Penalty time experiments...

[Duplode]

...or: Everything you know about penalty time is wrong.

(Okay, not everything; but some of these findings did surprise me.)

which is leading to a question - does anyone know how is penalty counting?

Surprisingly enough, it seems that at no point did anyone stop to document this basic bit of Stunts knowledge, ever since the times of Luke, Nailwood and Riesbich. I guess that was because the usual two-tile rule covers 95% of the scenarios met in the race track, and most of the time it doesn't matter for us pipsqueaks exact penalty for a racing line, only whether it is different from zero. Anyway, I ran a few experiments whose results seem to cover everything but the crazy edge cases involving dual-way tracks. Two interesting points they settled are:

• Skipping multi-tile elements is no more costly than cutting small ones.
• The penalty sometimes given for entering the start/finish tile through the "wrong" side does not depend on the direction of entry.

The main conclusions are included in the penalty time Wiki article for your enjoyment.

[Friker]

a very nice article! passing a finish line through air seems to be another exception in rules.

[CTG]

Penalty time is annoying. Especially if you always get 18 seconds (like me on 31st January, trying to complete the last quarter of ZCT 138).

Nice work!

[BonzaiJoe]

Great article! I'm honoured to be quoted. And I'm not sure this level of fan geekery has been reached for any other computer game.

[alanrotoi]

Nice article!
I'm interested in hacking replays to make my participation easier, faster and less stressing.

[Friker]

Great article! I'm honoured to be quoted. And I'm not sure this level of fan geekery has been reached for any other computer game.

offtopic: I like Heroes 3 gifs/videos showing how to exploit hero's abilities (like this one)

[zaqrack]

very nice article, thanks a lot!

[dstien]

I'm running out of superlatives to describe my appreciation of your contributions, Duplode. That sure is a mighty fine piece of good work!