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[StuntsLegacyEngine]

StuntsLegacyEngine
This first post will serve to keep at hand the information we're handling and to keep track of the status of the project.

The source code of this early version of the engine can be found at:
https://notabug.org/xlucas/sle

For compiling, FreeBasic can be found here:
https://freebasic.net

For creating track objects, you can get Blender from:
https://www.blender.org/

Currently, the engine can render objects at arbitrary positions and one can move around, define new objects with any rotation and place them. It accepts OBJ files. Ground and sky are not being drawn. It's easy, but better keep it clean for now. Some bugs present.

Hey, guys. I'm trying to figure out how I should define the sizes of tiles for the new version of my 3D engine and I wanted to make it so that the differences with Stunts were not too big, so that one could, say, race a Stunts track eventually. But when I come to researching what sizes are, I find great inconsistences. Can somebody point me in the right direction?

Basically, there are two approaches as to how to determine tile size. One is what I see has been done in the past and appears in the wiki: you measure the time it takes for a car to race on a road, then measure the length of the road and read the car speed from what Stunts tells you. Take all precautions to maximise precision and calculate the propotion. Doing this, in the wiki, it is estimated that tile length is about 62.5 meters.

On the other hand, a calculation I was making before falling asleep last night, without the computer was this. Second approach. Use common sense and size proportions we know from experience. For instance, I know a car usually fits inside a rectangle of width 2m and length 6m. Typically (and I've just verified this online looking up real cars), an average car can be a little less than 2m wide and between 4 and 5 meters long, but some are less than 4m or slightly more than 6m. Now, we all know that, on a Stunts track, only two cars can fit side by side on a road, so the road must be about 4m wide. The countless times I've been shot up into the air playing Stunts, I've estimated the road width is between a third and a fourth of the tile length. In my renderer, I used a third and it looks pretty much like Stunts. This gives a tile length of 12 to 16 meters.

Of course, I realise that my calculations are not precise and that also, Stunts lies a lot, but I didn't expect the differences would be so huge!  What should I do?  I'm starting from scratch and I want to choose a good tile width that I will have to preserve for the rest of the project. I would also like it to be as metric as possible. What would you guys recommend?

EDIT: OK, now I've just done what I was supposed to do before posting: I went to Stunts and took an F3 view from high above with two parallel roads, my car and the opponent. It seems the road is wider than I thought. Three cars could fit comfortably, four very tightly. So let's say that's 6 to 8 meters wide. With a ruler, that's almost 3 cm wide on the screen, but from a road to the parallel one (both taking from the same point on the road) there are 14 cm. That gives me somewhat less or somewhat more than 30 meters. Still too small!

Hi!  I think we had a topic on something more or less related to this, but I can't find it. I don't even remember the main idea of that topic to guess the title and look it up and it's more or less old.

Anyway... I was wondering when, in Stunts community, the term "powergear" came up and how. Who coined it?  Because most of us already knew powergear before getting online, yet I expect all of us had different names for it or no name. In my case, I had a copy of Stunts first in 1993. We played a lot and a friend of mine whose surname was "Dantas" once pointed out that you could maintain a high speed with the Indy even going over grass as long as you kept "the foot down" after hitting the end of the last gear. I surely had had this experience before, but I hadn't put much attention to it until he mentioned it in detail. We even built a track especially to reach that speed, all based on banked roads (we hadn't seen that we could just use jumps and loops to do it faster). For this reason, we called it "Velocidad de Dantas" or "Dantas's speed". That must've been around 1994. When I first started participating in Stunts forum, probably around 2010, I noticed this was referred to as "powergear", so I switched to that.

How about you, guys?  And again... who coined the term?

I was thinking that, after going through something that's much more heard of than experienced, maybe some of you might be curious about what it is like and what one learns about it as it progresses, so probably sharing this is the most useful thing I can get from this illness.

For those of you who haven't heard about dengue fever, it's a viral disease that's spread via a mosquito called Aedes Aegypti, the same mosquito that spreads zika, chikunguña and most famously, yellow fever. None of these diseases is a walk in the park (although walking at night in the park here can be quite dangerous). Dengue is arguably the most widespread of all these. The mosquito gets no harm from carrying the virus and it can't pass directly from person to person. TV and radio constantly warn about dengue especially during the summer, but until very recently, I had never known any case personally.

The last years, we've seen tons of these mosquitoes every summer. In spite of our efforts, it's super hard to escape them. Aedes Aegypti (from Latin "aedes", meaning "annoying" and "aegypti" coming from Greek and meaning "from Egypt"), the annoying Egyptian mosquito defends its name very well. It is active at all times of the day, very stubborn. Comes in swarms sometimes and doesn't mind a clap from time to time. It's fearless. It's rather small so you may not even feel its bite, but it's a noisy flyer that makes it very difficult to sleep. When you look at it up close, you notice its like a "zebra", with its black and white stripes, not just on the legs, but also in different parts of the body. We've got used to ignore them because it's so hard to fight them. And that's a big problem.

So this year, suddenly, we start getting trucks that pass by fumigating and a campaign sending people to enter homes and fumigate inside too. I should have turned on my alarms by that time, but all this coronavirus issue kept me distracted. Later, I heard my cousin had caught dengue and with him, his parents, at the same home. Again, I should've strengthen my strategies by then. One day, my brother falls ill with a high fever. He has a tendency to get high fever so I didn't make the connection. A doctor came and misdiagnosed him first, thinking he had plaques. Later on, as he wasn't recovering, another doctor came and recommended that he were taken to the hospital to check for either coronavirus or dengue. And there you're: he was diagnosed with dengue and sent back home to recover. When he was starting to feel better, one night, I suddenly felt some discomfort, I took my thermometer and measured my temperature: 37,5. An hour later, 38,5. Half an hour later, bed and shivers.

I knew it was the same thing. The fever would stay up at around 39 to 39,5 all the time unless I had 1 g paracetamol which was the only thing I could take and wasn't super effective either. Other stuff, like ibuprofen or aspirin can't be taken because dengue drops your platelets to the ground and you can easily get internal hemorrhage (bleeding), which is what makes dengue dangerous. I learnt that every year, many people, most notably children, die from this crap. As the illness progresses, your body weakens and you start to experience nausea and may vomit, you lose your appetite, laying on bed becomes super uncomfortable and in some cases, quite painful. Later, you get a burning on your skin, especially on your hands and feet that's very itchy, your fingers and toes swell and your extremities get red and with a rash. After my third visit to the hospital to control my platelets, I was told I would have to stay in because doctors feared I could develop internal bleeding. That didn't get to happen, but my nose was completely filled with little wounds from any contact with my handkerchief to wipe it and then, those little wounds would be uncomfortable and I tended to touch my nose outside, which made things worse. I had nose bleeding once. I was laying on my back and started to feel blood running down my throat, so I sat up and all blood came out. It was very disgusting, but fortunately, the wound was just in my nose.

Back at home, I have been able to get over the fever and no longer have digestive discomfort, but I do sleep very badly and even today, I feel pretty dizzy. I am kind of angry at dengue because now my body is en-guarde for this dengue type. There are four. If you later on catch a different type, you're very likely to develop severe dengue.

In short, dengue is not like a flu or a digestive intoxication. This is a serious disease that we have to try hard to avoid. This kills people and mosquitoes look so small and so common that you don't get the feeling of how dangerous they are. Some illnesses in the world get a lot of attention, such as HIV/AIDS, even though they are much easier to control, since prevention is very straightforward. Dengue has been largely ignored for a long time and only now is being taken more seriously and it's super hard to do anything to prevent getting infected. Many people catch dengue during a trip. That must be terrible!  So beware, guys. If you have the mosquito over there, avoid it at all costs and if you ever travel (whenever this thing ends), check whether there's dengue in the place you're going to visit and be very careful. Take care!

[permanent competition]

I've been working for several days on the new, version 2 of Race for Kicks. I have to say it's a great experience. I keep on learning PHP and I'm getting much better at it. I can't believe how fast I manage to add features. It's like I've written an engine with about five to seven times the power of R4K v1.5 and it's only taken me a few days, but of course, there are bugs to fix and I have to beautify it a little bit (something I'm not great at).

As I had said in another forum, the top change will be that a permanent competition will be added and the basic race system will be working on top of it. I already have this working. Only needs some minor touches. For example, while permanent races will allow you to choose any set of rules from a list and any car, the R4K races should require one certain set of rules (normally, always R4K OWOOT) and one or more cars for that race (usually one, or the three of the DTM pack). Until now, the race system is working the same way as the permanent track system.

pipsqueaks will be able to post on the chatroom, but also to send private messages to other pipsqueaks. When something relevant happens, such as a replay or track uploaded by that pipsqueak being verified or rejected, the pipsqueak will receive an automatic PM. The chatroom is already working. The PM system, I still have to build, but it's a lot simpler than what I've already made.

I am very satisfied with the track image generator that now displays tracks with Bliss graphics without me having to create the image outside the website and upload them like I used to do on v1.5.

Races have profiles they can edit, including changing their passwords and including a picture that will be displayed in the chatroom, beside their messages. This is specially comfortable for myself, since administrators can use this section to edit permissions. In the past, I had to do this manually from CPanel.

As I mentioned, now some pipsqueaks will be able to post tracks. When you post a track, an administrator or moderator has to validate it and it becomes available for the permanent competition. Later on, a race manager (usually, the administrator) can create a race out of this track and give it rules and a deadline.

While I don't plan on using this feature much, it is possible in R4K v2 to have more than one race running at the same time. In the future, I might add the option to have a particular pipsqueak moderate a certain race and not others.

When posting a replay, now publicity and verification are separate, which means you can make your replay public even before it's been verified.

Anyway, I just wanted to share what I've got so far and if you want to know anything about it or have suggestions, I'd live to read them and see what I can implement. I also want to make sure that R4K is a cooperative as possible with ZakStunts and does not cause any conflict, so if a feature or the way it's implemented should be inconvenient for ZakStunts, please let me know and I'll make some touches. Thank you!

You probably know some variation of this one. I know it like this:

- Three friends are travelling in a car on a long road and there hasn't been anything on it for hundreds of kilometers. They're tired and want some rest. They finally spot a small hostel or something like it. They stop by, get off the car and talk to a man at the entrance.
- The man says he's not the owner, that he'll be coming in an hour or so. When the friends ask for rooms, the man says he only has one left. He doesn't know the exact rate, but if the friends want to share it, he'll charge them $30 and they can go and sleep. When they wake up, he'll let them know if there's a difference, but won't be much for sure. So the friends take the room and each pays $10, totalling $30.
- When the owner arrives, the three friends are still asleep. The owner's replacement tells him about the rented room and that he's charged $30 for it. The owner says "You've charged them too much. It's actually $25 for that room. When the kids wake up, give them $5 back". But the guy thinks "How will I give $5 to three people?  Better just keep $2 for myself and give $1 back to each of them". And thus he does.
- Now the problem is this: if each one had paid $10 and is now given $1 back, then each actually paid $9. But they are three, so this is 3 times $9, which makes $27... plus the $2 that the guy kept, that's $29. So where is the other dollar?

RECOMMENDATION: If you see that somebody's posted an answer. First think about the puzzle before reading the replies. When I've given this problem to several people together, they tend to quickly influence one another and that's less interesting, even if they're wrong!

AND NOTE: People tend to stop for a moment and then tell me something like "You're saying it wrong" and then, they proceed to explain everything again just like I said it from the beginning. I know it happened that way. My question is precisely, how come if it happened that way, then it turns out a dollar is missing when we make the count?

Have you guys ever dedicated some time to thinking about time travel?  I'm sure you have. Of course, some of us love science fiction, others are just nostalgic of their past, others may be fascinated with the idea of seeing something historic... or prehistoric, etc. There may be different reasons. But... if you were told there exists a method, that one has been discovered... before you were told anything else about it.... What would you imagine it to be like?   When you have thought about time travel, how did it work in your mind?  Think of this for a moment before reading on, or I'll be influencing you with what I'll say next... and I'll still want to know the old answer.

- The style in Back to the Future makes the movie fun, but it's easy to find lots of pieces that don't match. It's like the grandfather paradox. Easy to see it doesn't work. Although, maybe you still think something like this could be possible if we just make some touches to prevent those contradictions.

- The one way that sounds the simplest for me, in the sense that it's the one that leads to minimal contradiction is to imagine that you can only travel to the moments you've lived, in your own body of the time. In this sense, you could also travel to the future if it's one you already lived and you're currently in a "past" relative to it. This would be like a "savegame" system. But this doesn't allow to travel beyond your lifetime. And there's also the problem that you wouldn't be going to the real moment you lived, since your new knowledge would be different from the one at the time. It would be an "extremely similar configuration", but not the same.

- There's also the idea that you can be physically transported, like in the first case, but to a parallel configuration, so you can do whatever you want. It's a copy, it won't affect the original. The actual problem with this is how to define a position. How can you tell if you're "at the same place"?  For instance, if you say "the place where I'm standing right now, but ten years ago", you could mean the same spot on Earth back then, or the same distance and angle from the Sun or from any other object. If you go so much into the past that plate tectonics make a difference, even the continents would be somewhere else.

Anyway... there are tons of ideas that can come up. This topic might be very interesting or too boring, but I just wanted to drop something in case you'd like to post your ideas. Then again, how do you imagine time travel?  And which time travel film or book have you enjoyed the most, if any?

The last race of this year has started!  I have made a new track this time and I think it's decently good!  There will be no December race this month as a mourning for the loss of the Republic in my country, hence the name of the track for this month. I think next year, I will be able to retake R4K normally, although I may be busy at the beginning.

The race features the Porsche 962 and it's quite enjoyable. I recommend you guys try it. I know my statement above may be controversial for some. It is not my intention to bother anybody, but to express myself and my feelings through this difficult time that will surely change my form of living. Nevertheless, just as I feel free enough to speak, I will so read too.

I'm used to the fact that all thoughts on politics are controversial. "Let us not talk about politics, please" says somebody at the table in Mother's Day after a barbecue or maybe at the office during a break. Surprisingly, people are more willing to accept the taboo than each other's ideas... even if it's just about listening. Does this taboo do any good?  And would abandoning this taboo fix anything anyway?

Yesterday (and this is not fiction), the pizza shop where I buy empanadas once a week (this is a common thing in Argentina) blew up. Exactly as I'm saying it. The owner arrived in the afternoon to open his shop as every other day. Maybe somebody didn't realise and left the gas running. Who knows?  I was able to hear the explosion from a distance of about 15 blocks, where I was at the time. The shop was completely demolished. It was a miracle that only three people suffered minor injuries, yet the business owner was renting the place and his employees probably weren't correctly registered. Again, who knows?  I can't help imagining the land owner claiming on the business owner, the electrician also being beckoned at, the employee who left the gas on, etc. Of course, neighbours were all super curious and formed a crowd around the place and we're just going to pick another pizza shop next time. Nobody will help; everybody will demand. As usual. The spectacular event was broadcast on TV. Not the explosion itself, but the aftermath. People love watching these things and talking about them. Even myself, I admit!  Now all this... was an accident.

Pick a random country. Of course, for every scandal, there will be one that will fit best, but all in all, any will do as an approximation. Spectacular events... and often not accidental. Or are they?  After all, if the guy at the pizza shop had been putting attention, he could've, in theory, prevented the explosion by always checking on the gas. So... not putting attention, not realising of what can happen, not considering the risks, in a way, turns a crime into an accident. Then maybe what we, common people, do when we vote is nothing but random and maybe what the people we vote for do afterwards is just accidental. That is, these politicians are all so predictable we should be able to see it coming. But we're human. We're forgiven.

"Don't you see this guy is an imperialist?"... "And don't you see this other one want to be a caudillo?"... Each of us surely has cried one of these questions to somebody else and has heard the other and largely ignored it. We're faction-based individuals. We vote for our favourite colour, not for whatever is right. Anyway, we don't even know what that is. We hear no warning. We just want to win.

A few months ago, I came across a video on YouTube in which a guy explained "democracy" in a very logical way. I had never heard somebody say it so clearly. He was claiming that what most "democratic" countries today have is not real democracy. That it's just the republican system. That democracy is about the people directly governing whereas, in a republic, it's the representatives. I already knew this, but one kinds of forget it and tends to use the two words interchangeably most of the time. The point is, to this guy, and it makes sense to me, "democracy" existed in the very far past in a few city-states, but does not exist today because, well, it usually doesn't work... like at all!  You can't have people just all decide everything. So majority vote is a system that creates the "illusion" of a democracy.

Now I had thought that I had always supported democracy, but after this and now, in expectation of my country blowing up at any time just like the pizza shop did, I am considering that maybe, not even the majority vote is fair. Not even this illusion works. Because the majority is not the wisdom of the people. It's just that: a majority. The same majority that watches stupid shows on TV or listens to horrible music at discos or gets horribly drunk and then drives. Picture this: a five-member family; the parents and three children. If the majority were to make the decisions, the children outnumber the parents, so they would be the ones to decide what's to be done in the house. Would that be fair?  And if not, why not?  Because it's the parents that work and bring everything to the house?  Well, something rings a bell here... I've head this thing before, haven't you?  But no, I'm not trying to convince you guys of anything or to create flame wars and I'm not sticking to my faction. I'm only calling to reason, to logic... maybe this same thinking, or any other... but... reason.

Thinking differently is not bad at all. Not thinking... well, that's the problem. Just wanted to share this. Thank you

I have been pretty busy these last days. I could've still built a new track, but because my niece was here last weekend, I decided I could ask her to build the track for this month. What happened is that I forgot and now she's on a trip and I had very little time at the end to upload a track. Then I say that 5:00am, the track I had made quite some time ago as a follow-up to the more successful 4:00am, had not been used (if I remember correctly) in a tournament ever. So here it is!  And the car for this month is the Xylocaine!

I've mentioned in a couple of occasions that this year I've been working on a home-made computer project with a friend of mine, but now I thought I'd drop it here, to share more information with you guys about it.

We had begun early this year thinking about how a microprocessor should be designed and had made some sketches on the PC and in paper, but it was all theoretical. Then we started to consider taking it to reality, but it seemed expensive, very likely to fail and well, it was going to be pretty slow and useless, except for learning from doing. So I asked my friend if he'd like instead to build a computer out of an existing microprocessor. We'd design mostly everything else. The idea sounded good and we chose the Z80B, which is a pretty popular microprocessor for these projects. It's 8 bits, but runs relatively fast (6MHz) so that the result could be comparable in power to an XT for some applications (and definitely not, for others, because of memory addressing, mostly).

We first started working on a PIC 16F84A micro-controller. These guys help a lot in developing projects like these. My friend had the software to program it, but it was windows-dependent, so we researched the protocol and managed to build a DOS-based assembler and burner. It took time and patience. Then, we incorporated a Z80A first and some latches and we used the PIC to emulate a memory system by controlling the Z80 clock and communicating with the PC. The PC would receive read requests from the Z80 via the PIC and return the values from PC memory and do the same the other way: receive data from the Z80 and store it in memory, thus emulating a memory environment. After considerable work, it was a success!  We were able to run simple programs at about 2Hz, ha, ha.

Now we've started running the Z80B at 4MHz directly connected to on board SRAM. We have a four-row LCD text display that we've already been able to interface and will soon be implementing a keyboard, a real-time clock and simple sound output, besides a parallel port. Our idea is to have this mini-computer help us with other electronics projects, being more friendly in that respect than a PC. But also, why not, get it to work like a standalone personal computer, eventually having a VGA output that could be converted to HDMI. We could even use a Yamaha OPL2 or OPL3 to output much better sound.

Another possibility would be to try to make it compatible, to some degree with either the Sinclair ZX Spectrum or the Commodore 128, in order to be able to run some of the software originally designed for those, but this would imply including some audio and video chips that are hard to find and sub-optimal nowadays for a project like this (harder to program, with worse quality and more expensive), so we'll see about that.

I was in a hurry because the month was almost over and also in a bad mood, because of a number of reasons. Really, the worst combination for having to create a track, but well, it was time to do it. I opened up the editor and quickly sketched something up. I threw all my bad mood toward one of my "enemies": Google, ha, ha. Then I tested what I had just created and to my surprise, I felt it was a pretty good track... at least, much better than other tracks I've made in a hurry. I felt it'd go well with the Porsche March Indy so there it goes. I'm pretty certain you guys will enjoy it

As you guys may have noticed, R4K is hosted at one subdirectory of my site dimioca.com. I've got my domain paid for another year, I think, but the web hosting actually uses a free hosting site. Some time ago, one of the support guys there attempted to persuade me to pay for the service, which actually wasn't expensive and I considered it, but in the end, I didn't do it. I do pay yearly for an e-mail service from them.

Now, this has happened: I've received an e-mail saying that all free accounts will expire and that their contents will be deleted, as they are going to stop providing free hosting. Yet, the due date has been a few months ago. My guess is that the guys don't want to drop me, as I am paying for another service, but officially, they very well could. I am going to speculate so I'm not going to pay for hosting right now. As a consequence, there is a chance that the site vanishes suddenly at some point. If that happens, I'll probably have to hire this host again or some other one... I don't know.

I do plan on keeping R4K running, but I'm not sure if I want to continue to pay for a domain and for the e-mail and/or hosting. It's not about money. I want to stop providing my personal information online. I don't think this will be an issue, as there is always an option on the Internet, but this is just to avoid surprises and so that any ideas you may have, you can post them here, any thoughts, etc. Thank you all for your attention!

I can't leave this subforum empty!  And it's true that season 2019 has already been running for half a year, but here we are. We're already at the fifth race. The results and replays of the first four can be viewed in the History menu at the R4K main site.

Current race can be played with any of the DTM cars and the track is Default with a few touches. Thanks to Seeker, Overdrijf, Dreadnaut and Lulisa (my niece) who are participating in this race so far. Half the race is still to go!

[Logging in to Race For Kicks]

Hi, guys!  I'm creating this topic because Seeker gave me a recommendation that I should extend the session times for login in Race For Kicks and I don't know much about how to do it, although Dreadnaut also suggested another way around it and I can think of a trick or too. Yet, this topic is not just about the login. I would like to add a little more.

Logging in to Race For Kicks
So first thing first... R4K uses PHP SESSION to preserve login data. I have no idea if there exists any way to set this up to create longer lasting cookies or whether, to get the login time to be longer, I would need to abandon SESSION and use something more complicated instead. I'd be interested in knowing the way. I personally feel the current session duration is OK, but I'm fine with longer ones too and I could even place a configuration for each user to have a different session length if they want. Two things I would very much like to avoid, though, are using external libraries and using Javascript. I am kind of proud of the purity of my code, ha, ha. Pure PHP would be best for me.

Cookie-less login
I had an idea in the past of adding an option for cookie-less login, because I would like to support people that have a concern towards the use of cookies over the internet, as opposed to sites pushing their users to just accept cookies "because they're so convenient". Cookies are useful, yes, but if somebody doesn't like them, I'd like to make life easy for them too. I have two ideas of how to do this: one is safer, but more uncomfortable. That would be a mode in which you have to enter your login and password everytime you send a replay or post a message. The other option would be that a user can choose to configure their profile so that their login is IP-based, that is, as long as they preserve their IP, they remain connected for as long as requested, but of course, if two people are sharing an IP, this is not viable and there's some risk to it. Anybody has opinions on this, knows any case in which something like this is being used or knows yet another way of achieving cookie-less login?  I'm really interested to learn about that.

Forum section, perhaps?
I was looking at the forum and how many sections it has, many of which are about tournaments that have not been running for a long time... and I'm posting in General ZSC. Since R4K is alive, I couldn't help thinking it could have a section in the forum and maybe inactive tournaments could be grouped in a category for inactive competitions or something?  Or maybe a category with only one or two sections could be renamed to include R4K, for instance, a category called "OWOOT tournaments"?

I want to clarify that I am not really demanding this. In fact, I am not sure if this is a good idea. R4K is not nearly as popular as those tournaments used to be when they were active and maybe a forum section for it would be too much. This is more of a question than of a request. I would like to drop the idea and read opinions, suggestions, etc. Just whatever you guys things is best, I'll be OK with

Subdomain?  Is it possible?
In the same way as above, I wonder if it would be possible to redirect something like r4k.stunts.hu to my site. Maybe it's not even necessary or good, so everything you want to say about this, I'll like to read. I don't think R4K is so, so important as to deserve this much, but maybe it's just more comfortable for pipsqueaks or maybe it just looks better. I'd like to read opinions. Thank you, guys!

Hi, folks!  Well, my track is up and I see some replays have already been posted in ZakStunts. I'm at work now, but I am wanting to watch them and see what you guys have been able to do on this baby so far!

Reading the first messages, I've realised my mistake when I made the little jump trick, in not including a split section for GAR to be possible. If it's still allowed, I would like to mend that up. May I?  I would modify the track in a way that it would still be compatible with replays already sent (except for the fact that the track-part of the file would be different, but that's fixable). If that's too much trouble, a special-rule is OK too, but I'm so sorry. I should've realised about this fact before posting the track. Anyway, just let me know and if I'm allowed, I'll make the change for you guys!

R4K is currently running a race using the Speedgate XSD. We've known for some time about its very particular behaviour when quickly lowering the gears while at high speed. I remember when CTG posted a video in the shoutbox about it and most pipsqueaks felt kind of disappointed, apparently. It seemed everybody expected Speedgate to be a well-behaved, realistic car and instead, it had this quirk. Maybe so much was this disappointment that the car wasn't included in the following year's car set for the tournament.

Since that day, I've been thinking about the car and its qualities and I've started to feel some strange love toward this feature/bug... Specifically, I've began to feel that it isn't any weirder than powergear, which we have gotten used to seeing as something normal in Stunts cars (albeit unrealistic, of course). I looked up Speedgate in the wiki and there's a reference about a "mild pseudo-anti-powergear". Does this line refer to the same feature I'm talking about?  Unfortunately, I am not very knowledged about cars internals in Stunts. If this statement is about something else, then how should we call this feature?  Do other cars have anything like it?  How do you guys feel about maybe loving this weirdness a little?

Anyway, this is just a bunch of questions about how we generally feel about this car, but mostly, for those of you who have more experience creating and editing cars and can shed some brighter light on the topic. Thank you!

Hi, guys. I kept thinking on this since GTAMan15 expressed his concern about uploading tracks and the copyright laws in the EU. I decided I'd write a topic on this to reach a clear conclusion on how we'll handle the software we handle here. In part, the programs we share, but mainly, the tracks and replays, which we continuously produce.

As I understand it, the following we know. Please do let me know if I'm mistaking on any of these points:
1 - Stunts itself is abandonware. Somebody from the original makers or distributors expressed at some point the will of allowing us to use it freely and nobody ever had complained, yet we don't have any official permission to distribute it as freeware. If one day, there is a problem (which is unlikely), we will be told and will have to stop distributing it. There isn't any chance of anybody being fined for the current use until we get a confirmation that we can or cannot distribute it this way.
2 - We can assume Track Blaster and other tools are freeware, because they were made for the community. Yet, for most of them, there has never been any confirmation either.
3 - Some tools are clearly free software or open source. I can confirm here that Bliss is one of them and because Stressed, for example, is posted in GitHub, if I remember correctly, it must be FOSS too. So zero problem to distribute these.
4 - The tracks and replays we have been posting here and in the tournament page are, by default, proprietary. Yet, the fact that the people who made them later posted them to these sites themselves, shows that they cannot expect the community to be punished in any way for downloading and using these files in the way they are normally used. However, should the producer of a track or replay wish to request this used to be stopped, they have the right to do so, although it would cost them money to enforce that. Who would do that?  Nobody. Anyway, it'd be better if there were a not somewhere saying that, by publishing your track or replay here, you release it to the public domain or something.
5 - In any case, posting something that you made yourself can never cause you any copyright problem, since it is your product. As far, of course, as you made it from scratch and not from other tracks and replays. But saving a replay from a track that's not yours shouldn't be a problem either since that is the normal, expected use of Stunts.

While the general rule is that nothing that we're doing is probably going to cause us any problem here, count on me for anything we can do to make it even more sure that things remain that way.

[Some things I have not tested yet:]

So... several times, while racing, I noticed how signs appear before some corners, but not always and I was puzzled, because there didn't seem to be a rule. I had already promised myself I'd do some research on the topic. Not that it's very useful, but you know, I don't like just going through life not understanding why things are the way they are, so here's what I found out:

1 - Stunts places corner signs only before open corners, but not before banked corners. All three materials work (this I actually didn't verify, but seems obvious) and even open splits. The sign is placed shortly after the beginning of the previous tile (at about 1/20th of the way).
2 - The previous tile doesn't have to be an empty path. It could also be a crossway, a slalom or even a ramp. The end of a boulevard also works. Some tiles can't have the sign, but not because of incompatibility with it, but before of rule number 3.
3 - The sign is only placed if there is a straightway four or more tiles long. Some tiles are not considered straightways, so they break the count and you have to start counting again from one after them. These include the tunnel, all corners (of course), the open split (though notably not the closed split) and all objects that are larger than one tile with the notable exception of up/down corkscrews.
4 - The start/finish line does count as straightway, but if it is located in the middle of a longer straigthway, only the tiles starting from the start/finish line itself will count.
5 - In the event that the sign is to be placed at a ramp tile, it is rised to the height of the ramp at that point and it is brought immediately by the road instead of separated and on the grass as it happens with other tiles. This ensures it's visible. In all cases, it's placed on the right side of the road.


Some things I have not tested yet:

1 - I have not verified that all materials do the same, although I'm quite certain they do
2 - Whether disconnected tracks also exhibit these signs, I don't know, but my guess is they don't because Stunts has to tell in which direction a road is to be driven in order to place the signs. This wouldn't be possible on disconnected tracks
3 - Not yet checked what happens if the sign is to be rendered on water. I guess they do get placed
4 - On this test, I didn't try the case in which the sign appears on a slope, but I remember having seen such signs many times while playing Stunts

If anyone is curious about this or has something to say, it'd be interesting to discuss it!

[What we have]

What we have
This is about one particular point that could later help for the global registry, but also for many other things. As I had said before in another thread, we don't currently have a way to uniquely identify tracks, let alone replays. For tracks, in ZakStunts, there's the ZCT number, which does a very good job, but it's not perfect, since one track may have more than one ZCT number and of course, tracks from other tournaments or well-known tracks that don't particularly belong to a tournament, don't have to have a ZCT number. Also, fantasy-names, which Bliss usually refers to as "track-titles" are good too, but are long to type and may contain non-ASCII characters and besides, many tracks don't have them, so they are good for looks, but not for general identification.

What could be done
I was thinking of a general track identification number system. There are two approaches at this: one would be to directly assign as many tracks as possible a number directly and maybe even reserve numbers depending on where the track originated or how it's been used. The other is to just start from zero or one and assign numbers as tracks are given them. The first option is more orderly, although the second one has the advantage of leaving no "holes". Furthermore, there's the thing about how to format these track IDs. A decimal number?  An alpha-numeric string?  Maybe a hex number?  Could also be a leading letter and a number. Anybody has thought about something like this before?

Estimations
I reckon we have a few thousands of tracks counthing what each of us has in their hard drives, plus old tracks from old championships, etc. Four decimal digits should be enough, but could be surpassed with some effort. Five or six should definitely be good. But usually, we're interested in about 500 tracks only. Something like #00921 could look good for a general track number, or maybe like 14-0122 where the first two digits would identify the source or origin of the track. I kind of prefer the first.

On replays
We currently have no general ID for replays, I think, other than them being saved in folders with their corresponding race in tournaments. A replay ID number could contain the track ID as part of it, but could also be completely general or be based on date-and-time when it was first registered anywhere (such us uploaded to a championship). In that case, it'd be complicated to work out the numbers for the thousands of replay files we already have.

On track hashes and circuit hashes
As I was taking I walk, I thought, it's great to be able to quickly compare tracks by using hashes based on all of the bytes in the file. Then, when they match, if we want, we may go ahead and compare the whole thing byte-by-byte to make sure it's the same, or not. But, depending on what we're looking for, sometimes it could make more sense to compare not the whole contents, but only what's on the accessible path of the track. A sequential follow-up of the track and it's branches could result in a parallel cricuit-hash that could be used to tell if two tracks are very similar or just versions of the same track. We could even be able to tell a rotation. Of course, the general track hash is still very important. I'm just saying the second one could be a plus.

Finally
Thanks, guys for reading my frequent brainstorming. Most people don't like reading long, but I think it's a good idea to just drop this here in case now or anytime anybody would like to think about it and add or maybe I suddenly light up a new idea one of you may have that may be much better than mine. My grain of sand.