Messages

1

Stunts Forum & Portal / Re: SESSION ID via GET in the forum?

« on: October 02, 2018, 09:46:37 PM »

That's not the forum in particular, but something PHP applications can do if they have trouble setting session cookies.

From: http://php.net/manual/en/session.idpassing.php

The first time a page is accessed, PHP doesn't yet know if the browser is accepting cookies or not, so after session_start() is called, SID will be non-empty, and the PHPSESSID gets inserted in all link URLs on that page that are properly using SID.

[...] A work-around is to turn on session.use_only_cookies, but then you lose session data for anyone who has their cookies turned off.

Could it be that you or an extension cleared cookies a short moment before?

Query string session ID used to be "safe", until wi-fi and the NSA happened. HTTPS is in my medium term plans, but it's mostly in the hands of Zak, being hosting configuration.

2

General Chat - ZSC / Old concept cars

« on: September 28, 2018, 08:09:42 PM »

There are some great ones in here: http://oldconceptcars.com/

The Lamborghini LM002 had some friends: Cheetah, LM001, and LM004!

3

Competition 2018 / Re: Z206 - Low As Resources

« on: September 26, 2018, 05:51:18 PM »

That ice U-turn is evil. It's almost faster to go cut it completely and take the penalty time —almost

4

Site Announcements / Re: Cars and rules for 2019

« on: September 25, 2018, 04:23:13 PM »

There is only one goal that seems very hard to achieve: car diversity on the same race.

Is that actually a goal? Whatever the calculations behind it, that can only work if you artificially push or force single people to use cars that are not the best¹ car. The current system works by forcing "everyone", which has a pretense of fairness, but any similar mechanisms while a race is moving would target pipsqueaks in possibly unfair ways.

[1] "best" intended as handling + bonus for the track

Now, beside any of these crazy ideas that are just brainstorming (feel free to use your creativity on them and change them wildly, ha, ha), one thing I'd like to propose is a field in ZakStunts where one can enter a lap and a car and obtain the lap with bonus applied

Mmmh, sounds like the RPLinfo page, or is it a different thing?

The "intersection chart" is something I sometimes make for myself, but it could be useful in general. Or what about just showing the top result converted for all cars?  "To lead with car X, you need at least 1'12!"

One thing you could try to get more cars viable per track is lower the car coefficients gain and loss. Not used is +1.5%, or +1%. This also lowers the drop from being used, keeping cars closer to the bonus where they are useful.

An equivalent solution is also reducing the total number of bonus points that circulate, which is currently 12×16 = 192. But if cars circulate faster, fast cars (Indy, MP4, IMSA) would become too strong: the only reason they are not an option is because they have large negative bonuses. Bring them closer, and they would always be faster.

If the Rambo Lambo is 20% below it's ideal bonus when a track with ice turns comes up it may not get used, if it sits 10% below its ideal bonus it may be worth a shot.

The track designer can assign or remove up to 20 points to any cars. Leo choose to keep values as they are, but we could have had the Lambo at 41% on this track. Because we trust the maths, but sometimes a track is begging for a specific car

5

Site Announcements / Re: Profile updates and changing password

« on: September 25, 2018, 03:59:29 PM »

Still, it'd be very interesting if it were easier to chronologically follow the activity of a pipsqueak. That would make it easier to contribute to the wiki, for example.

The statistics can give you some information about shoutbox and race activity. There is no full search though, it's never really come up as a priority.

6

Site Announcements / Re: Profile updates and changing password

« on: September 24, 2018, 08:28:11 PM »

Yes, it was this thread: http://forum.stunts.hu/index.php?topic=1480.msg18061#msg18061
I'm pretty sure I was active back then. Now, what I'm surprised of is that I don't show up anywhere in the scoreboards until 2015. I'm not 100% sure that I have posted a reply in ZakStunts prior to that date, but I used to think I had. Could that have been deleted?

This is confusing: there is no trace of you in the early seasons, except for 5-6 shoutbox messages. If your data has been deleted, it was very thorough: the user records are gone, and so are replays. Zak might remember something about it, but that's long before I discovered this website

About the "Years of Experience", my personal suggestion would be that there were a field in the profile asking when you first met Stunts. Then, this item would be calculated from that date.

This sounds interesting, although it's not exactly years of experience. For example, I would set it to '1992', but then I stopped playing for almost ten years before discovering ZakStunts. It's just a number though, and asking for the year makes it understandable.

Another thing that maybe is already possible, but I don't know, and surely would be interesting to have is something that showed when each pipsqueak was active and how much. Like a timeline. I think "activity" could be measured in terms of a linear combination of number of replays and number of messages posted per race.

Mmmh, I like this. I've been thinking about a way to show pipsqueak activity, and this would work well. We have more of 200 months of ZakStunts though, so it could get complicated to visualise, and fast

7

Site Announcements / Re: Cars and rules for 2019

« on: September 24, 2018, 12:49:36 PM »

This year, though, the bonuses were reset at the beginning of the season -- I can't say much about that, as I only noticed that now  In any case, this might be a good opportunity to revisit this matter -- we have been using bonuses for long enough that there might be some meaningful statistics about their evolution to be squeezed.

Actually, 2018 coefficients follow from last year as well, but there were both large custom changes (including the Ford Ranger getting 20 points to start with) and a rounding effort to stabilise the numbers.

When I made it possible to updated coefficients through the website, I discovered that the numbers had drifted quite a bit over time —a mix of small mistakes and car rotation, see chart attached. At that point, I decided to round the coefficients down to 12 points per car (192 total, down from 199 from the 2017 season).

Calculations are now automatic, which should prevent further drifting. Custom, per-track bonuses can still change the total, but the UI shows some warning signs if that's happening.

In that case, how are newly incorporated cars assigned handicap by default?

Let's say "feelings"   On one side, we want the seasonal cars to be used in at least one track of the season, which means they would get slightly higher bonuses than they deserve. On the other hand, it's not nice to mess up with the coefficients too much, because other cars might end up unused for too long. But it also depends on the tracks coming up and the other cars coefficients: if we introduce a car of a specific class I would give it coefficients close to the other cars of the same class.

More than about maths, it's about keeping things interesting: a) rotate all cars b) increase uncertainty in chosing the right car c) make of many tracks a memorable event (the powergear race, the slow and tricky race, etc)

8

Competition 2018 / Re: Z206 - Relativity

« on: September 23, 2018, 12:10:39 AM »

If only I had tried, instead of suggesting the GTO to Duplode

Only 10 minutes too late!

9

Site Announcements / Re: Profile updates and changing password

« on: September 22, 2018, 06:41:54 PM »

I suggest adding them back. The intent was to have the same fields as the opponent profiles.

Maybe "Years of experience" has more to do with playing Stunts than with the online community, so they could be separate things, but I think it's good like this too.

I see, matching the Stunts opponents profiles makes sense. I could make that:

• a custom number (the current choice)
• the number of years since joining ZakStunts
• the number of active seasons

It still feels like an arbitrary number, though, because the joke/simile is quite an obscure one.

By the way, a forum thread from the time when I had just registered in the forum suggests that I registered in ZakStunts shortly after, because Paleke invites me to join his team. Yet, my registration appears more much recent. Is it possible this has ever been reset?  Just curious.

Which thread is that? You appear in the shoutbox for the first time on 2005-11-28, but your registration date seems to be 2015-03-11.

I don't trust the registration date 100% for pipsqueaks that joined before 2016, when I fixed a couple of bugs in the way profile data was saved (and sometimes mangled).

10

Site Announcements / Re: Profile updates and changing password

« on: September 22, 2018, 01:00:07 AM »

Could you merge the infos with Leo Ramone with Shoegazing Leo?

There, should be done now! I have changed all the results 2004-2006 from Leo Ramone to Shoegazing Leo. Earlier results are in different tables which I don't understand entirely, so I won't touch them for the moment.

11

Site Announcements / Profile updates and changing password

« on: September 20, 2018, 11:43:14 PM »

It should be now possible to change your login password from the "Edit profile" page.
There is no password reset yet, so don't forget the new one

I've refreshed the rest of the profile information too, and removed "Height" and "Years of experience". The first one seemed a bit random, while the second felt always out of date.

Let me know if you want them back, of if you'd like to add different information!

12

General Chat - ZSC / Re: Reopening Race For Kicks

« on: September 12, 2018, 07:44:28 PM »

I'm away until Sunday, but I'll sign up first thing next week

13

General Chat - ZSC / Those tiny graphs...

« on: September 12, 2018, 02:21:20 PM »

This might not be very interesting, but it's quite satisfying if you are a data nerd.

You know those little bar charts at the top of the News Archive? The ones that show the number of posts per day — like the one in the attachment.

Well, these used to be little PNG images, created on the fly. But now they are little SVG images, created on the fly

They look exactly the same as before, but they are part of the page (no extra server request), they scale to any size without blurring, and... try to move the mouse over one of the columns!

14

Stunts Forum & Portal / Re: stunts.hu

« on: September 10, 2018, 11:16:17 AM »

Well spotted. How odd -- it was working fine two or three days ago, when I last had a look at it...

That was just me messing about, sorry. I've been working updating stuff here and there in the last weeks, with a PHP 7 upgrade in mind.

@Cas
This is the ZakStunts file for the running race. I removed that part of the portal at a certain point, but I can put it back one of these days.

15

Car creation with Stressed / Re: Finally there: the superkart (version 1.0), plus special race event.

« on: August 31, 2018, 10:57:07 PM »

O, I'm actually kind of curious what CTG would come up with for the kart.

I wouldn't mind two SuperKart tracks, they could be the first and the last of the competition