Task D16 : Complete the new Career racing mode for 2.0

[martkelder]

The main work has already been done.

The remaining work for 2.0 mainly consists in :

• complete the move from bt and other old robots to USR, Simplix and may be Kilo2008,
• move the current driver skilling system (skill.xml) to the better career system,
• complete the integration in the race configuration menu system, in the simplest / most consistent possible way for the end-user,

[ocirne94]

After some testing I can confirm that now Career mode loads without problems, but:

1) The player can't join any race.
2) Keeping reloading career mode and abandoning after the first event makes the next event be run on track "no name", which produces a segfault. Also quitting from qualifications lead the game to a segfault (very difficult to reproduce).
3) Right before starting a new career, the track displayed is different from the actual one of the first race - it appears to always be Spring track.

****4) I've met several crashes which showed only once, terribly difficult to reproduce, in Practice mode and Quick Race mode; also, the minimap has appeared broken (but this only once, not-reproducible I'm afraid).

[pouillot]

r3331 improves different things :

• the way drivers and cars are filtered-out in the driver select menu : added a new <race>.xml-customizable driver type and car category system, and applied it everywhere relevant (in a SuperCars? Championship, you no longer can race on a Vulture-V6R ;-)
• fixes at least 3) (but not in a really correct way, WIP),
• also gets rid of the bt drivers in the career*.xmls files (but not sure these sections and fields are actually used ...).
• seems also 1) is fixed, but there's many things I don't understand on the way the Career mode works, so expect other issues ...
• didn't see 2), may it's also fixed (let's pray).

[ocirne94]

First impressions:

4) First run, agin the event on 'no name' -> segfault; could not reproduce twice.
5) Still can't join in.
6) The bots take too much time to run their session, for the end-user this might be boring.

[pouillot]

First of all, I'd recommend you completely clean up your ~/.speed-dreams-2/results/career folder : this might help me to understand what's happening at least at the beginning :-)

4) 'no name' can only occur for a track whose "Header" section has no "name" string-property in its XML file ... you should be able to reproduce it after discovering which of your tracks has the pb ... whatever the race type (Quickrace, Practice ...). When found, please send me a complete console log, SD should not crash in this case (some sanity checks are lacking).
5) Could you explain how you can't join : where (which menu) are you prevented from joining, or where are you (silently) excluded from the race, ... or ... ?
6) is it too long for all the sessions, or only for one (practice, quali, race 1, race 2 ...) ?

[ocirne94]

4) Checked it twice, but with no result: all tracks I have (which are exactly the ones in trunk) have got their nice and correct name header; will do further testing later.

5) Oops...I thought I couldn't join in because the human driver didn't show in the first drivers lists (second race standings, loading drivers etc.). But going a bit further threw me in the middle of a practice session. I think that the user should be told when it's his turn, because it arrives so abruptly after a lot of bot-only and results-only racing.

6) Only practice: 10 laps * 15 bots * ~1.8 secs = ~4 mins 30 secs of waiting before actually starting, and this for every event.

7) After Practice, an empty Qualifications results table is shown. Quite useless.

8) The minimap is broken for practice, qualification and races. Only the blue green and red dots are shown.

9) In the starting line table for races, the driver's type is shown instead of its name.

[martkelder]

6) The practice runs are introduced for humans, because elsewise they need to start in an unknown car at the first qualification. Because only the 12 best qualifiers will join the race, so without practice a human might not even race at all during a season. I configured the robots to have the same practice as humans, just to make it fair. Robots also might need practice if they have a learning algorithm.

Maybe an option in the class xml file to force simusimu for robot-only sessions is a good (and not difficult in implement) option.

By the way, there should only be one practice session at the start of every season.

8) Is it only broken for career or only for other racing modes? I don't think there are many graphical differences between career and other racing modes.

[ocirne94]

8) It's broken for all _career_ races: practice, qualifications, first and second race.

10) Going into configure menu (in Career mode) lets the player be deselected; if so, the player will be present with its car in every category: if you switch among the cars categories, you always see the player, but always with the same car, also different from the chosen category; the user shouldn't be allowed to switch among cars categories in career mode, but only to choose his car with "Change car".

[kmetykog]

Mart, could you please explain what is needed on the robot side to enable robots for the career mode?

Thanks.

[pouillot]

4) Reproduced and fixed in r3351.
5) Also experience no human driver in first race ... is it normal, Mart ? at first sight, ReCareerNewAddDrivers? seems to do wrong things, even when human driver in Drivers section of career.xml ... but not clear to me.
7) and 9) Also experienced it in Championship mode ... not career-specific.

[martkelder]

10) The car the human drives in is determined on the result of the season before it. In the first season, the car is fixed. The car select in the career configuration is ignored.

5) If you select one human driver is will be in the Supercars_B group. If you select two humans, one will be in Supercars_A and the other in Supercars_B. Note that all robot-only result pages should be skipped.

ReCareerNewAddDrivers? should place the humans in last position of the Supercars class and use that as previous season.

Gabor: It is only neccesairy to have one robot with has career enabled. But I can write a design page of how the career works and the robots of the career work.

[kmetykog]

Mart: that would be very nice indeed.

[andrewsumner]

Is there anything I can do to help get this finished? I'm working on post-2.0 things while waiting for LS-GT1 and 36GP car setups to be finalised, and the career mode was something Mart & I discussed a long time before SD was invented...

[pouillot]

Mart, any chance to see you help us on this in the next weeks (for 2.0) ?

[kroartem]

Something is definitely wrong with career mode. The main problem is:
The player can't join a lot of races.
More over, there are a lot of text flooding in terminal. Here is some part of the output:
http://pastebin.com/h01S2zTp

[mungewell]

Just picking one of the 'errors':
--
01:02:19.214 Error GfParmCheckHandle?: parameter "Rear Right Suspension/bellcrank" out of bounds: min:1.45 max:1.45 val:1.43 in ("sc-cavallo-360" - "/usr/local/share/games/speed-dreams-2/drivers/simplix/sc-cavallo-360/default.xml")
--

Category specs 1.0 to 5.0 (default 1.3):
https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/speed-dreams/browser/trunk/data/cars/categories/Supercars/Supercars.xml#L398

Car specs 0.7 to 1.7, set to 1.43:
https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/speed-dreams/browser/trunk/data/cars/models/sc-cavallo-360/sc-cavallo-360.xml#L476

This should be OK to give 1.43 (adjustable 1.0 to 1.7), so where's the spec of '1.45 to 1.45' coming in????

[mungewell]

There's no mention of '1.45' in anything related to the Cavallo, BUT there is for the Murasama which would also be appearing to race.
--
01:02:19.339 Trace Loading Reliquum Eruo driver (Murasama NSX) ...
--

Car specs fixed 1.45 (ie no range allowed):
https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/speed-dreams/browser/trunk/data/cars/models/sc-murasama-nsx/sc-murasama-nsx.xml#L500

Are the parameters for the two cars getting merged by mistake????

[mungewell]

can repeat... opened #436 ticket specifically for the parsing errors

[pouillot]

Some more issues I (re)discovered recently :
* the LS1 class file is not installed (career_ls1.xmls), as notified by the code when starting a new career ; then if it get installed (by fixing src/raceman/CMakeLists.txt), the human driver can never join any race (whatever session, whatever class, whatever group).
* so there's something wrong / broken with the LS1 class in the Career mode.
* the Practice results menu for the human driver is always empty (should show 1 line per lap).
* this "Practice" results menu shows a "Qualification" title,
* the 1st race starting grid doesn't displays the right driver names (but "<not found>" strings).
* would be a bit clearer to the newcomers if the various results menus were showing the current "group" (like "Championship Supercars A" or "... B").

[pouillot]

r4305 workarounds the LS1 issue by inhibiting the LS1 class in career.xml (Mart, any better solution, if not fixing the LS1 issue ?).
r4306 shows the current career group in the loading screen and various results menus, fixes the empty Practice results menu for humans, and the wrong driver names in the starting grid menu.
r4307 adds some useful console traces to better follow up what's going on.

[pouillot]

And r4312 fixes r4306's regression on Race Start menu for races other than of the Career mode.

[pouillot]

r4360 restores the LS1 class and make it part of the Official contents (probably the reason why I told 11 days ago that the LS1 class was not working ; after this fix, it works for me).

[pouillot]

Reminder about remaining issues in the race-related menus :

• the "Raceman" menu (where the Start / Configure / ... buttons are located, and where you get a preview of the list of drivers of the race) :
  • it only shows the human players involved : this might be acceptable, but don't you think it'd be better if all the career competitors where listed here ? Mart, can you confirm that we can simply extract the AI competitors list from the career.xml file ?
  • for the human players, it shows a car that is not the one the Career mode assigns to them. Mart, could you give me a hint about how I could get the real car, for a new Career as well as for a resumed-from-results one ?
• the Track Select menu can't be reached, which is good (obviously),
• the Driver Select menu can, and it's needed in order to be able to select the human drivers. But :
  • shouldn't the "Change Car" menu be a read-only one, just as it is for robots ? Because Career choses the car, not the player (for the moment) !
  • shouldn't the AI opponent selection feature be completely inhibited here, as Career choses the AI opponents, not the player ?

[pouillot]

r4392 :

• removes the ls1-cavallo-570s1 from the usable cars for the Career mode, as it's not ready now and will not be AI-drivable for 2.0.
• adds the track name in the sub-title of the Starting grid and Standings menus.

Mart could you review the changes to career_ls1.xmls and do as you like any other changes you'd find preferable to mines ?

[pouillot]

r4495 make the File Select menu only show .xml files (no more .xmls, which are of no use for the end-user) : that way, the user can't accidentaly load results files from which Career mode can't be resumed.

[pouillot]

r4506 fixes the remaining issues about the Career mode :

• disable car choice (the Career mode doesn't support it),
• hide any car information (as we don't really know which car each human driver will get).

And thus closes the ticket :-)

Please test.