Having just completed the final Super Licence exam with all data displays off - taking the Porsche 917 around a drying Spa-Francorchamps - I was yet again blown away by the awesomely thrilling sense of total immersion. I found it tricky to make sure I wasn't in first gear instead of second on some of the tight wet bends (or second instead of third), but I otherwise didn't need to know laps or gaps. By completing this most tricky of tests within just a few goes, I also satisfied myself that Fanatec's March 2022 recommended settings for the GT DD Pro wheelbase are still good to go (except for NFR to 5, as suggested in their post) despite all the GT7 upgrades, but that's another story (and a very long thread on the Fanatec forum).
Anyway, I've been further pondering on the VR immersion dilemma and although I have not yet progressed to races with tyre wear and fuel etc, I can see that tightly-fought enduros with no race data and dash-only car data will be almost too challenging to consider ...although I admire those of you trying to do so in the name of purity and immersion. So for me at the moment, I intend to race sans-data for everything I can at this time in my game progression, listening to the engine for gear numbers and changes, and using observation to count cars and laps to ascertain my position and progress. It is doable and takes me back to my non-team karting days.
Ideally PD will introduce an MFD toggle that takes the place of the 'view' toggle for VR players - we shall have to wait and see. I did look to see if there was already one in the button-mapping screen but alas not 🙁
In the meantime I've been thinking about ways to use the limited GT7 telemetry data picked up by SimHub, to map what I can to haptics or sounds, and realised that although I'm still waiting for my transducers to arrive, it'll probably be too messy to mix haptic prompts for laps or gears with in-game haptic data. So then I thought about sounds. Could I wear an earpiece (feed from SimHub) under my headset without too much trouble? Or could I mix the signal from a SimHub sound channel with the game's headset feed with a simple impedance matching circuit? Rolling back my brain to my electronics engineering days, this is doable in principle.
So then I wondered if SimHub's mapping functions and available game telemetry metrics would allow me to trigger sound events for, say, a change of laps remaining e.g. in pseudo-code: if [event] LapsRemaining decreases, then play sound file {LapsRemaing}.wav i.e. "Four laps remaining". This could also be done for gear changes although maybe just for gears one and two to keep the noise down. So I googled to see what might be done in SimHub and found this >
https://www.simhubdash.com/community-2/simhub-support/how-to-use-sounds/ e.g.
Code:
[ExportEvent]
name='Blinker'
trigger=[TurnIndicatorLeft]>0 || [TurnIndicatorRight]>0
So yes, that would be doable. I then wondered if anyone else has done this and lo and behold I found that it has been done for iRacing by RomainRob...
This is mighty impressive and would be ideal for GT7 VR, but (a) the GT7 telemetry data is very limited, and (b) we might find that if GT7 with PSVR2 proves to be the commercial game-changer that we have found it to be at a personal level, that PD will start to address some of our requests. In the meantime, I've never coded anything Microsoft related before, and if I don't turn my attention back to my business for a while, I'll have no business to pay for Playstation and sim-rig equipment! If anyone else fancies having a look at introducing sound-prompts into the VR experience, I'd be happy to assist ...or is it all too much to worry about at the moment 🤔
Edit - Question: It would seem that two-into-one headset mixers are cheap and easy to get hold of, but not for TRRS jacks without more channels and lots of splitter cables. So when you guys race online, do you use mics; do you chat to each other whilst racing?
