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Strange things happened on this race - no hidden replays at all during quiet days ( ! - can anybody tell if that had ever happened before?) and a very tight scoreboard from 2nd to 7th despite relatively low activity during the final days. And then Ayrton bookends his title run by pulling off a shocking, even by his standards, eleventh-hour jump to impose his biggest victory in the whole season... all of that seems to indicate a section analysis would be very interesting, and, after performing it, one sees that's the case indeed. I only won't publish it now since I don't have BJ's replay - Zak accidentally put his 1:01.05 with Jaguar on the new track zip instead of the final Carrera lap. Once either BJ or Zak post said replay I'll update my spreadsheet and publish the analysis with further commentary.

He will have an experienced team around him to help, like Bilardo (Argentina's coach in World Cups of '86 and '90) and some other local coaches with good ideas and willing to work (Many of them took part in '86 team).

So it will be sort of a "management by committee", at least in the initial months... let's see how it goes.

I would have preferred to Bianchi, anyway Maradona can be good as coach. I think that the selection of a coach is not so important as the removal method, but yes this time, because we are in the limit of the classification.

Maradona at least has charisma and personality - one wonders how exactly that would convert into leadership, though, and how would the relationships within the management team would work. Anyway, more than the qualification itself I (from my unprivileged point of view) suppose the biggest fear should be that your NT goes down the same route Brazil went - playing sucky football in nine out of ten games. And having both Brazil and Argentina sucking at the same time would be bad for everyone, for football as a whole...

Looking at the bonuses it seems this will be a Audi/Vette race mostly, on the lines of Z83 - which feels like a good sign, as Z83 was my strongest ZakStunts race this year. And the layout is cute 

I ran the game without any other applications running other than AV and Firewall... Suitcase shuffle works great, I did an all correct 37 suitcases there, over 10000, but then the rest doesn't help, I get distracted or relaxed or something... And still can't get more than around 25 questions in Map Mayhem. How did you do to get 35 Dup?

For me all games run at similar speeds, even when running it on FF3 from a pendrive. I find Map Mayhem to be easier than the others because it requires shorter/simpler mouse movements and the visual hints from the maps are, on average, recognized faster. Comparing the three games, City Blitz is the harder for me by some margin...

What I feared... Damn!

Such anticipation... All I'm sure of is that I won't release a semi-finished version, though - Originally I was to fix release date at 30/11 as well, but with some luck it may be earlier than that.

Grazie, and I was thinking about a divulgation video as well - YouTube is there to spread the news...

Well, I could be wrong, but if this is not a real very crypted message, crossed with JacStunts... 

That was mostly subconscious, but still...

Great news! Will we be able to test it before the contest or are you keeping it top secret?

Well, I would prefer to avoid having to do multiple releases, be in the form of a "preview" intemediate release or as corrections needed on an early "final" release. As I tend to get obsessive with double-checking the smaller details while finishing a project, the final release will be, in all likelihood, quite close to the November 30th deadline. So you can say it's more on the "top secret" side   

and as for lag, the car 1 and car 0 are the same models, wich is 238 triangles permodel(not including wheels) i dont have dos box, so i ran it on a real dos computer using an intel 386 cpu @ 33mhz, not much lag with 2 cars loaded.

Wow, DOSBox is such a resource hog...

anyone here wana take a shot at the wheels?

OK, post it and I'll have a look at them later on...

whats the max amout of paint jobs stunts can handle?

The limit is 128, so in theory you can use (almost) as many as you wish (I have not tested implementing more than seven, though, so you'd better check if the car selection screen works normally in that case).

and why do my wheels glitch out when i turn my car to the left or right

Wheel rendering has a number of specificities that need to be taken care of. If you want to avoid trouble with them, first of all I suggest you to move the wheels to the first four positions on the polygon list and order them like this: front-left, front-right, back-right, back-left. Vertex order within the wheels matters as well, so the safest route is to clone exactly the coordinate values from some other car and then just displace them to the correct position.

Two extra tips that might be of help: First, be sure you're using the two-sided flag for any polygons which inner surface is to be exposed (as most likely is the case in the rear part of the truck body). Also, I noticed from your screen shots that your model is all composed by triangles. In case the absence of n-gons means there is a lot more than about 90 polygons on car1, it would be a good idea to double-check if there is no risk of frame rate issues (I had problems when trying to use a downscaled version of Corvette's car0, with 200 polygons). Should you feel the need to test that, the best route would be launching DOSBox with two cars loaded and lower the number of cycles progressively. If the frame rate remains normal up to ~8000 cycles in all likelihood there will be no problems. Else, it could be useful to merge a few triangles into n-gons (a number of .OBJ editors can't do that properly, but Anim8or can - see the first post on page 16 of the "Dissecting" thread should you need it).

Good find - with slightly different proportions it could well pass for a real kanji for the naïve... But Japanese (or Chinese) ideograms can be a bit shocking at times. For instance, I was quite perplexed to find in an online dictionary that this kanji, , which is just the one for "woman" () written three times, is used in the verb "to commit adultery", as well in words for a number of perversions... 

looks great, cant wait to drive it. mabey we can make a video of all the new mod cars...

Grazie, and I was thinking about a divulgation video as well - YouTube is there to spread the news...

I think it's more important to complete these cars first: dashboards, "tuning" with CarBlaster...

Yes, that's for sure - our machines need to be really well polished for the big show starting on November 30th, especially if it is going to be broadcast all over the Internet  . I'm somewhat fortunate in that respect, as most of the CarBlaster tuning for the Skyline was already done by early March, so other than adjusting the dashboard parameters in CAR*.RES, only some extra testing and possible last-minute corrections will be necessary. As for the dashboard, I managed to perform the limiting step, namely decomposing the NSX "dash" bitmap into its constituting elements, with less suffering and better results than expected, so I'm pretty optimistic about the progress of this part of the design.

We should open a new section for custom cars with the Stunts files and OBJ graphics...

Indeed, that's something which is pending for a while. Probably a "Game Modification"/"Modding" main category with file format descriptions as well as the pages for Stressed and CarBlaster would be a good start. It could be created be a subcategory of "Game information" as well, but then it might be a bit too hidden from the public eye.

Speaking of the Wiki, yesterday I noticed the SQL issue mentioned on my previous post also compromises the "Search" function...

here is a word of advice, neva have overlaying polygons of different colors as they will look glitchy ingame

There's a way around that problem: on Stressed, arrange the order on the polygon list so the one you wish to overlay is immediately after the base one. Then, turn the Z-bias flag on for the polygon which is to stay on top.

Well, it seems the guys all forget to verify their tracks before proposing them...

Actually this time the issue was raised a long time ago, before the start of the season (the original track was 4+ minutes of almost pure cornering), and the change was already decided - only the track pack file was not changed...

[the track was updated]

Here are results for the second round:

1º Mark L. Rivers - 2:18.20 - +10
2º Daniel DUPLODE - 2:19.25 - +8
3º Felipe NEMESIS - 2:19.55 - +6
4º Krys TOFF - 2:22.70 - +5
5º Rudah FLASH DRIVER - 2:26.85* - +4
6º Marcelo THYASROCK - 2:40.45* - +3

*Late replays sent within 12-hour tolerance

Current Standings:
1º Mark L. Rivers - 20
2º Felipe NEMESIS - 16
3º Daniel DUPLODE - 14
4º Marcelo THYASROCK - 8
5º Krys TOFF - 5
6º Rudah FLASH DRIVER - 4

Another tight race, in which Mark starts to build up a lead... Round 3, the GTO one, is already on. Just beware the track was updated from the version originally released on the track pack, so you should drive your lap on this one: http://www.badongo.com/file/11580111 . Happy racing!

Only thing I did was to reduce graphical detail (the eye icon on the top left corner) as BJ suggested, and it runs at an acceptable pace on my 96kbps connection (even if the initial loading takes long).