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 Future Potential Features I'd Like to Discuss 
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Selling plater

Joined: Fri Apr 19, 2019 11:45 pm
Posts: 84
Post Future Potential Features I'd Like to Discuss
So it's now been a little while longer since I started and I'm several seasons in (about 6). I'd like to update the list of things I'd like to see. I'm loving the sim and really getting attached to my little world that Mark created (thanks for that). It's a great job. That said, here's my list:

1. The ability to withdrawal a horse from a race from a horse's summary page. The upcoming schedule is shown and I'd love it if there was a button there to drop out of the races shown. I know you can get there through the white icon on another screen, but I'm in this screen a lot and also feel like it's more intuitive. Think about the process. I want to drop a horse from a race. Click the horse and there's the race with associated button. Makes sense (to me anyway).

2. I would LOVE to see the ability to set a filter/highlight for a horse to allow me to set what I want to highlight in the upcoming schedule. For example, take a horse that ONLY wants to run at 1m 1f. Let me set that as a favored distance and then either filter the schedule just for that, or highlight the entries that fit it. I could possibly even see it allowing me to set the class/grade as well, dirt/turf, competition levels. The key is to award the work we already do to get a feel for our stables. This would help greatly towards that. I know the existing filters are there, but they are global and I'd love to see that impacted by the selected horse. The existing filters are also not as granular as I think we could use, rating level, or setting something like "G3 or below", or just allowing multiple selections within a menu.

3. The ability to set an Alert. I have one horse that will ONLY compete at 2m or longer and would love to be able to set an alert to let me know when the schedule has something in it that fits. Otherwise this horse sits and I need to randomly keep an eye out for this race, unless there's some other way to see the ENTIRE schedule and book it well past what we normally see.

4. The ability to set my jockey list order to move my preferred jockey's to the top of the list. I'm not sure if it's a bug or not, but my assigned jockey is often available and doesn't seem to automatically take up the ride so I manually book him for every trip and he's at the very bottom of the list as are my backups.

5. I'm an audio guy who worked on a ton of text-to-speech and voice synthesis products (very much like what is used here). I would love to help out with the voice approach to make the announcer far less repetitive and to investigate other voices. There are easy ways to take the existing voice and create at least three distinct voices from it using pitch modulation and other methods. One flight sim product I helped with we were able to go from one voice to well over a dozen in different accents and even a few different languages all without adding to the cost (we essentially used AT&T's online stuff to legally record snippets and then built a library of terms and words from that. It then allowed users to even create their own which then resulted in dozens of other voices users could share). It's a bit odd for me as an American to have this one Scottish/Irish voice for every race. What would be REALLY awesome would be voices per country or even per venue. With a matrix it's also easy to set up a list of random phrases to be spoken which can be added to so that there are 10 different ways to say the same thing. The combination of them makes repetition less obvious.

6. I'd like to see timers available that I could set during a race. Say in the upper right area below the data. Literally a stop watch. Show me the key times for each section of the race so that I can sense how my horse is doing at each mark.

7. Obviously I'd also love to see more model variation in the horses (like mixed hair a bay with black hair, a bay with red hair, hair parts on different sides, different hair, different spotting, etc) but realize the limitations here especially where getting someone to model them in involved. Anything to make the experience feel more personal is a good thing, right?

8. (Added May 16, 2019) Now that I have the Mod folder working, it would be a nice help to have the Mod menu be on EACH game loading line so that you can set a default mod setting for each Game selection. This will drive me crazy over time having to manually set "StartIt" every time I want to load my main game.

9. (Added May 17, 2019) I'd like it if the app, when it's not in-focus (I'm in another program) would stop processing input for that other process. I will often need to jump to another window, respond to an IM or e-mail, and return to find things have happened in the game that I didn't intend.

10. (Added May 20, 2019) When you have staff in the Paddock and they identify something other than normal it would be great to alert me in some way so that I don't have to manually look there every time. If they were true staff they'd call up and say, "Hey, something's wrong with this horse." Perhaps flash the Paddock tab?

11. (Added May 20, 2019) I would love to see an icon, perhaps a small stopwatch, to show in the race history which races the horse set a track record for. Track records are really cool and sort of lost to history here.

------------------------

The following is a redux of what I said previously, but updated:

1. A simple thing that would make things MUCH easier on the eyes: add commas to currency listings. $1257281 is much harder to read than $1,257,281. This, to me, is both essential and easy. The space for this seems to be there on every area where currency is listed.

2. I'd love to see a feature-by-feature update to the docs or a youtube video that really covers every facet. I don't see that even with all the videos out there and often find things in the game that aren't touched on anywhere. Just had a jockey refuse to take a ride and there's no mention of it anywhere, for example.

3. I struggled at the beginning to do simple things. Just selecting where my stables live was not all that intuitive. The instinct is to click one of the white dots on the map even though the text says to click "SPACE". That just isn't clear. Perhaps saying click any "empty area" of the map would be more obvious. I kept clicking white dots which took me to the track in question where there was nothing to do. It took watching a youtube video to figure out the actual process. It was hard to change my stable name. That should be obvious on the Stable page and always available. I also can see NO way to change your PLAYER name if you miss the chance at the start.

4. Add support to pause a 3D race. Space is the universal key to pause and start a video. Here it skips the race. Ouch. When you're used to videos this gets you into trouble. I'd love to reassign the space key. I get phone calls and my only useful option is to mute now.

5. It would help me greatly to be able to tag things that are of importance to me and to be able to skip right to them. If my horse is in a race, let me jump right to it. If I tag an auction I'm interested in, let me jump right to it. Absolutely don't just skip right by ANYTHING I've tagged without alerting me. The most tedious part of this game so far is having to live by the Skip buttons. My race is the 5th of the day so skip four things I don't care about to get to what I do care about. Why?

6. I feel like the top level of tabs should always be shown (except for things like the Race view). They are the key interface navigation features. Taking them away seems counter-intuitive to me. Think about virtually any productivity app. The File menu doesn't just vanish when you go to another area of the app.

7. I really didn't get a sense of what I really should be focused on and spent two quick seasons essentially running out of my initial money because nothing really gave me a clue as to how to view the goals of the game. I see many saying the only way to really make quick money is to bet. Okay, say that in the overview, or somewhere. A more thorough tutorial might be all that's needed here.

8. As a US player I'm confused by several things like the lack of the term "Claiming Race" anywhere, which is different from a Selling Race. I'm also confused as to the lack of being able to place a Place bet. In the US it's common to be able to bet Win, Place or Show, or any combo and also exactas (which we have), trifectas and daily doubles (winner of the first two races).

That covers the most obvious things. For what it's worth I was a parimutuel at Garden State Park in the mid-80s so I at least have a feel for the industry and my QA company was a lead developer of the first respect horse racing sim (including breeding) with SportTime's OmniPlay Horse Racing in the late 80s. Nothing approached the depth of that game for decades. This appears to have surpassed it by a nice margin. I've been waiting all this time!

Thanks!


Last edited by Agrajag on Mon May 20, 2019 10:49 pm, edited 4 times in total.



Tue May 14, 2019 9:00 pm
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Selling plater

Joined: Sun Oct 17, 2010 1:05 am
Posts: 78
Post Re: Future Potential Features I'd Like to Discuss
Agrajag wrote:
3. The ability to set an Alert. I have one horse that will ONLY compete at 2m or longer and would love to be able to set an alert to let me know when the schedule has something in it that fits. Otherwise this horse sits and I need to randomly keep an eye out for this race, unless there's some other way to see the ENTIRE schedule and book it well past what we normally see.


There is. I always book my 4+ yo horses for the entire year at the start of the year. I book my 2-3 yo week or month to month. Through the diary, you can book the entire season.

I agree with most of the rest of the stuff you say, especially the commas!


Wed May 15, 2019 1:22 am
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Selling plater

Joined: Fri Apr 19, 2019 11:45 pm
Posts: 84
Post Re: Future Potential Features I'd Like to Discuss
jstu9 wrote:
There is. I always book my 4+ yo horses for the entire year at the start of the year. I book my 2-3 yo week or month to month. Through the diary, you can book the entire season.


GOOD to know. I have yet to see this option. Will have to see if I can find it. Will search for Diary. Thanks! One question on this. Why the 4 year-olds? What different about them? I'm handling scheduling for all my horses manually (up to 8 so far).

Quote:
I agree with most of the rest of the stuff you say, especially the commas!


Yeah, the commas seem like the simplest one of all to consider adding and it really would make things MUCH easier on the eyes/brain.


Wed May 15, 2019 6:35 am
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Selling plater

Joined: Sun Oct 17, 2010 1:05 am
Posts: 78
Post Re: Future Potential Features I'd Like to Discuss
Agrajag wrote:
GOOD to know. I have yet to see this option. Will have to see if I can find it. Will search for Diary. Thanks! One question on this. Why the 4 year-olds? What different about them? I'm handling scheduling for all my horses manually (up to 8 so far).


Mainly because at 3yo I don't know which are my best horsees and I often don't know there favorite distance, so I don't know which one is going to run for the Kentucky Derby on Jan 1. The 4yo, I generally know.

Now, the diary won't show *every* race, only the featured races, the stakes races and top handicaps, that sort of thing.


Wed May 15, 2019 8:24 am
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Selling plater

Joined: Fri Apr 19, 2019 11:45 pm
Posts: 84
Post Re: Future Potential Features I'd Like to Discuss
Now that I have the Mod folder working, it would be a nice help to have the Mod menu be on EACH game loading line so that you can set a default mod setting for each Game selection. This will drive me crazy over time having to manually set "StartIt" every time I want to load my main game.

Unless I misunderstand something as well, this looks as if you can only ever have one mod (or perhaps mod STATE) per game slot.


Thu May 16, 2019 6:34 pm
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Selling plater

Joined: Sat Jul 12, 2014 3:23 am
Posts: 73
Location: Philadelphia, PA
Post Re: Future Potential Features I'd Like to Discuss
Agrajag wrote:
4. The ability to set my jockey list order to move my preferred jockey's to the top of the list. I'm not sure if it's a bug or not, but my assigned jockey is often available and doesn't seem to automatically take up the ride so I manually book him for every trip and he's at the very bottom of the list as are my backups.


This is available on the Jockey hiring screen. There's text and a check-box just under where your retained jockey is listed that says something like "Autobook when scheduling". It's kinda hidden on the page and gets missed by many players.

Agrajag wrote:
6. I'd like to see timers available that I could set during a race. Say in the upper right area below the data. Literally a stop watch. Show me the key times for each section of the race so that I can sense how my horse is doing at each mark.


As an expansion of this, I'd love to see both a stopwatch of the race along with the +/- of the pace against the current track record for that distance. Maybe even against both the track / distance pace *and* the WR pace for that distance.

Agrajag wrote:
10. (Added May 20, 2019) When you have staff in the Paddock and they identify something other than normal it would be great to alert me in some way so that I don't have to manually look there every time. If they were true staff they'd call up and say, "Hey, something's wrong with this horse." Perhaps flash the Paddock tab?


As an expansion of this, sometimes I don't bother watching a race and just skip the day instead. I'd love if the game brought everything to a halt, took me to the pre-race screen, and informed me about the horse's condition when it's not in line with what it should be. Also the ability to scratch the horse from the race from the pre-race screen if you feel that the horse has no chance.

Agrajag wrote:
11. (Added May 20, 2019) I would love to see an icon, perhaps a small stopwatch, to show in the race history which races the horse set a track record for. Track records are really cool and sort of lost to history here.


Also a race that sets a WR time.


Fri May 24, 2019 8:28 pm
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