DWarehouse blog zone
Spotter Oddities 
Saturday, September 12, 2009, 11:09 PM - Spotter / Crew Chief
Posted by Dave Hoffman
In creating the spotter, it's always a series of decisions and trade offs. I like to go as outside of the box as you can get, yet, not have the intended message get lost.

For instance, we have the stock, "You're in 5th place." That's a little too boring for me, and honestly, it's very hard to find any audio of a spotter or CC saying that. There are scoring towers all over the place, I'm sure the drivers sneak a peak and already know that they're in 5th place. Same with iRacing. As drivers, whether we have F1 or F3 open, you already know what place you're in, no need to tell us.

So I look at those 12 triggers as complete wildcards, putting in there anything that I want to. Your in 1st-5th, you're back in 1st-5th, top 10, top 20. If you've used this pack or the NR03 pack for any amount of time, you pretty much know what I'm trying to accomplish.

I'm starting to stray off into a "spotter pack creation theory" dialog, so I'll get back on track.

In doing it how I do it, there are things that don't sound right. In no particular order...

With 4 laps to go in a race, Chad starts telling you that he's pitting you in about 3 laps or so. What!? Why!? Well, you've got about 5 laps of gas left in the tank, that's why he says it. At this point in time, the sim doesn't abort triggers if they're irrelevant. So my decision was to either put in the stock "5 laps of gas left," or go with something more realistic. I chose realism, which makes absolutely no sense when triggered late in a race where pitting isn't required.

Copy that for 2 laps of gas left as well, except this time Chad is yelling at you to pit. I don't like that it does that, I can't control it, so it is what it is.

You get those a lot in qualifying as well. Hopefully iRacing develops that a little bit further in the future. In the mean time, always defer to your F4 window.

Another oddity is taking the checkers, but Chad or Chris tells you something that leads you to think that the race is still going on. As mentioned before, it's probably one of those "you're in 3rd" type messages. Those really shouldn't be played when the race is over, but again, that isn't up to me.

In closing, I always have to make a decision when replacing an utterance. Do I match it up and have it say the same thing as the defaults, or do I get creative and go an entirely different direction with the verbiage. I tend to go the creative route just because it sounds more realistic. The side effect is that it opens up the possibilities to sounding completely out of place in certain situations. That's just the nature of the beast.

So yes, I hear it too, and I don't like it either. :)
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