Yesterday was round 4 of LFSCAR and for that round we used a custom (oval) layout. The event was intended to be 123 laps but once you reach 99 laps, the game only allows you to adjust in increments of 10. Needless to say the admins of the series had to make a change because of this bug.

With that being said, you couldn't do a "true" distance based enduro. If you wanted to do 200 miles on a 1.57 miles course, you would have to do 127.38 laps, which rounds to 127, not 130. Imagine that on a 3 to 4 mile circuit... I'm sure some of the admins from MoE (they discussed running a 1000KM event last season) might be slightly concerned with this, as I know a lot of the ovalers are.

+1 to BigTime's suggestion, and I want to add another simple one that had to do with the same race.

We were in the same race, and during the race people realized that the finish line checkpoint is not wide enough to stretch along the front straight AND the small pit road (which people would use to pit if heavily damaged (reset)). So if someone went down the small pit road they would automatically lose a lap, which was a bit unfair. My main point is that I think the checkpoints should be made to go wider (TBH, as wide as autoX wouldn't hurt anything) so things like this won't happen.

Quote from PMD9409 :

+1 to BigTime's suggestion, and I want to add another simple one that had to do with the same race.

We were in the same race, and during the race people realized that the finish line checkpoint is not wide enough to stretch along the front straight AND the small pit road (which people would use to pit if heavily damaged (reset)). So if someone went down the small pit road they would automatically lose a lap, which was a bit unfair. My main point is that I think the checkpoints should be made to go wider (TBH, as wide as autoX wouldn't hurt anything) so things like this won't happen.

Yeah, in all honesty there is no reason to limit ether of the two...

What about the /laps command as an admin? Does it automatically round it to the nearest tenth after 100? If so then that should definitely be removed,

It would break InSim and replay compatability due to lap bytes

Quote from lap bytes, info from MPR header file format on LFS.net :

0 : practice
1-99 : number of laps
100-190 : 100 to 1000 laps... (laps=[lb - 100]*10+100)
191-238 : 1 to 48 hours (hours=lb-190)

What would be a good idea is to add the following to the numbers after 48 hours as far as lap bytes go is as follows

239 - 500km
240 - 804.672km (500 miles for the Americans and idiots)
241 - 1000km
242 - 1609.344km (1000 miles for the Americans and idiots).

Old InSim apps would need a few more lines of code or they would roll over or die for those length races. New apps would add support for those numbers. I think that would be possible.

Yeah, a rework of the laps system would be good. The Kyoto 500 had a Green-White-Checkered system in place should a caution come which would cause the regularly scheduled distance to be finished under caution. But since that race was 270, I would have had to extend the race to 280 to get there, and throw the green on start of lap 278.

But yeah, in a future incompatible patch, you could have the system changed to where instead of:


You'd have it as:



Or something like this.

It would break not only game compatiblity but InSim and MPR file compatibility.

Anything new should be bolted on to the end.

deko jester - small problem there - what about laps races shorter than 100 laps :P

Quote from duke_toaster :

deko jester - small problem there - what about laps races shorter than 100 laps :P

No, my theory that any number > 100 is basically reconverted down to laps, where the program deducts 100 from it. The input value for a laps race is 101 or greater, eg /laps=101, where the extra 100 is known to the admin as the value that is deducted to actually set the laps.

It's nowhere near perfect. And it's just a very very very basic example. I'm sure there's a better way to do this. And It must wait until a later incompatible patch, perhaps even a feature for S2 final. I can wait for this.

d

Quote from dekojester :

It's nowhere near perfect. And it's just a very very very basic example. I'm sure there's a better way to do this. And It must wait until a later incompatible patch, perhaps even a feature for S2 final. I can wait for this.

Wow, I never would have dreamed changing the way you input laps would be such an issue. We are getting ready to run another auto x based oval so I'm sure we will run into the same problem. Once again, it's fixable on our part but really doesn't make sense to limit such a thing. Anyways, we hope this is something the dev's will keep in mind for the next new patch because in my eyes it is a fairly important fix.

Thanks for your input guys...