TORCS Championships 2009 - Street-1

The TRB caravan revisited Street-1 in sunny Australia this year (sadly without the Green Monsters Team not showing up) and I have to tell I've had many joyful and many not-so-joyful moments this time.

Compared to my last race here, my robots were quicker about 1 second in the qualifiers and 1.5 seconds during the race. They remained in/near the main field for most of the race and were lapped only 2 (or 3) times by the leader cars. They were in shooting range from the JDIs and Dummies for quite long into the race, in a race that was very close, intense and very exciting.

However they were not smart enough to hold on to their position when overlapping someone and let others behind gain significant time on them in those moments. That was the main issue why they did not finish in the top 10 in the end, this is definitely something I got to work on during the season break.

Here are the results and the screenshots...

JDIs bad qualy

First lap turmoil

Turn right, no straight...

Zhora advancing

No big differences in the field

Poor Berniw...

and poor EJ :)

Kilo here, Kilo there

If only we could see Berniw driver's face in this moment...

Yeah we practice this a lot at home with the Dotties

Jumpety jumpety jump jump

Way up high, to the sky...

Viewing a fierce battle from close

Jumpety #2

Ey mate what ye doin in there?

"Fuzzy ye in P5" "Roger......Woooot ye said P5???"

Let's come together right now...

Dummy loosing position

Wow lotsa stickers on this one

Jumpety #3

Fuzzy dropping down

and down

This grey one should use headlights,
makes me nervous when it appears suddenly behind

Ski slopes in Adelaide

Jumpety #4

Things kept on just happening and happening

Fastest guy in town? Kilo 2 \o/

Trac + random + GNUe

The Speed Dreams dev team is testing Trac these days, as provided by Sourceforge.net. Mart has imported trunk's TODO to TracWiki and JP set up some tickets based on the TODO. That is, if we close those tickets we are quite ready to release Speed Dreams 1.4.0 for beta. Should happen soon, but there are time-consuming tickets on the list, too - like setups for cars.

Mart has discovered that Sf.net's version of Trac does not provide the feature to update tickets based on commit comments, it's a pity. It should work and make life easier.

I've been working a lot these days on the Salty track 3D model. I am getting the taste of Blender now I think but I have so many future track plans... hard to list even. Keep an eye on what's coming.

Oh and I have a report for the G-track-2 race in TRB in the works... soon... got to run the next race, too... busy busy busy :)

Although it is not TORCS/SD related but the GNUenterprise.org project (gnue for short) I've worked for quite some time seems to be alive again, Reinhard has committed lots of stuff recently. Got to check it and update translations at least!

Corkscrew project ends

I've created the Corkscrew track for TORCS quite some time ago. It all started with Kennet requesting the track at 16 November 2007. Yes, that's right, it was 2007...

I've published the first version in January 2008 and then 2 more updates followed from me. My job stopped just short of creating anything 3D-related. The track was there, it was fun to drive, track & nearside textures OK, pits, turnmarks etc all done. But I really stopped there, not knowing 3D editors well enough to do any serious prettying.

It was recommended by Bernhard on the main TORCS website and had quite some downloads since then. After some time it got imported in the (then TORCS-NG) Speed Dreams project and it already got enhanced by the advanced graphics engine used there.

And then on a dull September morning I saw a complete new version submitted by Andrew Sumner to SD trunk (rev 1449). It was like - BANG WHOOAAA. It was wonderful!!! It has the lake, the hills, the buildings, the bridges - everything. Andrew has really gone out again and produced a real living track, a great job as usual from him. Thank you very much!

So you can find the latest version in Speed Dream's repositories - and that means my work with that project has officially ended. It is a good feeling though to know that I've added my share of work for a nice track I know many many sim drivers will love.

Have fun driving around!

Debug displays

I've just committed a change in Speed Dreams' sdl-port branch. It enables the debug mode display (controlled by key '5' when in race screen mode) to show some more detailed information besides the FPS value it used to display. Now you can also see the sector name, the distance from the starting line and the actual camera's name.

So now the debug display has 3 view modes. First is: no show :) Second mode is showing only the FPS while the third mode displays all the information discussed above.

See r1802 for the changes.