PAL news, on April 30, 2004, by Michael Jongerius
Ok, there’s too little activity lately
and therefore I haven’t got much too say every time I update. Maybe it’s because
of the summer that’s going on and most people are more interested in getting a
beer at an outdoor café, enjoying the sun and stuff. But still I also want you
to make some free time to kart, cause we have to keep smk alive. Too many
players have stopped playing the last year and few people joined the site since
then.
But anyway, here are the prs from some
(two) Pal players this week:
Armin Huber,
the german bc1 specialist, made some good prs on MC4 this week. He got a nice
looking low 1'41 on MC4 with a lap of 20"06. He is still 11th on the players
list, but I think we can expect a lot from him in the future.
Second there is Karel van Duijvenboden who’s also
one of those die hards out there that’s still karting and doing a good job at
it. He a good GV1 lap with his 12"36 and some good dp1 Legend times. These times
get him passed two players, namely Matthew McCarthy and Raphael Braun. Karel
moved to the 8th place, but has only a little lead. I hope we can
expect a battle here between these three people. That would be fun.
P.S. (sorry for any crooked(?) sentences I wrote)
Players' lists updated, on April 25, 2004, by Simon Laflamme
The PAL and NTSC players' lists have been updated to reflect players' improvements since April 18.
Quite some PAL activity has occured in the past 3 days. Pierre L'Hoëst has been active and set an history landmark on RR, by surprisingly tying very Sami's F-lap WR of 17"35**, which has been standing untied since 2000!! He later improved his 5-lap, which is not looking as strong yet, but has still broken into the high 1'27's with a 2nd ranked time in PAL. Armin Huber has returned from a very short period of inactivity, setting a nice amount of PR's on different tracks. There is, however, one little problem regarding these PR's. It was not specified which ones of them were NBT if any was, and so I sort of had to guess. I assumed that the MC4 F-lap was NBT since I knew it was NBT already on the SMK players' site, and therefore this PR (20"10) hasn't been taken into account for Armin's Non-NBT stats, and has been left to the "old" (or current depending on how it turns out) 20"26 Non-NBT PR. Armin, if you are reading this, please let me know as soon as possible which of the PR's you sent were Non-NBT and which were not, so we can clear this out! Thanks. And lastly in PAL, Andreas Runnelid has improved his MC3 F-lap, passing a player and tying another in the process.
On NTSC, -we seem to be getting used to it- only 1 player was active this week. This was Martin Morissette, who nicely improved his MC2 5-lap roughly half way to the WR. This also beat my (Simon Laflamme's) PR, which gives to Martin a nice load of wins on me in the Mushroom Cup, now! Hopefully I'll have the time and motivation to set some PR's soon, not only (if really) to take back some wins, but to increase the overall amount of activity in NTSC!
PAL news, on April 22, 2004, by Simon Laflamme
As I promised for this week, some reports on the PAL players improvements, as I didn't really cover much, if any of it during my Sunday's update:
Gerard Roodhorst kept PR'ing in the past week, focussing on courses where he has more room for improvements this time; these being BC1 and VL2. He still seems to have some difficulty standing against his brother's times on BC1, he says, but the VL2 PR's look promising so far. These new times moved him up one rank in SR score, just ahead of France's former champion, Jérôme Gava. Karel van Duijboden has not left BC1 yet, and as a result got outstanding sets of NBT and Non-NBT PR's, the Non-NBT PR's being both GOD now, according to the Non-NBT standards! Karel also tested his acquired BC1 and BC3 supremacy onto BC2, and got a rather quick F-lap PR that shows room for further improvements. Other than that, he also got a slight F-lap cut on MC2. Karel is now very close to passing Matthew McCarthy and Raphael Braun in most stats, and could potentially enter in a little 3-way battle with both of them, that is, if all three keep PR'ing at about the same pace. Well, both last active PAL player in Non-NBT this week are in fact Raphael Braun and Matthew McCarthy. Matthew had some trouble with the 4 thwomps in BC3, only improving his 5-lap there by a few hundredths for the time being, while Raphael kept his SR score in front of Matthew's with some DP1, GV1 and GV3 PR's.
Site's archives created!, on April 19, 2004, by Simon Laflamme
Hey, to save some space on this updates window, and make the old players' list I had saved worth something, I have worked tonight on getting ready a page that gathers every existing written updates and weekly players' list since the Non-NBT site's launch. (at the exception of one PAL players' list I didn't save correctly and therefore lost) Obviously, the page's title being "archives" is pretty self-explanatory that there is on there nothing new that has never been on the site, but it's still something interesting to check if you're as passionate by Mario Kart history as I am! :-) The link is up there in the menu.
Players' lists updated, on April 18, 2004, by Simon Laflamme
The PAL and NTSC players' lists have been updated to reflect players' improvements since April 11.
-First of all, the top times tables are still not ready. I could pretend that they gave me a hell of a hard time and that I just couldn't get anything working fine, but to tell the truth, I wasn't in the state of mind this week to get into this once again, so I didn't touch them at all. Maybe it will be better I think about a different and more efficient way to maintain them in an easy way, because having top 300's prepared in advance with 283/300 of the most bottom cells listed as "Name | 9'59"99" just doesn't make sense. Oh well, we'll see; I can't wait to finally get the top times tables issue solved.
Now onto the PR'ing activity:
-I'll be yet once again short on the PAL news this week, as I believe Michael Jongerius is ready to keep writting them weekly now! If I happen to be wrong, then I won't mind to catch up on the PAL activity and write PR'ing PAL/NTSC news by the middle of this week. Maybe just 2 PAL highlights I'd like to mention:
First of all, a new player has been added to the site this week: Paolo Galasso. Paolo is in fact a player who should have been on the Non-NBT since its first days, but for some reasons I cannot explain, I just never realized he wasn't on here until this week. Raphael Braun, who is Paolo Galasso's friend, had e-mailed me while I was into the Non-NBT site's main recruting activity, to tell me that Paolo, Serge Ludescher and him had all of their 40 PR's as Non-NBT and that they were willing to join the Non-NBT site. They were in fact the first names that I had written on my sheet back then, but still I managed to forget about one of them... Paolo, Raphael: if you are reading this, I'm truly sorry. I cannot believe I forgot such a thing and for such a long time! That said, welcome on the site, Paolo! :-) In a different PAL thought, I would like to bring your attention onto how close active players Raphael Braun and Matthew McCarthy are from each other in SR score. This is an interesting little battle to follow, because it has been this way for both of them for as long as the players' list has been released!
Now onto NTSC, activity has seemed to catch up a bit this week if we compare with the last few weeks, as 4 players were active. First is Ray Bergstrom who kept struggling to BC2 that just can't seem to give him the results he'd wish for. The PR's he got, along with a slight BC1 F-lap cut, nevertheless got him past Kevin Booth in SR score, sending Ray 1 rank higher on the players' list! Later during the week, Chris Balch sent some nice GV3 and RR improvements that also allowed him to climb 1 rank higher on the players' list, ahead of Jason Fraser and just 1 SR point behind Juan Sebastián Arévalo. 3 of the 4 PR's he got, GV3 F-lap being the exception, are now faster than Stanley Jeram's times, which are all former NTSC WRs on these tracks! Lastly, we had the "return" of 2 NTSC players that we had not seen active for some time. First is Christophe Paquin, who has been known lately for giving a try at pretty much every existing time trial trick/glitch in the game. :-) Out of all these trick/glitch PR's, he still managed to achieve 2 Non-NBT PR's, both being at MC3, with low 1'31's and 18's times! Second player to have made a kind of comeback this week is Martin Morissette, who has decided to focus more onto Non-NBT PR's from now on. He started doing so by improving his MC1 PR's first, with a 11"85 lap and a 5-lap that is getting dangerously close to mine (Simon Laflamme's), and that will more likely pass it if he keeps at it! :-)
WR pages updated + Pal news, on April 14, 2004, by Michael Jongerius
I updated the Wr pages of both Pal and
Ntsc. I added some things to the pages to make them a bit more exciting. Check
them out for yourself.
The
news:
Only one new WR this week.
Michael Jongerius played some Bc1 in order to beat
Armin Huber. He got a 5lap that is just 0.02 behind Huber, but he did managed to
beat the flap. He got it into the 60’s with a 17.68*!.
Further more dutch news from
Gerard Roodhorst. After his insane GV3 records last
week, he cooled down a bit this week. Maybe it’s because he made room for his
brother to use the SNES. But anyway, he still made some good prs at Bc1 and RR.
Then we have Matthew McCarthy. He made a really nice sub 20” flap on Mc4 together with a decent 5lap in the 1:41’s. He also made a very good dp3 5lap which has a legend D rank and is his best achieved standard now. With these times he passed Raphael Braun for 8th place!. He’s on his way to a Legend status now.
Players' lists updated + a few messages, on April 11, 2004, by Simon Laflamme
The PAL and NTSC players' lists have been updated to reflect players' improvements since April 4, but first of all, a few messages:
-Starting off with worst news, I still haven't got the top times tables to be ready for this update. I have been working on it rather hard yesterday, finally exporting the sorted top times lists to html files, only to realize several minutes later that, not only the format was completely inefficient, but the way I was exporting it was just done wrong, so out of frustration, I decided to leave it there for now. I should try to work on a different way to arrange the tables soon, and hopefully, it can be ready later this week.
-On a different thought, everything has been re-arranged regarding the BC1 F-lap rule's change in PAL, and now every PAL players' BC1 F-lap in the database is done without a boost to start the lap. The standards have also been modified to reflect this change, from GOD to Legend G, as the GOD time now stands at 17"71! This has affected slightly a few of the players' SR scores; those who had a BC1 F-lap of 17"86 or faster. Briefly, everything went fine regarding the rule's change, so this is now case closed!
-Another message, on a lighter note this time: I have added this week to the players' list a new feature; rather a new statistic. This is one statistic that came out of my mind earlier this week, and I was thinking that it would be really interesting to have something of the kind calculated for the Non-NBT site. What I was thinking about exactly was to have a formula that calculates an activity rate through the players' PRs' improvements for a given week/update. The formula would judge the importance of players' improvements altogether for one version (NTSC or PAL) and would give a number that reflect these overall improvements for that version that week.
Well, it took me a long time to get that formula up, because many factors had to be taken into account, but at the end, I was successful at doing so, and now, what I called the "Weekly improvements rate (Wir) is ready to be seen on the players' lists. I would have called it the Weekly activity rate, but then it would have acronymed to War, plus the percentage that the formula give really is more based on the improvements altogether than the "amount of activity". Anyhow, I feel my descriptions only summarize briefly what the concept is, so you're probably all still puzzled as to what the Wir really does and calculate, so to find it out, click on the stats' info page here or on the players' lists' pages.
-And last message before the usual PRs' update, I promise: the PAL WRs page hasn't been updated this week. The reason is because Michael Jongerius should be doing it later this week. He has added dates and splits features (where we could find them) to the WRs, so normally, he should be able to re-load it later this week, as well as write a PAL update. I said last week that he would, and he didn't, but it seems he really was busy with... things... or so he said. :-P But no, seriously, this should be for real this time, or else... no, let's hope it indeed is serious.
-Alright! So, still some very interesting activity this week PR'ing wise on the PAL version. First of all, Michael Jongerius has hit 2 new WRs this week, ones that he had never held before! First was on DP3, where he confirmed his Donut Plains supremacy reaching his 5th DP WR ever on a possibility of 6, 3 of which he currently still holds. The time was 1'20"03* on the 5-lap, which makes it look like 1'19's are very close now! Then, he surprised us on BC1 lowering the Non-NBT F-lap to 17"60's, a WR range that would have seemed impossible weeks ago, with 17"69*, 0"01 faster than Armin's lap! He also got a 5-lap in the 1'29"20's to go along with his F-lap. Gerard Roodhorst kept playing the course that can definitely be called his own now: GV3. The F-lap went even crazier than it already was, with a 14"85*, and yet, judged on some of the best 1st laps he got, it can still go a bit lower! Gerard also successfully took the 5-lap WR down to 1'15"26*, but here as well, there is room left for faster results from Gerard! Pierre L'Hoëst improved 1 Non-NBT PR this week, which was BC3 5-lap being taken into lower 1'31's. Matthew McCarthy also improved a single Non-NBT PR this week. His was MC4 5-lap going lower in the 1'42's. Normally, this PR should put him a little bit more ahead of Raphael Braun, but due to a few circumstances happening in light of the BC1 F-lap's rule change, Matthew lost a few SR point and is currently 1 SR point behind Raphael Braun in SR score. This should not take much for Matthew to gain back his rank over Raphael though, but that is if Raphael doesn't get at it... Catching up pretty fast on both of them now is Karel van Duijboden, who set at the beginning of the week great GV1 and GV2 F-lap improvements. The GV2 F-lap is particular for the fact that it is, I believe, the 2nd Non-NBT GV2 F-lap ever in PAL to be set landing the platform jump! Later on the week, Karel got into the BC1 activity and set 2 PR's that are almost as fast as Michael's new times there. These PR's brought Karel's 1-lap total time stats under the 5 minutes mark! Armin Huber has been working on some of his BC3 and GV3 PRs. And lastly on PAL, Andreas Runnelid has improved his MC1 and MC2 5-laps, the MC2 one getting slowly but steadily closer to the 1'20 barier.
In NTSC, this week again, only 1 player has been active, and this is Ray bergstrom, who will therefore be the one who gets the NTSC exclusivity this update. :-) Ray has been focussing this week again on his BC2 PR's, which brought his SR score closer to Kevin Booth's, who is now at a ridiculous 1 SR point far ahead of Ray. They also share very tightly most of the other stats.
BC1 F-lap rules' change in PAL for next Sunday update, on April 7, 2004, by Simon Laflamme
Due to recent confusion and discussions on the subject, I have decided, for the time being, that PAL players who have done their best BC1 lap with a boost to start it would have their non-starting boost laps put back up instead for the Non-NBT site. That's something that has been done for the PAL Non-NBT WRs page already, so I think it is only sensible that we do the same for the rest of the players' times and the different statistics calculated from them. I already started to e-mail a few of the players that had their old times done with a boost to start the lap, and normally this should not take long at all before I can gather from every PAL players a BC1 lap time done without a boost to start it. If you are one of the PAL players who have their current best BC1 lap done with a boost to start it, and that I have not sent you an e-mail yet, please send me one, or post your best non-boost lap on Yahoo groups so I can change it in the database.
The PAL BC1 F-lap standards will also be changed in the legend to GOD standards area to reflect the rule's change. I have not written the new standard table yet, but normally the GOD time should be somewhere around 17"71-17"73.
I'm sorry for any inconvenient it may cause, and I still encourage you strongly to post your thoughts on the zigzag boosts issue at the Message Board. Unfortunately, the board has seemed to be down for the last few days, but that kind of problem rarely last for a long time, so we can hope it will be back up working in the few days to come. Thanks for your cooperation.
Players' lists and World Records page updated, on April 4, 2004, by Simon Laflamme
The PAL and NTSC players' lists and World Records pages have been updated to reflect players' improvements since March 29.
Ok, I'll be short on the PR's udpates, because there are other messages I'll want to share lower in the update, and because this week-end has been rather rough for me, so I'm a bit in a hurry tonight as I write this. I'll focus more on the NTSC activity, which should be easy since only 1 NTSC player has been active this week, and normally Michael Jongerius should write a more detailed PAL update later this week!
First of all, 3 new PAL players enter the site this week, which is great news sicne none had been added up since the weekly Non-NBT updates started. First is Armin Huber, who is best known for being current BC1 World Record holder! Interestingly enough, Armin has pushed his BC1 5-lap down further this week, taking it to a nearly sub 1'29 time at 1'29"03*! Second is Willem van Voorst, who has been on the SMK players' site for a few months already. Willem initially entered the list ahead of Armin, but the later PR's Armin sent got him past Willem by a small margin, leaving Willem behind for now. And last but not least, Sébastien Holmière got to send a complete list of 40 Non-NBT times this week, entering the PAL list in 4th position just ahead of the 2 former French champions Nicolas Clementy and Jérôme Gava! Sébastien has been one of the most, if not the most, important user of NBTs on the SMK players' site, so it will be interesting to see how he performs on the Non-NBT site!
As far as long-time Non-NBT site's PAL players are concerned, 1 new PAL WRs have been set this week, making up a total of 6 Non-NBT PAL WRs in 3 weeks; not bad! Gerard Roodhorst has indeed been taking his revenge on GV3, but on the lap this time, setting a lap that might seem insane, but that, judged on Gerard's GV3 attempts can get even lower! The new lap timing WR is 14"88*. Other than that, as I said I'll be extremely brief in hopes that Michael will write more complete news later this week, so Michael Jongerius, Pierre L'hoëst, Karel van Duibboden and Andreas Runnelid have been other PAL active players this week.
In NTSC, Chris Balch took his already KB1 5-lap WR to even lower extents into the lower 49 seconds half. 49"48* is the new standing WR, which is now more than 1 second faster than 2nd ranked 5-lap time, and more than 2 seconds faster than 3rd ranked 5-lap time! The KB1 semi-recent strategy will have to be tried in more depth by more NTSC players soon, or else the NTSC KB1 top times might start to look like the VL1 ones. :-) Chris also got pair of PRs on GV3, VL2 and RR, the RR 5-lap nicely getting into 1'25's. In the process, Chris has passed Michael Liem in stats, and tied Jason Fraser in SR score. Jason had slightly better strats in average ranking and total times mixed though, so he was left with the lead over Chris for now.
Now onto messages I'd like to share: First concerns the zigzag boosts, which we
have known about for a long time already, but we just seem to start to realize
their consequences on different possible racing lines, and therefore the
consequences they have on the Non-NBT site which is likely to see its rules
modified soon.
To make history short, it was decided more than 2 months ago that boosts gotten from zigzag-shaped powerslides would be forbidden on the Non-NBT site. The main motivation for this decision was the new KB2 technique the zigzag boost allowed to do, but we also had slight, but still existing expectations that the zigzag boosts might start to spread around in different courses under forms that we had not seen it take so far. Well, the more time goes by, the more these expectations seem to have become reality. With the Japanese emulator videos that were posted on the message board a few weeks ago, it was made clear that zigzag boosts could potentially be used freely along straight aways in a rather abusive way.
Until then, nothing wrong, because the rule already suggested that those boosts would be forbidden anyway, but still a dillema seems to have arisen among the zigzag boosts. After watching a few videos kindly shared from Pierre L'hoëst and Karel van Duijboden showing powerslides which zigzag properties were questionable, it got me to wonder really: What should characterize a zigzag boost, and therefore be forbidden in Non-NBT? The videos Pierre and Karel sent me showed powerslides that had counter-steering so slight that you really were wondering if it should be NBT. The counter-steering itself was more done in order to make the driving line well fit the corner's curve, and the small barely visible zigzag itself wasn't really what was creating the boost, or so I highly think.
If we decide to allow some of the possible zigzag powerslides' derivations as Karel's and Pierre's videos have showed them, which I think is sensible, then we'll have to draw the line somewhere. The question is: How to determine where the line will be drawn, and how will it be clearly characterized? I have started a topic on the subject at the Mario Kart Message Board in the Non-NBT topic in the SMK section, and I'd appreciate if you could give the issue a thorough thought and post your personal views and suggestions on the Message Board's topic. Unfortunately, I could only upload Pierre's vid there, so if you would like to see Karel's vid, you'll either have to catch me on MSN or AIM, or send me an e-mail. Just keep in mind that the issue really just concerns zigzag-shaped powerslides boost, so please post your views and suggestions regarding that kind of boost only, for now. We would not like the issue to get any more expanded and complicated than it already is, so thanks to share your view while keeping your message topic-focussed.
The 2nd of my 3 messages, which should be shorter, is semi-related to the one just stated previously. Basically, I've been slacking off lately on the rules' page needed edition because of the recent events, and I just can't seem anymore to find the motivation to keep editing it. I was becoming a bit unsure of the things I was deciding to include on the page. Some of it required skills to be able to mess with pictures and animated gifs that I just didn't have, and it led to myself just giving up on the rules' page for the time being. More likely I would start working on it again when all other Non-NBT issues are solved, but that would probably take a long while, and even then I'm not sure if I would have the motivation to edit the rules' page to make it fully comprehensive and easy to go through for new players.
In regards of these various facts, I would be very thankful if someone who is familiar with the Non-NBT rules could help me getting the rules' page worked out. If you are interested to help into editing and creating some parts of the Non-NBT rules' page, you can contact me as always either via MSN or AIM or by e-mail. We can discuss the rules' page's features in more depth from there.
Lastly, I've been working during the main part of this week-end on getting the 80 (20 5-lap, 20 F-lap; each for the PAL and NTSC versions) top times tables as soon as possible. I have for now managed to get the whole times to self-automate themselves into the 80 lists with the players' names besides them, but I'm still trying to figure out how to export the data efficiently to .html files. Michael Liem and Mark Jones have helped me a lot so far on getting what's up now working, so before anything, I'd like to thank them. Unfortunately, despite the 1-year visual basic classes I had last year, I'm still having trouble to figure out the use of every important term the visual basic code the macro regarding html exportation that Mark sent me contains. Let's hope I will be able to get it working fine for next week's update, but I really can't tell for sure. I have already lost a lot of time testing different alternatives with the excel file that, at the end, appeared to be useless, so same can happen as well for html exportation. Thanks for your patience!