Settings

Screenshot

Overview

Here you can set various app settings. The settings are broken down into sub-tabs:

  • App
  • Save File
  • Devices
  • Auto Centering
  • Crash Protection
  • Soft Lock
  • Force Feedback
  • Steering Effects
  • Logitech
  • Audio
  • Voice
  • Chat
  • Messages

App

The app sub-tab has four checkboxes.

Start With Windows

If you have this enabled, then MAIRA will automatically start when Windows is booted up.

Start Minimized

If you have this enabled, then as soon as the app starts up it will minimize itself.

Close To System Tray

If you have this enabled, when you hit the close button the app will put itself into the system tray instead of exiting. The app icon will appear in the system tray and looks something like this –

There will also be a message letting you know where the app went. The message looks like:

You can right click on the system tray icon to get a menu. The menu will have two options:

  • Show Marvin’s Awesome iRacing App
  • Exit the App

Hide Tray Alert

You can choose to have the app not display a message when the app moves to the system tray.

Topmost Window

If you have this enabled, then this app will always appear on top of other windowed apps (like iRacing).

Window Opacity

There is a slider here that lets you control how transparent the app window is. Sometimes you just want to have this window on top of iRacing, but you want to be able to see some of iRacing through this window. This slider is how you do it.

Save File

The save file options basically allows you to control how your force feedback overall scale and detail scale slider settings are organized. You can have those sliders saved per-wheel (if you have multiple wheel bases), per-car, per-track, per-track configuration, per wet/dry condition, or any combination of those.

Devices

The only option in here currently is whether or not you want MAIRA to automatically reinitialize when USB devices are added or removed from your system. This can be helpful, for example, if you forget to turn on your steering wheel before starting MAIRA. You can disable this feature if you have some misbehaving USB devices that constantly connects/reconnects.

Auto Centering

This feature will allow MAIRA to center your wheel when you are off-track. You first need to calibrate MAIRA for your wheel by setting the full left, center, and full right values. Then you can set the strength of the wheel centering, and the style – slow and steady (default), or springy.

Crash Protection

Some of us are lucky enough to have insanely powerful wheels. Like 30+ N*m wheels, which honestly is quite dangerous. You can enable crash protection to have MAIRA try to prevent broken bones (no guarantees!). Basically how it works is if MAIRA detects that your car has sustained a certain amount of G-Force, it will temporarily reduce the detail scale slider down to 0% for the number of seconds you set.

The default value of 4.0 G is high enough to tolerate hard acceleration, braking, and cornering forces of a Formula car without triggering.

The duration timer resets every time your car is hit – so if the duration is set to be 4 seconds and you are hit by a car, and then another car, and then another car, and then (OMG those idiots!) yet another car… the 4 second timer will be measured from the time the last car hit you.

There is also an overall scale (OS) reduction slider here. You can normally leave this at the default 100% to basically kill all FFB when you are crashing. I would not lower this below 95% because crash forces are quite massive.

Soft Lock

Many cars in iRacing will have a smaller steering wheel range than your wheel base. This soft lock feature will help prevent you from turning your wheel beyond the range of the wheel of the car you are currently driving. Set the strength (how strongly to resist you) and the margin (how quickly to build up the resistance).

For example, if you have the margin set to 20 degrees, and the car’s wheel has a limit of 300 degrees, then when you turn your wheel past 280 degrees you will start to feel resistance. This resistance will build up from 0%, to whatever strength you set, when you hit 300 degrees.

Force Feedback

There is a checkbox here to invert the DirectInput signal to your wheel. Some wheels, such as some DIY EMC wheels, might need to have this checkbox toggled on.

The second checkbox controls whether or not MAIRA sends force feedback to your wheel when playing back recordings. Recordings are made by clicking on the record button on the main force feedback tab.

There is also a slider here where you can control how much clipping is considered acceptable, when using the auto overall scale feature. The slider ranges from 0% (no clipping) to 100% (fully clip details). The default is 25%, which allows for some clipping of the details. People with weaker wheelbases might want to set this to something like 50% or higher to get a stronger overall feel at the expense of a little more clipping.

Steering Effects

There is just one checkbox here, that basically disables the understeer button mapping whenever you are not driving on the centripetal track.

Logitech

Because we are required to disable iRacing’s support for the Logitech API in order for MAIRA’s force feedback to work, this unfortunately also disables iRacing’s support for the RPM lights on Logitech wheels.

This setting adds support for RPM lights on Logitech wheels via MAIRA. It is safe to just leave this on if you don’t have a Logitech wheel. You might want to turn this off if you want to control the RPM lights on your Logitech wheel using a different app.

Audio

Click Sound

This audio sub-tab lets you control the volume of the click sound that you hear when using mapped buttons to control the overall, detail, and LFE scales. You can also disable it entirely.

ABS Sound

You can also enable the ABS sound in this sub-tab. If you have this enabled, a tone will play whenever the ABS is active. You can adjust the volume and pitch of this tone. There is also a test button that you can press to hear the tone.

Voice

The voice sub-tab lets you control the volume of the synthesized voice that the app uses to communicate various things to you. This is also the spotter voice. You can change what voice is used. I prefer Microsoft Mark for English. Different languages have different voices.

You can download and install additional voices by clicking on the Windows key and typing “add speech voices” and then clicking on the + button to add voices. The voices for your native language should already be installed by default.

Chat

The option here is to send informational messages, which is normally spoken by the voice synthesizer, to you using the iRacing chat window. If you do not want to hear the voice synthesizer, you can turn the voice synthesizer off, and leave this on so you can still get these messages as text within iRacing.

Messages

This messages sub-tab has a bunch of messages that you can completely change. You can also make a message blank if you don’t want to see (via chat) or hear (via voice) that particular message. You can also change the messages to see and hear things in your own language.

Many of the messages will use a special string called :value: which should not be translated. For example, in English you might set the overall scale message to be “Hello friend, the overall scale is now set to :value:”. If you wanted to hear that in German, you would select a German voice and change the message to be something like “Hallo Freund, die Gesamtskala ist jetzt auf :value: eingestellt.” – at least, that’s what Google translate tells me.

Next: Console