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Orthogonally to the other proposals for PTB I would suggest to not carry over the time bonus across seasons: at season start every driver should be on a blank slate. Moreover, with inter-season carryover, on the final race of the year drivers with nothing at stake would be incentivized to alter their replay posting habits to try to carry as many hours as possible to the new season, i.e. staying just below the 132.5 or the 265 threshold. A ruleset should not force the competitors to pursue these strange goals.

(The replay controls aren't redrawn on every frame, so printf debugging kinda works.)

This was a funny part in my writeup If you need something more sophisticated, I recommend intro_draw_text which does the job quite nicely (example)

If you are analysing conformance, I remind you that the ported `update_car_speed` is currently disabled because it leads to desyncs with respect to the original game.

Looking at the leaderboard now it's awesome how well calibrated the car balance is. Not sure how the Diablo manages to be so competitive vs the Lotus despite lacking the special grip values of the latter, but the chronometer does not lie 

First, I'd like to congratulate you again for your title, Argammon.

It's a pity you have decided not to aim to win the next season. Now, dedicating less time to games and more to "real life" can be a wise choice and I don't want to dissuade you from doing that. And yet, things said and decided after a hard competition, when the adrenalin is still running high, might not always be the right ones. So I would suggest you to check your plans in a couple of months, when hopefully some of the negativity of these last months will have subsided. I think nobody will hold it against you if you announce you've changed your mind and are ready to challenge us full-time in 2026.

Whatever your final choice will be I'm looking forward to see your replays in the upcoming races!

@GTAManRCR If you are interested in alternatives, Cloudflare and Netlify offer free hosting: Cloudflare has unlimited bandwidth, Netlify has a generous 100 GB/month free plan.

@Argammon , congratulations for your Championship title! 🎉🎉 A really dominant performance!

Thanks for the quick fix!

There are no exploits. There is a limit of 2 ptb per race.

The limit does not guarantee the absence of exploits. In certain (rare) circumstances a driver could get more points by doing less.

To avoid the PTB exploits mentioned by MiDiaN in the shoutroom (and by me some months ago), we could slightly tweak the bonus in this way:
* 2 points if a driver gets 528 PTB-hours in a single race without the help of the carryover
* 1½ points if a driver gets 528 PTB-hours summing those of the race and the carryover

In both cases, the carryover is reset.

Clairwil is right, though

I should have known that ladies are always right I am a married man, after all.

MiDiaN should be the moral champion, but since he was a pro driver already in the last century I guess I can enjoy my amateur title with clean consciousness! ZakStunts 2025 was my first Stunts tournament ever, and actually the first racing tournament I ever took part in.

On a different topic, the masters really seem set to fight from the first minute this month. I can imagine Argammon is striving to get the mathematical certainty of his championship as soon as possible, and his competitors are hard at work to delay the party. Given the mechanics of PTB and its Fibonacci-based coefficients, the title might be mathematically awarded in a strange moment like the dead of night of a random Tuesday...

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I think it could be useful to formalize how the time is rounded after applying the car bonus. Last night I submitted a 1:45.10 with the Lotus, which corresponds to 83.029 seconds after applying the 21% bonus. The submission page showed me a weighed time of 1:23.02, which would have been enough to beat Mortimer by 0.01 s. However, after uploading the replay, the ranking showed a time of 1:23.03, exactly equal to Mortimer's and therefore penalized in terms of PTB.

My situation was not so bad as I got immediate feedback from the leaderboard, but in cases where a quiet replay is posted, having a unverifiable 0.01 discrepancy could result in big disappointments.

Pinging @dreadnaut

> Congratulations to HerrNove for having mathematically assured the 2025 Am League title!

Lol, not yet I might be promoted away from the league if I land on the "pro" podium in this or the next race. Failing that, to ensure a promotion at the end of the year, I need to get one extra XP: I already have 5, plus 4 from winning the Am league. So I need either another top 6 result (doable, but if Alan Rotoi is back in business the difficulty will be higher than before) or to land in the global top 6 (very good chances but not yet mathematically secured). Getting promoted is my seasonal objective, so I'll do my best to secure it as soon as possible.

Anyway, I love this kind of projections and you saved me a lot of work since I wanted to figure out what place each driver can still aim to. Thanks for the great post!

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.