Looking for objective reviews and/or experience with Tour de Giro online race simulation.
Please share your thoughts and insight, especially if using with Computrainer.
Thanks.
ADD: Alternatives, others?
Hmm…nobody here has experience with this?
Disclaimer: I’m the developer, so the below is totally biased and non-objective 
There’s a two-week free trial. You can give it a shot with no risk. Actually, there’s a 40km ride scheduled for 6:00pm EST tonight which should have a couple people in it.
I develop and test mainly with a CT, so you can be assured that the CT experience is splendid. All you have to do is set it up once, and then as long as your CT is on once you start the game, it should automatically connect and guide you through calibration.
Since this is our first real season on the market, there’s not a lot of press/reviews yet. We’re working on that…
One downside: since this is our first season on the market, there’s not a ton of humans riding every hour of the day. We’re seeing about 300-400km ridden per day, though that is growing rapidly. Generally you’ve got to schedule a race in advance to rustle up some human competition. That said, since we let you ride on any map you can make into a GPX file, it makes us somewhat more user-friendly than lots of other riding solutions - GPX files are everywhere, so if you’ve got a course you want to ride all you have to do is upload it. Also, there’s lots of computer players (we can support rides with about 100 riders human and virtual), so you can always get a good race going on even against some AIs.
In an effort to be somewhat objective… Alternatives:
-Netathlon - we hear from some netathlon refugees that netathlon hasn’t updated in quite a while, and their multiplayer servers haven’t been working for a couple months. Also, our graphics are mildly better. And our map selection is better.
-Kinomap lets you race on google maps as I understand it, but it’s not a straight up racing simulation with drafting and whatnot. Doesn’t support CTs, since it’s a phone app. I have heard lots of good things about Kinomap though, and their developer is a nice guy too.
-Tacx has a variety of very pretty multiplayer racing things, but their map selection is limited. Also, we’ve gotten feedback that says the game crashes very frequently and requires extremely beefy computers to play. And of course, it’s limited to Tacx trainers.
-There are persistent rumours that Trainerroad is working on group rides/racing, but I haven’t heard anything about them releasing that for this season, so you might be waiting for a while.
I did some early phase testing to help confirm CompuTrainer compatibility but it has been a while since I used it. The most encouraging thing I see is that the developer makes consistent improvement to the platform. Over the past year it has been fun to watch how this has improved and evolved. For my part, it is hard for me to state with certainty that I’ll be available to do a virtual race at a specific time due to family commitments but I expect to use the program in the future.
No actual feedback to offer but I spent a few minutes in the TDG booth at interbike and it looked awesome and like lots of fun.
I have ridden/raced over 200 “kilometers” on it mostly on last year’s development version and will be using it this winter as well. I found that whether racing against algorithms or real people it provides motivation that just riding on a trainer or rollers doesn’t. It is interesting psychologically that having a graphical representation of a real person trying to beat you to an imaginary digital finish line really will make you work harder than you would otherwise.
Basically you will have two types of races. Those against all Artificial Intelligence riders and those against AI’s mixed with humans. Personally I think both are fun but the humans are less predictable and so more interesting. For the AI races they will have differing abilities, and I believe they are chosen based upon your race history. So if your race history shows your average watts to be 200 you aren’t going to be stacked up against a bunch of 400 watt AIs, but for your first few AI only races you may win them easily while you develop a history. The drafting and calculated “speeds” (I’m using air quotes there since you aren’t actually moving in real life) seems realistic from the visual cues on the screen. When a real person joins in the race it provides even more motivation. The 3D is constantly improving but for me that is secondary; just having the visual cues of other riders, different terrains and elevations, and speeds calculated based upon real physics, whether it all looks cool or not, is the best part of the program. The added benefit is it just keeps getting better visually and has gone all the way from a red floating cube to pedaling people with trees, windmills, towns, etc.
I think it is great and worth a try even without the try-it-before-you-buy-it offer. I have even hooked it up on one computer with TrainerRoad on the other and just rode a time trial on TdG while I was doing TrainerRoad intervals with the little 3D me on the screen speeding up, slowing down, speeding up, slowing down, etc.
Thanks for sharing your experience and practical information.
Sounds good. I plan to check it out.
Question: Is it possible to selectively organize races/workouts with *only *specific people? (Say, with a regular training partner working together on particular goals, etc.?)
Not presently. All scheduled races are public. You can choose to not allow certain device types, but that’s it. You can always just ignore the other folks in a race and ride with your partner. The race doesn’t end until everyone has finished, quit, or gone idle for 5 minutes.
Never heard of this software before but will try it out this winter. Sounds fun.
Are more people using this software now? How many scheduled races per day approx.?
Any reviews from anyone using this on a consistent basis?
So I see it supports powermeter’s with Ant+ stick usage—does it support the Wahoo KICKR?? Will it control the resistence on the KICKR? I’ll have to give this a try…
You can generally get a scheduled race with 3-4 riders every evening of the week, and sometimes in the weekday mornings… If you want a big one, there is usually a decent-sized event with 12-15 riders about once a week - a couple users have referred their clubs, so they go riding on their favourite group-ride routes virtually. This week’s big ride was scheduled by an Ottawa/Gatineau-area cycling club, on one of their favourite strava routes: http://www.tourdegiro.com/RaceResult.php?id=6384
Peeking at our server-status page, there are currently 4 races running this very moment (one with 3 racers), and one user is running this week’s time trial.
As for total ridership, it has tripled every month since September. If you go to the race results page, you can see we’ve had 10 races run so far today (and today is only 11 hours old!), with 3 of them having multiple human riders. We’ve set a record for distance-ridden every single week since September.
And there’s finally a review up!
http://www.pezcyclingnews.com/...test-news/?id=113553
So I see it supports powermeter’s with Ant+ stick usage—does it support the Wahoo KICKR?? Will it control the resistence on the KICKR? I’ll have to give this a try…
The kickr will work as a powermeter, but we don’t do slope control for it. The game should be very playable with a kickr (no different than a powertap/quarq/etc), but the best way to play is on a CT.
Too bad that you seem to only back CT. I just tried my first ‘race’ and it was ‘fun.’ I apparently joined a race with a bunch of pro cyclists–31miles of 70.3 course and human winner was sub-hour–with computer folks not far behind…then there was me. I mean I was pretty happy with 23mph ave–gotta say that’s right depending on the HIM course but given w/kg not sure how real world it would be–and without the change of resistance for hills etc on the actual trainer it’s not something I would choose to pay for a this time.
Edit to add: And also despite ‘registering’ I never got the verification email (and no it’s not in the spam/junk folder) so I don’t seem to be able to log in–yet could race in the download part…whatever.
WOW I just want to say I was blown away by the PM I got from AHare—took the time to address all the issues I posted and gave a great explanation. I really enjoyed getting crushed ‘racing’ today and think it’s a great product–just wish I had a CT for this product–unfortunately I have a kickr. It’s products like this, with people like AHare, that are going to make the best products for US if we provide the input! Thanks again and best of luck!
We have a good group that races at least 1x a week
Great way to stay motivated and simulate a cycling race
Art and Eric have a super product and have awesome customer service
Absolutely worth checking out
A
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OK so was racing this am and seemed to drop the race–as in I was showing everyone, positions, etc then suddenly everyone else disappeared and just my stats were showing–i clicked on the screen and everyone came back but I definitely had the gap extend to the front of the race during the ‘drop.’ Based upon the chat it seems this happens from time to time. I’m guessing it thought I was ‘idle’ even though I was showing power etc–so I would ‘chat’ just to stay active—was it something I was doing wrong or just a random ‘error?’ The bottom line is this product sure feeds into my competitiveness…
That’s a network issue - sometimes your network will lose the connection to the server and reconnect. During the period that you’re disconnected, your rider will continue at 25% power, and then you get put back in where your 25% guy is when your computer re-establishes the connection. It’s fairly rare, but it does affect some users unfortunately. It’s the same concept as “lag” if you play other types of online games. My personal internet connection is actually pretty awful, and I’ve found it’s mostly a weak wifi signal in my case.
I’ve got a server update ready to move that to 75% power (25% is too harsh), but I need to wait for a quiet moment on the game servers before I can reboot them with the update.
So would a wired connection eliminate the issue? And yeah I’ll take 75% power vs. 25%!!! That hurt…
Wired can help, but we’ve had two users where it turned out a wire in their house was damaged, so their modem wasn’t getting a good signal from the cable company. I know one of them fixed it by calling his ISP and they found and fixed the issue. If it’s not happening regularly (regularly being multiple times per race), it may have just been a hiccup and won’t happen often enough to worry about.
X2
We’re now using TdG to host “group” rides with the club… For CT users it’s a wonderful tool in snowy Mi. Trick is to ride hard enough to stay out of “draft” mode. Customer support has been very positive - and I understand we’ll be able to turn off the draft mode in Q1 of the new year. Great product, especially on a CT.