessary to use 2 different compounds in the race.

Another change for season 15 is that in-race refueling is now banned. Fuel tank sizes have been increased, and the fuel usage has been lowered a lot for the lower engine modes. These engine modes are now also new, as they replace the engine management that we had before. In essence it's still the same system, but they are now pre-set values (being 70%, 85%, 100%, 115% and 130%) which is more realistic, easier for new members, and it allows me to tweak everything much better.

And finally the first 2 weeks of the season (called "pre-season" every team is allowed to use as much supplier sets as they want. This means that the number of engines, tires and brakes are unlimited. In week 3 all these parts will be removed and the maximum number of sets per season rule will be respected.

First of all: my apologies that the game has been down yesterday, but unfortunately there were some serious issues with the week update yesterday.

Every Monday at 0:00 a script launches the weekupdate. Before doing so, it takes a back up and sends this to a local back up storage, and two remote servers. This to minimize the chance of losing a backup. Every so many week updates, the older backups are automatically removed.
Yesterday, the launcher script went completely bananas, and launched 60 week updates which took the game all the way to week 69. This lead to crazy finances as every team had to pay debt for 60 times, pay persons for 60 times, etc. However, this also lead to the backups being overwritten by faulty backups leaving me with a backup that wasn’t usable to quickly restore to the point of before the (first) weekupdate and re-launching a week update.

Because of this, I had to do a manual rollback whereas I did the reverse of all the costs that had been made, and all the changes that had been done (youth drivers were suddenly 69 instead of 9 to give one example). This has worked for most of the issues, but I’m not certain yet whether everyone’s finances are 100% correct. Please let me know (in the chat, or by opening a ticket) if you think something is wrong with your team and I will look into it. Worst case scenario I will do a recalculation of everyone’s balance up until last week and then check how much costs/revenue had been made last week.

The cause of the weekupdate spiraling out of control has been found, and this is due to the new e-mailing system that was implemented mid last week. It is also part of a launching script that launches all the updates. This is why the beta database was unaffected as that still uses the old emailer. I have fixed the issue and made changes to the backup system whereas it should always do only 1 backup.

My sincerest apologies for this issue. It’s something I completely hadn’t foreseen to happen, but lessons have been learnt and changes have been applied.
The updates that are behind will be caught up, once we’re sure that most things are okay. Yesterdays youth races won’t be caught up however.

There were some projects that were stuck in development since the transition to the new points system. These have now been cleared, and because of a bug (or more, something that wasn't foreseen) they cost a lot of money (multiple millions). This has been refunded to those teams as those expenses were something in excess of 40 million, which clearly meant that the 5 million compensation of the beginning of the week did not cover.
If you had or have stuck projects or have lost many millions because of this bug, and you did not yet receive a refund, please open a helpdesk ticket.

The server went down last night, like it did some other times this week. I've found the issue now which was related to an old script that was not replaced by the upgrade. It's been fixed now, and we should have no more downtime issues.
To compensate the downtime, the hour update will also run at the 30 minute mark until we've caught up.