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).