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this kicks ass

Seconded 

Nice event, and at Monza of all places!

After the inscription and a short briefing about safe driving (30 minutes), all the participants at the session (50 every 30 minutes) have made an absurd and comic run to the cars, in order to preempt the most powered.

Sort of a taste of vintage Le Mans? 

but I jumped into a white new Volkswagen Scirocco (1.4 160 HP  ))

Very respectable stats indeed! That sounds like a really cool car...

Does this mean you can only run Stunts through DosBox on Vista?
That is the death of Stunts. Unless Vista is quickly replaced by another operating system in which you can run it properly.

Well, XP can't run Stunts properly either (no sound without extra tools like VDMSound, which can slow the game quite a bit unless you have a fast computer). It's likely most contemporary newbies race on DOSBox already anyway... which is not so bad: technically, the emulation is almost perfect by now and, as computers get faster and DOSBox evolves, will tend to get even better. And that's not to speak of platform independence - Vista, Linux, Mac, you name it... The main issue, IMO, is to get newbies to be aware as quickly, easily and painlessly as possible of DOSBox usage with Stunts, for that is the future ahead of us.

Welcome Eusebio! In addition to the thread mentioned by Krys you may wish to have a look at our Wiki page on DOSBox for further info on finding the right setup for your machine.

This reminds me a bit of the Batmobile from "Batman Begins"...

My vote went for Bonzai Joe. One might wonder whether his motivation will remain steady season long, but on the other hand how Ayrton, the alternative "obvious" choice, will fare probably depends on the extent he'll focus on Zak '09. In fact, the title challenge looks very open at this point, which will make for an interesting season. And by the way, I too sense a great opportunity for Chulk in this situation...

(Comment: Oh Heavens, I'm leading the poll! That sort of prediction usually does not finish well for me... )

How about some people racing on the track?

Come on, everyone! 

Amen.

Do you accept a positive comment about the track as substitute, at least for a while? The initial 30'' section, with the multi-loop combo, is really great - one of the best I can remember from USx tracks. It definitely makes my attitude towards this IMSA race more positive.

Hadn't seen the new poll, my answer is 2^8...
Anyway, in case anyone wondered how stunts.hu pages render on a text-mode browser, here it is:

Look at polygons facing down, such as the bottom of a car body.

Indeed - there is a very good illustration of that: the floor of the cargo section of LM002's car1. It has 0xFFFE0002 for Cull H and thus is only visible from above.

After looking a bit more at the culling data displays, I realized I understood them less than I thought, so I decided to finally build a debug shape (a cute pair of multicolored giant dices) and watch the bits in action systematically. Some of the observations actually enhanced my confusion, but others were quite definite. While you may well have realized quite a few of those already, I'll summarize them:

• Consider the position of visualization as being defined in a polar coordinate system centered at the polygon, with angular coordinates theta and phi. Theta is the horizontal plane angle (the one that acts as variable for Cull H), and phi is the vertical angle, defined so that phi=0 stands for a vertical POV and phi=90deg stands for an horizontal POV. The first remarkable fact is Cull H only acts for POVs with relatively large phi angles. That is, there is no horizontal culling for high camera positions. If you start with the F3 camera directly above a polygon, horizontal culling will only be seen after lowering the camera by 7 button presses.
• Additionally, Cull H only acts for relatively large distances from the polygon. On a flat surface, the threshold is about 17 button presses starting from maximum zoom.
• The way the negative direction half of Cull H operates on vertical polygons is still beyond my comprehension (well, that's not really a conclusion...)
• Perhaps the most clear-cut find of this list is the fact that the first flag of Cull H triggers polygon display for low values of phi and beyond a threshold radius. That is, if you zoom out enough and raise the camera with the flag turned off the polygon won't be displayed, period.
• And now for something (at least for me) perplexing: There is no such a thing as vertical culling. When you analyze simple debug shapes, the whole of Cull V (and, for that matter, the second Cull H flag) appear to be utterly purposeless. The very function of the first Cull H flag, as well as the patterns shown by the disks visualization, seem to indicate Cull V has no relation to vertical culling. On the other hand, the way those bits are set is too neat to be random... the only guess I can make about their function (based most on intuition, and very slightly on some stuff I've seen while toying with actual car models) is they are involved in some sort of occlusion-by-polygons mechanism, but it's just a weak conjecture at the moment. 

Overall, I find the facts above somewhat bewildering... but if they are correct, it might be feasible to work with less variables while implementing the rest of the culling stuff. At least for a while, maybe...

Still waiting for the results though I'm sure this will be my best tip ever. Around 60 or so. Good, good, good...


(Sorry, couldn't resist being a bit annoying... =D)

I'll make it easier than FTT0109 (due to some comments about this track).

Good thing to hear!  I'm not implying #9 should be easier, but just that after four notoriously difficult tracks a little "break" is convenient  - and in my case, if it happens on the Countach race, even better!

Bonzai Joe  - 80s: The Lost Decade of Music (preface by Zak McKracken)
Krys Toff - Design Of Newbie-Tailored Tracks 
CTG - 101 Tips On How To Avoid Conflict Escalation

Duplode - "The ultimate guide to modern mainstream programming languages"

But watch out, now I (almost) understand how a linked list works in C! 

Duplode, have you tried loading the blueprints into Anim8or?

No, I didn't! Although I'm not sure if I would prefer this method to model the general shape of the car (as one would have to cope with the three dimensions at once and then correct coordinates to integers anywyay), it seems to be quite helpful for reproducing smaller details in front and rear wiews. I'll keep note of it 

I'm sure about only one thing: by the end of the race the final combo will have reached a very high position within the "legendary infamous hated track sections" ranking...  

Since this topic has links to all those blueprints, I'll explain here the trick I am using to grab coordinates for the Skyline. There is an extremely useful program called Engauge Digitizer which allows one to extract coordinates from 2D graphs and images. All I had to do was to import the blueprint on the program and define three reference (axis) points according to the desired dimensions of the car (I picked the in-game ZR1 z-coordinates and calculated the adequate in-game dimensions from the Skyline height/length and width/length ratios). After the reference points are set, the program will tell the coordinates of any point of the screen as you hover the mouse above them. Just repeat the procedure for each of the views of the car, enter the grabbed coordinates on your 3D editor of choice and that's it - lazy modeling never made so convenient...  BTW, Engauge is natively available for both Windows and Linux.