Messages

Something similar with car colours.

To be honest, I hadn't thought full descriptions of each paint jobs would be included. I assumed rough labels like "Red/Blue" or "Red stripes" would be enough 😅

Re authors, I think single author plus a list of contributors should cover most cases, and provide a simple format.

Regarding the discussion on formats and syntax, I would prefer not to go into that now. In my mind the archive is not meant for direct consumption by tools, but should be optimised for people. It's a folder curated by a group of people, sort of a wiki. It should be easy to write.

It should be machine-readable though, so that we can build any number of fronts. One of them produces a format that garage tools can read, another is a searchable website, etc. That way, we don't have to choose one format that all tools ever need to be happy to. And we are not tied to GitHub as a service or similar. It could all run from your hard drive.

So my focus right now is "what data do we need to collect, and what's a simple, well supported format to type it in". I'll start lining up the fields we've discussed above in a schema. A question in the meanwhile:

I can think of different type of values for a car:
- those part of the car definition (e.g., powergear behaviour, transmission gears)
- those that need to be measured (e.g., zero-to-sixty)
- arbitrary labels that need agreement (e.g., "race car" or "rally")

Do we want to include all of these? Do we want them separate in the structure? (e.g., characteristics vs statistics) Can you help me list them and group them?

These also provide good filter options.

That's a very good point: filtering should be one of the main use cases.

@Duplode I agree on keeping off GitHub for most discussions, for the moment, so I have disabled all the chatty features on the project. I could link instead to a forum section, but also happy to continue in a thread.

@Cas The example structure above follows YAML syntax. I'm not wedded to it, but my take is as usual to use a format that is already common and successful in similar use cases, rather than defining a new one.

Let's start with some fields then. The only required one could be name 🤔

- the four letter identifier is the file name, it does not appear in a field
- name: the name of the car
- nickname: a shorter, commonly used name
- author: main author, or should we have authors as a list?
- year: (or release_year or year_released) year of release of the first version with this 4-letter id
- colors: list of liveries, in showroom order
- urls: key-value list of related pages (e.g., stunts wiki)
- description: brief description of the car, should cover all versions with the same car id
- game_version: one of 1.0 | 1.1

Do we want a general statistics key containing things like flat_speed, top_speed or zero_to_sixty? Would empirical numbers sit separately from fixed ones like grip_value or gears_number?

Thank you Duplode, that's a smooth new set of side pictures. The tall vs long car size difference will probably remain, not much we can do there. The Monster Truck might look tiny

Well, @Mark Nailwood agreed to join Slowdrive. We need to concede him access to team forum. Welcome, legend!

Great acquisition!

@Mark Nailwood is now part of the Slowdrive forum group, let me know if anything looks odd.

@dreadnaut , Did you try them?

Not had a chance yet, sorry. Anything you would like me to pay attention to or consider in particular?

Yeah, to bad you missed it. (I missed it myself as well unfortunately).

I know, I was quite disappointed   Not having holidays over Christmas managed to ruin a number of plans, lesson learnt.

So, that, basically.

Neat summary, thank you! Hope you'll enjoy driving the Indy as a normal car, for the first time in a while.

We've been conqlebuggling a bit in the little Telegram group to work out the proposal Duplode was talking about before.

Is the conqlebuggling worth saving for the future? (e.g., grabbing a log out of Telegram and archiving it here?)

Coefficients are up, and so are Erik's new card portraits! Thank you all!

@alanrotoi Could you double check if you are still OK with the track bonuses? I'm here if you want to make any updates.

Thank you Duplode, that table makes sense. I am sticking to the plan of bringing the Indy up though, which in this scale means -15. Should we remove 15 points from the other cars, or add 1 and go for 16*11 = 176?

Thank you @Erik Barros. Almost there:
- Could angle them a bit "up", to show a bit of the roof and hood? See Mercedes
- A slightly larger version if you can, > 100px tall would be perfect.

🙇

Rules: there are a number of options discussed in this thread which look very promising, but nothing that felt solid enough to be put into practice — while at the same time not requiring a month of development.

I will leave rules as they are for this year, as we keep an eye on problems and prepare the ground for the next season. I might open the "Rules for 2025" thread much earlier

A couple of thoughts so I don't forget them:
- an incentive to race throughout the month for the Amateur League is definitely missing
- checkpoints feel to me like artificial splits, which require spikes of activity: miss the spike and that's it; LTB (or variants) leave pipsqueaks with more flexibility around racing
- simple rules make a competition accessible

@dreadnaut: I am bad at reading between the lines and am not sure whether your suggestion was serious. That being said, I strongly prefer it to the status quo. My preferences aside, it would make it far too easy for strong amateurs to beat intermediate pros.

It was serious, but not deeply considered. My aim was actually to threaten all pros, not just the intermediate ones. Thinking more than a second about it, however, it is clearly a bad idea as everyone pointed out

To those kind folks who help me every year: could you prepare side pictures for the Thunderbird and Lola? 🙏