Immerse Yourself with Custom HUD Overlays - SimHub

[Music] [Music] Sim Hub do you really know everything it does I know for the longest time I thought I had a good idea but then I discovered I very much did not and it's quickly become my favorite addition to sim racing as a whole in 2022 big clan I get questions very frequently about how I'm able to get things to display on the screen in a certain way or how to show different information than you're able to see by default so at the risk of stating the obvious and in hopes there's someone else out there who hadn't already had this Epiphany I figured I'd share what I've discovered this year and how I use sim Hub how flexible and useful and easy it can be to create your own perfect minimal HUD experience but beware you might not be able to live without it after very quickly Sim Hub is a program which allows custom dashboards displays and Integrations with various Sim Hardware utilizing plugins which integrate to different Sims on the market there's a payware version which enables some additional functionality and higher refresh Dash motion but everything I'm going to show you here today is done with the free version it's very often used for folks with multiple screens to display gauges or displays on secondary monitors tablets I'd seen these types of dashboards shared all over the place but since I don't use a secondary screen or tablet I never really looked into them but I was looking for ways to spice up some of my videos or display information in immersive ways I really dug into a feature Sim Hub calls overlays personally I really don't like Huds or on-screen displays when I don't need them I know there's some folks out there that like their screen to look like an F-16 fighter jet but especially when racing older cars I really like it to be just about the car and the track and have minimal displays as possible overlays and Sim Hub make that easy they're on-screen displays basically a custom HUD that allow you to augment or even replace the default HUD that a Sim comes with overlays allow for incredible customization on what information displays where the information displays and how it displays there are a lot of ways to use sim Hub and this isn't even scratching the surface but I'll try to show you as simple as possible how you can start making and adding your own Huds to your favorite Sims now not every Sim is supported with Sim Hub but almost everything made since the mid-2000s is Sim Hub itself will have tutorials on how to enable it for a Sim but for most it just works immediately for some like ams2 or r factor 2 you're going to toggle on a setting or a dll or something in the Sim first one big caveat though you must be running your Sim in windowed mode or windowed borderless mode to be able to use these kind of overlays luckily you don't need to build something completely from scratch after installing SIM Hub the easiest way to jump in is by downloading an overlay or a layout to get started with places like race department or the official Sim Hub forums are a great place to find these most download as a single Sim Hub package and then you can double click and install the good thing and something that was completely lost on me for a while is that for many Sims you can actually interchange dashboards between them so it's not required to specifically find a dashboard for the Sim you're using especially if you're open to doing a little tweaking Sim Hub uses shared parameters that we'll look at in a few minutes which allow dashboards to largely work across Sims unless they're using a specific Sim setting like rest time and Truck Simulator you know something that's specific to that Sim and not going to be available elsewhere there are thousands of Huds and dashboards out there but a few I could recommend to get started are a nice collection from shovas made for GTR 2 specifically this overlay set contains a lot of panels to display different elements but generally has a really nice clean layout that I like a lot some of the elements like the map May specifically only work with GTR 2 but the general timing and lap overlay is the bones of what I use in a lot of Sims there's a nice pack called Simple dash pack by flesky bacon which has different Tac RPM gauges speed displays Etc these are in the form of dashboards but can easily be made into overlay elements to use and is the beginnings of what I use to make my rbr escort Dash that I run there's also a lot of additional functionality that can be brought to a Sim with Sim Hub user Gandalf the dwarf man these user names has made a relative timer for ams2 that with some customization can work in other Sims as well to show you who's ahead and behind you like the eye racing relative you might be familiar with and lastly in one of my personal favorites these are red tea one of our HRC drivers has actually made a pit board style HUD specifically for AC but one you can definitely use in other Sims this pit board appears only when you cross the finish line and will show you your position lap time and GAP to opponents for a short time before disappearing again very much in the style of the old GPL dashboard and something that's so cool to bring the newer Sims if you want to really immerse yourself you can turn off all the HUD and just use this to get a quick update on what's going on each lap I absolutely love it [Music] so when you launch Sim Hub you'll see the full list of games or at least a lot of the games and Sims that let you use it alongside and you can scroll through there's a lot in here that's not even actually racing Sims and things but there's so many games and ways to use sim Hub it's really cool and I think there's even some Sims outside of this list if you if you want to try to get it to work with them but but for almost everything I play except like the Dos games and Grand Prix Legends unfortunately although I've never tried zimhub does work quite well with almost everything else so I think one of the problems or things that's difficult with Sim Hub is just how many different things you can do with it but the dash studio for what we're talking about Dash Studio is where it all happens and within Dash Studio you should be brought to your dashboards by default and these are all the full dashboards the things that you could put on other displays but you could also use them as an overlay simhub does come with some of these by default but then anything that you install that has a dashboard that comes along with it you you'll see that here these are pretty easy to use if you did want to use a dashboard like it's an overlay or even for a secondary screen if you start one of them you can choose whether or not you want it to be windowed or on a second monitor this is how you could set up a tablet or something like that if we run with it windowed it's going to pop it up actually as a dashboard on our screen and this will sit on top of our game so if we wanted to we could actually just run with this you can size it up so that it's the right size put it on the screen where you'd want it and now we've got a tachometer that can probably be used in almost every Sim now these are all a self-contained type dashboard so everything is inside this little box that gets created but they do let you have more complex information displayed in one box but if you want more of the HUD style replacement if we X out of that and jump over to overlays this is where you can pick and choose and grab different elements and build your own HUD for a Sim so if you download and install any of the overlays we looked at they'll appear here in the list of available overlays and these are all the individual elements that you can use to build yourself a HUD up top where we have our saved overlay layouts are our different completed total Huds so all the different elements selected and available for us to use for a Sim alright so I have popped up automobile used to 2 in the background here just to go through how you make an overlay because it was a bit confusing the first time I did it to set up your custom dashboard you'll want to make a new overlay layout and it is easiest to do this when you're in the Sim but you don't have to but when you click that it's going to pop up this little box the overlay layout editor this is where we can choose our different overlays to mix and match and combine and set them up where we want them to appear on the screen so from this little box if I go to add an overlay I'll see a full list of all the different overlays that I've made any that I've downloaded I think Sim Hub comes with a few by default but any of the ones you downloaded like shellvas's overlays or the other ones we went through so if I scroll down I can find the show gtr2 and even though we're not in GTR 2 a lot of these should still work but I can add my style lap overlay and when you click add it's going to pop up on the screen in a red box which would allow you to drag it around and place it wherever you want it to you can see in the bottom right hand corner I can expand it and make it bigger or smaller but I can place it where I want on my screen and then come back here now I can place additional overlays or I could stick with that here but maybe we'll put on that ams2 relative timer as well so I can add that as a second element and drag it in here size it the way I want to place it wherever I want it to be on the screen so when you're done placing all your different elements you can come back to the layout editor here and click stop edit and then we'll want to importantly save our layout before we exit anything so we'll call this my ams2 testing layout now this layout is set up and you'll see I do have the box hide when not and race checked which is why everything disappeared but if I minimize this box and come back into my sim you'll see that my overlay has now appeared on the screen and I've got a nice little relative timer and my little lap chart in the top right hand side so if at any point I want to edit things say I've got something overlapping or I want to get rid of something on this dashboard if you all tab over to your sim Hub layout editor that should pop back up and allow you to edit the layout and you'll get these red boxes again so I can get rid of my relative timer maybe I want the laps remaining and stuff to be down here on the right I could stop my edit and then I could save it over the existing one or make an entirely new one and customize my Dash from there now that I've made my dashboard if you come back into SIM Hub you'll see my ams2 testing layout in my saved layouts and at any time if I want to use that all I have to do here is Click load and it'll pull up those different elements so if all you want to do is download different overlays that are out there and mix and match and build your own Huds that's really all you have to do but we can take things a step further and start customizing the dashboards and building exactly what we want [Music] so I think this is the point things where we go from the relatively easy tweaking and setting up your own dashboards to the slightly more complicated customization and something that's not going to be for everybody but I'm here to encourage you that it's not that hard to tweak stuff to your liking and I'll try to show you how I learned anyway and how to set up my own dashboards because I found it to be fairly easy and it lets you do so much more with Sim Hub also one really important thing if you're going to make and tweak your own dashboards don't distribute them without permission from whoever originally made it just like with everything else if somebody made something you're not allowed to take just bits and pieces of it without giving credit but definitely asking permission I think is the right thing to do so no problem in tweaking stuff for your own use but if you want to share it with others please ask permission first before doing so alright so building and customizing your own overlay it's not quite as scary as it sounds and as with a lot of things the easiest way to get into it or understand how these things work work is by looking at one that already exists so if we scroll down and are available overlays to one of the show dashes I think this is a good one to start with at least and go to more you'll see a few options here you can directly edit this dashboard but you can also duplicate it or export it I highly recommend duplicating whatever you're going to edit so you don't ruin the original but if we duplicate it here we can give it a new name I'll call mine Sim Hub time or demo then if we find that in the list then we go to more we can click edit so editing a dashboard is going to bring it up in the dash studio and this is where you can make changes and tweaks and see how everything is set up on this dashboard you'll see on the right it's made up of a bunch of different layers of different elements and every element that you add to your overlay is going to be a different row here in the components and kind of like photoshop with layers they're stacked in order for how they appear so at the top is the thing that's very much in the back somewhat opposite and as we click through you'll see the different elements highlight and these are all the different pieces that build up this dashboard the Dash Studio he has a very visual Builder so you can drag and drop stuff around you can copy and paste it you can enable a grid so that you can see how things are lining up or snap to the grid itself to make things look nice but it's pretty intuitive to slide things around when you do select an element like best lap here on the right side are all the different settings for how that appears so the general location of it as well as the font that it uses any background colors and down here in the text section the different fonts and sizes and things that it's going to show up as admittedly there's a lot more settings here than I typically play with but everything that you could customize is located on the right side in general there's going to be two types of things that you have on the dashboard you're going to have plain text like the words here best lap which is just written in static it's always going to say that or if I click over on the time for best lap you're going to have things that are populated via Properties or formulas so obviously for best lap we don't just want to show a static number we want to dynamically populate that with the best lap that happens so you'll see the formula box here on the right has been lit up and if we click that we'll be brought into our formula editor so there's two ways that you can set up what Somehow Here calls computed values you can use properties in a simplistic type notation style or you can actually use JavaScript I think the properties are the most straightforward easy ones to use and you can see here it looks a little confusing but it's game data best lap time how do I figure out what I would put here well where we have insert property and I'll actually get rid of our best lap time macro here if I click insert property you'll get a list of all of the different properties that are available now you'll see in the background I still have ams2 open it's easiest if you do have a SIM open because you'll see all the values that are currently coming for those different things but if I want to populate my best lap here if I search the list for best lap or if I scroll through we can see all the different parameters that might show up it looks like your game data best lap time that's the one I'll want so if we copy our name out come back here and inside of brackets put our copied value that'll return the best lap time if you actually jump back out into SIM Hub itself and click on available properties you can see that full list that exists and if you're really getting into this I recommend scrolling through and taking a look at what's available for any given Sim because there's a lot of stuff here that you might want to incorporate into your different dashboards but if all you're trying to do is display some of these different values which for me is mostly what I'm doing with a dashboard if you find the name of the parameter in the dash editor you can populate it as a computed value inside of brackets then that'll be what shows up on your dash at the bottom you do need to pick your results format so depending on what type of data it is this one is time so we've got minutes and seconds and tenths and hundredths and stuff and it'll show you an example of your result and your formatted results so with that this dashboard would populate but it really is that simple just populating different values onto the dash the rest of it applies with your different fonts and font sizes and just general display of everything now you can get way more complicated with this and you will see some of the dashes that you download online are going to have quite complicated functions I'll show you this one here for current lab if we click on our little F it's not just returning a simple app time what we actually have here is some JavaScript code which is doing some different displays depending on what's Happening so by checking the use JavaScript box you have access to write with JavaScript you can reference these different parameters using the prop variable but this one's basically saying if the car is in the pit then return nothing otherwise you know if the lap is valid then return nothing but lastly if it's not either of those things we want to return the current lap time so it's just accounting for some of those different instances where you maybe don't want to display some really Long Lap because you've been sitting in the pits for 20 minutes obviously it takes a degree of understanding programming and things like that to write this but not too hard to understand if you're reading it and this is where having other dashboards as reference can come in handy and something that you can do and again just for yourself please don't share stuff like this but if I just wanted a couple elements from this dashboard you can actually copy and paste between dashes so if I want my lap value which is something that's already been figured out how to populate copy that out I can have a new Dash that I have set up and paste that in tweak my different sizes and displays and everything to get it to show up like I want it to but using that you can combine elements from different dashes and get something that displays exactly what you want at any point when you're done working on a dash if you save it that'll save that overlay and if you already have that overlay selected in one of your saved overlays it's instantly going to use the newest version of it so using that type of approach to copy and change elements is how you can really get quite far in customizing building your own dashboard like with many things it's how much time you're willing to spend on is really how far you can go it's really incredible what some folks have devised using some of these simple formulas and things so whether you're going to embark on creating your own crazy dashboards or you're going to download some of the ones I mentioned in this video and just display some new information in new ways I hope this was an interesting look at Sim Hub and maybe something different than you see normally when talking about it if you have secondary screens and tablets and actually been looking at maybe getting one because it seems like an awesome way to show more things but even for something that's relatively simple like this just displaying information in a nice clean simple way on the screen might not be that important for some out there but for those that it is can create such a different experience and an immersive one in racing some of these Sims so hopefully that's enough info to get you dangerous with this and start creating some really cool dashes I'm sure there's some dashboards out there that I don't know about so if there's anything that's really cool that you think I or other folks would like definitely send a comment here so that we can all know about it I hope all of your displays now are beautiful but for now I think that's it from the display depart apartment so thank you for watching this is GP laps and I'll see you all again next time [Music]

Channel: GPLaps

Views: 22,459

Keywords: simhub, overlay, pitboard, custom hud, immersive hud, relative, iracing, ams2, rbr, richard burns rally, gtr2, assetto corsa, ac, rfactor, rf2, targa, timer, stop watch, mods, mod review, addon, free, workshop, steam, cockpit, rig, vintage racing, classic racing, 1966, gaming, video game, overview, gameplay, footage, commentary, history, original, first, intro, theme, music, multiplayer, review, testing

Id: GijeZv6TFCE

Length: 18min 25sec (1105 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 04 2022