NASCAR4 Replay Analyser - A tool for Papyrus NASCAR Racing 4 Made by Martin Granberg and Jonas Matton Version 3.0 - Released January 27, 2002 (To make this easier to read, select Word Wrap from the Edit menu.) (Note that not all features are covered in this text file, play around in the program to discover what it has to offer...) What is NASCAR4 Replay Analyser? ================================ NASCAR4 Replay Analyser is a program with which you can load up your NASCAR4 replays and analyse/compare driving lines and different kinds of "telemetry" plus generate race and practice reports. You can select up to five different laps. It doesn't matter if the driver of the lap is a "local human", AI-car, "multiplayer human" nor in what kind of session the lap was set. NASCAR4 Replay Analyser supports all tracks. Any upcoming tracks should work too. Furthermore you'll find lots of different tools and features in NASCAR4 Replay Analyser, see below for more details. Main features in NASCAR4 Replay Analyser are: Trackview with: *Zoomable trackmap showing road and surrounding grass, gravel traps etc *Drawn racing lines for different drivers/laps *Playback feature for playing the replays in "realtime" (driving lines+telemetry). *Split times *Print support *Export trackmap to bitmap Telemetry graphs: *Zoomable graphs with speed, time, slip angle, revs (RPM) and gear. Graphs are always shown in relation to distance(meter). *Possibility to plot time difference between two drivers, making it easy to see exactly on what part of the track you gain/loose time. *Attached trackmap indicating what part of the track currently is being marked with the mousepointer. Reports: *Practice reports - Practice results *Qualifying reports - Qualifying results *Warmup reports - Warmup results *Race reports - Race results - Fastest lap table - Highest climber table - Black flag lap statistics - On Track table - Leadchanges and leaders statistics *Lap Charts - Lap Charts for all drivers laps - Indication if the driver were off track during the lap etc *Lap by lap reports - A text report describing the race from start to finish including overtaking info, off track info etc *Complete reports (all the above) *Mechanical reports - Lists mechanical failures/damage to all cars during a race *Flag reports -List information and statistics about yellow flags in the race *Graphical Race Reports -Race and LapByLap reports combined and shown as a picture. *Race History Graph -This shows the development of the race for all drivers in one single graph. All drivers are compared to a virtual driver whose laptimes are consistent and equal to the winner's average laptime. Graph based on idea from Michele Merlino(www.forix.com) *All reports are printable and can be exported to file. Other stuff - such as: *Information about all drivers and their laps in a given replay *Traction Circle - With this you see the forces acting on the car and can judge the performance of the car and driver. Big thanks to Mark Gold for all help doing this. *See if a driver was off track at any time on a particular lap *Lap Finder which scans all your replays for a given track/game-mode/session. Good for finding your fastest laps. *Gear Change Analyser including "Speedshifter detection" *Automatic detection for incorrect online(warp) laptimes. *Sector Times with theoretically fastest laptime. *Export Records to html *Personal Best Laptime viewer *CD Database creator. If you have burned N4 replays on CD or another removable media but want to keep track of them and use these replays in N4RA this tool will be handy. *Option to save "telemetry" to a textfile. *etc What does this program cost? ============================ NASCAR4 Replay Analyser is free of charge for non-commercial use. This program is a work of love for racing sims, but if you feel the program is worth paying for and you want to contribute with an optional sum of money, visit http://home.bip.net/martin/n4ra/contribute.htm for details. Installation ============ Unzip all files included in this zipfile to a directory of your choice. Doubleclick on "NASCAR4ReplayAnalyser.exe" to start the program. If you haven't installed NASCAR4 correctly you'll have to locate the "Nascar Racing 4.EXE file" once. This is because we need to know where the track and replay files are located. Instructions ============ Below are some instructions and tips on the different parts of the program. ADD REPLAY LAP ============== After you choose which replay file that contains the lap you want to view you get a "Choose Lap To View" dialog. In this dialog you get some information about the replay and a list of all drivers in the replay. Navigate that list to find the lap you want to add. Note that only laps in bold are selectable. If they aren't bold then either the lapdata isn't included in the replay file or the lap isn't complete (ie aborted to pits). When marking a lap you get more information about the lap in a box to the right. After you marked a lap you can click on the "Quality Analyse" button. If you click on this the program scans the lap and displays something like this: Online quality of lapdata: 100% Largest online gap: 0 seconds If the percentage is anything but 100% then data is missing for part of the lap. This is because the client which saved the replay file didn't get information from the server about this car all of the time. The largest continuous gap is also reported. If the quality report says "Possible partly loss of data due to accelerated time or other disturbance" part of the lap MIGHT be missing. When GPL runs in accelerated time mode the telemetry data isn't saved in the replay file. Note that this quality report isn't always 100% accurate, we've noticed that in some rare circumstances (seems to be if latency is very high) a really bad quality could be reported as perfect. And a perfect offline lap might be reported to have a "possible loss of data". Consider the quality report a hint of how much of the lap you'll be able to see. All bold laps are selectable, but since the quality of the data might be bad, the graphs and driving lines might not be complete or produce strange results. When you found the lap you want to add, select it and click OK or doubleclick on the lap. If the replay file is large it might take a few seconds for the lap to load. You always get a quality report when the lap has been loaded (can be overridden in the Settings-dialog). ADD REPLAY LAP USING LAPFINDER ============================== This feature scans your replay directory and displays a list of all (viewable) laps. This list can be sorted either by driver, laptime, game-mode, session etc (default is unsorted). TRACKVIEW ========= This is a view showing the selected track and its surroundings. You also have a list of the currently loaded laps. Click on the lap(s) you want to plot driving lines for. Use the buttons on the Zoom toolbar to zoom and unzoom. You have to zoom in quite much to be able to see the difference in driving lines. You can also use the panning tool to navigate yourself around the track. You can scroll with the arrow keys as well. The splittimes presented are the intermediate times from 25%, 50% and 75% distance. The accuracy of these times for online laps depends on the data quality. You also have a Playback toolbar. Click on play to start play selected laps in "realtime". If you find the zooming of the trackmap in playback is incorrect you can pause, change zoom and then unpause to get it the way you want. If you don't have the track installed you'll not get the trackview. GRAPHS ====== The graph window allows you to analyse the loaded laps in detail. Choose which laps to plot and what to plot. If you select exactly two laps you can also plot the time difference between the two selected laps. If you select to plot this you'll two additional graphs. The straight one in the middle of the graph indicates where the time difference graph would be if the two selected drivers were exactly as quick on all parts of the circuit. The other graph shows how much ahead/behind the drivers are at different parts of the track. So if this graph increases/decreases at any point time is lost/won. In the small trackmap you can see what part of the track correlates to the mouse pointers current position. Rightclick in the graph for graph options and hold down shift and left mousebutton to pan the graph. If the quality of the selected laps are poor then parts of the graph might look strange. The slip angle available in the graph is defined as the difference between the direction the car is traveling and the direction the nose of the car is pointing. This means we don't (yet) take into account the angle of the front tires. REPORTS ======= Simply choose the report you want to see and you'll get it printed on screen. Click on "Export to file" to save the report as a textfile and on "Print" to print the report. Some advice and info about the reports ====================================== Wait until NASCAR4 says "Session ended" until you save the replay. If you don't - some of the last lap info might be missing from the replay file and the reports might not tell the true story. The program reports "Off track" for a driver/lap if the game has detected an off track excursion. It might be a crash or just going wide with two wheels on the grass. The mechanical report lists damage/failures for all cars which occur during the race. Note that for online races the mechanical report might look different on different clients due to not all data being passed along to/from the server. If you don't want pages of info in LapByLap report just for Lap 1 - take it easy in turn one on the first lap... :) Or turn off "Off the track info" in settings. E-mail ====== Please report bugs, suggestions and other feedback to: gplra@yahoogroups.com Please, do not send replay files to this address! If you think you've found a bug and want to send us a replay with which we can reproduce it, please contact us first. Neither of us have megafast connections to internet, yet... Homepage ======== http://home.bip.net/martin/n4ra Check this page out for new releases etc. History ======= v1.0 *First release! v2.0 *Added new tool: Replay CD Database Creator. More info on this in the program itself. *Added option to save "telemetry" to a textfile (under File menu) *Added option to include the official reason for retirement in the Race Report. (Note that the race report will take some time to be generated if you add this info) *Added some rather meaningless, but perhaps enlightning statistics to LapFinder(number of replay files scanned etc) *Added Export Records to html (creates html-files) *Added Personal Best Laptimes Viewer, lists all best times for all sim modes and all tracks. Sort of Export Records without the need to do the html-files. *Added right button menu in LapFinder. This has an option to copy the lap table to the clipboard so that the table can be pasted into for example Excel. *Added a new report(Mechanical report). At the moment this report tries to detect: -the official retirement reason -damage to engine -damage to gearbox(lost gears) -damage to suspension -blown tires v3.0 *Thanks to a tip from Dave Boyle we have fixed a minor error in our track drawing code, mainly visible in the drawing of the pitlane. *Updated PB-Viewer and ExportRecords to deal with track not included in N4's all.ini file, such as St Jovite. *Added new tool - Traction Circle. With this you see the forces acting on the car and can judge the performance of the car and driver. *The highlight of current track position in the graph has been updated, it now shows the 1% of the track around current position. *Removed "Time" from graph as the same info can be obtained by using the time difference graph. *Added longitudal and lateral acceleration to graph. *Added longitudal and lateral acceleration to telemetry export. *Added new report - Race History Graph. This shows the development of the race for all drivers in one single graph. All drivers are compared to a virtual driver whose laptimes are consistent and equal to the winner's average laptime. Such a report is a long time request. Graph based on idea from Michele Merlino(www.forix.com) This graph is carried over from the GPL version of the Replay Analyser and might not suit N4 races with many yellow flags. *Added speed (within brackets) in the Choose Lap To Load dialog. *Added speed (within brackets) in the Lap Chart report. *Changed the control for the Report window, meaning you wont see "Sorry, report is too large for this stupid textbox" anymore! *Fixed these bugs: -PB Viewer could sometimes crash, fixed. -The program didn't like tracks which track directories were longer than 16 characters, fixed. -Under some circumstances more than one Export Records html file could get the same name (Daytona and Daytona night for example). Fixed. Known bugs: =========== If you Zoom out extremely much, the program will crash. For a complete (and hopefully up to date) list of known problems, check the webpage. Misc ==== This program is freeware as long as you use it for non-commercial use. The program may not be distributed on a media (such as a CD-Rom or a diskette) for which money is charged OR on a media distributed with for example a magazine for which money is charged without the author's permission. DISCLAIMER ========== This software is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied. Use it at your own risk. Always remember to have a backup copy of your game. THIS IS NOT A SIERRA/PAPYRUS PRODUCT