Chequered Flag / News: Recent posts

After a considerable time in development, the first release of the Formula One Grand Prix/World Circuit (F1GP/WC) open-source editor Chequered Flag has been completed. The focus of version 0.1.0 has been on the track editor and this release provides the community with the most capable tool for modifying circuits to date. However, there is a lot more work to be done (most notably on the CC-Line display from this release), and users can expect more rapid and incremental improvements on all fronts into the future.... read more

As promised in the last news post (although slightly later than planned), I've uploaded a set of screenshots showing the Chequered Flag editor in operation. Although it remains under construction, the progress that has been made is quite impressive and I'm personally glad finally to be able to show the community some of what has been done to date. Our efforts will now go towards finishing and releasing the first version of the editor, which will then be uploaded to this site for users to work with.... read more

Although it has been a while since the previous project news post, development has still been going on with Chequered Flag. With most things completed for the first version of the editor and only two main things left to be implemented, the release of the first version (0.10) is due to occur within the next month or so. Screenshots of the editor will be available over the next week to allow a sneek preview of the current development level. After the initial release of the program has occurred, the development team on the project would be glad to hear from individual users with regard to suggestions, bugs reports and any other project-related involvement. As is normal, we are always looking for new developers and would be happy to include anybody who is interested into the project.... read more

A very significant development has recently taken place with a third developer joining the project in a part-time role. This would ordinarily be great news alone as additional programming time would be available to increase productivity. However, the third developer is none other than Rene Smit, co-developer of Gp2lap and GpxPatch as well as numerous other tools. His development work in the F1GP/GP2/3/4 community is virtually unrivalled and his presence on the Chequered Flag team is of significant forture to us. Rene has already proven himself to be invaluable by contributing the real equation to develop the CC-Line as well as significant work to uncover information on the game itself. All in all, this is a massive boost to the F1GP community and our hopes and ambitions are now significantly enchanced with what we can do with the game. With three developers now working on the project, we hope to be able to achieve great things into the near future.

Work is continuing on the project. F1GP/WC tracks can now be both read and viewed, both graphically and via a structured component display. Code is also in place to write the tracks back to file, but this is not yet included on the user interface. When this final element is complete, the editor will be on the road to be released as version 0.1.0.

The Chequered Flag project website has finally been completed and uploaded to Sourceforge. It is now live and publicly accessible. This site provides a better portal to the Chequered Flag project than the current project page provided for Sourceforge. The latter can unfortunately be a little overwhelming for users unfamiliar with the interface. Human and web usability issues were considered during the design of the Chequered Flag site and it should be accessible on a wide range of platforms, browsers, screen resolutions and colour depths. Navigation along the menu structure should also be simplistic for the benefit of end-users. Please let me know if this proves not to be the case for any reason.

Welcome to Chequered Flag, the project to create a universal editor for Formula One Grand Prix / World Circuit, a 1993 PC racing game. We hope to develop the first universal editor to further improve the capability of this classic game. While development is continuing quite well at the moment, we are always looking for new developers should anybody be interested. It will help speed up the process and develop a wider range of features more quickly for the community. If anybody is interested, please feel free to contact the adminstrators. We can discuss the situation further from there.