MTM 1 Drags Creation - Info and Beta track

[Fila]

They are set up like that yeah. They are set up to go perfectly at the line.

[Cale]

New beta: http://mtm2.com/~tracks/T2026/SILVERD_5-27-26.zip

I moved the guard line back a bit and it seems to have helped human driver competitiveness marginally. I think the next step is lowering the speed limits for the CPU trucks on that segment, but I don't know how much it would help.

Is there anything in the SIT I'm missing that defines the CPU garage settings?

[Ford-chan]

Pretty much performs the same like the last file, not really noticing much change in AI performance, though unlike Fila, I'm still winning at this track, so I'm still a firm believer that this is all within the fact that MTM1 behaves differently on some PCs, then again I've yet to try it on the 30FPS cap set.

One thing I did notice however is this...



Couldn't have said it better.

[Fila]

New beta: http://mtm2.com/~tracks/T2026/SILVERD_5-27-26.zip

I moved the guard line back a bit and it seems to have helped human driver competitiveness marginally. I think the next step is lowering the speed limits for the CPU trucks on that segment, but I don't know how much it would help.

Is there anything in the SIT I'm missing that defines the CPU garage settings?

I don't think so...

I should have some time over the weekend, I will try and look into the mtm2 code and see if I can find any reference on how computers set up their garage setting... if they even do.

[Fila]

So if I am understanding this code correctly, the computer trucks simply copy whatever settings the player has. Unless they are in professional mode, they copy the gear but the tire cut and suspension are both set to medium. This is for MTM2 though, so not sure if they changed it from MTM1.

[Cale]

So, for what it's worth, I just loaded up the drag into the PCEm virtual machine I've been using for my MTM1 sessions recently (A Pentium II/450 MHz config) and with that the computer trucks are competitive but definitely beatable, which makes me wonder if drags are just simply broken altogether on faster machines. I can usually do a 2.99-3.00 second run, where as the CPU trucks are generally 3.05-3.09 or so. The qualifying is still completely broken, though, so I must be missing something. I will say it looks great in software mode, which is how I would have played it back in the day.

[Ford-chan]

So, for what it's worth, I just loaded up the drag into the PCEm virtual machine I've been using for my MTM1 sessions recently (A Pentium II/450 MHz config) and with that the computer trucks are competitive but definitely beatable, which makes me wonder if drags are just simply broken altogether on faster machines. I can usually do a 2.99-3.00 second run, where as the CPU trucks are generally 3.05-3.09 or so. The qualifying is still completely broken, though, so I must be missing something. I will say it looks great in software mode, which is how I would have played it back in the day.

From my experience, MTM1 drags behave differently from modern PC to PC, either they stage slowly, won't stage at all, can't complete a turn without crossing the center line on the J drags, and even more damning, and this just so happens to be a thing when playing with the MTM1 drags in MTM2's 2.1 drag patch, some trucks (your HD Boogey Van and Grave Digger VII) they'll just be completely stationary, or will roll up to the Prestage line and just come to a dead stop a centimetre short of the line, even with the 30FPS cap set, or the recent Beta 0.44 with the partial FPS decoupling, same thing still happens.

Simply put... MTM1's drag code hates modern PCs.

[Fila]

On my end, the Boogy Van/Digger issue with stopping right before the stage in mtm2 happens in mtm1 one as well when I was testing it out. And the code in mtm2 that I have used is a direct copy/paste from mtm1 (it was there to begin with untouched), so it's clearly an issue with the code and modern cpus, something doesn't trigger right.

Now mind you, this is another matter that is a bit more complicated. MTM2 has special code to read the CPUs and that enables the engine to do some math, the problem is that code is written in assembly language. For those who don't know, assembly language is one step away from pure machine code and the reason language like C and C++ exist is because assembly was such a pain to learn. So to make it short, I look at that code and I got freak all clue what it is doing because it is mostly just gibberish numbers. lol

Back then it made sense for them to use assembly. C was relatively in its infancy, prone to low performance issues and if someone really understood assembly language, they would have been able to extract significant performance gains out of clever coding (you were responsible for memory management unlike most modern programming languages).

[Ford-chan]

So basically, whatever CPU you have on your PC right now, the game will just behave a certain way with it? That would explain some of the nuisances I've had playing the MTM games throughout various PCs over the years, even GPUs have the same problem, much like with the first version of Comm Patch #2 where the Chase Near camera will show transparency issues behind the tailgate of the trucks, in this case, the shocks on Cale's trucks being visable through the truck body.