Dark International Tournament - March 2009

Post by **dede** » Mon Mar 09, 2009 1:46 am

Intro
"Dark" means that you won't know other players results (and they won't know yours) until the end of the competition. You can know your partial position in the results page though.
All DIT tracks and laptimes will also populate the TurboSliders.com ranking, after the competition has finished.

Info
All you have to do is driving your best lap in a given track with each default car (EasySlider, Slider, Spinner, AntiSlider, Speeder).
There are two ways to take part to the tournament:
- drive in the DIT Official Server (it will be available now and then, not 24h/day)
- send your recordings

Recordings
A race is being recorded if there's a "REC" red message in the top right corner of the screen. It's possible to enable/disable recordings pushing the record button (F4 by default, configure it at 'Settings > Keys'). It's also possible to save recordings automaticall in 'Settings > Recordings' (you can save automatically last 'n' races or save all of them).
Only recordings generated with TurboSliders 2.0.0 will be accepted (minimum beta rc4). Please download the latest TurboSliders version (2.0.0 Official Release) if you are running a beta version, so that there won't be problems at all.

Sending a recording
You can upload your recordings from this page (you need to be logged in to access it). You can upload as many recordings as you want (only fastest lap with each car will be saved). All recordings sent after the deadline will still be saved (but they won't figure in the competition). Your laptimes won't be visible to anybody before the deadline.
Please don't delete your recordings from your hard disk after submitting them. Our software for video uploading is still in beta test, so there might be problems.
If that page doesn't work and the error is about "associated player profile", you need to associate your player profile to your TurboSliders.com account. You can do it through this page.
WARNING: It's recommended to use only one nickname, in order to be correctly ranked. Turbo Sliders offers the possibility to set up multiple player profiles. But using always the same one is quite tricky. Using the same nick name doesn't mean it's exactly the same player. To use always the same player (name & ID), back up your 'players.da2' (inside the TurboSliders '/data/' folder). That file contains all profiles. If you use multiple computers, copy that file to other PC's too.

March's DIT
Track: Sc_Marchipan (download)
Deadline: March the 31th @ 23:59 GMT
Results: available here, PUBLIC after the deadline, PRIVATE before

For any question, please reply to this post.

Storm · Post by **Storm** » Mon Mar 09, 2009 6:21 pm

just a tought, i believe this aint dark enough, in my opinion players shouldnt be able to see their current position. theres no suspense in the end of the month cause u'll only find out who's in front/behind you. it would be a lot more entusiastic if u just drive the best u can and then wait for the end to see the ranking, having no idea of what it is.

Post by **dede** » Mon Mar 09, 2009 6:41 pm

Storm wrote:just a tought, i believe this aint dark enough, in my opinion players shouldnt be able to see their current position. theres no suspense in the end of the month cause u'll only find out who's in front/behind you. it would be a lot more entusiastic if u just drive the best u can and then wait for the end to see the ranking, having no idea of what it is.

This was how it worked before. My feeling is that people stop trying too early if positions aren't published, so with public positions they try more in order to improve their laptimes.
Maybe it's just my feeling, there wouldn't be any problem to switch back to the old system.

Let's have a vote to decide what's the best system, and I will adapt the website to that. Let's hope to get feedback from all interested players: Tijny, Nerd [Uk], mikko, siLciR, iBlaze², Iijo, olio, Lux, Scud, iceman, and so on..

Post by **Tijny** » Mon Mar 09, 2009 6:47 pm

dede wrote:This was how it worked before. My feeling is that people stop trying too early if positions aren't published, so with public positions they try more in order to improve their laptimes.

That's exactly how I feel as well.

But maybe it could be made a little darker, like being able to check your position for each car only once or twice a month. That would bring back at least some suspension. Not sure if it's a good idea or if it's easy to implement though.

mikko · Post by **mikko** » Mon Mar 09, 2009 7:00 pm

In my opinion the current system is excellent, much better than before. Greatly motivates to try improving position. If you ask me, leave it as it is now.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to play much lately, having limited my driving practically for DIT only. Hopefully things will change, not soon anyway, that's for sure.

kovalainen · Post by **kovalainen** » Mon Mar 09, 2009 7:10 pm

I Agree with Tijny, its a bit too easy to check your postion all the time maybe some kind of limitation for that? but dont go back to total darkness.

dede wrote:My feeling is that people stop trying too early if positions aren't published, so with public positions they try more in order to improve their laptimes.

Scud · Post by **Scud** » Mon Mar 09, 2009 7:10 pm

If tournament goes completely dark, for me it will be really hard to find motivation for wank. But standings update only once or twise could work... or first 3 weeks works like it works now and last week would be completely dark.

pablinho15 · Post by **pablinho15** » Tue Mar 10, 2009 3:14 am

this track is simple but complicated = S

PD = finish among the top 10 = O

Burn · Post by **Burn** » Tue Mar 10, 2009 11:14 am

Storm wrote:just a tought, i believe this aint dark enough, in my opinion players shouldnt be able to see their current position. theres no suspense in the end of the month cause u'll only find out who's in front/behind you. it would be a lot more entusiastic if u just drive the best u can and then wait for the end to see the ranking, having no idea of what it is.

I agree with Storm, I like suspense as much as the next guy and it would make me wanna wank a lot more if I didn't know about it so early!

iBlaze² · Post by **iBlaze²** » Tue Mar 10, 2009 12:48 pm

mikko wrote:In my opinion the current system is excellent, much better than before. Greatly motivates to try improving position. If you ask me, leave it as it is now.

Scud wrote:If tournament goes completely dark, for me it will be really hard to find motivation for wank.

I agree with both of these statements. But there is just one thing I'd like to see changed. Don't use the same track for IHLC and DIT. Because doing it this way, we've already lost out on a whole week of the month for DIT wanking, but more importantly, we already know everybody else's current lap times. Last night I was wanking, and all I had to do to know whether I'd done enough to move up was to check the IHLC results. It was better in November-January, with no IHLC to start us off.

And yes I know it brings in more players to the DIT this way, but it also removes quite a lot of the darkness, because you already know what lap times you need to be hitting. Which kinda removes the point of the tournament.

rostami · Post by **rostami** » Tue Mar 10, 2009 4:04 pm

Storm wrote:just a tought, i believe this aint dark enough, in my opinion players shouldnt be able to see their current position. theres no suspense in the end of the month cause u'll only find out who's in front/behind you. it would be a lot more entusiastic if u just drive the best u can and then wait for the end to see the ranking, having no idea of what it is.

[siLciR] · Post by **[siLciR]** » Fri Mar 13, 2009 4:04 pm

i like it the way it is, and even more with references from de hot laps cup.

all in all hot laps is just 20laps each car, the times done there are a mere reference and not at all representative of the final times in DIT and at least for me, they give motivation to do some wanking.

An All Dark tournment would be boring.

Post by **dede** » Fri Mar 13, 2009 4:28 pm

[siLciR] wrote: all in all hot laps is just 20laps each car, the times done there are a mere reference and not at all representative of the final times in DIT and at least for me, they give motivation to do some wanking.

Having IHLC, DIT and Ranking on same tracks is quite a good idea, because people can have a starting laptime for DIT and Ranking even if they won't be able to wank all cars again by the end of the month.
Naturally laptimes between IHLC and DIT can't be compared, but in some cases IHLC times can be a solid base for DIT too. Basically this setting helps people to join three competitions driving only 1 hour cup.

lux2 · Post by **lux2** » Sat Mar 21, 2009 11:59 am

I raced on DIT server with all cars, but I have results only for easy slider. Is there something wrong? Lap times between 17 and 19 seem to be lost...

Post by **dede** » Sat Mar 21, 2009 1:30 pm

lux2 wrote:I raced on DIT server with all cars, but I have results only for easy slider. Is there something wrong? Lap times between 17 and 19 seem to be lost...

Yeah, at the moment we are using a new program to update records, since now the server is hosted directly at JGG server.
It would be helpful to know exactly what laptimes are missing (send me via PM), so I can check what's the error.

Records get updated manually, at the moment, so it might be that you have to wait up to 2-3 days to get your laptimes updated. It's not your case, though, because I ran the update yesterday.

Scud · Post by **Scud** » Sat Mar 21, 2009 2:14 pm

Looks like all my lap times are missing too.

About 5hours wank for nothing?

Post by **dede** » Sat Mar 21, 2009 6:22 pm

Well, all logs are saved. So in case records aren't saved correctly to the server, we still have the possibility to recover them in some way. But it's more likely a problem in the ranking update program. I'll check in next days.

Post by **dede** » Sat Mar 21, 2009 9:26 pm

Okay, now everything should be fixed. Please tell if laptimes look better now: I checked lux's laptimes now, and they look okay since they are faster or as fast as the ones he said (probably he improved them today?).
Please write here if you notice anything strange.

Big thanks to Tijny, who programmed these wonderful scripts (& fixed them very nicely, also)!

Darx · Post by **Darx** » Sun Mar 22, 2009 10:33 pm

Hmm, I remember getting 20.3 with spinner, but the standings show that I only got 20.4. Dede, could you look into this?

Post by **dede** » Mon Mar 23, 2009 2:07 pm

Darx wrote:Hmm, I remember getting 20.3 with spinner, but the standings show that I only got 20.4. Dede, could you look into this?

I didn't check, but I noticed you got multiple nicknames in the ranking. You can associate only one to your forum account, and others have to be merged manually by administrators.

Nickname merging is done manually after DIT end, so you won't be able to see your correct position until the end of the tournament.

WARNING: It's recommended to use only one nickname, in order to be correctly ranked. Turbo Sliders offers the possibility to set up multiple player profiles. But using always the same one is quite tricky. Using the same nick name doesn't mean it's exactly the same player. To use always the same player (name & ID), back up your 'players.da2' (inside the TurboSliders '/data/' folder). That file contains all profiles. If you use multiple computers, copy that file to other PC's too.

Next time take care of using the same nickname.

Post by **dede** » Wed Apr 01, 2009 1:42 am

Final results available here.