stunts-cartography - vectorial track visualization tools

[CTG]

How precise is the game in re-generating the coordinates of your cars? Does it calculate only with 1/1024 part of each squares or any fractional numbers are possible? I mean: is it possible that my car seems to be exactly in the middle of the road (midpoint is 512-512 units from left and right side of the square), but in real it's 511.95346 and 512.04654?

[Duplode]

How precise is the game in re-generating the coordinates of your cars? Does it calculate only with 1/1024 part of each squares or any fractional numbers are possible?

The car state data used for the physics calculations (and Cartography traces) holds the coordinates in 32-bit integers, each unit being 1/65536 (1/2^16) of a tile. Not arbitrary precision, but a lot higher than that of the graphics coordinates, and so what you describe does happen. The game also keeps the coordinates in 1/1024ths of a tile, presumably for updating the graphics. I don't know/remember which set of coordinates is used for path and penalty detection, though...

[CTG]

Win32 executable: https://bitbucket.org/duplode/stunts-cartography/downloads/stunts-cartography-0.3.0.0-win32.zip

Norton Internet Security says "SONAR Heuristic 112" danger for that download...

[dreadnaut]

There's still people with Norton installed?! Was it there when you bought the computer and forgot to remove it?

Go, time to uninstall it: you're old enough to use a computer without (deflated) training wheels.

[Duplode]

Win32 executable: https://bitbucket.org/duplode/stunts-cartography/downloads/stunts-cartography-0.3.0.0-win32.zip

Norton Internet Security says "SONAR Heuristic 112" danger for that download...

Must be a false positive. Norton doesn't have the grace to explain what that heuristic means in their knowledge base, but I wouldn't put beyond it being scared by web server launching.

[zaqrack]

Win32 executable: https://bitbucket.org/duplode/stunts-cartography/downloads/stunts-cartography-0.3.0.0-win32.zip

Norton Internet Security says "SONAR Heuristic 112" danger for that download...

damn we are busted. that was a virus coded by Duplode to fetch RPL files from all who install the cartography tool

[CTG]

Another question: what does define your / your opponent's exact starting position? The replay file or the game engine? I know, the replay also defines the track (and the start/finish line), but I mean the left or right lane.

[Duplode]

Another question: what does define your / your opponent's exact starting position? The replay file or the game engine? I know, the replay also defines the track (and the start/finish line), but I mean the left or right lane.

The engine. The replay file does not contain coordinates, only keystrokes. I don't think we got to pinpoint exactly where the starting offset from the centreline is applied during the 2010 restunts studies, but I guess it wouldn't be too difficult to find out.

[Duplode]

I finally brought myself to do some work on Cartography. This time I won't dare to announce a release date; however, I am quite optimistic after working around the most annoying issue standing in the way of the 0.4 release. Other good news include that a recent new version of the drawing library gave us a noticeable speedup (up to 30% in some cases), and that some technical adjustments are making the annotations/lap trace code a lot less repulsive.

[Duplode]

Stunts Cartography 0.4.0.0 is now available! New stuff includes:

• Support for lap traces and animation frames. Lap traces can be loaded with or without overlaid cars, and can be used either as a normal map annotation or as part of the new flipbook feature, which renders a PNG file for each replay frame and packages them all in a zip file.
• repldump2carto, an auxiliary separate program which generates input for the lap traces by extracting coordinates from repldump binary data (repldump is dstien's DOS game state logger; you can get it from Southern Cross). The output is a plain text file table, so beyond using the coordinates in the track viewer you can, for instance, easily import them into an Excel file.
• Autocompletion in the base path and file selection fields, which makes selection of tracks and replays much less annoying.

As of now, it is possible to generate a video animation of one or several replays, like the Z147 one I prepared a while ago, using just the tools mentioned above (repldump, repldump2carto and the track viewer) plus a video tool like FFmpeg to combine the PNG frames into a video. The provided documentation (README.txt, REPLDUMP.txt and the annotations help page linked from the track viewer) explains in broad strokes the necessary steps; if you have any doubts or would like a proper tutorial, just ask here.

Links
Win32 executable: https://bitbucket.org/duplode/stunts-cartography/downloads/stunts-cartography-0.4.0.1-win32.zip
Source code: https://bitbucket.org/duplode/stunts-cartography

Technical note: You will need a reasonably recent version of your browser for the track viewer to run (Firefox 11+, Chrome 16+, Internet Explorer 10+).

Looking forward for your opinions and suggestions. Enjoy!

Edit: The donwload link now points at the 0.4.0.1 zip. The bugfix release was needed due to a subtle bug which led flipbook zips created on Windows to look wonky on Linux.

[RacerBG]

I have followed this from a long time and I think that the progress is great! Keep up with the excellent work and happy racing!

[Duplode]

I have followed this from a long time and I think that the progress is great! Keep up with the excellent work and happy racing!

Thank you I do not have concrete plans for a new release at the moment, though there are a few features I would like to add eventually, such as independent captions (by "independent" I mean not attached to a car).

[Duplode]

I'm happy to finally announce the release of Stunts Cartography 1.0.0.0! This version includes the new features I have used in Cartography videos and maps over the last year, and also fixes several major annoyances. Here is the Windows binary download link (let me know if you need a Linux binary as well). To use it, put the stcarto directory into your Stunts folder, and run the stcarto executable from a command line. You can use stcarto --help (or stcarto viewer --help, etc.) for brief usage guidance, check the readme for more detailed notes, or ask anything about it here 

Here is a list of changes since the previous release:

• biggrid CLI subcommand, for rendering multiple tracks in a single map.
• r2c CLI subcommand, which corresponds to the formerly separate replaydump2carto executable.
• t2c CLI subcommand, analogous to r2c but for trackdata dumps, currently supporting trackdata09 (F4 camera positions) and trackdata10 (corner sign positions).
• Various improvements to the viewer GUI (which is now launched through the viewer subcommand).
• Show track name and scenery in the viewer GUI log.
• Tracks with Bliss metadata are now accepted by Cartography (they were formerly rejected by the file size checks).
• New types of annotation: markers and standalone captions.
• Frame-bound standalone captions for adding timers and other changeable information to flipbooks.
• Annotation captions in flipbooks can now show car speed, current gear and height, in addition to time.
• Fixes to the behaviour of the caption alignment options
• Alternative two-tone terrain style, inspired by dreadnaut's 4DOPEN terrain editor.
• Option for a transparent low ground background.
• Various visual fixes to track diagrams.
• Support for generating SVG flipbooks.
• Support for building Cartography with the SVG and Rasterific backends of Diagrams, making the Cairo/GTK dependency optional.
• Updates for building with GHC 9.0.2 and recent versions of dependencies.

[alanrotoi]

It works in windows 7 64 bits version and Chrome

[Cas]

Hey!  That's lots of improvements!  Does the option of not depending on GTK or Cairo mean that a Linux binary would likely run out of the box on any Linux distro?  And about support for Bliss metadata, does it use it or just accept it?  If you need quick details on the text and binary overlaid and split formats, just let me know. It's pretty simple anyway.