As very few issues were found with the version 5 Beta, very little has changed in this release. A few new feature have been added and some minor bugs fixed, but overall, the version 5 release is working quite well. Here are the changes in between 5.0 Beta and 5.1.
- The "Include Disabled or Time Factored Categories" feature is now complete. This feature allows you to specify a category level time factor by which the racers in that category will get their time multiplied by. So for instance if you set a category to 98 then their times will be multiplied by %98 thereby reducing the final finish times. As disabled racing has multiple levels of time factors each associated with specific Sub Categories who race each other in the same race, it became necessary to allow the setting of individual Category information for Sub Categories, not just the parent categories. You will now see a checkbox under the Category list in Category Info - Enter Category Info which allows you to choose if you want to edit just the Parent, or also the Sub Categories. This feature could also be used to perhaps specify a different time penalty for different sub categories in a biathlon race, or specify different prices for different sub categories in a loppet. It's a nice option to have when needed.
- Related to the above features, the Category Info screen has now been re-arranged to allow for the new features and to better change and flow depending on the options and features selected.
- The Electronic Interface test screen has been cleaned up a bit and the EI Interface settings like COM Port, Baud Rate, Time-Match Threshold, have been moved to the Options screen which is a more proper place for these kinds of machine level options.
- It was brought to my attention that although the Zone4 Sprint module has always been able to easily handle the advancing of 3 people from each heat, the new rules have changed the way these advancement will occure. Zone4 now automatically advances the top 2 qualifiers who placed 3rd in the quarter final and assignes them to their appropriate heat. So in order to use the new sprint rules, in the Quarters, only advance the first 2 place people and let Zone4 automatically advance the next two one all the heat results are in. There is also another change that under the old rules, the last placed person in the semi final heats would not advance to the B-Final whereas now they do, so the sprint module has been fixed to allow this to happen.
There are still many outstanding feature requests that I had intended to include this year, but simply ran out of time. As such, there aren't as many new features in Zone4 as had been planned, and hopefully some of these can be completed during the winter and rolled out to those wishing to try out specific things.