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[Saturday October 21, 12:00 GMT]

Hello all!

It's time already for our next live race, and we're getting a little experimental with the rules. Welcome to the Rallycross Regionals. Prepare to have your memory tested as well as your driving skill. The rules for Stunts Rallycross are below, but first there is the order of picking the date.

Update: we picked Saturday October 21, 12:00 GMT.

Because my own evening as your host is blocked unfortunately the "Saturday afternoon in South America, late Saturday in Europe, early Sunday in Australia" option won't be contending. This means that we can pick between driving on Saturday at 12:00 GMT or Sunday at 12:00 GMT.

This should match with the following schedule, but be adviced that this weekend is very close to the usual dates for switching out of daylight savings time, so triple check when 12:00 GMT is for you!

•    09:00 Buenos Aires, São Paulo
•    14:00 Amsterdam, Budapest, Rome
•    22:00 Brisbane


The Rallycross regionals will consist of 3 races, on 3 tracks, with 3 different cars (or sets of cars), all of which will be revealed over the next two weeks.

But let me reveal the first track to demonstrate the principle. Somewhere hidden in a Finnish forest lies a track known only as Local Lap. We will race on it using... oh Otto so many new cars... any car from the tier 1 muscle car pack by Alan Rotoi, the Plymouth Superbird, Dodge Charger or Pontiac GTO. Driver's choice.

You cannot view this attachment.
(The track will receive a last minute visual modification by a randomly selected participant, something you can see from the road that prevents pre-recorded replays from entering. In this case hopefully not a pine tree.)

Stunts Rallycross rules:

In Stunts Rallycross you have 8 minutes of real world driving time to finish a 5 lap race. Laps 1 through 4 are ended by driving through the tunnel, lap 5 is ended by going across the finish line, finishing the race. At least one of these 5 laps must be a joker lap, using the longer way around. The joker lap will always start by going straight at a large split. There will never be another point in the track where you can make the same choice.

The winner of a race is the fastest valid drive measured in total ingame time (driven + penalty). Given that most of these live races become videos now I don't think we really need to confirm validity during the event, as an invalid lap would get caught eventually, but a run is valid if:
1 it's 5 laps;
2 at least one lap is a joker lap;
3 there was no dual way switching*;
4 It was posted within 8 minutes of the race start;
5 It was driven on the version of the track with the last minute visual modification;
6 The finish time and penalty time are confirmed. Finish time will usually be the replay length minus one second. A replay with a delay of shorter than one second is legal, as long as the actual finish time is stated correctly.

*for now at least, a future change could be that any lap that starts by choosing the joker lap counts as the joker lap.

(End of Stunts Rallycross rules.)

Each race of course has its own winner, but the Rallycross Regionals will also feature an overall podium. Contenders will be ranked on total in-game time (driven + penalty) across all three tracks.

Practicing the tracks is allowed, pre-recording runs is not.

Mild teaser in the title. 

As I have bragged about to some of you before (and hi anyone who came here through the video!) I have gotten to make a version of Stunts for in a museum. This metrified version of the game features the beautiful but tricky DAF Siluro, and is being featured in the DAF museum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.

The DAF Siluro is a tiny tired lightweight sportscar with stepless automatic transmission, yes, in game, and a limited slip differential for some extra terrain grip.

Now, I'm not entirely sure yet where the Siluro might be going in the next few months, to begin with I would like to make a version that fits the scale of the regular Stunts world. But that's all for later. I have been pretty busy, and for the next few weeks I'm going to be very vacationing. For now, enjoy the museum piece that is the Stunts DAF Siluro edition.

To run this game, like most versions of Stunts, you need DOSbox or another DOS emulator. Mount the unpacked DAF folder containing all the game files as a drive, and start the game by typing "start".

If you did not come here through the video, there is a video! It can be found here, on the community channel.

And finally thanks to the community and particularly to its cluster of Daniels for the help and support. Where would we be without Daniels?



Note: the car files are using the abbreviation COUN, because the game will not work if there isn't a car called COUN. If you want to port this version of the car to another game version please use the abbreviation SILT, to keep these slots sort of standardized.

I posted this in the Zakstunts shoutbox, but I guess here is better.

I'm going to hopefully be sending some people to the community soon. I can give them exactly one link. (And it's on paper rather than digital, so it has to be a simple link.) The obvious choice is Stunts.hu. The design is a little "time capsule", but it links the forum, the wiki and the active competitions. Is there a possibility of maybe getting the Youtube channel somewhere on there as well? And is there anything else worth considering?

Is that page even sort of community controlled like Zakstunts? Or is it still Zak's baby, as the copyright notice suggests?

Edit: this project was completed, it was fun. See this topic.

So uhhhm, yeah, what the title says. No, really.

It's not a very well-kept secret that I'm working on another Stunts car, a DAF Siluro. The people in the Telegram group in particular have been seeing me spam about it a bit, and they also already heard what I'm posting here now. Anyway, because the Siluro is a concept car of which only one exists the number of good source pictures was rather small, particularly shots of the dashboard. That one car that exists luckily happens to live in a museum within my travel range though, the DAF museum in Eindhoven, which is how I knew it to begin with. So I asked the museum people if I could come over to make pictures and take measurements. So far so good.

When I was there, they told me that soon they will be swapping out their temporary exposition. The theme of the new exhibition (I don't actually know for how long it will run, probably half a year-ish) will be the 90's. Particularly cars and traffic and roads in the 90's. Stunts is a 90's game. So the museum guy asked me if I wanted to turn the game with my car into a playable museum piece. There are still some hurdles. One of which is that the museum folks being car people not computer people expect me to figure out most of the stuff about how to turn a game into a proper visitor-proof exhibit where nobody can come in and say destroy the boot up settings of the computer the game is running on. So that's going to be a challenge. Luckily the Telegram group again have been chipping in ideas, and my fellow Dutchy Daniel3D is willing to help out where he has time too. (That said: if that kind of stuff is totally up your alley, contact me!)

On the creative side they don't really expect more of me than a functional game with one DAF car and a few themed tracks (I had already been working on these beforehand, interesting happenstance, so I already have 6ish tracks ready to go). But, you know, it's kind of pretty cool to make something that ends up in a museum, so I should probably spread the love around a bit. So, do you want to build a museum piece? Do you want to turn this thing I'm making into a bigger, better thing?

If you have an idea for something you'd want to make for a museum piece DAF edition of Stunts, contact me, I'm all ears. It can be a car, it can be some other modification. There are a few demands and limitations:
- This whole deal is not final yet!!! I was asked if I wanted to do this only 3 days ago. However, because of the next item I wanted to inform people who might also really like to use this opportunity sooner rather than later.
- The exhibition opens on June 3rd. We have 3 months from when I make this post to opening day. So if you want to make something, you have to be able to make it before then.
- Everything must be related to the brand DAF. If you make a car for instance it has to be a DAF or closely DAF-related, like, as an example, the F1 car Williams tested in the 90's with a DAF transmission which they actually have standing in their museum. (The cars do not necessarily have to be realistic in performance, I already explained that even very fast late 80's sports cars can feel slow in Stunts, we are allowed to tune for the driving experience.)
- I am working on a variomatic transmission (a stepless automatic transmission included in all DAF cars) as part of my own project, between the car mass and the torque curve a reasonable approximation can be made. I'm willing to share what I make with anyone else working on a car.
- The intent is that the game as a museum piece will be primarily aimed at children, as brightly colored games drawing attention between regular "boring" museum pieces often are. I don't think I've ever seen any mod for Stunts that was in any way not suitable for children, but I thought I should mention it anyway.
- As a museum piece, a single visitor will typically not interact with the game for more than 10 minutes before their little brother makes mom tell them to let them play too, quality is definitely a higher priority than quantity. That's not to scare you into thinking you're not good enough at car making, I'm just asking to focus your effort on better, not more.
- As the person who was offered the opportunity and who is ultimately responsible for getting it running I am the project lead, and in the end what I say is final. I mean this in the sense that you can argue with me, but I can decide not to listen. I hope you all know me as a reasonable person, and I'll try to be reasonable, I just want to have it mentioned that if I think your paintjob could be taken as offensive, if I don't think making a Ferrari designed by Michelotti who also worked for DAF is a strong enough connection to justify having it in the game, if I think your dashboard needs more work or if I want my own car to be first in the line-up, because I have a big ego, I can make that call. To prevent disappointment as much as possible contact me with your ideas before you pour a 40 hour workweek into your ultimate masterpiece.
- The game will of course eventually be shared with the community. I'm not sure of this will happen before the end of the exhibition.

So, yeah, lots of text. I barely know what to make of it myself at this point. Stunts as a museum piece. Interested?

[How does this work?]

Would you like to get into car building, but is the sheer amount of things you'd need to know too big? Would you like to finally finish another build 8 years after your last one? Or are you going so smooth that you'd like to be challenged a bit by other people's ideas? Then this is the project for you. I'm looking for 8 adventurous souls, 7 not counting myself, to build a car together.

How does this work?

I have split the car making process into 8 steps. Each person does one step.

The 8 steps (longer descriptions further down) are:

1 Base shape (car1)
2 Other models/details
3 Paintjobs
4 Base performance
5 Engine and gearbox
6 Base dashboard image
7 Dashboard implementation and details
8 Text, quality control, wiki information, name

As a base rule you can check the work of others, but you cannot change it. If you notice the physical model of this bus is 12 centimeters long you can check with the base performance person whether that was intended, but if it was you can't go "that's stupid, I'm making it 20 meters". Similarly the paintjob person might ask if the model people are willing to change the polygons around to allow for certain paint patterns, but cannot dictate it. See it as an exercise in trust.

Not all steps are equal. Some are more work than others, some give more creative input than others, some require more technical skill than others. I'm hoping that within our community we'll be able to find someone excited about every job.

Because the passage of time is a thing and the car eventually needs to be done each person will in principle have a month to get their step done. Now, sure, you can't plan your summer vacation or your job's crunch time around a Stunts project, but the project is the most fun if everyone gets to see progress. If you don't have time for a big job, please don't sign up for a big job. Speaking of which...

How do I sign up?

You sign up by posting below, saying you'd like to join the project, and giving a top three of the steps you'd like to handle, ordered from first preference to third. (If you've become enthusiastic immediately but would like to do a little bit of thinking or ask for advice before committing to a list of roles that's fine too. As long as I eventually get it.) Then I will try to work out together with you who goes where in the project. If there are too many or too few volunteers I will also try to deal with that like an adult who would like to do cool stuff with you all. As a final thing: don't forget to mention if you'd be up for making this a video (see the last bit of this post).

The steps

1 Base shape (car1)
You have quite possibly the most creative control but also one of the more demanding jobs, you get to make the car's ingame model (car1 in the .3sh file) with Stressed. Let your creativity run rampant, as if you're writing the setup for a joke others will spend half a year telling. No pressure. You either know how to make a good less buggy model or are willing to learn.

2 Other models/details
You port car1 over to car0, where you can add the sort of details that only work in the showroom. You also take care of the car2 model that rolls out of the truck at the start and of the explosion shards. It's a good job if you're looking to get more comfortable with doing graphics work with Stressed and/or Carworks.

3 Paintjobs
Odds are that the model people already sort of made one paintjob, as it's just really useful during model making to see how things are going to look, but they're certainly not the boss of you. You know how some cars just make you want to drive them as you select your color? That's your task. Little technical insight is required, but an artistic look on things like shading is welcomed.

4 Base performance
You set the weight, size, wheel coordinates, air resistance, grip, grip modifiers and anything else you can think of that's not the torque curve or the gears. Actually setting the values is very little work, but it's massively important to the character of the car (among other things your weight value determines the car's powergear category), so we all trust you to think hard about it and to test if you like it.

5 Engine and gearbox
You set the torque curve, the gear ratio's, the maximum and idle rev's and the upshift and downshift points for automatic gears. If this appeals to you you might be a real gearhead. Flat track and real top speed as well as acceleration times all depend upon your work. You test hard to give the user the smoothest experience. The one performance related thing you can't set yet is the gearbox coordinates.

6 Base dashboard image
Remix, pixel art or based on a photo, you deliver a stunning dashboard. Your work is what will be in peoples' field of vision while driving. You create the dash, dast and dasm images for the stda----.vsh file.

7 Dashboard implementation and details
You get to do a little bit of everything. You do the gearbox including coordinates in the res file and you make the roof image (if the vehicle has a roof). You set the color and locations of the steering wheel dot, create the images in which the steering wheel is moved and set the needle positions for the meters in the .res file. I'll be honest, this is the role I'm least sure about because those last two in particular can feel a bit like that step that takes too long but just needs to be done. If you like the idea of most of this job but maybe not all of it you can work with person 6 and others to see how work can be divided better.

8 Text, quality control, wiki information, name
Yes, you read that right. 7 other people worked on it, you get to name it. I'm sure you'll think of something better than "Community Car" You also provide the information for the car select screen and for the wiki, things like top speeds and acceleration times. You perform rigorous final tests and check back with the team if you find anything odd and possibly unintended. If it turns out I forgot steps, you are the person responsible for getting them done.

Video project?

As an extension to building a car I thought it might be cool to have a video about it on our (by that time no longer) new Youtube channel. If everyone joining the project likes this idea I think it might be cool if we have like 2 minutes of footage with text or voiceover for each step. Everything you need to know to build a car is way too much information for one video, which is why we have the wiki and the forum, but a quickstart guide that doubles as a cool community project video could be fun. Maybe for instance you could record two minutes of working with stressed and talk over it about your design goals for this project or your best practices for making 3D models, whatever you like. But consider this an optional extension.

I just had a rough idea, and as I can't decide whether it should go in cars and rules or car bonuses I decided to set up a new thread for it. I'm proposing to help limit the amount of powergear surprises by rewarding people for finding them, preferably early-ish in the race. I suggest doing this by setting up a side competition, but with a bit of a twist compared to the amateur league or the GAR scoreboard. What I'm thinking of is closer to the mountain classification in cycling races, you get points for doing things that are almost unrelated to the main competition and in some cases even hurt your own chances in it.

Now, how to do that is a bit of a thing, I just thought of the concept within the last hour or so, but as an example of how it could be done consider the following:

- There is a little side scoreboard tracking only times posted using one of the powergear capable cars. (The status of something like the Speedgate is going to be a hot topic the first time it appears together with this concept.)
- Every race has three moments of measurement: the end of the public days, the start of the quiet days, and the end of the race.
- If you have the first, second or third fastest (corrected) time on the powergear scoreboard when one of these moments of measurement arrives you get 3, 2 or 1 point(s) respectively.
- These points are doubled if that replay also holds the same spot on the overall scoreboard. So for instance third on the side scoreboard and third on the overall scoreboard gets you 2 points. The reason for this is that we are mostly interested in having people find PG lines when PG might actually win the race. (It still counts if the PG replay would have gotten the same spot on the overall scoreboard if only you yourself hadn't posted a faster time with a non-PG car. That particular rule might be a little tricky to implement automatically.)
- The points are tallied up towards the end of the season, the person with the most points at the end is the powergear champion.

Possible variations:
- The second point of measurement could be moved earlier in the race. Like say 20 days after the start, rather than at the start of the quiet days. I'm not sure what would be best. Setting the point of measurement on the quiet days might make people think "it's just three days, I can reveal my time now and score points on both moments of measurement". At the same time people might feel like a revelation that late doesn't give everybody a fair chance to try and beat the time.
- The idea started with the concept of a bounty, where either the track editor, the previous point winner or an appointed "PG sheriff" would set a challenge like "the first person to post a replay that gets into PG at the loop and stays in it until the second tunnel without incurring penalty time gets a PG point", but I figure while fun that idea has too many moving parts and at least one person who is not allowed to compete.
- Another variation could be not limiting the points to the first three positions, but rather handing out points in the same way as for a regular race, starting at 12 points. The reason I propose not doing that is a little sneaky maybe: I want to motivate people who see a PG possibility but figure they'll never be the race winner anyway to go for those early points. Scoring six points for the powergear cup plus leading time by grabbing a temporary first place after ten days of racing is a pretty sweet bounty. And the rest of us gets a warning that this could be a PG race and a replay that shows the line that has been discovered. At the same time only rewarding the top three might demotivate non-top drivers, they don't need to look for powergear lines because they feel like they're not going to make the top three anyway...
- Dropping the "double points if your lap beats non-PG cars" thing might make the rules clearer and easier to understand.

So, that's my idea for a combination side-competition - powergear surprise-finder for next season. Any thoughts on it?


TL;DR: A separate seasonal scoreboard in which you get points for having fast powergear laps at the end of the public days, at the start of the quiet days and at the end of the race. (This bit added for clarification.)

Anyone up for doing the Stunts Online Christmas Festival together? I'm planning to be online on Thursday December 29, 3 days from now, at 14:00 CET, which should be 10:00 Argentina and coastal Brazil time and 23:00 in Brisbane, I think. Join me for some light live racing on Zakstunts' Christmas tracks, sponsored by Hunterboy.

Original race information posted by Hunterboy in the Zakstunts chat box:

ZakStunts 2022 might be over, but I wanted to do one more thing to send off this year. Introducing the STUNTS ONLINE CHRISTMAS FESTIVAL! If you log into Stunts Online (https://stunts.hunterboy344.com) with the server stunts-server.hunterboy344.com, you'll notice that I've updated the track roster to include every single ZakStunts end-of-the-year track (November or December for earlier seasons)! These tracks will last through the end of December, possibly longer if I forget to update the tracks again. Hope you all enjoy, and happy holidays!!

Hi party peoples, this is my contribution to the attempts to pick a date for a new Stunts World/Euro Meeting.

The dates are pretty biased around my own free days, so I wouldn't count on this being the definitive list. Please name any additional options in a post below.

It looks like I can't set these polls to "show who voted for what" (if you're willing to do so, please name your votes in a post), but at least I can let people vote for as many options as they want.

As for myself... I'm still thinking...

Edit, being the fifth voter: Actually I'm just going to cross them all (I had to guess at when people would be available, so I guessed by looking at my own work calendar) except ascension, that's usually when the best kayaking happens.

Because it's a little quiet in the shoutbox, and this is good to have clear early.

If at the first split you go right you can go straight at the last corner before the first banked section, drive across file tiles of grass passing under the elevated corner connected to the big solid elevated roads functioning as walls and drive on to the other one of the split roads just before they rejoin. This route is fast, because it's a lot shorter than anything else legal I've found so far. It could very easily turn out to be a competitive line, also depending on car and such. I personally think this isn't a fun route, it cuts off about half of the track's difficulty and interesting elements and I should have found and blocked it before sending the track in.

I don't think it would be practical to restart the race with a modified track file, we tend not to do that because that way people can't keep working off their old replays, even if the times already set themselves are carried over. (If you do decide on using a modified track I would recommend the attached version, it preserves metadata.) So I think the reasonable course of action would be to have a rule that "it is forbidden to pass under the elevated corner in the Northwest of the inner section". This would be an extra rule similar to last month's "no Indy" rule.

What do you guys think? Ban it or not, and how?

Also, predicting ZCT wins with Frieshansen second and all that jazz we do in forum topics about tracks.

One of my favorite games outside of Stunts is Riptide GP: Renegade. It pushes a lot of the same buttons as Stunts does, but with some different design choices that make the experiences different enough to play both. (It's one of those games where you automatically go full throttle all the time and it doesn't have a track editor, but to make up for it you get to race a rather too literal jetski on dynamic water with opponents and get to mess around with a stunt/boost system.) And it's a lot of fun. In fact I think this is the only game I bought both on the Android store and on Steam, and I pretty much finished everything in the game on both platforms as well.

But this game is part three of a series, and they started as mobile games. With how fast new phones and operating systems come and go both part one and two have been taken off the app store since before I ever tried looking for them. Part two is still available on Steam. It's not as pretty as part 3 because it was ported over as an afterthought rather than designed for both platforms to start with, but it was good enough for me. But part 1 was sadly for me lost to the sands of time. As the developer Vector Unit has since under pressure from the market moved on from making inexpensive but superb racing experiences to mostly producing more typical advertisement and microtransaction supported projects that keep the lights on in todays market but don't quite meet the same quality standards* it saddened me to know that one of their likely best games would remain a mystery to me forever.

Until today, when I found out the first Riptide GP was preserved by at least one file sharing site. I figure that for a game like this, unavailable through any paid means, it's okay to consider the game abandonware-like** and use an option like this, and even to admit it online. So now I've got a new game to play with. My first impression is that the water is even more dynamic in this one. I can see how that could become annoying, but it's a nice variation on the theme. If I put in a lackluster Zakstunts entry for this race you know what happened.

Anyway, now this game series has a topic here. Because a racing game is not officially good until there's a post about it on the Stunts forum.

*Although it looks like they may actually be recovering. Beach Buggy Racing 2 looks a bit "Mario Kart" for my taste, but it I might have to give it a try sometime.

**Of course just after I go online to brag about being a pirate I find out one of the links to a shop on their site does still work. The Amazon App store still sells the game, even if they're one version behind. Looks like I'll be trying to make my "support the developer" donation through there. They also still have the Android version of part 2.

(Update 4 days later: all achievements. I am a boat racing god. Also I had some time left over for the first time in a year and this is what I spent it on. ...There certainly are worse options.)

On behalf of Cas and myself I have the honor of inviting you to the Flaming Exhaust event, a double live race, taking place on Sunday the 3rd of July, at 13:00 UTC, which corresponds to:
Sunday 10:00 Buenos Aires
Sunday 15:00 Budapest
Sunday 23:00 Brisbane

The races will be run using the "Le Stunts" format, where you have 12 minutes of realtime to produce a replay of 8 minutes in length. Replay handling is allowed, but every time you rewind eats into that clock!

As the last race did, we included an element to honor the last live race winner: alanrotoi. This is why the first race I present today will be run with his Lola Cosworth INDY, a fabulous fast car with slightly tricky steering, a wonderful balance between realism and gameplay. Everyone drives a different paintjob, so reserve yours fast!

The track for this race will be The Journey. As I prepare for the 7th move in my adult life, I made a track that passes by the 5 towns and cities I lived in (plus 5 more I only worked in.) Fun fact about this track: counting 5 people per boat, barn or mill, 10 per bar and gas station and 50 per apartment block, this real world inspired map can handle the population density of the real area.


The route for this track is: at every split, go straight. Shortcuts are allowed as long as you don't pass any scenery elements (buildings, trees) on the wrong side.


Layout inspired by a trick ZdnBurns posted in the thread of the last live trace.

The other track for this event is a musically inspired masterpiece: The Alan Parsons Project. A challenging track that will test the drivers to their limits as they try to keep their finishing time within 12 minutes.


Are you confused yet, at how to handle a live race on all that? I know I am! Hills, slaloms, elevated corners, a loop over the water, what madness!

We're also keeping a little bit of hype up our sleeves for this one. We will unveil our car pick and maybe one or two additional rules later. Okay, one car-hint: we will be going fast.

As always we will be looking for volunteers to make a single last minute change to the tracks (a track element or nearby scenery) as an anti-cheat measure. I personally would prefer volunteers who don't like placing slaloms.

So, are you hyped, pipsqueaks? Are you ready for a double dose of live racing action? Will you be there? We will. See you on the tracks.

Speedy greetings,

Cas and Overdrijf

I just realized I can do this. First person to see what "this" is gets ten points.

[How it works:]

In the past the Stunts community has seen track design competitions, and there has been talk of things like revitalizing the Zakstunts permanent competition by having one track from each year going forward join the permanent tracks. In that kind of general spirit, and to try and encourage the many talented track designers this community have who give their all for every design they do I present: the election of the best track of Zakstunts season 2020!

How it works:

To vote for in this election, you make a post in this topic in which you sort all of this year's Zakstunts tracks into three categories: good tracks (0 points), great tracks (1 point) and totally awesometastic tracks (2 points). You can have as many or as few tracks in each category as you like, each track gets the number of points that come with that category.

You qualify for voting if you have partaken in any Zakstunts race or other Stunts portal related racing event (Race for Kicks, live races etc) during 2020 or any previous year (and you weren't one of CTG's ghosts  ). So that's everyone here. You can vote for these tracks using any criteria you like, and you can choose freely to explain your reasons or not. If you were the designer of one or more of the 2020 Zakstunts tracks you cannot vote for your own track(s), but your track(s) get(s) a free point ones you vote for the other tracks, as if you had ordered them in the "great" category. Voting is open until the end of January. Ones it is the first of February 2021 everywhere on Earth new votes will no longer be counted. The track with the highest point total wins.

(Legal note: this election was not passed by Zakstunt's main administrator or executive commission before publishing, no rights (other than bragging rights) can be derived from winning this competition. Complains about the procedure can be directed towards Overdrijf, who will surely take any suggestions into consideration for next year.)

(Yes, the results would look less brutally harsh towards whichever track ends up getting the fewest points if the categories were worth 1, 2 and 3 points respectively, but this way I need less fingers to do the counting.)

The contenders:

ZCT222: Defensive Driving


ZCT223: Sand am Main


ZCT224: Addition


ZCT225: PSX Madness


ZCT226: Terra Australis


ZCT227: Run Through the Jungle


ZCT228: Messa


ZCT229: b²-4ac


ZCT230: Rattlesnake


ZCT231: Kowloon


ZCT232: Serial Killer


ZCT233: Home Office


Start your engines, fasten your seatbelts, vote!

No wait, I've got a better weirder idea.

It all started with my concept. We're all a little weirded out by the current situation. Isolation, boredom, loneliness and even death itself are looming over us. So I thought: you know what we need? More of that. We need a proper pipsqueak quarantine facility.

Below I've posted 9 tracks, each around a bit under a minute in length. I've included them both as an image and as an attached track file. These tracks are called Quarantine Room 1 through 9. Each track can be obtained by replacing the lone arrow shaped highway piece in the split track section of that track with a start/finish pointing in the same direction. (As per the "Le Stunts" format we don't want to ever cross the finish line, which is why the start/finish is on a side track.) We're going to be doing one of these 9 tracks. Dreadnaut, as the person who took initiative for this live race, gets to say which track, and post his choice somewhere early this weekend, after which I'll supply the ready to go track for everyone who wants to join. But sd4000, as the first person to respond, gets to name which car we'll be using. This can be any car, but if it's a car from outside the current Zakstunts lineup there needs to be a way to download it. He has to make up his mind before Dreadnaut posts and the other way around, so have an answer ready in your head before this weekend. This way sd4000 will know roughly what kind of track he's picking a car for, but not which exact one.

Yes, it's overly complex, what were you expecting?

(If we want a second or backup race Cas can pick the track and Afullo the car, even if he can't make it to the event itself.)

Anyway, here it is:



Have fun picking!

That's right, you heard it here first: you can now get a traffic ticket for driving while you drive.

I've been meaning to try this for some time since I noticed Dosbox exists for Android. (Only testing Android. Don't have acces to a suitable Apple device.) There isn't a single official port, but there are several companies with their own port, most with a free and a payed version. There also appears to be at least one other emulator, which I ignored on the grounds that I don't want to be learning a new typing based program on my phone. I downloaded several of the free versions of Dosbox, gDosBox, IDosBox and Freebox, and after trying them a little bit went ahead with Freebox (by Fishstix) because they immediately showed me a good joystick that could work for Stunts. So here are my results:

The good:
-The game runs!
-Every feature can be accessed.
-The ingame joystick support recognizes the emulated joystick.
-Manual transmission works with the joystick (the two buttons are essentially space and enter)
-The aspect ratio is kept reasonable, seemingly going for a 640x480 feel rather than stretching to phone size.
-The sound works.
-You can add custom tracks, cars etc.
-Replays can be saved, and you can call on a keyboard for naming them while the game is on joystick mode. (The back button of the phone opens the replay menu.)

The bad:
-DosBox eats a lot of power. Eventually the program ran sort of smooth enough with the internal settings on low (except the simulation speed) and an emulation speed of 6000 calcs/second with a frame skip of 4. On the PC the general rule of thumb is you use at least 7000/second, preferably 20.000, and frameskip isn't really used. As a result the game isn't quite smooth enough for serious racing. But I could probably get the hang of it enough to get some reasonable mobile experience out of it.
-This Dosbox port automatically loads your downloads folder as its disk, meaning over time stray downloads will build up between the dozens of files Stunts uses to run. (You can probably run the game from a subdirectory or something, but I haven't gotten that far yet.)
-Stunts wants to calibrate your joystick when you switch to that setting (keyboard and mouse is the default on startup, but it works well enough to get to the menu), try to do this correctly, or you'll be stuck only making corners in one direction.
-I'm suddenly really bad at this. O god where is that car going?! Although honestly I'm not as bad at it as I'd thought I'd be. I can totally find the straight line on the straight. Most of the time.

So, yeah, it was a fun experiment. I own at best a mid range phone with a 1.5GHz CPU and 2GB of RAM. (Where are the days you could run Stunts on 1/10th of that?) so for a device two generations or so ahead this could actually work well.

EDIT Januari 8th 2019: I made a slightly improved version. The updated version is in the DTM 1.1.zip, the old version in DTM 1.0.zip. Behavior is exactly the same, it's just minor graphics and text fixes. Post #24 contains a bit more info about the update.



That's right, I am at it again. Coming in with not one, not two, but three new cars: the Stunts DTM pack. The Deutsche Tourenwagen Meisterschaft is coming your way. Bam.



A rivalry for the ages comes to Stunts. An Audi, a Mercedes and a BMW will battle it out. These beauty's are modeled and named after the cars from the 1990-1992 era, when these brands first crossed paths in the German touring car circus, but their performance has a little 2012-2018 era mixed in, as well as a healthy dose of "this way it's more fun". They come fully loaded for high speed racing around dynamic tracks, with the crowd favorite 5-speed gearbox and carefully tuned performance.

So they're fast, and they're fun, but one car could have done that. The point of this pack is how close these three are in performance, with a shared identity but a little flavor of their own as well. They can be raced against each other in a single race, in an IMSA Cup style format (who knows, one day) or, and this is the cool part, under a single coefficient in Zakstunts. Three cars for the price of one, races with four or five eligible cars in total. On most tracks the difference between optimized laps with all three vehicles should be less than half a second per minute of race time. So do you try to find how to get that small bonus, or do you count on the one you feel best with to take you home?

So, here are the specs (tested on BB 1.1):

BMW M3 E30 DTM:
Engine specs: DOHC inline 4, 2300cc
Torque peak at: 8100 rpm
Max horsepower: 370 HP
Transmission: 5-speed
0-60mph: 3.15s
0-100mph: 7.30s
Half mile: 17.50s
Flat track top speed: 186 mph
Real top speed: 199 mph
Strong suits: High speed acceleration, handling feedback, top speed, bugs, sharpest automatic gears

Mercedes-Benz 190 E DTM:
Engine specs: DOHC inline 4, 2500cc
Torque peak at: 8100 rpm
Max horsepower: 392 HP
Transmission: 5-speed
0-60mph: 3.15s
0-100mph: 7.30s
Half mile: 17.45s
Flat track top speed: 188 mph
Real top speed: 196 mph
Strong suits: Mid speed acceleration, handling, overshifting, smoothest automatic gears

Audi V8 quattro DTM:
Engine specs: DOHC V8, 3600cc
Torque peak at: 8100 rpm
Max horsepower: 474 HP
Transmission: 5-speed
0-60mph: 3.15s
0-100mph: 7.40s
Half mile: 17.60s
Flat track top speed: 190 mph
Real top speed: 197 mph
Strong suits: Very high speed acceleration, flat track top speed, jump distance.

The cars are in the attachment. I look forward to hearing what you think of it. Jetzt geht's los!

Note 1: This post was brought to you with the help of Duplode being awesome, and giving me advice, mostly on shape design with Stressed. The cars wouldn't have looked like this without him. The tools I used are Car Blaster by Mark Nailwood, Stressed by Dstien, a little bit of Anim8or and my trusty GIMP for image work.

Note 2: I redid a lot of things a lot of times, so it took quite some time to get to the end result. This did result into me getting some insights into the physics of Stunts, things that may or may not be known already to some people. I will share these insights in the appropriate thread somewhere in the coming weeks, with demonstration cars.

Note 3: I don't have names in mind for all the paint schemes, but #9 on the quattro is definitely called the Proudi.

Hi folks,

Long time no see. (Edit: In fact now that I look around more people haven't been talking too much. But that's fine as long as they're racing.)

I stumbled across a to me new site today, and it made me think of you guys. Classicreload.com is a game collection site similar to Home of the Underdogs and Abandonia, with a twist: the games are playable online. This includes Stunts. They have the uncracked version even, with the manual lines needed to login in their description text.

But here's the actual good part: Their game seems to have a memory. It remembers what users add to it. You can add tracks and of course high scores. I just put my name on Default, to make myself nice and visible. But I'm betting there's a few pipsqueaks here who deserve the visibility even more. So if you feel like defacing the internet a little, show those pipsqueaks how it's done.

But yeah, aside from that, good to be reading these forums again. Excuse me while I get lost for an hour or so.

Hi there again,

After a suitably long break from Stunts I have picked up another sort of project. I'm making a joke movie with "leaked" footage of a new visual setting for a different game, and what better game to use for that look than Stunts? However, the two "cars" I've made for it warp really weird the moment I try to get them to turn. They drive just fine (the car.res is just a copy of my kart at this point, as are the STDA and STDB files), but their looks get completely messed up. I thought it was because I had used 4-sided polygons that weren't flat planes, but I split all of those into 3-sided polygons, and the result stays exactly the same. Could it have to do with how the "first eight vertices are reserved for the corner vertices of the shape's bound box" (quoting the wiki), could I have screwed those vertices up somehow? Or is it something much simpler?

Anyone else who's seen this at some point?

Note: I'm only including one of the objects. The error in the other seems to work exactly the same, but it's also larger in size than anything I've made before, including my unfinished van project, so I'm trying to exclude any problems that may be due to its size from the equation for now.

Edit: The good news is: it's not the model. I've just managed to majorly screw up the .RES somehow, modifying it has given me a new variation of this bug. I can probably work around it.

Edit again: O, no, never mind, that was just the effect of crashing and restarting, the double version of the bug is less weird than the single version.

Today something happened to me, something that would change my outlook on life itself. Since I'm such a attention whore social person, I'd like to share my discovery with all of you.

I came across a picture of the outline of a real life racetrack, and I thought to myself "hé, that looks like something I could make in Stunts". So of course, I did. Below is a picture of the result, next to the real track, to scale (the yellow lines are 19 tiles or 19*205=3895 feet long). Both have an outline of the track placed over the picture. Okay, fair enough, the outline matches better with the real track than with the Stunts one, but there's definately a resemblance (I could make it fit better by removing that last chicane and moving the whole straightahead to the left one tile, but since the large corner in the middle gets blown up anyway I feel this captures the spirit of it just as well).

But the real revelation here to me is that I always found myself complaining about how there are no large corners in stunts, you always have to slow down so much (unless you use banked corners, which I always did a lot). Turns out that for racetrack turns, they're actually pretty much dead on. And yes, real racetracks are all about slowing down in the corners, but still, looking at this I guess Stunts is more realistic than I've always thought after all.

The track is the Goodyear test track in Colmar-Berg, Luxembourg (practically in the back yard of the grand duke, I guess his royal majesty likes the ambient sound of screeching tyres). But besides being a test track at times it's also used for actual races. The length of the track is supposed to be 3260 meter or 2.026 miles. Experiments with my time and average speed arround the track reveal my version is probably between 1,95 and 2.20 miles long (yes, that's a big margin, looking at the outline I'dd say a bit longer than the real thing wouldn't be a bad guess).

My only regret is I can't find laptimes I could try to beat anywhere. Too bad, I'd really hoped to be the first Stunts pipsqueak to beat a real one.

TL;DR: Wow, stunts corners are actually like the real thing!