Messages

Come on guys, track is active! I know that "blind" racing sucks but still... Does it help if I try to update the site tonight?

Maybe it will, especially if there are any new replays  I considered trying to improve a bit on the weekend, but there are so many intimidating hard sections I haven't done properly on my current replay that I didn't knew where to start...

Regarding JS races, only those with video proof required for all drivers will be implemented, which means no race so far, and probably none until Igor changes his mind and starts to ask for videos...

My question is a bit different. I asked when some drivers who currently race in JacStunts will join in FTT too... 

Oh, OK. But it seems they are not so interested...

Is it so even for you, Duplode...?
It should be nice if someone of them as Rudah, Nemesis or others would like returning our regular "visits"...

It would be nice, indeed... me and Krys have mentioned FTT a couple times on the Orkut forum, and Rudah once mentioned his intent of having a go at it, but it didn't materialize up to now (we were racing 0107 by then IIRC). Maybe the final Indy race would be more attractive for any debuts?

I'm going to try JACS as soon as I can. I hope they will also come to Unskilled.

Nice to hear!

Before I forget, here are them:

1º Mark L. Rivers - 2:15.10 - +10
2º Felipe NEMESIS - 2:18.00 - +8
3º Daniel DUPLODE - 2:19.05 - +6
4º Rudah FLASH DRIVER - 2:21.20 - +5
5º Krys TOFF - 2:23.15 - +4

Classificação Parcial:
1º Mark L. Rivers - 30
2º Felipe NEMESIS - 24
3º Daniel DUPLODE - 20
4º Krys TOFF - 9
Rudah FLASH DRIVER - 9
6º Marcelo THYASROCK - 8

Round 4 is already on since Monday, the car to be used is Lancia and there is no track correction to worry about  (nor will be any to the end of the season). As always, all are invited...

Do you know how to draw the torque curve?

Well, I know where to find the values (0x60 to 0xC7 of CAR*.RES) and have a reasonable estimate on how they correlate to "real" physical values, if that's what you meant by draw. By "elaborate graphical displays" I meant displaying the torque versus rpm values on the screen as a graph, and something analogous for the meter X and Y coordinates (and no, I can't program this sort of drawing... ).

I'm not sure what you mean by back face in this context, (...)

Front and back face were used in the usual sense of "sidedness", according to the orientation of the normal. If you change vertexes order from clockwise to counter-clockwise you exchange front and back faces, and so on. Now, if you pick a polygon and set both C1+ and C2+ to 77777 and 77777 you'll see that, for "large" distances, it will be visible regardless of whether you are looking at the front face or the back face. With 00000 and 77777 it will be as if the front and back faces were reversed. The vertex order and Z-bias flag only are active for "short" distances; for "long" distances C1+ and C2+ do the horizontal culling. I still can't understand C1- and C2-, though...

I'm currently using rough approximation to set the number of bits based on the polygon's angle on the Y-axis. The number of bits was determined by analyzing 3000 polygons from the stock shapes.

The direction is then set by rotating according to the angle around the Y-axis on the XZ-plane. Although we should check the range covered by each bit, the current solution appears to be surprisingly accurate. The only in-game test I've done so far was on Cody's Ranger. With proper culling data the glitchy polygons in the car selection screen disappeared!

I tested the solution for the Skyline, and it seems to be working perfectly indeed, both for car0 and car1  Users should only avoid using non-planar polygons or polygons with three or more co-linear vertexes, or be ready to fix the culling data, as the normal determination may not work properly in those cases (that is, obviously, not fault of your code...). Re-calculating the culling data for the default cars, your approximation matches the original patterns very well, usually only setting one or two extra bits on at most per polygon (it's better to set more bits on than less, anyway).

But will it make any difference performance-wise?

Testing with the downscaled Corvette car0 shape I mentioned some posts ago, the minimum number of DOSBox cycles needed for reasonable fluency with two cars loaded has dropped from 16000 to 14000. Some improvement, but still not enough to use shapes with ~200 polygons... 

I noticed your wiki edit, nice find! It looks like the game ignores these values when reading animation frames, I had only tested with opponent animations.

The game ignores those coordinates for moving parts of the dashboard as well, which have their positions controlled by CAR*.RES.
Speaking of bitmaps, there is one feature that will probably be necessary: a "Color to alpha..." option. I have not found a way to use the FF value of the palette and/or preserving the transparency within GIMP during the Import/Export cycle, so I had to paint the areas I wished to define as transparent with an unused colour from the palete and them replace it by FF on an hex editor. Allowing for that substitution to be done within Stressed is probably the easiest solution for the issue.

Official image of Williams 2009:

Even if the high rear wing and, in the case of this Williams, the strangely shaped nose are kinda ugly, they seem to make the overall car shape more "lively" and interesting, a little bit like those weird cars from the seventies. I liked the result...

I hope to see a team competition in ZSC 2009... I never understood why Duplode and Mark are racing alone. With a good teamwork they could easily beat Ayrton.

In my case, I think it had much to do with the timing of my entrance on the community, maybe mixed with a little bit of a "lone wolf" attitude. After realizing the potential to be competitive, I set up to make my way up the scoreboards as far as possible. And under the circumstances of Season 2007 - dwindling number of pipsqueaks, no two active teams battling in the same scoreboard region, almost inexistent midfield battles in contests other than USC - I had little incentive for looking for a team back then. A year and a half later, looking from the perspective of a more seasoned pipsqueak, I'm glad to see that situation is getting reversed - and if we're indeed going to have fierce team battles in Zak'09 I would dearly consider options for taking part into it   

PS.: On Duplode/Darkie speculations: back in April we had some chats at JACStunts on forging a partnership, but just before it could materialize DC's computer broke down and he has not returned since then...

PS2.: As for Duplode/Mark, well, the only thing that I can restate at the moment is the deep admiration I have for my favourite rival...

Wider, cleaner, better.  Row widths on the scoreboard are shorter and feel more natural under my FF2 as well.

My (weak) initial lap is already on your mailbox. It's 2:02.20...

Long and painful... for the moment, I'll be really pleased if I get to perform a better race here than in Ózd...

Well, I think the most direct way to reply to Mark's post without getting at a loss for words was to arrange time in the morning to drive an opening lap immediately...

For some reason my message gets truncated in the middle of the lower case character set, even though if I click edit I can read the whole thing...?!

Dark Grey (~90% chance of being included)

Weeeeh!!!! That and having Silver confirmed is all I need

OK, probability has just increased to 99% 

Cyan (99% sure not to include it)

Please don't

Please don't include it or please don't exclude it?

Brazilian Portuguese, for the record... 

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A bit more conventional than the European ones (the French...!!). The sequence is with a "standard" WinXP box, for a while ago I found there is a whole lot of extra stuff (European special chars, math symbols, etc.) under AltGr on my Linux (or at least on home my home computer setup).

The specs on those sheets should be enough for building a good *.RES - with power output and max torque and their locations in rpm a reasonable torque curve shouldn't be too hard to guess after having a look at the profile of a similar van (even if it's not exactly the same). I promise I won't take too long to look into it, even if it will probably not be before Zak's contest. Just a question: which gearbox should I choose?

And BTW, those pics of the dashboard are really clean shots. With some luck even a direct conversion might be feasible 

Anyway, as long as there's a yellow color, there's no need of other ones, except black/dark grey maybe.

You'll be pleased when you get to see the car painted in yellow then, I think it looks particularly good

Anyway, I forgot to append to my post a list of some available colours, ordered by the (current) likelihood of me including them. Please comment if you have strong feelings on any of them:

Dark Grey (~90% chance of being included)
Golden
Dark Green
Dark Red (if possible, darker than the default Vette colour)
Light Blue (lighter than cyan, I still need to confirm if that's really viable)
Orange-ish brown (same as above, just had the idea and need to check feasibility)
Light Purple
Black
Light Green
Pink
Cyan (99% sure not to include it)