Messages

Very interesting trick!  The logic of Stunts can sometimes appear very random

I'm feeling it might be possible to turn around on the boulevard without having to go to the end of the highway. I should give it a try

Very ingenious!

[Intro]

Intro
Hi, guys!  We should've had this thread... uhm... twenty years ago?    Glad we have it now. It's never too late for introductions.

Origins
I'm Cas. I was born in Córdoba, Argentina, but I consider myself cosmopolitan. I race under the NZ flag in ZakStunts. Currently 44 years old. I first came across Stunts in April 1993. I had recently acquired my brand new 386 and a friend from school came to my house with a ton of diskettes to share some games, which included Stunts (Brøderbund 1.0). Like is the case with Alan Rotoi, my version was also damaged. The Default track had been... uhm... "vandalised" and I couldn't race against Skid Vicious. The default replay was a Porsche March Indy racing on Default and flying up to the air and crashing at the loop.

First racing
I found that there existed Stunts tournaments in the late 90s, but I didn't participate back then. I didn't understand the rules very well and I'm shy and usually, instead of asking or trying, I do things only when everything is very clear, so I miss some chances. However, in late 2005, I discovered Paleke's World Stunts Championship in La Cueva de los Clásicos (a Spanish forum) and by 2015, I was already also very active in ZakStunts.

What I do
Although I've done considerable work creating CarWorks, I've never made a custom car myself. Not that I'm not interested. Quite the contrary. But I feel I'm not very good at that. One day, I'll do it. I'm also not a very good pipsqueak. What I contribute the most with here is programming and I like to participate in everything I can, even if I'm last. Together with KyLiE, I'm running the Race For Kicks tournament. I love building tracks that have a lot of visuals.

Favourites
The cars I tend to prefer are the faster ones. When I first had Stunts, I'd use the Porsche March Indy almost exclusively and sometimes the IMSA cars. Much later, I learnt to love other cars, but I still enjoy the roller-coaster feeling of high-speed Stunts. With custom cars, there are a lot of great options now, such as the Melange, the McLaren or the DTM pack.

Uhm... yes, I can do it. I should add the tracks and then pull the replays. I'm thinking I'll have to do it manually because we currently don't have a function to upload something in the name of somebody else (which we admins should have), so maybe I should implement that first. I've been thinking for a long time of an update for the track section.

Here's a replay on trail2!

Hey!  This is a very original idea!  It enables a completely new way of driving

He, he!  That looks very promising. The Acura is a car I'm very bad at, but I've seen it do impressive things.

Interesting. Could the width of the bars be made proportional to the highest absolute bonus at the time to solve this?

I plan to change that

If we can get to a level of understanding of the current physics engine, it could be translated or rewritten (in a fully compatible way, instead of having to do something new that acts similar to it). The physics engine, the graphics engine and the environment (say, menus an so) could be modularised so one can have varieties of any of them and use whichever one wants or modify them. Well... that's dreaming, but who knows.

In any case, 3D graphics isn't that hard. It does take time to do the work, but then, it works. Doing from scratch like I've been doing is a lot more educational, but I could easily plug it into OpenGL too. Anyway, I think that now the priority is to either learn to understand the original engine for the purpose above or otherwise, if it'll take too long, to write a new physics engine sufficiently close to feel like Stunts. There is little to no documentation about physics engine development compared to graphics. The ones that claim to document this actually just tell you to use some other pre-existing engine, which is not good in our case. Still scratching my head, but at some point, I'll break through the glass

I agree this is a great combination!

Tough

Childhood

[option 5]

I think option 5 makes sense if the "steps" are simple, straightforward, and work for everyone, such as "run it at double speed" or "play it with F2 up to 1:35 and then with F4" as more complicated example, but not if verification depends on a video or only works for some. Problem is you may not be able to tell if a procedure works for all, even after you've tried and it worked for, say, 5 people so far. For this reason, I'm more inclined towards 4.

However, same as Overdrijf says, and like I mentioned earlier, I'll support what the community decides and I too think Dreadnaut has the primary vote here.