Messages

Man!  Nobody should be allowed to govern for more than 10 years anywhere... (even if not all in a row)  Some politicians may be liked by some, but still, suppose they were good, 10 years in power can turn anybody into shit.

@Victor Narl ... Lotus: The Ultimate Challenge is a classic I absolutely love. Very simple, yet fun game with brings some nostalgia. Only once, I had a magazine about PC games during that golden era and among the games featured in that magazine, was this one. And I think it's the only one that showed in that magazine that I later got and played (another one was Syndicate, I remember, but I've never played it).

So great!  It was a lot of fun and I see I finally accomplished something in a live race    Ha, ha... First in jumps in the fog one and 3rd place (not last) in the daytime one

Third race (daytime)

Second race (night)

First race replay

I pick:

Fog: Lada Niva (yellow)
Night: Hummer (yellow)
Day: Land Rover (yellow)

Count me in.... I've got tons of things in my head and I don't want to forget to feel free to ping me in Telegram all you can! 

Just updated my binary and been quickly testing it (the stable one). I didn't notice anything like the barn issue. If I notice anything similar, I'll save the reply too!

Hi, @HerrNove. Yes, I definitely need to rewrite CarWorks. Unfortunately, I did something I never do when I wrote CarWorks: I used an external library. Now I don't remember where to put the files and how to compile them together anymore, so I can't build it. The library was only used to be able to load and save image formats other than BMP and TGA. What I would have to do is see where it is used and just remove that feature... or have it call ImageMagick instead if available.

The libraries required by FreeBasic I usually get by trying repeatedly to build a program that does graphics. It'll tell me, for example, that it's missing X11, then I do sudo apt install libx11-dev. I try again, then it says it's missing xrender, so I do sudo apt install libxrender-dev and so on until it works. One of the libraries... I don't remember which... you don't have to add the "-dev". But still, you're going to have problems because it will ask you for FBImage. The only way out is to, like I said, find where the code uses it and "unplug" it. I no longer remember how to compile it and I don't remember my own code very well any more either.

Hey!  Welcome, @Xavier!  Indeed, before I met Stunts, I had also come across a Hard Drivin' arcade like what @Duplode mentions and when I got Stunts, I initially thought it was a version of the same game. I remember the Hard Drivin' arcade had something very unique: when nobody was playing and it was in demo mode, the steering wheel would move following the replay actions. Could this be the one you saw?

Hey, Erik. stpeek.com is a DOS TSR program. You need to run it in the DOSBox environment before calling Stunts. For it to work, you'll need to use the binary I provided because each binary has a different offset for the memory, so I'll need to generate a new TSR for each otherwise. I found this one to be relatively light, since the idea is using external graphics

Well, I've tested this with my 3D engine and it works. The speed is not great, but I know there's a lot to optimise there. Some things that can be done with this:

- Show a map of all pipsqueaks in a live race. Note that this does not require changing live racing rules. You'll see when somebody does crash recovery and it'll be like going through pits: other pipsqueaks take over, but then they'll need to stop too. Perfectly normal
- Render the 3D race from any position live. You'll be able to move around and see how a live race is going
- Race with Stunts running, but looking at my renderer screen instead. This implies you can see other pipsqueaks. Some things need to be improve for this to be practical. It's doing some 10 FPS now and wheels still don't look good, but apart from that, it does work, so I intend to measure how much speed is being lost at each layer and then work to optimise
- Practise and create replays while seeing your ghost car from your previous replay. Thanks @alanrotoi for pointing this one out. This again requires some work as described previously
- Have the server automatically monitor where cars are and broadcast which lap each one is on as well as other data
- Allow a race manager to live monitor a replay as it's being produced to confirm authorship later. This one I'm not super enthusiastic about, but it's something that will become possible, so I just wanted to point out that I'm aware of it. In this sense, replay handling could also be controlled. There are some caveats, though: it's impossible to tell if the data you're getting is coming for a replay being played, so you need to have a new track, same thing we do on live races nowadays

He, he... yes. This is more a curiousity than anything at this point. The actual good use for this will be in live races, I think

Wow!  I rarely see these tricks coming. I'm too naïve at Stunts. One very curious thing about Stunts tournaments is that the spectacular tricks and the weirdness that fascinated us when we first got to know Stunts and that made us choose this game in the first place end up being the things we ultimately have to reject in order to have a functioning competition. The more predictable and natural replays are, the more well-behaved and accepted a race is, even if that can make it a little more boring, that is, more like other car games. If Stunts were like those games, would it have been able to compete?

Anyway, I'm not saying we should just let this happen. I agree there has to be a rule to prevent it. I just can't help thinking there should be a way to balance things so that we would occasionally (not all the time) come across the things that make Stunts unique. We haven't been able to achieve this with PG alone, so I guess it must be super hard to do it in general. What I mean with PG is our attempts to prevent PG being always there have caused the Indy to almost never be there and has forced it to only be there when PG is possible, two things that are quite opposite from what we wanted. For DWS, I guess the easy solution is to just not provide two paths when creating tracks. Sad... ha, ha.