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dreadnaut has already announced that players may use any version of the game to record their replays

Er... is that how my post read? I meant "someone might use a different client at the moment, and we can't tell", and didn't want to say "everyone may use whatever they want" as a rule. Second-language issue? Should I rephrase to be more clear?

In your article you wrote "Racers might use different versions of the game (original, SuperSight, Chocoloate?)" which reads to me the same way as KyLiE understood it, especially since the following "must" hints that a successful replay validation is the only requirement.

If you don't want to officially approve the new versions, a rewrite of that sentence is definitely a good idea.

Hey, I missed that the historical rankings reached 100 entries. That's good news!

@HerrNove What does it say under "Target Frame Rate" under about:support for you?

@svenanders Moving the question here to reduce the shoutbox noise. I think @Marco and @TaxiDriver prefer the shoutbox, so sorry for splitting the communication channels

My Target Frame Rate on Firefox is 60.

But you got 30fps locked or did it vary?

It varies. My laptop is much less powerful than your MacBook M4 (I have a AMD Ryzen 7 5700U)

@HerrNove What does it say under "Target Frame Rate" under about:support for you?

@svenanders Moving the question here to reduce the shoutbox noise. I think @Marco and @TaxiDriver prefer the shoutbox, so sorry for splitting the communication channels

My Target Frame Rate on Firefox is 60.

The "Recent changes" link is broken: https://wiki.stunts.hu/wiki/Special:RecentChanges

I find the wiki almost useless without that feature, but today I found a surrogate:

wiki.stunts.hu/api.php?action=query&list=recentchanges&rclimit=50&rcprop=title|user|timestamp|comment|sizes&format=jsonfm

It's not easy to read but it does show the latest changes.

> I'm thinking in particular of the "press Q to rewind" feature, which can greatly reduce the effort of replay handling

There is no way to detect these techniques so it's just a matter of honour, but if we allow "press Q to rewind", what is the limit?

Given that various players have said that using savestates is not allowed, I think we should discuss on where to trace the line. Because pressing accidentally "Restart driving" and losing a good segment becomes not OK if others competitors are avoiding that risk.

In my opinion, the moment we allow anything else than the original game, the competition is going to become about who is building with Claude the best computer assistance features. Ghost car with the replay to imitate? A dashed ideal line, à la Geoff Crammond? An overlay with the keys to press, like in Trackmania's streams? Some of these things would take a skilled programmer no more than 1-2 intense nights to create.

So, even if I might try these LLM-made reworks to explore new tracks and enjoy the game, or for competitions where everyone is using it, I hope we as community will say our "НЕТ" to the computer assistance arms race.

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.