Some timetrial ghost suggestions.

[wowie]

Allow an option to give ghosts a 0.25-0.5 second head start. Doing so would enable better timetrial racing, by allowing you to ride right behind your best time, and make minor improvements on each run. As a related suggestion, cause ghosts to rewind when you rewind, allowing you to make many mistakes while still being able to compete and compare your actions with that of your best time. Keep both of these optional, hidden in the replay menu. That's all I can think of at the moment. I might come up with more later.

Edit: Later wasn't far away. I hope something might eventually be built like what *cough*other games*cough* have, where there's a database of all the best replays, and a built-in feature that lets you download the "best lap" for every track, car, difficulty, and boost/flip setting, and gives you the option to upload your best laps, as well, if they're better than what's stored on the server... It might be a good idea to have a separate mode for this where there are only a few options presets to choose from, e.g. easy(easy sim, boost+flip enabled), medium(normal sim, boost+flip enabled), hard(normal sim, boost+flip disabled), hardcore(normal sim, boost+flip disabled, manual transmission only), so have difficulty+car choice, for a total of 40 different replays per track (10 cars times 4 difficulty levels), times 111 tracks, for a total of 4440 replays stored on the replay server, or more, after new tracks are added. IDK how much data this would use though, since I don't have any experience in that area, but it would be fun and convenient to have. Consider it a minor, low priority want, since it's probably unfeasible, given where the game is right now.

Thanks for reading this!

[Tapio]

Regarding the replay database: 4440 replays would be many gigabytes of data judging from a zipped 1.5MB replay attachment on another topic. So downloading the whole thing is out of the question, but on-demand downloading could work. Still, hosting that much data is not trivial, especially since you need to a) let users be able to upload new replays b) sustain the bandwidth. Reducing the replay count considerably would probably be needed to make this realistic. I originally thought using an svn repo on e.g sf.net could be an option, but authentication and making sure no malicious commits are accepted will pose an issue. If this would be implemented, might be worth checking how XMoto shares its replays.

[wowie]

Yeah, sanity check and file validation would be issues. Maybe only having 1 "difficulty" for the online timetrial database, and only allowing certain "competition ready" tracks, would work for the storage space reduction. Still would be huge, though. The need for such a feature isn't there, either, lol, at least not yet.

[CryHam]

Well as for ghosts this is just impossible. For example I have now 170 ghosts total 475 MB and this is mostly just 1 car. My old ghosts from few cars were about 1,5 GB, 539 files. So on average 1 ghost is 2,8 MB. And it is 3,76 MB per 1 minute of replay/ghost (a lot).
At the time I was implementing replays and then ghosts, I didn't care about size at all. And it's still so. No need for interpolation (its 160Hz like game), no worries about car sim changes, even across all SR versions I think.
The other approach like in VDrift is (I think) a resimulate not replay, so to record just input states each frame (steer,throttle etc). It is much less but it will be completely unusable if you change anything in .car. So either way this is out of being possible.

But I like the idea of this thing on server, having eg. 20 best lap times from people for each track or even with some restriction to have only 3 from 1 user (not to have full list from 1 man, giving others a chance).
Still, we don't have a server, and I wouldn't have time to maintain it, security matters here.
VDrift works very nice with it's content downloading from svn, but there is nothing being sent. i.e. to stay on server, like the lap time and player name. So this is probably difficult and time consuming to implement. I don't know how it works in RoR, they have it.