A Grand Prix is, well, a series of races where players get points in each race, the better the position, the higher are points. At the end, points sum up, and whoever has more points (and less time in case of equal points), wins.
Standard GP servers are made in a specific fashion, the server hides from public after the first race starts, players cannot reenter the server or change kart (e.g. an extra ESC makes you out of the grand prix). That's actually the reason why one can see most Grand Prix servers without a race started.It has its advantages (e.g. there won't be players who join randomly for a single race and ruin the scoring system).
I modified the code so that the server is always public, players can change karts, and the scoring system can be independent of the number of players joining; recently colors and team indicators were added so team GPs became possible.
In addition to things eltomito said above: there can be several hammer people who manage the GP (I think about whether the teams should be up to players, but I am not convinced yet). You need to reset your kart's color to see your own color. You are able to shoot your teammates, despite in most cases it is not desirable for the team (but not always!
) There are still individual and team standings, but due to server-only limitation, I can show only personal standings for those who finished in the race during the race's final screen; everything else is available
and doesn't fit into the screen! using /standings.
Grands Prix can vary, sometimes there are Frankfurt 2-like servers, sometimes different powerup config is used, sometimes there is just a fixed sequence of tracks.
I was expecting people unfamiliar with the topic to find this
https://forum.freegamedev.net/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=17232 thread so they can know when something happens but seems like it isn't visible much...