Over the course of the last 8 years or so, the Sim Commander has evolved significantly and has been generally regarded as a best in class, industry leading software that enabled users to easily achieve things that weren't previously conceivable.
More recently, a small percentage of users have expressed dismay with the complexity of the Sim Commander. We strive to serve a wide variety of customer experience levels from team engineers, military engineers, automobile manufacturer's/engineers, professional drivers, enthusiasts and even children in sim center or SimCade environments. We've traditionally done this by providing 5 levels of tuning capability, with the expectation that users would not drill down into levels that surpass their skill level. For years, that seemed to be the case and we received nothing but praise. However the last few months have seen the Sim Commander come under fire for either being too complex or not providing documentation that enables an enthusiast to understand and utilize things like a bandpass filter or range compression filter, etc.. that were meant for those without a signal processing or engineering background.
While each option in the Sim Commander is necessary to achieve ultimate realism across the variety of games, hardware and user skill levels it spans, it seemed that an alternative, customizable, simplified, visually appealing tuning UI for touchscreens and phones may better serve some portion of our customer base. It also seemed that many of the Sim Commander power users, while satisfied with the existing UI, were better able to understand the small percentage of struggling users and their desires than I personally could.
After a great deal of thought, we decided to provided new features that would allow power users to make and share a tuning user interface of their own design.
Initially, we are starting with the AccuForce. If the concept proves satisfactory to the users who are not satisfied with the output mixer tuning, we will expand this concept to include other devices. In this experimental early version, we are making roughly 70% of AccuForce tuning settings available to those who would like to experiment with making their own UI and provide feedback on the process.
We are also providing an example UI in the form of a "Dashboard Preset". You can download the dashboard preset file here: Experimental AccuForce Tuner Preset V3
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It's quite simple to import the dashboard preset to your profile in the Sim Commander for experimentation. Click image to see how.
Click image for brief animated illustration
If the concept proves to be a success, we will include similar simplified, modifiable user interfaces as part of our default profiles and will also hold a contest (details to be determined) in which prizes are awarded to the top 3 custom user interface designs submitted by the community.
It is my sincere hope, that together we can create and maintain an ecosystem where all levels of customer are not just accepting of the solution, but are both elated and enabled.