Permanent competition revival

[Cas]

Hey... any news of this idea?  It's a really good one!  I think ideally, it should be exactly as proposed by Dreadnaut on the first post, with the add-on by Zak of the additional track being voted among the tracks of the year. I would add that only pipsqueaks that participated in at least a certain number of the track that year could vote. Keeping the closed ones?   Mmm... if many people want them, OK, but I don't think that's necessary.

[Cas]

Well, six years passed. I had mentioned a year ago or so that I was interested in taking the work of setting up a new permanent competition. Now I am building into this idea with R4K. Earlier, I just wanted to do this because I saw you guys were busy with other things and I thought "I can do this and I want it to be a reality, so why not?". But now there's also another reason: I want to rewrite R4K and it comes in handy if the base code allows for several races and scoreboards being handled together. In other words, I want to rebuild the tournament on top of the permament competition system.

I would like to:
- Start with the tracks that come with Stunts, not including the closed ones
- Allow for posting tracks freely. In practice, there could be as many tracks as posted, but the ones that have more replays will appear first, so it wouldn't be messy. The closed tracks as well as any other track could of course be posted.
- Start with empty scoreboards. However, any old replay can be re-posted. There's a point here with the matter of authorship I would like to discuss to prevent easy cheating.
- Facilitate information exchange so that, if the Permanent Competition in ZakStunts is later on updated in the way planned in 2014, the tracks and replays can easily be incorporated and possibly exchange results between the sites.
- Allow posting with any car and any style (R4K-OWOOT, GAR, free-style, RH, NoRH, etc.) but making sure it's later possible to filter results so that one can check things like "fastest lap on Default with the Lancia in OWOOT". This way, there's a point in racing anything and not just Indy free-style. That is, you can set all kinds of records.
- For each style characteristic (say, OWOOT or NoRH), there would be three possible status configurations: Verified, Claimed, and No.

Again, I would like to do this to help and I'll be happy to hand the information and system if this is later to be implemented in ZakStunts. Also, if there's a plan my idea interferes with, no problem. Just tell me how I can help and I change the bearing or focus on something else. I would like to read opinions and suggestions.

[Overdrijf]

not sure about every year a new track. Which track? Maybe the best ZakStunts track voted for the year?

Plus maybe ZCT200, the legendary 7th official track.

[Cas]

Ah, that's a good one!  Yes, it's part of the Stunts pack in the end!

[dreadnaut]

Ah, that's a good one!  Yes, it's part of the Stunts pack in the end!

Go ahead mate, you have my support. It's a shame this project has been stuck for so long, but it got tangled behind other changes.

I like your proposal, it's along the lines of what I was thinking, but I would suggest to start smaller: multiple cars is important, but multiple race types and verification are extra dimensions of complexity, which I would leave for a second phase.

As usual, happy to help with code!

[Cas]

Thank you, Dreadnaut!  Yes, I'm not going to get all the bells and whistles going from the beginning, but I would like to pave the road well, that is, to leave the space for the features, so that it doesn't become a burden to implement them later. For instance, I would already include a pull down option menu for "racing style" just like the one for RH/NoRH. The data would just get to the file and later, it'll be easier to see what to do with it.

I'm having one directory contain all tracks which will be numbered as they are posted. Scoreboards for each track will be in the same directory with the same file name, but a different extension. This will mean lots of files, although easy to look up. I don't know if this is the most convenient for later archiving and sharing, but doesn't look that bad.