Okay. I'm going to post this one more time. My timing has been such that the first time I posted it, the forum experienced the weird post deletion, user banning episode and it dissappeared. I re-posted it and it was then wiped out with the site-restore operation. If it dissappears again, I'm going to take the hint
!
I am copying below (with permission) my correspondence with Weston at RaceRender. I inquired with them about RaceRender as a replacement for DashWare, guage conversion, and whether they plan to broaden their support to the RC flying niche as well as the motorsports community. I found the response very positive, and wanted to share it with anyone else who may be interested.
I certainly see a reason for many to want to stay with DashWare, even with the current situation, particularly those who are vested in it with custom gauges and templates and so on. However, as someone who is starting down the lane of this kind of video work, I prefer to start with a program that is being supported, expanded, and reasonably appears to have a future over a program I can only get if I'm willing to use a hacked version, and even that is at a dead end. I have seen RaceRender updated twice in the last few weeks, with v3.1.1 specifically including gauges to start supporting the RC aviation community. The last update to v3.1.2 was just over a week ago.
Without a doubt it will take a little time to get a gauge selection comparable to DashWare, but it will get there I'm sure. I think the general community was very happy to have DashWare supporting our interests, but for whatever reason, they quit on us. I can't speculate on whether it was for a good or a bad reason, but as I have made a few attempts to contact them before looking elsewhere, the reason being good or bad is absolutely irrelevant right now. I guess I prefer to support a product that is actively showing it wants to support me and my interests. Just my two cents.
For anyone interested, here is the correcspondence:
Hi Chuck,
Although there is not a direct or automatic way to use DashWare gauges, you should be able to use RaceRender Ultimate's tools to bring in custom gauge backgrounds and otherwise customize the displays to look similar, which can then be exported as individual object files (.RRO file type), or group template files (.RRT file type), and shared with other RaceRender users (we also have a place for that on our forum here: http://forum.racerender.com/viewforum.php?f=8 ).
There are already some aviation style gauges included in RaceRender, with version 3.1.1 containing a few more enhancements for that, but they just aren't part of the pre-made templates that are presented in the menu when creating a new project. If you click the "Add" button under "Display Objects", you can then find some Airspeed gauges under the "Speedometer" group, along with Altimeter, Compass, and Climb (V Speed) under the "Gauge" group, and some Tape-style altitude and speed displays under "Enhanced Display Objects". There is also a rotating compass image in the "E Image" group. With the Ultimate edition, these can all be customized and perhaps repurposed for other data channels as well.
Going forward, I do hope to create more aviation displays to be included in RaceRender, and to make those more accessible to users, along with options for the various other non-motorsports activities that people have also been using RaceRender for.
- Weston
RaceRender LLC
[email protected]
On Jan 16, 2015, at 11:23 AM, [email protected] wrote:
Message submitted on Friday, January 16th, 2015 at 11:23 AM by 2602:304:b1ba:9350:409e:ca02:b24c:3502
Session ID: 3a21a409a83915427224c5b62d1045ed
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko
Name: Chuck Bennett
Addr: [email protected]
Version: 3.1.1
Product: RaceRender Windows
MsgType: Other
OpSys: Win 7 SP1
OpSysBuild: 64-bit
SysText: PC / Flytrex Live 3G
Text: I am a quadcopter SUAV pilot. Until recently, it appears DashWare software was to SUAV flying what RaceRender is to auto racing. Both with work for the other, but they each catered to a particular niche. As I'm sure you are aware, DashWare has gone under, and that product is no longer available/supported. Many SUAV enthusiasts are turning to RR since the loss of DW. I was wondering if the multitude of guages from DW that were oriented more towards flying are adaptable to RR? Is there a conversion process they can be processed through, or do you have a user friendly editor in RR that would allow the guages to be imported and reproduced/output for RR?
Also, do you anticipate future revisions of RR to offer support to the niche market of SUAV flyers?
Thanks very much!
Chuck Bennett
