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A very nice find yesterday:

https://pikuma.com/blog/comanche-maps-reverse-engineering

Lots of retrohacking articles nowadays – mine included – seem a rehash of "I threw Claude at it and here's what it found". Happy to present a work that feels human made in both engineering and writing!

In case the wishlist is open (a big if with a 0-year toddler in dreadnaut's home!), I wish we could give decimal ratings to tracks. My favourite method is the one by BoardGameGeek, that allows to click on the stars if one wants to award a whole number, or to type a decimal number in a textbox. The number is rounded down in the histograms but the decimals count towards the average rating.

There are many tracks I do not rate because they would be worth 3½ or 4½ stars in my opinion, and rounding both upwards and downwards feels wrong.

Are there already congratulations to give? I wonder whether Ms. @Clairwil can help us to get an overview of the situation

Consider that

* Stunts has not been commercially available for decades (GOG, Steam etc. never had it)
* Some of its original devs said they were okay with the game being distributed for free.
* The current legal rightsowner is unclear (Encore Software maybe?). No company has claimed to own Stunts's copyright in the last 20+ years.

I think you should have no problem, either legal and moral, by distributing the full game. The possibility that somebody complains cannot be mathematically excluded but it seems almost totally theoretical. In cases where companies wanted to claim back the rights of long-forgotten games they usually just kindly asked the modders to take down their projects before the new edition came out.

Which is why, even if I am strongly pro-copyright and pro-respecting the authorship of the developers of old games, I feel ok in publishing my mod of Stunts, under my real name even.

If you want to feel safer, your idea of making the mod depend on the user providing the original assets is good: that's what the XWVM project does, and they're dealing with Star Wars, one of the most precious IPs of one of the most copyright-aggressive companies on the planet.

Obviously no method can give perfect assurance of being 100% in the clear: but, retrogaming is a dirty job, and one must accept to get their hands a little stained.

@Duplode is not on the scoreboard yet, and he's unlikely to completely miss a race!

Silly me! Predictions amended.

Predictions (edited)

1. MiDiaN (I think he will give the utmost on Arg's track)
2. Argammon (I think he won't give the utmost on his own track)
3. Victor Narl (seems it's possible to be competitive without power gear, and he still has to try the Carrera)
4. Alain (his trickfinding skill is of help on this track, but he'll probably rather help Victor to the podium)
5. Duplode
6. Alan Rotoi
7. Spoonboy
8. Zapper
9. Mark Nailwood
10. HerrNove
11. RC Bandit (has more free time than dreadnaut, and more motivation to get points)
12. dreadnaut

Oh, I had missed this announcement! Looking forward to a new tournament.

Another recent finding about sound and music modification on GPC:

https://youtu.be/LUjgzxsvFYA


Can this somehow be related to any previous post messages?

The author has promised a post about that mod, I guess it will appear on their blog. Maybe they will also say whether they were inspired by the recent developments.

(some minor glitches in the speedometer of Jaguar and Corvette: maybe a bug when processing the .PVS files? Sorry for raising an issue now, but I cannot keep myself )

Yeah, I've seen that issue too when converting car files, though I never bothered to investigate the cause.

I think the error is in the treatment of the `ins2` bitmap of the `STDA` file. For Jaguar and Vette, the bitmap is stored in a special format, as shown by the fact that the high nibble of the third byte of the "Channel bitmasks" has some bits set. Probably the bytes are transposed (i.e. the pixels are stored in column-major order).

The screenshot is taken with my fork of stressed, but the regular stressed is also able to process the data just fine. One just need to integrate its handling of special cases: see bitmapresource.cpp#L183 and following lines.

It is quite painful to do this kind of testing, but it does work.

Reminds me of a time where I had to start six instances of an unstable version of VMWare. It took some attempts before I managed to keep all the VMs alive for the few minutes I needed for my experiment.

Anyway, thought this screenshot might be a bit cool.

It's very cool to me! Congratulations, I think for many veterans this is a dream coming true!

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(some minor glitches in the speedometer of Jaguar and Corvette: maybe a bug when processing the .PVS files? Sorry for raising an issue now, but I cannot keep myself )

The card view is very nice! I'd also like to have a page showing all ZakStunts tracks ever (not filtered by year/author).

Something like this? https://zak.stunts.hu/tracks/all

Yes, perfect! Is it a new addition or something I had failed to see till now?

Hello and welcome, x29retaliator!

Thanks for your message! As much as I am getting fatigued by the deluge of retro ports in the post-Codex era, the presentation of your project is very tasteful and makes me curious. I do not take part in live races, but offering 8-way multiplayer as main feature shows to me that you have a good feeling for the game, where to improve it and where not to.

I'm quite sure the community could make good use of the multiplayer. Leaving DOS behind is not necessarily a progress (because with emulators I can play with my beloved huge rectangular pixels, Alain with his CRT-like shaders and Spoonboy with his phone) but I know how much easier is to work in a flat addressing space.

I'll take the freedom to advertise your project on the chatbox in the front page; this should get it more visibility.

So, I cannot rate the editor, hence I tried one of the bundled tracks.

I loved the choices! Stelvio Pass at sunset under the snow is something I'd love to see in AAA games. The graphics is in the classic "indie 3D game with stock assets" style, but fog effects and pastel colors give it some personality.

The racing is very arcadey, which is OK if that was the goal. After the first lap I learned to ignore the road and took the steepest line to the top of the mountain and back, since the penalty for driving offroad is so small. The punishment for going too far away from the track, instead (dropping the speed to 10 km/h) should be mitigated. The computer AI is very bad, but I can see this game as fun multiplayer experience for a light afternoon among friends, à la Mario Kart.

You should bundle your fonts: I saw a box with "01F947" where the corresponding Unicode glyph (🥇) should appear.

All in all a good effort! I suggest you publish some screenshots on your website, if you have one, or on social media. And at least a couple of videos on YouTube showing track editor and gameplay.

I tried the track editor, but there seems to be some bug. See video: https://mega.nz/file/5DkmFLYa#m5Od_W8MbDerjgsvlZvaWjGJWbYMqOmypIWCppZWNn0 (notice also the errors in the console)

Running on Debian 6.12.57-1.

Starting message:

Godot Engine v4.7.stable.official.5b4e0cb0f - https://godotengine.org
Vulkan 1.4.305 - Forward+ - Using Device #0: AMD - AMD Radeon Graphics (RADV RENOIR)

The card view is very nice! I'd also like to have a page showing all ZakStunts tracks ever (not filtered by year/author).

Other topic: the forum still writes "pipsqueak" instead of "rаcer". I'm sure it was a fun joke at the time, but after many years it has become a little stale. Can we do without it? The replacement is also confusing when one wants to use "rаcer" to refer to a rаcing game.