Recent posts

#1

Stunts Reverse Engineering / Re: Working native port of Stu...

Last post by x29retaliator - Yesterday at 04:54:20 PM

After further testing, I discovered something interesting: the start/finish line behaves normally only if at least some portion of the track has been driven in the correct direction (merely driving forward from the starting line until reaching the next tile is sufficient to prevent any weird behaviour). If you initially leave the start/finish tile in the wrong direction, and subsequently never drive any part of the track in the correct direction, the start/finish line either will not work at all, or will instantly end the race when the start/finish tile is entered without actually crossing the line.

Judging from your screenshots, it looks like you triggered the latter behaviour, as the Audi appears to be on the boundary of the start/finish tile rather than the start/finish line itself.

Yes, that sounds consistent with what I can see in both the original DOS game and the port.

Thanks for confirming.

#2

Competition 2026 / Re: Guest track 2026

Last post by Alain il professore - Yesterday at 04:07:35 PM

Hello my friends,

It's true that I 'm not that interested.

Have a nice day!

Yours, Alain il Professore.

#3

Competition 2026 / Re: Guest track 2026

Last post by dreadnaut - Yesterday at 12:40:07 PM

Hey @Victor Narl! How are you going to get experience, if you give up on creating a track? Please reconsider, we'd like to see your track on the list!

Also, Alain appears to have delegated the whole thing to ChatGPT, which makes me feel like he's not that interested. If you really want to give up your slot, we can also ask around.

#4

Competition 2026 / Re: Cars and rules for 2027

Last post by MiDiaN - Yesterday at 10:27:54 AM

The idea of motivating riders to join teams is good, but counting all riders would favor larger teams. Since teams can currently have 2–4 riders, I think keeping the top two scores would make the competition more balanced.

#5

Competition 2026 / Re: Guest track 2026

Last post by Alain il professore - Yesterday at 09:08:33 AM

Hello my friends,

Thank you very much for the trust! 🙂

I gladly accept the invitation to design ZCT305, the December 2026 ZakStunts track.

You are absolutely right: last December I would have liked to take part in the track selection, but I simply missed the opportunity. So I'm especially happy to get the chance this time.

I'll do my best to create a track that fits the ZakStunts spirit: interesting to discover, fun to race, and hopefully with enough depth to keep pipsqueaks searching for those last ticks until the end of the month. And let's not forget honoring the song name tradition.

So, officially: I accept ZCT305! 😎🏁

Thanks again!

#6

Competition 2026 / Re: Guest track 2026

Last post by Victor Narl - Yesterday at 09:00:00 AM

Given all experience creating interesting tracks within the ZakStunts concept, I would like to delegate my rights to create the track ZCT305 to @Alain il professore. I'm sure he wanted to participate in the track's creation, but simply didn't have time to take a place on this forum in time due to his lack of time last December. I ask @Alain il professore to confirm here his consent to accept the December track ZCT305.

#7

Stunts Reverse Engineering / Re: Working native port of Stu...

Last post by Foxpup - Yesterday at 05:39:00 AM

After further testing, I discovered something interesting: the start/finish line behaves normally only if at least some portion of the track has been driven in the correct direction (merely driving forward from the starting line until reaching the next tile is sufficient to prevent any weird behaviour). If you initially leave the start/finish tile in the wrong direction, and subsequently never drive any part of the track in the correct direction, the start/finish line either will not work at all, or will instantly end the race when the start/finish tile is entered without actually crossing the line.

Judging from your screenshots, it looks like you triggered the latter behaviour, as the Audi appears to be on the boundary of the start/finish tile rather than the start/finish line itself.

#8

Stunts Reverse Engineering / Re: Working native port of Stu...

Last post by x29retaliator - September 04, 2026, 08:41:10 PM

The car in the top-left drove down the road a bit, turned, and headed back towards the finish line going the wrong way. Just like the original game it then assumes you "finished" and gives you a huge penalty.

It really shouldn't though, if all you did was drive the wrong way. I guess you changed the way the start/finish line functions in order to account for cars starting on the previous tile, because in the original game, the start/finish line must be approached from the correct direction to count as completing the race.

Also, it looks like you're unnecessarily truncating the cars' full names to 4 characters depsite cars already having a 4-character short name (the gsna resource in the car*.res file) for exactly this purpose. It is used in the original game to identify the opponent's car on the scoreboard, when a high score is recorded while racing against an AI opponent. (This short name is not to be confused with 4-character filename code used to identify cars, which is often the same but may be different. For example, the Porsche March Indy has a short name of "INDY" and a filename code of "PMIN".)

(some minor glitches in the speedometer of Jaguar and Corvette: maybe a bug when processing the .PVS files? Sorry for raising an issue now, but I cannot keep myself )

Yeah, I've seen that issue too when converting car files, though I never bothered to investigate the cause.

Thanks for the help!

Are you sure it doesn't work like that? I tested this against the original DOS version (although with SuperSight) with DOSBox, and I got the same behavior.

Maybe I did something weird though. I should test again.

#9

Stunts Reverse Engineering / Re: Working native port of Stu...

Last post by HerrNove - September 04, 2026, 09:13:39 AM

(some minor glitches in the speedometer of Jaguar and Corvette: maybe a bug when processing the .PVS files? Sorry for raising an issue now, but I cannot keep myself )

Yeah, I've seen that issue too when converting car files, though I never bothered to investigate the cause.

I think the error is in the treatment of the `ins2` bitmap of the `STDA` file. For Jaguar and Vette, the bitmap is stored in a special format, as shown by the fact that the high nibble of the third byte of the "Channel bitmasks" has some bits set. Probably the bytes are transposed (i.e. the pixels are stored in column-major order).

The screenshot is taken with my fork of stressed, but the regular stressed is also able to process the data just fine. One just need to integrate its handling of special cases: see bitmapresource.cpp#L183 and following lines.

#10

Stunts Reverse Engineering / Re: Working native port of Stu...

Last post by llm - September 04, 2026, 07:15:58 AM

Basically, certain small reductions in speed (such as driving up an inclined plane, or driving in a loop), the game intends to reduce the speed. This is represented as a small, negative products. This negative change is multiplied and shifted, by Borland's unsigned 32-bit division routine (?). The problem is that the quotient is enormous but the game only rtains the low 16 bits and does an arithmetic shift. This results in a significant *positive* speed change.

Stunts itself was originally written using Microsoft C 5.1 (~1988) and assembler
restunts switched to the Borland compiler