Messages

Thank you, Duplode. Just like you, when I raced in WSC (which was between late 2005 and the whole of 2006), I felt that it was a strict OWOOT tournament, or at least, that is the idea that kept in my head. Now I watch the replays and see that corks (both u/d and l/r) are being jumped over and I have to conclude differently. There's a chance, as you suggest, that the rules (which I read and translated from the website as it was after it was abandoned) had been different in the earlier times, when I raced. I should put more attention when watching replays, to which tracks are being raced, to make sure. I'll keep on watching all of them.

About that line that said that WSC was at a point the sole strict OWOOT contest, which I changed to "the sole OWOOT contest"... would that still be valid?

I have made a graphic... not very neat, but does the job... about the different tournaments and how they extended through time. It's similar to how Wikipedia shows the evolution in the formation of rock bands with colour bars for the different instruments and the names of the different band members on a site. I would like to upload it as part of a Wiki article about tournaments in general, but the information I used to produce it is based on the forum and the Wiki and it's not like I've been there during those tournaments, so it will be needing a second look when I upload it. What the heck... I'll put it right here... What do you think?  Some where more intermittent than others, which makes it difficult to make a good graphic.

[free OWOOT]

Also... I've been carefully watching the replays from WSC and I have come to the conclusion that we have been mis-categorising it. WSC has always been a free OWOOT tournament, not a strict OWOOT one with few exceptions. If it is considered strict, exceptions are way too many. For example, jumping over any stunts was allowed and the road borders found in slopes were considered part of the road when it came to OWOOT. I have updated its status in the Wiki.

There is one statement in the Wiki that I had to change, but I am not sure about the truth of the modified statement. I reckon it was probably Duplode who initially wrote that section, so maybe you'd want to correct it. It said that "[at some point, WSC] was the only active strict OWOOT tournament". I have changed this to "... the only active OWOOT tournament". Is that correct?  I don't know if there were other free OWOOT tournaments running at the time.

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!

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!

Ah!  I know what you mean. That's why the last time, I chose to rewrite Race For Kicks entirely instead of patching the old one more and more. It had become so much of a mess inside that it was really difficult to make changes. Now version 2.1 is slowly getting to the same stage, ha, ha.

Count on me, guys!

I give my thumbs up to KyLiE!  In fact, I invited him!  Leo, what do you think?  Marco?

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!

OK... so there's some interest, but not that much, and also there's the feeling of preserving the uniqueness of the R4I event.... uhm.... We'll be finding a reasonable middle ground, probably for January!

Here I'll take 240. This number has to do with MIDI messages and I'm a musician

I'll take 238. I like physics and Uranium 238 is a very interesting element!

A closed track!  That's going to be interesting

Wow!    I tried it on my computer. Just saved four videos of about 30 seconds with DOSBox and stacked them 2x2. The output was produced in about 10 seconds. DOSBox does not transfer the normal3x factor to the final video (that is, is outputs the video with the original screen size of 320x200, which is what I wanted). The output works exactly as I would want. Quality is not excelent. I assume the quality of the source videos is already not so good, so I wouldn't blame ffmpeg, but it perfectly serves its purpose.

Hey, as I see it, this is so easy and fast to do that every race could have its own video. I think I'll make the experiment of replaying Race For Immortality and make a video with the replays to see how it goes

EDIT: I did it!  And the result is somewhat disappointing, but I guess it can be done better. Closely examining both the source and output videos, it becomes clear that the quality of the input is much better than that of the output. I'm pretty sure this can be changed with option in the ffmpeg command line. I have to see. Another thing I noticed is that audio is not included, but that's fine. It'd be a mess otherwise. I can just put some background music and that's it. The source videos, of course, don't have a border, so it looks a little confusing, and they don't have a title saying who's the driver for each. I have the feeling that these two things can also be handled with ffmpeg. I have to dig more into its options and capabilities.

EDIT TO THE EDIT: Aha!  I found the reason of the quality drop. The input files (generated by DOSBox) are AVI. For some reason, if I use AVI as the output, I get a decreased quality. I tried with Theora/OGG and and MP4. Theora gives a different result, albeit with the same degree of crappiness. MP4 looks a lot better (and renders faster than Theora... AND produces a smaller file that AVI). Just for testing, I am now making a try with WebM. It's taking an eternity. In the preview, I saw it looks just like the MP4 version. File size so far is small, so it looks like it's going to be more or less the same size. Conclusion: go for MP4

I read the article posted by CTG just today. Amazing!

An update of the thing here... I have seen in media not just from Argentina, but from other countries, that Argentina's quarantine has been "the longest in the world" in those words. I don't really know if that's accurate. For instance, I understand that Colombia has been in quarantine for approximately the same amount of time and most countries, I'm not sure. But I can say it definitely is long and still ongoing. The reason for this, in my opinion, is that we went into very strict lockdown at a time when there was a very tiny amount of cases so the thing got slowed down a lot, but not stopped. Of course, the government didn't do anything else so that prolongation has been useless.

Most of the time of the quarantine, while we heard about cases in the media, most of us (except people living in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires) have not known anybody personally who had been infected so it all appear very unreal. Yet, you would ask people and scepticism wouldn't get to the point of denial of the virus, thankfully (of course, there have been exceptions). About two to three weeks ago, we reached the point in my town (Córdoba) when everybody knows somebody personally who's infected or has been. It does look like the peak. Problem is, this has been so long that, precisely now that we need people staying at home, they are no longer willing to. Even province governments have felt forced to relax the measures to provent more shops going backrupt.

The good thing about this is that the peak is the fastest point and there already are signs of things starting to move back to normal. Hospitals in my town are almost full, but not overcrowded anymore. There's a lot of talking about the vaccine, but let's get real: we can't make that happen any faster and if we can, it's not safe. The summer is approaching and people are wanting to go on anything that feels slightly like vacation. I don't think anyone or anything will be able to stop them.

Next weekend sounds good for me!  I could be available on non-weekends, but the timing should be very good or I should know in advance where. If there's agreement about a day other than weekend, ask me with time, and I'll see if I can manage to be there at that time. But a Saturday would be ideal, and Sunday is #2.