How’s DRE 2022 Alpha?

So the Alpha has now been open for one month and I thought I’ve give you a short update on how things are going.

I, and my guinea pigs, have been hard at it with 20 updates in the last month. We’ve been chipping off the hard edges, especially in the beginning. Things are starting to work well now, so I’ve had a chance to sit in the cockpit myself to do some driving. Believe it or not: when launching a beast like DRE 2022, there are so many things to do, that just sitting down to do some racing and testing it that way hasn’t been possible until now.

In my own experience, the stars are aligning: Radio comms effects, overhauled code, and logic, a natural queue of DRE speaks being prioritized on the fly, and all the other changes make DRE 2022 feel much more like a real racing engineer.

Roadmap

For the launch, I still got a few features to add to DRE, but I also want to get it out in your hands asap, so more features will be added down the line. Actually, I’ve recently created a roadmap that you should check out and VOTE on. This is your chance to have your say at which features I’ll prioritize.

Alpha Invites

In terms of Alpha invites, we’re now about 40 people working on DRE, and I’ll slowly invite more as we go as DRE improves. I’m so grateful to the guys taking their time to not only test the latest and greatest, but even produce nice feedback and bug reports.

It’s not too late to apply for the Alpha. Click the button below to get started

You can look forward to DRE 2022! 🏎️

How do I get started?

Do you want to help out making DRE 2022 ready for launch? Apply for Alpha access right here

There’s a new DRE coming?

Certainly! What about VoiceAttack and existing profiles? Check the video below

DRE3 updated

Version 3.4.7 has been released to bring you more stability and changes to the existing DRE spotter. Some highlights are:

• Proximity Alerts improvements
• File Starter improvements
• Race Timing fixes
• Race Simulation stability

Get the update and read all the changes to the latest stable release for DRE3

DRE 2022 – Alpha access opens now!

What is DRE 2022?

DRE 2022 is a revolution and a brand new standalone iRacing spotter application featuring

• Built-in voice recognition
• Text-To-Speech output
• Radio communication effects
• So much more!

It’s built from the ground up, by leveraging years of improvements from DRE3. DRE 2022 now contains everything needed to run DRE as a sim-racing spotter. In other words, there’s no longer a need to download an additional app (VoiceAttack) just to try and use DRE.

Why a new app?

Since Digital Race Engineer’s inception back in 2015 (!) it’s always relied on VoiceAttack as its motor to drive the recognition and speech synthesis. Using VoiceAttack has been successful as it’s a fairly straightforward app that does the job needed.

However, there are quite some annoyances as well. See my latest YouTube video below on why a change is needed

 
Why DRE Goes Standalone

Current DRE3 issues:

• Want to trial DRE3? You need a purchased VoiceAttack just to do that
• Want to improve the voice quality? You need to purchase aging TTS engines, which are not that easy to come by, and in their nature limited in terms of realism
• Want to get started with DRE3? Too many steps to get going from installing, configuring VoiceAttack, then doing the same for DRE3
• Want to update DRE3? Remember to update both the plugin and import a new profile

The existing way of doing things has been okay-ish for skilled users, but for any casuals just wanting to dip their toes in the DRE3 universe, the learning curve is too steep.

The main goal of the new standalone DRE is to remove all these obstacles and let users simply download, install & go: This is now possible with DRE 2022. Check out the video to see other reasons for this change (and new features).

What about VoiceAttack?

Existing DRE3 users can continue on that version forever with VoiceAttack. I will long-term support DRE3 for 1 year, should there be any fixes needed. As long as iRacing and Windows keep their overall platform APIs steady, DRE3 should be golden for some years to come.

Switching to the new standalone DRE 2022, there’s still a great way to use VoiceAttack to extend DRE, just like before. Now, however, it’s actually even better. I’ve exposed hundreds of variables, events, and commands via the new DRE Lynx API, that you can use/call in VoiceAttack. This means you can author your own VoiceAttack profile and simply call the Lynx plugin which communicates with DRE. More integrations with other apps are planned. See the video for more info on Lynx.

How do I get started?

Do you want to help out making DRE 2022 ready for launch? Apply for Alpha access right here:

Apply for Alpha

For now, I’m looking for a few sim-racers to chip off the hard edges, before increasing the number of alpha users for a finer polish.

Alpha is the stage of development, where I’m still adding launch version features, and you’ll experience quite some bugs. Sounds great? Applying might let you get to download it and have your say on the initial launch version coming later this year.

I will touch on topics like new features, pricing, roadmap, and much more in later videos and newsletters so stay tuned.

I’m really excited about DRE 2022, and I hope you’ll like it.

Happy racing!

3.4.5 Released

I’ve released 3.4.5.0 for you containing fixes and a new alert.

Version 3.4.5 is a release containing all betas changes since 3.4.4

Download 3.4.5

What’s New

New Alert: “Pace car is rolling” is now heard when the parade lap starts at the end of gridding before a rolling start

Sorry DaveCam (and others): Launcher first time opens resolved in stalls due to logic for creating new persistence files. This is now fixed

Issues in spoken commands fixed

Announcing grid time duration has been fixed

Position at the end of the race was wrong if the leader…. Consider it fixed

Current Weather data was missing… No more

And more!

See all 3.4.5 changes

In case you missed the 3.4 features

See all new features