My (Crude) Sim Race Animator

[Bill Outsilver]

Love both the animator and the caller! Thanks for sharing Ronnie!!!

[Andy Gol]

Really awesome! Someone pay the man!

[Kim Plausible]

Incredibly cool, Ronnie! Thanks.

[Todd Lucas]

Very cool Ronnie, I could play on it all day!

[Tammy Stawicki]

I like it

[Keith Maidlow]

Change the bars to horses, merge the call with the race in one place and you've really got something. I'm very impressed with how quickly you put all this together and the fact that it works with all four call races that exist in the SIM.

Great job Ronnie!!!

[Josh Lamp I]

I can't get pacer charts to work, i tried 114524 and 116388.

[Bill Oelrich]

I tried running some races from a few years back and it wouldnt work. It just kept locking up. But the newer races worked fine.

[Mary Whalen]

I tried a race from a few years back too for the first try and was thinking it wasn't working for me. It was a 1 1/4 mile turf race so it would definately have four calls. Only to remember the race calls didn't happen yet. So that's why it won't work on races before year 24

[Ronnie Dee]

I can't get pacer charts to work, i tried 114524 and 116388.

I traced this error and the "parser" expected at least a 2 word race comment.

Aside: this is used to get the start comments. For example, in the Derby, Zipless II fell to his knees at the start so he was behind the start line (point the race clocking starts in the USA).

For 114524, the problem was with
Sunday Princess - 5 Consistently

For 116388, the problem was with
Hope and a Laugh - 4 Consistently
State of Art - 9 Evenly

Putting in a check to see if the comment was only 1 word has fixed this problem. (By the way, 116388 was an exciting race.)

Larry: Thanks for your post.

If anyone finds any other errors, please post them here.

I will upload the updated files later today. After I upload, I will post on this thread.

[Bill Oelrich]

talk about a closing kick....wow..4 mile steeplechase
race ID 121275

[Laura Smith]

That is WAY cool, Ronnie.

As an aside, I would personally be against adding little graphics of horses. I think it would detract from some of the imaginationy part of it. This animator is awesome from a statistical/analytical side, and that's the only thing I'd want an animator for. I wouldn't want to have the bars replaced by little horses -- all too often those kinds of things turn out to be a bunch of little identical models all rendered different colours, making awkward galloping motions.

I'd rather have the bars. Thanks so much for coming up with this, Ronnie! Fun to play with.

[Talia Ichinari]

I think replacing with horses just makes it easier to read.

[Ronnie Dee]

I fixed the bug pointed out by Larry and took Keith's advice to merge the animator and caller. I have uploaded SimRacer.jar to
http://www.mediafire.com/?dz1ntmdmdzo

[Ronnie Dee]

If there is anyone who wants to play with the java source code, I could post these files to the file server. If someone wanted to create their own customized version, they could make the minor changes to the SimpleAnimator.java file, compile it, and then "jar" the classes. It is unlikely one would need to modify any of the other java files unless one wanted to really extend this application (e.g., for the shorter races).

For example:
1. if one wanted to change the start screen race or default delay one would need to just change --

new SimpleAnimator("107816", 25);

2. if one wanted to change the animator's background color, one would just need to change --

private final Color GROUND = new Color(255, 228, 196);

3. if one wanted to change the color of the rectangles, one would change the values in the colors array.

Of course, changing the rectangles to horses would take more effort and considerable artistic talent. First, one would need to create an image of one horse (in which any transparent parts of the horse would be colored in by the java program) or custom images of 20 horses. The background color for these images would need to be the same as GROUND (see above) to blend in with the ground when animated. Then a few program lines would need to be changed to reflect each horse's positioning and the use of images instead of rectangles. The main challenge here is not in changing the java program but in creating the horse images that would look good when animated. Only a person with considerable artistic talent and patience should even think about trying this.