Good Morning, Good Afternoon and Good Evening, whenever you're reading this. I hope you're well. The admin here at SRO are always looking to improve your experience, both in and outside of races. In line with this, if you follow the link https://simracingonline.co.uk/discord, you'll find an invite to join the SRO Discord server. Once you've created an account and verified your account, you'll be able to sign in and join the core community on Discord. The first text room you'll see is #welcome-to-sro. This is an introductory room and is also where you'll set up your roles. Roles are highly configurable permission levels which allow massive levels of customisation for Discord servers. In our case, it makes 2 things possible: 1. Spam Protection. As popular a platform as Discord is, there are a thousand (I wish that was hyperbole) bots waiting to spam unsecured Discord servers with spam, viruses and other undesirable content. If a bot tries to join and is required to use some kind of mouse input, they cannot, and generally quit as soon as they join. 2. Your notifications from the server will always be relevant to the sims you own. We all love the sims we drive, but isn't it annoying getting notified that "Project Cars 2 Formula 3.5 championship is today!" when you've never owned Project Cars 1, let alone 2. These roles allows you to be completely removed from those notifications, you won't even see the forum! With that out of the way, firstly, you'll have to read the rules and accept them. You do this by clicking the race car reaction at the bottom of the first post. Then, you select your own roles based on the sims you own, or are interested in: Et Voila, you are set up to chat with the community on Discord about anything you like. We only ask that you keep conversations to their specific channels. Complaining about Project Cars 3 in Assetto Corsa chat defeats the object of having the above roles. While it's not the answer to all our problems as sim racers, it is a solution to a good few of them. As such, it is constantly in development, and any suggestions or complaints should be put in this thread so we can move forward with the feel of both the forum and the Discord.
Customising Discord Discord isn't the most flexible of software, being closed source and webUI based. However, there are a few options that you might want to know about: Accessing the Settings Discord is decidedly mouse-driven. There are keyboard shortcuts for some functions but they are fairly well hidden and only recently got published into the keybinds menu (we'll get there, don't worry!). So Firstly, you need to know how to get into the settings. For that, please see below: In the left hand column, right at the bottom of the page, you'll find your profile, mute and deafen buttons and settings. Click there for the majority of the options here. Dark Mode Clinically proven to be better for your eyes, as well as being less distracting when gaming, Dark Mode is a staple of gaming apps around the world. To set this, go to Settings>Appearence and you'll find it there. In here, you can also find other zoom and accessibility options, including Hardware Aceeleration, for those with more "collectible" gaming rigs. Setting up your Audio Something a lot of applications struggle with is choosing the right audio device for your mic and speakers (or headphones, I'm not a headphobe! I have plenty of mates with heads.) Throw yourself at Settings>Voice and Video to get yourself, and everyone else, sounding silky smooth, apart from that one kid with a potato mic. No one can save them, sorry. KEYBINDS (oh here we go) So, you've got your mic and speakers set up. You can hear everyone crystal clear, but no one can hear you! It might be you're in a channel that doesn't allow using Voice Activity (or VAC for short). You need to bind a key to activate those sultry tones. While this can be done in the Voice and Video tab, we're sim racers. We need a PTT button on the wheel, mouse, keyboard and HOTAS (for that one time you entered a Wipeout league.... and never again). Simply go to the Keybinds menu; Settings>Keybinds, and explore some of the ludicrous things you can bind using the button. To give you an idea of the kind of thing you can do, here's mine, fresh off the menu: Below these options, however, you'll find the aforementioned Default Keybinds that only recently made their way into this menu. I can see why! Who even makes this a default keybind? Text To Speech [TTS] We don't talk about this. Turn it off here if you value your sanity. If I missed anything settings-related, I'll add them to this post. Just reply below and we'll get a fully fledged reference for any struggling to get to grips with the Discord UI! ✌
