Bug?: Shouldn't the node number be zero at the start line, and then add up from there?

Quote from Dygear :

But yes, this is correct, 0 is not always the start line, unfortunately. I'm tempted to submit this as a bug, so we can at least get a reason why this happened.

Quote from avetere :

Yeah, I was about ask that too, especially since nodes aren't shared between configs (which would at least have been an explanation).

Quote from MadCatX :

Sorry to be so pedantic, but an area of a square is A = a*a, not a*2

Yeah ... Ok, I see you're point now, lol! Sleep is a good idea, but the girlfriend is apparently coming over, as I can I think hear her ascend the stairs as I type this message. So I'm sure that I'll be going to bed soon, although I don't think I'll be getting to sleep. But after that, I'll watch the WWDC video on Engadget and then I hope pass out for quite a while. After that I'll go to the ambulance corp (I'm on duty) and I'll ponder this question again between the gun shot wounds, people getting hit by cars, and the babies being borne.

[EDIT] Wait a second, 1658.29614 square miles is larger then the COUNTY I live in. Huh ... the possibilities!

Quote from GeForz :

There should be an prism button wrapper which takes care of assigning ids etc.

Easier said then done, trying to come up with a coherent solution to this problem is quite a bit more difficult then I had imagined, but if you want to come up with the syntax for these functions I'm all ears!

Quote from MadCatX :

Isn't the area a LFS track could have actually much bigger?

1 metre = 65 536
32 bit signed int = 2^31 = 2 147 483 648
2 147 483 658 / 65 536 = 32 768

16bits = 65536;
31bits = 2147483648 (31 because 1 bit is used for the sign).

65536 = 1 Meter;
2147483648 / 65536 = 32,768 meters

1 mile = 1,609.344 meters
1 kilometer = 1,000 meters

32,768 meters / 1,609.344 = 20.3610912 miles.
32,768 meters / 1,000 = 32.768 kilometers.

20.3610912 * 2 = 40.7221824 miles square
32.768 * 2 = 65.536 kilometers square

Quote from MadCatX :

I had almost no sleep in like last 30 hrs, so feel free to tell me how big a BS I just wrote

Get some sleep mate, I'm going to do the same.

Quote from avetere :

You'll have to consider that finishline usually is not the first node of the track.

Yeah, I could not think what kind of shenanigans they had in mind with that one. I mean really, what was the point of this? But yes, this is correct, 0 is not always the start line, unfortunately. I'm tempted to submit this as a bug, so we can at least get a reason why this happened.

Something I just noticed ... I could fit my entire town into a LFS track if I could figure out it's format. My town (Levittown) is 6.9 sq mi (17.8 km²), I could, in fact fit it, and my neighboring town (Wantagh) 4.1 sq mi (10.7 km²) without running over the limit. It's aberration would be WL (For Wantagh-Levittown) and I could make race tracks around my town . That would be kinda cool too, as there are some great streets around here that would make an awesome track, huh. Now if only Eric would make an ambulance car model and put that into the game, I could use the track as a training tool also for the Volunteer Ambulance Corp that I'm also a member of! I wonder how much data I can pull from Google maps about the streets in my town. If I could get each streets coords, I'm sure I could some how put this into an LFS track.

From the MCI packet, it is calling three different bits of data. The first is Node, the second and third are the X and Y.

Nodes are boxes laid out on the track that tell information about the track. For example, it gives information about direction, ensuring that the client is going the correct direction, and position. Node numbers get higher the further into the lap you get, this allows the LFS engine a very quick way to keep track of who is in front while on the same lap. As a higher number means they are further into the lap, it also means that the highest number has compleated that lap the most. In the case of a person being on the lead lap, and then having the highest node number, that person is in first. It's actually a very simple sorting algorithm to implement.

Now the second and third items that it takes from the MCI packets are also pretty interesting in that it provides information as to physically where they are in the world. X & Y start from the center of the whole map, with the X axis laying west (negative) to east (positive), and the Y axis providing north (positive) and south (negative) data on any object as it relates to the center of the map. But that's not all that is interesting about the X and Y information as it's format is not as one would expect. A value of 65536 (X), 65536 (Y) is saying that the object is 1 meter east (X) and 1 meter north (Y) of the center. As LFS is a native 32 bit game, and the base unit of measurement is a meter but that meter takes up 16 bits all by it's self, and the fact that we can have both positive and negative values we can assume that a 32 bit signed integer is provides the boundary of the track's world is 32,767 meters and -32,767 meters giving us a total area of about 40.7221825 square miles, or 65.536 square kilometers (I know, you did not see that one coming did ya!). Simply put ... The tracks could be HUGE!

Hope that helps with understanding what you're looking at. (I guess I should / someone should add this information to the LFSManual / LFS Wiki.

Quote from avetere :

Node corresponds with the nodenumber inside pth

Yeah, pretty much.

Cargame, what are you trying to do?

Quote from broken :

Awh, so sorry.
I shall make it up to you. Some day, I will surely give PRISM a go. ^^

Ohtay, it's a deal .

Quote from broken :

I haven't searched for PRISM's tbh

That hurts man.

Quote from broken :

but I'm sure there is one.

But of course there is.

Quote from DarkTimes :

You make a very good point about tooling.

And you both make a great point about developer support. One of the main draws when I started programming with PHP was that it had a easy to comprehend online manual in a central location. The fact that it included up to date information and provided great examples on how to use many of it's function helped me in so many ways to learn and grow with the language.

It's one of the areas with PRISM where I have lacked, and that is documentation, but I'll fix that before I get to version 1.0.0 and the API get's locked down. Don't want to do the same job 3 times or more, seeing as none of the API is mature yet, and anything can change at any time.

Quote from denis-takumi :

HyperText Markup Language != Programming Language its Markup Language

The only reason I included HTML & JS was because there is a project within the Libs & Tools forum that uses HTML & JavaScript. So who am I to judge?

Quote from denis-takumi :

JavaScript ! = Programming Language its Script

Quote from hyntty :

I'm sorry but I think you can consider a multi-paradigm, object oriented script language to be a programming language. At least it looks like one and can be used like one.

@denis-takumi, dito to what hyntty said about JS. It's hard to not see JS as a fully fledged programming language these days.

Quote from denis-takumi :

dotNet != Programming Language! its Framework

I've had this discussion before with DarkTimes and my reasons where already stated.

Quote from denis-takumi :

use Code::Blocks

I have, I don't remember liking the experience, but I'll give it another shot.

Quote from PoVo :

Have you tried Blumentals Rapid PHP 2010? I used NotePad2 too, and I switched to Rapid PHP

Never heard of it. But I'm willing to give something a try. At the end of the day, I can always go back to Notepad2 and gEdit as needed .

Quote from cargame.nl :

Netbeans!

I like netbeans, I like that I can use it on Windows, Linux and Mac. But it's to bloated and slow in most cases. I feel like netbeans should also be faster. But I'm willing to look at the latest version and see if anything has changed for the better.

Quote from misiek08 :

Hi!
I don't understand few parts of gapmon plugin code. Can you explain me it?

Yeah, I don't really know if the plugin works. I've not had it active in a while, and I wrote the plugin about 6 months ago. I think it was just a toy plugin that I was working to get an idea of how some people would write a plugin within PRISM.

1. You are right that $NPL->ReqI should be $NPL->PLID, unless there was a reason that I did that on purpose, but I can't think of what that would be right now.
   
2. The $NPL->UCID should be $NPL->PType & 6 to check if the player is an AI or remote client. As we really don't want to display buttons onto a AI player's screen as it might interfere with a normal client who is also a player on the server.
   
3. Yeah it should be BFN_CLEAR. This function is called within the onRestart callback that I setup within the plugin. After this function, I request NPL packets from the server in order to rebuild the interface. Why I did this, I don't know. But I'm pretty sure it's in order to avoid a bug situation. However, remove the code and see what happens ... It could get interesting!
   
4. The ($diff <= 0) ? '' : '+') vs an else statement is a matter of taste. I think I wrote the whole thing out to make it more explicit as to what I was doing for people reading over my code. It's quite easy to miss a ternary operator within a function call like that.

In my defense, I wrote this plugin like I wrote this post. At 4:30 in the morning while I was very tried. The only reason I'm awake right now is because I'm at work, and I'm sure that when I wrote that plugin I was not thinking straight. I'll fix the bugs later on today if I remember and push it in the next update (0.3.6?).

Quote from DarkKostas :

*DarkKostas is praying for it
After coding in SA-MP(San Andreas MultiPlayer) for more than 3 years i love this language.

I could not agree more, I love PAWN and is a great language for this exact situation. I really want to have a way to hook into the events of the game engine, but I don't know how to do that yet.

Quote from MadCatX :

I guess C# is gonna win this one.

PHP comes back to take the lead! So you never know!

Quote from PoVo :

It's easy to use, has many functions and is very powerful. I also love the Visual Studio IDE

Yeah, the IDE is nice, but I use NotePad2 to program in PHP.

Quote from SidiousX :

Probably the only time I regret not having G4. Such a terrible station.

After they took over TechTV to get X-Play [really, to get Morgan Webb (so hott, want to touch the hiney)], and then it became G4TechTV and then they started killing shows I never watched it. Then it became G4 again, and I've not seen that station at all. Leo Laporte said that Attack of the Show was good if you looked at it not as the thing that killed the Screen Savers, but as it's own show. But still I'm pissed at comcast.

Quote from misiek08 :

IS_PLC too? Good. Sorry, my mistake.

No, because the packet structure has not been released yet. Once it's released, I'll implement it within the next version that will just include the updates to InSim and nothing else.

Quote from DarkTimes :

Um, sorry to be pedantic, but

... But you can't help it I know.

Quote from DarkTimes :

.NET isn't a language, it's a platform on which languages are built.

When I put .NET on there, I knew someone was going to say this. I also had a feeling that it was going to be you. But what I mean is, is the languages you use also .NET compatible?

Quote from DarkTimes :

Anyway despite the above I'll always vote for Python

Don't you also program in C#? You should vote for all that you use.

Quote from PoVo :

Already looks like PHP will be getting the most

It's on in the lead any more. But I wonder of the people we have on here, what's the most known programming language / platform. I would what kind of market PRISM could have if it was written in another language. I've always said I really wanted to do PRISM in C++, but I'm just not that good at it, so I did it in PHP first. After I get my idea down to paper and it works well, I hope to also make a C++ version of PRISM, although, it would have a different name, and the plugins themselves would be in SmallC (PAWN) or SourcePAWN so that AMX Mod X and SourceMod plugin writers can come over and fell instantly at home.

How of hands, who knows what programming language. (I'm not trying to be comprehensive, just trying to get a feel of who knows what when it come to the languages most commonly used for InSim apps and the like.)

Python - 2 Projects
.NET - 8 Projects
C# - 4 Projects
PHP - 9 Projects
HTML/JS - 1 Project
Java - 1 Project
C++ - 1 Project

Quote from hyntty :

I would find it extremely unlikely for a real life drift team owner not being able to ****ing spell.

To be fair, I'm not 10 years old, and I can't spell for my life! (Spell check in FireFox that went everywhere else after was a god send for me.)

Quote from Doni Gedzo :

So how cant i be serious as our fella Dygear said ? No offense brotha but you are wrong.

No offense taken, I like being proven wrong, it does not happen very often.

Doni, when you get an S2 license, come back to this thread, I'll consider helping you then. But I'm not promising anything.

I would be shocked if he is not banned for a little while for the epic trolling that he does from time to time. Ya know, just to keep him in check.

But anyway, I really can't see this guy paying for an InSim application as he does not even have a S1 or S2 License. So if he is not willing to pay for the game, why would he be willing to play for an InSim application? I'm sorry but I don't take this very seriously, unless he is going to take LFS seriously enough to actually pay for it!

I'll get back to this, just a reminder to myself the idea of image sets is not a bad one, where the client can upload an image and then LFSWorld will take it's X size, and divide that by the number of states that this can have (I think it's 4; Offline, Online, Pits, and Spectating). So as long as the image you upload is divisible by 4 evenly, then you've uploaded a image that can be used. Then from there it's up to you to make sure that each state is handled within the image you upload. This will allow for custom image states on a per user basis if they so wish.

Yeah, that's another thing. We should really have access to what is going on with the server at any given moment. If there is a command going on, then the InSim application should be informed of it so it can update it's state to keep everything in sync.

With great power comes great responsibility. I think this is a step in the right direction, I think we should have much more power over the engine, I think we should have access to the the engine via a DLL interface that we can use to setup callbacks within our own programs. I want to be able to edit and change the game on the fly, I want tweak on the server side that will propagate to the client side automagicly. I want full control over the client's speed, I want to be able to setup hotkey functions onto their client that will allow for like a server slide KERS system, or DRS. I want images and sprites to be able to be displayed on screen. I want to be able to control the font I use to display information within the buttons. I want control over the engine and all of it's parts. But we are a long way away from that, and that's ok, because if we got all of this tomorrow none of us would know what to do with ourselves.

Last edited by Dygear, Thu, 2 Jun 2011 11:49.

Quote from cargame.nl :

This change is making those filters pretty unreliable?

Pretty much, yeah. But that's because it's only going to be able to filter whats in the /cars setup. It can't filter based on what it might not be able to give you as it just does not know that. That means it's up to us not to abuse it.

Quote from misiek08 :

Is anything from latest InSim update in PRISM? Maybe I'm wrong, but new packet has been released.

They are already all supported, they have been since 0.3.4.

Well, we don't have to even go that far, nor do I have the money to run a server on the scale that is LFSWorld. I could how ever add an option to cache results for a period of time within the LFSWorldSDK, but as the options change from server to server on what's available it might be an issue finding a common ground. It's like who has access to a database, what is the database type, sqlite, mysql, mssql, something else? Do they have PDO installed? Should it use a flat file system? Can this run in safe mode without giving the consumer many headaches.

How many queries does LFS World pubstats do a month? I'm just wondering as looking over my at the pubstats details apparently people are leaving the LFSWorldSDK in it's default configuration because my key that is getting shipped with it is still being used.


I've not used the LFSWorldSDK in about a year, and I was wondering if we could find out both how much the pub stats is using each month, and how many people are using the LFSWorldSDK. Also, is there anything I can do in the next version of LFSWorldSDK to make it more obvious to you that they are using the LFSWorldSDK? Setting a user-agent string perhaps?