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These are some really nice features in the 3.4 series!

Here is a tiny Restunts plaything -- thanks @alanrotoi for the idea of looking into it!

The starting line truck features an actual raised platform with a slope, as demonstrated by the animation at the beginning of the race (as well as the car dropping glitch that happens when you pause the game during it). This platform then magically disappears along with the truck once the lap begins. It turns out the surfaces that make up the platform are part of the start/finish line element; however, their existence is controlled by a conditional in build_track_object which skips them unless the animation is running. Since this is such a simple test, it is straightforward to disable it by poking at the executable with the help of a debugger. That allows us to get a taste of what would be like if the truck platform were a real track element!

Attached to this post you'll find a Restunts game executable that has been hex-edited to disable the aforementioned test. I have also added a demo track, in which you can drive straight at the beginning (out of the broken path and onto the chicane) in order to break the path finding, thus allowing you to drive through the start/finish line in either direction as many times as you want.

As expected, the platform works as a small ramp when driven the wrong way. While there is no slope when approaching the platform from behind while driving along the direction of the track, the platform is low enough that hitting it provides a well-behaved bounce, not unlike the boulevard bug one. Another quirk is that the platform covers only the right lane, as there is no truck for the opponent car on the left side.   

https://youtu.be/tS35tbktcLo?si=pTv8o0kHmK4h3dnt

See, they also agree that B teams don't need a lower size limit 

First, a little background: In last year's pre-season, there was some discussion about increasing team sizes, given that most teams were at or over the 4-member limit -- and, with Slowdrive having recruited a fourth pipsqueak, all teams are now in such a situation. The proposal didn't succeed, with the advice to teams being to instead lean on the distinction between, so to speak, unofficial members (as many pipsqueaks as desired racing together) and official ones (at most four people registered and scoring points for the team).

Thanks to @Overdrijf , though, I have realised there's an effective compromise solution right under our noses, one which can be implemented right now, under the current rules: B teams! If, for instance, Team Orion were above the size limit and had four of their pipsqueaks already active in the season, the extra members could be registered as Orion II (or The Belt, et cetera). Using B teams, I believe, allows us to steer clear of the potential problems with both a team size increase and an inflexible limit:

• Extra members now are recognised and shown on the scoreboard as being part of a team, which is much more welcoming and avoids any harsh feeling of exclusion.
• The scoreboard team affiliations now correctly show that the extra pipsqueaks aren't actually racing alone, making things a little more transparent.
• The official size limit keeps being 4, so there's no risk of affecting the competitive balance.
• There's no need for the rule book to continuously play catch-up with the trends, as a size increase might induce. (For instance, if we were to increase the limit to 5, it's not unlikely that the teams would take up the opportunity and expand, leading us to restart the discussion, but now about increasing it to 6).

As I mentioned above, it should be possible to start using B teams right now, as soon as the circumstances call for them. The only slight tweak to the procedures we'd need to do is waiving the minimum size of 2 restriction for B teams (and only B teams), as they are an extension of the main team, and it doesn't really make sense to allow 6-member teams to use them but not 5-member ones. A feature that would be nice to have but isn't essential is displaying B team status on the site, perhaps through a link between the team profiles in the database, or even just a notes field in the profiles that allows us to mention the affiliation.

I'm well behind schedule when it comes to planned Wiki article updates, but I'll get around to reporting the results over there!

For this topic at least, I did eventually catch up!  There's a Wiki article on unstable replays now, largely based on the long expository post a few pages back in this thread.

I feel the LTB system could be well worth looking into in this pre-season. Last year there were plenty of interesting ideas for reform (here is some of the discussion in the previous thread), but there was little time left in the cycle for them to mature and become actionable.

@Cas I wonder if the hesitation about Element has more to do with the general hassle of moving than with the platform in itself (which we're still getting to know). Looking at it from another angle, I think, in hindsight, that any move from Telegram to elsewhere was very unlikely early last year: several people had just joined over the previous few months, activity was very high, and there was a palpable buzz over the repressed demand for a third space finally being met in some way. A year and a half later, after a period of stability and with people having grown more familiar with the group chat dynamics, there might be space for reviewing our options.

@Spoonboy The channel was/is #stunts on EFNet. Its heyday was way back in the 00s, before my time here actually. @dstien and other people involved with Restunts then kept it active for some more time, but I believe it has been dormant for a very long time now.

One question that comes up every now and then as we look at our community venues is how effective are our options when it comes to having, so to speak, a social lobby: an official, easy to reach place with active conversation, both "on" and "off"-topic, where, in particular, newbies can land on and settle. Below is a quick (and not necessarily neutral!) review of where things stand, meant as a conversation starter should we feel like shaking things up a bit. (For another take, see this post by @Cas , written in a similar spirit last year.)

Now, for a very long time this Forum has been the central hub of the community, providing a space for conversation and linking various initiatives across the Stuntsphere. The usage patterns of the Forum, though, have changed significantly over the years. On the one hand, it remains a key venue for Q&A, technical discussion, project coordination and team activity. On the other hand, the volume of open-ended conversation in the Forum has fallen a lot since, say, the early 2010s, specially when it comes to off-topic chat. While a concerted drive to make the quieter corners of the Forum more active could be a worthy initiative, I see open questions about how accessible the old-growth structure of the Forum is to newcomers, and more broadly about what kind of forum culture we can hope to rekindle in this day and age.

Meanwhile, the Stunts group on Telegram, started by Cas about two years ago (cf. the thread about it here), has become a pretty successful experiment in running a "third place"  for casual chat, a role not unlike that played by the Stunts IRC channel, in tandem with the competition sites and the Forum, back in the early 00s. It sparked many interesting conversations, bout about Stunts and otherwise, and helped us keeping in touch with a few long-absent pipsqueaks. While the group is open to people from the community (let us know if you want to join!), up to now we have hesitated a bit when it comes to actively advertising it, or bringing it to a more central place in our ecosystem. One reason for that, I reckon, is the fact that the group is hosted on Telegram, a social media platform which, like most social media platforms, offers us little control over its workings, and which people might be unwilling to sign up for due to various reasons.

There are, of course, other spaces we might conceivably explore. In particular, last year we had a brief look at Element/Matrix (cf. this Forum conversation about it), and how it potentially could offer the amenities of modern group chat/messaging in a platform providing us more meaningful control, thus making it easier to bring under the stunts.hu umbrella. It could be a fitting time to revisit Element and consider what would it take, and what issues we might have to deal with, in order successfully set up a chat venue based on it.

the bit I'm not sure about is how someone watching the live stream would see the result. My first impression is that viewers would have to count laps manually, and for each pipsqueak, because the car streams are out of sync.

Lap counts are indeed the main thing to keep track of for a spectator of a Le Stunts race. Making that easier to do would probably require us to rely on a commentator (in a live broadcast) and captions (in post-edition) -- not sure about other options to address that within the limits of the format.

The full laps issue I was talking about is a secondary, largely separate matter, which nonetheless might be of some relevance when it comes to making results clearer for spectators. When following battles in the final part of a race, a target time is perhaps easier to convey and grasp than an arbitrary target position somewhere on the track. Furthermore, in the post-race, full lap results would mean we'd no longer need an annotated track map to concisely report the results.

Re live-broadcasting, what is the priority? The racing experience, or the viewing experience?

My personal take: racing experience comes first, but that need not stop us from going for low-hanging fruit that makes races easier to watch. (Also, experimenting with additional formats that are potentially more TV-friendly, as in @Erik Barros 's suggestions above, is well worth doing!)

I'm not sure I understand how varying the deadline would make the result more legible and immediate, can you clarify?

The increased legibility would come from no longer having to compare track positions: by only counting full laps, everyone crosses the line at the same place, and one only needs to look at the lap count and time at finish as shown in the game clock. The varying deadlines would be an extra tweak to deal with the side effects of the change -- without it, the drawbacks of the simpler implementations are IMO enough to cancel out any gains.

On the broader point about how it plays out, the general feeling seems to be that the Le Stunts format isn't necessarily the most natural fit to live broadcasting, in particular because the crash recovery rewinds scramble the timelines quite a bit. Personally, I don't see that as a major problem (opinions may vary, though!); still, it might be worth looking for ways to tighten the format a bit as long as they don't get too cumbersome.

[with track position at 8:00 as the tiebreaker]

Running Le Stunts races with a live broadcast (see the videos for Fortitude and Texarkana -- thanks @Erik Barros!) was an interesting experience that has provided food for thought about live racing formats. In this post, I'll talk about (and give my own spin to) one specific matter that concerns how we figure out results in the Le Stunts format.

The familiar Le Stunts rules specify that pipsqueaks have to drive an 8 minutes long replay and post it to the Forum within 12 minutes. Results are then defined by the number of completed laps, with track position at 8:00 as the tiebreaker. This way of assigning the results is as simple as it gets for the drivers (save your replay when the game clock gets to 8:00 and you're good to go). However, an outcome which depends on track position in an incomplete lap can be a little confusing to live spectators. Also, things sometimes get tricky for the race stewards as well, as small margins might require a photo finish for confirming the results.

That being so, there's a decent case for, instead of relying on track position at 8:00, only counting full laps. Results would be according to the number of completed laps and, as the tiebreaker, the game time when the final lap is completed. Now, that can be done in a few different ways. I'll say a few words about three of them, the third one being my preferred approach.

To begin with, we might simply rewind to the last lap before 8:00, checking lap count and finish time at that point. This is the simplest option, as the driver doesn't need to do anything different than under the traditional rules. However, I believe this approach has a serious flaw: the driving between the end of the final lap and the 8:00 mark no longer actually count for the results. That goes against the basic concept of the Le Stunts format, in which everyone is supposed to race for 8:00 of game time. Furthermore, discarding some of what has been driven can lead to awkward corner cases. Consider a track with laptimes around 1:00, and a driver who, approaching the end of their race, completes a lap at 7:02. The driver is now suddenly pressed into a quick decision on whether to make a mad dash to finish an extra lap in 58 seconds.

The obvious alternative, then, is to ask drivers to cross the finish line after 8:00. This approach, which mirrors the rules of endurance races, makes everyone drive at least 8:00 and gets rid of dead time in replays. The corner case problem, however, remains in a different guise. A driver who crosses the line at 7:59 now must complete one extra full lap, substantially increasing their risk of having trouble with the 12 minutes deadline. Meanwhile, there are no such concerns for someone who completes a lap at 8:01.

How, then, to require the line to be crossed after 8:00 while keeping things equitable? The way out that I can see is to add tolerance to the deadline to account for the final lap. In order to avoid giving everyone lots of extra slack, the tolerance should grow with how much game time each driver actually uses to complete the final lap. That can be done without resorting to calculators by using a table like this one:

In-game finish time    Deadline
-------------------    --------
8:00.00 -- 8:19.95     12:30
8:20.00 -- 8:39.95     13:00
8:40.00 -- 8:59.95     13:30
9:00.00 -- 9:19.95     14:00
9:20.00 -- 9:39.95     14:30
9:40.00 -- 9:59.95     15:00

(Side note: this approach might also be useful for alternative formats with a fixed number of laps.)

For instance, in a race which officially starts at 18:25:15, someone who completes the final lap at 8:46 on the game clock would have until 18:38:45 (thirteen and a half minutes later) to post their replay.

Keeping track of such adaptable deadlines would in principle be a little harder for drivers. In practice, though, it should be enough for pipsqueaks to set a 12-minute countdown like we currently do, knowing things will most likely be okay as long as you get to 8:00 in game with 1 or 2 minutes remaining out of the initial 12. (Also note that the adaptable deadlines are never stricter than the simple 8-in-12 rule.) As for the result checking process, figuring out the deadline from the finish time would be required; this extra step, however, looks like a fairly straightforward thing to do.

In summary: while counting only full laps is an attractive proposition, it doesn't come for free, requring some sort of compromise: be it going against the spirit of the format by embracing drives shorter than 8:00, tolerating potential unfairness in how much each pipsqueak is required to drive, or handling a little additional complexity brought by adaptable deadlines. In any case, I would be happy with the extra-lap-plus-adaptable-deadlines rule, and consider it a slight improvement over the status quo.

This double-header of live races has been a success! Congratulations to Alan for the wins, and to KyLiE for the podiums! Thanks to Erik for running the broadcasts, and to everyone who joined Fortitude and Texarkana -- hope you all have enjoyed it! 

[1:00.85]

Spoonboy

1. 1:06.75
2. 2:07.60
3. 3:09.80
4. 4:12.10

DNF, 5:00 at the dirt corner.

Laps:

1. 1:06.75
2. 1:00.85
3. 1:02.20
4. 1:02.30

[51.80]

Alan Rotoi

1. 1:00.45
2. 1:53.05
3. 2:46.30
4. 3:39.30
5. 4:31.10
6. 5:26.05
7. 6:21.65
8. 7:14.10

8:00 at the corner before the boulevard.

Laps:

1. 1:00.45
2. 52.60
3. 53.25
4. 53.00
5. 51.80
6. 54.95
7. 55.60
8. 52.45

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