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Herr Otto Partz says you're all nothing but pipsqueaks!

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Topics - Cas

#21
Stunts Related Programs / Simple Garage
September 24, 2021, 12:00:47 AM
I have had an idea very similar to Dreadnaut's CarPark in the relatively recent past. That is, besides the idea of a more complex and elaborate car manager more like what Daniël and KyLiE would like, which I also like, at a point, I thought that I could make something command-line-oriented to have it working soon and to make it flexible for the keyboard-centric user like me.

My idea was not exactly the same, but similar. Instead of using command line arguments for the main program, I envisioned the program like you'd call it and you'd get a command line interface inside it. Then you'd type command to list the cars, delete, backup, restore, etc. You'd also have commands to tag cars, so that groups of cars could exist that you could backup or move together quickly.

In my experience, nothing takes more time in developing a program than working on the interface visuals, so making this a command-line program would make it possible to complete the project very quickly, although it wouldn't be the nicest car manager for most users, which leaves space for somebody else making another with a different style as well.

Metadata?  Well, that's another topic. I don't think it should be dynamically added or removed from cars while handled by a car swapping program. Whether metadata should be added by the author when creating the car, that's another thing and I think it's up to the author.

EDIT: OK, I got tempted by the idea and I made this simple command-line-based garage manage. I didn't want to steal the name, so I called it Simple Garage. It's made quickly and my own way, but if you like it, just tell me, or I could just add things to it to make it more like the CarPark idea. Anyway, I'm willing to collaborate. The zip I've uploaded contains the Linux and DOS versions. I can also compile it for Windows if you guys want. If you call it with a command line, it'll execute the command. If you just call it alone, it'll open a console and you can call commands there. Type "HELP" for... well, help. "EXIT" to exit, of course.

Dreadnaut: if you like it and if you want to guide me a little, I can make this one work more and more as you want and then, if you prefer it, we could use the CarPark name. What it currently does is pretty simple. You can create groups of cars and move either individual cars or whole groups between Stunts and the garage. If a car has a number of files other than four, they're still all copied together, but you get a warning when you list them.

Most recent version:
Simple Garage 2.1 - 2023-02-02

Older sgar 1.1 and 2.0 kept just in case for now
#22
Hi, guys!  This is a DOS EXE file. Just put it with your Stunts files and run it from DOSBox to modify your R4K replay files to be accepted by ZakStunts. This is for you to be able to post your R4K Symbolic Link replays in the Symbolic Link race that's being held at the same time in Stunts. They won't be good laps for free-style, but they could go well for GAR!

Just type:
zakize myrpl.rpl

and it will make its hocus-pocus :)
#23
Stunts Related Programs / Stunts font editor
March 27, 2021, 10:06:13 PM
So, I analysed the format of Stunts fonts, as I mentioned before, and found that it's really very flexible. I created a Wiki article describing the format, which you can read here. It was Daniel3D that prompted me to take a look at this matter and I've created a font editor and a couple of format converters that I will soon publish here.

Daniel3D and I have been testing Stunts to see how it behaves with modified fonts and we've encountered that it is feasible to add diacritical marks and new characters for better support of other languages. Daniel is now in the process of creating a font that will use a code page mostly compatible with Latin-1, but allowing some extra characters so that languages that are not fully supported in Latin-1 (such as Hungarian) can be supported as well.

With these fonts, it will become possible to create translations like what GTAMan15 has been working on with all necessary characters, so we'll start by facilitating these fonts and a code page converter I'm going to develop to him, so that he can continue with his work more comfortably. We could also develop translations to other languages. Expect the software here in the next few days :)

EDIT: Current version of the editor and coverter can be downloaded from here
#24
Stunts Chat / ISA competition?
March 14, 2021, 02:07:32 AM
I've been looking at tournaments of the past in the Wiki and it calls my attention that ISA does not have a wiki page. The lack of information about this competition, which is said to have first defined OWOOT makes me worry that what is known about it could be lost as time passes and some people in the community become busy and enter hiatus or leave permanently or perhaps just forget details because of so long without thinking about them.

I would like to gather as much information as possible about this competition... and also, why not, about others that are represented, but without much detail, in order to construct a more thorough set of articles about the history of the Stunts community. So whatever you guys know that can help, please post it or point me to where I can find more info. Thanks!
#25
General Chat - R4K / New banner
February 20, 2021, 02:21:48 AM
Updating R4K banner for Stunts hub. Here's the new one :)
#26
General Chat - R4K / You guys better get KITT ready!
February 11, 2021, 09:13:48 PM
You better get KITT out of the garage, give it some polishing and some tuning, check the oil, inflate the tyres and load some fuel, because next month, we're having a challenge for you guys with this newcomer at Race For Kicks!

Start practising!  We're not accustomed to driving this TV star on an actual race and being skilled with it may make a huge difference :)
#27
As you may have read in another thread, I've realised that we've been doing it wrong about handling Car Resource files. I think it's important to point this out and explain it and, well, do something about it. I'll expand here:

Origins of the problem
Stunts stores most of its resources in a file format we normally call the resource format. This is nothing but a chunk-based binary format. The header specified a number of chunks and for each chunk, you have an ID and a position within the file. The notable thing about this format when compared to so many other existing chunk-based formats is that it does not specify the chunk lengths. Some format may also not include this, but they seem to have a rule that chunks are described in the same order as they are situated in the file and one always starts just after the previous one. With this, we can easily calculate the chunk length by substracting a chunk's position from the next one's. The thing is, Stunts does not do this, or not always. Some resource files (particularly, Car*.Res files) originally coming with Stunts include their chunks in another order. This complicates loading these resources for editing when creating tools.

What we have done about this in the past
Because most original resource files do have chunks in the expected order, most files have been analysed as what they are. But for Car Resource files, as all original cars had the fields in the same order and the most important one is of fixed length, we have been describing this file with fixed offsets from the beginning of the file. To the point that this is the way in which the Wiki lists the contents of the files. Some tools have been taking it for granted that files will be ordered like this. I can think of a few examples: CarWorks, Dash Manager, Car Swapper, Car Blaster, etc. One tool that does not do this, for instance, is Stressed. And all this would be fine if Stressed saved the files with the chunks in the order we're used to, but this isn't the case. Car Resource files created with Stressed use the growing order instead of Stunts ordering and thus, are incompatible with tools like Dash Manager and Car Swapper.

What I think we should do
Really, we can't blame Stressed. It really tries to be as clean as possible, cleaner than Stunts itself. And it does it well, because Stunts does not complain about the new ordering. That means that it's us that should make the change. To quickly patch this issue, I can try to develop a little program to convert between these two orderings, but this is a patch, not a solution. I will need to change Dash Manager... oh, and CarWorks... to be able to handle the files for input the same way Stressed does. But I recommend that, for saving, when we develop tools, we continue to save in the original order that came with Stunts. Stunts will be able to work with files in any order, but using this order guarantees that tools that didn't take the precaution that Stressed took will be compatible with our files. Apart from this, I think we should be updating the Wiki to make this clear and also to describe car parameters in terms of the chunks they're contained in. I can do that.

A way to do the loading easily
I've been thinking what would be an easy way to load these files, since they don't specify chunk lengths. I suggest the following. We read into an array all IDs and their corresponding offsets. Then, we sort this array by offset and optionally, add one extra item and set its offset to the total file length minus the header's length. Finally, we load each chunk's contents calculating the chunk length from the next chunk's offset minus the current chunk's offset. When we get to the last one, this calculation will work too if we've included the extra item. It's not super nice, but it's easier than any other loading method I can think of that is compatible with any ordering. This loading procedure can be use with any resource file. Saving is a lot easier.
#28
Stunts Reverse Engineering / Camera placement
January 23, 2021, 07:38:47 AM
I decided to make a thread for this even though it's not really useful like resolving the opponent's path is. I previously found a solution to how Stunts decides where to place turning signs and at that time, I tried to solve this, but I couldn't. Uhm... maybe there already is a thread?  I couldn't find one. Anyway, if there is, let me know :P

Here's the riddle: How does Stunts decide on the placement of the cameras for F4 view?  I've been making tests and, by placing objects around, it's easy to see where the camera is placed if you follow a replay. But I haven't been able to find a way to predict this. I should have written down what I had tested, even though it was not a solution. It's not as simple as the corner sign problem I resolved. Cameras are sometimes placed on top of bridges and if you count the number of tiles between cameras, it appears like you could predict it at first, but sooner or later, the track has to turn and with turns, all predictability is lost.

Anyway, I'll keep on testing, but if anybody has an idea to add, here we have a thread :)
#29
Stunts Reverse Engineering / Opponent's path
January 23, 2021, 07:28:14 AM
I'm starting this thread without much information just so there is a place where we can drop whatever we have about this topic. The idea is  getting to fully understand how Stunts resolves what is going to be the opponent's path on a track. There has been some discussion about this in the past in different threads, but I think there isn't a thread specially for this, so it'd be better to put everything together.

We know, of course, that Stunts will try to find the shortest path for the opponent and it seems it first adds the number of tiles for each path and apparently ignores the numbers and types of obstacles there may be. However, I've made experiments in which I tried to force two equally long paths in different orientations and I haven't been able to find a theory that can predict Stunts' choice in those cases.

To show how counting tiles is non-trivial, when counting, single-tiled objects count as one tile and two-tiled objects count as two tiles, of course. Then, four-tiled objects are less clear because you can either turn or go straight and, in the case of the cork u/d, you go straight, but you follow a whole circle in the middle. My guess is Stunts ignores this and takes it as two tiles. But what if you turn?  Is it two tiles or three tiles?

My original guess was that, when path lengths were equal, Stunts would pick either the first path it resolved from the group of candidates or would display a preference either towards going straight or towards turning. I also suspected that orientation could break this, that is, rotate the track 90 degrees and the path may change. I don't remember the results of this test, but it's worth trying again.

Anyway... shoot everything you can think of!

EDIT: Maybe this should be moved to reverse-engineering...
#30
Chat - Misc / Write in C (song) - I laughed a lot!
January 10, 2021, 07:21:26 AM
I have to share this with you, guys. I was looking up about languages that are not OOP (I hate OOP), languages that I didn't know about. I know the first answer is always C, but C is ambiguous about graphics so this is a problem that goes on forever. Anyway, in a forum, somebody had asked this same question and I started reading and somebody else just replied by posting these lyrics:

When I find my code in tons of trouble
Friends and colleagues come to me
Speaking words of wisdom
Write in C

As the deadline fast approaches
And bugs are all I can see
Somewhere someone whispers
Write in C

Write in C, write in C
Write in C, write in C
LISP is dead and buried
Write in C

I used to write a lot of FORTRAN
For science it worked flawlessly
Try using it for graphics
Write in C

If you just spent nearly 30 hours
Debugging some assembly
Soon you'll be glad to
Write in C

Write in C, write in C
Write in C, yeah, write in C
Only wimps use BASIC
Write in C

Write in C, write in C
Write in C, write in C
Pascal won't quite cut it
Write in C

Write in C, write in C
Write in C, write in C
Don't even mention COBOL
Write in C

And when the screen is fuzzing
And the editor is bugging me
I'm sick of ones and zeroes
Write in C

A thousand people swear that
TP7 is the one for me
I hate the word "procedure"
Write in C

Write in C, write in C
Write in C, write in C
PL/1 is '80s
Write in C

Write in C, write in C
Write in C, write in C
The government loves Ada
Write in C

;D  While I disagree about C being good for graphics, these lyrics are just genius!
#31
Stunts Chat / What IS Stunts anyway?
January 10, 2021, 03:20:30 AM
This thread, I'm starting it after exchanging a few messages with Duplode about Stunts when compared to realistic driving engines. We all know that Stunts is different, but I wonder which characteristics we recognise in Stunts as unique and which of those we really embrace. In contrast, it'd be interesting to mention which ones we wouldn't miss if they weren't there anymore (or maybe we've come to love them all). I'm talking mainly about the physics in the game.

I can quickly think of powergear and how easily it is for a car to be shot very high up into the sky with just the power of its engine. These things, personally, I find attractive and would certainly miss. On the other hand, I would not miss coming from a jump and landing exactly where two pieces of elevated road meet and crashing instantly. I am also unsure about being able to remain upside down inside a pipe or going throw slalom stones or loops, whether I'd miss those or not. What do you guys think?
#32
Chat - Misc / Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year
December 24, 2020, 05:19:29 AM
We're nearing Christmas time. It's 1:15 am of XMAS eve here, so I guess some of you will be there pretty soon. I would like to wish you all have a Merry Christmas and that, despite the difficulties this very weird year has brought to us, manage to spend some good time with your loved ones, be them family or friends or both!

In a week from now, we'll be giving an end to this complicated year. It's had lots of annoyances, but we all learnt a lot from it... mostly about things that you would've have expected and yet, can still happen!  Who knows... maybe next year, we get visited by aliens!  Anyway, one thing I did like about this year is that my family had more free time so we were able to get to spend more time together, at least the ones that live at my house. So I haven't been alone at all. Still, the company of my online friends here has made a year that could've been pretty boring, very interesting and fun. Thank you.
#33
I slept a little and now I've been making some tests. My hypothesis was that black artifacts shown in the track preview screen for the track Cactus Festival reminiscent of inkblots were due to the presence of player cars in the track design whose miniature shape included ellipses that were incorrectly rendered and that this was to be expected of custom made cars, like is the case of the Melange.

My test yields affirmative results. In fact, the Melange is not the only one to cause this issue. All the cars that produce these effects are custom-made, though most custom-made cars do not produce it. For each car, the distribution of the artifacts is different and sometimes, it may change for each peek in the track preview. Other artifact also appear occasionally. This suggests that there is something we do not know about how 3D shapes are supposed to be designed because some aspects of them are rarely put to the test.

Cars that produce these bugs:
Audi DTM - Huge black and red painted areas
BMW DTM - Huge black triangle
Porsche 911 Turbo - Yellow regions and distortions in terrain rendering
Melange - Two black inkblots

Custom-made cars that don't:
Mercedes DTM - Very curious since the other two DTM cars do
Speedgate
Nissan Skyline
Ford Ranger
Superkart
Xylocaine
Ferrari F40
GT3 Mark II
Lotus Esprit
McLaren Honda

After a track has been displayed in the preview and exhibited glitches, Stunts becomes unstable and is likely to crash. The colours in the glitches appear to be complete unrelated to the paint job colours.
#34
Custom Cars with Stressed / Car Wiki articles
December 15, 2020, 09:51:46 PM
Hey, guys!

I've been taking a look at car articles in the Wiki, especially those that are custom-made. I found that some custom-made cars that are very used (and some that are not used so much) don't have an article or have a very minimal article. I am willing to create and edit articles to have that completed, but it turns out I don't know a lot about cars so I'm not the best car reviewer. I could start by making the articles and then other people could contribute a thorough analysis or you guys could help me make those analysis in the depth these cars deserve.

So far, what I have done is create an article about the DTM pack, which mentions the three cars, but this article is very basic and I think each of the cars should have its own individual article as well with much more detail.

Then... which aspects should I measure and how?  Everybody who would be interesting in adding to this, I guess the more we are, the better, but as I said, I'm willing to do the whole thing myself if necessary... I would just want some directions to do it well. Thanks!
#35
Stunts Chat / Crash with no sound
December 14, 2020, 06:50:52 AM
Hey, guys. I remember since a long time ago, that sometimes, you would crash and no sound would occur. For some reason, I had associated this with the Jaguar, but now I've been trying it and it does make a sound when crashing, so I don't know if this was fixed or if there's a relation. What do you guys know about this?
#36
CarWorks

Current version: 1.1
Last release: 6 August 2022 (with bug fixes on 10 August 2022)
Project site: http://www.raceforkicks.com/projects/carworks.html

Original presentation:

Hi!  I think I should make a thread about the project I'm working on right now. It's nothing too big, but it may be of interest, so here it goes. So far, in this preliminary stage, I've called it CarWorks. Its purpose is to aid in car making, but it's very different from Stressed (and of course, not nearly as developed) and they could be used together. In other words, when it's finished, you will be able to make a car either with Stressed alone or with CarWorks alone, but much more comfortably, with both together.

CarWorks puts emphasis on the interaction with 3D shape editing tools like Blender or Anim8or. It's a simple program that's capable of loading and saving car files as well as OBJ files. When interacting with OBJ files, it takes special measures to preserve the surface materials. This allows the car maker to use Blender, for instance, specifying the car materials in the program (Blender) so that, on export, the OBJ file will have everything it needs to be converted into a car shape. That's the idea, because in practice, so far, a few touches still need to be made.

Another idea I've implemented in CarWorks is auto-generation of information that normally has to be rebuilt from scratch. For example, it can automatically generate all desired paint jobs starting from the original model. You just specify the general hue for a paint job and all shades are automatically created. Same way, CarWorks can load a full-size car shape and scale it for car0, car1 and car2, so you can have a working car pretty quickly. This, of course, means the sacrifice of having a too high-poly shape for car1 and car2, but with modern computers, that shouldn't be a problem. CarWorks as of today, does not do anything with culling. It's all activated: you can see every polygon from every direction (although they're 1-sided by default). If there's a need of a change, it can be made later with a tool like Stressed.

I'll be posting it not far into the future.... but any opinions or suggestions are welcome! :)
EDIT:
The CarWorks+Dash Manager project can also be found at www.raceforkicks.com/projects/carworks.html
#37
Stunts Chat / Stunts competition archive - About WSC
December 04, 2020, 03:36:21 AM
I'm looking at the competition archive and I want to point out a few things and ask others having participated in WSC myself...

Track 11, called "TIM" does not refer to Time Bandit, but to The Incredible Machine. 100% sure. Also, "MI" does not stand for Mission: Impossible, but for Monkey Island. I remember when that track was running. Not sure about "AR". Airborne Ranger doesn't ring a bell to me, but I really can't think of anything else. "SI" is definitely correct (Space Invaders).

I wanted to know whether the order in which the tracks are numbered is known to be the order in which the races were held. It does look like that at the beginning, but then there are some details. For example, Paleke made series of tracks with names that were related. There are tracks called after continents, tracks called after games, after Argentine pipsqueaks and after food and there are a few that don't follow any rules because they were made during a track design competition in 2006.

I'm pretty sure that track #29, called HOTROD, makes references to the old PC game called Street Rod, also known here as HotRod, but other tracks with names of games appear earlier in the list. Also, Sudoku appears last and probably belongs in the same group too.

The following are Argentine pipsqueak names: Recalde, Cassoulet, Cabalén, Gálvez, González (mistyped by Paleke), Traverso, Reutemann, DiPalma, Rayes and Fangio.
Tracks I know for a fact that participated in the track design contest were: 4AM, NACH1 and ACACIA AVENUE.
I don't remember the tracks TATETI and NAVAL, because they probably came up during my hiatus, but "Ta-te-ti" is how we call the game Tic-Tac-Toe in Argentina and "Naval" clearly refers to "Batalla Naval", that is, the "Battleship" game. So these are board games. Makes sense that they're together.

Anyway, that's the info I have!
#38
General Chat - R4K / On the road for a new season
November 29, 2020, 06:22:39 AM
Only one more race to go for season 2020, the year everybody hated, at least a little, ha, ha, still had some good things. Through the wind and thunder, the tournament site has been getting a lot better and the competition improving. I'm very thankful to KyLiE for his enormous contribution in the development of Race For Kicks as it is today and to Dreadnaut for being always there when I had PHP questions.

For this coming month, we are preparing something special. I can't say much. But I'll tell you about the changes that have been made so far:


  • Race history has been greatly improved with the addition of historical chat dating from season 2018
  • Old replays that had been superseded and deleted from the scoreboard can now be downloaded with the adition of the full-scoreboard (akin to ZakStunts' All Results)
  • Replays in old races now display the date when they were posted, another feature that will be good for archiving
  • The chat system finally accepts URLs that are translated to links, pipsqueak mentions and media. Thanks to Dreadnaut!
  • In the Profile menu, there is an option to enable or disable 3rd-party item auto-embedding

And there are many more smaller details and some more things are pending, so next season, we'll have a very powerful system!  So stay tuned for the next race and feel free to visit and be curious and make suggestions about the look or features. Thank you all so much!
#39
This isn't a super necessary feature, but it would be very easy to implement and would make it more comfortable for pipsqueaks to check on public RPLs that have already been posted and learn and improve.

My thinking is that, in ZakStunts, when you're looking at the scoreboard, you see somebody got a very good lap and you wonder how. Then, what you have to do is go to All Results and go down the list carefully to identify the replay that corresponds to that lap. This isn't hard to do, but if there were some form of "direct access" to download straight from the scoreboard (not as a replacement, but as an additional choice), it could be even better. I imagine it perhaps as making the "Driven" and/or "Sent" fields links. Same way, when a replay is publicly posted and appears in the Shoutbox, that could be clickable too.

Again, I realise this does not add anything new but comfort, but sometimes, when I want to check several replays, I look at the scoreboard and try to memorise the sent times and laps of each of them to later look them up in the All Results sections and I noticed that in most races, I don't check all final replays and I've been thinking that I should; otherwise, I'm actually missing part of the race.

Another thing that might help would be if we could download a ZIP with all scoreboard public replays so far at any point in the race, but that does sound like a more complicated thing, isn't it?

Anyway, just thoughts and ideas. Thank you!
#40
General Chat - R4K / New Race For Immortality?
October 31, 2020, 08:20:22 PM
I was asked some time ago, maybe a year or maybe two, about whether there would be another Race For Immortality event. When I held that one, I was thinking of it as a unique opportunity, so later on, seeing new pipsqueaks and some that had come back from hiatus, I lamented that some of them had not been at the time to participate. Right now, I see that activity is at a local high and I begin to consider if there's a way that could be done.

The problem with this, as I was thinking before, is that, if I replace the old records with new ones, then the old even would not have been a "race for immortality". On the other hand, old records could be mixed with the new ones by ponderating the track lengths, but this is kind of messy perhaps. There is also the fact that some people, in particular, AbuRaf70, have participated in the event and I like the fact that his record remains in Bliss.  Now, if everyone except him can participate this time, maybe we could keep his record ponderated, but update all others. There is another, simpler approach is this is to be done: simply make it so that Bliss displays two separate sets of records and that's it.

Anyway, I would like to know how many of you would like to have another Race For Immortality or lament not having been able to participate back then and if so, what would you propose as the best possible way of handling the issues I described?  We were a bunch back then, but now I feel we would be a bigger bunch!  What do you guys think?