Questions about Messages, Speed Traps and other little things

[Sherrington]

Hi guys! First up i want to say that i’m really enjoying your Server Manager. I’ve been using the free Version for quite a while and upgrading definitely was the right move.

I’m running Version 2.4.9 on an Ubuntu 22.04 LXC with 5 Server instances running - no real issues so far. I just have some questions about features that i just can’t seem to get to work the way i want them to:

In the Server Messages Options, i’ve configured the content manager welcome message as follows:

{{ .Track }} {{ with .TrackLayout }}({{ . }}){{ end }} - an event hosted by {{ .ServerName }}

Our other servers:

<LinkToServer1> - Free Mod content with direct CM download integration

<LinkToServer2> - No Mods, only Kunos content

<LinkToServer3> - Free Mod content with direct CM download integration

<LinkToServer4> - Free Mod content with direct CM download integration

{{ .EventDescription }}
{{ .ChampionshipPoints }}
{{ .CarDownloads }}
{{ .TrackDownload }}
{{ .ReservedSlotsDescription }}

The problem is that my custom Message with the Links and everything isn’t getting displayed. When i select the Server in CM there’s only the default Description with the Car Downloads and everything. I’ve restarted the servers and the CM Wrapper Integration is enabled (as per default) I’m not sure what i’m doing wrong.

Also, the speed trap feature is a big question mark in my head. I have configured traps on both long straights on Suzuka as you can see on the following screenshot:

And as far as i can tell they’re just not really doing anything. I’m not getting speed messages in my chat or in the live timings so i’m wondering if i have to set up something else separately for this feature to work.

The last thing is about Looping events. I think i figured out how to loop events on my servers but in my opinion this feature could be improved (or maybe i’m just missing something).
In an ideal world, i’d love to have a tab under races for each server, where i can just add events from the races pool and put them in an order i want them to play out in. This would also make it more inuitive for third parties, like my friend John, to spin up a quick instance of three races back to back on the server, without accidentally editing a race meant for another server instance, or making the 37th template of an event that will never get deleted again.

Is there a way i can organize this better in my version? Is something like this planned in an upcoming version?

Thanks for your support guys.

[Hecrer]

Hi Sherrington,

Thanks for the kind words, I’m glad you like our Manager!

I’ll do my best to work through your questions, please let me know if I can cover anything in more detail.

CM Welcome Message

It sounds like you have this set up correctly, my first thought is that maybe Content Manager is caching the description and not displaying your changes. You should be able to verify that by turning off caching and turning on “load server information directly” in Content Manager, you can access those options from the burger bar at the bottom right of the server list.

If that doesn’t help, perhaps something in your message is failing to parse properly, do you see any errors in your Manager logs when starting an event related to the welcome message?

Speed Traps

After configuring Speed Traps for a track/layout a new section will appear in any race form when that track/layout is selected. In this section you can enable chat messages and/or messages to Race Control (speed trap hits should always be shown in results files as well). Currently speed traps can’t be shown on Live Timings.

Looping Events

I think I’m following here, and we will consider this a feature request, I think it’s something we could look in to improving.

As it works now you click the “play” icon at the top right of any event to add it to the Auto Loop, and they loop in the order they were added. You can also use the “Auto Loop” tag below the search bar to only display events that are currently in the Auto Loop.

Thanks!

[Sherrington]

Hey Hercer, thanks for getting back to me. I have found some things out too in the meantime.

About the Welcome Message: turns out i just really had to restart the whole container on my end for some reason. Now that the LXC is rebooted, the Messages appear in CM.
I want to mention though, that the Messages seem to be stripped of their formatting, but that’s probably a bug on my end. I should probably try and re-do the Messages before coming to any conclusions.

Cool! Makes sense that there is a menu for Speed traps, but i didn’t see it as I added the Speed Traps after creating the race. It would probably be a good idea to add a sentence in the Wiki about this.

I didn’t know that the Events looped in the Order they were added - that’s good to know.

I mean i like the looping feature but it’s just not how I personally would like to have it. In my mind it would be great to have a playlist, where you can drag and drop events and it just goes through the events in that order, with an option to loop the playlist. This would also greatly improve the usability especially for “Guests” like my buddies that want to do three events back-to-back on a saturday afternoon and don’t know the documentation.

I would also appreciate some kind of Mechanism that lets me (as admin) configure Races to only be used on some server instances instead of seeing all races on every server. If i didn’t have a different UI-Color for every Server-Instance, I would get confused quickly and probably start a Time Attack Event on my Drift Server, which would then mess up the Auto-Loop and yada yada yada - I think you get my point.
Maybe have a drop-down with Checkboxes in the Race configurator that let’s me choose the visibility of the Race: All servers, Server1, Server2,…
This would also greatly de-clutter the races page, which is a problem for someone like me with self-diagnosed OCD lol

One thing that I haven’t figured out still is that the auto loop will sometimes replay the first event - So for instance the Race will be Mugello and the “Next Race:” will say Mugello again, and only after the second race on Mugello it will advance to Nordschleife.
I haven’t figured out if that’s a bug though or if i’m just using it wrong because it only happens some times.

Thanks so far and I appreciate you guys. I hope AC Evo will allow to self host at some point and if it does I hope to be able to obtain a server manager license again from you guys. In the meantime thanks for keeping AC alive, it means a lot to me.

[Hecrer]

Hi Sherrington,

On the Welcome Message, Content Manager formats it with BBCode so not all formatting will work. If you want exact control over the formatting then you can turn off the “Render Content Manager Wrapper Message as BBCode” setting on the Server Options page (by default ACSM will attempt to generate the BBCode automatically) and then directly write your message in BBCode.

I agree there are some improvements that could be made to the looping events, it’s a system we haven’t revisited in a while but we’ll consider your suggestions for the future.

For per-server Custom Races, unfortunately the general structure of the multiserver tool for ACSM would make this difficult, but we will consider it as a feature request. As a workaround for now, you could try adding the server name to all events you only intend for a certain server, then using the search function to filter by them.

On the Auto Loop behaviour, that does sound like potentially a bug with the loop restarting for some reason, does it only seem to happen if you manually start an event in the loop?

Thanks again!

[Sherrington]

It seems like every time the container reboots (the hypervisor reboots weekly, so the container does too) the auto loop starts to bug and then this bug that we’re talking about occurs.

I’ll have to investigate that further to be sure but i’m not sure when I’ll get around to it at the moment so i just wanted to tell you about my suspicions.

I’ll keep you updated if I find something out. Thanks for now.

[Sherrington]

Hello again,

so from the limited testing i’ve done it acts like this:

1. • Race A is in Session, next race is Race B
2. • Container (and with it, the Server) reboots while Race A is still in Session
3. • After Reboot, the previous Session (Race A) is resumed, next race is now Race A

What i would have expected:

1. • Race A is in Session, next race is Race B
2. • Container (and with it, the Server) reboots while Race A is still in Session
3. • After Reboot, the Race A is restarted and starts fresh. Next Race is Race B.
     With setting the Session time to 9500, it will rotate the session before the reboot.

After the reboot it looks like this:

This sucks, because i wanted to have a weekly rotation. I have to reboot the Server once a week because else the RAM on my Hypervisor will fill up and cause trouble.

If you have any Questions or Ideas for a workaround, i’d be very thankful.