[Torcs-users] Robots and compilation for a total ignorant

[Jorge C. <jor...@gm...>]

Hi there.

Back in 2014 I posted here on an issue I had with a race schematic I was 
trying to implement. It worked with the information Bernhard provided 
me, but I soon found it was a bad idea - that reace type soon became too 
clumsy and too annoying. Since then, I've continued to run my races 
mostly in quickrace mode, and to test stuff short of compiling anything, 
since I know nothing about compiling code, I don't have the time to 
learn, and I don't have any IDEs installed. But now I hit a snag.

Thing is: I came up with a fun way to race, using different "personas" 
(i.e., human drivers) driving different cars and dividing the cars in 
tiers with promotions and relegations like in football. But in some 
tiers things get uncompetitive and predictable pretty fast and in others 
there simply aren't enough cars of the same kind to make a good solid 
race. For instance, if I'm racing in the tier dominated by WRC cars, I 
know that in most tracks damned cars are much faster than berniw two 
ones, and if I'm racing in the bottom tiers where historical cars 
dominate not only berniw hist cars are almost always much better than 
InfHist ones, but also the cars themselves are so different from 
eachother that their overal positions in the finish line are almost 
predetermined before even starting. Also, the 4 open-wheeled or the 4 
stock cars are not enough to make competitive and interesting races on 
their own.

And then there's a bunch of cars without a driver.

So I'd like to try other driver/car combinations. Testing stuff, I 
learned that I can change the cars the drivers drive by editing the 
driver xml files... but that's not quite what I wanted: I wanted to add 
driver/car combinations to my options, not replace existing ones. I 
devised the cunning plan of copying all the files of one of the existing 
drivers and then editing the filenames and the stuff in the xml file, 
figuring it might create a new driver I could use to expand the cars 
they drive to more than 10 (say, a "damned 2", with cars 11 through 20 
including ow, stock and historical cars), but that didn't work, alas.

I do know that if I compile stuff I'd probably be able to do what I 
want. I might be able to get sparkle running, and I might be able to 
simply make copies of the other current drivers with different cars or 
use those robots developed for the racing board (which might also give 
me a bit more of a challenge, if they're faster than the default ones), 
but as I said all that stuff about compiling is pure mandarin to me, and 
I can't even find and download the visual studio 2008 you recommend, so 
I figured I might ask: is there another way to do what I want to do? Any 
other way?

And if there isn't, if what I want to do demands compiling stuff, what 
is the easiest, most dumb-proof, least demanding in terms of learning 
stuff, easiest to find, install and run and less time-consuming way to 
compile robots for a Windows user?

Thanks,
Jorge