rars-digest 19950806

Robot Auto Racing Simulation (RARS) Mailing List Digest 19950806 The rars-digest is a compilation of choice cuts from the RARS mailing list. It's published once a week to comp.ai.games, rec.autos.simulators, and to individual subscribers. Send mail to [email hidden] with a subject of 'subscribe rars-digest' to subscribe, or 'unsubscribe rars-digest' to unsubscribe. Contents authors addresses Anyone using WinRARS? Replies to WinRARS Qs RARS 0.62 for Watcom C++ 10.0 Yet another WinRARS Re: How to specify cars used Design reveiw: Where other cars are on the track ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ From: "Mitchell E. Timin" <[email hidden]> Subject: authors addresses To: [email hidden] (Rars- List) Date sent: Sat, 29 Jul 1995 09:46:57 -0400 (EDT) Hello Rartians, Last week we had a disappointing turnout of novices for the oval track races. I hope we can get more for next Sunday's road races. It would be good if someone wants to encourage or invite some of our past participants to compete again. Here are the addresses of almost all of our past competitors. Heath - Patrick Tierney <[email hidden]> Rusty - [email hidden] Rob - [email hidden] (Rob Creager x2365) Ramdu - [email hidden] (Randy Saint) Blender - [email hidden] (Carl D. Burke) Indretti - [email hidden] (Mike Inman) Burns - Safai Ma <[email hidden]> WappuCar and Bubble - Jussi Pajala <[email hidden]> Emily - Tim Battersby <[email hidden]> Bingo - Tristrom Cooke <[email hidden]> racer_X - Muir Lee Harding <[email hidden]> Piranha and IndyMan - [email hidden] goCART - Thomas Rooney <[email hidden]> Bacon - BCABE <[email hidden]> JayMan1 - [email hidden] (George Doster) Marvin - [email hidden] (Nicole Greiber) Phase - [email hidden] (Nathaniel Thurston) OscCar - [email hidden] (Oscar Gustafsson) JXBot3 - [email hidden] (Jeremy Weatherford) Carski - [email hidden] (Robert Skupinski) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date sent: Mon, 31 Jul 95 11:01:48 PDT From: Muir Lee Harding <[email hidden]> Subject: Anyone using WinRARS? To: [email hidden] Just wondering if anyone has tried using my windows port of RARS or compiled any drivers as dlls. I'd like to start hosting a race series, but I don't have Borland and I prefer drag-and-drop to re-linking. If you'd like to have your driver compiled into a dll, I can do so. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date sent: Tue, 1 Aug 95 09:22:00 PDT From: Muir Lee Harding <[email hidden]> Subject: Replies to WinRARS Qs To: [email hidden] For the benifit of the rest of the list: >Do you know if any versions of visual basic can build dll's? I suppose >I could buy a C compiler.... :) I think the key to building dlls is in the linker, not the compiler. If your system uses a librarian to produce .lib files, then it is very likely that it can also make dlls (same process). I haven't used VB lately, but every other system I've seen that produces windows apps, can also make dlls. I'd be very interested in hearing of you have success using VB, let me know how it goes! >Is there a size limit to the drivers? I read in one of your messages that >you didn't create dlls for Wappucar because it was too large... There is not a size limit on the drivers, the reason that I didn't include WappuCar in the last upload is that it had to be linked against the entire RARS tree (wappu uses data directly from some of the rars modules). If a driver uses the situation exclusively to get info, it will weight in at about 30k, WappuCar was ~300k. >I tried it and the green background stayed there forever - not a car or >track in sight. (I downloaded the .exe file; I have not tried to build >it.) When did you download it? I posted a new version not too long ago that fixed a couple of problems with the command-line processing. I think the newest version was built on July 21st. <<Note: After writing the above I realized that this must have been the newer version, the old one had a grey background.>> >Anything wrong with being entered in both races? Nope, all drivers may apply. Along these lines - It would be quite simple for me to add in support for 'teams' that would alow a pair (or more) of drivers to exchange information. Would anyone be interested? >My 'bot is *written* >under a Unix system. It compiles okay on Timin's system, apparently, so >would it compile okay into a dll? Your driver should run fine as a dll, with two small changes that don't affect the control functions in any way: first, it shouldn't (but can if it uses the following fix) call my_name_is() - winrars just uses the name of the dll; second, if the driver makes use of the data segment provided by rars (s.data_ptr) or my_name_is(), then it _must_not_ use a static initialization flag. A better method that will accomplish the same thing is to use 'if (s.to_lft == s.to_rgt == 1.0)' (which also works in DOS RARS), instead of the traditional 'if (init_flag)'. If you'd like, I can compile the driver into a dll for you, and return the code with any changes that are required. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date sent: Wed, 2 Aug 1995 01:42:51 -0700 (PDT) From: Russell Bornsch+ <[email hidden]> To: Rars-List <[email hidden]> Subject: RARS 0.62 for Watcom C++ 10.0 Since I couldn't find my Borland C++ disks, I did a quick port of RARS 0.62 to the Watcom C++ environment (my development environment of choice). If anyone's interested, I can put this on the RARS FTP site or something. I haven't tested it extensively at all, just ran the default race once tonight after getting it to compile. About the only things that changed were the graphics routines. Points to Mr. Timin for portability, though it did generate hundreds of warnings... I'm very new to the RARS scene, but now I can write car AIs. I expect to be joining the race meets very soon. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date sent: Wed, 2 Aug 95 16:29:14 PDT From: Muir Lee Harding <[email hidden]> Subject: Yet another WinRARS To: "Mitchell E. Timin" <[email hidden]>, [email hidden] Hi All, I've uploaded yet another update of WinRARS to ftp://ftp.best.com/pub/ijs/uploads. The biggest addition to this version is a toolbar, and better support for Windows 3.1 (no more blank screens). The .txt file is included below for details... If you need Win32s I now have a couple URLs that serve it up! RARS FOR WINDOWS VERSION 1.2 BETA! Contents: -------- winrars.zip - Contains winrars.exe winrars.exe - Executable for Win3.1 w/ Win32s, and for WinNT (x86) Summary: ------- Yet another update! RARS The .63b patches have been incorporated. The RARS command-line optional are disabled in this build -- hopefully, I will be integrating all of the RARS options into the GUI soon. The default drivers are no longer being built-in, so you will have to load them from dlls. A toolbar has been added. Misc small bugs nuked. Quick Start: ----------- Run winrars.exe, then drag-and-drop the drivers dlls that you want to run from the filemanager, then select FILE | RUN RACE. Repeat as desired. Notes: ----- WinRARS requires Win32s to run under Windows 3.1. Known Bugs: ---------- 1) Under Win3.1 rars is single-threaded, so the UI thread cannot be started. This means that once the race begins, you can't interact anymore (no instrument panel, options, or abort...). New Features: ------------ Toolbar for selecting designated driver(NT), track, laps & races Dynamic loading of DLL-based drivers. Resizable Window (before the race begins) Multiple races per session (NT & Win3.1) Drag-and-Drop (drivers) On tap: ------ Drag-and-Drop (tracks) Improvements to the GUI: Include all RARS options Re-order for drivers Selective driver replacement Questions? Comments?: -------------------- [email hidden] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ From: [email hidden] Date sent: Wed, 2 Aug 1995 15:15:08 -0400 To: [email hidden] Subject: Re: How to specify cars used In a message dated 95-08-02 01:17:14 EDT, Shad Augenstien ([email hidden]) wrote: >Hello all, I just got rars to compile on my HP and I was wondering how I can >select which cars I want to race. Say I write a car and I just want to test >it alone on the track. I compile it, then how do I link it? thanks In the Makefile, near the top, there's a list of cars. It's setting some variable, I don't remember which. Maybe "OBJS" or possibly "CARS". If your car is called foobar.cpp, just add foobar.o to that list. Then, and here's the tricky part, open up carz.cpp. Page down a ways until you see a whole bunch of lines like: robot FooBar1; robot FooBar2; Just add the *name of your driver's function* here, with robot in front, followed by a semicolon. Then, just below this, should be a list declaring a large static array. It starts out witht the driver's name, followed by two indexes into a color array, and then a (char *) NULL. For some reason, RARS only allows 16 cars. This array should have 16 entries. At the end, there's probably 1 or more cars named "Dynamic". You probably want to replace one of these. Just type your drivers *name* over the "Dynamic". You may want to change the color indices. The default compiling should handle it fine, if not, go to the end of the Makefile, where you'll find a list of the rules for making cars. Add your car there, compiling however you need to. Then I assume you know about the -d option. If not, try "rars /?" for information about it. Note the differentiation (sp? :) between your driver's source file, and your driver's name. For example, my driver's name is JXBot3. This is what the driver function is called, and that's what it calls mynameis() with. I put "JXBot3" in carz.cpp. jxbot3.cpp is the name of the source file, so that's what goes in the Makefile. Clear as mud? :D ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date sent: Thu, 3 Aug 1995 16:20:41 -0400 To: [email hidden] From: [email hidden] (Shad Augenstein) Subject: Design reveiw: Where other cars are on the track I just got into RARS a week ago and I've been reading the tutorials and Digests to catch up. One thing I noticed is that Collisions are becoming all that more important. I also noticed that the only way to tell if you're going to hit someone is by a boolean variable, not very realistic. Also, the only other cars you know about are the three closest "in-front" of you. As someone else pointed out, your car has no mirrors nor side windows. What I suggest is that you know the position of everycar on the track, and the velocities of those right around you. My reasoning is that in normal driving you can see all the cars around you and know very well what their position is relative to you. This is just a natural ability that comes with knowing how to drive a car. As for the cars not around you, most drivers have a crew, and they're linked by radio to that crew. So if they want to know about where another car is that they can't see, they can ask the crew. It doesn't seem like it'd be a lot of trouble to impliment this, and it would help a lot in 1. Not running into other cars, and 2. Making racing decisions, for example, their's three laps left and I'm two laps behind the # Dave "Gizmo" Gymer [email hidden] http://www.mal.com/~dgymer/ /* Plug and Play? More like Plug and Pray! */