Messages

Or... the new pipsqueak can join the team, but cannot score for that season?

Right, I was thinking about something of that sort, that is, not just to find a zip online to download, but cars in a garage could just as well be zipped. Currently, PG is only moving files. The convenience is that the user can come and drop car files in the garage directory and they'll be picked up, but generally, it'd be good to implement zip at that level too.

Definitely!  A UFO!

Just gave it a good ride!  It feels more powerful than the Melange, but with a similar handling, clearly surpassing the IMSA standards, but friendly, comfortable

I'm thinking that we all have one or a few tracks of our own that we're particularly proud of or that played a significant role in the community, maybe tracks that are referenced in different circumstances. In my case, 4:00am is clearly my favourite and because it's been around many times, some time ago, I decided to create a Wiki article specially for it: https://wiki.stunts.hu/wiki/4:00am

Talking with Alan Rotoi about one of his tracks, I thought I'd make a thread for us to tell about our best tracks and possibly to promote special articles for the few best.

Going back to my own track, I created 4:00am around 2006 because I was participating in WSC and Paleke had had an idea of making a track design contest. Each pipsqueak could submit up to two tracks, if I remember correctly, and then, everybody should vote for their preferred and second preferred track excluding their own and I think the first one would get two points and the second, one point, from each pipsqueak. Adding up, you'd get to sort posted tracks in order and the top four would make it to the tournament. 4:00am was one of the winners.

When ZakStunts opened to posting pipsqueak's tracks for all months, I posted 4:00am, which was well received. Later, it was featured in R4K, which wasn't a problem since the racing format is different. When I started distributing Bliss, I included the track initially as the default track you'd use to estimate your coefficient, but then, after organising Race For Immortality, I switched to the Bliss track, yet kept distributing 4:00am in the package. Recently, when DOS Game Club and our community met and the Leaderboard was created, I also posted 4:00am there.

So how about you guys?

Oh!  I think the most significant tracks each of us made should have their articles. I wrote an article about 4:00am and I'm sure there are many tracks that deserve one. This one looks very important!

Ah!!  I'm looking at the wrong one. This is the regular CCC with the NoPG car set!  Sorry, ha, ha

The version being specified is indeed important. What about several versions of the same car when the author makes an upgrade?  Just curious. But it does sound good.

Having the internal files specified like that does help. Of course, one could just unzip the file and look, but being able to gather the file names from the list itself is quicker.

If all cars are going to be in Zip format, that structure is perfect. One thing I could point out is, suppose that for some reason a car is not zipped, then how would a link to the individual files be specified?  Maybe just take the same zip directory and get to the last slash.

About YAML files, I don't think it's difficult to read a specific YAML file and they look good, in contrast with JSON. My concern was about having to support the whole YAML spec, which is very large, just to read a specific case, since that would either force me to include a 3rd party library and make my code large or have dependencies... or, write a very long parser that could have bugs. Yet, whenever it's sufficient to just parse a specific case, that's not a problem for me. This other format does look very simple indeed.

Ah!  Great tribute!  Honouring one of our greatest legends. Uhm, which is that track on the left hand side?  It's not AbuRaf's Avenue. Maybe a track he won on?

Really convenient!  The only thing I had done in that regard was when Daniel3D asks me to auto-generate a spreadsheet with the car specs. Not sure where I left the program that generates that. But it's a lot better to be able to just select which cars and characteristics you want to compare, like you do here

Uhm... was the purple Lambo in the default replay already present in the DOS version?  I don't remember because I never let the demo play, ha, ha. I used to when I had 1.0, but there I had a different demo

Hey, I think this got too complex. I've realised the solution for all of us is very simple. When we see something we don't like, we tend to feel that our work is being sabotaged and we have the urge to respond quickly. I understand Dreadnaut perfectly on this because I feel the exact same way. But we both know this is just a feeling and we really just want to do our work and follow our plans and develop. So... I cooled down and thought "what is it that is causing the problem and how can we get rid of only that?"

Well, the idea I proposed initially was that CRIs should have: an ID, car name and list of files. Any more information can be there, but is not necessary. Now I think we just need to restructure it this way: an ID, car name, list of files and where to find them. With that, the conflict is over. Example (doesn't have to be this format):

Code Select Expand

car:
 name: Porsche March Indy
 id: PMIN
 files:
 - pmin.zip
 location: https://whatever.com/car
car:
 name: Some Custom Car
 id: SCCR
 files:
 - carsccr.res
 - stsccr.3sh
 - stdasccr.vsh
 - stdbsccr.vsh
 location: http://this.otherplace.net/carfiles
This means that, if I want to grab pmin.zip, I'll curl it down from https://whatever.com/car/pmin.zip and if I want to get stdasccr.vsh, I'll go and download it from http://this.otherplace.net/carfiles/stdasccr.vsh.

Done. So, if you have a tournament and want to host your cars, that's OK. If you want to have people get them from the Archive instead, it's OK too. I don't get into convincing people to do either way. But, regardless or where the cars are located, you, in your site, provide the list, the CRI, which is the thing that doesn't make sense to centralise. There really isn't much philosophy here.

Like always, I'm open to ideas on what to add or change. I just don't want to be told not to develop something. I'm trying to cooperate here. I hope that is always clear.

This is really good!  So the report would separate the list of differences by car ID, in the same format, right?  Very useful for somebody who's working on a car and needs to check without going back and forth between existing cars.

I still have to release a car of my own!

Yeah, I got that feeling from our previous discussion in the previous posts of this thread, but I still think we're on the same page on what the Car Archive intends to do.

Well, to clarify on my end, I don't intend to duplicate anything. I am aware that repositories already exist and have existed for a very long time. I only want my garage program to be able to access them as well as the Archive and I would like that, if anybody happens to have an repository for any reason (for example, it'd make sense for a creator to want to have their own car repository with their own cars even in spite of the existence of a centralised archive), they can easily gain access to their own files through Pretty Garage. This should not interfere in any way with the Archive. That's to explain the idea I originally came with and I still have.

Now, after our conversation here, I have taken what you said into consideration and developed a different idea (in addition, not to replace the other one), that is that, sometimes somebody will want to be able to retrieve a list of cars, but not a repository. For example, currently, ZakStunts does not provide cars, but it does provide a list of allowed cars for each season. This may change with the Archive, but it's still something that may happen in other occasions. So the garage should be able to retrieve the list of cars from a "CRI" like the one there, but it'd be a group, not a repository. The user would have to have the cars locally. It'd nevertheless be useful, because it'd help them quickly configure their Stunts to have ZakStunts-allowed cars at hand.

I apologise for making it all too long. It's always very hard for me to summarise my ideas, especially when I'm trying to prevent clashes and conflicts. As you already know from me, I like to create and I usually have no problem to retouch, but I don't like abandoning productive ideas. I try to count to ten before replying because I tend to be more clashy otherwise. I think we both know this feeling.

That's really good!  It prevents unnecessary dependencies on third party libraries and reduces the chance of bugs on independently developed software.