TMcArthur, sorry that you are not feeling very welcomed - the people who aren't welcoming are in the minority for sure and every community has them. I didn't feel very welcomed in the rFactor forum earlier this year either so saying this is only an issue in LFS is not true. Now guys, let's give this man a break - he's trying to do something FOR LFS, despite barely knowing the sim in the first place (only a demo user - for now
).
MoE runs a live update system that shows what is going on in the race for the past 6 laps. Surely, a similar system can be used to compile end results too? - once in place, it wouldn't even need to be touched - or at most, just be reset between races. If you can't find the time to make something like this, you could ask in the
Programmer's forum. They're a friendly bunch - someone ought to help your cause as it would certainly be good for LFS.
You could also use
LFS Stats (this has to be done by a person on the server sadly - but maybe there's a way to do it from the server side too, after all, the "host" is essentially on the server). The advantage with that is the fantastic output that you get along with it. Here's an
example. Its really become the standard for LFS league results. If you note above the results, there is a little underlined >. That will bring up qualifying results on the right. It is very easy to use. (Just for the record, I didn't really deserve that win - I just picked those stats because there were more cars there - it was T7R|Exodus who was flying until his connection died
)
[EDIT: I see you mentioned race stewards - they could do this easily, all it takes is running an exe during qualifying
, then another exe takes the output and makes an HTML straight out of it - taking all of 30s to do]
I also saw something recently, called "Live for Stats" - it can be found
here. Apparently it does a similar thing on the the fly (so people who aren't racing can monitor race progress) but I haven't looked into it much. I think it uses LFS World's InSim Relay but you'd have to ask someone else how that whole thing works - basically its a race progress data feed being chucked out on the fly.
At the very least, you could get the data you seek from the
MPR header format (I don't think qualy times go in there though). Writing a parser would not be much effort, but if you can't find the time to do it, again, ask in the Programmer's Forum. It shows the basics - car name and all.
If you dig a bit deeper into this whole thing, I think you'll find that (probably with more effort) LFS can output a heck of a lot more data than anything else.