- Someone crashes and the race is suspended
- After the race was suspended, the driver who caused the interruption can be selected (1-6)
- After selecting the driver, the penalty can be selected (none, 5 seconds stop and go, 10 seconds stop and go, ...more?)
- After the penalty has been selected, the race can be restarted and the penalty will be attached to the selected driver
- If they enter the pits the next time, the penalty will be served (re-fueling can't be prohibited on software side)
- If they don't serve the penalty until the end of the race, they will be disqualified
- If someone receives multiple penalties, the times will be added on top of each other
- Should also be possible to apply a penalty on jump start
(this is a merge of #203 and #220)
Great!
Penalties should be given manually, as described in bullet one and two.
Plus
- one penalty option is enough, time should be adjustable in settings according to track length
- if re-fueling can not be prohobited, is it possible to re-set fuel to level before or at entering the box?
- instead of disqualification, i would prefer to subtract rounds, i.e. 10 per unresolved penalty
Thanks, Marc!
It may be easier to (in a group setting anyway) just implement a delay to the race suspend?
This way, all drivers that did not wreck get a little advantage before track power is cut.
With the above proposal, someone has to man the tablet / cell phone to administer penalties, correct?
It would seem, implementing a race suspend delay would serve the same purpose, and would not require being tied to the app to administer.
@smartracer, what do you think about that? Would that also satisfy your needs regarding penalties? I agree with Andrew that the main purpose is probably to penalize drivers who cause a suspension of the race by wrecking their car.
To Stefan's point, there is justification for both, I think?
My point:
I am thinking that each driver would now have a "Track Call" button to push, thanks to your implementation of the space bar feature from a plug & play keyboard. This keeps 1 person from having to MC the race, if you will.
In this scenario, the delayed power cut is what is used with Race Control System 64. If I am not mistaken. RCS64 also has stop and go penalties. These are administered / assigned to the driver that pushes the button on their controller, which Carrera does not have this feature, hence the aforementioned.
Stephan's point:
I believe, would be that he is actively manipulating the software screen for track calls, so why not the extra step to administer proper penalization?
Regardless of the position, an adjustable race suspend would be a nice feature that users could implement if they choose to, or not :)
Very cool Stephan!
I assume you hacked the CU to do so? I was going to go that route, until I decided to ask Marc if he could implement space bar command. That way I could create a plug and play method, which is admittedly much more expensive than your route, but still cheaper than a warranty voided CU should something have gone wrong :)
Also, I wanted something that I could move to a PC if I wanted to use race control software on a computer. As Marc continues to improve Smartrace, I just don't see that happening anytime soon :)
At any rate, both penalty options have merit, I think. I believe one is much easier to implement than the other, if I'm thinking through the programming correctly.
Question for this:
The only way to serve penalties would be if you have a pit lane, correct?
What if the user would like to perform penalties and does not have a pit lane?
Depends on the penalty.
You cannot give a stop&go penalty to a driver on a digital course without a pit. If you stop the car on track someone will for sure crash into it.
You may sanction a driver by subtraction of one round.
Exactly. It was a rhetorical question meant to illusteate the confines of only 1 way to approach penalties.
I would like to cast a vote (fwiw) for the "automatic" option.....for example, trigger an automatic lane call if a controller is at 0 throttle for X seconds (X to be an option).
The benefits, as I see them, are considerable:
- it is much easier to implement than a series of dialogs plus enforcement of pit stop time
- it is easier to administer - it requires no additional buttons and racers don't have to be within reach of a specific button
- it requires no additional Carrera hardware - not everyone has a pit lane, for example
There are certainly drawbacks and in an ideal world, we would have both at our disposal. I do feel that the automatic version has less drawbacks in addition to the all-important much lower use of developer time (a very scarce commodity).
Without additional hardware it is not possible to select the driver who should be penalized.
I still prefer manual penalty assignment as even with additional hardware it is not always the pusher who should be penalized.
Besides that, the throttle is nothing I can detect in the software. The protocol doesn't deliver this information.
I go back to a delay on suspend. Without it, there is no penalty for a driver that constantly wrecks. Inversely, there is no advantage for a driver that does not wreck.
Hi everyone,
I continued working on this and this is the current state/behavior:
implementation progress: 99% (some extensive tests still to come), release probably in the next 1-2 weeks (if not earlier). Depends on when our second born arrives :-D
Behavior:
- penalties are only available in races
- the PENALTY button can be triggered anytime (as suggested by @smartracer) and resides next to the START and ESC buttons
- the dialog triggered by the penalty button allows for either assigning time penalties (2, 5 or 10 seconds) or to substract a round (can be triggered multiple times to substract more than one lap)
- time penalties are added on top of each other (meaning that if a driver already received a 5s time penalty and receives another one, its now a 10s penalty)
- penalties can be served anytime in the pits. The serving is started immediately when the driver stops in the pits and is being cancelled if they start refueling
- tire change (if weather is enabled) automatically starts after the penalty has been served completely (which means that it is not possible to change tires without serving the penalty first)
- if a driver doesn't server the penalty before the race ends, they're getting disqualified (no other possibility to punish this)
Marc
There you go. 3.6.0 is out (Android already there, iOS probably following tomorrow). Have fun! :-)
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