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Null pointer assignment

I know YAML very generally. I should read the fine details about it. I think the most important thing is that it be easy to skip what one doesn't want to parse at the moment and that it doesn't get too complex. For example, escape characters complicate the format quite unnecessarily. This can be solved either using a format that does not use escaping or using a format that does, but avoiding the creation of files that use this feature. YAML has its drawbacks, like it takes more space than JSON. But on the other hand, it's much more readable by humans and I like it more.

I think we can add as many details as necessary, but the ones that are crucial for the internal car configuration, in my opinion, are title, author and release date. This latter would serve as a "version number" and I would recommend it be in YYYY-MM-DD format so that we can easily sort them by string order and quickly know which one is newer.

If there can be more than an author, I would say it'd be important to have one field for the main author called "author" and another for co-authors or something of that sort. The idea is that, when you want to read the author property, you know to expect a simple string and not have to deal with the possibility of finding an array. Just my idea.

On another, related topic. I'm working on another garage program, a more visual one, but this could be implemented for Simple Garage as well. The thing is I've been leaving room in the code for online repositories to be read by the program. While developing, I've realised of some things that would make it more straightforward to do this:

The easiest way to read a repository is to know that, at the given web path, there's a file with a fixed name, say "repo.yml", if it may, that contains a list of all cars available in that repository, for each item, containing at least the car name and the list of the file names that are included for that car. Then, when you want to actually download the car, what you do is look for those files in the same directory and curl them down. They could be the individual car files or a single zip file containing them. In the latter case, we should agree on the zip file name, for example "car<ID>.zip", like "carcdor.zip" for the Melange, so that the program can recognise it. Any more ideas can be built on that.

This way, the program reads the repository list once at the beginning and doesn't need to scan it again for each car.

About JSON... I've said before I don't like it because it's difficult to parse and it's true, but of course, this is especially true for the general JSON format. You can always have a certain JSON file have a more specific format that follows JSON, but that can be expected to be much simpler. There's also XML... probably the least optimal of the three. Anyway, I'm just throwing my ideas. Let me know what you guys think.

Right. The situation with cars that are a lot bigger than most complicates the thing a little bit. If they are scaled differently, they look weird in the scoreboard, but if they are all scaled the same, the majority of cars will look very small

Canal

It's very timely that you're posting these ideas now, because I've started working on a procedure to auto-generate car images from 3SH files yesterday. My idea is to use that as part of a new garage program, a more visual one. I could follow your guidelines to make both looks compatible with each other. I still haven't done what Dreadnaut suggested (the SVG idea), but I could use the same code to produce that.

I suppose they can be decompressed with stunpack. The thing is to later actually open them and edit the chunks

DNA

Ecology

The "P" in "PES" means "packed", following the rule of other extensions in Stunts. The "SH" in "ESH" stands for shape, following "3SH" and "VSH". Not sure what the "E" means. "Extra"?  I think ESH/PES files store bitmaps that are not car-related and yes, it seems to be an older format that has limitations and probably because of that, came VSH/PVS. Just guessing... it could be that ESH/PES have one byte to represent width and another to represent height, so images can't be larger than 255x255.

Cartridge

It's really hard to tune the car bonuses to achieve what you want with your track because, until people start racing, you never know really what can be done. I tried that with my previous ZakStunts track and failed miserably. I wanted to have many competitive cars.

Ha, ha!  Glad it worked!  It's curious that it's a PVS, because the uncompressed variant would be a VSH not ESH. It seems that Stunts has even more option for scenery files. Then surely a PES file would work too, but we have no way to make one. It'd be interesting to see why it looks for that one too.

The Cure

Nutella 

I began with my new job in October, so no vacations for some time. Yet, this company gives me a whole month of paid holidays per year!  That's crazy good for an Argentine!  I've never had anything like that before