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

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Messages - Cas

#1651
General Chat - R4K / Re: New Race For Immortality?
November 01, 2020, 07:22:48 AM
Yeah, I have the same feeling... On the other hand, I held the event at a time when activity here was at a moderate low, so several pipsqueaks could not be present. Now I see so many people on board and that's why. The scoreboard in Bliss is pretty small. So... these two opposite aspects of the thing in my mind.... That's why I would like to know if many people would like to participate in a second run to see if it's worth it. I figure if that is the case, the best would be to have Bliss display the 2016 scoreboard followed by the 2020 scoreboard. It's like... all pipsqueaks deserve to be there if they want to. I don't know. I think it was Afullo that asked me about it once.... Was it you, Afullo?

Anyway... yeah... maybe it's not a very good idea :/  Just wanted to read opinions to feel convinced either way.
#1652
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?
#1653
Competition 2020 / Re: Season video?
October 31, 2020, 06:45:35 PM
It occurs to me that some races or part of them could be shown with the screen divided in four and the four top final replays showed simultaneously, as if watching the race. If it were to be just part of a race, the last part would be ideal, so we can see how they arrive one by one. I would say top 3, the podium, but then there'll be holes in the screen, unless the #1 is shown in half the screen and #2 and #3 in quarters.
#1654
Competition 2020 / Re: Season video?
October 30, 2020, 03:38:00 AM
I like that idea very much!  I think Overdrijf's most recent replay for the last race in Race For Kicks (which ended up not being valid for that race, but is still posted in the tracks' permanent competition) is something that shouldn't be forgotten, so I propose the replays from R4K can also participate in this... like a video about the most amazing Stunts occurrences of the year. Besides cool music, good commenting would be great. You guys just tell me how I can help.
#1655
Glad you like it, GTAMan! :D  This was something that should've been done before. About colouration, it's been an unfinished and unofficial feature in Bliss for quite some time.

And Dreadnaut, wow!  I understand from this that I will be able to give Bliss a true full interface with ZakStunts, right?  At this moment, the interfacing to get the current track and its metadata uses official interchange information (from the json file), but for the scoreboard, I'm having to parse the HTML, which will break if at any time a modification is made to the style of the page. If you do get a stable interchange file working (a.k.a. "API"), let me know and I'll make the changes. It would make the tournament access faster and more reliable.

Bliss is getting very complicated to update. The code is too big and each piece of it has been made without thinking of the ones that came after it, of course, which has accumulated a lot of redundancy and inconsistences. At this point, I feel like rewriting the whole thing, but that would be too much work. Yet, something like changing the procedure to read the scoreboard from ZakStunts is, in my opinion, important to update if it comes up. I can see that the project involves a lot more information, but I don't think I'll make this Bliss able to navigate through past races and such. It's too much to add to this code. I'll leave that last part for Bliss 3.0... if I decide to do the big thing.

Oh, and KyLiE found a bug in Bliss 2.5.7, but it only affects the DOS version. I'm fixing that now.
#1656
Stunts Related Programs / New Bliss 2.5.7
October 22, 2020, 05:18:55 AM
Alright... I've been saying for over a year that Bliss is complete and I'm only going to make more changes in case of bugs, but...

NEW VERSION: BLISS 2.5.7

New features:

  • Colouration - Use colours to mark sections of the grid. Good for tutorials and to set rules for a race. Remember those times when you had to take a screenshot of a track, then clip a part and use a drawing program to make markings on it?  You can do it from within Bliss now with this option and the Track-shot menu
  • Improved tournament protocol - Now Bliss supports Race For Kicks!  Yeah, really, it was a shame that all this time, it didn't. And besides, for anybody who would one day want to make a little championship or race event, it's much simpler now to hook with the protocol, the details of which are described in the manual

Other changes:

  • Track-shots should now work well even in DOSBox... hopefully :)
  • E-mail and website have been updated in the start screen
  • DPMI server included in the package to make it simpler for DOS users, given that DOSBox no longer provides built-in DPMI. Thanks for pointing this out, KyLiE!

This update isn't crucial, as no major bugs have been fixed, but if you use track-shots and would like to use it for track schematics, I recommend upgrading.
#1657
General Chat - R4K / Re: Race for Kicks
October 19, 2020, 03:14:02 AM
Hey, you should have been able to make the replay public in the scoreboard, unless there's a bug. Anyway, as expected, and sadly, I can't approve it for OWOOT :(  because it doesn't execute all stunts, but it really is an impressive one, so I've opened the track in the permanent competition, where you can re-post the replay as Free OWOOT. That would make it valid.

As I mentioned in the chat room, this kind of happenings make me consider turning R4K into a primarily Free-OWOOT (as opposed to strict-OWOOT) tournament with occasional strict OWOOT tracks (opposite to what it is like now). Another such event was when somebody (not sure, but maybe Alan Rotoi) posted a replay that I couldn't approve because he drove on the roof of the tunnel. Also, strict-OWOOT makes me feel compelled to avoid using u/d corks in tracks. What do you guys think?

On the other hand, R4K is like it is because it's inspired in the rules of Paleke's WSC.
#1658
Competition 2020 / Re: ZCT232 - Serial Killer
October 19, 2020, 03:07:59 AM
Uhm... probably GTO.... or Acura?  I always say I'm not good with the Acura, but I think on this track, it'd work for somebody more skilled.
#1659
When I first got Stunts, it was Broderbund 1.0. At that time, 1993, in Argentina, it was impossible to get any original version of any software. All came through piracy. There wasn't any place where you could buy originals and there wasn't any internet either. Often, when you started the games you'd buy at these pirate places, they would show some logo made by the rippers and then you'd press a key and continue to the game. Thus, I don't know if what I got was a faithful copy of the original or if it had any modification of these files. I still have that copy and I can share the replay (v1.0) if you guys wish.

The replay was made with a blue Indy racing on the Default track we all know. Everything would go well until the car got to the loop. At that point, it would get up to 90 degrees and shoot for the sky, finally crashing into the ground. In the foreground, the well known text would flash saying "Professional driver on closed circuit". I remember I found it difficult to believe, considering that phrase, that such replay was the original one.

About the car  in the intro, didn't I read somewhere that the Ferrari F40 had been made based on that car?
#1660
General Chat - R4K / Re: On Dimioca site and free hosting
September 28, 2020, 10:26:41 PM
So... to update the news... yes, fnhost.org died. It never came back!  On the other hand, KyLiE has very kindly offered to host the tournament so you guys can now find it at http://www.raceforkicks.com :)
#1661
Well, fnhost apparently died, so this probably doesn't matter any more, but to respond... I was about to contact fnhost about it and didn't do it. Now they're gone, so nothing changed. I think it wasn't that serious (I mean, it is serious, but doesn't affect me very much because in only caused problems when downloading private replays, so most users were OK). I expect this will not happen when I move to another server.... in fact, to any other server, ha, ha. I think it was a very particular flaw of fnhost.

In case somebody is reading this and doesn't know what it's all about, I PMed Dreadnaut recently about a problem I was having with fnhost, the server that just died, where R4K was running. When you download files from a server, there are (to summarise) two ways you can do this. One is by just clicking on a link that points to that file. This worked fine. The other is by calling a PHP process that will generate the file for you to download. Whenever I tried this, fnhost was appending some trash at the end of my files. To keep private replays private, R4K stores them in a protected directory, but when I, or any moderator, has to verify a non-public replay, they have to download the file somehow, so it had to use the second method. This corrupted the replay files. In practice, this wasn't serious because replay files with trash appended at the end work just the same in Stunts most of the time (not if the replay is interrupted, for example), but still, I wanted to find a solution for this because it's not nice to have corrupted files downloaded. One case is when you tried to open a corrupted replay with Bliss. It would not realise it's version 1.1 and the track would not look good. Now, because fnhost died (apparently) and I'm moving to another server soon, this problem vanishes.
#1662
General Chat - R4K / fnhost.org expired?
September 24, 2020, 03:10:34 AM
Yesterday, by sheer chance, I had the idea of making a full backup of Race For Kicks. I couldn't have been more lucky with my timing!  Today, I try to get to the site and I get a message saying it's expired. When I click on the link they give, they take me to the "privacy policy", so I think... "How strange?  Did it have to do with any privacy-related issue?". So I go to my e-mail and there's no warning or notice that anything would happen. Weird.

Finally, I go to fnhost.org, root page, to see if I can log in or anything. Only then I realise what is going on. The whole fnhost.org is down and now, putting attention, it says "This domain name expired on 2020-09-23 12:06:46. Click here to renew it" (clicking "there" is what takes me to the privacy policy page). See, it's not their hosting, but their domain. Maybe it's both. Who knows?  And they didn't even warn me so probably they didn't even know.

Alright, so... either the guys at fnhost.org will renew their domain and everything will be back to normality soon or I will just have to move to a new host. One thing I can do in the meantime is pay for a domain name and host the website myself on my computer. This means it wouldn't be up all the time, but at least, it could be up. The thing is reliable hosting is expensive... Not for somebody living in a normal country, but this is the Argentine Medieval Feud.
#1663
After a few months, I'd like to write an update on how version 2.0 has been performing and the features that have been added and bugs fixed with some prospect for the future.

Version 2.0 is really a lot more comfortable to use for me, as an administrator, than the old version 1.5. During the racing months, though, I've encountered several bugs, some pointed out by you guys, that I've had to fix and thus, I've actually been using CPanel just as much as before, but still, it's been much simpler. It's sometimes sad that half of the power added to this version only applies to the administration panel, so it's not obvious for the regular user.

Something I'm not entirely satisfied with is the new archiving method, which I'm starting to think, is worse than before. Replays don't go to a race directory once it's finished. Instead, they remain in the public replay directory all mixed up. Of course, the information on which replays correspond to a certain race is still stored in the scoreboard, but it makes it more complicated to look them up outside the system. Besides, off-scoreboard replays are completely unlinked and the only way to identify them is to actually open them in Stunts and see which track they run on. I'll have to do something about this in the future.

On the good side, virtually everything I mentioned in the last post has been implemented, even the profile image, which I had postponed many times. Only it's a 32x32 avatar, but I might make it so that a larger version shows in the profile. Moderation is possible both globally and locally for a certain race. You get messages when your replays get rejected for some reason. Also, things I had not mentioned were added, such as more emoticons and quick links on the side of the main page. The rules have been updated to include information on the different racing styles.

I'm thinking that this system could be later on adapted so that it can be easily installed and configure on any server and set up to have any appearance you would like, so that anybody could quickly start a tournament of their own. Stunts community is old and activity fluctuates, but hey, it's alive after so long... so I wouldn't be surprised if a new era of tournaments were to come in the future :)
#1664
Competition 2020 / Re: ZCT231 - Kowloon
September 20, 2020, 09:36:37 PM
I like how the track goes completely surrounded by buildings. Also, I was thinking this track would be good for LeStunts because the start/finish line is situated in a pits-like parallel road :)
#1665
Chat - Misc / Re: Time Travel
September 20, 2020, 09:28:26 PM
Yes, you're right. The same thing happens to me with music. I come up with something and then I think "naaah!" and I scrap it because it's too cheesy or not very intelligent and then, I'm sitting at my computer and my next door neighbour turns up his reggaeton to max volume and I realise it all makes no sense!