We initially created the Owners Club as a humble forum. The basic premise was to provide a venue for exchange of SimXperience product related information where members used their real names and trolling was kept to a minimum. It didn't take long before folks started looking for ways to exchange Sim Setup Profiles via the forum (which is ill suited for the task) and so the idea of "cloud enabling" the Sim Commander was born.
Unless you've been living in a cave, you know that just about everything is becoming "cloud enabled". My toaster isn't currently cloud enabled but I wouldn't be surprised if there is such a device available.
To some extent I think the concept is being taken a bit too far for the sake of being able to use the latest buzz words ("cloud" or "social"), but occasionally there are legitimate needs for such capability and you've made it quite clear that SimXperience customers have such a need.
As we looked over what types of information you wanted to share, the following items became immediately obvious.:
Sim Setup Profiles
Sim Setup Profile Comments & Ratings
Lap Telemetry Logs (more on that in a future blog entry)
With this basic concept in mind, we set out to simplify the task of sharing a Sim Setup profile and finding Sim Setup profiles that are applicable to your simulator, be it a full motion Stage 5 racing simulator or a motionless SimVibe setup.
Any such system requires a login and this one is no different. If you have a SimXperience.com account and have purchased a SimXperience product, then you have everything you need to access the Owners Club from within the Sim Commander software. Simply use your SimXperience.com username and password when prompted to login into the Sim Commander 4 software.Before we get any further, I should mention that participation in the SimXperience Owners Club is optional and the Sim Commander still functions without an internet connection or Owners Club Login. You simply won't be able to connect to our servers to search for and obtain contributions that others have made.
Utilizing these new features is quite simple. As shown in the screenshot, sharing one of your Sim Setup profiles with the Owners Club community requires only a single click. When you share your sim setup, it will become available to others who have the same simulator type as yours
Once your sim setup profile has been shared, a new Owners Club tab will appear that allows you to view and respond to comments made by other Owners Club members. A rating system is also available and visible on this tab.
Locating and downloading a sim setup profile in the Owners Club is also a fairly simple task. Your search is automatically filtered to sim setup profiles that are for the same simulator type as yours. Additionally you can search by car, track or filter further for profiles with specific other outputs present. For example, you can limit your search to sim setup profiles that contain SimVibe Chassis mode.
The basics above are all that's required to share or obtain sim setup profiles that were developed by SimXperience staff or other members of the Owners Club community.
We hope that you'll find this new feature to be useful and the sim setups of others to be educational. Please let us know what you'd like to see next!