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And here is the ZCT268 update! Three pipsqueaks have reached personal best ratings this time: Argammon, Mark Nailwood and Spoonboy. Below is the updated evolution chart:

Wow! What a unique race. Maybe the best result by Dstien and a strong comeback for Paradisio (Mingva).

Also, Renato's comeback after the 2006 title. A memorable race, thanks @Erik Barros for the video!

One thing I've noticed that I didn't see in the original files in CarWorks is the Circle and 4 dots in the image attached, or any way to alter them. I've Saved these files and hope to proceed with creating a Cybertruck dash.

IIRC, while you can edit the values directly, there are commands to fit the physical bounding boxes to the graphical model -- could you fill in the details, @Cas ?

Hello and welcome, @desktopsimmer ! Brilliant to see the Stunts Cybertruck finally becoming a thing 

On the instant crash, my first guess is an issue with the physical wheel coordinates in the CARCTRK.RES file. If the coordinates of the four wheels don't add up to zero, the car starts moving and rotating on its own, which might lead to a crash against the ground. If you attach the file here, we can have a look at it to confirm if that's actually happening.

When was the last time these PG cars won without PG? I think never, maybe once in 2001 the first season. They always were and will be PG cars unless you successfully prepare a special track to avoid PG.

I believe ZCT230 is the only example in the recent past. A long long time ago, there was also ZCT080, and arguably ZCT084 and ZCT087 as well (those two have significant PG sections, but they don't take most of the lap). I guess many Acura races would also count, but I'm not looking at them since the Acura is a different beast to the other three, as the lack of PG slides means partial PG lines are much more common.

After looking at various ways to adapt the bonus set, I'm starting to think that large bonus changes or veto rules on PG cars would create a self-fulfilling prophecy: if we push them low enough, they will only win by surprising everyone with an unexpected powergear lap. They will only ever be PG cars, no more driving the Indy on a flat fast track, or enjoying the Vette on a tricky twisty road.

I share this skepticism about measures that directly target PG cars. That's part of the reason why my earlier suggestion was PG-agnostic: spreading the bonuses a bit further all over, while also boosting cars that spend too many races without a win.

Side question: when is PG win welcome?

I think ZCT260 is a good example of a successful PG race: it was obvious from early on that it would be a GTO PG race, so everyone had plenty of time to focus on the car, practice the lines, watch public replays, and so forth. In contrast, ZCT261 wasn't as satisfying: a PG surprise in which the PG line, though requiring a touch of ingenuity, was not as interesting as the non-PG lines with Carrera/Challenger/Countach that were worked upon for most of the month. A PG late switch or surprise can be enjoyable if the PG line is exciting enough (if nothing else, we get some eye candy at the end of the month  ). It goes without saying that, track designer decisions aside, we don't have a lot of control over car-track combinations and the quality of PG lines. Global adjustments to the system are better suited to affect the bulk frequency of PG wins, which IMO are the key concern here. (In particular, I don't think PG surprises are inherently bad, but if they happen every other race they are hardly worthy of being called surprises anymore.)

Welcome @Niels007007 ! And yup, that's indeed a bug in versions newer than Stunts 1.0 (Broderbund 1990). We've only realised its likely underlying cause quite recently. In addition to the replay buffer, later versions store snapshots of the game state every thirty seconds to make rewinding the replay tape faster. The game allocates memory for twenty such snapshots. Twenty times thirty seconds is ten minutes, and so at that point we get a hard crash. See this post for some extra discussion of rewinding in Stunts 1.1.

Tired of Bitbucket and Atlassian quirks, I have migrated all my repositories to GitHub for the moment. The last remaining on Bitbucket is the mirror of Restunts. Should I migrate it as well, or do we have a more official (non-SVN) place for its code at this point?

Migrating sounds good -- for one, Bitbucket's online code browsing is pretty bad, which gets irritating while chatting about the code. I don't think there is any relevant amount of links from the outside world to the current repository. For the most part, it's just a smattering of references in forum/Telegram archives, plus a handful of branches @Daniel3D and me might want to bring over.

(It's worth noting that there is a restunts clone/fork at GitHub, namely the one set up by @xor2003 at https://github.com/xor2003/restunts . I have occasionally used permalinks to it out of frustration with Bitbucket's interface.)

@Argammon My two cents on the trajectories:

When you fly a trajectory similar to the one indicated in the picture above it is difficult to tell whether the finishing tile or the split triggers the end of the lap. A quick test is to change the trajectory so that the car clearly lands on the finishing tile. If that test triggers 6 seconds penalty time the lap is invalid. However, I am unsure if my test detects all instances of the problem.

Your test should be good enough in most situations. A typical scenario here resembles the contrast between the orange (legal, with penalty) and red (illegal, skipping penalty) lines in the picture below:



(Alan's deleted lap, by the way, is unambiguously a red line case.)

A potentially problematic situation, though, is the blue line one: a trajectory with enough swerve to catch the final corner (which is enough to avoid penalty) and then miss the finish tile. In such cases, the penalty check won't help, and it isn't easy to tell where the car is at the end of the lap with only the naked eye:



However, there is an in-game camera trick that makes verification easier. Stop the tape at the end-of-lap frame, switch to the F3 camera, place it fully overhead (up direction all the way), zoom out and then rotate the camera (left/right direction). If at some point while you rotate it the split element disappears from view, so that you only see the start/finish element, the car is crossing into the finish tile, and the lap is legal:



This is a slightly conservative test, as if you are very close to the boundary of the tiles (even closer than in the picture above) neither the split element nor the start/finish one will disappear when the camera is rotated, and so the test won't be conclusive. That probably won't be much of a problem, though, as if you're trying something like the blue line getting too close to the limit will likely cost you time (the more you bend the line, the longer the trajectory is).

Edit: Attaching the replay used for the screenshots above, in case you want to reproduce the test. (It is Alan's deleted lap with a different ending.)

The ratings have been updated for ZCT267! Personal best ratings were attained this round by Argammon (retaking the current ranking lead, and entering the historical top 5!), me, Frieshansen, Mark Nailwood and Spoonboy (triple digit improvement!). Below is the evolution chart:

That does clear it up, thanks @dreadnaut ! While I kinda like the crossing-the-line interpretation, it's indeed questionable whether the added complexity is worth the trouble.

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Track 1!

Dropping by to confirm I'll be here on Saturday