GPL Replay Analyser - A tool for Papyrus Grand Prix Legends Made by Jonas Matton and Martin Granberg Version 7.9 - Released november 26, 2010 (To make this easier to read, select Word Wrap from the Edit menu.) (Note that not all features are covered in this text file, play around in the program to discover what it has to offer...) What is GPL Replay Analyser? ============================ GPL Replay Analyser is a program with which you can load up your Grand Prix Legends (made by Papyrus) replays and analyse/compare driving lines and different kinds of "telemetry". You can replay the races to see how it developed and generate race, practice reports and various statistics. You can select up to five different laps. It doesn't matter if the driver of the lap is a local human, AI-car, multiplayer human nor in what kind of session the lap was set. GPL Replay Analyser supports all tracks. Furthermore you'll find lots of different tools and features in GPL Replay Analyser, see below for more details. Main features in GPL Replay Analyser are: Trackview with: *Zoomable trackmap showing road and surrounding grass, gravel traps etc *Drawn racing lines for different drivers/laps *Playback feature for playing the replays in "realtime" (driving lines+telemetry) *Playback feature for watching entire races *Split times *Print support *Export trackmap to bitmap Telemetry graphs: *Zoomable graphs with speed, gear, longitudal and lateral acceleration, transition rate(changes in lateral G's), slip angle, RPM, height, pitch, roll, steering, orientation, time, suspension movement, locked wheel info, oilpressure, fuelpressure, oiltemperature, watertemperature and tire squeel info. Graphs are always shown in relation to distance. *Possibility to plot time difference between two drivers, making it easy to see exactly on what part of the track you gain/loose time. *Attached trackmap indicating what part of the track currently is being marked with the mousepointer. *All graphs are printable. Printed page also contains trackmap and secondary graphs. Record Export: *Export records for all installed tracks(not only original) to html. Reports(formerly included in the program GPLReport): *Practice reports - Practice results *Race reports - Race results - Fastest lap table - Highest climber table - On Track table - Laptime consistency table - Leadchanges and leaders statistics *Lap Charts - Lap Charts for all drivers laps - Indication if the driver were off track during the lap etc *Lap by lap reports - A text report describing the race from start to finish including overtaking info, off track info etc *Complete reports (all the above) *Speed reports - Lists top speed per sector and overall, as well as lowest and average speed. *Engine detection reports - Tries to detect which engine is used by all drivers in the replay (for finding swapped engines) *Mechanical reports - Lists mechanical failures/damage to all cars during a race - Detects _some_ shift-R's *Graphical Race Reports -Race and LapByLap reports combined and shown as a picture. *Race History Graph -This shows the development of the race for all drivers in one single graph. All drivers are compared to a virtual driver whose laptimes are consistent and equal to the winner's average laptime. *Detailed Race Report -This reports use of Shift-R(when and total number of Shift-R's used), damage to cars, info about all overtaking moves, disco, retirement in a much more detailed way than the other reports. *All reports are printable and can be exported to file. Also available is the possibility to export to a complete html site. Meaning you can have full results on the web minutes after the race. Other stuff - such as: *Information about all drivers and their laps in a given replay *See if a driver was off track at any time on a particular lap *Possibility to extract and save one lap out of a larger replay file *Lap Finder which scans all your replays for a given track/car/class. Good for finding your fastest laps. *Traction Circle - With this you see the forces acting on the car and can judge the performance of the car and driver. Big thanks to Mark Gold for all help doing this. *Speedtrack - a trackmap painted in different colours to show where speed differs between two laps. *Gear Change Analyser including "Speedshifter detection" *GPLRank Handicap Calculator (overall and for all chassis) (original GPLRank metod) *GPLRank, ChallengeRank and MasterRank Handicap Calculator (overall and for all chassis) (new GPLRank metod) *Track Organizer *CD Database creator. If you have burned GPL replays on CD or another removable media but want to keep track of them and use these replays in for example Export Records this tool will be handy. *PB Viewer for all tracks, lists the drivers Personal Best laps on screen. *Via PB Viewer you can also upload times directly to GPLRank or export times to an ini-file. This ini-file can be uploaded to various ranking sites. *(For track creators) Export lap to .grv(groove) file *Merging of up to 5 laps from different replay files to one single replay file (a la GPL SpyGirl) *Option to save "telemetry" to a textfile. *Automatic detection for incorrect online laptimes. *Online Laptime Verifier. *Sector Times with theoritecally fastest laptime. *Commandline support for loading laps via commandline or from another program. *Experimental "Rating" tool showing ratings for aggressiveness, smoothness etc *Command line support for automatic generating and export of text reports (se readme for info on how). *etc Installation ============ Unzip all files included in this zipfile to a directory of your choice. Doubleclick on "GPL Replay Analyser.exe" to start the program. If you haven't installed GPL correctly you'll have to locate the GPL.EXE file once. This is because we need to know where the track and replay files are located. Instructions ============ Below are some instructions and tips on the different parts of the program. ADD REPLAY LAP ============== After you choose which replay file that contains the lap you want to view you get a "Choose Lap To View" dialog. In this dialog you get some information about the replay and a list of all drivers in the replay. Navigate that list to find the lap you want to add. Note that only laps in bold are selectable. If they aren't bold then either the lapdata isn't included in the replay file or the lap isn't complete (ie aborted to pits). When marking a lap you get more information about the lap in a box to the right. After you marked a lap you can click on the "Quality Analyse" button. If you click on this the program scans the lap and displays something like this: Online quality of lapdata: 100% Largest online gap: 0 seconds If the percentage is anything but 100% then data is missing for part of the lap. This is because the client which saved the replay file didn't get information from the server about this car all of the time. The largest continuous gap is also reported. If the quality report says "Possible partly loss of data due to accelerated time or other disturbance" part of the lap MIGHT be missing. When GPL runs in accelerated time mode the telemetry data isn't saved in the replay file. Note that this quality report isn't always 100% accurate, we've noticed that in some rare circumstances (seems to be if latency is very high) a really bad quality could be reported as perfect. And a perfect offline lap might be reported to have a "possible loss of data". Consider the quality report a hint of how much of the lap you'll be able to see. All bold laps are selectable, but since the quality of the data might be bad, the graphs and driving lines might not be complete or produce strange results. When you found the lap you want to add, select it and click OK or doubleclick on the lap. If the replay file is large it might take a few seconds for the lap to load. You always get a quality report when the lap has been loaded (can be overridden in the Settings-dialog). ADD REPLAY LAP USING LAPFINDER ============================== This feature (new in version 2.0) scans you replay directory and displays a list of all (viewable) laps. This list can be sorted either by driver or laptime (default is unsorted). TRACKVIEW ========= This is a view showing the selected track and its surroundings. You also have a list of the currently loaded laps. Click on the lap(s) you want to plot driving lines for. Use the buttons on the Zoom toolbar to zoom and unzoom. You have to zoom in quite much to be able to see the difference in driving lines. You can also use the panning tool to navigate yourself around the track. New in version 3.0 is that you can scroll with the arrow keys as well. The splittimes presented are the intermediate times from 25%, 50% and 75% distance. The accuracy of these times for online laps depends on the data quality. You also have a Playback toolbar. Click on play to start play selected laps in "realtime". If you don't have the track installed you'll not get the trackview. GRAPHS ====== The graph window allows you to analyse the loaded laps in detail. Choose which laps to plot and what to plot. If you select exactly two laps you can also plot the time difference between the two selected laps. If you select to plot this you'll two additional graphs. The straight one in the middle of the graph indicates where the time difference graph would be if the two selected drivers were exactly as quick on all parts of the circuit. The other graph shows how much ahead/behind the drivers are at different parts of the track. So if this graph increases/decreases at any point time is lost/won. In the resizable trackmap you can see what part of the track correlates to the mouse pointers current position. Rightclick in the graph for graph options and hold down shift and left mousebutton to pan the graph. If the quality of the selected laps are poor then parts of the graph might look strange. The slip angle available in the graph is defined as the difference between the direction the car is traveling and the direction the nose of the car is pointing. This means we don't (yet) take into account the angle of the front tires. REPORTS ======= Simply choose the report you want to see and you'll get it printed on screen. Click on "Export to file" to save the report as a textfile and on "Print" to print the report. Some advice and info about the reports -------------------------------------- Wait until GPL says "Session ended" until you save the replay. If you don't - some of the last lap info might be missing from the replay file and the reports might not tell the true story. The program reports "Off track" for a driver/lap if the game has detected an off track excursion. It might be a crash or just going wide with two wheels on the grass. Spins, contact with barrier/other cars, penalties, pitstops are not recorded AFAWK. If you don't want pages of info in LapByLap report just for Lap 1 - take it easy in turn one on the first lap... :) Or turn off "Off the track info" in settings. The mechanical report lists all damage/failures for all cars which occur during the race. Note that for online races the mechanical report might look different on different clients due to not all data being passed along to/from the server. The shift-r's reported should not be taken as a fact, but rather more as a hint. Testing has shown it is not a reliable way of detecting shift-r's. Shift-r's are reported if a car which has damage suddenly is completely OK again. So shift-r's where there never was any damage in the first place will never be reported. EXPORT RECORDS ============== Since GPL only save records for the original tracks we included this feature. It exports the best training, practice, race and overall laptimes for all installed tracks to html files. Since GPL itself stores records for the original tracks we collect times for these tracks from the file player.ini. For the other(=not present in player.ini) tracks we scan through all the replay files to find the best times. Both the normal GPL replay directory and the alternative replay directory are scanned. The method we use is pretty fast so it shouldn't take more than a couple of seconds even if you have a couple of gigs of replays. So you'd better save the replay next time you set a new PB! Note that it's only necessary to save a small part of the session for the time to be included in this feature. The html files are exported to the directory specified in the options dialog. The files will be placed in a subdirectory named something like FirstName_LastName_Date. If you want GPLRA to use another style sheet than the default one, put a "gplra.css" in the working directory of GPLRA. Then GPLRA will use that one instead of the default one. Note! When collecting lap times from the replay files we search for laps set by drivers with the same NAME as the one in player.ini. GPLRank ======= Calculates the GPLRank for the different players. Track Organizer =============== With this you can change the order the tracks appear in GPL and on the Export Records html pages. You can also change trackname, number of laps etc. It doesn't change the order of the tracks in the World Championship though. Commandline support =================== (1)To generate and export text reports automatically, use this interface: (gplra.exe) -expreports -fREPLAYFILE -dDESTINATIONDIR (-mech) Parameters must be supplied in that order! For example: -expreports -fc:\gpl\replay\leaguerace.rpy -dd:\racereports\ (please note the trailing \ in destination dir) This will create the following reports in 'd:\racereports\': leaguerace_Practice.txt leaguerace_Race.txt leaguerace_LapChart.txt leaguerace_LapByLap.txt If you also want to generate the mechanical report, use this syntax: -expreports -fc:\gpl\replay\leaguerace.rpy -dd:\racereports\ -mech You then get 'leaguerace_Mechanical.txt' as well. After the processing of the replay GPLRA qill quit. (2)This second option is mostly interesting for other developers wanting to integrate their program with GPLRA. Contact us for more info about the interface if you need help. To get automatic loading of a certain replay lap - use this interface: (gplra.exe) -loadrpy -nNUMBEROFLAPSTOLOAD -fFILE -sSESSION -dDRIVER -lLAP Parameters must be supplied in that order! For example -loadrpy -n2 -fc:\replay1.rpy -s1 -d8 -l11 -fc:\replay2.rpy -s1 -d8 -l10 (3)To generate a complete Report Site automatically, use this interface: (gplra.exe) -reportsite -fREPLAYFILE -dDESTINATIONDIR Parameters must be supplied in that order! For example: -reportsite -fc:\gpl\replay\leaguerace.rpy -dd:\reportsites (note that this will take some time to generate). After the processing of the replay GPLRA will quit. E-mail ------ Please report bugs, suggestions and other feedback to: gplra@yahoogroups.com Please, do not send replay files to this address! If you think you've found a bug and want to send us a replay with which we can reproduce it, please contact us first. Neither of us have megafast connections to internet, yet... Homepage -------- http://gplra.pike.nu Check this page out for new releases etc. History ------- History can now be found in the file 'history.txt'. Known bugs: ---------- If you Zoom out extremely much, the program will crash. Only laps from the first practice session as well as the race in full length Grand Prixs are supported. The second practice session is ignored. For a complete (and hopefully up to date) list of known problems, check the webpage. Misc ---- This program is freeware as long as you use it for non-commercial use. The program may not be distributed on a media (such as a CD-Rom or a diskette) for which money is charged OR on a media distributed with for example a magazine for which money is charged without the author's permission. DISCLAIMER ---------- This software is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied. Use it at your own risk. Always remember to have a backup copy of your game. THIS IS NOT A SIERRA/PAPYRUS PRODUCT