AC Corner Cutting Analysis Tool

[Captain Condescending]

Hey everyone!

So with the recent push in the Club races to stamp out corner cutting, I was trying to think of an effective way of enforcing it. In the absence of any proper reliable flag and penalty system in AC (that I'm aware of), it seems looking back post race is the best way. I'm not a staff member, so I can't comment exactly on how this is done for club races, and so this thread might be totally redundant.

I know a lot of people choose to simply set penalties to off, and set the max wheels out allowed to 4, so people don't get messed up by dodgy penalties, and it's just a case of policing within servers. There's probably a great and effective way of doing it, but to me this seems prone to errors and conflict. To me, surely setting the max allowed wheels out to 2 (in club racing we allow 2 wheels outside the track), that way cuts are registered as such, but keep the penalties set to off. This way, especially in qualifying, everyone can be certain no cuts are being made, as laps will be invalidated (as far as I'm aware this is how it works?).

I was discussing this with a friend, in conjunction with showing him simresults, and what they do with the race_out.json files, when I noticed that those files actually include a "cuts" value for each lap! A bit of explaining to my non-sim-racing friend and him fiddling with Go later, and we have made a little tool for analysing this.

Now, this is in revision 1, literally thrown together by him in about 20mins, but i'll explain how it works, link to the GitHub and if this sounds like it's useful for you guys maybe we can get some improvements made: https://github.com/cj123/acstats

The gist of it is as follows. Firstly, it prints out each lap for each driver in each session, showing lap times and number of cuts on that lap. Secondly, it flags which lap was the fastest by that driver in that session (this for qualifying sessions, you can see if their fastest lap had them cut the track). Thirdly, it compares each lap to the average of that driver's previous laps to determine if that lap could be considered faster. Finally, if a lap had cuts, and it was faster, it flags that lap as the driver having cut and gained an advantage (this is more for the race than other sessions of course).

Pretty simple, I know, but I think with some work it could be very effective. I think the first thing that needs fixing is that it needs to disregard very slow laps from the averaging. Maybe it should ignore any laps slower than 107% of the fastest clean lap? Maybe higher than that? I don't know, that's where more experienced drivers need to weigh in.

Anyway, I guess my basic question is, have I completely wasted my friend's time by not knowing or understanding something? Is this potentially a useful tool? Is there a better way entirely of judging corner cuts? I'm totally out of my depth here, so I'd love some experienced guys to weigh in.

-Joe
Edit: here's a download link for the tool -
https://www.dropbox.com/s/w19oomoof9micwf/acstats.zip?dl=0
Just extract them both in documents\assetto corsa\out and double click the .bat file. Results are in analysis.txt

Edit 2: Scroll down a bit to see the results of some of my experimentation to get AC's track limits to be better. There's a download for a surfaces.ini file for Silverstone GP that makes it much stricter, and might be worth some testing. I'd love feedback on this!

 

[Captain Condescending]

Well in theory you only need to set the pitlane and the racing tarmac to "is valid=1". Most of the default tracks don't have more than 3 different tarmac colours.
I'm testing Spa at the moment... You have these strange... violet, red etc. tarmacs but when you drive on the track, it's only ONE surface I think. Let's see

There are also some surfaces called "bump", for example, and I know on Red Bull Ring there are lots of oddly named surfaces. I wouldn't want to set them all to 0 without a bunch of testing, but in theory I can't see why you wouldn't be correct.

 

[RasmusP]

@Andy Jackson hey man, maybe you want to help? we will have some "mod nights" in the future and we might be able to make them 100% cut free

 

[Andy_J]

@Andy Jackson hey man, maybe you want to help? we will have some "mod nights" in the future and we might be able to make them 100% cut free

I'd love to help but all this editing mumbo jumbo is above me. I applaud what you guys are doing though. It's great work that should help stop those members (they know who they are) who just can't race without breaking the track limits. It's a pity the actual developers couldn't do this though.
Rasmus, if I could help I would.
It's time to take the battle to the track cutters and cheats.

 

[RasmusP]

So @Captain Condescending and me can proudly say: Our Spa Version is 100% CUT FREE
I will check if this is 100% legal too and well, maybe this is going to change the AC cut detection to something really GOOD!

EDIT: @Andy Jackson no problem man! What you actually CAN do is to help us testing (just driving around, checking if you can cut anywhere) once we have something real to present

 

[Bobby Pennington]

Can I just say that I'm so proud to be a part of such a great community. @Captain Condescending thank you so much for this I am truly to have someone like you in our Club. You just got promoted to Overlord of the Overlord. This is just awesome stuff.

@RasmusP thank you for taking this and running with it. This may be the game changer that we are looking for. Oh I hope this the answer. Is there anything on my end that I can do to help? If so, hit me up in a PM or we'll get on ts and I'll start asap.

Thank you both for this wonderful conversation. It's made may day. This weekend was pretty tough for me so it's nice to start the week like this

 

[Captain Condescending]

Can I just say that I'm so proud to be a part of such a great community. @Captain Condescending thank you so much for this I am truly to have someone like you in our Club. You just got promoted to Overlord of the Overlord. This is just awesome stuff.

@RasmusP thank you for taking this and running with it. This may be the game changer that we are looking for. Oh I hope this the answer. Is there anything on my end that I can do to help? If so, hit me up in a PM or we'll get on ts and I'll start asap.

Thank you both for this wonderful conversation. It's made may day. This weekend was pretty tough for me so it's nice to start the week like this

I'm just happy to be able to help and be part of an awesome racing community online! Things can only get better!

 

[Captain Condescending]

Here's a video of it in action.

http://www.racedepartment.com/media/videos/racedepartment-nocut-mod-in-progress.27748/

 

[RasmusP]

Here's a video of it in action.

http://www.racedepartment.com/media/videos/racedepartment-nocut-mod-in-progress.27748/

Awesome video!
For the guys who just want to see results in under a minute:
LINK to a very quick example video by me.
@Andy Jackson you are allowed to cry out of joy. We definitely are!
If you want to have a test run just PM me

 

[Andy_J]

@Andy Jackson[/USER] you are allowed to cry out of joy. We definitely are!

This is wonderful Rasmus. I am crying out of joy. This is going to revolutionise AC for starters. RIP you pesky track cutters. Funny how they are very quiet now eh? But this is an important start on the road to stopping the race cheats and hopefully they won't like it and move to other places to do their poor racecraft.@RIP

 

[InsaneOzzie]

Brilliant, just fekin brilliant guys, I tip my hat to you both and bow in awe of what you have created in such a short time.
Just a thought, would it be possible to create an app that searches the track for the required "track sections" and automatically applies the changes required, or is that going beyond the scope needed to alter the track limits?
As I said Im a "professor of nooboligy" and have no idea about any of this coding stuff.

@Andy Jackson agreed RIP to all track cutters, Karma is a Bitch eh!!

 

[Bobby Pennington]

As I said Im a "professor of nooboligy" and have no idea about any of this coding stuff.

And I am your student oh Great Convict

 

[Captain Condescending]

Brilliant, just fekin brilliant guys, I tip my hat to you both and bow in awe of what you have created in such a short time.
Just a thought, would it be possible to create an app that searches the track for the required "track sections" and automatically applies the changes required, or is that going beyond the scope needed to alter the track limits?
As I said Im a "professor of nooboligy" and have no idea about any of this coding stuff.

@Andy Jackson agreed RIP to all track cutters, Karma is a Bitch eh!!

It's probably not necessary. Editing the files is the bit that takes no time at all. The thing that would be nice is if there was an app to tell you what surface you're driving on. That way it would make our lives much easier when it came to testing.

 

[RasmusP]

Exactly!
At the moment we just set everything that doesn't sound like racing tarmac to "is valid = 0" instead of "1". Like "curb3" or "black concrete" etc.
Difficult is spa for example where you have "asph-spa-black" but also red, green, violet, blue... In the end we needed them all. It's the end of pits, from eau rouge to the double gauche etc.
So yeah an app that simply tells you on what surface you are on would make it a 5 minute thing instead of 60-90 per track

 

[Andy_J]

@Andy Jackson agreed RIP to all track cutters, Karma is a Bitch eh!!

It sure is Andrew.
It would be interesting if those detractors of RD's track limits rule would come on down and discuss their corner. I mean they tried their upmost to belittle me at every opportunity and defend track cutting because in their words, it's not a big deal,everyone does it, just race etc etc blah blah. A couple of those said members even went as low as to say "you are only crying out for this rule because you are not as fast as me" childishness. I really would like to see their contribution to this thread and their reasoning as to why we shouldn't pursue this quest to stop track cutting here at RD.

Back to the topic, guys if I can be of any help in testing, just let me know. And keep up this fantastic work.

 

[psynusoid]

I for one welcome our "Giant ant overlords"/this.
Proper track limits will however make my "Is this a good time to bring up track limits" comments null and void.

 

[RasmusP]

Now we only need to find a way to implement them. This will take some time and maybe hit a problem we don't know that it exists, but I think it will be used in at least SOME way

 

[BrianUK]

It sure is Andrew.
It would be interesting if those detractors of RD's track limits rule would come on down and discuss their corner. I mean they tried their upmost to belittle me at every opportunity and defend track cutting because in their words, it's not a big deal,everyone does it, just race etc etc blah blah. A couple of those said members even went as low as to say "you are only crying out for this rule because you are not as fast as me" childishness. I really would like to see their contribution to this thread and their reasoning as to why we shouldn't pursue this quest to stop track cutting here at RD.

Back to the topic, guys if I can be of any help in testing, just let me know. And keep up this fantastic work.

And you wonder why people troll you, when you act like the headmaster's resident grass with unadulterated baiting.

 

[Bram Hengeveld]

It's great work that should help stop those members (they know who they are)

You obviously misunderstood the last message I wrote on your profile a while back but I'll rephrase it differently and in public this time. The next time you are going to throw any of these annoying cutting accusations towards the you know who they are people, without sending us an incident report with facts so we can actually do something about it, it will be your last post on RaceDepartment and you can throw empty accusations somewhere else.

You have now reached the point you are violating our Terms of Service general rules.

I mean it, no more witty remarks, no more rephrased sentences with the same message. If we don't receive an incident report to go with it, you will be shown the door.

 

[Matheus Machado]

Maybe it should ignore any laps slower than 107% of the fastest clean lap? Maybe higher than that? I don't know, that's where more experienced drivers need to weigh in.

The system you proposed is decent, similar to what rf2 properly edited with limits give you. Although I have some remarks on it:

First, it needs to ignore a lower threshold off the fastest lap. 107% is too much. Sometimes we need to avoid an accident and that can cost 1 second or 2, which right now is detected as a cut. It also shouldn't be able to penalize people for being slower using more track. Remember that AC slows you down off track already.

Second, I wasn't sure how the wheels were detected. It should only care for the outside of the tire.

Third, is there any way this can be logged live, so a steward can look at it? Or at least set a number of times before the driver receives a penalty? I ask because AC penalty system is stupid, as it gives you a slowdown penalty, which any sensible person would turn it off.

Lastly, some tracks don't have lines to mark the road, often being a kerb to determine limits (Adelaide I.e.) that system will be useless if there is tarmac in the other side.

Anyway, that system is a great tool for leagues. It would have saved me plenty of time back in GTC S6.

 

[Lorenzo Bonder]

My only point of discussion is this:

Server side, user side or both?

I agree on Matheus remarks, though I'm 100% certain this won't solve the game problems, track limit abusing problems and stuff.

For leagues it would be useful for GTC S6 really when me Matheus and Tobias ran it, and I meant it in every sense of my word.