Messages

Thank you, guys!  I had forgotten to give a description. Thanks for adding it as well!

I'll take a look again at the json file to understand the format. Right now, my site does not automatically build the cfg file anyway, so the json would be written by me manually just like the cfg, but my intention is that I can later update that from the administration panel, like I do with the handling of replay files and the highscore table. I'll let you know when I have that working

Thanks, Zak. Here I'm posting the banner, same size as the others, also GIF. The data could be:
Name: Race for Kicks
Status: Active
Manager: Cas
Length: Individual races
Replay Handling: Optional
Cars used: Assigned per track
Track interval: Varies
Link to: http://dimioca.com/r4k

More specific and variable information can be gathered from http://dimioca.com/r4k/tour.cfg, which is a text file. Each line contains a variable name, equals sign and a value and this is updated for every race. Relevant variables:

tour: Gives the tournament name, currently "Race for Kicks". Likely to stay the same
cttitle: Name of current track
ctauthor: Author of current track
ctdeadline: Deadline string
ctcurcar: Car for current track
startdate: Date the race started

There's no need for you to read these, but there they are, available.

Another possibility could be that you just select a modality, which won't affect handicap, and then, you can filter the score table to show "all", "NoRH only" or "OWOOT/GAR only". Also, maybe there shouldn't be handicap like affecting the final time, but something more like LTB, that is, extra points, say "Merit Bonus". This not necessarily has to affect the final season score either (although it could)... It might as well just display as a separate final score. Again, I'm just throwing tons of ideas in the hope that one or two of them might be good or might at least give rise to another idea that could be good.

Indeed!  It reminds me of my own tracks, ha, ha. I always love speed

Guys, in my case, I will participate in the main competition every month or most of them. For NoRH or GAR, I can say I will participate, but less often... maybe half the races. I think I would be more likely to participate in GAR than in NoRH because shorcuts are usually very risky and most shortcut-based attempts to race a track end up in a crash, whether this is not necessarily so in OWOOT. On the other hand, some tracks are just not good for GAR. But I would try to post replays for both whenever I can.

Idea:
Maybe all modalities could go to the same socreboard and a new column would day which modality was used. Depending on the modality, a handicap value could be given, to encourage diversity of modalities. To prevent new players from cheating (stating they are doing NoRH when they are not), NoRH and GAR options could be disabled for new pipsqueaks until they've raced a certain number of tracks or vouched-for by another pipsqueak. Same way, this could be banned for pipsqueaks suspected from having cheated. These are just ideas.

PHP-code:
At the moment, I don't know, but of course, Dreadnaut, count on me to cooperate. We can share code or create sites that intercommunicate in any way that's good for the community. For instance, I was thinking I could this year take care of the records on the default tracks that come with Stunts and keep record of them for all modalities. Once I manage to get it working, I could pass you the code and the data or share it with ZakStunts or anything. Whatever is best. Another thing I would like to accomplish is finally creating a mod to verify NoRH. This is hard and I've tried to do it several times, but it'd surely be an achievement.

The domain is down and I really don't understand well why. I'm trying to solve it. The server is working fine. So you can use this link:
http://bngjj1-user.freehosting.host

There are times and times. When I first started racing in the community, it was not ZakStunts that I first got to. There were a number of active tournaments that also had many pipsqueaks. I enrolled in Paleke's WSC, which was OWOOT with replay-handling. That's the way I started. I remember that, at that time, I knew about ZakStunts and it had more pipsqueaks than WSC, but still WSC had some 7 to 10 pipsqueaks every month.

The real issue with tournament popularity has to do not so much with how many people are in the community, but about why they are in the community. Back then, most pipsqueaks were new and they were changing all them, so the reason was just to try something new. A lot of effort was put into attracting more pipsqueaks because there were relatively few permanent ones. But some of them did become permanent. Today, most races occur without any new pipsqueak. One or two appear per year. pipsqueaks participate because they learnt to love the community and they want to be part of it. Because the number is reasonable, not much effort is being put in getting new pipsqueaks. Also, I'm sure the tournament site has been a lot of work for many years and for no money, so after all this time, it's hard to still feel like investing all that time and effort.... completely reasonable. It makes sense to start a new event, even a new tournament from time to time, in hope that people will like it. If it doesn't work, it still was worth the try

This one is having a little bit more movement.

My personal taste: I love fast races. I do think, though, that it's very important that all cars have a chance sometime, but if we're going to just rotate one, then I'd definitely vote for a fast car.

About the second score table, NoRH with shortcuts sounds amazing to me. I've never tried that. In any case, if you'd like to keep GAR running as well, my site and its system are at the service of Stunts community. Say, for example, if Marco would like to maintain a GAR tournament next year, I offer him my code so he can use the platform as an administrator. I can set up the whole system for him. The reason I think this makes more sense is because last year both GAR and shortcut-based races were running on a same track and it's unlikely for a track to be amazing for both things at a time, whereas RH/NoRH is a minor difference in terms of how a track should be designed. By using my platform, Marco (if he'd like to be admin of GAR) could have his own tracks, designed for GAR. The platform could be added to Stunts.hu hub and the two sites could also link to one another more visibly. This is just an idea, of course.

EDIT: Oh, I have one more idea I would like to add. What if every car were classified as either "fast" or "slow" and instead of just rotating the whole list, one month were fast, the next slow, then fast again, etc.?  This would allow designing a track to be fast or slow.

That's a very interesting one. I know that there have been many different approaches to recreating Stunts. Many of them have been mentioned in this forum. Maybe the best known is Ultimate Stunts, but all are too different from Stunts.

In this particular case, it appears at first sight that the game is much more similar to Stunts because it uses its original 3D models, but it's actually entirely different: the physics are more like that of other car games and the engine is both hardware and software demanding, since it uses 3D hardware effects and if I understood correctly, it's built upon third party libraries (too many dependencies). These things are nice, but I think that, for a recreation of Stunts to stick, it has to be... well... "Stunts". Only a few things can be changed that people would accept such as:

- Make the game run natively on newer OSs
- Allow higher pixel resolution
- Maybe change the collision and physics engine as long as they still appear to be the same (that is, it's not that important if replays are incompatible with the new one, but it is important that the game still feels like Stunts). Changing the engine would allow more practical car design, making the game more flexible
- Allow mods

I've made a triangle drawing function that I could translate to assembly to make it lightning fast, but then comes all the 3D and collision and I fear that will kill me, ha, ha.

Wow!  Looks like a whole lot is known about the internal workings of Stunts. I would gladly start writing a Stunts-like game if I were more comfortable with some things (namely, triangle collision, 3D triangle-based rendering). My idea is that, if one kept some concepts simple like in Stunts (textureless single-coloured triangles, no shadows, no gradients), one could produce a very fast 3D engine with high resolution and without the need to rely on 3D drivers and graphics acceleration. A tweaked Newtonian engine could incorporate the elements we see in Stunts physics to recreate the feeling of driving in Stunts, while not necessarily producing the exact same results. A portable engine, with no dependencies, would be amazing. If this much is already understood, maybe we could put forces together to create it.

New track: New Year - 2017
Waiting for you, guys!

[Bliss]

Hi, guys. I'm here announcing that we can now consider Bliss to be complete, although some bugs might be detected in the future, that I would have no problem to fix and maybe some feature would become important one day and requested, but other than that, it already does all it has to do. You can download the latest, final version from here:

http://www.dimioca.com/bliss

I would suggest that you guys download it and keep the zip file and if you can also replicate it to your sites, to have an alternative download source, it would be even better, in case my server would ever fail. Following are some changes you're going to find in this final version:

• Time estimates are now based on the results of the Race for Immortality event held in October and November of this year
• It is now possible for a user to calibrate with any track, not just 4am.trk
• Bliss.trk and napalm.trk are now also included. Replays from R4I are, too, built-in in a subdirectory
• Bliss is now free software under the GPLv3. You can take a look at the source code if you wish
• Shortcut keys now try to follow the path being drawn
• You can still select a track element by pressing space and typing, but now what's being typed is highlighted in the panel
• Background landscape images have been replaced with public-domain landscape graphics
• There were a couple of bugs, one regarding cutting with the mouse and another having to do with scenery generation, both fixed

Thank you all guys for your support on this project and special thanks go to Duplode, for his amazing feedback!

I'm back! Soon to be checking replays!

Thanks, Duplode, for creating this topic and thank you guys for joining again. I haven't been checking the replays or writing here or racing in ZakStunts these last days because I'm on a trip. I'm currently in Puerto Madryn, in the Patagonia, South of Argentina. I will be returning home this Sunday and I'll be active again. I tried to post a message in R4K and discovered a bug. It looks like the session system conflicts with NoScript (a Firefox plugin that I use) and even when I enable the site IP, I still can't remain logged in (which did work from my home computer). When I tried to write a message, it not only logged off, but also deleted another message Leo had sent, so I have to make my code blocker-proof. Another thing I want to do is develop a NoRH verification system so that a handicap can be given to benefit NoRH replays.

This track, Dubai, I made very quickly, so any comments on it are welcome