GT7ShiftTone

It beeps, you shift.

Windows GUI application to provide a shift tone for Gran Turismo 7.

On first launch

You will need to find and manually set your console IP address into the UI:

• Find the IP address by going to the PS Settings -> Network -> Connection Status -> View Connection Status -> IPv4 address
• Enter this IPv4 address into the PS IP entry box then hit Start
• After this, GT7ShiftTone will automatically connect to this address and autostart

Steps

• Load into Special Route X Time Trial, drive past the first tunnel (with the finish line)
• Straighten the car, apply full throttle in a gear that goes from low/medium RPM to revlimit in a few seconds
• When revlimit is hit twice, briefly press handbrake to disengage the clutch
• Let the car roll for several seconds to 10 seconds (finish before the uphill section)
  • Avoid steering inputs as much as possible, controller is preferable
• Press throttle to finish. You can now go to other races with a shift beep.
• Be aware that false positives exist: not every beep is an upshift.

Current release

First public version. This program is not yet user friendly and does not save any car data yet.

Launch with:

• gtbeep.py: For Python users
• GT7ShiftTone.vbs: to launch the application (Preferred, requires ZIP download)
• GT7ShiftTone-debug.bat: to launch the application with an additional commandline window that shows debug information (requires ZIP download)

Changes:

• Added database with car names and manufacturers from ddm999 on GitHub
  • Name is displayed above the power graph
• Corrected finding the frame of pressing upshift, this assumes 100% throttle. The beep was correctly timed all along.
• Added window to display a history of shifts, needs more work
• Added toggle to enable/disable Dynamic Tone Offset (this should no longer be necessary to disable)
• Added status message on the state of the connection with GT7
• Added revbar range (starts at 85% and ends at 99% of the telemetry value)
  • The telemetry upshift value can differ from the value listed in the Transmission page: Transmission value will be wrong

Implementation

The approach is to get consecutive points of acceleration values across a large range of RPMs up to revlimit. These acceleration values include the acceleration from engine torque minus various resistive forces.
We derive drag by letting the car coast with the clutch engaged and measure how much the car slows based on speed. We add this back to the acceleration curve to cancel out the drag and this gives us the basic torque curve.
We effectively ignore other sources of losses such as rolling resistance as drag is dominant at higher speeds: The resulting curve is close enough.

The Tone Offset is dynamic. The program keeps track of the time between a shift tone and an initiated shift, and modifies the running Tone Offset if the tone is early or late.

There are three triggers for the shift tone:

• Shift RPM: The RPM value at which power in the current gear becomes lower than the power in the next gear: the ideal time to upshift. If the application predicts shift RPM is reached in the defined tone offset time, trigger a beep
• Percentage of revlimit: Uses the tone offset distance as predicted distance to current RPM hitting the listed percentage of rev limit
  • Example: A rev limit of 7500 and a value of 98.0% triggers a tone if it predicts 7350 RPM will be reached in 283 milliseconds
• Time distance to revlimit: uses the tone offset value plus the revlimit ms value as predicted distance to current RPM hitting the defined revlimit. Defaults to 100 milliseconds, which leads to a default prediction distance of 383ms

The delay between beep triggers is currently set to 0.5 seconds. This time-out is shared between the three triggers.
If you choose to not shift and remain above the trigger RPM, the program will not beep again even if revlimit is hit.

Settings

The settings are saved to config.json on exit. This includes Tone offset, Hysteresis, Revlimit %, Revlimit ms, Volume, Dynamic Tone Offset and Console IP. The power curve and gear ratios are not saved.
Remote telemetry sends data at 60 packets per second. The offset variables (Tone offset, revlimit ms) while defined in milliseconds currently use packet counts in the backend.
There is one packet per 16.667 milliseconds, approximately.

General display values:

• Revlimit: The limit on engine RPM by its own power. Revlimit is derived upon finishing a full throttle sweep up to revlimit.
• Revbar: The range in which the revbar lights up. It begins at 85% and starts blinking at 99% of a predetermined value, generally equal to the upshift line in the Transmission tuning page but not always
• Power: A guesstimate on which RPM peak power is hit
• Tach: The current RPM value as reported by the telemetry. Updates 30 times per second.

Per gear:

• Target: The derived shift RPM value.
  This requires a power curve (revlimit shows a green background)
• Rel. Ratio: The relative ratio of the gear ratios between two consecutive gears.
  If gear 2 has a gear ratio of 2.375 and gear 3 has a gear ratio of 1.761, then the relative ratio is 2.375/1.761 ≈ 1.35: third gear is 35% longer than second gear.
• Ratio: The gear ratio of the gear
  • Toggle between Ratio and Rel. Ratio by double clicking the "Ratio" or "Rel. Ratio" label text

General configuration:

• Tone offset: Predicted distance between the beep trigger and the trigger RPM value. This should not be taken as reaction time and minimized. It should be regarded as the time you can consistently respond to the tone with the least amount of mental effort. Defaults to 283 ms.
• Revlimit %: The respected rev limit in percentage of actual rev limit. This is to create a buffer for transients that could cause the engine to cut out due to hitting actual rev limit. Defaults to 98.0%.
• Revlimit ms: The minimum predicted distance to actual rev limit. This is to create a buffer for fast changes in RPM that would otherwise lead to hitting actual rev limit, such as in first gear. Defaults to 100ms.
• Hysteresis: Hysteresis may be set as another layer to smooth RPM. An intermediary RPM value is updated only if the change in RPM is larger than the hysteresis value, which is then used for the shift beep tests. Defaults to 0.5% of maximum engine RPM.
• Dynamic Tone Offset: Enables or disables the dynamic updating of the tone offset.
• Volume: Adjusts the volume of the beep in four steps total. Each step is about half as loud as the previous, where the second loudest is the default. A value of 0 mutes only the shift beep.
• Edit tickbox: If unticked, the up and down arrows for the Tone offset, Revlimit ms/% and Hysteresis values do not function. This is to avoid accidental clicks.
• Reset button: If pressed, reset revlimit, power curve and all values for all gears. Configuration values are unchanged. If the UI is unresponsive, restart the application.
• Start/Stop button: Stops or starts the loop to collect packets. In short, if button says "Stop" it is running, if it says "Start" the program is not tracking the game's packets and will not beep.
• View graphs button: If enabled and pressed, displays a power graph in a separate window.

Known issues

• Assumptions: not grip limited, shift duration of 0 and no penalty to power after shifting (aka, a turbo)
• The default values are arbitrarily chosen and may not suit individual cars or track surface.
• Application will on rare occasions crash: related to the UI library and cannot be fixed
• Power values in the graph are percentage-based: GT7 only provides acceleration not power/torque. Cannot be fixed.
• Due to noise in the acceleration data it is not always possible to derive at which RPM peak power occurs. It can be off by 100 RPM or more.
• The data is smoothed and will not 100% match the ingame curve which is linear interpolation between points
• Some cars have a harsh drop in power and will not hit revlimit at higher gears (Super Formula '23 for example), complicating data gathering
• Revlimit is marginally above the ingame revlimit in by far most runs. We cannot assume it is a multiple of 100 for non-stock cars so rounding down is out.
• Revlimit is an approximation and is equal to the last highest RPM seen on the full throttle run minus the points smoothed out.
• On Windows the socket is not closed cleanly for no apparent reason: requiring a new console on most consecutive launches
• Linux support is untested