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Hello All!

As you have likely noticed, my activity this year in the Stunts world was very shallow and weak. There is just too much going on in parallel and whereas my love for Stunts lasts forever, my passion for the game is year-on-year decreasing, which makes it harder to dedicate sufficient time when there is not much available. This is expected to turn even worse  during the coming months, as our new house is almost completely built, and there will be a lot to do with moving / settling in / etc.

Thanks to dreadnaut, it really does not take much time to upload a new track each month (less than 10 minutes, excluding track design),  but I feel bad about the lack of involvement and commitment regarding news posts, racing, forum life and so on. The community deserves more and better as there is still a lot of positive energy that should be nurtured. 

With no other Stunts championships running in parallel, stopping ZakStunts is not something I would support, but I am really considering taking a break from championship management: letting someone else do the driving, for the above mentioned reasons. If someone volunteers with good plans and has the support of the community, I would be glad to hand over the wheel for 2018 and perhaps beyond.

Any thoughts, interests? We are well in time to prepare, the new manager could think about changing some of the rules for 2018, etc.

The first one - I'd say it is unusually fast - at least for me 

The 1st track

There is no Movies topic? 

I have watched an Argentinian-Spanish movie last week. Argentinian films (or South-American in general) rarely reach Hungary.
The title is Wild Tales / Relatos Salvajes.

It was very good. A collection of unrelated short stories with onething in common: the protagonist cannot take something anymore. Funny, witty, surprising, with subtle society critics. I liked it a lot. I wonder if this was a well-known movie in Argentina or something more artistic.



 

[Cars:]

Starting this thread a bit later than usual, so quick feedback is welcome.

Cars:
Xylocaine and Speedgate out for sure. Prefer to keep the Melange and the F40, unsure about the Porsche 911
Which ones should be the replacement cars? I would opt for a best-of from the past years, including only cars with proven realistic and bug-free behavior.

Rules:
I did not plan any rule changes. The 14-days public replay rule seems to be a success and needs no adjustment. However, I am open for any recommendations.

Schedule:
one month or 4 weeks intervals?

A fellow site visitor sent me an article on Quantum Link, which was basically a pre-internet internet for the commodore 64 in the late 80s and early 90s.
I never heard about it before and found it pretty amazing. If you are interested in computer history, take a look at his site.

https://www.tinytickle.co.uk/quantum-link/

This topic has been moved to Stunts Related Programs.

http://forum.stunts.hu/index.php?topic=3260.0

A tribute to Leo's injury.

Hi All,

You may not have seen my message on ZakStunts: I have banned two users from both the forum and ZakStunts: Vector and CTG.
Vector's ban was requested by one user, CTG's ban was requested by four users, including myself and himself. 

As despite his request CTG almost immediately tried to come back under a new alias, I had to restrict forum registration to require admin approval. I may need to do the same on ZakStunts.

I am sorry the situation has come this far and hope my decision benefits the community. Please let me know if you disagree.

Quoting myself from Marco's thread with a bit of added detail 

now that we have replay publicity at ZakStunts, it would be completely OK with me, to add two checkboxes at the replay upload form so pipsqueaks can indicate whether they have raced with RH and/or no OWOOT. If a checkbox was set, a small icon appears on the scoreboard next to the entry indicating the OWOOT / noRH time. We would also code a rule for OWOOT and noRH replays to be publicized always, any time during a race.

So at least you can compare yourself against others, and we have the power of publicity to verify whether OWOOT rules were properly used. Racing in NoRH or OWOOT does not grant any additonal points or benefits to pipsqueaks of the main championship, but may be displayed on a separate scoreboard as well (similar to Newbie leage)
Sure, no way to prevent RH, so noRH replays would be still on a voluntary basis. But if we can live with the occasional cheaters and frequent accusations without a reason, this is an easy to add feature that may bring more fun to all of us.
What do you all think?

At least I would be interested to race so. Anyone else?

@dreadnaut: I guess we would only need two checkboxes,two nice small icons, two boolean columns in the results database table and a few new SQL queries for the new scoreboards. Does not seem much work to me.

I have a well-treasured Nintendo Wii. We had a NES when I was very young, so I sort of grew up with Mario and his friends and believe Nintendo makes the best consoles ever. But that's beside the point. The Wii is a 9 year old machine now sold in great numbers and as such can be heavily customized.

That means DOSbox runs as well. Which brings us to... Stunts! Can it work? I had to try.
So I loaded DOSbox and Stunts on my Wii's memory card and started some experiments.

I have started DOSbox from the Wii homebrew browser - after dosbox.conf was pre-configured for 4000 cycles and mounting + auto-starting Stunts.


It starts!


It actually runs quite pleasant, not 100% smooth but playable. Raising the cycles unfortunately does not seem to help, movement becomes jerky. Screen quality is OK, I have a HDMI 720p scaler device plugged on the Wii, that probably does not help Stunts much, it could be better without it. But its OK.


Trouble is: controls. Of course I can play with a USB keyboard plugged in on thw Wii, but what's the fun in that? So off we go to the DOSbox Wii wiki to learn and the  keymapper to configure stuff a bit...

The joystick is an obvious choice. It is mapped to the Wii's Nunchuk and works without extra configuration, just needs the usual calibration.


All I had to configure was to map the shifting keys to the two buttons on the Nunchuk. There we go, see it in action!
http://youtu.be/G96MNXCP3JE

Well, nobody said it will be easy, have you tried driving a car with your thumb only?

But I know what everyone is interested in... after all the Wii has a motion-controlled remote. Can we motion control Stunts?
The motion control maps to the... mouse. Damn. I guess none of you play Stunts with mouse controls. No wonder.

I mapped the mouse buttons to the B and A buttons on the Wii, activated mouse controls in Stunts and went for yet another test drive:
http://youtu.be/cuYjpHiJ56w

Mouse controls... duh. I actually recorded four videos in all of which I was unable to stay on the road longer than in this one. You are supposed to center the mosue before turning in the other direction... not what motion control was meant for.

So for now: no motion control suitable for Stunts is the conclusion of my experiment. It may be continued

Please announce official team rosters here so I can set them on the site as well. Remember, a team consists of 2 to 4 pipsqueaks.

I hope to see at least 8 guest tracks this year. Track designers have some additional powers this year: they can distribute up to 10 positive and negative car coefficient points amongst the cars - so you can adjust the coefficients to the track. For now, you can apply here, soon hopefully a public track upload form will be available on the site.

A quick and easy track for starters

No, not in the way you would expect, but apparently you can now play Stunts in your browser - along with 2000+ other DOS games.

https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games/

If I would start digging a tunnel from the place we live in Shanghai, cross the core of the Earth and continue digging... I would end up surprisingly close to Alan Rotoi! See the attachment.

source: http://www.freemaptools.com/tunnel-to-other-side-of-the-earth.htm

Track title is a wish I have for my sons tonight (and especially during the race )

This one is in Shanghai, about 5km from our home. The Nanpu bridge. Very nice bridge - double! up/down corkscrew combination:

Now with Lise being famous, let's see how many of us were on TV!

As for me, I was three times on TV, though only twice talking.

- First when I was 7 and my classmate was featured in the famous "Három Kívánság" (Three wishes) show. He had a stupid wish though.
- Second I was 12 and I was interviewed (yay!) as a member of the first Hungarian field hockey team. Not even my own parents could understand what I was saying because I got my teeth braces installed a week before.
- Third I was 22 and my father was playing in the "Do you want't to be a millionaire" show. I was the relative who accompanied him to the show and had an awkward greeting

Plus a number of unplanned appearances as background, member of crowd, etc.
So overall nothing I can be proud of

I would like to have 6 guest tracks this year again - every second month. Applications are welcome!