Modules — the parts of the window you choose to have

RGE STUDIO

Write your own screen, and watch it draw itself while you type.

One STUDIO tab, and one thing on it: the screen you are writing, with the screen it draws beside it as you type.

It had four sections. Three of them — a scratchpad for one formula, a list of the channels you had kept, and a plot of all of them against one distance — were standing in for a single line of a document. ~ Speed (km/h) = speed is a plotted channel, and you can watch it being drawn while you type it. Four tabs for that was three tabs too many.

What was worth keeping from them is here. The channels you saved and the ones the tyre pack downloads are **ready-made lines**: press one and it lands in your document, where you can give it a range, a ~, a panel of its own or a place in a sentence. Every channel a formula can read, every shape a formula can take and every kind of line a document can have are one press away, from the same three tables the site's reference is generated from.

The language is arithmetic and trigonometry, comparisons, a choice, three questions about the whole lap, two more about another lap — best and last — sentences with the car written into them, four things a formula can *do* rather than work out, slots it keeps between frames, and a canvas with eight marks on it. A rev counter with a needle is nine lines; a map of the track you are on is two.

It has no loops, no recursion and no way to call anything you wrote, and every jump in a compiled formula goes forward. That is what makes a document impossible to write badly enough to cost a frame.

It is a module of its own so a driver who writes no formulas carries none of it: nothing in the base program parses, compiles or runs one.

Its documentation →

SHARED LAPS

Laps other people drove, and the ones you choose to share.

One LIBRARY tab, and the thing a first evening at a circuit is missing.

Every comparison this program makes — where the time went, what the brake pedal did wrong, which corner to work on — is a difference from a reference lap. With none but your own, the whole analysis answers "you drove like you" and the braking view is blank. One good lap in the same car at the same circuit turns all of it on at once, and it lands in your ghosts like any lap you saved yourself.

It is a library and not a leaderboard, and the difference is the whole design: a ranking gives people a reason to lie and then needs an anti-cheat race that one author loses. Nobody cheats to upload a lap somebody else learns from. Laps are ordered by time because that is a useful order, and nothing here is called a record.

**There are no accounts.** The first time you share anything, two random numbers are made on this machine: a public one that goes beside the lap, and a secret one that proves the lap is yours if you come back to change or remove it. No email, no password, nothing to log into — and so nothing that can ever be sent to you. YOURS shows the public half and will throw the whole thing away if you ask.

What leaves the machine is decided by you, per lap: the name shown beside it, whether it is listed at all, and whether your setup goes with it. **The setup is off unless you say so**, and you can turn it off again afterwards — it stops being downloadable the moment you do.

It is a module of its own so that a driver who never installs it sends nothing anywhere. Not by a setting they have to find and trust: by the code not being in the program.

Its documentation →

TYRE AND BRAKE CHANNELS

Nine ready-made channels about how the car is being driven, kept up to date from the site.

Grip used, trail braking, both feet down at once, coasting, speed per gear. Nine formulas written out so nobody has to derive them, sitting in CHANNELS beside the ones you wrote. Change one and the copy is yours.

This one really is a download: it is data rather than code, checked against the checksum the site publishes, and it refreshes itself in the background — which the program never does to itself.

Its documentation →

THE CIRCUIT IN THREE DIMENSIONS

The track at its real width and real elevation, turned and tipped, with everything on it.

Every map in this program is flat, and a circuit is not. The one on ANALYSIS is drawn from where the car went — the right shape, seen from directly above, and half the information. Eau Rouge climbs forty metres in three hundred; the Corkscrew drops six storeys; Bathurst is a mountain. From above, all three are a bend.

The altitude was there the whole time: it comes off the game's own files with the rest of the circuit, and until now nothing drew it. This does. Turn it, tip it, zoom it, drag it with the pointer, and colour your lap on it by speed, throttle, brake, gear or height. The corners carry the names the track gives them, and the car is on it where you are.

**It is not the scenery.** The trees, the buildings and the grandstands are meshes inside the game's own model files; reading and drawing those would be a different program, and one that could not run beside the game it was decoding. What is here is every part of the circuit the game will tell us about — and the elevation is drawn larger than life, with the number said on the screen, because to scale a seven-kilometre circuit with a hundred metres of climb is a flat sheet with a wrinkle in it.

The projection is worked out once per camera move rather than once per frame; a frame hands over one mesh and one line.

Its documentation →

THE LOGBOOK

RECORDS learns what you changed, and what each evening was worth.

**It adds no tab.** RECORDS already lists every session you have driven; this is what that list becomes when the module is on. A second list of the same sessions on a ninth tab would be more places to look for the same thing, with the note you wanted on only one of them.

It is the one part of setup work this program did not touch.

It reads the car, it tells you the front left is over its window, and it keeps every lap of every session. What a driver actually does between stints is write down what they altered and look, next time, at whether the times moved. That was a notebook beside the keyboard, and a notebook cannot say what the best lap was that evening.

So: every session you have driven, newest first and narrowed to the car and track you are in, with a line you write against each — and the best lap of each, in order, so a run of changes reads as a run rather than as a column of numbers — and each evening carries **how much its best lap moved from the one before**, which is the number a work log exists to produce.

RECORDS already lists every session you have driven, and this does not repeat it: that one answers what you have driven, in a table of everything. This one answers whether what you changed helped, narrowed to the car you are sitting in.

It is **not** a setup diff. The core can compare two setups, and it is tempting to show what changed between the one you ran in March and the one on the car now, but nothing on disk records which setup was on the car during a past session. Inventing that link would be a guess dressed as a measurement. What is recorded is what you write down.

The sessions are the ones the program already keeps; this adds one file of notes beside them, so a session deleted takes its note with it.

Its documentation →

CALL OUTS

What the engineer would say, on whatever screen you are on.

One line across the top of every screen, carrying the single worst thing the engineer currently has to say.

The core works out what is wrong continuously, and the window drew it on ENGINEER and on the dashboard. Somebody reading a trace on ANALYSIS, or writing a screen in the studio, was told nothing at all — and a warning that only reaches you on the page about warnings is a warning that arrives after the stint.

Nothing is drawn when there is nothing to say, which on a clean car is most of a stint: a banner that is always there stops being read. How much has to be wrong before it appears is a choice, and so is whether it is one line or the whole finding with the reasoning under it.

The findings are the engineer’s, already worked out. Which of them is worst is the dashboard’s own ordering, shared rather than repeated. This chooses where and how loudly, which is a front end’s business.

Its documentation →

LOOK

Fifteen ways to make it the screen you actually own — palette, sizes, contrast, warmth.

Five palettes, four text sizes, three spacings, square or soft corners, three weights of panel border, how loud a verdict colour is, how far panels lift, plain bars or quartered, what sits behind the screens, and two switches, and whether a panel's heading is set in capitals or as it was written.

They are two panels of rows rather than a dozen boxes: every name is given the same width, so every row's buttons start in the same place and adding a setting adds a row. Twelve panels of different heights in two columns lined up nowhere.

Three of them are about reading rather than taste. THE BIG NUMBERS grows the readings you take at a glance and nothing else, so a window on a second monitor can be read from across the room while still holding as much. CONTRAST is distance from the background rather than brightness, which is what the word has to mean on a light palette as well as a dark one. WARMTH puts a cast over everything for two in the morning, and does it by multiplying and renormalising rather than blending, so every colour stays recognisably itself instead of the blue going grey.

The palettes come from the shared core, so the terminal and the in-game panel offer the same five under the same names. Two things are deliberately not on the list: where a verdict's thresholds sit, which are the engineer's, and monospace for numbers, because a column of readings that does not line up is the one thing this window must not do.

Its documentation →

MOTION

Everything eased, and the window running at your screen's rate.

The program moves as little as it can on purpose: a frame drawn beside a running game is a frame the game wanted. This spends them anyway.

The window stops waiting for something to change and runs at your display's rate. Every animation gets longer, so a hover, a tab's underline, a bar and a colour crossing a threshold travel rather than snap. Panels rise into place instead of being there. And the lap behind the screens drifts, which is the one thing here allowed to move on its own — it carries no reading, and a window of unchanging numbers reads as a photograph of a program.

GENTLE is half of all of it, CALM and QUICK are how long everything takes rather than how far it goes, and each of the five movements has a switch of its own — panels rising, the cascade down the page, a panel answering the pointer, the worst reading breathing, and the backdrop drifting. This is the one module that is entirely a matter of taste, and one yes was the wrong shape for it: somebody who wants panels to rise but cannot stand a moving backdrop had to have both or neither.

For machines that are not the bottleneck; off, none of it runs.

Its documentation →