...or:
Everything you know about penalty time is wrong.(Okay, not
everything; but some of these findings did surprise me.)
which is leading to a question - does anyone know how is penalty counting?
Surprisingly enough, it seems that at no point did anyone stop to document this basic bit of Stunts knowledge, ever since the times of Luke, Nailwood and Riesbich. I guess that was because the usual two-tile rule covers 95% of the scenarios met in the race track, and most of the time it doesn't matter for us pipsqueaks exact penalty for a racing line, only whether it is different from zero. Anyway, I ran a few experiments whose results seem to cover everything but the crazy edge cases involving dual-way tracks. Two interesting points they settled are:
- Skipping multi-tile elements is no more costly than cutting small ones.
- The penalty sometimes given for entering the start/finish tile through the "wrong" side does not depend on the direction of entry.
The main conclusions are included in the
penalty time Wiki article for your enjoyment.
