Lap and position display

[thelusiv]

I noticed after my last update that now we have a lap count and position display. I like it! It needs some tweaking as the text is kinda big, I think ideally it could have smaller words and larger text. Of course really, the timer graphic should be modified to include the text and then just the numbers could be displayed. We really need some kind of better timer display. I guess I should work on that sometime...maybe for next release.

edit: Some other ideas...instead of displaying "Lap 1/99", why don't we add an option to specify how many laps to run, and use that number. As robot cars complete the number of laps they could be told to pull off to the side and hold the brakes. After the player finishes the car's brakes could be applied for ten seconds, when we could force stop the game. I can make the GUI catch this and display a screen saying "Winner" or "Loser" for now...later we can take the player to a stats screen showing times and all that fun stuff.

Thanks to rookie1 for work on this badly needed area of gameplay!

[rookie1]

Actually I was thinking maybe we should split practice mode and race mode. Practice mode will only have player car with no limit on the number of laps. Kinda like the original practice mode. And create a new game mode called 'single race' or 'quick race', where player can select car, track, number of opponents, number of laps, etc.

[thelusiv]

That makes sense, I agree. We could even replace the disabled Career Game button on the main menu with a "Race" button that does what you describe, until we actually develop the career mode.

For now, I think we should only allow up to 3 robots. First off, only some of our tracks have multiple start positions; none of them have more than 4. Second, the game still performs very slowly with that many cars on track, on most computers. Third, I can think of a simple way to set up a menu to select a fixed number of robot players, but to allow the player to select any number will be more difficult and would require me to write a new GUI widget of some kind.

[rookie1]

I've changed the max number of opponent cars to 3 (r1533)

[thelusiv]

This should probably go in the track updates thread, but does anyone want to go through the tracks and make sure each one has 4 starting positions?

[rookie1]

I've replaced 'Career' mode with a 'Single Race' mode (r1534), where player can select the number of opponents and number of laps. The game will apply brakes to a car if it has passed the finish line. Currently the logic to end the game after all cars have passed the finish line is not there. So you have to press Escape to end the game.

I've only updated the menus of 'simple' skin. 'x1' skin not updated yet.

[joevenzon]

Don't spend too much time on the x1 skin. It's just the simple skin with changes to a couple of the graphics -- the menu files are (well, were) identical.

[thelusiv]

Yeah, I agree, if any changes are made to the menus just do it in the simple skin, before the release I'll delete all the x1 skin's menu files and replace them with a copy of the simple menus.

edit: I tried out the new single race menu and the you win/you lose message. Testing with the CT on the new Barcelona track, I was told twice that I lost when I actually won, and by a good bit. Is this something about the Barcelona track perhaps? Maybe I'm missing a gate somewhere?

[rookie1]

Nothing to do with a missing gate. I've improved the way win/lose is detected. Hopefully this problem should be fixed. Try r1545.

[rookie1]

I've added a field in TIMER class to store the total time for each car. There is also a condition check for end of race at vamosworld.cc. What's left is to display a proper race result screen. Still trying to figure out what is the best way to do this. Seems to me there is no way to construct a dynamic page with the current GUI system. Any suggestions?

[thelusiv]

It is possible to create dynamic GUI pages, but not easy. They must be constructed by first creating each of the widgets, then adding them to a newly created page object. Finally the new page object is added to the gui, and the gui is commanded to switch to the new page. I've written all the functions to do this, but it's never been tested. You could probably set this up with labels, but ideally we could have some kind of table widget that would neatly display all the data. In lieu of this, maybe it would be best to write a function that is passed a few vectors with times and such, that returns a new Page object containing all the data, or something along those lines.

[rookie1]

I've added a result page at end of race. Mouse is not working at this page though. You can still press Enter to go back to main menu.

[thelusiv]

I tried out the position code and everything seems to work now - I was unable to up until now because I was working on control editing. Position seems to show up correctly both forward and reverse. The lap number also seems correct both forward and reverse.

Last night on one trial run I finished a race (won), and though I waited for the other cars to finish, I never saw the result page. What triggers this?

[joevenzon]

Think it might have been a forward/reverse bug?

[thelusiv]

I've added a result page at end of race. Mouse is not working at this page though. You can still press Enter to go back to main menu.

This is fixed in SVN r1574, plus I fixed up some other stuff related to this; I added a StopGameConfirm menu. This shows up when you either leave a race from the in-game menu, or the race ends, and the user Pauses the game. This allows the user to quit before the AI finishes the race, and still displays the Race Results no matter when the user leaves the game.

One last thing I'd like to see added to the RaceResults page (before the upcoming release) to accomodate this change is a "Best Lap" column on the Race Results page, which tells the best lap time for each car. If the user quits before the race is done, then the best lap times can be displayed for all cars that haven't finished yet. For cars which have not completed a lap yet, or not finished yet, their times under those columns can be listed as "--:--" or just be left blank. What do you think about this, rookie1?