#BigRingVR 8.0.0.960 released — What's New

46 builds since 8.0.0.914, and the app has a new front door: BigRingVR now opens on a Home screen, and Challenges have a tab of their own.

🏠 1. A new Home screen

A bar down the left side now takes you between Home, Rides and Challenges. Home brings together everything about you in one place:

• Scheduled rides — your to-do list of rides, ready to go. Show all opens the Rides list with your scheduled rides already filtered.
• Top rated rides you haven't done — the five best-rated rides you haven't completed yet. A great answer to "what should I ride today?"
• Your challenges — progress and days left on every live challenge. Click one to open it.
• Recent rides — your last five rides from any computer. Ride again takes you straight to the ride (and offers to resume it if you stopped part-way); Activity opens the ride's page on the website.
• What's new — new rides and BigRingVR news side by side. Ride it starts a new ride; Read more opens the article right inside the app.

Every ride on Home shows its difficulty pill — the same colours as the Rides list — so you know whether it's green or purple before you pick it.

New installs open on Home. If you're already riding with us, BigRingVR keeps opening on Rides — and you can customize which screen the app shows on startup: Home, Rides or Challenges (Preferences → General → Start screen).

🏆 2. Challenges — their own tab

All our challenges in one place, looking just like they do on the website: live now, coming up, and those that ended in the past year.

Open a challenge to see:

• the total distance, elevation and difficulty, start and end dates;
• how far through the challenge period we are, and your own progress (rides done out of the total);
• every ride in order — rides you've completed show a ✓ and a green Ride again, the rest a Ride it that starts the ride straight from the challenge;
• the leaderboard — Fastest and Distance, medals for the top three, and My position to jump to your row.

When you finish a ride, Home and your challenge progress update by themselves.

🗺️ 3. A bigger in-ride map

The map now comes in Small, Medium and Large. Press Z during a ride to cycle through them, use the right-click menu, or set it in Preferences → Ride Experience → Map Options → Map size. Large also zooms out a step, so you see more of the road ahead. Thanks Joe for the idea!

📡 4. Sensors and trainers

• Your trainer's resistance, made visible. If your trainer stops accepting resistance changes, a banner tells you — "Your trainer isn't accepting resistance changes" — so you know straight away why a climb feels flat, and what to do about it. When it recovers, you'll see "Trainer resistance is working again."
• Cadence drops to 0 within 3 seconds of your last pedal stroke, including on sensors that go quiet when the cranks stop.
• If a cadence sensor stops sending mid-ride, your trainer's cadence takes over, so the number keeps going.
• Bluetooth heart rate and cadence sensors start sending data sooner after they connect, and hold the connection.
• A trainer that keeps connecting and dropping is retried at a steady pace, which keeps the app stable while it sorts itself out.
• Old sensors you no longer use? If a configured sensor hasn't connected for many rides while your others have, BigRingVR offers to remove it — at start-up and in Preferences → Sensors.

🌐 5. Our new website

Every website link in the app now opens our new site, preview.bigringvr.com — ride pages, your activities, challenges and news. If you haven't seen it yet, read The new BigRingVR preview website is here in our news, and make sure to check it out.

⬆️ Updating

• Already on BigRingVR 8.x? You'll get this build automatically — just accept the in-app update prompt.
• Upgrading from BigRingVR 7.x? Please uninstall 7.x first, then follow the install steps in our earlier post.

System requirements: BigRingVR 8 runs on Windows 10/11 (64-bit), including Snapdragon/ARM laptops, and macOS 13 (Ventura) or higher. The Mac build is universal — native on Apple Silicon (M-series) and Intel Macs.

Download:

• Windows
• Mac (Intel & Apple Silicon)

What would help most from this round

1. Look around Home and Challenges and tell us what you'd like to see there next.
2. Try the Large map — press Z during a ride.
3. If you ever see the trainer resistance banner, please send your logs right after that ride.
4. Which Start screen did you pick? Home, Rides or Challenges — we'd love to know.

As always — if anything looks wrong, Preferences → General → Upload Logs to Support right after the ride is worth more than a description.

Thank you all and Cheers!