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

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Messages - Duplode

#31
Quote from: Duplode on October 12, 2024, 05:04:51 AMBy the way, I probably should try setting a lap time on the "A" track...

Done;)
#32
Competition and Website / Re: Position Time Bonus
February 17, 2025, 11:07:28 PM
@HerrNove Indeed, partial carryover does lead to some weird edge cases. Similar situations were also possible with the LTB system that we had until last year: under that, 120 leading hours in one race and 360 in the next would give two points, while 360 and 120 would give just one point (plus 120 h carryover).

Why even have partial carryover, then? That's a fair question. I'd say partial carryover came about as a compromise between two things:

  • On the one hand, the main goal of carryover is making it rewarding to earn hours at lower rates. That's especially important now with PTB, given that it's impossible to reach PTB +0.5 in a single race from 4th place or below.
  • On the other hand, not having carryover after PTB +1 is meant to introduce jeopardy, and tactics, to fights for the lead. The spirit of it is that if you want PTB +2 (which is a fairly large reward in a linear point system like ours) you gotta be prepared to defend your lead and settle the matter in the current race, without relying on carryover into the future.

Allowing carryover in all cases would make the system essentially continuous, so that summing the hours across the twelve races would be enough to know how many points one gets. That would mean a system that's easier to make sense of, but perhaps a less exciting one as well.

On a somewhat related note, something I'm curious to see -- and that, I guess, we'll only find out in practice -- is whether fights to reach (or prevent!) PTB +2 will be common. If such fights fail to happen, we might have a separate reason to consider adding PTB +1.5.
#33
Chat - Misc / Re: Association game
February 15, 2025, 07:36:24 PM
Mind
#34
Here is the Folyami update after ZCT282! After an eventful first race of the new season, personal best ratings were attained by Argammon (+2 atop of his leading position), Frieshansen and Spoonboy (moving in tandem towards the 2000 points mark). Sizable gains also include those by race winner Alan Rotoi (+36, now nearly back to the 2200s), Overdrijf (+46, biggest increase among ranked pipsqueaks) and Shoegazing Leo (+33, continuing a long-term trend of steady improvement). This race also saw afullo, KyLiE and Usrin returning from breaks. Below is the updated evolution chart:

#35
Competition and Website / New features 2025
February 15, 2025, 01:29:27 AM
A minor update (way more minor than the ones by @dreadnaut in last year's thread): in the sent replays stats page, the bar chart for specific races now includes days before the official start (a common case being the Sundays when a track is posted), and subtly highlights the days in which the different phases of the race begin (official start, non-public days, and quiet days).
#36
Chat - Misc / Re: Association game
February 15, 2025, 01:14:41 AM
hard
#37
Competition 2025 / Re: ZCT283 - Shadowplay
February 15, 2025, 01:09:55 AM
Comeback Time, Groovy!  :D
#38
Coordination is an important aspect of it, and it does work as a rule of thumb. It seems to ultimately boil down to how tight the deadline is. For instance:

  • A 15 minutes deadline certainly requires coordination.
  • A 60 minutes deadline also requires a certain amount of coordination. While, much like in a Formula One qualifying session, we typically won't see everyone starting to race at the same time, all pipsqueaks nonetheless need to join at a time reasonably close to the start.
  • A 24 hours deadline arguably doesn't require meaningful coordination in this sense, as pipsqueaks have an entire day to drive and send their replays. The choice of date for the race might make people more or less likely to join, but to an extent that also applies to a monthly race.
#39
General Chat - ZSC / Re: Car image generator
February 13, 2025, 10:54:09 PM
Quote from: Cas on February 13, 2025, 10:47:18 PMYeah, I haven't been able to catch up with the most posted threads. If I find where, I'll comment. Otherwise, @Ryoma is invited to post here too

It was on the ZakStunts shoutbox (Ryoma doesn't have a Forum account at the moment).
#40
General Chat - ZSC / Re: Car image generator
February 13, 2025, 10:13:13 PM
@Cas Ryoma asked about that (sans the CGI part) on the shoutbox -- pinging you here because the shoutbox has been moving fast lately  :)

Quote from: Ryoma on the shoutbox, 2025-02-12@Cas is it possible to compile only the part of pretty garage which create the side view to produce an image of 640 pixels for example ? I know you draw the wheels after...but is it possible ?
#41
Competition and Website / Re: Position Time Bonus
February 13, 2025, 04:26:35 PM
Until the implementation of PTB is ready, this page on the site proper will be used to post PTB updates and archive the charts of completed races. I'll try to update it after each Wednesday and Saturday in the first three weeks of the race, as well as after the deadline.
#42
CarEdit3 is now available from the Southern Cross downloads page as  well! Thanks to @dm_s1e6 for sharing this excellent tool with us, and to @Zapper for continuing its development :)
#43
Well spotted. The crash seems to happen when exiting ZCT037's first banked corner -- maybe because of all the 46-primitive boats that come in sight rather suddenly?
#44
Quote from: HerrNove on February 10, 2025, 12:20:25 AMI have spent a lot of time and attempts to try to raise the limit of 400 primitives, and I've finally made it! The gain is not immense, but it had become a matter of principle for me. Now the game can display about 480-500 primitives, which means that complex scenes will be rendered more fully. You can check how many polygons are being rendered, as well as other infos, by pressing F5.

Very good! The degradation mechanism is an interesting way to try and find a balance between the competing needs of the mod. I have done a few quick tests with detail-heavy cars like Zapper's F40 and Ryoma's Jaguar XJ220, and so far I haven't gotten a crash with this latest build.

(And speaking of tests, I drove a few laps on In Your Eyes, and it looks gorgeous with the mod  :) )

Quote from: HerrNove on February 10, 2025, 12:20:25 AMOh, I thought illusion tiles were a deliberate effect of the track designers :D

That's an interesting point  :D While sometimes illusion elements are added for the visual effects (Krys TOFF, for instance, would often use them in the way), in other cases they are mainly used to manipulate track continuity and physics. A memorable example that comes to mind is the half-loop in ZCT274 -- @Argammon might tell us how much of each of those two alternatives applied there  ;)

Then of course there are the quirks of the original rendering, with some illusion elements only appearing as you land on them, missing parts of multi-tile elements being drawn anyway, and so forth. While in the base Restunts port we'd ideally have an exact, "bug-for-bug" reproduction of the original, a mod can of course adopt whatever makes more sense for its purposes.

Quote from: HerrNove on February 10, 2025, 12:20:25 AMI'm playing with these settings and the mod is running very fluid. Granted, I have a good PC but nothing extraordinary (AMD Ryzen 7 5700U).

On my old laptop (i5-7200U), I'm trying the mod with fixed 60000 cycles on DOSBox Staging (a configuration I've been testing lately for separate reasons), and it runs well enough.
#45
Quote from: HerrNove on February 02, 2025, 09:54:40 PM* provide me a link to the source code of your branch (if public), and maybe your replay so that we have a common reference;

I said earlier that my fork on Bitbucket was private. Embarrassingly, it turns out I was wrong about that  :o I must have mixed it up in my head with some of the other private Stunts-related repos I have there. Anyway, this is the fork: https://bitbucket.org/duplode/restunts . I think the only branch not available from elsewhere is the "siluro" one, which has the tweaks for the DAF Museum edition. (Also, I still plan to move this away from Bitbucket...)