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Is "I like it the way it is" an acceptable answer? I think it manages to be the perfect combination of old and new-style web design, avoiding both the questionable artistic choices of the Web of the Nineties and the deadly pop-up/whitespace/high-latency mix of modern UIs. But let's see if others have instead ideas about further improvements!

@Alain il professore the site seems down again: I get a "suspended domain" page if I try to connect.

If you need another free provider, I'd note that Cloudflare offers unlimited bandwidth for 0$. My blog is hosted by them and I had a pleasant experience till now.

EDIT: the problem seems now resolved

Looking good, very good! Feels alright around 20k cycles on Default. I'd probably use it on level 2 or 3. Definitely not 5   I'm currently still in the vanilla camp, but I can see this giving a real advantage on LeStunts live races for example.

Thanks for the feedback! If the mod is successful think a discussion should be had whether it is competition-legal. It appears to me that many competitors are OK with that but it's worth to get an official consensus. For now, when I play competitively I do so only on the vanilla game.

Thanks to both of you for testing!

@KyLiE Happy to hear my small surprise was found by someone Not sure if the new track of the month in R4K is meant as stress test for my mod but I'm going to try it out soon. Interesting that the author is the founder of Pixelmusement, I guess retrogaming is a small world after all.

@Matei Feel free to adjust to your liking the params of the two fast modes. If you send me back the results in the next days I can bake your preferred numbers in the release.

New volunteers are welcome!

Here a refined version:
* 5 graphic modes with different detail/speed balance.
    * FULL: 180 tiles, slowest but most detailed algorithm. A fast 486 or DOSBox with cpu=dynamic are recommended
    * GOOD: 110 tiles, similar to current official release
    * FAST:  80 tiles, should work well with @Matei's machines
    * VFAST: 50 tiles, for your dear 286
    * BLIND:  1 tile, the one you're in. You think you could drive on Default with your eyes closed? Time to prove that!
* The graphic level is autosaved in a file called `STUNTS.INI`, and auto-loaded at startup (curious people might want to edit that file and set the parameter to 5 to activate the mysterious 6th graphics mode)
* Small miscellaneous improvements (e.g. F5 only prints the camera coords when the F3 camera is active)

One bug I noticed is that the Display Options menu does not work when looking at a replay on a crowded scene. A likely symptom that I am using 101% of some available resources. However, as long as all the commonly used functions work, I think this is acceptable. The Display Options can be entered in the main menu anyway.

What's the community opinion about using savestates, like those provided by Dosbox-X, instead of the integrated rewind function?

I have never tried them since I play on vanilla DOSBox, but I would like to try as it seems to me that 50% of my playtime is spent pushing the rewind button. With savestates I would be able to focus on the interesting parts: driving, taking notes, studying the map, etc.

But, I think this should be first explicitly approved, at least informally, as it would give an advantage to those willing to use a specific emulator, wrt those playing on real hardware or other platforms.

Thoughts?

The previous version with the settings mentioned before seems a little faster.

It's probably because this version uses a more stubborn algorithm that drops less tiles at each attempt, so it takes more time to converge. For the faster modes I will put back the old tile-dropping method so that the performance matches the previous version. Thanks for providing the settings, these will become the "fast" model.

Not a good idea because the options in Stunts are not saved in a file, so people would have to configure those options every time they start the game. I suppose it's also complicated to do.

Yes, but also the most interesting. And yes, what you say is on point: if I go this way I must also add the (automatic) saving and loading of the settings in a config file, or at least a setup.exe that patches the executable to auto-select the desired level at startup. Should be fast to write nowadays, with AI-assisted tools.

Providing multiple executables is by far the easiest choice. It's also intuitive, but has the problem that it does not scale if I want to add other options: the number of exes grows exponentially.

Which method I choose will depend on how much time I find.

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If anyone plays with the mod, I recommend trying to put the camera at a distance of about 32768 units. Interesting things happen on the verge of the signed rollover.

With the DOSBox keyboard commands you can increase or decrease cycles, but you cannot set the dynamic core which is key for top performance.

I meant entering "core=dynamic" at the command prompt.

I did not know you can do that, thanks for the info! Typing config -set "cpu core=dynamic" at the prompt could be easier than fiddling with the config files. I'll add that to the readme file. But I'll still provide the different modes to support older machines, other emulators and even real XX century hardware.

Idea: all cars available and no rules.

There is a way to make all cars available: set a fixed -100% coefficient to anything outside the 16-car list for the year. I'm not really joking: this might actually be a useful way to keep cars away from the competition proper while still allowing people to drive for fun with them.

I'd love to see that! But only if @dreadnaut can implement it without going crazy. I guess this would create many special paths in the code (e.g. you must not add the time to the car podiums, you cannot generate a car icon, etc.). You also cannot "just" set a coefficient, you have to ignore the time outright to avoid it skewing the diagrams.

My experience is the same.  Using the DOSBox settings that you recommend, I didn't notice any slowdown on ZCT288.  I tested this on an Intel Core i7 6700HQ and an i5 10300H.  What's your idea regarding the CPU configuration?  I know that you can change it in DOSBox using commands.  Is that it?

With the DOSBox keyboard commands you can increase or decrease cycles, but you cannot set the dynamic core which is key for top performance. DOSBox uses the dynamic core automatically for protected mode programs, but sticks to the normal core for real mode games, I guess for better compatibility. To force the dynamic core on old games like Stunts you have to edit the .conf file.

My idea is to provide different graphic detail levels so that people with different machines and levels of expertise can find a combination that works for them. I'll check if I can repurpose Stunts' options menu for this goal. Worst case I can instead provide different exes.

I am also not super happy of having wasted time to find a rules-sanctioned way to negotiate the slalom, just to see said rule changed two days after.

The slalom was a ticking time bomb at Race For Kicks that unfortunately went off during that race.  The rules were changed to make sure that it didn't happen again and to make it fair for the majority of the race.  We did the best that we could in that situation.  We like to make the competition as inviting as possible for newcomers, so rest assured, the rules won't be changing again anytime soon.

Sorry for that part: when I have complaints I use to raise them directly and not complain behind the back. I just wanted to use this as example of how having more rules tends to generate more of these situations. I understand ZakStunts had similar cases with dual-way switching and track splits neat the endline, so no tournament is safe in this respect.

I really appreciate your work on this!  I just tested it and I didn't notice any issues, but you're right, the performance is significantly worse for the same amount of CPU cycles.  A prime example of this is that there is noticeable slowdown on ZCT288 at even 250000 cycles.  Still, removing the bounds on the camera zoom is a great addition!

Thanks for the quick feedback! If you have time, try to test it with the dynamic core using the settings I wrote. In my experience, it provides much better performance than using a fixed # of cycles, however high. On my mid-level laptop (Ryzen 7 5700U) it runs fluidly.

But I agree that it's also important to have a variant that does not require to edit the dosbox.conf file. I have an idea about that, that I'll try to implement in the next days.

Hello guys,

as you might have noticed in the last days I have been working on a new release of SuperSight. Here the main news:

* Reduced exe size by 70% thanks to @llm's work. More space for tracks and cars on your floppy!
* New rendering algorithm: shows up to 180 tiles and tries to scrape every byte of memory to depict as many polygons as possible.
* Removed the bounds on the camera zoom so that you can enjoy the scenes from up high.
* Extended debug infos (F5), including camera angles for easier comparison of given scenes.

The minus side is that the engine really needs CPU power, so I recommend you to configure DOSBox to go fast:

Code Select Expand

[cpu]
core=dynamic
cputype=auto
cycles=max
The mod works fine on my PC, but before releasing it I'd like to ask anyone interested to test it, so that while you are busy I can stay on top of this month's leaderboard for longer I can be sure that the new version runs on a wide range of configurations and tracks.

Here's a take on last month's track. You can find a couple of other views in my recent posts. Note that I chose the best angles, your mileage may vary.

You cannot view this attachment.

@Matei : if you want to try on your machines, I made it easier to reduce the computational load. Download the branch supersight-next, edit src/restunts/c/frame.c and decrease with the variables TILES_TO_DRAW_MAX and low_detail_priority_thresholds to your satisfaction.

I'll start by giving my strong support for the Hexa as new car. Impressing performance and visuals, partially compensated by the difficult reading of the steering indicator.

Also curious about Mazda 787B, Lada Niva and Citroën XM. I have not tried any but I feel they'd be nice novelties.

I liked all this year's cars so it's hard for me to suggest which should drop to make place.
But maybe Esprit and Diablo tend to overlap a little bit too much, and my beloved Oxia should not become a regular presence to keep its magical aura. Mercedes DTM can go if it manages to win a race, otherwise I'd be happy to give it a second fourth chance.