How the timing/penalties work

[jlv]

Since there have been a couple of incidents involving timing/penalties in the SX series, I thought I'd try to explain the timing.

As you ride around the track, the game is always checking your front wheel against the next three gates. So if you skip 3 gates you have to go back and hit one for it to continue scoring you that lap. If you don't, it will not score you until you go all the way around and hit one of the 3 gates it is checking.

It also checks the previous three gates, so if you get off track and accidentally hit a gate from somewhere further along the track, you can still hit the next gate so you won't get a penalty.

After the race, the game takes every section you missed, calculates the average time for all non cutters through that section, and adds one second to that time. If your section time is slower than that, you will not be penalized. If you are faster, you will be penalized the difference between your time and the average plus 1 second time.

[Ashes]

DAMN!

JLV - as always, you have really thought about how you do things in this game.
I'm impressed. Thanks for explanantion

[Duckstream]

This happened to me at the new s turn a lot, but since i figuret i need to go trogth it with the checkpoint so i can get my stats to the site, they are there now

[jlv]

The S turn was why people were losing laps at Indy. There were three gates to protect the left, right and left bales, so if you screwed up before it and decided to skip the whole S turn it would stop scoring you until you came back around. It's almost always better to get back on the track as soon as possible. The only way you will do better by cutting is if you're already 1 second behind the average time through the section.

[Talisker]

Hello,

Sorry for bumping this old thread but i have to deal with this subject, wich is still a good one.

I'm making a server side php script in order to parse and analyse the result of a race with the results.txt file.
Penalties calculation are not included in results.txt, so i made a function based on what is said here.

My result are quite good, except i got a very little difference in penalties, a few decade of ms.

So i wonder if their was a update of this calculation since 2010 ? or is this still true ?

And btw, just to confirm what i think :
- first lap is ignored for the average calculation ? right ?
- what you call section is, if gate n is missing : gate n-1 -> gate n+x , where x is the first next gate not missed by the player ? right ?

Thx for any help

[jlv]

You might be off by a hair because the game counts in units of 1/128 seconds. The first lap is separate from the rest when calculating the average. You're correct on the section definition.

If you want to match exactly, try copying this:

http://mxsimulator.com/racestats.js

[Talisker]

A big thank you for your reply and the js exemple, that helped a lot.

I see what i was doing wrong, it's not a average of all section times but the average of the average section time for each players.

Now all my times are totaly good and reflects exaclty what the game say, not even one ms of difference

Thank's a lot.

[Wahlamt]

How do you need to hit a timing gate? Should it just be anywhere of the semicircle? Going to use this picture as a reference.


Previously I've always seen it as I'd have to enter by the green (straight) part and exit out of the semi-circle. But can you do it like the blue line, would that still count? Also it is your front wheel that matters if it's in the timing gate or not? Not the bars or any other collision point of the bike/rider?

[jlv]

It tests the center of the front wheel against the entire area of the gate. The direction doesn't matter.