Here's another patch for the TrackLab AX designer. I have fixed several export & file save/open bugs and included a simple .trk file importer which will overlay the imported track (or track segment) on the current design. It can be downloaded here: TrackLab v0.1d.

John.

This is a great track, Dragon, I've been having a lot of fun on it. Glad you were able to find TrackLab useful. BTW, I'm just posting the v0.1d patch here and in the Add-Ons forum. Thanks for your help in tracking down the export bugs!

Cheers,
John.

Quote from glyphon :

Hows development on this coming?

Hi Glyphon. I've been working on other projects, sorry to say - this was a little labor of love for the AXers out there. I will get back to it, I promise. That said, I have fixed several export & file save/open bugs and included a simple .trk file importer which will overlay the imported track (or track segment) on the current design. It can be downloaded here: TrackLab v0.1d.

John.

Quote from Michael Denham :

One addition I think would be highly valuable is to be able to import layout files into the program for editing.

Yes, I'm tinkering with that now. To make it really useful, I think I have to add general curve-grouping to the editor, so you can move/scale/rotate groups of curves at once, then I'd make it possible to import .trk files as groups that you could place as entire track elements.

The other minor problem with this is that the set of objects for each track are different, so you'd have to have different sets of importable elements for each track, or it would have to drop object assignments on import if the original track didn't match.

Quote from Stuff :

Hey! A fellow AutoX program maker buddy. (I made the Layout Thingy)

I have to say this is a nice program yet very simple to use. The way things should be. The feature of distributing objects along a curve is something I had in mind if I ever got around to updating my own.

So keep up the good work and if you want, please steal the aerial and object graphics of AU1 for your own program. Yes, not all the objects are there but they will be someday

Thanks for the encouraging words RayOK. I do plan to add rendering at some point and your offer is very much appreciated.

I've posted a patch that should fix all the currently-reported problems, including the red/white barrier lengths. You can get it here. Sorry again its 14MB, I'll have to figure a patch scheme for the Python library .zip.

Try opening/exporting the troublesome .trk files again and they should work now.

John.

Sorry about these troubles. Again, it's alpha code, never been banged on by other people. I'll try and fix things as quickly as possible.

Glyphon: thanks for the two .trk files. I have found at least a couple of the bugs and hot on the heals of some others. I'm able to fully open both track1.trk and track2.trk now and I'm chasing the export issues.

Will post a patched version shortly...

John.

Quote from cdub :

Argh!

I spent a whole lot of time making The World's Best Autocross Layout (TM) and lost it all. It could have been the size of the thing, though I did trim it down to less than 500 objects.

What needs to be done with Library.zip? Extract to dir, or just leave it?

cdub, very sorry to hear you had troubles. Did you save the layout as you were going along (as opposed to exporting)? If so, can you send me a copy, so I can try to repro the problem? If not, saving regularly is probably the best way to deal with any fragility in this early release of the designer.

The log file is useful, I see one or two possible causes - did you have any really short curves which had long objects like barriers? Did the program crash with a message or just exit silently? Did it crash several times?

Regarding the Library.zip, you don't need to unzip, Python digs the libraries out of it on the fly.

Anyway, I'll keep looking and banging on it, but as I say, the best thing to do if you want to try again is to save regularly, since that both protects your work and will give me a starting point for exploration if you run into troubles again.

Quote from kiss me :

hi, i'm using the program, but its not easy for me...
i made a layout, but when i load it in lfs, no objects are showing...
can u show a screenshot of a layout u made with ur prog?

Here's one: http://www.lyric.com/porscheme ... 6ax5/AX5-track-in-LFS.jpg

What track are you designing for? How many curves? What kind of course object(s) and what spacing? What is the object count in the status area of the designer? When you load it into LFS, what is the object count in the lower right corner?

Thanks for the encouraging words, all. It is certainly the case that a lot more could be added to the program, but I wanted to get it out in the simplest form that I thought would be actually useful, both to sort of run it up the flagpole and also not to overwork it.

I'm very interested in all suggestions for improvements and will try to get something out that has just the right set of features (and no more ).

Quote from MAD3.0LT :

do u have to have lfs to use the program cause my computer is 300k away form me atm

No, you can use it standalone to make designs which you export as .LYT layout files. Later, you can transfer them to your LFS installation.

Quote from vrooom :

Would i suggest a little thng. how about cut, copy, paste functon. it will be very usefil.

Yes, to be complete it should have full cut/copy/paste & multiple selections and so on, but I thought it was at least useful in this initial form. You can sort of get the effect of copy & paste by using the Duplicate toolbar button. The other most useful feature feature would be duplicate & offset, so you could draw one side of a course and have it generate the other side. I'll do another rev with all this at some point.

Cheers,
John.

OK, just uploaded a fix: v0.1c. It should be a lot faster rebuilding edited curves that have a lot of objects on them.

I'll point the link in the original posts to the new file shortly.

Last edited by johnw3d, Fri, 21 Jul 2006 05:27.

OK, just found the rebuild performance problem, just repackaging and uploading a fix now. Dang, sorry to make you guys first line of QA. I'll ping when the fix is up.

Thanks for the limit info sil3ntwar, I'll look at putting a limit count in place.

The object rebuild is *very* slow, it was much faster than that during development, maybe something happened during the py2exe bundling. I'll see if I can figure what it is. Stay tuned...

> Can you provide a (smaller download) link for people who already have Python?

Yes, I will at some point. It uses a number of 3rd-party libraries like wxPython & Numeric you'd have to install as well. It's about 14MB now, which is not too onerous, but it would be about 60KB without the Py runtime.

It's unclear what the exact limit on object count is. The layout file definition provides an unsigned 16 bit int for the count which allows for >65,000 objects. I'll post a query to see if anyone knows the limits and code that into the designer.

I can also add a rebuild button, or maybe a View Objects checkbox, but for now you can just assign the object "None" while you are editing long curves and then re-assign when it's ready to export.

Just posted this to the Autocross section, but it was suggested I repost here...

I finally have a cut of the bezier-curve based Autocross layout designer I mentioned on this forum a while ago. In it's initial form, you can use it to draw course outlines with bezier curves and then have the program place course objects along the curves at defined intervals.

Here's a screen-cap of the UI:

http://www.lyric.com/downloads/tracklab.jpg

The program is available for download here. Unzip into a suitable folder and read the ReadMe.txt file. (Please pardon the large download, it's written in Python and the zip includes the Python runtime & libraries.)

Questions, comments & suggestions most welcome.

Enjoy!!

John.

Last edited by johnw3d, Fri, 21 Jul 2006 05:13.

It's written in Python, about 50K of source, but shipping it as a bundled executable brings along the whole Python runtime and required libraries. It's a reasonable trade-off - Python is substantially faster to code. I may post the Python source at some point.

At the moment, you can only create curves, just make it short enough to contain one object. There will be updates if it gets some interest. It is actually a side project as part of a larger extensible track analysis laboratory for both sims and real racing.

John.

I finally have a cut of the bezier-curve based Autocross layout designer I mentioned on this forum a while ago. In it's initial form, you can use it to draw course outlines with bezier curves and then have the program place course objects along the curves at defined intervals.

Here's a screen-cap of the UI:



The program is available for download here. Unzip into a suitable folder and read the ReadMe.txt file.

Questions, comments & suggestions most welcome.

Enjoy!!

John.

Last edited by johnw3d, Fri, 21 Jul 2006 05:26.

I current use MOMO wheel with LFS - is there much difference between it and the DFP? I'm thinking of waiting out the new G25 , but wondering if I should get a DFP while waiting. If the MOMO is OK, are there recommended settings (FF force, steer-reduction, etc.)?

The "TrackLab" program started out as an alternative to the charting and analysis software that came with my GPS DAQ unit, which is pretty crude, and this seems to be the case with most of the DAQ systems I've seen. The GPS-to-LFS layout was just a quick hack for fun, though it did work out quite well and I will refine it. For the moment, I'm going to continue working on the charting and analysis features, and will probably provide an importer for LFS RAF data logs, so you can use it to analyse your LFS driving. Adding a decent interactive AX layout editor is a fair bit of work, mostly because of all the curve & line drawing & editing code, but I will get to it in time.

Meanwhile, if Tweaker or interested others have drawing programs like Illustrator or Visio, etc. that can output SVG files (scalable vector graphics), I can knock up an SVG-to-LFS AX layout converter pretty quickly, at least as a tool to get the initial bulk of the layout done. Let me know if that would be useful. Certainly, placing AX objects along a curve is actually quite trivial, I don't know why someone would say it was impossible.

BTW, I noticed the 3D Render section in the forum mentions 3D Studio MAX as the renderer of choice. Does anyone know if the LFS programmers use it as their main modeller? It turns out I was one of the developers of MAX back in the days.

John.

Another good book is Going Faster: Mastering the Art of Race Driving : The Skip Barber Racing School, here's the page on Amazon. Very detailed yet approachable discussion of cornering, braking, shifting & driving strategies.

Oh, I forgot to mention the NoCal autocross sites for Tweaker (I'm in Los Gatos). At least for the Porsche club, the local chapter sites are Golden Gate and Loma Prieta, and their AX pages are here and here. The PCA site has an overall event calendar as well. You could also try the local SCCA solo site, and in fact, most of the car marque clubs will run AX.

Last edited by johnw3d, Thu, 1 Jun 2006 16:11.

Thanks for the encouraging comments! I plan on improving the program, adding the other AX areas in LFS and probably allowing bezier-curve based manual track layout, so you could use it to help build your layouts, Tweaker.

I'll post again when I have more to show.

Cheers,
John.