Messages

@Cas Ryoma asked about that (sans the CGI part) on the shoutbox -- pinging you here because the shoutbox has been moving fast lately 

@Cas is it possible to compile only the part of pretty garage which create the side view to produce an image of 640 pixels for example ? I know you draw the wheels after...but is it possible ?

Until the implementation of PTB is ready, this page on the site proper will be used to post PTB updates and archive the charts of completed races. I'll try to update it after each Wednesday and Saturday in the first three weeks of the race, as well as after the deadline.

CarEdit3 is now available from the Southern Cross downloads page as  well! Thanks to @dm_s1e6 for sharing this excellent tool with us, and to @Zapper for continuing its development

Well spotted. The crash seems to happen when exiting ZCT037's first banked corner -- maybe because of all the 46-primitive boats that come in sight rather suddenly?

[Now the game can display about 480-500 primitives]

I have spent a lot of time and attempts to try to raise the limit of 400 primitives, and I've finally made it! The gain is not immense, but it had become a matter of principle for me. Now the game can display about 480-500 primitives, which means that complex scenes will be rendered more fully. You can check how many polygons are being rendered, as well as other infos, by pressing F5.

Very good! The degradation mechanism is an interesting way to try and find a balance between the competing needs of the mod. I have done a few quick tests with detail-heavy cars like Zapper's F40 and Ryoma's Jaguar XJ220, and so far I haven't gotten a crash with this latest build.

(And speaking of tests, I drove a few laps on In Your Eyes, and it looks gorgeous with the mod  )

Oh, I thought illusion tiles were a deliberate effect of the track designers

That's an interesting point  While sometimes illusion elements are added for the visual effects (Krys TOFF, for instance, would often use them in the way), in other cases they are mainly used to manipulate track continuity and physics. A memorable example that comes to mind is the half-loop in ZCT274 -- @Argammon might tell us how much of each of those two alternatives applied there 

Then of course there are the quirks of the original rendering, with some illusion elements only appearing as you land on them, missing parts of multi-tile elements being drawn anyway, and so forth. While in the base Restunts port we'd ideally have an exact, "bug-for-bug" reproduction of the original, a mod can of course adopt whatever makes more sense for its purposes.

I'm playing with these settings and the mod is running very fluid. Granted, I have a good PC but nothing extraordinary (AMD Ryzen 7 5700U).

On my old laptop (i5-7200U), I'm trying the mod with fixed 60000 cycles on DOSBox Staging (a configuration I've been testing lately for separate reasons), and it runs well enough.

* provide me a link to the source code of your branch (if public), and maybe your replay so that we have a common reference;

I said earlier that my fork on Bitbucket was private. Embarrassingly, it turns out I was wrong about that  I must have mixed it up in my head with some of the other private Stunts-related repos I have there. Anyway, this is the fork: https://bitbucket.org/duplode/restunts . I think the only branch not available from elsewhere is the "siluro" one, which has the tweaks for the DAF Museum edition. (Also, I still plan to move this away from Bitbucket...)

Forget about dual-way, it's time for dual-track racing!

In the end, at least I did stick with one of the drafts, as opposed to discard them both  (I still hope to turn the other one into a viable competition track someday...)

I wonder about the car bonuses.

I won't mess too much with them, as you'll see shortly 

[Räcer]

Chequered flag PTB update for ZCT282!

Räcer		Time earned		Points earned		Carryover to ZCT283
Alan Rotoi		341:15		1		00:00
Argammon		383:37		1		00:00
Spoonboy		187:56		0.5		55:56
Duplode		151:55		0.5		19:55
Frieshansen		69:06		0		69:06
Mortimer McMire		37:09		0		37:09
dreadnaut		29:01		0		29:01
Zapper		8:29		0		8:29
Cas		4:26		0		4:26
KyLiE		4:16		0		4:16
Overdrijf		3:25		0		3:25

(Time earned and carryover are in "stunts minutes", that is, they have already been weighed according to the positions. As before, there might be slight differences in the hour counts in the final implementation.)

The full breakdown of real hours spent at each position is in the attached spreadsheet.

Quick update on ZCT283: I currently have two sketches unrelated to each other. I'm not satisfied with any of them right now, but something is going to come out of it -- hopefully within this evening, as I'm already late 

I was able to determine that the fault happens somewhere in update_car_speed. I cannot find where the conversion from assembly to C introduced a discrepancy wrt the original Stunts, but simply replacing the function with its original asm version solves the issue.

Good move! My guess is that the porting bug in update_car_speed is something like a subtle truncation discrepancy. I'll investigate that at some point in the coming week.

Can you compile the colour needle mod into this modded binary? Here are the details on how it works:

I believe the mods are currently separate because the needle mod was done on asmorig, while SuperSight was done on the ported code. That said, as long as the code touched by the two mods doesn't overlap (and I think it doesn't) it should be straightforward for us to compile a bespoke binary combining the two -- that's the same kind of thing HerrNove has done to avoid runniing into the de-syncing bug.

Great to see! And indeed, a lot of liberties were taken with the original design of the Jaguar.

That's a good observation. I'd say "live" versus "non-live" is mainly about aspect #1, which is something that several live race formats have in common:

• Hotseat live racing, WSM-style: Everyone physically in the same place, trying to get a result given a fixed number of attempts. Perhaps the pipsqueaks won't be literally driving all at the same time (especially if there's just one computer!), but it's close enough. Results are as live as they can be.
• Le Stunts: 12 minutes to post an 8 minutes replay, so everyone drives at the same time due to the tight deadline. Results aren't truly live, being instead compiled from the replays posted to the Forum.
• Stunts Online session: Unlimited attempts within 10 minutes to drive a NoRH lap. Everyone drives at the same time (though the individual laps aren't in sync), and the results are live.

We can of course try to find grey zones. For instance, is a race with unlimited RH and a deadline of 15 minutes a live race? What if we change the deadline to 60 minutes?

* if you use a pure Windows platform, try to build my mod (https://github.com/AlbertoMarnetto/restunts/tree/supersight – use commit 1e81d6b i.e. the current head) there and check if the replay desyncs in the same way

I couldn't get to it yesterday (it was a long day...), but now I've just done a few tests on Windows. SSTWIN.RPL and SSTWAU.RPL were driven with your mod (latest from GitHub, built on Windows), and they de-sync on plain BB 1991... but so does RSCWIN.RPL, which was driven on base Restunts built with make restunts! Furthermore, the base make restunts build also has the keyboard arrows issue.

It appears, then, that the issues affect Restunts builds with ported code (make restunts) generally, rather than just your mod or the Wine build process. The Restunts builds we had been using elsewhere (Mod 1.0, Mod 1.1, DAF Museum) were based on asmorig/make restunts-original instead. That's good news in that the issues aren't side effects of your mod, even if that also means there will be future work in debugging the ported code.

Indeed -- "correspondence" feels very appropriate, @HerrNove ! There is a long evolutionary chain linking automated replay publishing in competitions like ZakStunts to the very earliest competitions ran through mailing lists: first, with the rise of the Web, competition managers began publishing laps sent by e-mail on websites; later on, Zak hooked the mailing directly into the site, and eventually e-mails were replaced by more convenient means. The replay posting page at ZakStunts is still called "mailer" 

I wonder if building the game under Linux+Wine is introducing subtle differences.

That's definitely worth checking!

If you have the time, would you help me with a cross-check?

Sure! I should be able to do it either tomorrow or on Tuesday. I'll build your mod on Windows and redo the tests.

On repositories: I currently have a private fork on Bitbucket, which I used some time ago for working on the DAF Museum mod. While I can make it public or grant you access, given that the future of Bitbucket doesn't look too rosy I'm thinking of bringing it over to GitHub anyway.

For the moment, I have attached the Default replay I mentioned, driven on SuperSight. You'll notice that I went a little too slowly onto the bridge, and failed to get powergear. When replayed on plain BB 1991, the Indy instead gets powergear on the ramp, and so the car misses the corner after the bridge and loses its way.