3 minutes
Kart Primer
Our Kart version of choice is Mario Kart: Double Dash!!! for Gamecube. The vast majority of our play is at Baby Park, 9 laps with frantic items.
Official Baby Park
- 150cc. versus. 9 laps. frantic items
- 5 players. 4 active and 1 sitting.
- 50 total races in blocks of 10. Each player races 40 and sits 10.
- Draw lots to determine initial sitting order. rotate one seat to right every 10 races.
- Re-pick characters and karts each time seating changes. Seat #1 selects first and fifth, #2 second and sixth, #3 third and seventh, #4 fourth and eighth.
Scoring
- 1st Place = 4 points
- 2nd Place = 3 points
- 3rd Place = 2 points
- 4th Place = 1 points
Gap Scoring
- relative scoring. differs from overall standings because one player is always sitting out.
- measures finish position differential between players.
- on a cluster standings view, you read the column below a player’s name. A positive number means the player whose name is the column title leads the player whose name is the row title. A negative number means the opposite.
- ex: Player A finishes 1st and Player B finishes 3rd. Player A is credited with 2 Gap Points relative to Player B. Player B is debited 2 Gap Points relative to Player A.
Rk | Nm | # | WP | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Jer | Tom | Dan | Nic | JD |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Jer | 40 | 118 | 18 | 9 | 6 | 7 | na | -16 | -10 | -26 | -20 |
2 | Tom | 40 | 108 | 12 | 11 | 10 | 7 | +16 | na | -2 | -21 | -25 |
3 | Dan | 40 | 104 | 9 | 12 | 13 | 6 | +10 | +2 | na | -11 | -17 |
4 | Nic | 40 | 89 | 6 | 10 | 11 | 13 | +26 | +21 | +11 | na | -14 |
5 | JD | 40 | 81 | 5 | 8 | 10 | 17 | +20 | +25 | +17 | +14 | na |
Software
My friends and I started playing Mario Kart: Double Dash for Nintendo Gamecube on the day of its release in 2003. But it wasn’t until 2010 that I wrote a viable program to track results.
Despite more recent versions, I feel the double item management coupled with the loosest mini-turbo handling of any iteration makes Double Dash the series' greatest entry. Baby Park stands as the ultimate arena for local multiplayer. Time Trial is also a worthwhile endeavor.
In August 2010 I began exploring the Google App Engine platform. I wrote a system to collect race results in Fall 2010.
Check out a live instance or view the code.
The basic structure of the site allows you to create a league. The league has login credentials which can be given out to allow access to the league. Within the league you create player, venue and season entities. And within a season there are clusters which are groupings of matches.
As of 2012 the system has collected over 1000 races.
EDIT: 2013-05-12. I’ve taken down the GAE app. I broke it while extracting its historical data.
EDIT: 2016-01-04. I’ve done some analysis on the extracted data.
EDIT: 2016-01-11. I’ve done even more analysis on the extracted data.