pro_engineer — features

Pro Engineer/Features

Everything it does — all 218 features, folded by area

Longer than most people expect from something that costs nothing.

Open whichever part matters to you. The counts on the right are real — they are checked against the rows before this page is deployed, because a landing page that overstates by six is worse than one that says nothing.

218FEATURES
9TERMINAL TABS
5GAME WINDOWS
18GUIDE CHAPTERS
2LANGUAGES
0.1%OF A CPU CORE

EVERYTHING IT DOES

Two simulators, and what each one measures 9
Assetto Corsa and CompetizioneBoth read through the same core, so every screen works on either. A simulator is a folder rather than conditionals through the middle of the engineer.
You choose which, on the launcherGAME: < … >, on every platform. Not detected: both games publish under the same three names, so a guess can be confidently wrong, and on Linux the helper has to be in one game's prefix before that game starts.
It tells you what your game reportsBefore you press start, a list of what that simulator measures and what it does not — so nothing about a missing verdict is a surprise later.
Advice that rests on a missing measurement stays quietCompetizione publishes no tyre wear and no temperatures across the tread, so the wear and camber verdicts are withheld there rather than reporting four unworn tyres as four destroyed ones.
"Not measured" is not "measured as zero"Ride height, wind and track grip read zero on a game that does not publish them. The screens say which it is instead of drawing a car on the tarmac on a still day.
Brake pad and disc lifeMillimetres per corner, on the game that measures it. Over a GT3 stint that is the consumable deciding the race, and it takes the place of tyre wear.
Track limitsA lap the game called invalid is stored as invalid and sets no best sector.
The wrong parser cannot attachEach reader refuses pages declaring the other game's shared-memory version. Reading the wrong ones gives you plausible numbers rather than an error, which is the worse failure.
Pinned to a recorded sessionThe layout was measured off a real stint — a GT3 at Spa, 8376 samples — and the tests assert against those bytes. A page of zeros proves nothing, so nothing was taken on trust.
The window 26
Ten screens, twenty-one viewsDashboard, telemetry, engineer, analysis, strategy, force feedback, setups, records, guide and settings — with sub-views inside most of them.
Twenty-seven plottable channelsSpeed, pedals, steering, slip, g forces, revs, gear, fuel, brake bias, tyre core and tread temperatures, pressures, wear, suspension travel, load, camber, ride height, TC, ABS, force feedback and conditions.
One cursor across everythingHover a trace and the same point on the track is marked on the map and on every other plot at once.
The circuit from the game's own filesComplete from the first frame rather than traced out as you drive, so there is a map before the first lap is finished.
Corners with the names they haveRead from the track's own sections: Eau Rouge is Eau Rouge, not T3.
The pit lane, drawn apartIts own colour, because it is a road you may not race on.
How wide the road isRead out of the track's AI line — the width at the cursor, and the circuit's typical width beside the corner count.
The road drawn under your lineWhich side of the line each half-width belongs to is worked out from your own driving, and until it is, no edge is drawn rather than a guessed one.
Zoom to sixty timesInto one corner, with the driven line thinned to the screen instead of to a fixed count — so it stays smooth all the way in.
A scale barA drawing to scale that does not say what scale it is to is a picture.
Your car, from its own modelOutline, wheelbase and track read out of the model the game itself renders — a Miata and a GT3 are different shapes, and a mod nobody has seen works the same way.
Tyres the size the car has themEach tyre's radius and width measured off the wheel in the model, so a fat rear is a fat rear on screen.
The car drawn as a drawingHorizontal sections through the body — the bumper, the arches, the cabin — rather than one filled silhouette.
How far the car is leaningBody roll from the travel at four corners and the measured track width, as an artificial horizon.
Tread as a gradientInner, middle and outer across the tyre with nothing drawn between them, instead of three tiles with two seams.
Readouts beside their own wheelLaid away from the centreline, so on a narrow car they move apart rather than into each other.
Findings that name the corner“T7 · Les Combes — 0.28 s”, with one instruction resting on two measured numbers, ranked by what each costs.
Peaks with a place“Front brakes up to 675 °C in T1 and T14, over the limit for 4 % of the lap” — rather than a lap maximum with nowhere to go.
An unexplained loss says soWhen nothing measured differs, it reports that instead of choosing a reason.
Any lap against any lapNot only against your best. Two laps driven differently on purpose say more against each other.
The theoretical best lapYour best sectors assembled, and the gap to it — time you have already proved you can find.
How repeatable you areThe spread from your best to your median: half your laps are inside it.
When to stop, answered firstOne number and which of fuel, the clock or the tyres runs out soonest, with the arithmetic under it.
The panel and the bridge, from insideInstalls the in-game panel, says whether CSP is there and which version is installed, and fetches and starts the Proton bridge.
It says when the game stopsA paused session keeps a readable mapping and stops changing it; the status line says how long the numbers have been still, so a pause is not mistaken for a hang.
Native, not a browser in a windowOne file of about twenty megabytes, no web engine and no second process rendering HTML — it opens instantly and leaves the frames in the game.
Tyres and brakes 14
Tyre pressure per cornerLive, in psi, bar or kPa.
Inner / middle / outer temperatureAll three per corner, not just the middle. The spread says whether a tyre is leaning the right way, which is what camber advice is made of.
Distance from your target hot pressurePer corner, with front and rear targets set separately.
Cold pressure calculatorWhat to set in the garage to arrive at your hot target, from the ambient and track temperature.
Brake temperaturePer corner, with a configurable ceiling and an overheating verdict on the lap summary.
Tyre wearPer corner, as a percentage of the tread.
Remaining tyre life in lapsFrom the worst corner rather than the average — a set is finished when one corner is.
Camber advice per axleFrom the inner-minus-outer spread, keeping the sign. An outer edge running hot wants more negative camber; reading only the magnitude gives exactly the opposite advice.
Measured only under loadA tyre says nothing about camber on a straight — both edges run level there. The sample is taken while the car is actually cornering, and the verdict waits for a second of it.
Bottoming detectionCounted per corner from the suspension travel, with a ride-height verdict after the lap.
Stint lengthHow long you have been on this set, which is not the lap count.
A tyre window per class of carFormula, GTE/GT2, GT3, GT4 and one-make, touring, road, vintage — read off the car itself, with ranges taken from published operating figures. One band for every car was chosen for road cars, and told a Formula driver that 78 °C was fine.
Brake ceilings per axleThe fronts do the work. One number for four corners is either too low for the front or blind to the rear — and at 800 °C it was silent on GT3s, which never reach it and manage brake temperature more than anyone.
Your own thresholds always winAnything you set yourself overrides the table, and a mod car nobody has classified keeps your numbers rather than being pressed into a class it may not belong to.
The race engineer, while you drive 11
Plain-language advice"Fronts over 28.4 psi (target 27.5)" with what to do about it.
Grouped findingsFour cold tyres is one line. Fronts, rears, left side, right side, all four.
Severity rankingInfo, warning, critical, worst first — so the line you read at 200 km/h is the one that matters.
Up to eight linesWith a slider for how many reach the overlay, and the number actually sent printed under it.
Confidence on every lineA count of corroborating observations and their spread, not a number picked while writing the rule. One observation is never confident however extreme.
New advice looks differentFrom advice that has been on screen for four laps.
Cause and checkWhy it is happening, and what to look at next run to know whether the change worked.
Shift pointRev bar with a configurable offset from the limiter, so the light comes when you want it.
Fuel warningRaised when what is left falls under the laps you configured.
It names which temperature it judgedThe mean across the tread where a game publishes one, the core where it does not — and the line says which, so you are never comparing two different measurements without knowing.
Pressure targets follow the compoundSlicks, street and wet each have their own band, and on a green track the cold-pressure target is adjusted only where the game actually reports grip.
The lap debrief 7
What the engineer made of the lapPressures and temperatures against your own windows, camber per axle, brakes, and how it was driven — up to eight lines.
Three laps of historyPage back through them with the game paused, in the terminal and in the car.
Sector times against the session bestFour tenths spread across a lap is a shrug; four tenths in one sector is a corner to go and look at.
Compare with the previous lap or your bestBoth, because they answer different questions.
What is leftLaps of tyre life and laps of fuel, coloured by whichever runs out first.
A clean lap says soRather than leaving an empty column that reads as "the analysis did not run".
A lap that measured nothing says nothingZero pressures are not flat tyres. Every average that was never taken is treated as absent rather than as zero.
Corner-by-corner lap analysis 10
Corners found in the traceA stretch where lateral load stays up long enough to be a corner rather than a kink. No track data, so it works on mods and on tracks nobody has written a table for.
Where the time went, corner by cornerEach corner is charged the track from its own entry to the next corner's entry — where a bad exit is actually paid for — so the sections add up to the lap's own delta.
Only the losses that matterOne key hides every corner that cost less than a tenth.
Braking point in metresHow much later or earlier than the reference, measured on the straight before the corner.
Entry, minimum and exit speedAll three against the reference, per corner.
Throttle timingHow long after the apex you got back on the power, against the reference.
Matched by distance, never by indexTwo laps can detect a different number of corners. Comparing T5 to T5 by position in the list compares two different corners and invents a delta.
Chicanes stay two cornersA left never matches a right, however close together they are.
No comparison is not zeroA corner the reference lap does not have is drawn as no answer, because inventing one is worse than admitting it.
Direction, apex and peak loadPer corner, with the apex taken at the slowest point rather than the tightest — the timing is what this is for.
Laps, ghosts and traces 12
Ghost delta by distanceAgainst your own recorded best lap, not whatever reference the game picked.
Speed and RPM against timeThe whole lap, plotted.
Both pedals and steeringThrottle, brake and steering angle traces, so a lock-up or a correction is visible rather than remembered.
Track map from your own traceDrawn from the positions you actually drove, so it needs no track file.
Friction circleThe GG diagram: how much of the tyre's grip you are using, and in which direction you are wasting it.
Slip ratioAgainst throttle, so wheelspin is separable from a car that simply has no grip.
Damper histogramsSuspension travel distribution per corner.
Sector splitsOn tracks with two, three or four sectors, detected rather than assumed.
Theoretical optimal lapFrom your best sectors, which need not have come from the same lap.
Save and load lapsAs JSON with full metadata; load one back as a ghost on another day.
MoTeC-compatible CSV exportNamed after the car, track and lap.
Reference times per car and trackKept between sessions, and worked out from the car's own specifications when there is nothing to compare with yet.
How you are driving 14
The car or the drivingUndersteer in the same quantity on every lap while the lap times move about is not following the driving. One that comes and goes with them is.
Both halves, or no verdictBlaming the driving needs the symptom to move and the driving to have moved with it. Four laps driven to the same time carry no variation for a symptom to follow, so nothing is pinned on you.
It reports from lap one, and attributes from fourWhat happened is yours immediately — a two-lap sprint is not silent. Whose it is waits for a stint, because a car that understeers and a driver who turns in too early produce the same trace.
An episode is counted onceA slide held for half a lap is one moment, not the hundreds of samples it lasted. Counting per sample is how one long slide arrived as "oversteer, 1454 times".
SmoothnessHow steadily you use the controls, rather than how fast.
AggressionHow hard the car is being asked to work.
Trail brakingHow much brake is still on while the car is turning.
CoastingThe share of the lap on neither pedal — usually the cheapest time on the table.
Pedal overlapThrottle and brake at once, counted.
Full throttle percentageHow much of the lap is spent flat.
Grip usageHow close to the friction circle's edge you actually run.
Lockups and wheelspinCounted per axle, not guessed from the lap time.
Understeer and oversteer momentsCounted over the lap, so one moment is not a verdict.
Over-rotationSteering past what the corner needs, with the worst excess angle — the tyres are scrubbing and the lap time shows it.
Fuel, stints and strategy 8
Consumption from your own lapsMeasured lap by lap, not taken from the car's data files — which read zero on lap one anyway.
Laps remainingOn what is in the tank, with a configurable safety margin.
Fuel needed to finishAnd how short you are, for a race of a given length.
Fuel per lap, recent historyThe last few laps, so a heavy stint is visible rather than averaged away.
Race pace historyLap times across the stint, so you see the drop-off rather than feel it.
Tyre life projectionLaps left on this set, beside the fuel, so the shorter one decides the stop.
Track conditionsAir and road temperature and grip, with how they have moved during the session.
Predicted lap timeFrom the delta as the lap runs, rather than after it ends.
Force feedback 4
Clipping meterWhether the wheel is saturating and losing every detail above the clip point — the most common reason a car "feels numb".
Four verdicts, not a numberOptimal, light clipping, critical clipping, or a signal too weak to feel.
It says which way to go"Safe to increase gain" or back it off, rather than leaving you to interpret a percentage.
Measured over the lapCounted in frames, so one kerb strike is not a diagnosis.
Setups 5
Setup browserCommunity setups by car and track, installed into the game without restarting it.
It knows which one you are onMatched against the loaded car's fuel, brake bias and pressures.
Setup comparisonField-by-field difference between two setups — wings, ARBs, camber, toe, springs, dampers, ride height, gearing.
Cold pressure targets per setupRead from the setup file rather than assumed.
Nothing is overwritten quietlyInstalling a setup is an explicit action, and the file it came from is named.
The in-game overlay 11
Five windowsThe main panel, the engineer, telemetry, status and the lap debrief — opened and closed independently.
It installs itselfEvery time the application starts, and rewrites itself whenever it differs from the running build. No step to forget.
Every block switches offIndependently, from inside the game, and the choice survives closing the window.
Readable at 4KText drawn at any size rather than at the five fixed tiers the platform offers.
It works outside a sessionIn the garage, in the pits, before the green — and it tells "waiting for the car" apart from "waiting for the application".
Its own lookBacking plate from transparent to solid, text size, line spacing, rules between lines, upper case, an editable colour palette.
A changed-settings tabEverything that differs from the defaults, what it was, and a reset beside each line.
A typed consoleFor what has no widget.
Two languages in the carThe panel's own words follow the application's language, not the game's.
It computes nothingLua runs on the render thread, where a millisecond is a sixth of the frame budget at 165 Hz. Everything is worked out on the desktop side and copied in.
A diagnosis when it is blankOne screen that says which of the application, the bridge and the panel does not fit — the question this project gets asked most.
Sharing a session — two machines, one network 10
Somebody else's session on your screensOne person drives; the other sees the dashboard, the traces, the map, the corner table and the engineer — of the driving happening on the other machine.
Every screen, not a summaryWhat travels is the whole reading, so the watching machine finds the laps, builds the traces, draws the map's line and runs its own engineer. A spectator can ask the same questions the driver can.
In your own units and your own languageBecause the sentences are written on the machine reading them, not copied from the one that sent the numbers.
Either front end, either way roundThe terminal watching the window, the window watching the terminal, or two of either. One protocol since v0.4.5.
Two keysS shares, W watches. The port, the rate and being findable are chosen for you; the only thing asked is who to send to.
Nobody reads an address out loudCopies announce themselves on a group everybody joins and appear in each other's list, with the car and the track beside the name. Typing an address still works, for a network that blocks multicast.
An announcement says nothing about the drivingA name, a role, a port, the car and the track. A machine with no business here can read every packet on the group and learn a name — and a test keeps it that way.
Being findable is its own switchOff does not stop you seeing anybody: listening is free and says nothing. For a hotel, an office, a LAN party.
It says what the link is doingWho is sending, at what rate, how old the picture is, the worst it has been, and how many readings never came. Heard-from-and-gone-quiet is not the same state as nobody-ever-sent.
A watcher never writes a recordSomebody else's lap is not your personal best, and a file that outlives the session is the one place that mistake would be permanent.
The built-in guide 9
The friction circleWhat the GG diagram is actually telling you, and why the rectangle is slow.
Tyre thermodynamicsMolecular friction, the inner/middle/outer matrix, and what each pattern means.
Differential tuningPower lock, coast lock, and what each does to entry and exit.
Suspension frequenciesNatural frequency in Hz, the motion ratio trap, packers and bump stops.
DampersBump against rebound, and which one you are actually feeling.
AerodynamicsThe aero seesaw, rake angle, and the weight penalty of downforce.
BrakingTrail braking, lift and coast, and reading the delta.
Wet setupsThe golden rules of rain, and why steering goes light.
Sixteen chapters in allWritten to be read between sessions, in the application, offline.
Modules — the parts you choose to have 9
A MODULES tab, and seven things in itEach says what it costs before you press anything, what it depends on, how large it is and when it last changed. Nothing is on until you turn it on.
Off, a module costs nothing at allNot the code, not the memory, not the frame time — and that is asserted by a test rather than promised.
On takes effect at onceNo restart. The tab appears, the setting applies, the handbook grows a chapter.
The list comes off the siteSo a new module or a corrected description needs no new release. With no network, the copy built into the program is used instead.
A module too new for your build says so“Needs Pro Engineer x.y.z”, rather than a button that would do nothing.
A tab a module added says where it came fromOne line at the top with the module's name and where to turn it off, because a screen the program did not ship should not pretend it did.
Some modules add no tab at allThe Logbook changes a table that was already there; Call Outs adds one line across every screen. A module is a part of the program, not necessarily a page.
A module can carry its own settingsDrawn on its card, beside the thing they are about, on the page you are already on when you wonder.
One module really is a downloadNine ready-made channels, fetched from the site and checked against the checksum it publishes. Everything else ships inside the program and says so.
Write your own screens 20
A STUDIO tab: a rail, your document, and what it drawsAll three at once. Type a line and the screen it makes is beside it, following the car.
One line per thing you want to seeSpeed (km/h) = speed. Give it a range and it is a bar; put ~ in front and it is a line over the lap. No shape keywords to remember.
Sentences, with the car written into them"Doing {speed:0} km/h in gear {gear:0}." Put when after it and it appears only while that is true — which is how a warning is written.
A canvas, with eight marks on itDots, lines, boxes, rings, arcs, text, the whole lap as a shape, and where the car is on it. A rev counter with a needle and a red zone is nine lines.
A map of the track you are on, in two linespath x, y draws the circuit fitted to the canvas; here x, y puts the car on it.
Ask your best lap what it did herebest(speed) is what that lap was doing at this place on the track, so speed - best(speed) is the one number every telemetry program exists for. Nothing at all until there is such a lap.
Things a formula can do, not only work outprint, warn, alert and title. A row that fired a warning draws itself in that colour.
Things it keeps between framesstate best = 0 and remember best = max(best, speed): a peak, a counter, how long something has been true.
Seventy-two channels, under nine headingsEvery tyre's core and tread temperatures, its pressure, wear and slip; every brake's disc and pad; load, travel and camber at each corner; fuel, bias, the aids, ride heights and the weather.
Questions about the whole laphighest, lowest and average, worked out once when the lap changes rather than at every point of it.
Trigonometry, and eleven more functionsEvery angle in degrees, in and out, because every angle this program shows is.
An editor, not a box of grey textColour as you type, a mark under the word that is wrong, names that finish themselves, line numbers, and indentation that keeps itself.
Stand in for one of the program's own tabsinstead of DASHBOARD, and your screen is where the dashboard was. It says so every time it is opened.
Or one sub-tab of oneinstead of ANALYSIS / CORNERS replaces that sub-tab alone; the other seven stay the program's own and the strip stays where it is.
The program's own tabs arrive as editable documentsPress a tab's name and its rows are in the editor as they are drawn now — taking a reading off it is deleting a line. What cannot be written in this format is named before you start.
Builds: the same program, arranged more than one wayEach its own file under a name, switching in one press, a new one copied from the one you have.
What it draws, in a window of its ownA real second window you can put on the other monitor, while the editor takes the whole of the first.
Send a screen to somebody as one lineA string that survives being pasted into a chat window. A half-line is refused rather than half-applied.
A document can name itselfAnd it appears on MODULES beside the ones that shipped, saying which tabs it adds and whether every line reads.
It cannot hang your windowNo loops, no recursion, nothing that allocates while it runs, every jump forward. That is what lets a document somebody wrote run inside a program you are racing beside.
The circuit in three dimensions 13
A circuit is not flat, and this is the map that says soEau Rouge climbs forty metres in three hundred; the Corkscrew drops six storeys. From above, all of them are a bend.
The elevation at its own sizeThe slopes the track really has, not a hill drawn taller to make a point. Tipping it is what shows the slope.
The road at its own widthOut of the track's own files — eleven metres at Spa and half that through the Bus Stop.
Kerbs, striped the way circuits paint themAt the road's own edges, with the pit lane, the start line, the sector lines, the corner names and the DRS zones.
Lit by a sunA real surface normal and one light, so a climb reads as a climb and a flat road is one brightness whichever way it winds.
A free cameraA switch, then W A S D to fly, R and F for up and down, the pointer to look. It cannot go through the road. The turntable is still there and is what it opens with.
Air, with distanceFar parts of the circuit fade toward the page, which is most of what makes it read as a place rather than a diagram.
Your lap where you actually drove itFrom the car's own position, not down the middle of the road — so running wide, clipping an apex and a different line into a corner are visible as what they are.
Your quickest lap's line under itQuiet and unbroken, so you can see whether you took a different line or the same line more slowly.
Coloured by what you are looking forAgainst your best lap, or by speed, throttle, brake, gear or height.
The car, at its own size and in its own shapeIts outline read from its own model, pointing along the road. Zoom into a corner and it is what says how much of the road you were using.
Point at the lap and it says what was happeningSpeed, gear, the pedal that is down, where round the lap, and how far off your best you were at that exact place.
Three levels of detail, and it says what each costsFor a machine the game is already using all of, the road and your lap and nothing else.
How it looks, and how it moves 10
Five palettes, including a light oneFor a daytime desk or a stream overlay. They come from the shared core, so the terminal and the in-game panel offer the same five under the same names.
Fifteen things about how it readsFour text sizes, three spacings, square or soft corners, three weights of border, three heights a panel lifts, bars plain or quartered, how loud a verdict colour is, what sits behind the screens, proportional prose, and one colour instead of two.
The big numbers, on their ownThe readings you take at a glance get larger and nothing else moves — so a window on a second monitor reads from across the room and still holds as much.
Contrast, and warmthContrast is distance from the background rather than brightness, which is what the word has to mean on a light palette too. Warmth is for two in the morning, and leaves blue blue.
Put it all back, in one pressEvery setting, on both screens.
Motion, for a machine with frames to sparePanels rising into place, a cascade down the page, a panel answering the pointer, the worst reading breathing, and the backdrop drifting — each on its own switch.
How long is separate from how muchCalm, steady or quick changes what an animation takes rather than how far it travels. They are different tastes.
What it will not do is roll a numberAn eased number is a number nobody measured, shown as though somebody had.
Call Outs: one line, on every screenThe single worst thing the engineer currently has to say, wherever you are. Nothing at all when there is nothing to say, which on a clean car is most of a stint.
The Logbook: what you changed, against the times it producedEvery session carries how much its best lap moved from the evening before it in the same car, and a line you write about what you altered — typed straight into the row.
Platform, integration and comfort 16
Windows, Linux and Steam DeckUnder Proton, with a bridge for the overlay and a diagnostics screen that says which piece does not fit.
About 0.1 % of one CPU coreA terminal application, so no GPU cost at all on the desktop side.
Reads the game safelyThe shared-memory pages are re-read until two reads agree, so a frame caught mid-write is discarded rather than drawn.
Nine screensDashboard, engineer, telemetry, analysis, setups, strategy, force feedback, settings and the guide.
Wide or tallEvery screen has a second layout for a portrait monitor or a narrow window.
UDP JSON feedThe computed frame, ten times a second, for writing your own front end in about fifteen lines.
Watch another driverOn the same network: their telemetry and their engineer in your own panel.
Every key rebindableFive categories of setting, with conflict detection, and every on-screen hint printed from the binding — so it cannot tell you the wrong key.
Works on two keyboard layoutsA rebound letter keeps working in Cyrillic, because a driver in a race does not stop to switch layout.
Two languages and three unit systemsEnglish and Russian; psi, bar or kPa; Celsius or Fahrenheit.
ThemesAn editable palette, in the terminal and in the car.
Screenshots of the terminalOne key writes a PNG of what is on screen, for a bug report or a setup thread.
A demo modeRealistic telemetry with no game running, so the screens can be seen before anything is installed.
Updates itselfChecks the release page, lists what is available, and can install without you finding it.
It writes down why it crashedA crash log, and a panic handler that puts the terminal back the way it found it.
No account, no cloudNothing leaves your machine unless you set an address yourself.

No account, no cloud, no subscription. Nothing leaves your machine unless you set an address yourself.