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Talking with Alan he showed me a possible model for Melange. If he'll make it by Stressed, it will be so cool...

well if it will be done on schedule I'm okay with 4 extra cars next year...

I would like to help with this, but I'm afraid I wouldn't find enough time on the following days to get it ready on time... The only possibility I see is with, say, three people cooperating (with Alan agreeing and if possible supervisioning the whole thing, of course). Any volunteers?

Good news for me...

With the same designer in USC:

- Zalaegerszeg (Indy): 1st
- Ozd (Lancia): 3rd
- Dobsina (Lancia): 1st

For me:

- Gÿongÿos (ZR1): DNF
- Ozd (Lancia): 13th
- Dobsina (Lancia): 5th

I'm afraid I can't agree...

For the rest, one favourite car, one acceptable, one avoidable, one brrrr... You know...

It seems we agree with this feeling, only that I probably mean quite different car picks 

[16 tiles = 1 kilometer]

Nope : max speed is 255mph, but you need lucky bugs to reach it.

I'm not sure the car actually goes that fast, it just says so in the evaluation...

I've had it say something like 340mph once, and believe me I wasn't going that fast

I had a replay around 400 once too, after a crash in PG. I think the car doesn't go that fast, just the evaluation page gets confused.

I think so as well - 245mph is the limit for sustainable speed - but still it is something to wonder about how the game can possibly get confused with speed readings. Maybe on some  extreme crashes the forces acting on the car are intense enough that the 245mph cap actually gets broken, if only just for a frame...

BTW, just an useful observation on tile lengths. As mentioned, a tile is 205ft long. While giving the value in feet makes sense from a stressed user perspective, track designers may find another approximation more relevant: 205ft = 62.484m. Considering 62.5 = 1000/16, we can say that for all practical purposes 16 tiles = 1 kilometer...

1. Alan Rotoi (Ayrton's sequence will be broken, not Meganium's  )
2. Ayrton (maybe a little bit less focused now...?)
3. Duplode (no reason for me to be to get so optimistic, but anyway  )
4. Mark L. Rivers (one that will push it to the edge, small gaps around his position expected)
5. CTG (CTG 5th in a mostly Acura race?! That will be a hell of a tight one! )
6. Super Brian (building up on his momentum, a mercurial performance)
7. Bonzai Joe (maybe a bit unmotivated for this one, will prefer to focus on Eszék / ISM)
8. Zak McKracken
9. dstien
10. AbuRaf70

In fact I had already tried to do those experiments several years ago (long before joining), but they were left incomplete due to lack of knowledge on the game internals. Now that the info was available, I felt compelled to finish them 

Few years ago I calculated the length of tiles to be able to tell the length of the lap (middle line).

You mean for the USC stats? I though you just used the time and the average speed data to calculate it...

You do know that this kind of s... tends to get displayed pretty prominently for everyone to see on the "most recent posts" section, right?

[How long a track tile actually is?]

I'm opening this thread as a spin-off from the "Dissecting" one, so we can post file dissections and gameplay experiments on Stunts physical model in a neat way. It could also be useful as a place for experimental CarBlaster questions. The first results I would like to announce are on a pretty basic but very relevant question that can finally be solved with good accuracy now that we have better insight on CarBlaster workings and the graphic files coordinates:

How long a track tile actually is?

The obvious experiment is to race a car through some distance at constant speed, measure how long does it take and calculate the length accordingly, the "constant speed" bit being the troublesome part: Due to truncation of digital speedometer readings to an integer value and to the nature of the rpm curve (defined in steps of 128rpm) it is very hard to be confident about keeping a constant and known speed value, even with tricks such as holding the gas steadily at redline or lowering aero drag to zero (so that the car rolls on forever at constant speed). Moreover, ideally one would prefer to run this test at very low speeds, so that times and positions can be measured with better precision; however, the speed truncation means the relative error of the speedometer is very high at low speeds (if you assume that a reading of 10mph could be anywhere between 10 and 11, that makes for 10% relative error...). Thus, I ended up doing the most obvious procedure, picking the Lada Niva and shooting it to 245mph in a 27-tile long straight, delimited by water terrain so I could check exactly where the tile boundaries were. The actual speed might be slightly higher than 245mph due to truncation, but at such high speeds the effect on the overall result of a 1mph difference would be rather small.

The results attained were as follows: the Lada took 15.4s to cross the 27 tiles at ~245mph (I was very lucky in that the measurement was unusually accurate, for the nose of the car had almost the same relative position to the start and finish lines when crossing them). Some math reveals that the straight was (assuming exact 245mph speed) 1.048 mile long, and thus each tile would have 0.03882 mile.

And now for the interesting stuff, during which I'll use imperial units so the numbers get prettier. Since one mile is exactly 5280 feet, that means one tile measures 204.95 feet, very close to an integer number... since we should expect a slightly higher speed than 245mph due to truncation, it is perfectly reasonable to admit the developers made it so that each tile has exactly 205 feet, or 62.484 meters. That, in turn, triggers a cascade of interesting implications:

• Using stressed to make experiments with the track tiles, I verified each tile is 1024 points (internal coordinates/stressed units) long (track element graphics are usually slightly longer to generate some overlap and prevent any graphical glitches at the tile junctions). Now, the size of a stressed unit can be found by doing 205/1024 and, surprisingly enough, the result is almost exactly 0.2 feet! (the actual value is 0.2002ft; it would be exact should the tile length be 1025 points, but of course an odd-length tile would not be convenient at all).


• The height of a ramp/hill/etc. is 450 points; using the 205/1024 conversion factor that would amount to 90.09ft, or 27.46m. One might wonder about what Stunts gravity would actually be like expressed into numbers then. Using the fact that a car, when not affected by any weird bugs, takes ~1.45s to drop from a hilltop to the ground, Stunts' gravity acceleration would be 26.1m/s^2, some 2.66 times the real-life value... counter-intuitive, isn't it?


• It is widely known that Stunts cars cannot go faster than 245mph due to game engine restrictions. Converting that speed to internal Stunts units (points per frame) gives 89.83 points/frame. That is, a car running at 245mph covers a distance almost equal to its length in 0.05s (the Indy, for instance, is 98 points long). Now the need for an artificial speed limit in order to avoid excessively jumpy motion at 20 frames per second appears to be perfectly natural...


• And finally: have you ever had the impression that Stunts cars are a bit too large for the tracks they race on? Well, that's not just an impression anymore: Lancia, one of the shortest original cars, is 79 points long, which amounts to 15.8ft or 4.82m, surely much larger than the real car. Larger cars like the Corvette would be well over 6 meters... The reason for those distortions is pretty clear: just like the very tall hills with strong gravity, the game designers have done so because it looks better at low resolutions. And nobody was supposed to notice anyway 

Some nice little things I, and possibly others, were curious about were clarified with those tests. Hopefully the informations can also be useful when people start to design track/scenery elements to scale...

I really don't know if I can agree with that... 

[Rejoice]

And not only what BJ said, but also Mark's tracks are pretty good ones to listen to...

The proper name of the track (...) is Rejoice,  (...)

I didn't knew this one either

Yes, it's easy to get confused about which lines are valid...  First time posted as well anyway 

The obligatory question: Krys, is dual-way switching forbidden? Your track description on the news makes it feel that should be the case...

Talking with Alan he showed me a possible model for Melange. If he'll make it by Stressed, it will be so cool...

Oh my, that's truly lovely 

You Ranger keeps improving steadily Cody  Just a few extra suggestions for making the tuning closer to your specs:

• Version 1.4 has maximum revs (set by bytes 033h and 032h) at 6598rpm, which is most likely about the value you want it to be. However, the torque curve of the car is 71 bytes long, thus extending to 71*128 = 9088rpm (each byte in the curve covers 128rpm). That means the tail of the torque curve is not being used, and the car hits peak torque right at the readline. For a more natural acceleration feel, I suggest you to compress the torque curve further, so it fits on 52 bytes (that correspond to 6656rpm).
• Remember you can reduce acceleration at high speeds selectively by raising the aerodynamic drag parameter (byte 05Eh, two positions before the start of the torque curve). Note that raising aero drag will also reduce your top speed on a flat track; although since your max revs/gear ratio combo can't make the car possibly faster than 152mph that won't concern you too much.
• If you're going to adjust the grip, you will find the "fine-tuning" adjustment at byte 0CAh useful. By reducing it from its current value to something closer to zero you can have a car with better handling than most other Stunts cars, yet not way too much better (your current specs, with 1 at 0CBh and 211 at 0CAh are quite close to IMSA car handling, actually).

And finally, when you're done with the tuning I can provide a reasonable estimate based on CarBlaster values for the HP that will be quoted on the info page 

Wonderful news Zak, all of best to you three! 

Mark did really catch all of us by surprise - I think "classy" and "stylish", as CTG wrote on the USC news, is really the best adjective for describing it.  But the pipsqueak I'm really amazed by this time is SuperBrian! His lap is very solid, and the result is even more impressive after noticing it was not only done with autogears, but also without either of the loopcuts... despite narrowly missing the third place this time, he is very likely to become a regular podium visitor as soon as he completes the switch to manuals. Congratulations Brian! 

BJ, Duplode: lazy bones! (motivating insult)

Well, it seems BJ was the one able to make lazy racing more effective this time  The comparison between our section times will be interesting - I want to find whether I dropped those two seconds due to technical or tactical reasons.